Overheard on the fringe of Gramercy Park, smartly costumed mother to teen-age daughter: “You must understand, dear, that we’re not the sort of people who give clever names to cats.”
| 1963 |
Silver was housed in a fishbowl that Miss Madge recovered from a hatbox in the attic. The sisters remembered this bowl with unexpressed remorse. It had been the prison of three goldfish, the consolation of their bedridden mother’s last years. All three had died soon after her funeral, because neither of the sisters (younger then and so heartless) could see why she should be the one to feed them.
Miss Madge sat long on the floor of the attic, gazing with brimming eyes into the glass bowl between her hands. Through its side she could see the shiny black wall of the hatbox, narrower at the bottom, spreading gracefully upward, like a lily, or like an inverted top hat. It had indeed once contained a top hat, and the pad of green plush used to smooth its glossy sides still lay in tissue paper at the bottom. The hat had been their father’s, the very symbol of his dignity, only taken out for weddings and funerals, or for periodical inspection. The box stood under the marital bed long after Father’s death, but when Mother died Miss Jessica had taken it and sent the topper to a jumble sale. Guy Fawkes Day was the only day in the year that one of the Miss Gullivers went out shopping alone, the other staying at home with Nelson, the windows shut and the curtains drawn—the popping rockets and raucous cries played havoc with Nelson’s nerves and they did not like to leave her alone in the house. On Guy Fawkes Day Miss Madge was sure she had seen Father’s top hat balanced over a ghastly white face borne past her on trundling wheels. Later in the day she had come upon an abandoned go-cart at the corner of the public house. In it was a sagging figure with a top hat jammed over its face. That night she had dreamed confused jack-in-the-box dreams, of Punch, of Judy, of the dog Toby, and a limp figure flung down down into blackness. And now she sat on the attic floor with the bowl on her knees, and remembered how her father had always loved her the best, how she and Jessie had giggled and kissed and quarrelled, but Jessie always had her own way about everything.… And how life was passing and nothing had ever really happened to either of them.
Silver was in greater danger of being overcherished than neglected. Miss Madge attended to him more closely than his primitive needs required, ever fancying he looked hungry or his water needed changing. Miss Jessica insisted on training the light from an electric bulb over the bowl for two hours every day, having read that fish required ultraviolet rays. Miss Madge was afraid the glare would give Silver a headache and bought a blue bulb of immense power. The poetry of life was never quite dead for Miss Madge: to stand and stare gave her a satisfaction of which she was almost ashamed. (She was one of the few women who could watch a baby at play without longing to pick it up.) Once, she had come back from early-morning church to find that the wild iris in a bottle on the windowsill had freed itself from its sheaf; if she had not gone to church she might have witnessed the final click as the delicately sprung petals were released. The thought almost made her hate the vicar. She would release a fly from the toils of golden syrup and watch for an hour its herculean efforts to scrape the cloying film to the edge of its wings in tiny beads, which fell one at a time onto the table. And she never wearied of watching the water sift through the filaments of Silver’s subtly articulated tail.
Silver was the only fish in the house, but otherwise his hold on identity was slight. His sex was bestowed on him firmly from the very beginning, but there was nobody to vouch for it. He might just as well have been a girl-fish. And then one day a small boy came to the back door with another minnow, in a Crosse & Blackwell jar. He explained that it was he who had left Silver on the back doorstep, and now he had brought another to keep him company. The Miss Gullivers were positively excited at this idea and the transfer from jam jar to fishbowl was expeditiously made under the keenly interested eyes of Nelson before you could say knife. Miss Jessica gave the little boy majestic permission to come the next day and see how the minnows were getting on. She even gave him a biscuit and watched him out of sight.
Back in the drawing room she found Miss Madge and Nelson in a state of agitation. The new minnow was floating belly up in the fishbowl and Silver was swimming serenely to and fro in the middle depths. Victorious Silver! He would not tolerate a rival in his realm. The Miss Gullivers were sorry for the poor stranger, of course, but gave him to Nelson to play with. And they were sorry to have to tell the little boy the new minnow was dead. They allowed him to come into the drawing room again, whereupon he staunchly declared that the minnow swimming triumphantly out of the weeds was the new minnow—he knew every spot on its body. According to this horrid boy, it was Silver who had been routed, killed by the newcomer and played with and subsequently eaten by Nelson. Nothing could convince the Miss Gullivers of this; they, too, knew every spot on their minnow’s body. Miss Madge even knew his different expressions and could see when he was tired or out of spirits by the changing rhythms of his fins. From that moment Silver entered the charmed circle of ambiguity. Was he, or was he not, really Silver? The Miss Gullivers put all doubts resolutely from them, but in their hearts they were never quite sure.
“I’ve done it again.” (illustration credit 23.3)
Silver brought fresh complications into the lives of the Miss Gullivers, each of whom lived in perpetual anxiety lest the other should have left the drawing-room door open. And even when one of them was in the room, even when they were both there, they had to keep a sharp lookout in case Nelson jumped on the windowsill. Nelson’s very presence there was enough to set Silver darting frenetically to the bottom of the bowl, and once they had only just been in time to pull the terrible hooked paw out of the water.
Each morning the Miss Gullivers set out for a row of shops parallel to Jocelyn Terrace, where they lived, to do the shopping for themselves and their pensioners. It made no difference whether they turned down Budd Street, Lupin Street, or Caitlin Place, since their house was in the middle of the Terrace. Miss Jessie did not mind which of the three side streets they took so long as it was not the one preferred by her sister. If Miss Madge took a tentative step toward Budd Street, Miss Jessie marched resolutely on to Lupin Street. At the subtlest indication that Miss Madge intended to stop at the traffic light, Miss Jessica would turn and cross the road the other way, and Miss Madge, tense with frustration, would follow. After Miss Madge had come back from a whole month in hospital, she did think Miss Jessie would allow her an invalid’s privilege. But no, Miss Jessica waited as usual for her sister almost to turn the corner into Caitlin Place and then stalked on to Lupin Street, sure of being followed. Then let her! thought Miss Madge, and trudged stubbornly along the pavement of Caitlin Place. From this day they had gone to the shops along different streets, and there was a new problem: to anticipate each other’s choice, never to be trapped into the semblance of surrender. Usually they met unsmiling outside the pet shop or the butcher’s, but sometimes they stopped in their tracks, simultaneously visited by the harrowing apprehension that they had forgotten to shut the drawing-room door. They would have been saved this agony if one of them had stayed at home, or they could have gone shopping on alternate days, but their jealous ardor made this impossible.
To indifferent eyes, the passage of the years left no traces of change in the sisters, and none but indifferent eyes ever rested on Miss Jessie or Miss Madge now. Increasing deafness, failing eyesight, asthmatic breathing, absentmindedness almost amounting to amnesia are taken for granted in the old. The tremor of the hand, the tic that sets the head a-bobbing were noted by few, and even when noted were undifferentiated. Was it Miss Jessie whose left hand shook and Miss Madge whose head kept nodding, or was the one whose hand shook Miss Madge and … And—Oh, shut up, can’t you?, people said before these speculations were completed.
Miss Madge was the first to go (that month in hospital). She had no illness, was not a day in bed, but one afternoon when they were seated in silence with th
eir needlework beside the fire and Miss Jessica had begun to wonder if it wasn’t time to put the kettle on, Miss Madge let her work drop on her knees and said very faintly, “Jessie.” And that was all. Nelson began jumping onto Miss Madge’s knee and down again, mewing, and almost the first thing Miss Jessica had had to do was to carry her out of the room. Resting her withered cheek on the warm, domed head, she thought, No one will ever call me Jessie again. The absurd—almost blasphemous in the circumstances—question arose in her mind: What would Nelson call me if she could speak?
Miss Jessica wept when she saw Miss Madge looking so calm and beautiful laid out amidst spring flowers on her bed. But when the thought visited her: Who will cry when I am dead?, she sobbed.
And one morning Nelson was found stretched on her side on the drawing-room hearth, the tip of her tongue showing between clenched teeth. Miss Jessica had a slight stroke the next day. Through all this death and devastation, Silver mounted his watery treadmill as if defying time and death to catch him up.
Miss Jessica’s stroke left her much as usual but for a kind of landslide from her left eyebrow to the point of her chin. The cousin came up from Huddersfield, solicitors were consulted, and the house and most of the furniture were sold. Only the grandfather clock turned out to be of any value, and it was snapped up as a period piece by a prowling American the moment it made its appearance in a Fulham shopwindow. A seaside cottage was found for Miss Jessica and furnished with the comfortable armchair, the bed, and the drawing-room carpet, and other unsold pieces. Mrs. Yorke next door promised to keep an eye on Miss Jessica, and soon a new Nelson came into her life. He had turned up on Miss Jessica’s doorstep one morning, in sad plight after a night of storm during which a ship went down with all hands in full sight of the cliffs. The romantic view was taken that the cat had been sent to console her in her loneliness. Nobody knew what Miss Jessica herself thought about it, but she gave the name of Nelson to the stranger—a half-grown tom, black, with an ample shirtfront and one white paw. It was too strenuous for such an old lady to be always keeping an active cat away from the fishbowl, and Silver had to be given to two little boys who were staying with their parents at Mrs. Yorke’s next door. A cat was more company than a minnow, after all, and Miss Jessica had never been so devoted to Silver as had Miss Madge. When the visitors returned to town they left Silver behind, and their landlady’s husband took the bowl down to the edge of the sea and tipped him into an outgoing wave, where he died immediately.
Miss Jessica was no longer known by her Christian name, or by any name at all. The fisher people called her “the old ’oman next to Mrs. Yorke’s” and the boy from the village shop left her groceries with Mrs. Yorke’s order, saying, “The eggs and the golden syrup is for the old ’oman.” Miss Jessica lived quietly through the winter, and Nelson grew into a fine, purring cat. When summer came round again, seaside visitors stroked the black pussy seated so proudly under its own rooftree, and a small girl whose father and mother brought her to live at Mrs. Yorke’s for the summer took to sitting on Miss Jessica’s porch step to fondle Nelson and chat with the old lady. People saw Miss Jessica’s lips moving and little Pattie looking into her face, nodding gravely and stammering out shrill, half-inarticulate phrases, and wondered what the two could be talking about. Pattie’s father, who had exhibited in the Royal Academy ten years before, did a picture of the porch with Pattie seated at the old woman’s feet—only you couldn’t see their faces properly and Nelson wasn’t there at all. They forgot to send Pattie in to say goodbye when they went back to town in the autumn, and by next summer Miss Jessica was dead and her cottage taken by a family from London.
“A pity,” said Pattie’s mother. “It would have just suited us. We ought to have gone round and said goodbye to the poor old thing.” Pattie’s father was sorry, too; he had hoped to go on with his picture and send it to the Royal Academy. But Pattie burst into tears. “Why did she die?” she asked, looking up wildly. “I didn’t want her to be died.”
| 1973 |
ELECTRICAL STORM
Dawn an unsympathetic yellow.
Cra-aack!—dry and light.
The house was really struck.
Crack! A tinny sound, like a dropped tumbler.
Tobias jumped in the window, got in bed—
silent, his eyes bleached white, his fur on end.
Personal and spiteful as a neighbor’s child,
thunder began to bang and bump the roof.
One pink flash;
then hail, the biggest size of artificial pearls.
Dead-white, wax-white, cold—
diplomats’ wives’ favors
from an old moon party—
they lay in melting windrows
on the red ground until after sunrise.
We got up to find the wiring fused,
no lights, a smell of saltpetre,
and the telephone dead.
The cat stayed in the warm sheets.
The Lent trees had shed all their petals:
wet, stuck, purple, among the dead-eye pearls.
—ELIZABETH BISHOP | 1960 |
(illustration credit 23.4)
from GETTING THROUGH TO THE OTHERS
* * *
EMILY HAHN
In a collection of papers written by various experts in the field of what Professor Thomas A. Sebeok, of Indiana University, has called “zoosemiotics”—in other words, animal communication—each writer tries valiantly to define what he means by the term, and, if no two of them actually agree on a definition, at least they provide a most stimulating lot of theories. As Professor Sebeok himself tells us, “speech is the principal, but by no means the only, mechanism whereby communities are knit into social organizations via a systematic flow of messages exchanged over interpersonal communication channels.” There are other mechanisms, he points out: such “sensory modalities” as auditory and visual signals, touch, smell, taste, even temperature signals. Gulls communicate with each other by means of postures and movements as well as calls. The male American alligator roars to attract the female, but she is also attracted by the fountain of water sent up by the roars, and by a musky smell from the glands in his mouth. The more I have read about the subject, the less I have felt I knew. In search of really practical ideas about animal communication, I have turned to zoos and the people who work in them.
At the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum, in Tucson, which houses creatures indigenous to the region, I asked my questions of Charles L. Hanson, curator of birds and mammals. “There are lots of things we don’t understand about animal signals,” he admitted. We were sitting in a pleasant office surrounded by low-lying shrubs and here and there a tree. A pair of small ferrets were making free with the place, running about, wrestling with each other, and sometimes taking mock refuge in the bookcases. They emitted shrill, tiny squeaks, like rusty machinery, as they boxed and scampered. Facing Dr. Hanson across another desk sat the zoo’s curator of education, Doris Ready. Every so often, she had to stop listening to the conversation to answer a telephoned inquiry about school visits or publications. “Why animals react as they sometimes do to strangers is a puzzle,” said Hanson. “I know there are criticisms of observations made in a zoo, on the ground that the situation is so artificial that such observations have no validity. I don’t think that’s true. Even in an artificial situation, the animals still reflect intelligence levels, communication levels, and behavioral patterns that are characteristic and valid, and these should be given serious consideration, because, after all, they simply cannot be made in the wild. It’s the only opportunity we have to document. I think most people are beginning more to accept such knowledge. When we see the relation between bobcat and human being here, for instance, there’s no reason to suppose that it differs radically from communication between bobcat and bobcat in the wild. Certainly we shouldn’t just ignore it, though the interpretation, of course, is always open to question. I must admit that here at the museum we are emotionally involved w
ith our animals, and such involvement precludes objectivity. Even so, the observations themselves are valid. Interpretations by other people are quite all right as long as one doesn’t throw out the material.”
The Big New Yorker Book of Cats Page 40
