Cat People

by Michael Korda

On the other hand, in her calmer moments, she liked to cradle herself against the astonished Mr. McT, with her paws around his neck, grooming him gently. In her hands, Mr. McT, with his thuggish ways, who had won his place at the top of the heap by tormenting poor old Jake in his last days, became a new and more gentle cat.

  It would be nice to think of his transformation as the perfect ending to a story—love conquers all, even McTavish—were it not for the fact that Mr. McT was, like Jake, getting older and sicker. He lost his healthy appetite, he lost his impressive bulk and swaggering ways, and finally be began to lose control of his rear legs, so he was obliged to pull himself along with his front legs, dragging his hind legs behind him, and was often unable to get up once he had lain down. He had diabetes. It is possible—Who knows?—that Mumsie, Hooligan, and Kit Kat might have ganged up on him, but Ruby protected him, always staying close by, and looking after him, as faithful as could be. By this time, she was nearly fully grown, a biggish cat, but still very thin and rangy, and she devoted herself to comforting Mr. McT as much as she could, until the final, sad day when the vet who was coming over to put Margaret’s beloved horse Missouri down—he was nearly thirty, she had owned him for nearly twenty-five years, and of all her horses he was her favorite, but age and illness had finally caught up with him—agreed to take care of McTavish in the kitchen at the same time, thus sparing him the dreaded trip to the vet, and allowing him to die quietly in his own home, surrounded by the only two beings who had ever loved him, Ruby and Margaret.

  He was buried together with Missouri, and the ashes of Chutney and Jake, each in a separate Petrossian bag, at the end of the lawn, where it meets the woods, within sight of the kitchen window, and Margaret was heartbroken, but confident that she had done the right thing.

  As for Ruby, although she had lost the one big love of her life (to date), in the manner of cats she did not grieve, or lose her appetite, or sit around looking lost and mournful. To this day, she still rather likes to lie down on the peach-colored chaise longue in the bedroom (on a protective towel, since this was one of Thom von Buelow’s pricier fabrics), where she and Mr. McT had liked to cuddle together in his last days, and perhaps she remembers him, or there is still a trace of some familiar scent….

  You never know what goes on in the mind of cats, after all.

  But in its own way, McTavish’s life did have a happy ending—he found a good home, and at the end of his life he found love.

  Cat or human, that’s not such a bad way to go.

  8. Tootsie Comes to Stay

  There is always another cat waiting in the wings.

  Even while poor McTavish was still with us, he would occasionally look out the window of “the library” (which, now that Thom has moved to Tuscany, we have transformed back into “the television room”) and see a fleeting white shape on the little porch outside at night.

  This was one of our three outside cats, all wild and shy. One of them, Agent Orange, had been around for years. Margaret had ambitions of getting hold of him, but, as she admits, “I have never been able to get close to him, let alone touch him. Every time he disappears for a week or so, I think that’s it, he’s dead, but he always shows up again. He is a large, bright orange cat, or ginger, as we call the color in England. He looks better during the cold weather, as his coat fluffs up and gives him the appearance of weight gain. Periodically, I put worming medicine in his food, usually in some chicken I’ve cooked for him. In winter we put doors up on the dining-room porch, with a cat door for him, which he quickly learned to use. Sometimes he’ll curl up in a box, which is there for him year-round, or lie on the door mat. But the minute my hand touches the doorknob, he’s gone. So I am never able to treat his wounds when he comes back with them, or brush his matted coat, or get a flea collar on him. On evenings I don’t see him waiting, I call and bang his plate on the stone floor of the porch. Hoping he will appear before the food freezes in the winter, or is covered with flies and ants in the warm months. And I do wait until I see him before putting out water in the wintertime, since it freezes so quickly. He will run away when I do this, but he comes back.”

  Agent Orange continues to elude Margaret, and also continues to come back just when you think he’s gone for good, usually sitting on the low garden wall next to the herb garden about suppertime. He appears to live under the old lawn shed/garage in which Margaret’s midmount mower and some other equipment is kept, and occasionally Mumsie used to slink away to visit him there.

  Tootsie was a later arrival. Margaret described her as, “Very wild. Pure white, with a calico tail, pale orange ears, and a dot of color over each eye. She lived in the cavernous trailer barn, where we set up a warm basket behind one of the horse trailers, and gave her dry food every day. I saw her on Michael’s office porch some evenings, where we have another cat basket, and I put wet food out for her, hoping she would it eat it before too long. Some evenings I actually saw her, but if she caught sight of me, or Michael, she was gone. I say ‘she,’ as white cats are so often females, but I could have been wrong.”

  But Margaret was not wrong, as it turned out, for Tootsie, unlike Agent Orange, finally stepped into the house with no regrets or fears once the door was opened to her, shook herself off, took a look around, and decided to stay.

  At first, she was kept in a wing of the house containing Margaret’s “trophy room,” hung with ribbons and silver awards, the “library,” Michael’s office, a small kitchenette, and, up a steep, twisty eighteenth-century flight of stairs, Margaret’s office and a bathroom. Once a separate house about a quarter of a mile away, it was transported on log rollers and fastened to the bigger house early in the nineteenth century, presumably to cope with the needs of a growing family, and a single door now connects it to the hallway of the original house, so that it forms a kind of separate, self-contained two-floor suite, the wide-plank, eighteenth-century floors on different levels than the rest of the house, which results in odd, mildly dangerous steps where you least expect them, and very low ceilings. Tootsie’s litter tray was placed in the kitchenette off Michael’s office, much to his horror, making a total of three in the house (our neighbors the Lynns once had twenty-eight), and her food bowl and water bowl put in the fireplace, on a tray. The general idea was that this was a temporary measure, following which Tootsie would be adopted by some cat-loving friend, or would integrate herself seamlessly into the household. Like so many temporary arrangements involving cats, it gradually became permanent.

  Tootsie settled in very quickly, and made the rooms her home, with the result that for some time she seemed unaware of the fact that there were other cats in the house, while they seemed unsure of her presence. Margaret had intended her to stay until she warmed up, but it soon became evident that she had no intention of crossing the threshold into the hallway and entering the rest of the house, while the other cats, once it became clear to them that she was really there, proved to be equally unwilling to cross over into what was now clearly Tootsie’s territory.

  This produced something of a Mexican standoff. The door to the hallway, which initially we kept closed, was like Beirut’s famous Green Line, or the Berlin Wall, or the Israeli fortifications on the West Bank, a barrier so uncrossable that when we finally lost patience with keeping the door closed, neither Tootsie nor the other cats would cross the threshold once it was open. Tootsie had no interest in exploring the rest of the house—indeed she may not have realized at first that it existed—and apparently still less in meeting any of the other cats. As for them, they tried to pretend that nothing was out of the ordinary, and that they had never wanted to go into the library or through Michael’s office and up the stairs to Margaret’s in the first place, even though the former and the latter had been among their favorite places to sit.

  Tootsie’s favorite place was in the library/television room, on the back of one of Thom von Buelow’s most expensively upholstered armchairs, covered in beautiful white chintz with roses. There she could look out the w
indow, or turn her head and survey the doorway, commanding the high ground in case any of the other cats entered the trophy room from the hall. She showed no desire to go outdoors again, and raised a terrific fuss if the door to the porch on which she had once sheltered was even opened a crack, and apparently did not feel any need to exercise, beyond the occasional wary stroll to the litter tray or the food bowl. What she liked best was when we had dinner and watched television—she was very content to sit on the top of the sofa, behind our heads, or to sit on Margaret’s lap. On nights when we did not eat dinner in the television room for one reason or another, she howled and complained noisily, furious at the disruption to her routine and at being deprived of human company. She was, obviously, a “people cat.”

  Very occasionally, Mumsie, one of the braver and more assertive of Tootsie’s sister cats, made a forced entrance into the library, but this usually produced a fight, and since they were both white cats, a blizzard of white fur. Eventually, Tootsie would come out of her domain and sit in the hallway at breakfast time, a foot or two from the door, howling piteously just to make sure we didn’t forget to bring her “room service,” but always making sure of her line of retreat first. Once or twice, to break the ice, we carried her upstairs, despite wails and moans on her part, and plunked her on the bed, where she would sit quite happily for a few minutes (thinking, no doubt, “This is the life!”), until enough of the other cats appeared to make her feel surrounded, then she would choose a good moment when their attention was directed elsewhere to jump off the bed and scurry downstairs, back to the safety of her own apartment.

  It’s important to understand that cats are quick to form territorial rights to certain places and positions in a room, to which they attach enormous significance, and of course a newcomer, even with the best will in the world, is only too likely to upset the existing arrangement and cause chaos, rather like a new guest settling into a boardinghouse and sitting down in “somebody else’s” chair. In our case, the bedroom, a sketch of which appears on the next page, had been very effectively divided into certain key positions—Hooligan, in her basket beneath the window, Ruby on top of the television cable box, which was formerly Kit Kat’s place, until she gave it up to Ruby, Kit Kat in the laundry basket, which used to be Mumsie’s place, until she apparently traded it to Kit Kat, and Mumsie herself on the bed, as close to the pillows as possible.

  These positions had not been reached without many disagreements in the past, and of course death had played a role in freeing up certain of them—Jake and McTavish had fixed favorite spots too, and had held on to them by seniority, size, and a certain sense of male superiority. Particularly choice spots, like the basket below the window were much sought after and envied and only after McTavish’s death did Hooligan feel free to make it her own. Until Kit Kat herself gave up the cable box as a place to nap or sleep (very high ground, plus the no doubt pleasing electronic warmth), it would have been unthinkable for Ruby, as a newcomer, to sit there. Also there was no challenge for the place from the other cats, since it required a couple of high jumps to reach—really, Kit Kat and Ruby, big jumpers, were the only contenders.

  It is all very well to love Elsa in Born Free—one would have to have been “born dead” not to shed a few tears at the ending—and to accept at face value the message that lions are, in fact, or ought to be, “born free,” but lions, like all the members of the cat family, big and small, are ruled by precise social obligations, which they take very seriously, and, when necessary, enforce with extreme violence. They are born into a society with rules as rigid as those of feudal Europe, with mutual social obligations that mean a lot to them. Far from being “born free,” cats are born into a world of demanding rules, a whole litany of “do’s” and “don’ts” that are bred into them, and also, no doubt, passed on from mother to kitten, and reinforced as necessary with a sharp slap. We like to think of animals as “free” in ways that we are not, but one of the benefits of owning cats is the ability to perceive that life is just as complicated for other species as it is for ours, and the need to figure out “the right thing to do” in complicated circumstances, just as worrying as it is for us. Cats do not have the equivalent of an Emily Post to guide them, but etiquette and preservation of social order matters just as much to them as it did to Ms. Post, and they spend a good deal of their time trying to figure out where they belong, and to combine feline good manners with self-interest. A little like us, you might say?

  In any case, the objection to Tootsie was not so much her presence upstairs per se, but the question of where she would fit in—a real estate problem, really—while for Tootsie the difficulty was to avoid making a wrong step, or faux pas, which might offend the other cats and spark off a fight over territory in which Tootsie could find herself fighting one against four, with predictable results.

  Anybody who has been to boarding school, or college, or served in the armed forces, will instantly recognize the difficulty that a newcomer faces when entering any place in which the chairs, the bunks, the bathrooms, or the closets have already been divided up. Tootsie’s choice of the bed—well, she didn’t actually choose it, since we plunked her down on it—upset both Mumsie and Kit Kat, who felt that they had long since earned “bed privileges,” and the resulting level of hostility, though silent, was enough to make Tootsie run for cover.

  Creatures of habit, cats like to have things in the place to which they are accustomed. In the kitchen, mealtimes have to follow an exact placement, rather like a formal dinner with place settings. Kit Kat eats on the countertop, to the right of the sink, next to the toaster oven. Hooligan eats on the floor, in front of the refrigerator. Mumsie would either eat on the left of the countertop, separated from Kit Kat by the sink, or on the kitchen table. Ruby, as a newcomer and a slow eater, gets the floor, as far away from Hooligan, who is a fast eater, as possible, since otherwise Hooligan is apt to come over and push Ruby away from her food so she can steal a second helping. Tootsie, of course, gets room service. Changes are not appreciated, and the order of who gets fed first is equally sacrosanct.

  Eventually, Mumsie and Tootsie made peace rather tentatively—they occasionally even shared the television room sofa, formerly off-limits to cats, covering the most expensive piece of furniture we own with white hair, but their eyes always remained firmly fixed on each other, just in case. They sat at opposite ends of the big sofa, facing each other, completely immobile, like two small white Sphinxes, waiting to see who made the first move.

  In the meantime, Tootsie became a kind of fixture. She shows no desire at all to expand her horizons—she has never made it to the dining room or the kitchen, she has her own private litter tray, and lives altogether like some kind of mystery passenger who never leaves her cabin on a luxury steamer or the old Orient Express, receiving her meals on trays, and never emerging to mix with the other passengers. There is, in fact, something of the grande dame about her, with the odd splodges of color above her eyes, and her ability to sleep for about twenty hours a day.

  And still they came. Margaret never stops looking for new cats.

  “Last fall after a long season of eventing with the horses, my barn manager, Toby, and I decided it would be fun and something quite different to go to the cat show at the Civic Center in Poughkeepsie. I particularly wanted to see some of the more exotic breeds, seldom being exposed to any cats but the ones arriving at the door.

  “But after we spent some time walking up and down the aisles, oohing and aahing at this breed or that and shaking our heads at others, we naturally gravitated to the area where the different adoption agencies were located. What a mistake! Especially as I was on the rebound from losing both Mr. McT and Mumsie and felt particularly vulnerable. Each kitten, pairs of kittens, families of cats, old battered ones, young skittish ones, I found myself saying to Toby, ‘We’ve got room for this one or perhaps those two.’ She smartly moved on to check out the ‘accessories’ area and by the time she came back I had two black and white eight-w
eek-old kittens, brother and sister, put to one side, while I continued to look for more. ‘Don’t think Michael is going to like this much,’ she said. ‘Okay, let’s stop here.’

  “I filled out the forms and answered all the questions that went along with the adoption. Telling everybody who was now stopping by to look at the two adorable kittens, tussling with each other, ‘They’re mine. I’ve already named them, they are called Bonnie and Clyde.’ Everything was going very well until it came to the form of payment for their adoption fees. I immediately whipped out a credit card, being a plastic person, only to hear that cash or a personal check would do. I heard Toby’s voice behind me, ‘I have cash’—what a relief—into one of the agency’s travel boxes they went, perhaps not quite so energetic as they had seemed earlier, and I was asked if I would like to strike the gong. ‘We strike the gong each time a cat or kitten is adopted,’ I was told, ‘so you get to hit it twice!’ What a moment as I banged away, heads turned, people clapped and cheered. “Toby was in a little bit of a hurry to be on her way once we arrived in the driveway and Michael came out of the house. So I was left standing with the cat box. ‘Hi, guess what?’ ‘I’ve guessed,’ Michael said.

  “This story did not have the happy ending I had hoped for. Bonnie and Clyde who had grown quieter and quieter on the ride home, and who made visit after visit to the litter tray from the minute they got out of the carrier in the kitchen, through the evening and night, were at our vet’s doorstep first thing the following morning. Where it was very quickly discovered they were infested with a type of parasite, hard to get rid of and not a situation I felt I should expose our other cats to, so I had to call the agency who agreed to collect them from my vet’s and return them to the foster home where they had been living prior to the cat show.”

  Thus life goes on, with a new mix of cats, a changed cast of characters. Out of the blue, as in all life, awful things happen. As Margaret says, “We are never prepared for death by accident. If there is an existing illness, upcoming surgery, old age, then we have a period of time to accustom ourselves to what is coming, and likely make arrangements.