The fat man and the Madame presented a contrast that was not unusual in this apartment house, which had a brilliant past and no future. He was bulky, uncouth, sloppily attired. Madame Phloi was a long-legged blue-eyed aristocrat whose creamy fawn coat shaded to brown at the extremities.
The Madame deplored fat men. They had no laps, and of what use is a lapless human? Nevertheless, she gave him the common courtesy of a sniff at his trouser cuffs and immediately backed away, twitching her nose and showing her teeth.
“GET that cat away from me,” the fat man roared, stamping his feet thunderously at Madame Phloi. Her companion pulled the leash although there was no need; the Madame with one backward leap had retreated to a safe corner of the elevator, which shuddered and continued its groaning ascent.
“Don’t you like animals?” inquired the gentle voice at the other end of the leash.
“Filthy, sneaky beasts,” the fat man said with a snarl. “Last place I lived, some lousy cat got in my room and et my parakeet.”
“I’m sorry to hear that. But you don’t need to worry about Madame Phloi and Thapthim. They never leave the apartment except on a leash.”
“You got TWO? Well, keep ’em away from me or I’ll break their rotten necks. I ain’t wrung a cat’s neck since I was fourteen, but I remember how.”
And with the long black box he was carrying, the fat man lunged at the impeccable Madame Phloi, who sat in her corner, flat eared and tense. Her fur bristled, and she tried to dart away. Even when her companion picked her up in protective arms, Madame Phloi’s body was taut and trembling.
Not until she was safely home in her modest but well-cushioned apartment did she relax. She walked stiff-legged to the sunny spot on the carpet where Thapthim was sleeping and licked the top of his head. Then she had a complete bath herself—to rid her coat of the fat man’s odor. Thapthim did not wake.
This drowsy, unambitious, amiable creature—her son—was a puzzle to Madame Phloi; she herself was sensitive and spirited. She didn’t try to understand him; she merely loved him. She spent hours washing his paws and breast and other parts he could easily have reached with his own tongue. At dinnertime she consumed her food slowly so there would be something left on her plate for his dessert, and he always gobbled the extra portion hungrily. And when he slept, which was most of the time, she kept watch by his side, sitting with a tall regal posture until she swayed with weariness. Then she made herself into a small bundle and dozed with one eye open.
Thapthim was lovable, to be sure. He appealed to other cats, large and small dogs, people, and even ailurophobes in a limited way. He had a face like a beautiful brown flower and large blue eyes, tender and trusting. Ever since he was a kitten he had been willing to purr at the touch of a hand—any hand. Eventually he became so agreeable that he purred if anyone looked in his direction from across the room. What’s more, he came when called; he gratefully devoured whatever was served on his dinner plate; and when he was told to get down, he got down.
His wise parent disapproved of this uncatly conduct; it indicated a certain lack of character, and no good would come of it. By her own example she tried to guide him. When dinner was served she gave the plate a haughty sniff and walked away, no matter how tempting the dish. That was the way it was done by any self-respecting feline. In a minute or two she returned and condescended to dine, but never with open enthusiasm.
Furthermore, when human hands reached out, the catly thing was to bound away, lead them a chase, flirt a little before allowing oneself to be caught and cuddled. Thapthim, sorry to say, greeted any friendly overture by rolling over, purring, and looking soulful.
From an early age he had known the rules of the apartment:
“No sleeping in the cupboard with the pots and pans.”
“Sitting on the table with the typewriter is permissible.”
“Sitting on the table with the coffeepot is never allowed.”
The sad truth was that Thapthim obeyed these rules. Madame Phloi, on the other hand, knew that a rule was a challenge, and it was a matter of integrity to violate it. To obey was to sacrifice one’s dignity . . . . It seemed that her son would never learn the true values in life.
To be sure, Thapthim was adored for his good nature in the human world of typewriters and coffeepots. But Madame Phloi was equally adored—and for the correct reasons. She was respected for her independence, admired for her clever methods of getting her own way, and loved for the cowlick on her white breast and the squint in her delphinium blue eyes. In appearance and behavior she was a classic Siamese. By cocking her head and staring with heart-melting eyes, she could charm a porterhouse steak out from under a knife and fork.
Until the fat man and his black box moved in next door, Madame Phloi had never known an unfriendly soul. She had two companions in her tenth-floor apartment—genial creatures without names who came and went a good deal. One was an easy mark for between-meal snacks; a tap on his ankle always produced a crunchy tidbit. The other served as a hot-water bottle on cold nights and punctually obliged whenever the Madame wished to have her underside stroked or her cheekbones massaged.
Life was not all petting and treats, however; Madame Phloi had her regular work. She was official watcher and listener for the household.
There were six windows that required watching, for a wide ledge ran around the building flush with the tenth-floor windowsills, and this was a promenade for pigeons. They strutted, searched their feathers, and ignored the Madame, who sat on the sill and watched them dispassionately but thoroughly through the window screen.
While watching was a daytime job, listening was done after dark, requiring greater concentration. Madame Phloi listened for noises in the walls. She heard termites chewing, pipes sweating, and sometimes the ancient plaster cracking, but mostly she listened to the ghosts of generations of deceased mice.
One evening, shortly after the incident in the elevator, Madame Phloi was listening. Thapthim was sleeping, and the other two were quietly turning pages of books, when a strange and horrendous sound came from the wall. The Madame’s ears flicked to attention, then flattened against her head.
An interminable screech was coming out of that wall, like nothing the Madame had ever heard. It chilled the blood and tortured the ears. So painful was the shrillness that Madame Phloi threw back her head and complained with a piercing howl of her own. The strident din even waked Thapthim. He looked about in alarm, shook his head wildly, and clawed at his ears to get rid of the offending noise.
The others heard it, too.
“Listen to that!” said the one with the gentle voice.
“It must be the new man next door,” said the other. “It’s incredible!”
“How could anyone so crude produce anything so exquisite? Is it Prokofiev he’s playing?”
“I think it’s Bartók.”
“He was carrying his violin in the elevator today. He tried to hit Phloi with it.”
“He’s a nut . . . . Look at the cats! Apparently they don’t care for violin music.”
Madame Phloi and Thapthim, bounding from the room, collided with each other in a rush to hide under the bed.
That was not the only noise emanating from the next-door apartment in those upsetting days after the fat man moved in. The following evening, when Madame Phloi walked into the living room to commence her listening, she heard a fluttering sound dimly through the wall, accompanied by highly conversational chirping. This was agreeable music, and she settled down on the sofa to enjoy it, tucking her brown paws neatly under her creamy body.
Her contentment was soon disturbed, however, by a slamming door and then the fat man’s voice bursting through the wall like thunder.
“Look what you done, you dirty skunk!” he bellowed. “Right in my fiddle! Get back in your cage before I brain you!”
There was a frantic beating of wings.
“GET down off that window or I’ll bash your head in!”
The threat brought a torrent of
chirping.
“Shut up, you stupid cluck! Shut up and get back in that cage or I’ll . . .”
There was a splintering crash, and then all was quiet except for an occasional pitiful “peep!”
Madame Phloi was fascinated. In fact, when she resumed her watching chore the next day, pigeons seemed rather insipid entertainment. Thapthim was asleep, and the others had left for the day, but not before opening the window and placing a small cushion on the chilly marble sill.
There she sat, a small but alert package of fur, sniffing the welcome summer air, seeing all and knowing all. She knew, for example, that the person walking down the tenth-floor hallway, wearing old tennis shoes and limping slightly, would halt at the door, set down his pail, and let himself in with a passkey.
Indeed, she hardly bothered to turn her head when the window washer entered. He was one of her regular court of admirers. His odor was friendly, although it suggested damp basements and floor mops, and he talked sensibly; there was none of that falsetto foolishness with which some persons insulted the Madame’s intelligence.
“Hop down, kitty,” he said in a musical voice. “Charlie’s gotta take out that screen. See, I brought some cheese for the pretty kitty.”
He held out a modest offering of rat cheese, and Madame Phloi investigated it and found it was the wrong variety, and she shook one fastidious paw at it.
“Mighty fussy cat,” Charlie laughed. “Well, now, you sit there and watch Charlie clean this here window. Don’t you go jumpin’ out on the ledge, ‘cause Charlie ain’t runnin’ after you. No sir! That old ledge, she’s startin’ to crumble. Someday them pigeons’ll stamp their feet hard, and down she goes! . . . Hey, lookit the broken glass out here! Somebody busted a window.”
Charlie sat on the marble sill and pulled the upper sash down in his lap, and while Madame Phloi followed his movements carefully, Thapthim sauntered into the room, yawning and stretching, and swallowed the cheese.
“Now Charlie puts the screen back in, and you two guys can watch them crazy pigeons some more. This screen, she’s comin’ apart, too. Whole buildin’s crackin’ up.”
Remembering to replace the cushion on the cool, hard sill, he went on to clean the remaining windows, and the Madame resumed her post, sitting on the edge of the cushion so that Thapthim could have most of it.
The pigeons were late that morning, probably frightened away by the window washer. When the first visitor skimmed in on a blue gray wing, Madame Phloi first noticed the tiny opening in the screen. Every aperture, no matter how small, was a temptation; she had to prove she could wriggle through any tight space, whether there was a good reason or not.
She waited until Charlie had limped out of the apartment before she started pushing at the screen with her nose, first gingerly, then stubbornly. Inch by inch the rusted mesh ripped away from the frame until the whole corner formed a loose flap. Then Madame Phloi slithered through—nose and ears, slender shoulders, dainty Queen Anne forefeet, svelte torso, lean flanks, hind legs like steel springs, and finally proud brown tail. For the first time in her life she found herself on the pigeon promenade. She shuddered deliciously.
Inside the screen the lethargic Thapthim, jolted by this strange turn of affairs, watched his daring parent with a quarter inch of his pink tongue protruding. They touched noses briefly through the screen, and the Madame proceeded to explore. She advanced cautiously and with mincing step, for the pigeons had not been tidy in their habits.
The ledge was about two feet wide. Moving warily, Madame Phloi advanced to its edge, nose down and tail high. Ten stories below there were moving objects but nothing of interest, she decided. She walked daintily along the extreme edge to avoid the broken glass, venturing in the direction of the fat man’s apartment, impelled by some half-forgotten curiosity.
His window stood open and unscreened, and Madame Phloi peered in politely. There, sprawled on the floor, lay the fat man himself, snorting and heaving his immense paunch in a kind of rhythm. It always alarmed her to see a human on the floor, which she considered feline domain. She licked her nose apprehensively and stared at him with enormous eyes. In a dark corner of the room something fluttered and squawked, and the fat man opened his eyes.
“SHcrrff! GET out of here!” he shouted, struggling to his feet and shaking his fist at the window.
In three leaps Madame Phloi crossed the ledge back to her own window and pushed through the screen to safety. After looking back to see if the fat man might be chasing her and being reassured that he was not, she washed Thapthim’s ears and her own paws and sat down to wait for pigeons.
Like any normal cat Madame Phloi lived by the Rule of Three. She resisted any innovation three times before accepting it, tackled an obstacle three times before giving up, and tried each activity three times before tiring of it. Consequently she made two more sallies to the pigeon promenade and eventually convinced Thapthim to join her.
Together they peered over the edge at the world below. The sense of freedom was intoxicating. Recklessly Thapthim made a leap at a low-flying pigeon and landed on his mother’s back. She cuffed his ear in retaliation. He poked her nose. They grappled and rolled over and over on the ledge, oblivious of the long drop below them, taking playful nips of each other’s hide and snarling gutteral expressions of glee.
Suddenly Madame Phloi scrambled to her feet and crouched in a defensive position. The fat man was leaning from his window.
“Here, kitty, kitty,” he was saying in one of those despised falsetto voices, offering some bit of food in a saucer. The Madame froze, but Thapthim turned his beautiful trusting eyes on the stranger and advanced along the ledge. Purring and waving his tail cordially, he walked into the trap. It all happened in a matter of seconds: the saucer was withdrawn and a long black box was swung at Thapthim like a baseball bat, sweeping him off the ledge and into space. He was silent as he fell.
When the family came home, laughing and chattering, with their arms full of packages, they knew at once something was amiss. No one greeted them at the door. Madame Phloi hunched moodily on the windowsill, staring at a hole in the screen, and Thapthim was not to be found.
“The screen’s torn!” cried the gentle voice.
“I’ll bet he’s out on the ledge.”
“Can you lean out and look? Be careful.”
“You hold Phloi.”
“Can you see him?”
“Not a sign of him! There’s a lot of glass scattered around, and the window next door is broken.”
“Do you suppose that man . . . ? I feel sick.”
“Don’t worry, dear. We’ll find him . . . . There’s the doorbell! Maybe someone’s bringing him home.”
It was Charlie standing at the door, fidgeting uncomfortably. “ ’Scuse me, folks,” he said. “You missin’ one of your kitties?”
“Yes! Have you found him?”
“Poor little guy,” said Charlie. “Found him lyin’ right under your window, where the bushes is thick.”
“He’s dead!” the gentle one moaned.
“Yes, ma’am. That’s a long way down.”
“Where is he now?”
“I got him down in the basement, ma’am. I’ll take care of him real nice. I don’t think you’d want to see the poor guy.”
Still Madame Phloi stared at the hole in the screen and waited for Thapthim. From time to time she checked the other windows, just to be sure. As time passed and he did not return, she looked behind the radiators and under the bed. She pried open cupboard doors and tried to burrow her way into closets. She sniffed all around the front door. Finally she stood in the middle of the living room and called loudly in a high-pitched, wailing voice.
Later that evening Charlie paid another visit to the apartment.
“Only wanted to tell you, ma’am, how nice I took care of him,” he said. “I got a box that was just the right size—a white box, it was, from one of the nice stores. And I wrapped him up in some old blue curtain. It looked real pretty with his
fur. And I buried the little guy right under your windows, behind the bushes.
And still Madame Phloi searched, returning again and again to watch the ledge from which Thapthim had disappeared. She scorned food. She rebuffed any attempts at consolation. And all night she sat wide-eyed and waiting in the dark.
The living room window was now tightly closed, but the following day the Madame—when she was left by herself in the lonely apartment—went to work on the bedroom screens. One was new and hopeless, but the second screen was slightly corroded, and she was soon nosing through a slit that lengthened as she struggled out onto the ledge.
Picking her way through the broken glass, she approached the spot where Thapthim had vanished. And then it all happened again. There he was—the fat man—holding out a saucer.
“Here, kitty, kitty.”
Madame Phloi hunched down and backed away.
“Kitty want some milk?” It was that ugly falsetto, but she did not run home this time. She crouched on the ledge, a few inches out of his reach.
“Nice kitty. Nice kitty.”
Madame Phloi crept with caution toward the saucer in the outstretched fist, and stealthily the fat man extended another hand, snapping his fingers as one would do to call a dog.
The Madame retreated diagonally—half toward home and half toward the dangerous brink.
“Here, kitty. Nice kitty,” he cooed, leaning farther out of his window, but under his breath he muttered: “You dirty sneak! I’ll get you if it’s the last thing I ever do. Comin’ after my bird, weren’t you?”
Madame Phloi recognized danger with all her senses. Her ears were back, her whiskers curled, and her white underside hugged the ledge.
A little closer she moved, and the fat man made a grab for her. She jerked back a step, with unblinking eyes fixed on his sweating face. He was furtively laying the saucer aside, she noticed, and edging his fat paunch farther out the window.
The Cat Who Had 14 Tales Page 13
