Unsolved Cat Who... Mysteries

• What was the true nature of Penny's feelings toward her brother? I'm loathe to start this off with a relatively seamy topic, but I'm organizing the list chronologically and and Played Post Office comes first, so here we go.

  I actually raised this topic about a year ago on the discussion list, and since the question was better-phrased by a more alert, better-rested version of myself at that time, I might as well self-plagiarize - "...What does everyone think about [the nature of Penelope's relationship with Alex] - is it intense sibling-type love, or an inappropriately-placed romantic love? I've always leant toward an exceptionally fierce case of the former, but I can't be sure - Penelope seems so worshipful, doting, and jealous of the man. All this can be explained by Penelope being extremely possessive of her brother, though there's just something about the fond, flowery, idealized way in which she talks about him that makes me suspicious. I'm not trying to be prurient (if it were the latter, it clearly wasn't acted upon) - it's just that the issue has kinda nagged at me whenever I think of [The Cat Who Played Post Office]."

  Most (if not all) of the folks respondents leaned toward the idea of romantic love, most of their observations (all of which interesting; go to eScribe from the Links page and do a search for "Penny") encapsulated in a post from Patricia Noone:

  "I think I always leaned toward assuming there was misplaced romantic love which Alex made use of to control and exploit Penny. But now that I think about it, there's no real definite proof of this offered in the book. I remember someone, maybe Amanda (?), saying the situation between the two had been ready to blow for ages, so people in the town are aware there's something bizarre."

  Entirely thanks to a thorough search by Eileen C. (merci!), the passage of which Patricia speaks has been located, in Chapter 15. To quote Eileen's e-mail, "Qwilleran calls Penelope's suicide 'unthinkable', to which Amanda responds" -

  "Not to me! I knew that unholy situation was headed for an explosion, but I didn't figure on suicide. I thought she'd blow her brother's brains out, if he has any."

  Ah. Great Amanda line at the end there. Also, Melinda does vaguely mention in the last chapter that "a lot of us had guessed at the relationship between Penny and Alex". Patricia continues:

  "Plus Penny dodges all male invitations...and I think Jr. says she's known for this." The narrative indeed makes a significant point of Penny refusing Qwill's dinner invite - "Most women welcomed his invitations....His doctor was eager for his invitations; why not his attorney?" (All right, Qwilleran is still semi-fresh from the city and yet has a sizable ego woman-wise, but the length of time that the story dwells on the refusal denotes it as something suspicious and possibly pertinent to the plot in the future.)

  The most revealing text comes in Penelope's letter to Qwilleran at the end of the book; her reactions to her brother's behavior are not necessarily out of the realm of sibling affection (albeit unusually ferocious sibling affection), but Penelope's wording can be considered telling. Penelope describes Alex's fling with Daisy Mull as "a knife in my heart", feeling that her brother "betrayed" her; she considers the death knell to their partnership her brother's "bringing a 'brilliant' young attorney to Pickax as a partner in the firm and - this was the crushing blow - as a wife!", mourning that "the face that I had thought so beautiful" had "thrown away in a moment...my lifetime of devotion and sacrifice".

  Profound hurt at betrayal by someone to you've devoted yourself to and sacrificed for your entire lifetime, around whom you've structured your entire life, is the most persuasive explanation that supposes purely sisterly love, but then the question arises of why one would continue for such an unusually long time to extend that devotion and sacrifice. Penelope was indeed thrust into a definite role of Alex's protector by her family; the story notes that her father asked her to study law in order to support and save face for his incompetent son, effectively requesting that she build her entire career around taking care of her brother. But then, no one forced Penny to, say, hire the school bully to protect young Alex from getting picked on in elementary school beforehand, or to stick right by his side on social occasions forever afterward. And Penelope herself notes that "I have always loved my brother with an irrational passion. Even as a child I was enamored and possessive, yearning for his attention and flying into a rage if he bestowed it elsewhere." Habitually protecting Alex somewhat started out as familial duty and surely reinforced any existing incestuous feelings, but Penny continued the role long after social pressure and familial obligations obliged her to. The need to protect is likely an effect, not a cause, of the love.

  Perhaps much the reason why the platonic-love theory seems plausible is because it is the proper, genteel (and still plausible) explanation, better suited to the series's relatively proper, genteel tone. Not to say that controversial subjects do not arise in the Cat Who... world, but it's just that Braun is not interested with having her series invest itself in overly lurid details - the sordidness one would associate with the subject of...incest, and thus the less seems the more appropriate. I'm still settled in the sisterly-love view in my mind, if only mostly out of habit, but I now see that the misplaced-love opinion is more logical from an "intellectual", so to speak, point of view.

• What was the deal with Russell Simms? I've heard theories about her being a Visitor, but what kind of intrepid alien explorer travels light years to a distant, foreign planet to be scared away by a few past murders? Every time the subject of Underground pops up for any extended period of time, questions about Russell's purpose in the story and eventual fate arise. I have a feeling that Russell's odd appearance and perpetually, eerily ill-at-ease demeanor are what generate such speculation about her - if she were some ordinary schmo tourist, we'd just write her off as a loose plot end that didn't pan out and move on. But the young woman's dress and hairstyle border on downright anachronistic - the book itself notes she looks like a product of the 1920s - and her manner of speaking - pained, trepidated outbursts after pregnant pauses - speak to a fearful secret that she's seems to be always on the desperate verge of telling.

  All this would be very good if it came to something or even hinted at something without a definite conclusion, but without any direction it's all very frustrating, alas.

• Did Isabelle survive? The ending of Lived High leaves in doubt the fates of many of the residents of the Casablanca, but Isabelle's is a particular sticking point due to the fact that, from her on-and-off (mostly on) heavy drinking, she was far more likely than most anyone else in the building to be half-conscious, unconscious, or too judgmentally impaired to save herself at the time of the blaze. She's settled back in her addiction the last time we hear from her in the book (the faux-suicide phone call that leads to Qwilleran being accidentally locked out on the roof), an ill omen in itself, and the ending of Lived High is saturated enough with defeat to allow Isabelle to die through succumbing to her liquor habit.

  Willful suicide - Isabelle being aware of the fire and just letting the flames consume her as a convenient way out of her dead-end life - cannot be ruled out either, considering her mental condition. Barring that scenario, though, Isabelle's best and most likely chance for salvation if she was indeed inebriated to some extent at the time of the fire would be, as a friend of mine theorized, Sweetie Pie - if the little kitten somehow roused her or alerted the woman in time to save herself (which leads to another pressing question - did Sweetie Pie survive?). It boils down to a matter of opinion, I guess. Myself, though, I can very easily see her sprawled out on the couch unconscious, oblivious to the fire all around her...

• WHAT WAS IN THAT ACCURSED MELINDA SUICIDE NOTE? I seem to be the only one who cares about this, but it bugs me to no end. I assume it contained, of course, the expected teary confession, a acknowledgment that she could never have Qwilleran but an assurance that she will always love him, etc., but I still would've liked the opportunity to read the genuine article.

• Was Grandma Gage's will changed? Betty and Claude's get-rich-quick scheme hinges on altering the wills of their wealthy tenants and then killing them off to cash in, but the terms of Euphonia's will, while in line with the villains' agenda, don't seem uncharacteristic for her to me. Both her correspondence from Florida and the accounts of her acquaintances at The Park of Pink Sunsets support the idea that teaching her neighbors her ideas about healthy living revitalizes her. And Euphonia, though respected, was still regarded as rather odd in Pickax (understandable considering some of her habits - honking her car horn at every intersection, etc. - but doubtless based partially in what must have been perceived in conservative small-town Pickax as Grandma Gage's zany new-age quackery and disheartening for the woman whatever the circumstances); it's not a stretch to imagine that she was grateful to finally find a (semi-)receptive audience.

  What about shortchanging her family, though? Well, Euphonia was rather peculiar in to whom she gave money and to whom she didn't; being family did not assure that Grandma Gage would take care of you. Ask Senior Goodwinter.

  That said, though, there's a very good chance that the identities of Euphonia's heirs were left intact but that the amounts left to each were altered. Though she believed in having her offspring forge their own way in the world likely would not have set her grandchildren up for life (perhaps using the rest of her fortune to support a favorite charity or cause - she seems like that type of person to me, and she surely has an activist's conviction), it seems she would at least have willed them enough for a little treat or nest egg (at the very least for Junior - she did give him his Jag, after all); having her grandchildren fly in from the four corners of the U.S. for the reading of the will only to slap them in the face by awarding them just $100 is a spiteful act ill befitting Euphonia.

  But...could it be that she wished to teach her grandchildren a lesson about the wages of greed? Could Euphonia have deemed the Jaguar to be reward enough for her favorite grandkid, rejecting the others, who, from what we can tell by the books, mostly ignored her, in favor of the neighbors for whose attention she was so grateful in her final days? Euphonia would have been torn between two competing loyalties in composing her will, and, considering the circumstances, the so decisive triumph of the one so new, so welcome, and so long in coming to her is not implausible. But who's to say? Can one really fathom the workings of a mind which orchestrated something so abstract and surreal as the funeral Euphonia threw for herself?

• What are the four ways to pronounce February? In The Cat Who Tailed a Thief, Qwill pens a paean to February that praises the month as, among other distinctions, "the only month that can be pronounced four different ways". The story mentions the flood of inquiring reader mail Qwill's claim precipitates, but we never get an answer as to what exactly the four ways are. My own stab:

  Fe-bru-a-ry
  Fe-bu-a-ry
  Fe-bru-ra-ry (or "Fe-bru-wa-ry", depending on your speech idiosyncracies)
  Fe-bu-ra-ry (or Fe-bru-wa-ry)

• What happened to that dang hiker? Another most-frequently asked question, unquestionably due to the ridiculousness of the proffered "death by Sand Giant" solution. As a mysterious, half-believable "Mulder" alternative theory for a death that has a plausible "Scully" explanation, it'd be fine, but as a stand-alone, only-alternative solution, it's ludicrous in a Cat Who... context.

  The second greatly vexing point about this "Sand Giant" business is that having an mysterious, unexplained death in a whodunit eventually explained away as being caused by something natural, or at least noncriminal, completely unconnected to the mystery is frustrating, illogical, and disappointing. (And that goes doubly so here, as the folderol surrounding the backpacker's initially mysterious identity was a similar letdown. Actually, having a dead body pop up in Pickax and prolonging the enigma of his or her identity, making ferreting out the victim as central to the whodunit as the perpetrator or motive, would be a promising and unique plotline. But that's neither here nor there, alas.)

  Yeah, so this entry doesn't really offer any deeper answers or speculations on the "mystery", just griping and expressions of dissatisfaction. From the e-mail I've gotten about the subject, though, I'm not alone in my feelings...

• Argh! Why did Qwill burn his mother's letters? This issue recently seems to have replaced "Why did Mrs. Cobb have to die?" as the greatest source of fan outrage. It's never really been an issue for me, though -
  • Qwill's always been a deal-with-it-and-move-on type of fellow, particularly in regards to emotional matters (I've gone on about this topic at length in "A Defense of Qwilleran's Behavior in The Cat Who Talked to Ghosts").

  • This does not mean, however, that Qwill is immune to emotional shock, and the letters' revelations must've dealt a whopper. Qwill had an idealized picture of his parents beforehand - in his eyes, his mother was a gentle but strong-willed near-saint; his father was a mysterious, distant figure envisioned through second-hand memories screened through the filter of his mother's affection and fond reminisces. Having that image so abruptly and, in the case of his father, thoroughly shattered must have been, to be sure, an undeniably horrible shock. No need to keep those unpleasant memories around.

  • In a trait probably gained from his bout with and recovery from alcoholism, Qwill has seemingly trained his (for lack of a better word) what's-good-for-him instinct to swiftly override his feelings of selfish want and self-indulgence in critical decision-making situations. (Take Qwill burning Aunt Fanny's little black book of secrets at the end of Played Brahms, despite his tantalizing realization just beforehand (and his little you-moron reprimand afterward) that it could give him nigh-unlimited power in Moose County.) Keeping those old letters around would just allow his new wounds to fester; they offer only poisoned memories, a cold record of two people at their weakest, most wretched moments. Romanticized as they were, Qwill's fond images were probably more faithful to what the "real" Anne Mackintosh and Dana Qwilleran were like. Qwill loves his parents and knows that both were good people at heart; he doesn't need the letters. Best to be rid of them.

  The move was indeed an impulse, but, ultimately, not an out-of-character action.

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