The Big New Yorker Book of Cats

by The New Yorker Magazine

  When several ushers took hold of Father Malt, Mr. Keller, the head usher, a druggist and a friend of physicians, spoke with authority. “Don’t move him! That’s the worst thing you can do! Call an ambulance!”

  Three ushers thought to cover Father Malt with their overcoats (three others, too late with theirs, held theirs in their hands), and everyone just stood and stared, as I did, at the old priest, my friend and protector, lying under the mound of overcoats, with the indifferent snow settling down as upon a new grave. I began to feel the cold in my bones and to think that I should certainly perish if I were locked out on such a night. I heard Mr. Keller ordering Mr. Cormack to the rectory to phone for an ambulance. Reluctantly—not through any deficiency in my sorrow—I left the scene of the accident, crossed the snowy lawn, and entered the rectory with Mr. Cormack.

  After Mr. Cormack had summoned an ambulance, he called his old pastor, Father O’Hannon, of St. Clara’s, Minneapolis (of which Sherwood, our town, was gradually becoming a suburb), and asked him to be at the hospital, in case Father Malt should be in danger of death and in need of extreme unction. “The assistant here, Father Burner, isn’t around. His car’s gone from the garage, and there’s no telling when that one’ll be back,” said Mr. Cormack, sounding lonesome for his old parish. At St. Clara’s, he’d evidently been on more intimate terms with the priests. His last words to Father O’Hannon, “We could sure use someone like you out here,” gave me the idea that he had gone fishing for Father Burner’s favor but had caught one of the white whale’s flukes. Now, like so many of us, he dreamed of getting even someday. I could only wish him luck as he left the rectory.

  I watched at the window facing upon the tragedy, enduring the cold draft there for Father Malt’s sake, until the ambulance came. Then I retired to the parlor register and soon fell asleep—not without a prayer for Father Malt and many more for myself. With Father Burner running the rectory, it was going to be a hard, hard, and possibly fatal winter for me.

  The ironic part was that Father Burner and I, bad as he was, had a lot in common. We disliked the same people (Mr. Keller, for instance), we disliked the same dishes (those suited to Father Malt’s dentures), but, alas, we also disliked each other. This fault originated in Father Burner’s raw envy of me—which, however, I could understand. Father Malt didn’t improve matters when he referred to me before visitors, in Father Burner’s presence, as the assistant. I was realist enough not to hope for peace between us assistants as long as Father Malt lived. But it did seem a shame that there was no way of letting Father Burner know I was prepared—if and when his position improved—to be his friend and favorite, although not necessarily in that order. (For some reason, I seem to make a better favorite than friend.) As it was Father Burner’s misfortune to remain a curate too long, it was mine to know that my life of privilege—my preferred place at table, for example—appeared to operate at the expense of his rights and might be the cause of my ultimate undoing. It was no good wishing, as I sometimes did, that Father Malt were younger—he was eighty-one—or that I were older, that we two could pass on together when the time came.

  Along toward midnight, waking, I heard Father Burner’s car pull in to the driveway. A moment later, the front porch cracked under his heavy step. He entered the rectory, galoshes and all, and, as was his custom, proceeded to foul his own nest wherever he went, upstairs and down. Finally, after looking, as he always did, for the telephone messages that seemingly never came, or, as he imagined, never got taken down, he went out on the front porch and brought in more snow and the evening paper. He sat reading in the parlor—it was then midnight—still in his dripping galoshes, still in perfect ignorance of what had befallen Father Malt and me. Before he arrived, the telephone had been ringing at half-hour intervals—obviously the hospital, or one of the ushers, trying to reach him. The next time, I knew, it would toll for me.

  Although I could see no way to avoid my fate, I did see the folly of waiting up for it. I left the parlor to Father Burner and went to the kitchen, where I guessed he would look last for me, if he knew anything of my habits, for I seldom entered there and never stayed long. Mrs. Wynn, the housekeeper, loosely speaking, was no admirer of mine, nor I of her womanly disorder.

  I concealed myself in a basket of clean, or at least freshly laundered, clothes, and presently, despite everything, I slept.

  Early the following day, when Father Burner came downstairs, he had evidently heard the news, but he was late for his Mass, as usual, and had time for only one wild try at me with his foot. However, around noon, when he returned from the hospital, he paused only to phone the chancery to say that Father Malt had a fractured hip and was listed as “critical” and promptly chased me from the front of the house to the kitchen. He’d caught me in the act of exercising my claws on his new briefcase, which lay on the hall chair. The briefcase was a present to himself at Christmas—no one else thought quite so much of him—but he hadn’t been able to find a real use for it and I think it piqued him to see that I had.

  “Make ratatouille.” (illustration credit 6.2)

  “I want that black devil kept out of my sight,” he told Mrs. Wynn, before whom he was careful to watch his language.

  That afternoon, I heard him telling Father Ed Desmond, his friend from Minneapolis, who’d dropped by, that he favored the wholesale excommunication of household pets from homes and particularly from rectories. He mentioned me in the same breath with certain parrots and hamsters he was familiar with. Although he was speaking on the subject of clutter, he said nothing about model railroads, Father Desmond’s little vice, or about photography, his own. The term “household pet” struck me as a double-barrelled euphemism, unpetted as I was and denied the freedom of the house.

  And still, since I’d expected to be kicked out into the weather, and possibly not to get that far alive, I counted my deportation to the kitchen as a blessing—a temporary one, however. I had no reason to believe that Father Burner’s feeling about me had changed. I looked for something new in persecutions. When nothing happened, I looked all the harder.

  HARD LINES

  Here is a short history of the cats owned by Lisa Scoville, aged seven, which she wrote for no particular reason:

  CAT NAMES AND WHAT HAPPEN TO THEM

  Tiger. The door slammed on him and he died.

  Fluffy. She walked away and got lost.

  Puffy. We gave her away.

  Prince. A dog got her.

  Ginger. We still have her. She is not well.

  | 1959 |

  I spent my days in the kitchen with Mrs. Wynn, sleeping when I could, just hanging around in her way when I couldn’t. If I wearied of that, as I inevitably did, I descended into the cellar. The cellar smelled of things too various—laundry, coal, developing fluid, and mice—and the unseemly noise of the home-canned goods digesting on the shelves, which another might never notice, reached and offended my ears. After an hour down there, where the floor was cold to my feet, I was ready to return to the kitchen and Mrs. Wynn.

  Mrs. Wynn had troubles of her own—her husband hit the jar—but they did nothing to Christianize her attitude toward me. She fed me scraps, and kicked me around, not hard but regularly, in the course of her work. I expected little from her, however. She was another in the long tradition of unjust stewards.

  Father Burner’s relatively civil conduct was harder to comprehend. One afternoon, rising from sleep and finding the kitchen door propped open, I forgot myself and strolled into the parlor, into his very presence. He was reading Church Property Administration, a magazine I hadn’t seen in the house before. Having successfully got that far out of line—as far as the middle of the room—I decided to keep going. As if by chance, I came to my favorite register, where, after looking about to estimate the shortest distance between me and any suitable places of refuge in the room, I collapsed around the heat. There was still no intimation of treachery—only peace surpassing all understanding, only the rush of warmth from the register, th
e winds of winter outside, and the occasional click and whisper of a page turning in Church Property Administration.

  Not caring to push my luck, wishing to come and doze another day, wanting merely to establish a precedent, I got up and strolled back into the kitchen—to think. I threw out the possibility that Father Burner had suffered a lapse of memory, had forgotten the restriction placed on my movements. I conceived the idea that he’d lost, or was losing, his mind, and then, grudgingly, I gave up the idea. He was not trying to ignore me. He was ignoring me without trying. I’d been doing the same thing to people for years, but I’d never dreamed that one of them would do it to me.

  From that day on, I moved freely about the house, as I had in Father Malt’s time, and Mrs. Wynn, to add to the mystery, made no effort to keep me with her in the kitchen. I was thus in a position to observe other lapses or inconsistencies in Father Burner. Formerly, he’d liked to have lights burning all over the house. Now that he was paying the bill, the place was often shrouded in darkness. He threw out the tattered rugs at the front and back doors and bought rubber mats—at a saving, evidently, for although one mat bore the initial “B,” the other had an “R,” which stood for nobody but may have been the closest thing he could get to go with the “B.” I noticed, too, that he took off his galoshes before entering the house, as though it were no longer just church property but home to him.

  I noticed that he was going out less with his camera, and to the hospital more, not just to visit Father Malt, to whom he’d never had much to say, but to visit the sick in general.

  In former times, he had been loath to go near the hospital during the day, and at night, before he’d leave his bed to make a sick call, there had had to be infallible proof that a patient was in danger of death. It had been something awful to hear him on the line with the hospital in the wee hours, haggling, asking if maybe they weren’t a little free and easy with their designation “critical,” as, indeed, I believe some of them liked to be. He’d tried to get them to change a patient’s “critical” to “fair” (which meant he could forget about that one), and acted as though there were some therapeutic power about the word, if the hospital could just be persuaded to make use of it. Father Malt, with his hearing aid off, was virtually deaf, Mrs. Wynn roomed down the street, and so I had been the one to suffer. “Oh, go on, go on,” I’d wanted to say. “Go on over there, or don’t go—but hang up! Some of us want to sleep!” There were nights when I’d hardly sleep a wink—unlike Father Burner, who, even if he did go to the hospital, would come bumbling back and drop off with his clothes on.

  In general, I now found his attitude toward his duties altered, but not too much so, not extreme. If he’d had a night of sick calls, he’d try to make up for it with a nap before dinner. His trouble was still a pronounced unwillingness to take a total loss on sacrifice.

  I found other evidence of the change he was undergoing—outlines of sermons in the wastebasket, for instance. In the past, he’d boasted that he thought of whatever he was going to say on Sunday in the time it took him to walk from the altar to the pulpit. He was not afraid to speak on the parishioners’ duty to contribute generously to the support of the church, a subject neglected under Father Malt, who’d been satisfied with what the people wanted to give—very little. Father Burner tried to get them interested in the church. He said it was a matter of pride—pride in the good sense of the word. I felt he went too far, however, when, one Sunday, he told the congregation that it was their church and their rectory. There had always been too many converts hanging around the house for instruction, and now there were more of them than in Father Malt’s day. The house just wasn’t large enough for all of us.

  THE VIGIL

  (illustration credit 6.3)

  (illustration credit 6.9)

  Father Desmond, noting how little time Father Burner now had for himself (and for Father Desmond), suggested that the chancery be petitioned for help (“There’s just too much work here for one man, Ernest”), but Father Burner said no, and so resisted what must have been the worst of all possible temptations to him, the assistant’s sweet dream—to have an assistant. He said he’d go it alone. It almost seemed as if he were out to distinguish himself, not in the eyes of others—something he’d always worked at—but in his own eyes.

  At any rate, he was beginning to act and talk like a real pastor. When Father Desmond came over or phoned, they talked of construction and repairs. Father Desmond, one of our most promising young pastors, was building a new school—with undue emphasis, it seemed to me, on the gymnasium. Father Burner, lacking authority to do more, made needed repairs. He had the rectory kitchen painted and purchased a Mixmaster for Mrs. Wynn. He had the windows in the church basement calked and installed a small institutional kitchen there, thus showing all too clearly that he intended to go in for parish suppers, which he’d abominated in the past as the hardest part of the priesthood.

  Father Desmond and Father Burner now spoke fluently a gibberish that only a building pastor could comprehend. They talked of organs, bells, and bulletin boards, coin counters, confessional chairs and hearing devices, flooring, kneeler pads, gym seats, radiation, filing systems, electric fans, mops, and brooms, and all by their difficult trade names—Wurlitzer, Carillonic, Confessionaire, Confession-Ease, Speed Sweep, the Klopp (coin counter), Vakumatic, Scrubber-Vac, Kardex, Mopmaster, and many more. And shrubbery and trees.

  There was a great need for trees in Sherwood—a need that, I daresay, had never occurred to Father Malt, or, presumably, to many of the older inhabitants of the town. The new people, who lived in “ranch houses” and worked in Minneapolis, seemed to like trees, and so, in his new phase, did Father Burner.

  “When spring comes,” he said, in cold January, “I’ll plant some maples.”

  Father Desmond, who knew where Father Burner’s thoughts were hiding, said, “Someday you’ll build, too, Ernest.”

  After fourteen months in the hospital, Father Malt was moved to the sisters’ infirmary in St. Paul, where there were supposed to be other patients, including old priests, of similar tastes and outlook. In our busy rectory, the seasons had come and gone without pause, the seasons as we observed them—baseball, football, Christmas, basketball, and Lent again. There were further improvements, or at least changes. Father Burner got Mrs. Wynn a white radio for her kitchen and thereby broke the tradition of silence we’d had under Father Malt, who hadn’t even listened to Cedric Adams and the ten-o’clock news.

  I spent my mornings in the parlor and thus escaped the full effect of Mrs. Wynn’s programs, but in the parlor, or wherever I went in the house, I heard those same voices, always at the same hour, always repeating themselves, and for a while, at first, I took a certain interest in those miserable lives. Can a woman over thirty-five find love again? Should a girl, the ward of a man twenty years older, marry him? For these questions, as time went on, I could see there would be no answers.

  In our rectory, another question was being asked, and for this question there had to be an answer. Father Burner was pastor of the church in all but name, and could hope, with good reason, that this, too, would be added unto him in time, if he worked and prayed hard enough. During the first weeks after the accident, Father Burner and Father Desmond had discussed the physical aspects of Father Malt’s case—what kind of cast, the number and type of pins, and all the rest. Lately, however, they’d been taking another line, more to the point and touching upon Father Burner’s chances.

  The difficulty lay, of course, in Father Malt’s refusal to give himself up to the life of an invalid. Nothing could be done about appointing his successor until he actually resigned or died. No one, of course, openly suggested that he do either. It was up to him to decide. Father Desmond believed that, sooner or later, the Archbishop would go to Father Malt and precipitate a solution of the problem. But even the Archbishop was powerless to force Father Malt to resign against his will. As long as Father Malt wished, as long as he lived, he would be pastor, and
this was according to canon law. Father Malt was an “irremovable pastor,” well liked by the people of the parish, a favorite at the chancery, where, however, it was known—according to Father Desmond—that Father Burner was doing a bang-up job.

  Father Burner was the rare one who hadn’t asked for help, who was going it alone, with just two monks, down from St. John’s, to assist him over weekends. He would go on retreat in June for five days (he wasn’t much on card games, though), but he planned no regular vacation. He worked like a dog. He lost weight. He was tired. I was edified.

  In May, I heard Father Desmond say, “Ernest, it’s time to widen your circle of friends,” and so Father Burner, rather unwillingly, tried to give a poker party at the rectory. Father Desmond, popular (as Father Burner wasn’t) with the older men, a surprising number of whom claimed to have sold him on sobriety, invited several pastors and, significantly, no curates. But only two of those invited showed up—Father Kling and Father Moore. They belonged to the active set, a kind of Jockey Club for pastors, which maintained a floating poker game, a duckblind, and a summer lodge. They gambled, hunted, and fished in common.

  On the evening of the party, when they came into the dining room, where the cards and chips were laid out, I could see that Father Desmond had led them to believe that Father Burner, of all people, was playing host to an almost official session. Father Kling, a forceful man, glanced at Father Moore, a mild one, and remarked that he’d understood others were coming. With good grace, however, he and Father Moore sat down to play.

  Father Desmond, who seemed to regard his function as essentially one of public relations, started right in to plump for Father Burner. “It’s a shame somebody doesn’t tell the old man to retire,” he said, referring to Father Malt. “It’s not fair to Ernest, here, and it’s not fair to the parish. This place needs a young man, with young ideas.” I, for one, wasn’t surprised by the utter silence that followed these remarks. Father Kling and Father Moore, as even Father Desmond should’ve known, were not so young themselves, nor were they so hot on young ideas.