Kitty Cornered: How Frannie and Five Other Incorrigible Cats Seized Control of Our House and Made It Their Home

by Bob Tarte

  But after that, it was all anticlimactic as we hiked the ponds. We surprised a trio of black-crowned night herons that barked like dogs, watched a northern harrier conduct its ghostly glide in search of prey, and heckled the eastern kingbirds that shadowed us. But our peak experience had long since faded. I couldn’t get Frannie off my mind and wanted to go home.

  FRANNIE WAS STILL box-top bound when I got back. I had only seen her up on her feet that one time, and I was starting to wonder if a three-legged hobble was as good as it would get. I had met dogs and cats that navigated quite nimbly as tripods, so Frannie could certainly learn to cope without the use of one leg. But I could tell that her lack of progress frustrated her. Being an invalid was bringing out the Lucy side of her personality.

  Maybe she was sick of hearing about the yellow-headed blackbird. I was telling her that the blackbird was the most beautiful bird that I had ever seen, “but my little girl is even prettier,” when she whacked my hand with her front paw. Thinking that she required a treat to elevate her mood, I microwaved a dollop of fancy cat food. It had come in a microscopic can and cost more per ounce than opium.

  Back on the porch, I was shocked to find her planted in front of me on the welcome mat standing on all four legs. I didn’t want her crossing paths with queen of the world Agnes, who had sidled up behind me in hopes of sharing the food. The resumption of warfare didn’t strike me as the best recuperative strategy.

  Without thinking I clapped my hands to disperse the opposing generals—a stupid thing to do. A startled Agnes flew up the stairs. Limping but moving assuredly, Frannie scurried across the porch and vaulted up to the windowsill. While I was thrilled that she had rejoined the quadruped club, she had gone one hurdle too far for my peace of mind. Moobie’s bathroom-vanity gymnastics had caused me enough grief already. I didn’t need a second feeble cat trying to break an Olympic record and who knew what else.

  I lifted Frannie off the sill to set her down on her box-top bed. But just as she loved to be petted while she ate, she now apparently associated her accident with being carried. She clung to my ribcage as if it were a tree trunk as she squeaked pathetically. I touched her down on the floor and she trotted over to her cardboard box, while I retreated to the bathroom to examine several puncture wounds.

  “WHERE’S AGNES?” I asked Linda as I held the doorknob.

  “Outside taking a chipmunk census.”

  “Kitchen door closed?”

  She nodded. “But that gate isn’t going to do any good. Frannie will fly right over it.”

  “Not with a bum hip.” I checked the “baby gate” at the foot of the stairs. “It’s enough to discourage her.”

  “Until she breathes on it and knocks it over,” Linda said.

  Thanks to the nurturing effects of the stream of worry I directed toward Frannie, she was walking more smoothly and less like a windup toy soldier every day. We didn’t want any hitches in her recovery, so we confined her to a single room at a time to reduce the temptation to rocket around at high speeds. And above all we kept her away from a certain cantankerous cat.

  The cantankerous cat had other plans. I let Frannie in, and while I fiddled with the gate, Agnes darted out from behind the rocking chair and charged at Frannie. Frannie stumbled backward, seemingly cowed. Then she stiffened her front legs and slingshotted herself at Agnes to the music of a growl from deep inside her chest. Agnes leaped over the gate, banging it with her foot. Frannie followed, sailing over it like an Olympic hurdler, chasing Agnes into the upstairs bedroom.

  That victory seemed to stimulate the healing process. To our amazement the limp all but vanished within a couple of weeks, the better for Frannie to pace back and forth in front of doors.

  “I don’t want her going outside again,” I said. “I’ll worry about her every minute.”

  “I know, but she isn’t happy in the house,” Linda said. “And we really don’t know what happened to her. Didn’t the vet say that she might have fallen from a tree? We can’t keep her away from everything.”

  I didn’t like it, but I knew that Linda was right. Frannie was a stray who needed her space. So after agonizing about it for a while, I threw open the exit.

  To her credit, she changed her behavior. On the plus side, she no longer vanished into the woods for hours at a time. Following Lucy’s example, she clung to the periphery of the house, snoozing on the picnic table, stretching out on a sunny patch of lawn, or sitting contentedly on the cement steps. On the negative side, she had made up her mind to be more resistant than ever about coming back inside.

  AFTER DINNER, ONCE I had lured the ducks and geese into the barn with table scraps, I opened the basement door for Frannie, who had been trotting along at my heels. Instead of following me into the house, she rubbed back and forth against the door frame. Then, making certain that I was watching, she pranced over to caress a picnic table leg. I returned a few minutes later with a chunk of warm chicken on a plate. A dance ensued that brought her an inch inside the open door before she pirouetted and skittered back to the picnic table. When I walked over to her, she trotted away.

  “She’s hardly been outdoors for weeks,” I told Linda. “I’ll give her another half hour.”

  She performed the door frame–rubbing routine twice more. When it got to be eight thirty, she had parked herself less than three feet from the basement door but farther away from coming inside than ever. The more I wheedled her, the more coquettish she became. “That’s enough,” I told her. “You’ve got to come in. Or you’re not going out again for a very long time.” She let me get within inches of grabbing her—I was angry enough to violate our no-picking-up-the-cat understanding—when she dashed under the pine tree, reappearing to tease me with the lovable kitty blink, which stung. It was a desecration of that blink that she had given me at the emergency clinic.

  “How could she treat me this way after everything I’ve done for her?” I asked Linda, sounding remarkably like a sitcom parent. I made one final attempt to coerce Frannie in, but she wouldn’t even poke her nose out from under the tree.

  A little after nine o’clock, as I settled in for a long night’s journey into anxiety, Linda announced that the cat who had made a mousie toy out of me was at the side door scratching to come in. On the porch, I fed her in silence, banged the door shut, and peered out through the living room window as she hopped up onto her box to lick her feet.

  “You can’t really expect anything else from Frannie,” Linda said as we got into bed. “She already traded a lot of her freedom for the security of living with us, and since her accident, she’s given up even more.”

  I didn’t say a word. If I couldn’t argue with Frannie, I could give Linda the cold shoulder for her taking her side. I was about to pull up the covers and turn toward the wall, but I relented and kissed her good night instead.

  I loved each of our cats, even the next-to-impossible-to-love Lucy, but Frannie struck me as special. Her virtues wouldn’t impress most people. She lacked Moobie’s friendly personality, Agnes bettered her in the feistiness department, and Lucy was second to none as a chair hogger, to give credit where credit was due. Even our duck Victor was more affectionate. Frannie could be quirky, twitchy, fearful, proud, manipulative—no, wait a minute, that was me. There was a deep and possibly pathological bond between us, making me feel like she was the kind of cat that came along just once in a lifetime.

  Chapter 10

  Don’t Call Him “Mr. Cuddle-Wuddle”

  Months later Frannie was still wary of us. The mere threat of being petted as she waited at the door elicited a pitiful eek. And when I tapped the floor and urged in a falsetto voice, “Come see me, sweetie,” I might as well have been talking to a cactus. Lucy, of all cats, answered by hopping onto the couch and hooking one paw over my knee, despite the lack of pine tar–based shampoo. Frannie was now officially the most standoffish member of the household.

  I phoned my sister Joan for encouragement, expecting to hear that her feral cat
Ember had lived up to her name by warming up to them.

  “We can’t touch her,” she said. “Not if we don’t want to get shredded. She likes being around us, and we can play with her with a string. But she’s not a cat you can touch.”

  “How did you ever take her to the vet to get her spayed?”

  “I bought a pair of heavy leather gloves that covered my arm up to the elbow. Then I put on my thickest winter coat and lowered her into a pet carrier as quickly as I could.”

  Joan’s experience sounded like way more adventure than I could handle at the moment. As I lay down in the mattress for a nap, Moobie settled in alongside me for the first time in weeks. She had shrunken in both mass and energy and spent her days curled up on a pile of clothes in our closet. I had missed her, and it depressed me to realize that I’d probably never have this kind of physical closeness with Frannie. But at least I could touch her without fear of getting shredded.

  Linda interrupted my nap to tell me that her friend Reverend Evans couldn’t care for his cat any longer because of his Parkinson’s disease. Could we take him? Word had apparently percolated up from the stray-cat grapevine to human clerical circles that we were pushovers for feline orphans.

  If the call had come through while Frannie was recuperating, I wouldn’t have just said no. I would have snipped the phone cord. As it happened, we were enjoying an extra­ordinary phase when none of our animals was causing us any trouble. Yes, Bella had bitten me when I had handed her a peanut, and the cord to the dining room radio near Rudy the rabbit’s cage was missing a strip of insulation. But no parakeet, parrot, dove, rabbit, goose, hen, or cat was currently ill or injured—and Linda hadn’t seen another bear. So as I furrowed my brow and pretended to be occupied in thought, I was actually stifling a yawn. Our animals suddenly seemed so effortless to live with that keeping a mineral healthy would be exhausting in comparison. I couldn’t come up with an argument against taking in another cat. But I still told her, “No. Four cats is enough.” I didn’t want to disturb a perfect state of equilibrium.

  “He’s eight years old,” Linda said. “He won’t be able to find another home and will have to go to the animal shelter.”

  “Good. Then Lucy will have company.” I also ignored her insistence that this was a lap cat who loved people. Very affectionate, I could hear her saying next. Instead she dropped a bombshell that blew away my objections.

  “His name is Mabel. They thought he was a girl when he was a kitten, so they called him Mabel and they never changed his name.”

  “You mean to tell me—” I could barely speak through my indignation. “You’re saying that for eight years this male cat has been saddled with a girl’s name?”

  “I don’t know why they didn’t change it, but that’s what Reverend Evans told me.”

  I just knew this had to be emblematic of a long history of neglect. I envisioned a sad-eyed cat, naked except for a few stray tufts of hair and scrawny enough that he could slip through the bars of Bella’s cage.

  “Get the poor guy over here,” I said. I hoped we weren’t too late.

  FRANNIE MUST HAVE overheard Linda’s phone conversation with Reverend Evans. She registered her displeasure by climbing a tree and stationing herself on a branch twenty feet off the ground. A robin was singing from the redbud tree, drowning out her low-octane squeak, but I could see her mouth opening and closing.

  “She’s trying to get down, but she can’t figure out how to do it,” Linda said. Turning around on the branch to face the trunk, Frannie inched forward until she was vertical, head pointed downward. As gravity grabbed her, she hopped down to a lower branch, which seemed like progress. But there were no more branches beneath her. Turning logic on its head, she climbed back up to her former perch and then ascended to the next branch up. She stared down at us and opened her mouth.

  “Call Gary,” Linda said. Gary was our handyman and a good friend who happened to be a sucker for animals, especially cats.

  “They usually come down on their own,” Gary told me on the phone, reacting to my hysteria with typical calm. “It might take a while.”

  “I’m worried about her leg. It’s permanently dislocated, and I don’t know what will happen if she falls. And I don’t know what kind of shape her pelvis is in.”

  Twenty minutes later he was leveling his ladder against the tree. I didn’t want to mention it, but I felt obligated to interrupt his climb with advice. “She doesn’t like being picked up, and she isn’t declawed. So you might want to be careful.”

  “I’ll do my best,” he said. “I’ve gotten scratched lots of times.” Frannie must have watched a sitcom depiction of cat behavior in a tree, because she initially climbed down toward Gary, but just as he stepped within arm’s length, she scrambled higher. “I could wait up here awhile,” he said. He was on the third rung from the top. “I really can’t do much else.”

  “It’s going to be too dark to see her soon,” said Linda.

  After fifteen minutes of wheedling her, Gary called it a night. “She’ll come down,” he said. “She’ll get hungry by morning.” We thanked him profusely, though I felt wounded that he hadn’t worked a miracle.

  I caught cell-less Gary on his landline just as he walked into the house. “As soon as you left,” I told him, “I looked out the window and she was prancing around in the grass. You wouldn’t even know that anything had happened.” I knew something had happened, though. The surge of adrenaline kept me up for hours. I spent the time wondering what kind of trouble Mabel would bring.

  THE EXPRESSIONS OF the two men in our front hallway activated my naughty-cat radar. Linda introduced me to the soft-spoken Reverend Evans, whose gentlemanly demeanor reminded me of my late dad, and his son, Paul, a college professor who appeared fit enough to bench-press me. I took a step backward toward the stairs in case that thought occurred to him. I noticed that Mabel hadn’t accompanied them inside.

  “The cat’s still in the car,” Linda said.

  “In the backseat, last time we saw him,” Paul chimed in. Both he and his dad smiled helpfully, but neither of them moved.

  “Is he in a carrier?” They traded glances and shook their heads, nope, no carrier. Reverend Evans grinned in apparent appreciation of the idea of pet carriers in general. Neither of them had budged, though their faces brimmed with encouragement.

  “Would you like me to get him?” I asked. Paul nodded his approval. “Could I just carry Mabel in my arms?”

  “You could try,” he said, “but he might bite you.”

  “He’s quite the cat,” Reverend Evans said with a chuckle.

  Linda told them that Mabel would have to be nice to Moobie, Frannie, and Lucy if he wanted to live with us. (Agnes’ name didn’t even come up.) Paul reassured her that Mabel didn’t really bite all that much as a rule. Reverend Evans agreed, and the two men expressed the opinion that it would definitely be a good thing if people’s cats got along. As they drifted into the living room and farther from the cat in the car, the discussion meandered away from Mabel and toward animals in general—backyard birds, the crazy things that squirrels did. I understood that I couldn’t put off the inevitable any longer unless I called Joan and asked to borrow her gloves that went all the way up to the elbow. I ducked into the basement for a pet carrier, and then I announced, “I guess we should go out and get him.” Fortified by supportive nods, I marched toward their car. The faces in the window were solidly behind me.

  I WASN’T A brave man. But I had the benefit of ignorance. I knew that there were cats like Ember who would shred you if you touched them, but they existed as far outside of my personal experience as a can-do attitude. So I resolved to make a stab at getting Mabel into the carrier.

  I cautiously opened the rear driver’s side door—and froze. Gazing up at me from the floor was the silliest cat I had ever seen. He emitted a long meow that resembled a moan of complaint from our hen Helen. Normally I considered animals to be my betters. I’d rarely met a dog, cat, bird, or swine
that didn’t brandish some trait I envied, and I’d learned to respect the defenses of a creature as small as a three-inch-long short-tailed shrew. But I had never felt more equal to and less intimidated by any living creature than Mabel. His classic gray American tabby markings would have lent a strikingly handsome flash to any other cat. But the cream-colored circles edged in black around his eyes, his white chin and muzzle, and the dramatic M on his forehead collided with a goofy expression to give him the air of a Mardi Gras clown. He meowed again mournfully. I hesitated to pick him up, concerned that he might make me laugh so hard that I would drop him.

  The great big beanbag complained as I eased him into the carrier, but he didn’t seem unusually put out by what he considered to be another of life’s travails. “Didn’t put up much of a fight?” Paul asked as I opened the carrier door and the cat slipped behind the entertainment center. When I squatted down, Mabel peered back as if we had known each other for years and I had disappointed him yet again.

  As Linda peppered Paul with a flurry of questions about his students at the college, he and his father slowly, almost imperceptibly, reversed direction from the center of the room until the minister had curled his fingers around the doorknob. “Sarah’s going to miss him,” he told me. I heartily agreed, no doubt about it, she sure will, while shooting Linda a “Who’s Sarah?” glance. Reverend Evans pumped my hand and thanked me as we walked them to the car.

  “It must be hard for him to give up his cat when he lives alone,” I said.

  “I didn’t know it wasn’t his cat,” said Linda.

  “What do you mean? Whose cat is he?”

  “I only took him because I thought he belonged to Reverend Evans. His daughter Sarah’s new boyfriend doesn’t like cats, so Reverend Evans was looking after Mabel for her until she could find a home for him.”

  This news flabbergasted me. We turned down “take my cat” pleas all of the time from friends, and now a priceless slot in our house had been scarfed up by a stranger—and for what I considered to be the worst of all reasons for getting rid of a kitty. I would have chucked out the boyfriend instead. None of this changed the fact that Mabel needed a home. But as he ratcheted up his meows a dozen decibels, I doubted that the home would be with us.