by Lissa Warren
Searles spent the rest of his life engaged in what one historian has called “obsessive castle building,” often in collaboration with the well-known Boston architect Henry Vaughan. One of their projects was the least ornate of Searles’s six houses, the main house at Stillwater Manor, which is visible from the front window of my parents’ room—the one where Ting suns herself in the late afternoons. The Manor House, as it’s known around here, is a three-story, twenty-four-room mansion built in 1905 in a Tudor/Elizabethan style, with its vertical and diagonal timber frame and whitewashed wattle-and-daub walls. Elsewhere on the property is the Carriage House. All of it is surrounded by castle walls, with a gate we drive through daily to get to our much simpler home.
In addition to being a lover of grand structures, Edward Searles was something of an environmentalist. He wouldn’t hesitate to change the course of a stone wall if a tree was in the way. A swinger of birches, Robert Frost would have liked him—and may have. In Derry, New Hampshire—a mere dozen miles from the Manor House in Salem—is the Robert Frost Farm, where the poet lived with his family from 1900 to 1911, and which served as fodder for many of his greatest poems, including “Mending Wall.” The two men were contemporaries, and practically neighbors. In fact, the Frost Farm was just six miles up the road from Searles Castle, Searles’s more elaborate home in Windham, made of sandstone from his own quarries.
Nature and respect for it are tenets of Stillwater Circle; always have been, from what I can tell. It’s one of the things that drew us here, because it’s one of our basic tenets, too. But as anyone who lives in New Hampshire will tell you, nature can be a pain in the ass. Don’t take my word for it, however; take Ting-Pei’s.
It was a sunny Monday in spring when Ting-Pei alerted Mom and Dad to a commotion in the fireplace. Thinking that a bird must have come down the chimney, Mom told Dad to open the window while she went and got an old bedsheet. Back downstairs, she held one end of the sheet up to the fireplace and Dad held the other. He reached down and unlatched the glass doors.
“Ready?” he asked her.
“Ready,” she said. And with that, he flung them open.
They were expecting the bird to fly into the sheet so they could trap it and carry it to the window, where they figured it would know what to do. The bird, however, had other ideas. From behind the sheet came a hissing noise, a cloud of ash, and a whole lot of thwacking. Mom was so startled that she dropped her corner, screaming, “That’s no bird!”
Technically she was wrong. It wasn’t a warbler, or a blue jay, or a thrush, a tufted titmouse, or a yellow-shafted flicker. It wasn’t a catbird or a mockingbird, which we used to confuse until Dad pointed out that the catbird was gray, like Ting. It wasn’t any of the small, pretty birds that reside on our property and that my parents were expecting. It wasn’t even a pigeon or a mourning dove or crow. It was certainly avian, but at that moment it was mainly a giant black object flying at Mom’s face.
“Duck,” Mom screamed, so that’s what Dad did, crouching beneath the mantel.
“No, you idiot—it’s a duck!”
And so it was—a female wood duck, wild-eyed and covered in soot, right down to the tips of her iridescent wings. She must have been trying to build a nest on our chimney when she fell down into it, kerplunk.
The story would have ended there if Dad had opened the window like Mom had asked. But he had thought better of it while she was upstairs, afraid that Ting might fall out. He had reasoned that the bird, once ensconced in the sheet, would be easy enough to take out the front door. But that was back when it was a wren or a chat, not a two-pound wood duck with a three-foot wingspan.
The terrified duck flew around the room, brushing against everything as she went. We had just had the whole place painted, of course: Benjamin Moore Mystic Beige. Now the room looked like a Pollock painting, thick black brushstrokes on every wall.
The duck finally landed on the bay window ledge. Mom snatched the sheet from Dad, threw it over the duck, cranked open the window, and pushed the duck toward it.
And where was Ting during all of this? Under the kitchen table, of course, about as helpful as my father, who rose up from his crouch just in time to see Mom scoot the duck off the ledge.
Ting was a bit more obliging when it came to the field mouse—but only a bit. Our laundry room is on the lower level, and it’s strictly off limits to Miss Ting-Pei Warren. Too many nooks and crannies where she could get into trouble, most of them crammed with insulation and pipes. She is, of course, fascinated by the place, as anyone would be by something so close but so completely out of reach. She became even more fascinated with it, however, when a field mouse established residence.
February in New Hampshire is always bitter cold, but this year it was particularly brutal—well below zero with the wind chill factored in. Dad had taken to wearing a ski cap around the house, to keep his bald head warm. Mom wore silk long underwear beneath her turtleneck and polar fleece. The thermostat read 70 degrees, but our high-ceilinged rooms were considerably colder—cold enough, in fact, that in the mornings and evenings we could see our breath. To a field mouse, however, it was positively toasty compared to the great outdoors. And so one came in, through some crack or hole, and set up camp between the washer and dryer.
A wood and metal mousetrap was out of the question. Barbaric things, those. We researched glue traps, but they sounded just as awful. Luckily, in the process, we stumbled onto a website for humane mousetraps—the catch-and-release kind. We bundled up, laced our boots, and ventured forth to Walmart.
Fast-forward one week. Then fast-forward two. The traps were empty (we’d set three, labeled Donna, Jerry, and Lissa), the mouse was still living in the lap of luxury, and we were quickly running out of clean clothes. It wasn’t that we were afraid to go into the laundry room with the mouse in there (we knew he’d hide at the sound of our footsteps); it’s that we’re softies and didn’t want to disturb him. The washing machine had a tendency to thump, and to a mouse the dryer would sound like a tornado. But make no mistake, we wanted him gone. Not traumatized, but gone.
Ting wanted him gone, too—but in a different way. She wanted him gone from the laundry room and into our sunroom so that she could chase him. Afraid she’d somehow miss the mouse’s grand exit, she took to guarding the laundry room 24/7. This worried Dad, especially.
“Did you feel her nose?” he asked me and Mom. “It’s so cold. And her ears—my God, her ears.”
“Yes,” said Mom, “they’re a little chilly.”
“Chilly?” Dad barked. “She’s almost hypothermic!”
“If she’s cold she’ll come upstairs,” reasoned Mom.
“Neglect,” muttered Dad. “Neglect.”
Disgusted by what he perceived to be a terrible lack of concern on Mom’s part, Dad decided to take action. He dragged a chair from the sunroom to the laundry-room door, where Sergeant Ting was stationed, picked her up, sat himself down, and stuffed her in his robe. I passed them an hour later on the way to my room. Her purring was audible; so was his snoring. His action was inaction, and it was working like a charm.
I don’t know how long they stayed like that—I went to my room to read—but at some point I heard running and screaming in the sunroom next door. I went to have a look. Feeling a bit neglected herself, Mom had apparently snuck downstairs to see what Ting and Dad were up to. She decided to check on the mouse while there, and had left the door open a crack by mistake.
The mouse saw his shot at freedom and ran right past her into the hall. Ting, hearing him scurry by, shot out of Dad’s arms. She chased the little brown mouse into the sunroom, where they commenced playing Whac-A-Mole between the flowerpots. Mom grabbed an empty one and placed it over the mouse just like a cake-stand cover. Dad, suddenly a man of action, grabbed a nearby copy of The New Yorker and slid it under the flowerpot, thus trapping our houseguest so that he could be shown the door. Game over, Ting bolted upstairs to the bedroom.
More trouble than
they were worth, those mice.
But the animal that vexed Ting the most was the one we called her “boyfriend bunny.” For an entire summer, without missing a day, a little gray rabbit came by to see her, almost always at ten a.m. He would sit by the back door and wait for her, and because it was glass, he could see her coming. The second she walked in, he’d stand on his hind legs.
“He’s myopic,” said Dad. “He thinks she’s a rabbit. She’s gray and about his size.”
Whatever the rabbit thought Ting was, Ting knew what the rabbit was, and objected. She would go to the door and stare at him, and he’d inch forward until they were nose to nose. The first few weeks she hissed at him, but as the summer wore on, he wore her down. She learned to tolerate his presence.
Fall arrived at last, and the bunny stopped coming. Ting searched for him for a couple of days, then put him out of her mind. Her space was her space, her sun, her sun. She didn’t want to share it. Something there is that doesn’t love a wall. Ting wasn’t one of those somethings.
Chapter Seven
Party of One
A cat, however, is never without the potentialities of contentment. Like a superior man, he knows how to be alone and happy.
—H. P. Lovecraft
We Warrens rarely learn our lesson. After Ting had been with us for a few years, we got to thinking that, as happy as she was with her human companions, she might appreciate a playmate—a little, feline playmate. We weren’t stupid enough to think that Ting would want a sibling. Ting had been raised as an only child, just like me, and we couldn’t imagine her sharing her home with another cat on a daily basis. But somehow we managed to convince ourselves that she might be up for a playdate. That was mistake number one.
Mistake number two was our selection. We quickly ruled out our neighbor’s cat, Lulu. Though sweet-tempered, she was a very big girl, and we were afraid she’d play too rough—without meaning to, of course. A man with whom Dad used to play bridge had a perfectly nice Persian named Buster. But Persians shed and, if they didn’t get along, Ting would have reminders for days or weeks after—on the couch, on the carpet, everywhere. There was Gus, cousin Sonya’s black-and-white longhair, but Nashua was forty-five minutes away, and it seemed like asking a lot of Sonya to pack her up and haul her to Salem.
We briefly flirted with the idea of taking out a personal ad, but really, what would it say? “Insanely spoiled purebred seeks same”? “SGF (single gray feline) seeks buddy for mischief and napping”? And where would we place it? The Boston Globe? Too expensive. The Boston Herald? Republican. The Boston Phoenix? A bit too alt. Craigslist could be creepy, and JDate wasn’t around yet (never mind the fact that Ting wasn’t technically Jewish and, also, that Ting was a cat).
Enter Esmé, named after the Salinger story. Like Ting, Esmé was a Korat. I thought Ting-Pei might be more at ease with a cat who looked a lot like her—that there’d be a familiarity, a certain level of comfort. They could even be related, the Korat gene pool being as small as it is. Esmé was a bruiser compared to Ting—almost eleven pounds—but I knew her to be a good, gentle cat, and, what’s more, I was friends with her father. What I didn’t know was whether she was a particularly social cat—but, then again, I didn’t know if Ting was, either. After much discussion we decided to give it a try.
On a cool afternoon in April, Esmé came over to play. Her dad carried her in and set her down in the living room. Like any well-adjusted cat, she started having a look around—jumped up on the window ledge, checked out a bit of ivy. She seemed perfectly at ease here. Excited I’d found a friend for Ting—perhaps a long-lost cousin—I went upstairs to fetch her. From the second I brought Ting down the stairs, I realized we’d made a bad miscalculation. Here’s a transcript of what ensued:
Esmé: Sniff. Hello. Sniff. Meow.
Ting-Pei: Crouch, growl, hiss. Whap whap.
Esmé: Sniff. Sniff. Mew?
Ting-Pei: Die! Die! Die!
By that point Ting had rolled on her back and was thumping poor Esmé with her powerful hind feet, her canine teeth bared and glistening in the sun. Before I could make it across the room, Esmé’s dad had swooped in to save her. Embarrassed, I muttered an apology as I bent to pick up Ting. I could feel her heart racing, her body tense from her encounter with the vile gray intruder with the cute and literary name—the beast from beyond that Mommy Lissa, clearly a traitor, had invited to the house.
Our guests left quickly and, within an hour, Ting had forgiven me. I’d learned an important lesson, though: Don’t mess with another person’s solitude—and by person, I mean cat.
Chapter Eight
Ting Is Missing
As anyone who has ever been around a cat for any length of time well knows, cats have enormous patience with the limitations of the human kind.
—Cleveland Amory
I’m a homebody. I travel for work, but not much else. My parents, however, especially my mom, love to take excursions—the more exotic, the better. Since I graduated from college and moved back home—meaning, since they acquired a free, live-in cat sitter—they’ve gone to Ireland (Mom’s choice; her maiden name is McKittrick), Hawaii (Dad’s choice; when he was in the navy, he was stationed at Pearl Harbor), Scotland, St. John’s, Aruba, St. Martin, Cancún, Cabo San Lucas, Curaçao, Bonaire, Australia, China, and Costa Rica.
My parents brought back a present for me every time they traveled, and it was always the same thing: a cat figurine. With each one came a story—of the cats they saw while there, and the role of the cat in that country’s culture.
Given my roots, I’ll start with Ireland. The Irish cat figurine is jet black—heavy like a paperweight, supposedly carved from Irish turf. It was made in Ballyshannon, a town in County Donegal that looks over an estuary and claims to be Ireland’s oldest. The cat is curled up and sleeping, its head resting on its right front paw, its tail curved around its haunches. Ireland has the legend of the Kilkenny cats—two cats who battled to the death and devoured each other until just their tails remained. Lovely story, that. But it’s a symbol of Irish scrappiness.
My parents’ trip to Scotland resulted in another black cat—a tall, thin one with perky ears and oh-so-perfect posture. Unlike in America, in Scotland (and the rest of the UK, for that matter), black cats portend good luck. Not Si-Sawat-level good luck, of course, but good luck all the same.
My parents went to China for two weeks, so they brought home two figurines. From Shanghai, an alabaster one with its tail tucked under its chin, and from Beijing, a basketful of cats made of ivory (synthetic, of course; we’re pro-elephant here), complete with handle and lid and, near its base, two ink-drawn flowers. They shared what the shop clerk had told them: that dogs have long been the pets of hunters, and cats, the pets of farmers. For that reason, China, an agrarian nation, strongly favored the cat. Recently, eight five-thousand-year-old cat bones were found in the Chinese farming village of Quanhucun. Testing showed that one of them was from an elderly cat who probably couldn’t have survived in the wild. It suggests a certain level of domestication—that the farmers must have protected the cat—and it was quite surprising to archaeologists, because cats were thought to have been domesticated a mere four thousand years ago, and in a completely different country.
One of Mom and Dad’s trips to Cancún yielded a pair of tiny clay cats, one sitting up on its haunches, alert; the other, asleep in a ball. Mayan designs in black and brick-red covered their shoulders and backs. In Mexico, it’s all about the jaguar, not the domestic cat; they had various jaguar gods, in fact. So it wasn’t just in Egypt that cats were worshipped.
My parents always liked going to Cancún. They had a time-share there. It was quick and easy to get to, exotic but also familiar. It was black bean soup, and grilled tomatillos, and huevos rancheros for brunch.
But their favorite trip—by far, their favorite trip—was a three-week safari to Africa in 1999.
They selected Tanzania for one reason, and one reason only (though it was act
ually three): lion, leopard, and cheetah—the Big Cats. It took a few days of tenting on the Serengeti, but eventually, with the help of their guide, they managed to see all three in their natural habitat. They even got to see a mama lion nursing her month-old cubs.
Ting was a still-energetic four-year-old at the time, and was used to receiving all of my parents’ attention. I left the office right at five each night while they were gone and went directly home to her. The first week she seemed fine, but by week two she was clearly bored and lonely, following me from room to room while I warmed up the Bagel Bites I’d been living off of for ten days, or did laundry, or looked in my father’s desk for stamps, or changed out of my work clothes.
The second Thursday night that Mom and Dad were gone, Ting seemed particularly needy. It was garbage night, though, which meant I had work to do: change the litter box, empty the kitchen pail, tie up the little bag in the bathroom, then drag all of it to the giant bin in the garage so that first thing in the morning I could roll it out in front of the garage and leave it for the garbagemen.
Ting was underfoot the whole time, which was funny while I was doing her box (she christened it before I could finish pouring the litter) but annoying when I was trying to gather the trash. At one point I gave her a firm “Could you stop?” and it seemed to do the trick.
Chores done, I settled down in front of the TV in my parents’ room. After an hour or so it dawned on me that Ting was being a very good girl. Too good of a girl, in fact. And where was she, anyway? She wasn’t in her spot on top of Dad’s armoire, or on the back of the bedroom couch, or curled up at the bottom of the bed, or asleep in her favorite rocker. Could she be under the bed pouting because I’d been a little stern with her? Entirely possible, I thought. Like the rest of the Warrens, that cat knew how to sulk.
