The Big New Yorker Book of Cats

by The New Yorker Magazine

  Hiram, my daughter’s husband, said, “I’ll go for you, Frank, if you’ll tell me the way.”

  He was being kind, but he is also unctuous and prematurely balding, and I let my irritation with the others taint my reply: “It would take too long to explain. There are about six forks and none of them are marked.”

  “He’s the country boy,” my wife told Hiram with a collusive smile. “Let’s let him go.” To me she said, “You love those windy old roads.”

  It was a relief, as it always had been, to get out of the house and into the car, and onto the rolling freedom of the leafy roads. Newish ranch houses, built in homely mixtures of wood and sandstone and vinyl siding, added their window lights and mowed yards to the scattered habitations that I remembered. My mother used to recall being allowed to ride in the gig with her father when he caught the train into Reading at the Fern Hollow station, and then, though she was only nine or ten, bringing the gig back to the farm by herself. Of course, the horse knew the way. In the darkness, thinking of a little beribboned girl allowed to bring a gig through three miles of forest and tobacco fields, I missed one of the forks. Rather than turn around, I took what I remembered as a shortcut, but it led to a dead end at an abandoned gravel pit. It took forever, it seemed, to backtrack and find Fern Hollow. But Stoudt’s Keystone was still open, with its two gas pumps and side porch loaded with horse feed and sacks of fertilizer. Behind the counter, Roy Stoudt nodded in recognition, though I was disguised in a citified shirt and blazer. When I told him what I wanted, he said, “I was wondering how those cats would manage.”

  “Not so well. The neighbors promised to shoot some but they haven’t yet. I need just a case, to tide us over.” I pictured the kittens staggering with hunger and said, “Maybe two cases.”

  “Your mother favored the protein beef mix and the seafood medley.”

  “Fine. Anything.”

  “She used to say they turned up their noses at pork; they were Old Testament cats. She was a funny one. You never quite knew when she was kidding.”

  “Yeah, that was a problem for me even.” In Princeton, I would have said “even for me.” The local lilt was not hard to slip into. Stoudt’s Keystone was a long, dark store, its floorboards hollowed by wear, with gleaming nails, where generations had shuffled past the cash register. It still sold little tubes of flypaper and plugs of chewing tobacco. I had trouble deciding, amid the abundance of packaged carbohydrates, which brand of pretzels to buy. I settled for a bag that claimed “NEW! Lo Fat, Lo Sodium.”

  As he rang up my purchases, Roy went on, “She used to say to me, ‘My boy thinks I’m crazy, feeding all these cats, but it’s my only luxury. I don’t drive a Mercedes, and I don’t wear mink.’ ”

  “I never said crazy. I may have said funny.”

  “She did trap some and take them down to the humane society,” he pointed out. “It was just nature kept getting ahead of her.” There was a slyness mixed in with his amiability; I sensed how much of a local joke she and her cats had been. “There,” he said. “I’ve given you the discount for quantity I used to give to her.”

  “You don’t have to do that.” I could have bitten my tongue. I could hear his response coming, like the pedantic distinction, made much of in elementary school, between “can” and “may.”

  “I know I don’t have to, Frank, but I want to,” Roy said. “We’ll miss your mother around these parts.”

  The cat-food section of Stoudt’s Keystone would certainly miss her. I said what I should have said in the first place: “Thanks for the discount, Roy.”

  Outside, under the moth-battered lights, bits of abandoned railroad gleamed in the parking lot, where it hadn’t paid to wrest the iron tracks from the blacktop. They crossed the little road, pointing on either side to tunnels of darkness. The woods had still not fully reclaimed the right-of-way; the rails were gone but the spalls and creosoted ties had been left and discouraged growth.

  The morning of the funeral, I began to clean out my mother’s crammed desk and found a little note on brittle blue stationery in an envelope addressed simply “Frank.” It said:

  In the event of my death I wish to be buried in the simplest possible ceremony, in the least expensive available coffin. Instead of flowers, I ask that contributions be directed to the Boone Township Humane Society, R.F.D. 2, Box 88, Emmetstown, Penna.

  I had done it all wrong. I had bought her the second-most-expensive casket in the undertaker’s basement, cherrywood with shiny brass rails to carry it by, and had arranged with the Lutheran pastor for the usual Lutheran service, with a catered lunch afterward. The announcement of the death in the Reading paper had said nothing about giving money to the humane society. Nor did her note say anything about what I was to do with the cats.

  After the burial service, Dwight sidled up to me on the cemetery grass and said, “I haven’t been able to come over with the rifle these last days—we’re getting the buses ready for the school year, there’s been a ton of maintenance. And Adam has the late peaches coming in. But we’ll get to it, absolutely.”

  The sight of the cherrywood coffin, with its brass fittings, sinking into the clean-sliced earth was still gleaming in my brain. I said, “Dwight, maybe it’s too much to ask. Why don’t you and Adam forget about it, and I’ll try to think of something else. It’s not your problem.”

  “No, now, we wouldn’t want to do that,” he said consolingly. He looked strange, in a navy-blue churchgoing suit under a noon sun on a weekday. Adam had brought his entire family, including three grandchildren, getting them out of the orchard and into their good clothes. A few other neighbors were there, and Martha Stoudt from down in Fern Hollow—she was the caterer. Roy had stayed behind the counter at the store. Three of my female high-school classmates showed up, touchingly, and a business associate, a fellow-accountant, of my father’s who I thought had long ago died. In fact, though older than my parents, he was wiry and tan. He spent half the year in Florida, and didn’t lack for dancing partners down there; this last was confided with a wink. Senility showed only in his tears, which refused to dry up in the outdoors, even with the early-fall sun beating down and a dry wind blowing on the cemetery hill. He cried for all of us, it seemed, while smiling and hopping about on the grass.

  Martha Stoudt and the pastor’s wife had been too optimistic about the funeral attendance; there seemed mountains of potato salad and cole slaw and sliced bread and cold cuts waiting for us in the church function room. The food held us fast like flies; we murmured and circled, though the farmers were anxious to get back to their farms and my high-school friends back to their jobs. All three women worked in welfare administration, oddly—government-sponsored mothers to the nation’s hordes of orphans.

  As for my mother, it is strange, once a life is over, how little there is to say about it. I could feel her in the room, polite but taking sardonic note, for future reference, of our collective failure to quite rise to the occasion. People had always struck her as inept, compared to animals. It galled me on her behalf that the minister, in the very strenuousness of his oratorical attempt to evoke my mother’s elusive qualities, had forgotten to signal the organist to play “A Mighty Fortress.” How many Lutherans get buried without hearing, one last time, “A Mighty Fortress”? I felt it as a scandal, albeit minor. Ignominiously my living kin gathered up all the uneaten food and went back to the forlorn house, with its rotting sills and teeming population of invited pests. The cats, though it was not their dinnertime, were swarming hopefully on the back porch; some of the barn cats had ventured up to the house and made gray streaks in retreat across the lawn as our car pulled in. The house was stuffy and still inside; Andrea went around tugging open the sticky windows, in contravention of my mother’s theory that closed windows sealed the coolness in. She and our daughter, Nancy, were dying to get back to Princeton; we had left it to a neighbor to feed fat old Josie, along with our own sleek cocker spaniel. Max and I were to stay a day or two—whatever it took—and load up
the truck and get the house clean enough for the real-estate agent to show. Everywhere we looked, from the refrigerator full of cold cuts and potato salad to an attic holding a half century’s worth of broken furniture, crockery wrapped in ancient brown newspapers, albums of ancestors whose names nobody now knew, and Life magazines of special historical interest, we were overwhelmed. Nancy put her one-year-old son, Peter, down upstairs for his nap. Andrea had a headache, Max and Hiram turned on the television set, and I escaped by getting in the car and driving to Emmetstown.

  (illustration credit 7.5)

  Four miles of back roads, crossing and recrossing a creek on rattling bridges, brought me to the outskirts of Emmetstown, where an ugly stencilled sign pointed the way to the Humane Society. I had been here a few times with my mother, delivering trapped cats. The society had lent her two galvanized cage traps a dozen years ago. She would bait them with liver pâté. On various weekend visits I had helped her lug her bizarre catch. Tomcats and new mothers were the hardest to carry, as they made the long cages pitch back and forth in their terror, hurling their bodies against the dropped doors and trying to bite and claw their way through the wire mesh. You handed them in over the Humane-Society counter and a stocky, pale teen-age girl would take them away and ten minutes later, looking slightly paler, would bring the cages back empty.

  In the years since I had been here, there had been some refinements. From the concrete-floored rear of the complex there still drifted animal smells and yowls, but the front room looked more like an office, with framed certificates and prints of wildlife. The high bare counter was gone, and a walnut desk occupied the center of the shag-carpeted floor. Here sat a broad-shouldered bland woman with “big” hair, teased and tinted copper.

  Her pale face lifted to me when I came in; her lips remained parted, so her front teeth showed in a semi-startled way I found appealing. Before I could introduce myself, she said, “I was sorry to read about your mother, Frank. She was a real nice lady. Such lovely manners, even when you could tell she was upset.”

  “When did you see her upset?”

  “Oh, with the cats. Having to bring them in to be, you know, disposed of, when they were a lot like pets to her. She would say goodbye by name, sometimes. She used to say it was the tamest that trusted her enough to take the bait; the really wild ones never got caught.”

  “It was horrible, the way they multiplied.”

  “Well, they will, if you feed them.” She added, as I grappled with this Malthusian truth, “That’s the nature of the beast.” Seeing me still baffled, she said, “It’s hard.”

  “Yes,” I agreed. “Hard. Do you have any ideas as to what I should do?”

  “About the cats?”

  “Absolutely.” What else? I had no other problems that I knew of.

  She thought and said, “Well, do you still have the traps?”

  “I haven’t looked, but I guess they’re still in the barn.”

  “I ask because your mother hasn’t been in for a couple of years at least.”

  “She got too weak to do it. A trap with a fighting cat in it isn’t so easy to handle.”

  “Oh, I know.” She spoke with an increasing gentleness, as if to a crazy man. Though her fingernails were short and unpainted, her face was made up with that faintly excessive care of minor officialdom—of small-town postmistresses and small-city lawyers’ secretaries. I suddenly knew that this composed executive woman was the stocky girl of years ago, the teenage executioner. She had assumed I recognized her at once, as she had me.

  A young male minion in dungarees and ponytail opened the door to the fragrant beyond, said a few unintelligible words, received a confirming nod, and closed the door.

  Lamely I continued, “I think she got overwhelmed and couldn’t see beyond dishing it out every day. There’s an absolute mountain of tin cans in the woods!”

  She changed the angle of her listening head, and her professional patience seemed momentarily strained. “What I started to suggest was, if you still have the traps in the barn, you could set them and bring in one or two every day. The ones you don’t eventually catch will be so feral they’ll keep to the woods.”

  “But I can’t stay!”

  She blinked at my fervor. Somehow she had seen me as replacing my mother in the little house, with its eighty-two acres of milkweed and horseflies and sandy red mud, as if my whole life had been killing time until I could take possession of my inheritance.

  “I live in New Jersey!” I insisted. “I have to get back to my house, my job.”

  “You’re putting your mom’s place up for sale?”

  “I have to! I can’t take care of it!”

  She pursed her lips slightly as she took this in. “It’s considered a nice place around here, but if you can’t, well, you can’t. Your mother wouldn’t want you to do the impossible.” Yet a loyalty to my mother drove her, after a pause, to go on, “Though she always spoke of you as the one who’d take charge. She’d say to me, ‘Amy, I’m just holding the fort for Frank.’ How many days can you stay, then?”

  “Two at most.”

  She thoughtfully scratched below her dough-colored little ear and I caught a whiff of her perfume. “So, then. Bring the borrowed traps in, and we’ll cross them off your mother’s card. Otherwise I’d have to charge you.”

  “Fine. I’ll do it tomorrow.” I hoped she didn’t expect me to bring them in loaded. I didn’t have any liver pâté, for one thing.

  “And then, you know, Frank, we have a man who does some trapping for us. He lives not far from here, and works out in your area, at the hardware store in Morgantown. He could set the traps at your place on his way to work and pick them up on his way back.”

  “That sounds wonderful. Wonderful. How much does he charge?” Like a frontiersman packing a firearm, I had brought a checkbook, just in case.

  “Oh, nothing to you. It comes under township wildlife control. He does it as a kind of hobby.”

  “Wonderful,” I repeated once more. “It sounds almost too good to be true. Let me write a donation to the humane society. It’s what my mother would have wanted, I know.” I pondered the proper amount. A hundred dollars seemed not enough for the magnitude of the service. I pictured the waves of cats, gathered like gray sheaves into cages set out in the dawn’s dewy light and harvested at twilight. Even two hundred seemed modest. I wrote a check for two hundred and fifty, which came to about six dollars a cat. The amount startled her, I could tell by the arch of her plucked and pencilled eyebrows. “And here’s my number in Princeton if you ever need it,” I said. “Could I have your card, so I can maybe call to check on progress?” I didn’t want her, and her offer, to get away.

  “Of course, Frank.” She had stiffened; she had at last realized that she was a stranger to me—someone simply to use. The card said, “Amy Reidenhauer, Director, Boone Township Humane Society,” with the same address as on my mother’s note to me. I had cracked the code. I drove back to my farmhouse exhilarated, making the tires squeal on the winding Emmetstown road. It came to me that of all the women in the world I loved Amy Reidenhauer the best.

  In the next two days, Max surprised me by being a great help in the packing up. While I stood around in the midst of my inheritance paralyzed by the imagined importance of everything, he made decisions. Keep this, take that. When he and I drove away in the yellow rental truck, we left the rest of the funeral meats in the woods, as a last feast for the cats. “O.K., kitties,” I told them as they mewed up at my face. “Now you’re on your own.”

  In the months to come, as fall activity was renewed in Princeton, I avoided going back. I was afraid of getting sucked in. Everything was handled over the telephone. It was almost eerie, to see society smoothly bring into play its perfected machinery for the transfer of property. My lawyer, another old high-school classmate, arranged for the estate assessment and sent me forms to sign and return. The real-estate agent kept me apprised of prospects and offers. When I asked him if he, on his lates
t showing of the house, had noticed any cats around the back porch, he pretended to search his memory before saying, “Why, no!” Their mewing, furry, hungry substance had vanished like the matter of a dream. My mother’s meagre treasures—the rose-pattern china, the pine corner cupboard, the curly-maple sewing table, two lace tablecloths, some turquoise jewelry from my parents’ one trip to the Southwest, and a brass tiger stamped on the bottom “Made in China” and forever marked by my childhood impressions of hugeness and menace, though it was scarcely six inches long—found their niches in our home or our daughter’s, with a few pieces promised to Max when and if he ever settled down. Little Peter wanted the wind chimes. Josie inherited her yellow plastic dog dish. In Pennsylvania, the auction crew came into the house, cleaned it out of every tattered piece of furniture and antique junk, including the Life magazines from V-E and V-J Days, and in late October sent me a respectable check for the proceeds at auction. In early November, the realtor had found a retired couple from Philadelphia whose bid was in the bottom end of my asking range, and who promised to keep renting the fields to Adam and Dwight. The buyers vowed they had no intention of developing the acreage but refused to sign a covenant without a sharp reduction in the price. I backed down. The farm could take its chances. We set the date of the signing for the Monday after Thanksgiving.

  “I’m not worried about you, Henley. You’ll land on your feet.” (illustration credit 7.6)

  I felt guilty, selling the place. My mother had believed it to be a piece of lost Eden and wanted me to live on it for my own good. Pathetically, she would argue that I could still teach at Princeton, with a readjustment of my schedule that would bunch my teaching into a few days in the middle of the week. “What about my wife?” I asked.