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Before I focus on the two short stories I am going to analyze, I would first like to place them within a larger context in Updike's short fiction. The “Sandstone Farmhouse” and “The Cats,” beyond the respective collections in which they appeared, namely Afterlife (1994) and Licks of Love (2000), could find their natural environment and take their full meaning within a story cycle arranged by the reader. Just as Olinger Stories (1964) could be read as “a loose Bildungsroman,” according to Robert M. Luscher (1988, p. 99) the cycle of mother-son-related stories rearranged from Updike's thirteen story collections could be read as a sort of Familienroman, a family romance. Mother and son are mythologized and elevated to the status of a goddess and a creator, respectively. These independent collection-deserving stories spin out the very same tale of a filial cathexis, the libidinal attachment to the mother, and the indestructibility of the son's erotic wish. Three stages are to be found in the filial relation to the mother: departure, midway self-exploration, and return. “The Sandstone Farmhouse” and “The Cats” fall within the phase of return, which is both actual return to the mother's house and regressive return to the maternal body. Along with “His Mother Inside Him,” they constitute Updike's trilogy on mourning. While “The Sandstone Farmhouse” features a son trying to come to grips with the maternal house bequeathed to him, “The Cats” deals with a son wrestling with another part of his maternal inheritance, her numerous cats. I will argue that the resurgence of the past which haunts the son, at a loss before his mother's heritage, is intimated through a series of defense mechanisms set in motion