Freedom [281]
“I have children myself, and I understand that,” Walter said. “But we’re only talking about keeping your Bobby indoors. Unless you’re on speaking terms with Bobby, I don’t see how you know he minds being kept indoors.”
“My cat is an animal. The beasts of the earth weren’t given the gift of language. Only people were. It’s one of the ways we know we were created in God’s image.”
“Right, so my point is, how do you know he likes to run free?”
“Cats love being outdoors. Everybody loves being outdoors. When the weather warms up, Bobby stands by the door, wanting to go out. I don’t have to talk to him to understand that.”
“But if Bobby’s just an animal, that is, not a human being, then why does his mild preference for being outdoors trump the right of songbirds to raise their families?”
“Because Bobby is part of our family. My children love him, and we want the best for him. If we had a pet bird, we’d want the best for it, too. But we don’t have a bird, we have a cat.”
“Well, thank you for listening to me,” Walter said. “I hope you’ll give it some thought and maybe reconsider.”
Linda was very offended by this conversation. Walter wasn’t really even a neighbor, he didn’t belong to the homeowners association, and the fact that he drove a Japanese hybrid, to which he’d recently applied an OBAMA bumper sticker, pointed, in her mind, toward godlessness and a callousness regarding the plight of hardworking families, like hers, who were struggling to make ends meet and raise their children to be good, loving citizens in a dangerous world. Linda wasn’t greatly popular on Canterbridge Court, but she was feared as the person who would knock on your door if you’d left your boat parked in your driveway overnight, in violation of the homeowners covenant, or if one of her children had seen one of your children lighting up a cigarette behind the middle school, or if she’d discovered a minor defect in the construction of her house and wanted to know if your house had the same minor defect. After Walter’s visit with her, he became, in her incessant telling, the animal nut who’d asked her if she was on speaking terms with her cat.
Across the lake, on a couple of weekends that summer, the people of Canterbridge Estates noticed visitors on Walter’s property, a handsome young couple who drove a new black Volvo. The young man was blond and body-built, his wife or girlfriend svelte in a childless big-city way. Linda Hoffbauer declared the couple “arrogant-looking,” but most of the community was relieved to see these respectable visitors, since Walter had previously seemed, for all his politeness, like a potentially deviant hermit. Some of the older Canterbridgeans who took long morning constitutionals were now emboldened to chat up Walter when they met him on the road. They learned that the young couple were his son and daughter-in-law, who had some sort of thriving business in St. Paul, and that he also had an unmarried daughter in New York City. They asked him leading questions about his own marital status, hoping to elicit whether he was divorced or merely widowed, and when he proved adept at dodging these questions, one of the more technologically savvy of them went online and discovered that Linda Hoffbauer had been right, after all, to suspect Walter of being a nutcase and a menace. He’d apparently founded a radical environmental group that had shut down after the death of its co-founder, a strangely named young woman who clearly hadn’t been the mother of his children. Once this interesting news had percolated through the neighborhood, the early-morning walkers left Walter alone again—less, perhaps, because they were disturbed by his extremism than because his hermitlike existence now strongly smacked of grief, the terrible sort of grief that it’s safest to steer clear of; the enduring sort of grief that, like all forms of madness, feels threatening, possibly even contagious.
Late in the following winter, when the snow was beginning to melt, Walter showed up again on Canterbridge Court, this time carrying a carton of brightly colored