by Lissa Warren
But Ting’s biggest contribution to Christmas was the Christmas tree itself. Anticipating her inability to resist low-hanging ornaments, we had left the bottom branches unadorned except for a strand of little white lights. So as not to attract her attention, we had even declined to use the kind that blink. On the higher branches we had hung ornaments, but only ones made of wood, fabric, paper, or metal—basically anything that couldn’t or likely wouldn’t break. In other words, we cat-proofed Christmas—or so we thought. What we failed to calculate, however, was Ting’s agility and determination. Throughout the month of December, she had made several attempts to climb the tree, sending numerous angels cascading to the floor. Each time we heard the commotion, one of us ran over to rescue her—by which I mean pry her from the trunk claw by claw while she glared at us over her shoulder.
And then, on Christmas Eve, a miracle occurred: Ting-Pei Warren, the Judeo-Christian Buddhist cat, high on catnip and tuna water, silently scaled the six-foot spruce while her family sat by the fire, making short work of a pecan-encrusted cheese log. The three of us turned just in time to see her, a silver star atop the highest bough. And just in time to see her lose her balance and take the entire tree down with her.
Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night.
Chapter Five
Any Given Day
I love cats because I enjoy my home; and little by little, they become its visible soul.
—Jean Cocteau
While holidays with Ting were never uneventful, as she grew older she mellowed considerably. Daily life with her became wonderfully routine. There’s something about having a cat to take care of that regulates a family. Ting’s basic needs and predictable habits, coupled with her expectations for slow movements and soft tones, superseded any desire we might otherwise have had for excitement—and that was fine with us. She had a calming effect on the house. Like all good cats, she radiated peace.
Mornings with her were Mom and Dad’s favorite. As soon as one of them started to stir, Ting would use the little brown-suede stand at the base of their bed to hop up onto it and creep along their bodies until they were face-to-face. She’d nestle there between them, purring softly, until they were both awake enough to fuss over her—to drag their nails along her jaw or push her onto her side and rub her chest. Sometimes she’d start kneading, sometimes she’d doze off. Mostly, though, she just stayed for a bit, got what she needed, and then popped down. She could do so soundlessly, if she chose, or with a thud for the front paws and a thud for the hind—quick as a horse’s canter.
Changing her water was Dad’s job. Each morning, he’d pick up her glass from its spot in the bathroom and take it downstairs to the kitchen sink, rinse it out, and refill it—not with tap water, though; we used bottled for Ting, just like we did for ourselves, to guard against the lead we felt sure was present given the age of our house’s pipes. Every couple of days, the glass would go into the dishwasher and Ting would get a clean one.
While Dad poured Ting’s water, Mom took care of her food. She’d throw out whatever was left from the night before (which, generally speaking, wasn’t much), wipe the dish out carefully with a Kleenex, and put down fresh. We’d watch the dish throughout the day and replenish it as necessary, never wanting to put down too much at once, lest it get stale.
The water and the food resided beneath a print of Mondrian’s Blue Chrysanthemum—a poster from the Guggenheim’s centennial exhibition, October 8–December 12, 1971. Mom and Dad were living in Pearl River, New York, then, but they’d driven into the city for its opening, met their friends Elliot and Sharon for dinner, and then driven home. I was born nine months later, seven months to the day after the exhibit ended. The poster is special to my parents because of the timing, but I love it for the symmetry: blue cat with silver tipping, blue chrysanthemum with silver frame. I sometimes think that if the house were on fire, one of us would grab Ting, one would grab Cinnamon’s ashes (which I keep on the mantel in my bedroom), and one would grab the Mondrian.
After eating her breakfast, Ting would always look to settle in the sun. In the living room, we have a print of Degas’s Ballet School, in which a scuffed diagonal intersects a slant of light coming from a window half obscured by a spiral staircase. Lack of tulle aside, Ting would have fit right into the painting given her love of basking on hardwood floors, which she did every morning from 7:00 to 8:00 a.m., one paw stretched out in front of her as if to keep the light in place, her body absorbing the heat. When the light finally shifted, one of us would scoop her up and hold her. It was like pressing the sun against your chest.
The rest of Ting’s morning was generally spent on the window ledge in the lower-level sunroom, which gets the rays for a few more hours. We’d placed a Mexican blanket there for her—a beige, royal blue, and bright yellow one that we got in Cancun back when I was in high school. It took so many washes to make it soft that all the colors have run together. In the spring Ting napped on it against a backdrop of hot pink azalea blossoms; in the winter, she blended in with the bare, gray branches. On weekdays, Mom and Dad would take turns going downstairs to check on Ting every hour or so. There was no need to, really—she was always fine—but seeing her reassured them; not just that she was well, but that everything was.
On weekends, I would often bring work down to the lower level and camp out on the couch beneath Ting’s ledge. Writing is easier with a cat beside you. Add a blanket and a cup of tea, and I’m good for an hour—two if Mom comes down with a second cup of tea.
When Ting would hear Mom and Dad preparing lunch, she’d generally head upstairs to the kitchen and situate herself on the back of the living-room couch so she could watch them eat from afar. If lunch was tuna fish or sardines, she’d camp out on the table itself. She would never try to steal a bite; she didn’t have to, as one was always offered.
After lunch came bath time—hers, not theirs. That task could be accomplished in any number of places: the big bay window in the living room, the bedroom rocking chair, a cardboard box lined with a beach towel and placed on the shelf of the closet in Mom and Dad’s bedroom. Ting’s only rule was that her bath could not be disturbed, because any part of her touched while bathing would have to be washed again. Once she was clean, a nap ensued. The nap would often travel—armchair to bed, carpet to couch—but regardless of where it migrated, it would usually last until dinner.
Dinnertime called for a prowl, which always made me think of my prison-guard grandfather—my mother’s father—patrolling the yard. Ting would roam silently from room to room, sniffing the night air as she went, rubbing her face along the hearth, and checking out anything new—be it a brown paper bag full of cornhusks or a relocated ficus. By dessert she had settled down and would demand that attention be paid—scratching, brushing, petting, or all of the above. Then she would curl up on the couch while we read or watched TV.
Bedtime had its own rituals, of course. After the news—Mom wanted to hear the weather; Dad, the scores; and I wanted to hear some hard news that one of my authors could speak to so I could pitch them to the media the next day—one, two, or sometimes all three of us would tuck Ting into bed, wherever she’d decided bed would be that night (a pile of laundry left in the orange armchair in my parents’ room; Dad’s robe bunched up in the rocking chair on Mom’s side of the bed). And almost immediately she’d fall asleep, completely unaware she had anchored our day. The clocks in our house were superfluous; we marked our time by the cat.
The French novelist Colette once said, “There are no ordinary cats.” And while clearly we think Ting is one of a kind, you’d be hard-pressed to find a cat we don’t like. That’s why it baffles me that, somehow, cats have gotten a bad rap. We all know that black ones have been pegged as harbingers of bad luck—best avoided, like walking under ladders. But a more insidious smear campaign seems to be under way, painting cats as selfish and aloof. It’s foolish, really. Cats don’t snub; insecure people just think they do. And I’m embarrassed to say t
hat authors are helping to perpetuate this myth.
Some of the digs are fairly gentle, as in L. M. Montgomery’s novel Anne of the Island: “I love them, they are so nice and selfish. Dogs are too good and unselfish. They make me feel uncomfortable. But cats are gloriously human.”
And in Christopher Hitchens’s The Portable Atheist: “Owners of dogs will have noticed that, if you provide them with food and water and shelter and affection, they will think you are god. Whereas owners of cats are compelled to realize that, if you provide them with food and water and shelter and affection, they draw the conclusion that they are gods.”
Or in Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl: “Sleep is like a cat: It only comes to you if you ignore it.” Then there’s Seanan McGuire’s Rosemary and Rue, where it says, “Cats never listen. They’re dependable that way; when Rome burned, the emperor’s cats still expected to be fed on time.”
Even poets have participated:
Before a Cat will condescend
To treat you as a trusted friend,
Some little token of esteem
Is needed, like a dish of cream.
—T. S. Eliot, “The Addressing of Cats,” Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats
The cat criticism is often more barbed, though. James Thurber once said: “I am not a cat man, but a dog man, and all felines can tell this at a glance—a sharp, vindictive glance.” In Jodi Picoult’s novel, House Rules, a character says, “I think cats have Asperger’s.” And the fur really flies in Jonathan Franzen’s novel, Freedom: “Walter had never liked cats. They’d seemed to him the sociopaths of the pet world.”
Thankfully, though, there are some authors who “get” cats and who vouch for them. Take, for example, Robertson Davies, who said, “Authors like cats because they are such quiet, lovable, wise creatures, and cats like authors for the same reasons.” And Ernest Hemingway, who pronounced: “A cat has absolute emotional honesty: human beings, for one reason or another, may hide their feelings, but a cat does not.” And Mark Twain, who attested, “If animals could speak, the dog would be a blundering outspoken fellow; but the cat would have the rare grace of never saying a word too much.” And Anne Morrow Lindbergh, who supplied, “I saw the most beautiful cat today. It was sitting by the side of the road, its two front feet neatly and graciously together. Then it gravely swished around its tail to completely encircle itself. It was so fit and beautifully neat, that gesture, and so self-satisfied.”
But perhaps Charles Dickens said it best: “What greater gift than the love of a cat.”
The author Andre Dubus, whose books I publicized in the ’90s when I worked at David R. Godine, a small literary press in Boston, once told me that he thought short-story writers had more in common with poets than they did with novelists. I think he was right. But I’ve always seen an even stronger connection between poets and painters—always thought they were cut from the same cloth. Both create something that’s painstakingly exact yet open to interpretation.
No two people will see the same thing when they look at a Vermeer, or a Seurat, or a Rembrandt, or a Cezanne, just like no two people will have the same reaction to a poem by E. E. Cummings or Anna Akhmatova, or Elizabeth Bishop or Wallace Stevens. And, of course, the Imagist movement in poetry, which strove to express so much through so little—concise language and precise images—is in its restraint redolent of the Impressionist movement in art, with its truncated brushstrokes, and the Pointillism movement, with its dabs of paint.
In graduate school, while studying to get my MFA in poetry, I became further intrigued by the connections between poets and painters, whether friendships like that between Gertrude Stein and Pablo Picasso, or instances where a poet found inspiration in a painting, or a painter in a poem. My final project—a book-length collection of poems—contained verse inspired by Edward Hopper’s Rooms by the Sea, Chinese artist Chao Shao-an’s Early Snow on Lotus Pond, and Amedeo Modigliani’s Portrait of Jeanne Hébuterne, to name a few. For my final paper, I attempted to translate some of Picasso’s poems into English. You’d think a Cubist would have had better line breaks.
But Picasso redeemed himself in my eyes when I saw his cat paintings—and there are more of them than I would have thought, including the admittedly disturbing Wounded Bird and Cat (for a gentler pairing, see Paul Klee’s Cat and Bird) and the slightly perplexing Lying Female Nude with Cat (it looks to be a kitten, not a cat, and it presents a couple of anatomical quandaries). But for reasons that are probably self-explanatory, I’m most drawn to his Crazy Woman with Cats.
The number of influential artists who’ve painted cats is astounding. Henri Rousseau’s The Tiger Cat has a Picasso-esque quality to it—the angular, almost pieced-together face—as does Fernand Léger’s Woman with a Cat, with its puzzle-piece person and puzzle-piece cat. Mary Cassatt’s Children Playing with a Cat is a puzzle, too—but not literally this time. It’s perplexing because the cat’s not playing at all; it’s completely conked out in the little girl’s lap.
Cassatt’s fellow Impressionist, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, was also intrigued by children and cats, giving us Young Boy with a Cat and L’Enfant au Chat (Mademoiselle Julie Manet), where the child looks pensive but the cat is the epitome of contentment. That child was, in fact, the niece of painter Édouard Manet, who himself contributed Madame Manet with a Cat (I think, if you’re a painter, at some point you have to paint your wife with her cat—that is, if you want her to stay your wife) and Les Chats (three small cat etchings on a single sheet of paper; I’m not a tattoo type, but if I were, they’d be contenders).
But back to Renoir, who also painted La Jeune Fille au Chat (“Young Girl with a Cat”) and Sleeping Girl (aka, “Girl with a Cat”). It’s worth noting that, in the latter painting, the cat is sleeping, too, his right paw resting in the girl’s left hand. The girl looks exhausted. She’s wearing sensible shoes. Her skirt is blue and her cat is blue, and from a distance you can’t tell them apart. In the same vein as Sleeping Girl, there’s Renoir’s Sleeping Cat. “Looks familiar,” Mom said, nodding in Ting’s direction when I showed her Renoir’s ball of a cat.
But my favorite Renoir painting is Woman with Cat. It was done almost a hundred years before I was born, and yet it’s so familiar. The woman holds her tabby the same way we hold Ting—cheek to cheek, her left arm supporting the cat’s back legs. Her skin is pale, her eyebrows dark. There’s no ring on her finger, but she’s happy.
It’d be a challenge to find a major artist of the nineteenth or twentieth century who didn’t paint—or at least sketch—a cat. There’s Vincent van Gogh’s Hand with Bowl and a Cat, done in black chalk. There’s Paul Gauguin’s Mimi and Her Cat (gouache on cardboard) and his Little Cat, which I like even better (“Would go great in our living room,” said Mom, of the black, leopard-like cat crawling toward brown and burnt-orange balls). And speaking of black cats, there’s Henri Matisse’s Girl with a Black Cat, in which neither of them look particularly pleased.
On the other end of the color spectrum is Pierre Bonnard’s The White Cat (oil on canvas, longest legs ever). Bonnard also painted Sitting Woman with a Cat, where the curve of the woman’s dress melts into the curve of the cat’s tail. Yes.
And of course there’s German Expressionist Franz Marc, lover of vibrant colors. When he wasn’t painting deer, he was painting cats—a prolific cat-chronicler if ever there was one. Two Cats, Blue and Yellow and Cat on a Yellow Pillow are my favorites. But I also like Cats, Red and White, Three Cats, Cat Behind a Tree, and Girl with Cat.
If I had a dime for every painter with a painting titled Girl with Cat—or something like it. The names of the paintings are downright boring. How interesting, though, that cats are almost always portrayed by painters not as the solitary animals so many authors have made them out to be, but as communal creatures who take delight in their human companions.
Cats and painters. Painters and cats. Not only are cats the frequent subject of paintings, they have also been the beloved pets of painters. And that�
�s where things get sad. Some of the most cat-loving painters never actually painted their cats—or anyone else’s, as far as I know. Chief among them, Viennese painter Gustav Klimt, who liked cats so much he permitted them in his studio, and even allowed them to play among his sketches. As Lee Hendrix, senior curator of drawings at the J. Paul Getty Museum, said, “[Klimt] posed models on a bed so that their languorous bodies could suggest floating, a motif that’s very important in his art.” It seems he had another reason for posing his models on a bed. Klimt fathered at least fourteen children, mostly with said models. If only he hadn’t been so busy “studying” the human form—and, sadly, contracting syphilis. His love of lines would have lent itself so beautifully to the feline form.
There are three other painters who may or may not have had cats, but who, to my great disappointment, didn’t paint them. The first is French Impressionist Edgar Degas, who chose the ballerina as his muse when the lithe, supple cat was there for the offering. He should have taken his cue from Leonardo da Vinci, who did a twenty-three-drawing Study of Cat Movements and Positions, and concluded: “The smallest feline is a masterpiece.” The second is Amedeo Modigliani, who chose to paint the long, sad oval of the human face instead of the fine and angular face of the feline. And the third is Edward Hopper. All those windows, and not a cat in them. All that light to bask in, wasted.
Chapter Six
Good Fences
A dog is a dog, a bird is a bird, and a cat is a person.
—Mugsy Peabody
Our house on Stillwater Pond is located on an old apple orchard that was once part of the Searles estate. Edward Francis Searles was born on July 4, 1841, and died in 1920 at the age of seventy-nine. In between, the interior and architectural designer married one of his richest clients, Mary Frances Hopkins. Twenty-two years his senior, she was the widow of railroad tycoon Mark Hopkins, one of the four founders of the Central Pacific Railroad. Searles met her while designing her home in Great Barrington, Massachusetts—a three-year project that ended in 1888, one year after they married. When she died in 1891, he inherited $21 million and the house he’d built for her, along with real estate in San Francisco and New York. He also inherited property in Methuen, Massachusetts, the town on the other side of our pond.