Cats

Cats are central to the account Rhoda Penmark gives after Clara Post falls to her death: she says a lost kitten drew Clara onto the back stairs. The animal is never seen by anyone else in the scene, so the story of its presence becomes a small but consequential test of Rhoda’s explanation—and of whether her calm account can be trusted.

The kitten in Rhoda’s account

One afternoon, while Edna Post is shopping and Clara Post is alone with Rhoda, Clara falls down the spiral back stairs and breaks her neck. Rhoda tells Edna about the death when she returns, offering an innocent-sounding account of how the fall happened. According to Rhoda, Clara heard a kitten mewing on the landing, insisted on going outside to investigate, and then missed a step and fell five flights into the small cement courtyard. In this telling, the kitten is the reason Clara approaches the stairs; its supposed cry supplies the first link in a chain ending in her death.

Rhoda also places herself within the story as a witness and follower: she says Clara went out to look for the animal and that she followed. The account makes the kitten’s presence important without bringing the creature into view. No one else reports hearing it, and the reader encounters it only through Rhoda’s explanation.

Edna Post’s contradiction

Edna responds with a specific objection. She says Clara hated cats and had been afraid of them throughout her life, adding that even all the kittens in Baltimore mewing on the landing would not have drawn Clara near. Her knowledge of Clara directly conflicts with the behavior Rhoda has described. The dispute is therefore not simply over whether a kitten might have been present, but over whether Clara would have acted as Rhoda claims.

Rhoda answers by insisting that Clara did go out to look for the kitten. When Edna asks where it is now, Rhoda says it ran down the steps and describes it as a little gray kitten with white feet. The details make her account more vivid, but they do not resolve Edna’s objection: the animal remains absent, and Rhoda’s description cannot independently confirm that it was there.

Narrative function

The kitten functions as the proposed cause of Clara’s fall and as the weakest point in Rhoda’s explanation. Edna’s immediate contradiction shifts attention from the plausible sequence of a misstep and fall to the reliability of the story that precedes it. Because the animal is unseen, the scene sustains uncertainty through conflicting testimony rather than through a direct revelation about what happened on the stairs.

Rhoda’s next concern is not the kitten but the little glass ball Clara had promised her. Christine Penmark rebukes her for asking whether it is hers now. Placed directly after the contested account of the fall, Rhoda’s question gives the scene another unsettling turn: the kitten story has just been challenged, while Rhoda has already moved to what she expects to receive from Clara’s death.