My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales

MARJORIE SANDOR. The White Cat

IN THE STORIES YOU LIKED BEST AS A CHILD, MY LOVE, THERE WAS always a terrible repetition of tests. The hero, in order to win a wife and make his fortune, set out full of confidence to retrieve some object not even precious to himself. He was driven by the father-king who, facing the wobbling end of his reign, was in an unusually selfish, wheedling mood. And, let’s face it, this father had never been a noble fellow: forever trying to steal a kingdom, or defend his own against imagined enemies.

Three times the hero plunges back into the unknown world he has by dream or accident discovered, where the treasure — coveted by the king, whose hungers are unconscious and therefore impossible to sate — lies surrounded by obstacle, tedium, dragon. Three times he plunges in, three times risks his life to get the prize: first it’s the golden apple; second, the magical linen woven of thread so fine the whole cloth can pass through the smallest needle; and at last, the tiniest dog in the world, who can be heard barking inside a corn kernel, itself enclosed in a walnut shell.

The trouble is, in that other world, there appears someone more alluring than the object of the quest, for instance a beautiful white cat who begs the hero to stay — without words, of course. Please stay. Take the treasure back to the king, but come back. I need you here. I am forbidden to say why.

The mystery of the white cat’s need, not to mention her startlingly human beauty and intelligence, is far more deep and fulfilling and morally necessary than the foolish king’s demand for a golden something-or-other. It in fact turns the quest trivial, wrong, and inconsequential.

With each successive journey it gets harder and harder to cross the border back to the king, the real world. The reward — wife and land and future fortune — goes dim, the whole thing revealed for what it is, a repetitive, pointless exercise, an exchange of commodities: golden apple for king’s kingdom, princess-bride, etc. The taste of ashes in his mouth, the hero travels into middle age. Meanwhile, deep in the woods of his awakened imagination, the cat-queen, who can offer no material reward or even a logical reason why he should give up the world for her, waits helplessly by the midnight gates of her kingdom, bound by an ancient curse of silence, forbidden to ask favors or tell her story. Who is she? You don’t know, but the prince’s third and final return to his father’s castle, with apple, linen, dog at last acceptable to the king, and the earthly reward achieved, always left you feeling hollow, incomplete.

By now the lost domain, with its caverns and balustrades, its pointed gates and absolute danger, had gotten hold of you.

Meanwhile, back in the king’s palace, the elusive world is dismissed with shocking ease by courtiers and peasants alike. The prince himself is now bound by silence, too, his story trapped behind walls and briars and the hills in the distance, until, like the blurry cluster of the Pleiades, it is only visible when you gaze to the side.

But it’s too late: your heart’s been surprised, its true domain awakened. A domain that will haunt you until you go looking for it once more, on your own and without assignment, without hope that it will bring you anything useful in this world. Certainly it won’t make your fortune. It will, in fact, destroy you, as far as the king and his courtiers are concerned. Is this the world you lean toward, the one you cannot reenter a fourth time without dying, without abandoning the life lived reasonably, dutifully, under the king? Do you fear that if you put your sword to that life, everything, including the white cat, your silenced queen, might turn to ash along with everything else?

In the fairy tales of your childhood, my love, recall that the hero never came to this pass. He stayed home after the third journey, ever dutiful, and was rewarded by the last-minute appearance of a girl, strangely familiar, but from another kingdom entirely. And in that same moment, the father-king is released from the terrible grasp of his desires. Who can say which is the greater miracle? Never mind: the kingdom rejoices.

You rejoice, too, but even at the height of celebration you suspect the truth. I do, too: I watch you sleeping. I know that when you look across the border in your dreams, you see her plainly there, the white cat lost in her castle, her woods, her kingdom, she of fantastic, inhuman dignity, forever awaiting rescue. Observe her closely: she is your own kerneled heart, woven of miraculous thread and thrice-protected from human view, she whose life will open like a palm on the day — please, God, far from now — of your death.

White cat, I am revealed for what I am: his human wife. Be patient. Keep by the gate as you must. Silent sufferer, cruelly bound, wait as we wait, but on the other side.