Cat People

by Michael Korda

  The standard newspaper story about cats, quite the contrary, is when the fire department has to be called out to rescue a cat that has climbed so high up a tree that it can’t get down, and even then, it usually manages to scratch its rescuer once it’s been reached by ladder—in short, the typical cat story is when a lot of valuable equipment and the time of a whole lot of firefighters, police officers, and animal protection officers are spent to rescue a cat from someplace where it shouldn’t have gone in the first place, and get no thanks for their trouble from the victim. Humans go to large-scale heroics on behalf of cats, but cats generally don’t go in for heroics on behalf of humans, and that’s that—it is hard to imagine that even a whole room full of cats would attack a burglar. Judging from ours, they would open one eye, then go back to sleep—certainly they would not guard the family silver or the jewelry box or the gun cabinet with teeth bared. On the other hand, cats will go back into burning buildings to rescue kittens—they are quite capable of heroism on behalf of other cats.

  Even geese are better at guarding things than cats—as the Romans knew, when they surrounded the capitol with geese, which would let off an ungodly row of cackling and honking at the approach of a stranger at night. Of course geese have their downside, as anybody who has ever stepped in goose shit can testify, and neither their bathroom habits nor their quarrelsome tempers make them easy to keep as pets, but if you want animals that will sound the alarm loud and clear and attack an intruder fearlessly, geese might be worth considering—a full-grown goose coming for you in a rush, wings flapping and beak snapping aggressively, is something before which even the staunchest burglar might retreat.

  But cats don’t do that. Admittedly, some of their bigger relatives—lions, tigers, leopards—are as fearsome as an animal gets, but your average domestic cat is definitely not a substitute for an attack dog, though there are cases on record of cats waking up their owners when the house is on fire or a burglar has broken in.

  Cats are by no means simply useless or decorative animals. If you happen to have a mouse around, most cats will do their best to kill it for you (though you will not necessarily appreciate the mess they make, since cats are neither neat nor tidy killers), but even mousing, when performed indoors, is pretty much dependent on the cat’s appetite (outdoors they may do it for le sport). Given two squares a day and a frequently filled bowl of dry food for between-meal snacks, a cat’s desire to kill mice diminishes rapidly to zero.

  Our own have actually been seen to nap while a mouse darts boldly across the room in front of their noses. They may open an eye to give it a curious glance, but if they’re not hungry, they’re apparently willing to live and let live, and the mouse seems to know it. When we first moved to the country the equation seemed to us simple: cats = no mice. But that has not proved to be the case. We have, over the years, invested countless dollars in electronic signals that are either supposed to drive mice mad or away, mousetraps from the most sophisticated to the simple, old-fashioned ones (baited, according to local custom, with peanut butter or Kraft cheddar singles), and various kinds of poison that are supposed to be harmless to domestic animals, not to speak of lining the drawers with sheets of tin. But still, in the long winter nights, we can hear the mice scampering around in the walls and overhead in the attic, while the cats sleep soundly, indifferent to the patter of innumerable tiny feet. “Nothing to do with me,” seems to be their motto, when it comes to mice. Or birds in the house. Or bats.

  Our cats, it will be surmised, share our lives, pretty much on their own terms, take it or leave it. We may see ourselves, from time to time, as having played a benevolent role by giving them a decent home and regular meals, but the cats don’t seem to see it that way at all. On the contrary, they see us as the privileged ones, whom they have honored with their company. And perhaps they’re right—humans can learn a trace of humility from the way cats see them. No bad thing!

  Every once in a while one reads of another chapter in the long debate of cats vs. dogs. A dog lover had written in to a pet magazine determined to prove that dogs are smarter than cats, one of her illustrations being that whereas dogs quickly learn to recognize their own name and respond to it, cats don’t. But is this really so? Nonscientific observation seems to indicate that cats do indeed recognize their own name, but unlike dogs, feel it’s beneath their dignity to respond to it. After all, our name for a cat may not be its name for itself, to begin with—just because you’ve decided to call her “Tulip” or “Kit Kat” doesn’t mean the cat has accepted that name—then too cats do respond to the name they’ve been given by humans, but only if it’s to the cat’s advantage. We can stand at the front door at night shouting “Hooligan!” over and over again until we’re hoarse, without seeing a trace of Hooligan (who being jet black simply vanishes when it’s dark), but if you add to her name the magic words “din-din” (for dinner, needless to explain), Hooligan will emerge out of the night into the light of the front porch in a few seconds. She recognizes her name all right, but unlike a dog she’s not about to coming running at the sound of it—unless, of course, it’s accompanied by the promise of dinner.

  From which one might conclude that, in fact, cats are smarter than dogs, and also don’t make a fetish of obedience.

  Ours sometimes seem very smart indeed.

  3. Queenie

  Our dear friend Larry Ashmead, editor, bon vivant, indefatigable clipper of odd news items, and a cat person’s cat person, had a cat-loving neighbor, an old lady who actually went to the trouble of buying brains from her local butcher and cooking them (sautéed in butter) to provide meals for his aged cat (twenty-four years old!) with no teeth, who naturally required a soft diet. While this surprised some people, it did not surprise us. Margaret often cooks chicken breasts for her cats, boiling them, then serving them up diced, with a generous helping of the warm broth, for her “old guys,” and sometimes warmed milk for cold winter nights for the “outside” cats. (The warmed milk seems a less successful culinary treat, since at least one cat loved it, but threw it up afterward.)

  Well, perhaps cooking for cats is not so surprising, after all—people will go to extraordinary lengths to provide for their cat (or cats). If that weren’t so, how to explain the existence of CatPrin, for example, a custom clothing tailor for cats, enabling the proud cat owner to dress his or her cat up in a variety of different costumes, following which you can enjoy the moment, photograph the cat, then, according to CatPrin’s instructions, “Remove her clothes and give her a hug.”

  Judging from the expressions of the cats in the catalog photographs, that would also be the moment when one might expect to receive a serious scratch in return—they do not look like happy campers. Cats, after all, deeply prize their dignity, so being dressed up as a chick, or a frog, or a high-school cheerleader, seems unlikely to bring much in the way of pleasure to a cat, nor do cats have much of a sense of humor, at least about themselves.

  Of course clothes for cats are not a more improbable idea than some of the things listed for cat lovers in the upmarket, but relatively sane, Hammacher-Schlemmer catalog. How about a “cat stroller,” so you can push your cat out for a healthy fresh-air stroll, like a baby in a pram, with half the stroller made of mesh and the other half of striped fabric, in case the cat wants privacy? How about an English “wicker bunk bed”—hand made by the venerable firm of W. Gadsby & Son, in business since 1864—for cats, so “social cats” can snooze one above the other, after they’ve worked out who gets the top bunk and who gets the lower one? How about a covered outdoor playground for cats, or a pet door designed to exclude anything but your own cat from entering the house through it? How about a covered basket—Gadsby & Son again, “There’ll always be an England”—so you can carry your cat strapped to the handlebars of your bicycle, instead of leaving it at home?

  Kittens, of course, are full of playful fun—they chase their own tail, they roll themselves up in a ball, they play hide-and-seek with each other and with humans, b
ut once they’re fully grown, cats tend to cultivate an air of pained and reproachful dignity. Not only do they not do tricks, they don’t much like tricks played on them.

  There’s nothing a cat likes less than appearing foolish, and most will go to great lengths to avoid it. Indeed this is one of the principal characteristics that cats share with humans. Anybody who lives in proximity to a cat will recognize the way a cat behaves when it has made a graceful leap for a shelf or a ledge and missed—a quick, desperate grapple to pull itself to safety, followed by a furtive look around to see if anybody was watching, then a careful grooming of a paw, as if to indicate that the whole thing went off just as planned. In short, exactly the way humans behave when they have slipped on a wet spot on the floor, or dropped the groceries, or tripped over something: recover, brush oneself off, pick whatever you dropped up, and pretend that what happened was exactly what you meant to do.

  The swift recovery of dignity—if at all possible, and at any cost—is one of the salient characteristics we share with felines, as is the instinct for what the French call l’amour propre, meaning the need to put the best face on things and to tidy oneself up as quickly one can. You can observe this among humans of the urban persuasion on rainy days in the streets, when a taxi cuts in close to the curb and sends water flying over the pavement from some filthy puddle, spattering pedestrians. Indignation, followed by a quick, furtive attempt to clean up, followed by a quick look in all directions to see if anybody saw (or is, worse yet, laughing), and finally the determined, stately resumption of the walker toward wherever he or she is going, pretending that his trousers (or her stockings) aren’t wet and splashed with mud or worse….

  The animal world is full of perfectly interesting and worthy creatures that don’t care a damn about this kind of thing—horses roll in the mud until they’re filthy, but they aren’t a bit of ashamed of it; dogs roll in horseshit and worse and don’t feel in the least badly about it; bears don’t appear to go in for grooming at all or ever feel the need to look their best, nor do pigs; elephants cover themselves with mud or dirt, the more the merrier; hippos wallow in filth happily—but human beings and cats share the need to look their best in the eyes of others.

  This desire not to appear foolish is a strong bond between humans and cats. Cats are in some respects a mirror image of ourselves, and though it’s almost always misleading to impute human feelings to animals, cats may be an exception. Dog owners are said to come to resemble their dogs in facial appearance (certainly Michael had a grand-aunt who came to look exactly like her Pekingese), but with cat owners it’s the personalities that mesh and come to resemble each other, sometimes so closely that it’s hard to tell whether it’s the cat that is imitating the person, or vice versa. The late Phyllis Levy, a book and magazine editor with a taste for perfection—even the best was never quite good enough for her—was passionately devoted to her cat Tulip. To know Phyllis was to hear all about Tulip, to call her was to hear all the news du côté de chez Tulip, who mirrored her owner’s svelte grace and unrelenting perfectionism. Phyllis and Tulip faced the world with the same perfect poise and manners, and just as nobody had ever seen Phyllis, to our knowledge, anything but elegantly dressed and made up, Tulip never appeared before guests until she was impeccably groomed, and like her mistress, preferred, when possible, to make a grand entrance—she even seemed to know where to sit in order to be flatteringly high-lit. Her eyes were the same shape and color as Phyllis’s, and like Phyllis she could fix her gaze on you in a way that either suggested you were the most important person in the word, or beneath her notice.

  Since it was an integral part of Phyllis’s profession to eat lunch out—and, very often, dinner—almost every day at fashionable restaurants, where, being Phyllis, she knew the right table to sit at, as well as the names of the owner, the chef, and the maître d’hôtel, all of whom would come over to kiss her hand and tell her how beautiful she looked, Tulip’s meals were very often cooked for her by New York’s best French chefs, who, knowing Phyllis’s devotion to her cat, would prepare special little plats du jour for Phyllis to take home—friandises of minced sweetbreads, or tiny quenelles, or minced game birds, lovingly wrapped in foil shaped into a swan, with a string for easy carrying from one finger. Like Phyllis, Tulip was not a big eater, but had a discriminating palate, and never seemed to put on weight, no matter how many packages Phyllis brought home for her from La Côte Basque, Caravelle, or Lutèce, any more than Phyllis herself did.

  Just as it was impossible to imagine Phyllis sitting down to eat a hamburger at her desk—for one thing she liked to wear white and pale pastel colors that don’t respond well to ketchup—it was hard to imagine Tulip wolfing down a can of ordinary cat food. Although the fastidious white cat that used to advertise Fancy Feast cat food—its food served in a crystal goblet brought in by a butler—in no way resembled Tulip, every time the commercial ran one thought of Tulip, also waiting, no doubt, to be summoned to a meal by the genteel clink of a silver spoon on fine Waterford crystal.

  Both Tulip and Phyllis are gone now, hopefully to a place decorated in perfect taste—Tulip not only fit in with Phyllis’s décor, which might have been designed around her, but may have been the only cat in history that never sharpened its claws on the Fortuny fabrics or threw up on the pale peach-colored wall-to-wall carpets—and one still remembers them as bound inseparably together, really a single soul, elegant, refined, never able to pass a mirror without glancing in it, mutually devoted to the simple idea of perfection. Phyllis was about as feline as a person can get while still standing on two legs instead of four, and at moments of delight, she actually seemed to purr. Tulip might easily have been her sister.

  When people have a long-term relationship with a cat, what makes it work is often a discrete and perfect match of character and personality, not necessarily the kind of thing you can plan on, or for, but more serendipitous, like the kind of love in which two people fit together like pieces in a jigsaw puzzle, a snuggling, complementary relationship, in which each supplants the deficiencies in the other, and which, when the two are joined together, adds up to more than the whole.

  Cats seem very good at reading human character, though they occasionally overreach. Once they’re comfortably installed in a house, for example, and have been there long enough to regard it as their own, they may come to assume mistakenly that anyone who enters the house loves cats, and is simply dying to have one sitting in their lap, even though they’re wearing a dark blue suit or a black skirt and may, in fact, be allergic to cats. But when they first join the household they’re pretty quick to decide who the dominant cat lover is, and what his or her requirements are of a cat.

  If what you want is a cat on your lap, or on your bed, you will get one—cats have a way of sensing what’s required, and most of them are quick to adapt. You want a companion to sit beside you and purr while you watch television? A cat is likely to figure that out pretty quickly. What’s more, cats seem able to read human moods. If you’re miserable, or sick, or simply feeling the blues, a cat seems to know it, and will appear from wherever it has been sitting to curl up next to you and provide you with warmth, companionship, and—who knows?—sympathy. If you’re happy, you’re likely to find the cat is happy too, playing around your ankles, and following you around the house with its tail held upright. Whatever is going on in your mind, a cat is likely to sense it and pick up the “vibes.”

  There are exceptions, of course; some cats, like some people, are insensitive, and not every cat can therefore be expected to play the role of a furry “mood ring” (for those old enough to remember mood rings), but in general cats do respond to their owner’s moods, which means that when you’re in a bad mood, they’ll take refuge under a piece of furniture to ride the storm out, and when you need warmth and spiritual comfort, they will generally do their best to offer it, in their own way. Advice, of course, they can’t give, at any rate directly (though if your cats show a marked dislike for a suitor and show it
, don’t dismiss the possibility that they may be right), but after all you can’t expect the impossible from an animal that can’t speak.

  Of course cats do speak, in their own manner; some cats are more vocal than others, but it is usually possible to tell the difference between annoyance, anger, pleasure, indignation, and warning, in the sounds cats make. Even a non-cat lover can distinguish between a contented purr and the screech of an angry or frightened cat when attacked by another cat, and those who are close to cats claim to have a more sophisticated understanding of catspeak. Larry Ashmead goes so far as to claim to have “conversations” with his cat. Well, not just Larry Ashmead, to be fair—a lot of people claim to do this. There’s even a Web site devoted to understanding what your cat is saying.

  There’s no question that conversations with a cat are therapeutic—after all, a cat doesn’t argue, answer back, or tell you that you’re dead wrong, while a human voice, in the right tone, preferably soothing and praising, is something most cats appear to enjoy listening to in moderation. Also, you can whisper your deepest secrets to a cat in the absolute confidence that they’re not going to be passed on to anyone, which is more than you can say of humans, including your best friends. Cats probably hear more good gossip than anybody, including gossip columnists, which might explain the self-satisfied expression and general air of superiority that most cats affect.