For many years he filled a role in Margaret’s life that was special, and knew it—he was her emotional stabilizer, her adoring companion, purring away like a well-tuned motorboat as he lay at her feet, or on her lap, or cuddled up next to her on the bed. His idea of heaven was a long nap with her on a cold day, always a silent, unconditionally loving presence, never about to spoil the mood, as so many cats do, with a sudden swipe of the claws. He was never bored, always glad to see her, and when she came home, he could often be seen at a window near the front door, waiting for her faithfully, his shiny yellow eyes fixed on the pathway of uneven, irregular paving stones that led to the front door. He was too dignified to do the equivalent of shouting out “You’re home! You’re home!” by jumping up and down like a dog—his expression was forgiving, as one might forgive a daughter who had stayed out too late, and relieved, as if he was thinking, “Who knows what she gets up to when she’s out of my sight?,” and perhaps just a touch reproachful. He had that element which is almost as hard to find among cats as it is among humans: kindness.
Chutney was, in fact, a prince among strays, so much so that it was hard to remember that he had once roamed wild in the fields around the house. Not every stray turned out to be that successful at adapting to domestic life, of course. Some had to be moved on to other homes, and some, as you will see, never made the grade—the saddest stories of all. But Chutney not only made the grade, he defined it. Queenie could be temperamental, often ate too fast and threw up on the carpets (in those days, we still worried about such things and came running day or night, with soda water—said to be good for dabbing off stains—paper towels, a spatula, and, if worse came to worst, a spray bottle of Resolve, with its endless list of warnings about the ways in which it might fade or bleach out colors if you didn’t follow the directions exactly, all of it printed in microscopic type which you weren’t likely to read at three in the morning on your hands and knees in the freezing cold, after Queenie had had second thoughts about her dinner), but Chutney seldom if ever made a mess, or prompted us to ask ourselves what we had been thinking of when we were persuaded to spend such a lot of money on pale green (pale green, perfectly calculated to show every stain and spot, including the circular bleached ones made by overenthusiastic use of Resolve!) wall-to-wall carpeting, and beautiful rugs. Chutney could have lived in a shop full of priceless oriental carpets without risk to the merchandise. Really, he had no bad habits, unless you count a total, loving dependence on Margaret.
Of course you can never tell with strays. Some work out, some don’t, there’s no way to know in advance. You learn something from each of them. It’s a whole different thing from that of buying a kitten in an upmarket pet shop—you’re getting a cat with a whole lot of prior issues and ingrained habits, one that has survived rejection, starvation, freezing cold, and brings with it everything from ticks, fleas, and neglect to serious illnesses and a major chip on the shoulder. A few, like Chutney, gradually turn themselves into ideal cats, a few, more rarely, don’t even require a period of transition—they walk through the front door, groom themselves, take a walking tour of the house, and settle in as if they had always lived here. Chutney in his time would see a good deal of va et vient, the comings and goings of numerous cats, some successfully adopted, some, alas, not.
At a much later date there was Chui, for example. As Margaret says, “‘Chui’ is Swahili for leopard. I called him that because his coloring was similar to a leopard’s. He was around nine or ten months old when he sauntered down the path one day, his right ear folded over. He only stayed with us a short time, as he had one unfortunate habit of peeing on the other cats when they got into a tussle. It placed him in a no-win situation. But we found him a home with a dog, who quickly put an end to his habit, and they are living happily together.”
Poor Chui was a perfect example of a stray cat with a problem you couldn’t have guessed at in a million years. Not only couldn’t we have guessed at it, neither we nor the other cats could believe it when it happened. The irony of it was that he was in every other way an attractive and well-behaved cat, except that his secret weapon was surprise—coupled with the sheer shock the other cats felt when they got peed on. They virtually quivered with indignation! A slashing tooth-and-nail attack they might have taken in their stride, but Chui not only caught them by surprise, he deeply humiliated them. They did not forgive him, and neither did we, since he generally attacked them when they were gathered on one of the nicer couches, and the stain and odor of cat piss tends to stay around for a very long time indeed.
Then there was Mrs. Bumble, named after the wife of the beadle in Dickens’s Oliver Twist. Margaret describes this particular stray thus: “From ditch to dining room in three weeks! That’s all it took Mrs. Bumble. She was a long-haired tabby with a magnificent tail, like a grand plume. She went through all her blood tests with flying colors, had her shots, and was spayed. She arrived plump for a change and took great care of her appearance. Got along well with all the other cats. Then one evening, as I was going down the stairs, I put my arm through the banister railings to stroke her. A mistake. She grabbed my arm and bit me from hand to elbow. Shit, I thought, I should go to the emergency room at Vassar Hospital, but I could be there for hours, and it’s the women’s finals at the Australian Open on tape, I can’t miss that…so I cleaned it up, drenching the arm in iodine, and wrapped it. By the next evening I had put myself on antibiotics and two days later I was in the office of a hand surgeon. He was gloomy and thought he should open up all the puncture wounds. I bargained for another twenty-four hours with antibiotics, and to take it from there. Within a month she had bitten me again, no warning, just purring away in my lap. “It’s your hand again this time,” Michael said. “It could have been your face, or an eye.” He took her to the vet’s early the next morning.”
It’s not often that you get a cat that’s unpredictably dangerous. You learn pretty quickly that some of them may bite in certain conditions, but you also—if you have any smarts at all—learn equally quickly to avoid those conditions. Most cats, in any case, give ample warning of their intentions. They give a low, deep-throated growl, or puff themselves up like old-fashioned muffs, every hair on end, or signify in some other way their intention to attack. If you persist in what you’re doing—grooming them with a stiff brush or a metal comb when they don’t want to be groomed, for instance—then you can hardly complain when they try to bite or scratch. Mrs. Bumble was in a different category altogether, poor thing—she was a “stealth cat” if ever there was one, sitting there as peaceful as can be, and striking out all of a sudden and for no understandable reason. Margaret might have patted her two dozen times, with no consequences at all—in fact with every sign of enjoyment on Mrs. Bumble’s part—but on the twenty-fifth time, out of the blue, she sank her fangs in, again and again. A mental imbalance? Some trauma from her previous experience as a house cat? Who knows, who can say?
We debated a long time before reaching our decision, but there was no alternative, really. When she was in a good mood, Mrs. Bumble was the nicest and most affectionate of cats, and she was certainly attractive—a really striking cat. She was a tough survivor too, having spent a few weeks of the winter in a drainpipe to one side of our driveway. Still, what are you going to do? You can’t give away a cat that bites without provocation, and even our vet Mike Murphy, who is often (surely against his better judgment) drawn into attempts to get a cat adopted rather than put down, had to admit that he didn’t want the responsibility of putting Mrs. Bumble in somebody’s home only to have her turn on her new owner. There’s always the possibility of the outright lie—“Oh, she’s a dear, wouldn’t hurt a fly, you’ll love her!”—but that doesn’t seem fair, and when the worst has happened, and somebody else is in the emergency room, how is one going to feel about that?
So Mrs. Bumble had to be put down—there wasn’t really a choice—a glum day for all concerned. It’s hard enough to put down a cat when it’s old, or ill, or in
pain, but much harder when it’s plump, healthy, and glossy, brimming over with élan vital, as Mrs. Bumble was. Even Mike Murphy—a man whom one might have supposed had become used to animal tragedies—looked at her doubtfully. It might have been useful if Mrs. Bumble had chosen to attack him at that very moment, sitting on the examination table, but no such luck. The ladies at the animal hospital looked at Michael as if he were Heinrich Himmler, when he left her there, but then they hadn’t gone to the emergency room with Margaret, or seen what her hand and arm looked like after one of Mrs. Bumble’s surprise attacks. Not all stories have a happy ending, and that’s all there was to it. Having said this, over nearly twenty-five years of feeding God only knows how many strays, tempting them close to the house or even into the house, adopting them, or getting them adopted by people who were looking for a cat, Mrs. Bumble was the only one who turned out badly, and could neither be adopted nor given away.
Chutney saw some of them come and go, liked some of them, had his doubts about others, but retained his position, not exactly as First Cat—he wasn’t about to fight for a position on the pecking order he didn’t care about—but as senior, and in Margaret’s case, most beloved, of cats. He had a kind of Buddha-like wisdom and calm, which we often admired and envied, and an ability to take the rough with the smooth in life which we might all have done well to emulate. He seemed like a permanent institution, and it was hard to imagine the house or the farm without him. And so it was even more of a shock when, quiet to the very end, he passed away. “One snowy afternoon,” Margaret remembers, “he went out for a walk and when it got dark and he had not come back, I went out looking for him, and found him lying on a garden path. He had not been dead for long. I sat in the snow and picked him up. ‘You’re all right now, you’re with me,’ I said. We had him cremated and his ashes were in one of my closets, along with his bowl, for many years.”
5. Mumsie and “The Terrible Twins”
After Chutney, we never looked back, or, to be more exact, we never looked for cats. They, on the contrary, looked for us. It wasn’t a question of finding a cat, cats simply appeared, “out of the woodwork,” as the saying goes, and it was more a question of trying to decide which ones should be invited in. A preliminary test period was usually called for, which in some cases was protracted.
Margaret didn’t take her time making her mind up about Hooligan, however. “Hooligan,” she remembers, “was abandoned with two other cats in a house just up the road from us. The tenants moved out overnight in a bitter February, leaving doors swinging open. Along with a young woman who was working for us then, I went up to take a look inside, and found one room with several empty cans of cat food. Immediately, two cats appeared, and a third stayed crying outside. We managed to get hold of the two, but never the third. I kept the two of them in our barn laundry room with food and water for several days without letting them out. ‘Hooligan,’ as we called her, was jet black with lime green eyes, everything I would not choose, other things being equal, in a cat, so long-haired that to this day she often takes on a spiky look, like that of a punk rocker. She walked in a most peculiar manner, and had endless stomach problems. Her companion was a short-haired black-and-white female, for whom we found a wonderful home with Michael’s assistant, Rebecca. Hooligan, once alone, made the trip to the vet for her blood tests and shots, lived for years in the laundry room, where floorboard heating was installed for her benefit in the winter, and a flap door so she could come and go as she pleased. She lived on a special diet—expensive, naturally—and eventually her digestive system settled down. She loved to be groomed, which was good, as she was always a mess, drooled continually when you made a fuss of her, and seldom strayed far from home. Then one summer, about half a dozen years after she first came here, she came to the front door of the house, and I let her in. ‘Just to cool her jets,’ I told Michael—it was a brutally hot and humid summer. She walked around, upstairs and downstairs, tried one of the litter boxes, drank a little water, decided that she liked air-conditioning, and settled onto one of the good dining-room chairs. She has never left since, except for an occasional stroll around the garden in good weather.”
Hooligan fit in surprisingly well, partly because she looked exactly like a black fur pillow when she was curled up on a piece of furniture, partly because she wasn’t aggressive as cats go, unless directly attacked, partly because given her coloring, she was practically invisible except in broad daylight. With her waddling gait and her curious hair—the spiky tufts of hair coming out of her ears were longer than her whiskers—she was certainly no beauty, but she made up for that in character.
The next arrivals were very different indeed, more like the arrival of a circus in a small town. With some, there had been a long period of getting acquainted on both sides before they entered the house, a sense that we were choosing the cat, as well as the cat choosing us, but this time it was clearly the cat that made the choice. In England, at the beginning of the Second World War, a vast scheme was put into effect in which whole families were unceremoniously “evacuated” from the big-city slums which were prime, if accidental, targets for German bombing, and dumped on rural households by the authorities, with unpredictable results. We were about to have something like the equivalent of this experience.
It began with a reconnaissance mission. As Margaret remembers, “Mumsie simply turned up at the back door one July morning. I heard her crying before I opened the door, a plate of food in one hand. She was pure white, lean, but healthy-looking. She ate and walked away.
“Maybe she’ll be back, I thought, and told Leslie, the same young woman who had found Hooligan with me, to keep an eye out for her.
“Later that day I came home from Rhinebeck and Leslie said, ‘I saw the white cat all right, but I think you’d better go round to the front of the house and take a look, that’s where she is, with her two kittens.’
“She had two tiny, pure white kittens, one quite bold, the other very shy. For a couple of days they all lived under the porch, but then the remnants of Hurricane Bertha came through, with heavy rains. I had gone off to an event for three days, so I called Michael and asked him to get the three of them onto the enclosed front porch. ‘Are you crazy?’ he asked. ‘We have all that fabulous porch furniture out there, it’ll be ruined. Besides, we don’t know anything about these cats, they could have all sorts of diseases. Anyway, they’re wild, I’ll never catch them.’
“‘Get Trina,’ I said. ‘She is helping in the barn this weekend, and she’ll give you a hand. And make sure they have food, water, and a litter box. Oh, and throw some sheets over the porch furniture. Gotta go, have to walk the cross-country course.’
“I called later. ‘They were all washed away,’ Michael said. ‘We couldn’t find them. We tried, Trina and I spent hours.’ There was a long silence. ‘Okay, okay, we got them in eventually, just kidding.’ The kittens had apparently vanished down a drainpipe in the pouring rain, while Mumsie, not one to panic, pretended not to notice their absence.
“Mumsie immediately realized her good fortune. She had found foster parents for her babies, freeing her up to do all those fun things, like hunting, lazing around in the sun, grooming herself, playtime—after all, she was young, it was her first litter. You have to hand it to her, she was a good mother—she had found her kittens a home—but she wasn’t all that interested in feeding them anymore, since there was someone else to do that for her now. A couple of months went by, Mumsie had her vet visit, friends came by to look at the kittens, and the nights started to get chilly. ‘We’re going to have to bring them indoors off the porch,’ I told Michael. ‘First of all, it’s getting cold, and second, the kittens have to get used to living inside, since they’re both going to be indoor cats.’
“Michael blanched. ‘What, are you crazy?’ he asked. ‘Are we going to have three more cats in the house? The entire place will be covered in white cat hair! Oh my God!’
“But they came in, the kittens tore around nonstop all
the time, they amused us for hours, and they did indeed cover everything in the house with white hair. Before Thanksgiving, the two of them went off to new homes, one to a colleague of Michael’s at Simon and Schuster, the other to our doctor in Poughkeepsie. Mumsie cried for one night, then seemed to forget all about them and settled into the good life. She quickly became a favorite of Michael’s, who, I have noticed, falls into a pattern: loves the females in the end, and never really warms up to the males. Mumsie loved to go out all day hunting, and didn’t like new arrivals on her turf. She won some, lost some, and staked out the dirty clothes basket to sleep in at night.”
Mumsie’s arrival inevitably changed the feline pecking order, as any new cat will, but this was aggravated in her case by a certain noticeable sense of entitlement on her part. Perhaps it was that as the mother of two rambunctious twins (for a while we referred to them as “the Terrible Twins”), she regarded herself as having a special status that set her apart from other cats. Certainly she had not arrived looking as if she had spent a long time in the woods and fields foraging for food—it seemed more likely that, as is so often the case, the birth of her kittens was more than her owner had bargained for, and she was simply thrown out of the house, or more likely taken a good way from the house and turned loose, kittens and all.
Cat People Page 6
