A man from Nyack has told us a story which goes back to the recent mating season and concerns two powerfully built tomcats who, with hate in their hearts, fought a duel just before dawn on somebody’s lawn. The sun rose to reveal the scene of battle, the fighters gone, the grass covered with cat fur. Very soon there appeared many of the birds that had selected Nyack for their summer home. They quickly cleared the lawn of fur, using it to line their nests. A fable for our time.
| 1943 |
Another of Mr. Kendell’s foreign maneuvers was a proposal of his that the White House adopt two British royal kittens, Jane and Belinda, that were born in the Silver Room of Buckingham Palace a fortnight or so after Roosevelt’s fourth election. “This was a terrifically important project to cats, both here and abroad,” Mr. Kendell said quietly. “Besides cementing Anglo-American relations no end, it would have furnished a magnificent opportunity to scotch, once and for all, the superstition that the presence of a cat in the White House brings immediate death to the President.” I said I hadn’t known there was such a belief. “Indeed there is!” said Mr. Kendell. “I’m surprised you haven’t heard of it. One of the most pernicious calumnies prevailing today. The canard seems to have started after the assassination of McKinley, when it was said a cat was seen around the Executive Mansion the preceding evening. Supposedly it was confirmed—ha, ha, I say!—when another cat was reported to have appeared there the night before Harding’s death.” Mr. Kendell told me that the idea of a Presidential adoption came to him the minute he read about the birth of the palace kittens. “I decided the Society should sponsor the move, and I at once released word to that effect to English and American newspapers,” he said. “Then I wired the President’s daughter, Mrs. Boettiger, whom I knew slightly, to do what she could to hasten the adoption.”
“Everyone be home by two o’clock!” (illustration credit 8.7)
The next day, the story was widely published in the British and American press. A few hours later, Mrs. Roosevelt announced that the plan was impractical, because Fala hated cats. “What an irony!” Mr. Kendell said. “What an absurd end to a great opportunity! Fala hating cats! Why, in ten minutes I could have had him and the kittens playing beautifully together for the rest of their lives.”
“How?” I asked.
Mr. Kendell looked at me as if I were hopelessly stupid. “Merely by introducing them properly,” he said. “You simply hold the dog and cat a few feet apart until they get each other’s scent. Then you push them together until their noses touch. After that, they’re fast friends. I’ve done it hundreds of times. Utter nonsense, Fala hating cats!” Mr. Kendell was, of course, much disappointed when the adoption plan failed to come off, but he stood up manfully under the blow. “When the papers asked for my reaction, I made a simple public statement,” he said. “I declared, quote, I most profoundly regret that the Roosevelts do not seem big enough to upset the White House cat superstition and the preposterous dog-cat enmity theory as they have the two-term Presidential tradition, unquote.”
To the general public, Mr. Kendell may be best, if now only dimly, remembered as the author, in 1948, of the gigantic Cats for Europe scheme—a plan to send a million American cats to the Marshall Plan countries to rid them of rats. This project, he told me, originated as the result of his reading a statement in an English magazine that something like 40 percent of Europe’s food in storage, including Marshall Plan consignments, was being destroyed by rats, which were multiplying rapidly because over a million European cats had disappeared during the war. Mr. Kendell saw a chance to strike a blow both for America’s homeless short-hairs and for her allies’ food supply, and swiftly went into action, one result being, according to an awed clipping-bureau official who in due course telephoned him, that during a single week more than six million column-inches of articles describing the plan were printed in papers here and abroad—very likely the greatest sustained publicity barrage ever laid down in the interests of cats. Offers of cats poured into the Society’s headquarters by the thousand, and in the midst of all the bustle Mr. Kendell sent the following memorable cablegram to an English newspaper editor for his guidance: “NEGOTIATIONS REFERENCE 50,000 CATS FOR EUROPE BEGUN WITH STATE DEPARTMENT.” The message related only to the proposed initial shipment, which was to be headed by an aerial task force of five thousand cats. “Our plans were well laid,” said Mr. Kendell. “We wanted no pets, no fancies, but hardened American short-hairs who could take it and dish it out. Several airlines were found that would fly the cats over in groups of seventeen hundred, five cats per crate, in heated DC-4 cargo planes, and the lines also agreed to lend hangar space at LaGuardia Field where the cats could be examined for health and temperament, inoculated, and registered with a serially numbered tag affixed to one ear. The cost, around a million and a half dollars for the first fifty thousand cats, I figured was to be borne by the Marshall Plan, with the trade associations of the various countries and the Society itself assisting.”
The State Department, however, suggested that Mr. Kendell take up his proposal direct with the appropriate government bureaus of the Marshall Plan countries, and the scheme got entangled in red tape, from which it has yet to be extricated. Mr. Kendell was telling me that France and Italy still have the plan under favorable consideration and that he expects enthusiasm for it to pick up over all of Western Europe as soon as the red tape is cut away when the telephone rang.
Mr. Kendell answered it and carried on an animated conversation for several minutes, during which he frenziedly made pencilled notes on a piece of paper he had snatched up. Then he turned to me, breathing rapidly. There were traces of perspiration on his temples.
“That was one of the wire services!” Mr. Kendell told me excitedly. “They were relaying to me the extraordinary deed of a Dr. William Orr, a veterinarian of Minerva, Ohio, who has just miraculously saved the life of a cat that got trapped in a brick kiln out there.” I had noticed that whenever Mr. Kendell talked about the misfortunes or sufferings of cats, he was inclined to lower his voice. Now he was talking almost in a whisper. “Brick kilns get frightfully hot, you know,” he said. “How the cat got in this one is a mystery. But when the workers opened it to take out the baked bricks, after thirty-six hours of continuous operation at between six hundred and nine hundred degrees Fahrenheit, there was poor pussy—terribly dehydrated, its tail and paw pads scorched off, scarcely able to move. What chance did it have for survival? None, you’d say. But after almost a week of skillful medical attention and selfless, twenty-four-hour care, Dr. Orr pulled his patient through. What altruism! What an act of devotion to cats! I must notify our membership at once. I must poll our board of directors on awarding Dr. Orr the Society’s special citation for humanity. Please excuse me.” The soft sound of his voice ceased, and the room was quiet except for the wind chuffing outside.
(illustration credit 8.8)
Mr. Kendell turned quickly to his typewriter, inserted some paper, and, without a preliminary pause, began hitting the keys. It was time for me to go. He seemed so absorbed that I didn’t interrupt him to say goodbye. I doubt whether he was even conscious of my leaving the little room. Quietly, I closed the door behind me. Lights now burned in the other offices along the hall. Back of the glass in Mr. Kendell’s door there was only the late-afternoon gloom. But through it came the thump-thump of a typewriter, hurrying as though to make up for lost time.
| 1951 |
“Today is the day I start the new me!”
CAT HOUSE
* * *
MAEVE BRENNAN
A fact with which everybody who knows cats can’t help being acquainted is that their traditional sign of true devotion to human beings is bringing to them, and leaving with them, gruesome offerings, such as mice, rats, birds, that they have caught and killed. Even when the person so honored knows who the cat is, he is faced with a problem that isn’t easy to solve. Well, we ran into an old-fashioned artist friend of ours the other day who lives on the top floor of an o
ld-fashioned five-story building in the southernmost part of Greenwich Village. The building, he tells us, has long been infested by both rats and cats. The cats hold a slight edge and, conscious of their worth and function, lounge around on the stairs of the building when they’re not working, and have to be stepped over by the tenants, all of whom prefer the cats to the rats. Our friend swears he has never owned one of the cats himself and hasn’t even petted one or spoken to one, but somewhere in that herd is a cat who has taken a fancy to him and has been honoring him, every two or three days, by toiling all the way up to the top floor during the night with the offering that might be expected and depositing it just outside his door, where he can’t help seeing it first thing in the morning. He’s thought of trying to make all the cats hate him by kicking at them on the stairs, but he’s a gentle chap, and besides, he says, the stairways in the building are very badly lighted. He doesn’t know what to do. His attitude toward the matter leads us to suspect that any day now the poor fellow may be driven to abandon his studio and that loving, unknown cat.
| 1955 |
TOWN OF CATS
Fiction
* * *
HARUKI MURAKAMI
At Koenji Station, Tengo boarded the Chuo Line inbound rapid-service train. The car was empty. He had nothing planned that day. Wherever he went and whatever he did (or didn’t do) was entirely up to him. It was ten o’clock on a windless summer morning, and the sun was beating down. The train passed Shinjuku, Yotsuya, Ochanomizu, and arrived at Tokyo Central Station, the end of the line. Everyone got off, and Tengo followed suit. Then he sat on a bench and gave some thought to where he should go. “I can go anywhere I decide to,” he told himself. “It looks as if it’s going to be a hot day. I could go to the seashore.” He raised his head and studied the platform guide.
At that point, he realized what he had been doing all along.
He tried shaking his head a few times, but the idea that had struck him would not go away. He had probably made up his mind unconsciously the moment he boarded the Chuo Line train in Koenji. He heaved a sigh, stood up from the bench, and asked a station employee for the fastest connection to Chikura. The man flipped through the pages of a thick volume of train schedules. He should take the 11:30 special express train to Tateyama, the man said, and transfer there to a local; he would arrive at Chikura shortly after two o’clock. Tengo bought a Tokyo–Chikura round-trip ticket. Then he went to a restaurant in the station and ordered rice and curry and a salad.
Going to see his father was a depressing prospect. He had never much liked the man, and his father had no special love for him, either. He had retired four years earlier and, soon afterward, entered a sanatorium in Chikura that specialized in patients with cognitive disorders. Tengo had visited him there no more than twice—the first time just after he had entered the facility, when a procedural problem required Tengo, as the only relative, to be there. The second visit had also involved an administrative matter. Two times: that was it.
The sanatorium stood on a large plot of land by the coast. It was an odd combination of elegant old wooden buildings and new three-story reinforced-concrete buildings. The air was fresh, however, and, aside from the roar of the surf, it was always quiet. An imposing pine grove formed a windbreak along the edge of the garden. And the medical facilities were excellent. With his health insurance, retirement bonus, savings, and pension, Tengo’s father could probably spend the rest of his life there quite comfortably. He might not leave behind any sizable inheritance, but at least he would be taken care of, for which Tengo was tremendously grateful. Tengo had no intention of taking anything from him or giving anything to him. They were two separate human beings who had come from—and were heading toward—entirely different places. By chance, they had spent some years of life together—that was all. It was a shame that it had come to that, but there was absolutely nothing that Tengo could do about it.
Tengo paid his check and went to the platform to wait for the Tateyama train. His only fellow-passengers were happy-looking families heading out for a few days at the beach.
Most people think of Sunday as a day of rest. Throughout his childhood, however, Tengo had never once viewed Sunday as a day to enjoy. For him, Sunday was like a misshapen moon that showed only its dark side. When the weekend came, his whole body began to feel sluggish and achy, and his appetite would disappear. He had even prayed for Sunday not to come, though his prayers were never answered.
When Tengo was a boy, his father was a collector of subscription fees for NHK—Japan’s quasi-governmental radio and television network—and, every Sunday, he would take Tengo with him as he went door to door soliciting payment. Tengo had started going on these rounds before he entered kindergarten and continued through fifth grade without a single weekend off. He had no idea whether other NHK fee collectors worked on Sundays, but, for as long as he could remember, his father always had. If anything, his father worked with even more enthusiasm than usual, because on Sundays he could catch the people who were usually out during the week.
Tengo’s father had several reasons for taking him along on his rounds. One reason was that he could not leave the boy at home alone. On weekdays and Saturdays, Tengo could go to school or to day care, but these institutions were closed on Sundays. Another reason, Tengo’s father said, was that it was important for a father to show his son what kind of work he did. A child should learn early on what activity was supporting him, and he should appreciate the importance of labor. Tengo’s father had been sent out to work in the fields on his father’s farm, on Sunday like any other day, from the time he was old enough to understand anything. He had even been kept out of school during the busiest seasons. To him, such a life was a given.
Tengo’s father’s third and final reason was a more calculating one, which was why it had left the deepest scars on his son’s heart. Tengo’s father was well aware that having a small child with him made his job easier. Even people who were determined not to pay often ended up forking over the money when a little boy was staring up at them, which was why Tengo’s father saved his most difficult routes for Sunday. Tengo sensed from the beginning that this was the role he was expected to play, and he absolutely hated it. But he also felt that he had to perform it as cleverly as he could in order to please his father. If he pleased his father, he would be treated kindly that day. He might as well have been a trained monkey.
Tengo’s one consolation was that his father’s beat was fairly far from home. They lived in a suburban residential district outside the city of Ichikawa, and his father’s rounds were in the center of the city. At least he was able to avoid doing collections at the homes of his classmates. Occasionally, though, while walking in the downtown shopping area, he would spot a classmate on the street. When this happened, he ducked behind his father to keep from being noticed.
On Monday mornings, his school friends would talk excitedly about where they had gone and what they had done the day before. They went to amusement parks and zoos and baseball games. In the summer, they went swimming, in the winter skiing. But Tengo had nothing to talk about. From morning to evening on Sundays, he and his father rang the doorbells of strangers’ houses, bowed their heads, and took money from whoever came to the door. If people didn’t want to pay, his father would threaten or cajole them. If they tried to talk their way out of paying, his father would raise his voice. Sometimes he would curse at them like stray dogs. Such experiences were not the sort of thing that Tengo could share with friends. He could not help feeling like a kind of alien in the society of middle-class children of white-collar workers. He lived a different kind of life in a different world. Luckily, his grades were outstanding, as was his athletic ability. So even though he was an alien he was never an outcast. In most circumstances, he was treated with respect. But whenever the other boys invited him to go somewhere or to visit their homes on a Sunday he had to turn them down. Soon, they stopped asking.
Born the third son of a farming family in the hard
scrabble Tohoku region, Tengo’s father had left home as soon as he could, joining a homesteaders’ group and crossing over to Manchuria in the 1930s. He had not believed the government’s claims that Manchuria was a paradise where the land was vast and rich. He knew enough to realize that “paradise” was not to be found anywhere. He was simply poor and hungry. The best he could hope for if he stayed at home was a life on the brink of starvation. In Manchuria, he and the other homesteaders were given some farming implements and small arms, and together they started cultivating the land. The soil was poor and rocky, and in winter everything froze. Sometimes stray dogs were all they had to eat. Even so, with government support for the first few years they managed to get by. Their lives were finally becoming more stable when, in August, 1945, the Soviet Union launched a full-scale invasion of Manchuria. Tengo’s father had been expecting this to happen, having been secretly informed of the impending situation by a certain official, a man he had become friendly with. The minute he heard the news that the Soviets had violated the border, he mounted his horse, galloped to the local train station, and boarded the second-to-last train for Da-lien. He was the only one among his farming companions to make it back to Japan before the end of the year.
The Big New Yorker Book of Cats Page 16
