Miss Ross met Sergeant Kelly just the other day in the subway.
“Remember all that excitement in the stationery store, Rita?” he asked genially.
In spite of the truce which she has forced upon the Police Department, Miss Ross is still a familiar figure in the magistrates’ courts. At least six times a year she appears against people who have maltreated animals or else have insulted her or hampered her in the performance of her duty. She is merciless with those who abuse animals. She has succeeded in having countless five-dollar fines imposed on tradesmen who beat their horses, and one Negro janitor who was convicted of burning cats alive in his furnace was sentenced to six months in jail. She has never lost a case, though sometimes the penalties have seemed to her soft and foolish beyond belief.
“My pet dislike is judges who are lenient in cruelty cases,” she says, and probably only their judicial robes have saved many magistrates from the more tangible weight of her displeasure.
With those who harass her personally, she is more moderate, though no less effective. All she wants is an apology, and her courtroom manner is lucid, demure, and undoubtedly maddening to her opponents. Last summer Miss Ross summoned an Irene Mara before Magistrate Nicholas Pinto in Coney Island Court. This woman, aided and abetted by her mother, had used uncivil language in attempting to restrain Miss Ross from making off with a brood of cats. Unkind words had led to blows and in the end the embattled ladies had been separated by several patrolmen. A certain disarray in Mrs. Mara’s appearance suggested that Miss Ross had had all the better of the skirmish. Nevertheless, the judge, influenced by the deceptive meekness in Miss Ross’s manner, ruled that she was entitled to an apology.
COLLECTOR
“Have you missed any dish towels?” reads a notice tacked up in the entrance hall of that huge old apartment house at 142 East Eighteenth Street. “We have a cat who keeps bringing them home. Please come in and claim them. Sands, Apt. 4-A.”
| 1949 |
“Me apologize to her!” cried Mrs. Mara incredulously, and started to flounce out of the courtroom. The judge had her brought back and, after a stern lecture, the apology was given.
“He called me a lady,” Miss Ross says merrily, recalling this scene. “ ‘You apologize to this lady,’ he said. Me, a lady!”
Before the stray cats of the city so relentlessly took possession of her life, Rita Ross gave every promise of a successful career on the stage. Born Marion Garcewich, in the section of Harlem just north of 110th Street, she was the daughter of the German-Jewish proprietor of a gents’ furnishing store. She attended Public School 170 in that neighborhood and eventually was graduated. In her teens, her family moved to Brooklyn. For a while she was a salesgirl for Loft’s, and afterward a model for Galen Perrett, a commercial artist, from whose studio at 51 West Tenth Street her likeness emerged as the radiant face in the Bel-Ton Powder advertisements, displayed throughout the transportation systems of the city. In 1919 she got a job as a chorus girl in a road company of So Long, Letty.
Unfortunately for her career, it was at this time that she fell under the influence of her private daemon. Foreshadowing that remarkable pedestrianism which was later to wear down strong men, Miss Garcewich (now, for theatrical purposes, Rita Ross) used to walk across Brooklyn Bridge every day on her way to work in Manhattan. The cats of the lower East Side, degraded and mournful, attracted her strongly, and she got to picking up one or two of them and taking them to an S.P.C.A. shelter on her way uptown.
It is hard to say how this merciful habit gradually became a compulsion. It appears that one cat simply led to another. Miss Ross herself has no explanation of it except in vague, humanitarian terms. It is only clear that from a lady who could, on the whole, take a cat or leave it alone, she was suddenly translated into the most prodigious cat-catcher of our time. As her obsession grew, her other interests inevitably suffered. She was no less fetching as a chorus girl, of course, but she became a little embarrassing as an associate. In Salt Lake City, she rescued an alley cat from a vivisectionist by beating him severely over the head with her handbag. In Indianapolis, where she had gone with The Spice of 1922 company, she was dismissed for picking up a dirty white poodle and installing it in her dressing room.
By 1926, when she was playing in The Song of the Flame in Chicago, her peculiarities were so generally recognized that she was warned by the management not to bring any animals into the theatre. She wrestled heroically with temptation, but the habit had her in an iron grip. One night she smuggled in two shivering kittens and hid them in shoebags below her mirror in the general dressing room. The cats, numb and grateful, remained as they were during the first number. When, however, the chorus girls came back after the second number, clawed costumes covered the floor and the wardrobe mistress panted after two hilarious cats. Miss Ross returned to New York. She remained on the stage during the run and tour of Hope Hampton’s My Princess in 1927, but her heart wasn’t in it. When it closed, she retired to devote all her time to her cats.
“I’m not sorry I stopped the stage,” she says. “This work is much more interesting. You never know what’s going to happen.”
(illustration credit 10.5)
She realizes that a professional cat-catcher cannot hope to be as immaculate as Mrs. Harrison Williams, and occasionally this causes her mild distress. Last summer she passed Arthur Hammerstein in Greenwich Village. Miss Ross was in full regalia and the producer looked firmly at something else.
“My, was I embarrassed! I just slunk past.”
On the whole, though, she has never regretted her choice. The average chorus girl, she feels, is at least as peculiar as she is, and not in the direction of good works, either.
Miss Ross now lives with her widowed mother, a brother, two sisters, and a nephew, all of whom regard their relative’s habit of sleeping in a room crawling with cats as merely odd. These cats are transient, being ones that she has picked up too late at night to turn over to the S.P.C.A. She maintains only one cat of her own, a deaf, toothless antique named Tibby-Wibby Simpson Ross, the gift of an amiable colored woman Miss Ross met on Lenox Avenue. In addition to the usual handicaps of age, Tibby-Wibby has another, of an embarrassing nature.
“He’ll never be a daddy,” Miss Ross explains delicately.
Miss Ross is given her room and some of her meals by her family, and, since she is a vegetarian and a light eater anyway, the others don’t cost much. Money for her clothes, her cat-trapping equipment, and the rest of her needs comes from well-wishers. She is supported at the moment by two anonymous ladies—one in Brooklyn and one in Manhattan—who send her a total of fifteen dollars a week in care of Variety, which still nervously handles her mail. At various times during her career, Miss Ross’s patronesses have changed, but she has always been able to find ladies, generally prominent supporters of the S.P.C.A., who were anxious to continue her good, though unusual, work. Occasionally there are windfalls from antivivisectionists or people whom she has helped to rid of a plague of cats. In all, she receives about nine hundred dollars a year, which is ample for a woman who up to now has never even been able to find time to go to a talking picture.
“You never chase me through back yards anymore.”
Singular things have happened in the course of her career. Once, when she was re-arranging her cats in a ladies’ room in an “L” station, a habit she has when pressed for time, another passenger, alarmed by strange, thin cries from an adjoining booth, told the ticket agent that a child had just been born, and was barely restrained from sending for an ambulance. Again, in the old New York Hospital at Fifteenth Street and Sixth Avenue, Miss Ross was forced by a series of improbable circumstances to pursue a cat up from the basement and under a bed in the psychopathic ward. Doctors and nurses, coming in to find what they imagined to be a fully dressed patient down on her hands and knees mewing, tried to get her undressed and back into bed. Things looked fairly black until somebody discovered that there actually was a cat under the bed. Miss Ross
, however, kept her poise.
As a matter of fact, she says she has been really at a loss only once. That was when a dozen of her cats escaped three summers ago while she was riding on the Third Avenue “L.” Miss Ross was sitting quietly with her eyes closed, bothering no man. Suddenly, for some unexplained reason, the lid of her animal case flew open. A stream of cats, long pent and indignant, emerged and, with Miss Ross anxiously after them, leaped and gambolled down the aisle, springing over and upon the agitated passengers. When the train stopped, the cats, Miss Ross, and most of the passengers got off in a hurried flux. The passengers milled unhappily around on the platform. The cats, with Miss Ross pursuing the main body, scampered down both stairways. Baffled by their unfamiliar surroundings in the street, the cats darted perilously about in the traffic while Miss Ross sifted after them, like an image in an old moving picture cranked up to dizzy speed. In the end she got them all, but for once the situation threatened to be a little beyond her.
“I can tell you I blushed,” she says, describing a vehicular chaos which must have compared very favorably with that immediately following the Wall Street explosion.
The future, like the past and present, holds for Miss Ross only a continuation of her singular crusade. The half-million cats still loose on the streets are a challenge to her genius and she cannot rest until the last one is trapped and riding to its doom. Even at her present spectacular rate, it is the work of a lifetime. She approaches it without misgiving.
| 1938 |
ARMY CATS
1.
Over by the cemetery next to the CP
you could see them in wild catmint going crazy:
I watched them roll and wriggle, paw it, lick it,
chew it, leap about, pink tongues stuck out, drooling.
Cats in the tanks’ squat shadows lounging.
Or sleeping curled up under gun turrets.
Hundreds of them sniffing or licking
long hind legs stuck in the air,
great six-toed brutes fixing you with a feral,
slit-eyed stare … everywhere ears twitching,
twitching as the armor plate expanding
in the heat gave off piercing little pings.
Cat invasion of the mind. Cat tribes
running wild. And one big pregnant
female comes racing through weeds to pounce
between the paws of a marble dog
crouching on a grave and sharpens
her claws against his beard of moss
before she goes all silky, luxuriously
squirming right under the dog’s jaws,
and rolls over to expose her swollen belly.
Picture her with gold hoop earrings
and punked-out nose ring like the cat goddess Bast,
bronze kittens at her feet, the crowd drinking wildly,
women lifting up their skirts as she floats down
the Nile, a sistrum jangling in her paw.
Then come back out of it and sniff
her ointments, Lady of Flame, Eye of Ra.
2.
Through the yard the tanks come gunning,
charioteers laughing, goggles smeared with dust
and sun, scattering the toms slinking
along the blast wall holding back the waves
from washing away white crosses on the graves,
the motors roaring through the afternoon
like a cat fuck yowling on and on.
The gun turrets revolving in the cats’ eyes
swivel and shine, steel treads clanking,
sending the cats flying in an exodus
through brown brittle grass, the stalks
barely rippling as they pass.
3.
After the last car bomb killed three soldiers
the Army Web site labelled them “martyrs.”
Four civilians killed at checkpoints. Three on the airport road.
A young woman blown up by a grenade.
Facts and more facts … until the dead ones
climb up out of the graves, gashes on faces
or faces blown away like sandblasted stone
that in the boarded-up museums’
fractured English “leaves the onlooker
riddled and shaken, nothing but a pathetic gaping …”
And then I remember the ancient archers
frozen between reverence and necessity—
who stare down the enemy, barbarians,
as it’s told, who nailed sacred cats to their shields,
knowing their foes outraged in their piety
would throw down their bows and wail like kittens.
—TOM SLEIGH | 2009 |
CROUCHING TIGER, TREMBLING PENGUIN
* * *
ROBERT SULLIVAN
For the moment, the penguins at the New York Aquarium are safe. But the aquarium’s staff remains concerned, and, naturally, is taking some extra precautions, because the penguins are being stalked by a pack of feral cats.
One morning last November, Paul Moylett, a seal-and-walrus keeper, was walking through the aquarium when he noticed a black cat eying the penguins, in their open-air habitat, alongside the Coney Island boardwalk. “I saw the cat in a crouched position, and its tail was flicking back and forth, so I ran into the exhibit and scared it away,” he said the other day. Around the same time, Dave Rodahan, a lab technician, spotted one cat in with the penguins and a pair crouching among some yucca plants. “They were looking at me almost as if they were doing a kind of bait thing,” he said. “I’ve never seen any cat here do that kind of behavior before.”
The cats in question are abandoned pets and their offspring. They have been seen around the aquarium in small numbers for years, like feral animals all over the city. (The Bronx Zoo has begun shooting wild dogs.) Several years ago, however, a retired Wall Street precious-metals trader who lives in the neighborhood began feeding the cats, and the population exploded. Last year, about thirty cats could be seen regularly patrolling the outskirts of the penguins’ poured-concrete habitat, so the aquarium hired an exterminator to trap them. This made neighborhood cat lovers mad. They complained to the Bay News, a local paper, about the exterminator, who seemed evasive when he was asked how he was disposing of the strays: he told the paper that he had given some of the cats to “a person in New Jersey who takes care of animals.” The aquarium fired the exterminator, and the cat problem returned.
The species of penguin being stalked is Spheniscus demersus, more commonly known as the black-footed penguin. It is a native of southern Africa and can reach a height of twenty-four inches. When it stands, its armlike flippers often shiver slightly, making it appear nervous. And because it emits a donkey-like braying sound, Spheniscus demersus is also known as the jackass penguin.
On a recent cold afternoon, several of Coney Island’s jackass penguins were standing, un-stalked, in their habitat, in plain view of the Cyclone, the old Coney Island roller coaster. A pond of sixty-degree water stood between them and a clutch of Russian women wearing furs and carrying small children and Louis Vuitton bags. The rest of the penguins were in their burrows, where they were being tended by their keeper, Stephanie Mitchell, a thirty-two-year-old Massachusetts native who started at the aquarium in 1998, as a volunteer. Mitchell admitted that she had not initially been drawn to the penguins, whose reputation suffers among aquarium keepers because of their intense, ammonialike smell; she had hoped to be a dolphin keeper. “Obviously, I was one of those persons who was, like, dolphin, dolphin, dolphin,” she said. “But I’m really, really happy. I love these guys.”
Mitchell was wearing khakis and a blue jacket smeared with penguin guano. She said that the aquarium is home to twenty-two male penguins, eleven female penguins, and four penguins whose gender is not yet known. The names of some of the penguins are Giovanni, Curly, Bert, Moni, Willow, Cinders, Old Man, and Roxette. Carmine is the oldest penguin; he has lived in Coney Island for about twenty-two years. Penguins are mon
ogamous, but, because there are more males than females at the aquarium just now, relationships in the colony are in flux. “We have some females doing some shopping,” Mitchell said.
As she set out to feed her charges, Mitchell talked about the likelihood of a feral cat’s killing a jackass penguin, whose only predators in the wild are Cape fur seals, skuas, and great white sharks. “Penguins are fast, but not that fast—though they could just jump in the water,” she said. “I am constantly worried about Willow, because he’s a small bird. If anybody’s gonna get caught by a cat, he’s the one. But there’s no way a cat’s going to get them out of their burrows. Sometimes I can’t get them out of the burrows.”
Mitchell crept carefully out onto the simulated concrete rocks with a bucket of fish in her hand, and a little crowd of penguins waddled up to her. She was tossing fish and chatting with the penguins, complimenting them, when suddenly she sensed something behind her. She turned slowly. It was only a seagull. She shooed it away.
“They’re not gone,” Mitchell said ominously, referring to the wild cats. “They’ve just gone underground.”
| 2001 |
HOW TO MAKE A CAT TRAP
* * *
E. B. WHITE
Anyone who can use a square, a saw, and a hammer can make a cat trap. It is well, however, to have a blueprint to go by, and if possible a particular cat in mind that you want to trap; for if you were to make a trap that didn’t work, or even made a trap that worked and caught a cat you didn’t want, I can’t see that there would be anything gained on either side.
The Big New Yorker Book of Cats Page 20
