Cat People Read online

  Although there is no official place for cats in the British armed forces, except for the Royal Navy, any army barracks or R.A.F. station is sure to contain a surprising number of cats. No kitchen or mess is complete without a cat-in-residence, and soldiers and airmen adopt cats, even when strictly forbidden to do so. Soldiers going into the trenches in the First World War often hid stray kittens in their tunics, fed them from their rations, and found a certain peace of mind in comforting the animals during bombardments. (Cats were, as you might guess, highly esteemed in the trenches, given the number of rats in them.) They maintained their appeal during the Second World War—more than one soldier landed on the Normandy beaches hiding a cat, at least one British paratrooper dropped into Arnhem with a cat zipped into his jumpsuit, some tank crews are reported to have kept a pet cat in the turret of their tank, and one intrepid cat accompanied his owner, a Royal Air Force pilot, on bombing raids over Germany, snoozing on a parachute pack despite the flak.

  That’s the way it is—once you let a cat into your life it is likely to share the best and the worst of it with you. It’s not so much a question of loyalty, as of habit. Besides, cats are adventurous, and born survivors, just as capable of bringing up a family in a subway tunnel (or a tank turret) as in the finest of homes, if need be.

  Generally speaking, however, cats prefer to observe human activity from the prone position, with a skeptical eye. Either you find that comforting, or you don’t. It’s all the same to the cat.

  As for a spirit of adventure, on that score it’s hard to beat a cat. Michael’s initial experience of living with a cat as an adult was during his first marriage, when his then-wife, Casey, suddenly announced out of the blue that she wanted a cat—not only did she want one, but, by God, she was going to have one (she was a Bennington girl), and what was more she knew just what kind she wanted—a Burmese. Since they then lived in a small apartment on East 56th Street, with their son Christopher, he thought that quarters would be a little cramped with an additional resident, however small and furry, but consoled himself with the thought that this, like many of Casey’s enthusiasms, would pass.

  Needless to say, it did not. A city girl, she went to Fabulous Felines, then a well-known pet shop on Lexington Avenue, wrote out a check for a Burmese kitten, and brought it home, together with its water bowl, feeding bowl, scratching post, and litter tray. Like most cats, it took one quick stroll around the premises—not difficult since they were so small—shrugged, and settled down on the couch. As kittens go, it was young enough to miss its mother, but cats and kittens don’t grieve or mope much, and tend to accept the hand that fate has dealt them stoically. Napoleon—as the kitten was quickly named—had his namesake’s piercing eyes and masterful disposition, and despite his initial objections, Michael soon became accustomed to him, and he to Michael.

  They lived on the fourth floor of a big apartment building, next door to the Midtown Tennis Club, and during Christopher’s infancy had taken the trouble to put screens on most of the windows, so, once he started walking, he couldn’t fall out. Not all the windows had been screened—you had to remember which ones were safe to open and which were not—and this became doubly important once Napoleon joined the family, as cats are on the whole more likely to jump up on windowsills than children, and if a window is open are apt to keep going.

  One evening, Casey was cooking something in the kitchen in the toaster oven that caught fire—haute cuisine had apparently not been one of the things they taught at Bennington—and the apartment quickly filled with smoke. Anxious not to choke to death, or ruin all the furniture with greasy smoke, Michael opened a window, then rushed into the kitchen to help put out the fire. When the smoke began to clear, Napoleon was nowhere to be found, and after a quick search, his eye caught the window, and Michael realized to his horror that he had opened one of the windows that wasn’t protected by a screen!

  He closed it quickly, but it was all too clear that the tragedy had already occurred, and a closer search of the apartment made it clear that Napoleon had not gone into hiding, as he hoped, but had gone out the window into the night, four floors down onto 56th Street.

  Glumly—he had plenty to be glum about, on top of a natural feeling of guilt and sadness—he went downstairs with a flashlight to look for the mangled corpse. He explained what had happened to the doorman, who sighed sadly, and said he had seen nothing and heard nothing. His mood was not improved by the weather—it was pouring rain (raining “cats and dogs” as they say, he reminded himself lugubriously), and he sloshed up and down 56th Street looking for the tiny body, perhaps further mangled and flattened by a passing taxi. There was no sign of it, however, and he knew better than to come home without it. Thinking that the cat might have taken a slightly different trajectory, he talked his way past the night watchman onto the courts of the tennis club, but there was nobody there either. He stood in the dark for a few minutes, holding his flashlight and trying to think of something sensible to say when he went back upstairs, but nothing useful came to mind. He swung his flashlight around, taking one last look.

  Then, all of a sudden, he noticed two yellow eyes staring down at him from the roof of the tennis club. There was no proof they were Napoleon’s—New York is full of stray cats—but slipping the night watchman five dollars, he persuaded him to let him climb up the fire escape, where, soaked, but otherwise unharmed, he found Napoleon. He picked him up and climbed back down again. “That a mighty lucky cat,” the watchman said, shaking his head.

  Michael thought so too. As he looked up, he could see what had probably happened. Napoleon had stepped out of the window, dropped four floors down, landed on top of the building’s cloth canopy, thus breaking his fall, bounced on the heavy canvas and took a flying leap to the top of a dividing brick wall, then jumped down about twelve feet onto the tennis club.

  Four stories is a long fall—at least forty feet, more than enough to kill a human being—but Napoleon wasn’t even sore or lame, just wet and mildly irritable.

  Michael brought him home to his grieving wife and son, who were so astonished to get him back alive that Michael was instantly forgiven for having opened the wrong window, and came away from the experience with a deep admiration for a cat’s survival instincts, and a phobia about open windows that he never lost.

  When Michael’s marriage broke up—perhaps the incident had gone deeper than he assumed at the time—Margaret, the woman he had fallen in love with, turned out to be a cat lover too. Indeed, her cat, a large orange male named Irving, was the witness to their love affair, and it was clear, first of all, that he did not approve of Michael—he didn’t like her husband any better—and secondly, that he came along with Margaret, wherever she went.

  He always had.

  And he always would.

  2. Travels with Irving

  I saw Irving in a pet store window on Columbus Avenue,” remembers Margaret. “There were several other kittens but he sat to one side on his own. He was orange and looked vulnerable. I went in and bought him and carried him home inside my coat. We made lots of small excursions together in the beginning around New York. Down to the drugstore, the supermarket, my friend Mayo’s apartment, to visit the vet, to Blooming-dale’s, and to the occasional movie.

  “As time went by and we became inseparable—not a healthy thing, my then husband said when he was around, which was not often—we made longer and more adventuresome trips. Sometimes with him too, a trio. I remember staying in a suite at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel in Los Angeles. I had called in advance to inquire about their policy toward having pets in the rooms. The person to whom I spoke said they allowed small dogs and couldn’t see that a cat would be much different. They obviously knew little about cats! Irving had a great time with the floor-to-ceiling drapes, especially the lining, which seemed irresistible to him. When we checked out we were asked not to bring the cat back again. Burt, my husband, seemed a little unnerved—he was, in his world, somewhat of a celebrity—and unaccustomed to nega
tivity at check-out time, quite the opposite in fact, eager hotel staff wanting to know the date of a possible next visit. He approached Irving and me, in a fog of cigar smoke, cameras and light meters swinging from his neck. ‘What the fuck did he do? I’m telling you, kiddo, it’ll take a miracle to get back in here next time.’

  “We came back to New York on American Airlines, and in those faraway days, they had an area in the rear of the plane called the Piano Bar. It was cozy and Irving came out of his travel box and spent the flight on my lap.

  “In the early seventies we took a house every winter in Cuernavaca for a month. I was not going without Irving and announced this at one of our black-tie dinners for twelve, among which were several couples who were planning to spend some time with us. The chatter stopped, eyes swung around to stare at me, Burt inhaled on his cigar, and when he could speak, he said, ‘Never going to happen, kiddo, the airlines, the Mexican authorities, getting him back into this country, you name it, no way.’ Some guests, anticipating a dinner table squabble, added their thoughts. What about cat food, litter, how would he travel? My friend Mo, who was going to drive down from Washington with her husband, said quietly, ‘Oh, we’re taking the food and litter, whatever he needs.’ ‘No problems with traveling,’ I said. ‘I already called Air France, they have the best flight, stops in New York en route from Paris to Mexico City, and they said they did not care what I brought along, provided I got it onto the plane, I could bring a cow if I wanted. And I thought I could find some sort of collapsible cardboard box to use as a litter tray during the flight, and Burt could put a plastic bag of kitty litter in one of his carry-on camera bags.’

  “There were some shifty looks around the table and a nervous laugh from one guest. ‘I’m not carrying any goddamn cat shit stuff in with my cameras, kiddo, are you crazy?’ Burt said.

  “‘We’ll see. Let’s have coffee, shall we?’

  “Irving went to Mexico several times.

  “He also went to the Okefenokee Swamp for a long weekend. We traveled by overnight train from New York, via Washington where John Chancellor, who was then the anchor for NBC’s Nightly News, and his wife, Barbara, joined us, arriving at Mekong, Georgia, the next morning. I didn’t take Irving out on the boat in the swamp, a bit too risky, but he loved the train ride, sitting on top of the seat above my head, watching the country roll by. We went to Lexington, Kentucky, and up to Martha’s Vineyard. But my life changed and I traveled less and so did Irving.

  “In the end, once Burt and I were divorced, and Michael and I bought a farm in the country, Irving’s trips were reduced to driving back and forth to Dutchess County, where he finally settled. For all his travels, he was an indoor cat and unused to the outside. I often wonder what he thought, going from pet shop window to ‘trains, planes, and automobiles,’ and finally from an apartment on Central Park West to quiet retirement in a country house.”

  Irving had his faults, but he was the most faithful of cats, and totally devoted to Margaret, to the exclusion of all other interests. By the time Michael entered his life he was a cat of firmly fixed habits, and used to life as an apartment dweller. When we bought our house in the country, as a weekend retreat at first, Irving disliked the drive there and back almost as much as he had disliked Burt’s cigar smoke. He did not suffer in silence—he yowled, drooled, moaned, and threw up all the way from Central Park West and 65th Street to our farm on Friday nights, and did the same on the way back on Sunday nights. Very often, he threw up before we had even left the garage or the driveway. It sometimes seemed as if he spent the entire week living in dread of the two-hour drive to Dutchess County.

  Saying, “Oh, well, he’ll get used to it” (as we did several times every weekend), about any cat, by the way, is generally a mistake. Cats seldom get used to things they dislike. Like the Bourbons, on their return to France after the long years of exile during the Revolution and Napoleon’s empire, of whom Talleyrand said, “They forgot nothing and they learned nothing,” cats have a good memory for anything that has been done to them that they resent or dislike, and very little capacity for forgiving and forgetting. Nor are they easily bribed. With cats, first impressions count, and the cat’s initial meeting with a person is likely to imprint itself on its mind permanently.

  In Irving’s case, age, or perhaps disappointment that when Margaret left Burt, Michael would eventually arrive to replace him—Irving would certainly have preferred to have had Margaret to himself, and never made any secret of the fact—had soured him on travel. After all, at one time in his life he had been a well-traveled cat and not even the longest of trips had dismayed him, so it’s hard to see why he should have taken such a dislike to a piddling little two-hour commute to the country. Or perhaps it was just that he was used to traveling first class on airplanes, and being fussed over by flight attendants, rather than being chucked onto the backseat of a car, together with his box and a litter tray, and regarded it as a distinct comedown in the world, having traveled to the Okeefenokee Swamp by train in a private sleeping compartment and stayed in a suite at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. In those easygoing days, airlines accommodated easily to cats, at any rate in first class, and Irving flew the skies with his own litter tray, dinner dish, and water bowl, back when airplanes had piano bars, and Braniff stews wore miniskirts and patent leather boots designed by Courrèges. In short, Irving was used to the best, and no doubt brooded wistfully over the days when he had roamed the world with Margaret in style.

  And why not? After all, cats have standards too. As easily as they revert to the wild, they get used to a certain pattern of comfort. The wrong kind of cat food, a change in the way the furniture is arranged that eliminates a favorite place to nap, a break in the household routine, is more than enough to send them into a snit, or give them a bad case of the sulks. What’s more, they are skilled at making their “owner” (Does anybody really “own” a cat?) feel guilty. Cats may not be able to smile, but they certainly know how to look aggrieved, and can resist or ignore any attempt at reconciliation for a very long time indeed. Nor are they easily bribed. Stroking them, scratching them behind the ears, offering them a particularly succulent treat, will rarely do the trick. Only a prolonged campaign of apologies will bring forgiveness, which won’t come until the cat is good and ready to offer it, and not a moment sooner.

  Cats rarely attack people except in what they see, no doubt, as self-defense (though there are exceptions, as you will see when you meet a cat of ours named Mrs. Bumble, named after the object of the parish beadle’s affections in Oliver Twist), but even the nicest of cats will signal displeasure by a quick swipe with the claws, when all other measures have failed or been ignored, and we keep a bottle of Mercurochrome or iodine on hand upstairs in the bathroom and downstairs in the kitchen, and of course a box of Band-Aids, for just such moments. Ours mostly express dissatisfaction by means of a series of graduated acts of low-level vandalism, designed to attract attention. First they will knock over small picture frames, then, if that fails, they scratch the screens—a noise which resembles that of a fingernail on a blackboard after a few minutes. Then they move on to heavier stuff—sharpening their claws on expensively upholstered furniture or the better rugs and carpets, pushing over bowls of flowers or their own water bowl, making a diligent attempt to scrape the wallpaper off the walls, etc. By that time, no matter how determined we have been to sleep in a bit on a Sunday morning, we are both up and ready to go downstairs and open cans of cat food. And that’s forgetting such guaranteed waker-uppers as prolonged yowling or throwing up on the faux-oriental carpets.

  Smaller and younger cats can chase each other at high speed around the bedroom floor, leaping up and down off the bed, and landing on furniture with a terrific thump that dislocates every item on it and sends glasses, pens, and books flying, but the older cats don’t have to bother with physical exertion—a good, long session of strumming tunelessly at the screens with a claw will do just as well, they have learned, if not better, and hardly re
quires any effort at all.

  Well, living with cats is a compromise, after all, and most of the compromising inevitably has to be made on the human side, since cats don’t compromise easily, and tend to regard your turf as theirs. Cats have a genuine sense of entitlement—even when they are on the outside looking in, as strays, most of them do not stoop to looking wistful or appealing; rather than grovel like dogs, their approach is usually demanding. A photograph of one of Margaret’s all-time favorite cats, Jake, looking in through the kitchen window on a winter’s day makes that clear. The expression on his face is haughty, mildly impatient, and slightly censorious, as if he were saying, “You can see I’m out here in the cold waiting to be let in, how long do I have to wait here?” One look at him is enough to tell you that there will be no fawning gratitude from him when the door is finally opened. If he could speak, he would no doubt say, “About time, too!,” and stomp off grumpily to sharpen his claws on the dining-room carpet.

  Cat people, almost by definition, have learned to compromise with their cats, which is sensible, since the cats are unlikely to do much in the way of compromising back. But this is the feline way, and perhaps part of the cat’s appeal to human beings, who are generally used to getting their way with animals. You can search through history, newspaper files, and literature in vain for the cat equivalent of the traditional heroic dog story—the feline equivalent of Lassie, or Rin Tin Tin, or Balto (the brave sled dog that brought the serum to Nome, Alaska, and who is immortalized in a life-size statue in New York’s Central Park, as well as by a popular brand of French cigarette), or the Seeing Eye dog, simply does not exist. There are stories aplenty of cats who find their way home from hundreds of miles away (usually because they have been dumped or forgotten when the family moved), but none of a cat bravely sacrificing its life to save its owner’s, or plunging into the flames to rescue a child, or being used by the police to detect narcotics or explosives.