The Big New Yorker Book of Cats
Page 29
The Chartreux is so rare that those wishing to acquire one usually have a six-month wait, and kittens can cost as much as a thousand dollars each. Mr. Andrews now has nine Chartreux. They live with him, uncaged, in a two-bedroom apartment. The one male Chartreux has the other bedroom.
| 1993 |
CAT-SITTING
* * *
JOHN BROOKS
Mrs. Dorothy Wilde Browne, a lady who lives on West Eleventh Street, has set up a profitable business as a cat-sitter. As a matter of fact, Mrs. Browne has become something of a cat-sitting operator, since she has subsidiary sitters working out of Yonkers, Bronxville, Sutton Place, Thirty-third Street, Twenty-third Street, Maspeth, and other points too far from West Eleventh Street for her to handle personally. We stopped in to see Mrs. Browne recently and found her sparring with a fat Siamese cat, whom she addressed as Zebeard. Zebeard, she said, was a temporary boarder, and she went on to explain that she takes a few animals into her apartment while their owners are off on vacation, but most cats become unhappy when moved away from their familiar surroundings, and therefore have to be sat with at home. “Here’s how I happened to get into the cat-sitting line,” said Mrs. Browne. “I found myself with some rather heavy medical bills to pay, so I wanted some work, but at the same time I didn’t want to go to an office. Three of my children still live at home. I didn’t want to do baby-sitting, either, because I’ve brought up four children and that’s enough of that. Nevertheless, the idea of baby-sitting led to the idea of cat-sitting. I’ve had pets all my life and I’ve often been faced with the problem of what to do with them when I went off on a vacation. I put an ad in the Villager, and the response was instantaneous and overwhelming, and practically overnight I had more business than I could handle.”
Mrs. Browne dragged Zebeard off an upholstered seat that he was trying to eviscerate. “I believe the name Zebeard means absolutely nothing,” she remarked. She then went on to explain her modus operandi as a cat-sitter. Clients, on leaving for vacation, give her their apartment keys; she makes the rounds of client cats twice a day—morning and evening—feeding, brushing, and conversing with each one. “Loneliness isn’t much of a problem with most cats, but they do like their comforts,” she said. As the project snowballed, she went on, she began to get requests for service from points farther and farther afield. She decreed that she would not sit south of Vandam Street or north of Seventeenth; she makes her rounds on foot, and lines had to be drawn somewhere. A little while later, she began recruiting helpers, partly through newspaper ads and partly through the Fifteenth Street Quaker Meeting, of which she is a member. “Altogether I have forty-two helpers listed,” she told us. “I serve as a clearing house for jobs, but I don’t take a cut. The worst sitting job I’ve had was with a Siamese near Gramercy Park, named Mitzi. That little hellion arched her back like a puffball, and I never dared approach her without a full watering can.”
Mrs. Browne, who told us, in passing, that she is a first cousin twice removed of Oscar Wilde, began by charging a dollar a day per cat, but she found out that kennels charge ten a week, on the average, just for boarding a cat or dog in a small cage, and now she has doubled her price. She will not sit for any animals except cats, but for the living-in-her-apartment part of the operation she has accepted dogs, monkeys, and a myna bird, which kept asking her, “Going out with the boys?” An armadillo is coming to board with her late in September; she has never been asked to go and sit with an armadillo, and if she were, she wouldn’t. Mrs. Browne told us that business booms in the late fall, when people begin going off to Bermuda, Nassau, and Florida. “One advantage cat-sitting has over baby-sitting is that the owners are generally so far away they can’t call up and pester you,” she said.
| 1954 |
MYSELF WITH CATS
Hanging out the wash, I visit the cats.
“I don’t belong to nobody,” Yin insists vulgarly.
“Yin,” I reply, “you don’t know nothing.”
Yang, an orange tabby, agrees
but puts kindness ahead of rigid truth.
I admire her but wish she wouldn’t idolize
the one who bullies her. I once did that.
Her silence speaks needles when Yang thrusts
his ugly tortoiseshell body against hers,
sprawled in my cosmos. “Really, I don’t mind,”
she purrs—her eyes horizontal, her mouth
an Ionian smile, her legs crossed nobly
in front of her, a model of cat Nirvana—
“withholding his affection, he made me stronger.”
—HENRI COLE | 2001 |
Click here for hi-res image.
from CAT MAN
* * *
GEORGE STEINER
This review ought to be about a cat, the most illustrious, compelling cat in the history of literature. Bébert was a Montparnasse tabby, born probably in 1935. He met his second master in occupied Paris in late 1942. “Magic itself, tact by wavelength,” as his master described him, Bébert was to be left behind when the master and his wife, Lucette, decamped for Germany in the dread spring of ’44. Bébert refused separation. He was carried in the travelling sack. The voyage led through lunar bomb craters, strafed rail lines, and cities burning like mad torches. Under bombardment, Bébert, almost starving, became lost, but rediscovered his master and Madame. The trio crossed and recrossed the collapsing Reich. In a last, despairing lunge, they reached Copenhagen. When the Danish police came to arrest the unwelcome guests, Bébert slipped out across a roof. Caught, the legendary beast was caged in a pound at a veterinary clinic. When his master was released from jail and was recuperating, Bébert had to be operated on for a cancerous tumor. “But the Montmartre tom had been around the block. He withstood the trauma and made a speedy recovery, with the slower and wiser serenity of aging cats, faithful, silent, and enigmatic.” Amnestied, Bébert’s patron headed for home at the end of June, 1951. Four lesser cats—Thomine, Poupine, Mouchette, and Flûte—accompanied them on the voyage. Sphinxlike in years, Bébert, the secret sharer, died in a suburb of Paris at the end of 1952. “After many an adventure, jail, bivouac, ashes, all of Europe … he died agile and graceful, impeccably, he had jumped out the window that very morning.… We, who are born old, look ridiculous in comparison!” So wrote his grieving master, Louis-Ferdinand Destouches, physician, champion of social hygiene among the destitute, wanderer in Africa and the United States, manic crank.
It is Bébert I want to write about—Bébert the arch-survivor and the incarnation of French cunning. But it is a voluminous biography of his wretched owner that I have before me—of that mad doctor who, under the name Céline (taken from his grandmother), produced some of the greatest fiction and documentary “fact-fiction” not only in this century but in the history of Western literature. Bébert would be a joy to report on. Céline is not.
| 1992 |
(illustration credit 16.2)
DOOR
The cat cries for me from the other side.
It is beyond her to work this device
That I open and cross and close
With such ease when I mean to work.
Its four panels form a cross—the rood,
Sign of suffering and redemption.
The rod, a dividing pike or pale
Mounted and hinged to swing between
One way or place and another, meow.
Between the January vulva of birth
And the January of death’s door
There are so many to negotiate,
Closed or flung open or ajar, valves
Of attention. O kitty, if the doors
Of perception were cleansed
All things would appear as they are,
Infinite. Come in, darling, drowse
Comfortably near my feet, I will click
The barrier closed again behind you, O
Sister will, fellow-mortal, here we are.
—ROBERT PINSKY | 2001 |
THE PET
Fiction
* * *
SALLY BENSON
Morton Hyde’s drugstore opened at eight o’clock every morning. By that time, the man from the bakery had delivered the daily supply of jelly doughnuts, English muffins, and Danish pastry, and Mr. Hyde had started the coffee in the Silex on the electric stove behind the counter. Since he was an old-fashioned man and thought that drugstores should sell only drugs and medicines, he hated this part of his day. But the boy who worked at the soda fountain didn’t come on until ten o’clock, and Mr. Hyde reluctantly filled in for him until then. Mr. Hyde also hated the cosmetics he had stocked to meet the competition of the chain drugstore two blocks down the street, and he still remembered with distaste the first dozen boxes of Djer-Kiss powder he had put on sale. He felt that the cosmetics stank up the store and drowned out the bitter, therapeutic smell of the ingredients that went into prescriptions.
One morning, at about five minutes of eight, there was a knock on the door. Turning around, he saw Ed Davis standing outside, his shoulders hunched and his felt hat pulled down over his eyes. Mr. Hyde switched the electric burner under the Silex to “Low” and went to let him in. “Morning, Ed,” he said as he opened the door. “Something wrong?”
Ed Davis went to the counter and sat down on a high stool, pushing his hat back on his head with a tired gesture. “I been up all night,” he said. “I don’t ever want to put in a night like last night again.”
Mr. Hyde switched on the neon lights, which flickered once or twice before they filled the store with a hard, uncompromising glare. “What happened?” he asked.
“God-damnedest night I ever had.” Ed fished in his pocket and brought out a piece of paper, which he put on the counter. “We almost lost Midge.”
“Midge?” Mr. Hyde repeated.
“Our cat,” Ed explained. He shoved the paper toward Mr. Hyde. “I got a prescription for her. She almost died. I’ve had her to the vet’s.”
Mr. Hyde picked up the prescription and read it. “You want to wait?” he asked.
“Do I want to wait?” Ed said. “After all I been through, waiting don’t seem nothing to me. I been waiting all night. That cat started in about nine o’clock—just when Milton Berle was signing off—and she kept it up until I got her to that vet in Middletown, about 6 A.M.”
“Kept what up?” Mr. Hyde asked.
“Throwing herself around,” Ed said. “I never saw nothing like it. The Missis couldn’t handle her, and neither could I. You wouldn’t think an old cat like Midge would have the strength to throw herself around like that. I think you’d better give me a cup of coffee. I ain’t had a bite of breakfast.”
Mr. Hyde went behind the counter and, setting a cup and saucer on the counter, filled the cup with coffee and pushed a pitcher of cream and a bowl of sugar toward Ed. “Animals can be a great responsibility,” he said.
“Midge ain’t an animal, exactly,” Ed said, putting three heaping spoons of sugar in his coffee. “She’s more like a human. All the time she was throwing herself around, you could tell she was ashamed of herself. She’d fly around and then look at me like she was asking me to excuse her. But she couldn’t stop. It was pitiful. Do you know that vet over in Middletown?”
“No,” Mr. Hyde said. “Will you have something to eat?”
“My stomach’s still turning over,” Ed said. “You don’t know whether that vet’s a crook or not, then?”
“What makes you think he’s a crook?” Mr. Hyde asked.
“He charged me seven bucks. And do you know how much that crook Jenks socked me to drive to Middletown and back? Nine dollars each way! Eighteen dollars!”
“That’s a lot of money,” Mr. Hyde said. “Eighteen dollars plus seven and two dollars for this prescription comes to twenty-seven dollars. You could have bought a new cat.”
Ed Davis set his cup down in the saucer so hard that the coffee slopped over. “I could have what?” he asked.
“You could have bought a new cat,” Mr. Hyde repeated.
“That’s a hell of a thing to say.” Ed looked down at his hands; they were scrubbed clean but were callused from work. “A hell of a thing,” he said. “People ain’t got hearts. They got holes where their heart is supposed to be.”
“I’ve got a heart,” Mr. Hyde said, irritated. “But I see a lot of sickness in this business, and I can’t get het up over a cat.”
“People are skunks,” Ed said. “They got no feelings. They’re crooks and skunks.”
“I wouldn’t say that, Ed. That’s a pretty sweeping statement to make,” Mr. Hyde said. “You’ve got to admit an animal isn’t a human. I mean, when you first got this cat, what did you get her for?”
“By the way, I’ve ordered a cat.” (illustration credit 17.2)
“We got her when she was eight weeks old. She was as pretty as a picture on a calendar,” Ed said. “We had field mice in the cellar.”
“Exactly,” Mr. Hyde said. “You got her to kill field mice. You got her for a reason. And now she’s old. How old is she?”
“Eight,” Ed said.
“Eight,” Mr. Hyde repeated. “That’s old for a cat. She’s outlived her usefulness.”
“Like hell she has,” Ed said. “She acts like a kitten. And if you’d have seen her last night, you wouldn’t say she was old. Up the curtains and down again—around the sofa and back. All over the damned place.”
“Maybe,” Mr. Hyde said. “But does she still catch mice?”
“Mice don’t come into the picture no more,” Ed said. “I don’t give a damn if she never catches another mouse. Mice ain’t the point. She ain’t caught a mouse in years.”
“Then what do you keep her for?” Mr. Hyde asked.
Ed Davis banged his fist on the counter. “What do we keep her for?” he said loudly. “What do you keep that boy of yours for?”
“Rich is my son,” Mr. Hyde said.
“What does he do?” Ed asked. “Catch mice?” He laughed sarcastically. “No, he don’t even catch mice, and never did. He don’t do nothing—just fools around.”
“Look, Ed, Rich is a boy and your cat is a cat,” Mr. Hyde said. “You say she’s eight years old and having fits. Maybe it would be kinder to have her put out of the way.”
Ed Davis slumped on the stool and put his head down on his hands. “Now I’ve heard everything,” he said.
“I’m trying to tell you that you haven’t got the kind of money to throw away on a sick cat,” Mr. Hyde said. “Twenty-seven dollars doesn’t grow on trees.”
“Look,” Ed said wearily. “You don’t get the point. It ain’t the mice and it ain’t the money. It’s Midge. She’s our cat.”
Mr. Hyde walked toward the back of the store. “You want this prescription filled?” he asked.
“That’s what I come for,” Ed said. “The vet knocked her out, but I want this for when she comes to.”
“It’ll take about ten minutes,” Mr. Hyde said. “You can charge it if you want to. But if I were you—Well, there’s a new litter of kittens at Holbrooks’ place.”
“Don’t give me no more arguments,” Ed said. He pushed his coffee away. It had got cold. “Midge is our cat. Money don’t mean a thing.”
“O.K.,” Mr. Hyde said. “If that’s the way you feel. I told you you could charge it.”
Ed Davis rubbed the rough place on one of his hands. “No, thanks,” he said. “The way things stand, I’d rather pay cash.”
| 1955 |
ON THE DEATH OF A CAT
In life, death
was nothing
to you: I am
willing to wager
my soul that it
simply never occurred
to your nightmareless
mind, while sleep
was everything
(see it raised
to an infinite
power and perfection)—no death
in you then, so now
how even less. Dear stealth
of innocence
licked polished
to an evil
lustre, little
milk fang, whiskered
night
friend—
go.
—FRANZ WRIGHT | 2003 |
ATTENTION: LOST CAT
* * *
PATRICIA MARX
Reward if you find my cat, Sally. Sally is eleven, but she has the face of a cat much younger. She is taffy-colored and has no distinguishing features except for the spot on her lung. Sally understands eight commands. Nine, if you count “Drop it! Drop the baby!” Sally loves a good steak but will gladly have whatever you are having. If she seems to have trouble swallowing, call Dr. Sidarsky, at (570) 555-1212. Dr. Sidarsky calls every day to ask if Sally is back. Once, Dr. Sidarsky invited me to a tennis match where a little girl who could not speak English beat the defending champion. If you ask me, Dr. Sidarsky has a crush on me. Before Sally was lost, Dr. Sidarsky nominated me for Pet Owner of the Year. When the judges came to our house, Sally would not come down from the breezeway. I’m not saying that was the reason I lost the title, but it cost me points.