James, Fabulous Feline

by Harriet Hahn

  “I’m afraid to,” wailed the woman. At last she got up, blew her red nose and went to wash her face in the lavatory.

  Marilyn turned to me. “Poor Elsie,” she said. “She is an excellent cataloger but she has been getting more and more unhappy. She is afraid to go out, and it is a terrible struggle for her just to get to the office, and then there is a terrible struggle to go home. She really needs professional care.”

  James was tugging at me.

  “You want to know what a psychiatrist is?” I said.

  James nodded.

  “A psychiatrist is a doctor who deals with emotional problems such as Elsie’s. He helps you unravel the associations that cause your anxiety.” While grossly oversimplified, I thought this explanation would do for the moment.

  James nodded. Then he squared his shoulders and marched off in search of Elsie. He seemed determined to become a psychiatrist and solve her problems. It would take his mind off his missing earrings.

  He found Elsie sitting at her desk looking gloomily into space at nothing. He insinuated himself beside her. Slowly, she let her hand stroke him. He purred gently but did not move. The technique that had been a success with Miss Elena might do here for starters. At last Elsie looked at him.

  “Nice kitty,” she said.

  He purred a little louder and rubbed his face very slowly against her hand. She smiled.

  Peter was free so I stopped watching the doctor at work and went into Peter’s office.

  “James has a new profession,” I said. “He’s becoming a psychiatrist.”

  “Good,” said Peter. “Shortly we’ll all go to lunch with Dr. George Levithan, an excellent psychiatrist who is also a collector. He has just brought in some material for us to sell and I’m taking him to lunch at the club.”

  At noon James and I joined Peter at his club, where we were introduced to Dr. Levithan. Peter cleverly got the doctor to talk about how he managed some of his cases while James listened so intently he forgot to eat. In fact, at one point he moved to sit on a ledge that was almost directly under Dr. George’s hand. Shortly thereafter, the doctor began to stroke James in an abstract sort of way. James purred very softly, and Dr. George stopped talking about cases and told us several very poignant stories from his own youth. When he was finished we were all silent for a moment. Then he stopped stroking James and resumed his professional manner.

  After lunch, James and I said good-bye to Peter and Dr. George and headed back to Baron’s. James wore his smug expression. The one that says I-know-all-there-is-to-know on a given subject. This time it was psychiatry.

  He watched the tenants with a new intensity as they came and went, and in the late afternoon when Roger and Poppy came to call, he sat next to Poppy and listened to her carefully, but first he patted Roger on the ear.

  “I know,” said Roger ruefully. “I’ll get them back, don’t worry. I don’t want that girl to have them any more than you do.”

  Poppy was full of excitement. She didn’t need James to open her up. She had just been offered what she defined as “the perfect job.” A school in Amsterdam had commissioned her to design costumes for a special pageant. The school had little money, so the costumes had to be made of inexpensive materials and had to be easy enough to make so that unskilled students could make them. The pageant itself had to do with nature—something to do with emphasizing environmental protection.

  “You see,” said Poppy, “it has all the elements I love—children, a technical challenge, an emphasis on nature and, I might add, a most agreeable group of adults to work with. I’ll be gone about two weeks, maybe. Of course, it barely pays expenses, but who minds that.”

  “But what about me?” asked Roger wistfully.

  “Come along,” said Poppy.

  “Can’t,” said Roger. “I have to stay and pay attention to my investments. Besides, I have money in a new show.”

  “You and your money!” said Poppy with some asperity. For some reason Poppy hates the idea of wealth.

  At last we all went out to Wheeler’s for a fish dinner.

  As we were leaving the restaurant to go our separate ways, James flipped his ears back and forth.

  “I know,” said Roger, “I know.”

  The next day James spent the morning at Thwaites. Peter watched him and reported that James approached Elsie as he had before and just sat under her hand. At first she stroked him, then she began to talk to him in a very faint whisper. James could not hear exactly what she said, but he stayed perfectly still and purred gently. She was not crying, and when Jerry, whose job it was to distribute the mail, memos and messages, bounced in to deliver her mail, she did not jump with fright. At noon Elsie sat at her desk eating lunch. As usual she refused to go out with any of the others.

  James returned to Baron’s for the afternoon, found me going out and patted his ear.

  “I’ll call Roger,” I said, “but tonight is his opening, so we won’t see him and I have to go to a society meeting, so you won’t see me, but check tomorrow.” James waved in salute.

  The following day he repeated the procedure with Elsie but something unusual happened. Elsie almost immediately picked James up and carried him into the women’s lounge, where she sat in a comfortable chair and cried, talked, and cried some more, soaking James’s head in the process. Because he has great self-control when he needs it, he kept on purring, despite the fact that Elsie’s dismal tale, which he could now understand, was not at all interesting. At last she dried up, washed her face and returned to the office, carrying James on her ample hip. Then she did something she had never done before. She went up to Marilyn, who was sitting at the front desk.

  “May I go to lunch with you?” she said, blushing. “I’ll pay my way and I won’t talk much.”

  Marilyn smiled. “What a good idea,” she said. “But you’d better put James down. He can’t come with us.”

  “Oh, yes,” said Elsie, blushing even harder. “Sorry, James.”

  James rubbed against her leg once he was released and tastefully waited till Elsie and Marilyn had gone before returning to Baron’s.

  He scratched at my door about five o’clock as I was reading the Financial Times. I put the paper on the table and opened the door for him, and at that moment the bell rang. I spoke into the intercom.

  “It’s Ellen,” came a breathy voice.

  “It’s Ellen,” I told James as I hung up the phone. “She’s coming up.”

  She always seemed to turn up when Roger was expected. He and Shep were due shortly.

  I let her in. She opened her purse, took a jeweler’s box out and walked over to the table where James was reclining next to the paper.

  “Here are the earrings,” she said, looking at the paper. Then she stiffened. She tried to pick up the box again, but a paw with claws extended caught her hand.

  “Ouch,” she said, sucking her little finger.

  James was up and sitting on the table, the earring box under his paws and the paper all over the floor.

  Roger and Shep took that moment to arrive.

  “Sorry about the play,” Shep was saying as they entered. “I guess you really took a bath.”

  “Lost it all,” said Roger, though he did not sound really stricken.

  “Hello, Ellen,” said Shep.

  “I see you brought back the earrings,” said Roger. “Thanks.”

  Ellen was staring at Roger and there was nothing in her eyes but scorn. “To think I wasted my time on you!” she said, “and I got nothing for my efforts except a scratch from that damned cat.” She grabbed her purse and slammed out of the apartment on her gorgeous long legs.

  James grinned his most evil grin and hurled himself at Shep, who was stretched out in the big chair.

  “Watch it, boy,” said Shep, and then he and James roughed each other up happily.

  “I don’t understand,” said Roger. “She comes apart just because she learned I lost some money on a play. I told her once how much I was putting into it
and it was nothing of importance.”

  James stopped playing, hopped off Shep’s lap and dragged the Times out on the floor. He looked at the page carefully and then to our surprise arranged himself on the paper, after a few false starts.

  “That’s the way he was on the table when Ellen came in,” I exclaimed.

  Then we all examined the paper.

  There was a headline, which read in its entirety:

  R. HAMFORD FILES FOR

  BANKRUPTCY

  However, with James’s tail in place it read:

  R. HAM

  BANKRUPTCY

  The subhead read:

  R. H. Enterprises

  To Be Dissolved By Court

  Shep howled. Roger laughed ruefully. “I guess she believed it. After all I am always wanting to go to pubs and take the tube and she always wanted the most elaborate restaurants and taxis, so that quick look combined with my comments about the play convinced her.”

  “You never thought that girl was anything but a cash chaser, did you?” said Shep.

  “To tell you the truth I never thought much about her. She is very pretty and she can be flattering, and when I first met her she was fun to play around with. Then I met Poppy and forgot all about her except for the business of the earrings.”

  In the end we all went out to the nearest pub to celebrate Roger’s initiation into losing money in the theater. We had shepherd’s pie and James consented to drink stout, about four ounces out of Shep’s first pint.

  “James,” I said sternly as we were riding up to the fourth floor in the elevator. “Do you realize you lied to Ellen?”

  James, who was riding on my shoulder so he could push the floor button, patted my mouth. He was looking disgusted. He shook his head. Then we both began to laugh and as I opened the elevator doors, he streaked upstairs, his tail flicking happily back and forth.

  James was now a cat of affairs. He spent his mornings at Thwaites performing as a psychiatrist or as a stamp sorter, depending on what was required. The afternoons he spent at Baron’s, either sitting on his table checking on tenants or following María around to see that the building was being properly maintained. Peter reported that Elsie was still lugging James into the women’s lounge and sobbing on him, but it appeared that as a result, she was less afraid and had taken to going out to lunch frequently. Marilyn reported that Elsie had even been known to laugh. She certainly was working more efficiently.

  Fortunately I had nearly completed tracking a painting through a number of sales catalogs to establish its provenance beyond doubt. At the same time I was growing nervous. I had called Costain Cummings three times and each time I was told he was unavailable. Had something happened to the models? The thought left me consumed with anxiety.

  Flat twelve was a busy place of a late afternoon. Peter Hightower came by. He sat in the big chair, a glass of La Iña beside him and a plate of salmon with fresh dill and brown bread ready at hand. James, who had sipped some sherry for a change, was sitting happily on his lap. As I looked at my two good friends, the round, pink-cheeked face with its blue eyes smiling happily above the grey furry face with its golden eyes, also smiling happily, I felt for the moment completely happy.

  Peter stroked James softly. “You know,” he said in his soft baritone, “you really might be a psychiatrist. I think I’ll call you Dr. James. You have been very helpful to Elsie.”

  James smirked slightly. He knew he was one of the great psychiatrists of the world.

  “Elsie came to me right after lunch today,” he went on. “She said she wants to see a psychiatrist and would I recommend one and arrange her schedule to fit.”

  James sat up, surprised. After all, he was a psychiatrist. Why would she need anyone else?

  “I had been hoping for a long time we could get her to want to see somebody. It is useless to insist someone see a therapist until there is a desire on the part of the patient.”

  James patted Peter sharply.

  Peter looked down at his friend.

  “Now, Doctor,” he said. “Don’t you think it is better to let her cry in Dr. George’s consulting room rather than all over you in the women’s lounge?”

  James shook his head.

  “Come now,” Peter continued. “After all, you got her started, which is the important part. The rest sometimes takes years and years.”

  James’s golden eyes flew open in astonishment.

  “Psychiatric treatment often takes a long time, and I think a cat with your varied abilities has too much to offer to even consider spending the next two years listening to Elsie sob.”

  James began to settle back. He half closed his eyes and assumed the air of the Renaissance cat ready for any challenge.

  Later on Roger and Lord Henry stopped in, joined us for a sherry, reported all well with Helena and no word from Poppy. We all went off to an early dinner at Colombino’s, where James ate ravioli and a wonderful dessert made with fresh cherries, white wine and Drambuie. Over dessert, Roger, who had drunk his share of good red wine, began to talk about himself. I don’t suppose the fact that James was sitting right next to him purring softly had anything to do with it, but Roger, who has a fine intelligence and a well-developed sense of humor, almost never talks about himself.

  “I don’t know what to do about Poppy,” he said. He mashed a bread stick into crumbs. “I’m crazy about her. I’ve never felt like this with any other girl. I think she likes me and we certainly have a wonderful time together, sort of the way you and Helena do.”

  Lord Henry smiled. “Then ask her to marry you,” he said.

  “I have,” said Roger, “a number of times. She says she can’t give up her independence.”

  “What does she mean by that?” said Peter. “You haven’t threatened to lock her up, have you?”

  “No,” Roger laughed. “She says that I have all this money, which I do, and that if she marries me she will have to give up her career because no one will take her seriously anymore. Like Helena, she says. She wants to make her mark in her profession, not be the rich wife of a successful investor and besides, she says, money is immoral.” Roger sighed.

  “Well,” said Peter, “why don’t you just live together, sometimes at her place and sometimes at yours?”

  James looked up from his plate of dessert and glared at Peter. James believes in marriage and family.

  “What would we do with the children, move them about?” asked Roger, laughing.

  Lord Henry smiled. “So you want children. What about Poppy, does she want children, too?”

  “She loves kids and sometimes the thought of a family of her own is just right, and then she says we will be overpopulating and ruining the environment and she will have to leave them to a nanny if she is to go on with her work, and besides it is sinful to bring children into a world of atom bombs and constant wars. I just don’t know what she wants. I only know I miss her terribly when she’s gone.”

  Roger looked very unhappy at that moment. Then he recovered his usual even disposition. We talked for a bit longer and then separated for home.

  The next morning I finally got through to Costain Cummings.

  “Where have you been?” I asked.

  “Terribly involved,” he said. “I suppose you are looking for your models.”

  “Yes, you must be through with them by now.” I sounded a little sharp.

  “I have been after them,” said Costain, “and Photography assures me they will be back in my office tomorrow morning. Will you put in an appearance?”

  “I’ll be there at nine o’clock,” I said.

  “Excellent,” said Costain and rang off.

  I went about my business. James went about his. Since I fully expected to pick up the models the next day, I stopped off at Thwaites’s shipping department, where the supervisor knows me well, and arranged to have the two pieces packed and shipped by air, special valuable merchandise handling. I heaved a silent sigh of relief. That assignment was almost finished.
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br />   That evening James came by and had only finished his usual survey of the apartment, which he makes every time he comes, when the bell rang and visitors were at hand. Poppy arrived, back from Amsterdam with an elegant Edam cheese. Roger brought a single-malt whiskey from Islay called Lagavulin, which we had never tasted. Shep came with some Guinness stout and Jane Jensen carried a big briefcase along with herself.

  I put the contributions away and took orders, and James seated the guests, making sure that Poppy and Roger were next to each other on the sofa and that Shep had the big chair, so he could stretch his long legs and James could jump on him. Jane and I had to be content with straight chairs.

  “You call it “La-ga-voo-lin,” said Roger. “The distillery where it comes from is right next door to the Laphroaig distillery on the island of Islay in the Hebrides.”

  Roger, James, Poppy, Jane and I tasted. Shep slurped stout.

  James tasted once more, considered, tasted again, smiled, tasted again and fell over grinning.

  “I guess he likes it,” I said, “and so do I.”

  James took a brief nap, during which he missed most of Poppy’s account of her trip to Amsterdam, which had been, from her point of view, hugely successful. Her simple patterns for costumes had been easy for the children to follow and had inspired some excellent variations. The pageant had been enthusiastically received by a much larger audience than expected, and the performance itself had been very moving and impressive-looking. Of course, the management had not been able to pay her a fee at all but did pay her expenses. Poppy regarded it as a huge success and talked about next year.

  I was glad James did not hear all this as he is a stout capitalist at heart and would not have approved.

  “Roger certainly should have seen it,” said Jane. “I was in Amsterdam when it went on and the comments in the papers afterward were glowing, particularly about how visually exciting it was. ‘Poppy Balsom is a great new talent,’ they said.”

  “Oh, come,” said Poppy, blushing. Her account had not included any mention of this praise.