This puzzled and annoyed him. “Didn’t I talk to anybody about what?” he demanded.
She smoothed her dress over one knee. “Well, it sounds like what they call a compulsion,” she said. “Something you have to do, but you don’t know why.”
His annoyance grew, and his voice rose a little. “Whenever I do anything that I don’t know why, I’ll let you know,” he said coldly. He seemed to become abruptly soberer, as he always did when he was caught between irritation and reminiscence. His eyes opened wider and looked clearer. “We haven’t even come to the part that you would call compulsion,” he said, “but I wouldn’t. Anyway, it wasn’t like deliberately running a lawnmower over a frog, or something like that—something your boy friend Rupert Valentino would do, and probably did.”
“It wasn’t Valentino,” she said, “and you know it.”
He finished his highball, and put the empty glass on the floor by his chair. “Llewellyn is worse,” he said. “One day I was at the library and suddenly I stopped reading and went all the way home to tie up that damned cat. You’ve got to remember that the library was three miles from my house. I opened the front door and began calling, ‘Here, pussy, pussy, pussy.’ I knew Lydia wasn’t home.”
“I don’t think I like this,” Alice said. “I don’t think I want to hear about it. I mean it sounds kind of deep-seated now.”
He picked up his glass and rattled the ice in it. “I said, ‘Here, kitty, kitty, kitty. Here, kitty, kitty, kitty,’ but she was hiding. All right, all right, I found her and tied her up again, and then I went back to the library—after she got out, of course. When I came home that evening, Lydia said, ‘The dotted-swiss cat has run away. I can’t find her anywhere.’ ”
MISSING
A Seventy-second Street housewife we know had to call in a plumber the other day. Her cat watched him with deep interest while he went about the business of getting the kitchen sink working again. As the plumber put away his tools, he remarked, “Say, that’s quite a cat you got there. Seems to know just what’s going on.” Our friend agreed that it was indeed a knowing cat, and added that most Siamese cats were like that. “A Siamese, hey?” the plumber said, and glanced around the kitchen. “Where’s the other one—asleep?”
| 1945 |
“Is this supposed to be funny?” Alice asked. “Because it isn’t.”
He went to the bar with his glass again and she didn’t say anything. She had several ways of not saying anything, and this was the one he disliked most. Even with his back turned, he could feel her not saying anything. “All right, all right,” he said over his shoulder. “This is the drink that would kill Rupert, but I am not a thimble-belly. I am not the kind of man who loses one glove in a theatre and his wife has to look for it under the seats, either. And I do not extend my fingers when I examine my nails. I, by God, double my hand like a man.” He made more noise than was necessary with the ice cubes and the seltzer bottle, and walked back to his chair with his lower lip protruding. Still Alice didn’t say anything. He sat down and there was a ten-second silence, which he ended by saying, in his mocking tone, “Here, kitty, kitty, kitty, kitty, kitty, kitty, kitty, kitty, kitty.”
She took another drink and said slowly, “Ah, shut up. I can’t stand writers after it gets dark.”
He looked deep into his highball and said, “The fastest time Dimity Ann ever made getting out of the cord was seventeen seconds. No fractions. You can put it down to research, if you want to. I am probably the only man in the world who knows the fastest time a cat can make getting out of the cord of a bathrobe. Seventeen seconds.”
“What I would like to know,” Alice said after a long pause, “is why you haven’t told me this story before. I mean I wish you had, somehow. It’s the kind of thing a man would tell a girl when he was going with her, I mean if it wasn’t deep-seated.”
He snarled, “I wish the hell you wouldn’t keep using that damn word. You don’t know what deep-seated means. It means worse than a bad cold, but you wouldn’t know what that means. I didn’t tell you about Dimity Ann because it isn’t the kind of story a man thinks of telling a girl. It’s really not important.”
Alice jiggled the ice in her glass. “I don’t like to hear you say it isn’t important, because that’s just the kind of thing that is,” she said. “I mean if you think it isn’t important, it probably is. But now you are trying to—trying to—what is it they call it when you don’t want to face how important it is?”
He sat looking at her cloudily for a long moment. “You are the God-damnedest fuzziest psychologist in the world,” he said. “What you are buzzing around like a mosquito is ‘overcompensation.’ But, as usual, you are completely wrong. I am telling this story for the first time because this happens to be the first time I have ever had a great big lovable cat man in my house. I had not given Dimity Ann a single thought for eight years until tonight. Tonight all I had was cats—cats for cocktails, cats for dinner, and cats after dinner. Did I ever tell you about Rupert? He was one of my alley cats, and what distinguished him from the others was his ability to play a comb with tissue paper on it, and the fact that once he swallowed his own tail. This is what is known as psychological evasion.”
Alice found, somewhat to her surprise, that she had finished her drink, and she held her empty glass out to him. He came over and got it and carried it to the bar. “Just a light one,” she said. He made the drink and took it back to her. “Did you ever find Dimity Ann?” Alice asked. “I mean it would be awful if you drove that little kitten out into the streets and it died or something.”
He laughed. “I forgot to tell you about that,” he said. “Dimity Ann was picked up by Mary Pickford, who happened to be driving through in her limousine. The cat lived happily ever after, and became one of the greatest little pals Buddy Rogers ever had. This is known as minimization of the monstrous.”
Alice turned her glass around slowly in her hands. “What makes me think you are trying to make me believe you are making this all up?” she asked. “I know you must actually have had a cat, or Lydia had one, because you could never make up the name Dimity Ann.”
He got up and began to pace around the room. “This was a charming cat,” he said, “but there just happened to be something between it and me, a kind of perverse communion. That day at the library, it was as if a faint, distant bell had rung. It was a signal from the cat to me. I think she actually wanted to be tied up, and the only thing that really worries me is that I was weak enough to give in to her. Lydia once had a Siamese cat that liked to have a Scotty drag it by its tail. The damn cat would lie on its back and wave its tail at the Scotty until the Scotty sighed and dragged it around. Its name was Asia. You won’t believe this, but while the cat was being dragged, it purred.”
(illustration credit 2.2)
“You just made that up,” Alice told him. “You made it up to annoy George Bennett, and I think I know why you didn’t tell him. You were trying to think of something that would shock him, but you decided that he would be amused, and you didn’t want to amuse him. Now you are trying to make me believe you didn’t tie up Dimity Ann, by telling obviously impossible stories.” She looked at her wristwatch.
“I know,” he said. “It’s almost four, but I’ll stay up all night if you insist on blaming me instead of Dimity Ann. It’s always the cat’s fault. They’re strange creatures. You ought to know that.”
Alice hadn’t been listening. She sat forward slowly, frowning at the floor, and he knew that she was searching for a contradiction of something he had said. She found it, and looked up at him suddenly. “I wasn’t buzzing around ‘overcompensation,’ ” she said. “That’s not the right word at all. Overcompensation is when you are nice to little girls and old ladies because you have been cruel to your mother. It means you ask for ice cream in a loud voice in a restaurant if you really think you are becoming an alcoholic. It means things like that.”
“Keep your guard up, Willoughby. We’re entering big-cat
country.” (illustration credit 2.3)
He sat down, leaned far back in his chair, and studied her as if she were something in a museum. “What did you major in at college?” he asked. “If it was psychology—”
“I know what it is!” she cried. “I mean I know what it is when you pretend that tying up the cat wasn’t important. It’s defense mechanism.” She brought this out triumphantly.
“You’re getting colder and colder,” he told her. “Defense mechanism, to use one of your cunning illustrations, is when a dowager at a formal dinner drops the ice cream down her bodice and then tells her hostess she is having a chill.”
He began to drink his highball rapidly, and she said, “We’re not going to sit up all night and argue, even if we do disagree on certain terms.” He paid no attention to this and finished his drink. Then he put the glass slowly down on the floor by his chair. “I guess it is late,” he said surprisingly, “and that goddam cat man wore me out. Like a fool, I just sat there and gave him my fixed grin and acted as if I were interested in his cats. The only one of them that had any guts was the one that could catch a baseball at thirty paces. It couldn’t have been his cat. It must have belonged to the neighbors.”
Alice got up and began emptying ashtrays and gathering up glasses, including his. She took the glasses out to the pantry, set them down, and stood there a moment frowning, going over the case of Dimity Ann. Suddenly she hurried back to the living room. There was something she had to tell her husband, and she was afraid he might have fallen asleep. When he did that late at night, it was almost impossible to bring him back to full consciousness. He was sitting in his chair with his eyes closed, but he was not asleep.
“The thing that worries me most is your going all the way home from the library to tie up the cat,” she said. “If you had just happened to tie up the cat when you saw it, and were in your dressing gown, that wouldn’t be anything at all. But I can just see you sitting there in the library and suddenly jumping up and forgetting where you were and tiptoeing out, to go back home, five miles.”
He jumped to his feet. “I did not tiptoe,” he said coldly, “and it was not five miles! I don’t understand why you have to make it sound furtive. There wasn’t anything furtive about it. It was as normal as tying a can to a dog’s tail.”
Alice sat down and watched his gestures, which were wide and agitated, an invariable mannerism of his when he was holding an untenable position.
“Look!” he shouted. “When I got to the library I found out I had left my research notes at home, and I couldn’t get anywhere without them. I went back to my house, as any sane man would, and in the course of hunting for them I tied up the cat. I have tried to tell you it was a little game we played together. Every time Ed Morrison goes home, for instance, he throws a few darts at his dart board. It was as simple as that.” He sat down in his chair and began groping on the floor beside him for his glass.
“You have a wonderful memory,” Alice reminded him. “You never forget anything, and you certainly wouldn’t forget notes if you were going to the library to use them. I mean it wouldn’t be like you.” She stood up and walked toward the door into the hall, but stopped beside his chair. “Please don’t rationalize this,” she said quietly. “I don’t want you to get in deeper than you already are.”
“There is something serious the matter with you,” he said crisply, in the tone of a trial lawyer cagily abandoning a shaky defense for a random attack. “You’re trying to transfer some anxiety neurosis of yours to me by mixing me up in all this goddam terminology.” He folded his arms and leaned back in his chair with the satisfied look of a counsellor who has brilliantly rested his case.
“What research were you doing that day at the library?” she asked.
He stared up at her. “How the hell should I know?” he demanded. “This was eight years ago.”
She watched the left corner of his mouth turn up, the way it did when he was about to tell a daring story in mixed company or an inconsequential lie to her in private.
“I didn’t go to the library at all that day,” he said with a full grin. “I hid in a closet until Lydia had left the house, and then I came creeping out on all fours, calling, ‘Kitty, kitty, kitty, kitty, kitty, kitty, kitty, kitty, kitty—’ ”
“Scat!” she cried loudly, as much to her own surprise as to his. Then she walked slowly out into the hall, and waited at the foot of the stairs for his last word. On nights like this, he always had the last word. She could see his right hand groping for his missing glass, and she could sense his mind and tongue searching for something final to say. She realized, after several long moments of silence, that he couldn’t find the last word, for the simple reason that she had said it herself. She ran up the stairs as lightly and swiftly as a girl, restraining a new and unexpected impulse to clasp her hands above her head and wave them, in triumphant greeting to the invisible wives of all the writers in the world.
| 1952 |
DEFENCE OF CATS
* * *
WOLCOTT GIBBS
The other day the editor of a great newspaper decided that he ought to find out if dogs are better than cats, so he sent a man up to see Albert Payson Terhune, some of whose best friends have fur. It turned out that Mr. Terhune preferred dogs, feeling strongly about the whole thing.
Only women like cats, he said, and added disparagingly that this seemed to him “a very significant tip-off on the makeup of the two sexes.” This was the place, of course, for the reporter to ask Mr. Terhune if he thought dogs were better than women, but apparently he forgot to. Anyway, Mr. Terhune said next that the only real friendships he had ever made with cats were with those that thought they were dogs and acted that way. For a moment this gave me quite a cheerful picture of Mr. Terhune and his cat friends hot on the scent, yelping and baying, but I imagine that the intent was a little more mystic than that, implying some subtle masculinity of the spirit, and I suppose we might as well let it go.
Finally, Mr. Terhune summed up his whole opinion of cats by calling them lazy, disloyal opportunists, with nothing to recommend them except a low mechanical cunning.
“Cats can do some marvellously intelligent things,” Mr. Terhune admitted reluctantly. “They will learn by themselves to unlatch a door.”
This seems to me not only an intelligent but almost a miraculous accomplishment, except in the case of an extremely tall cat, but in any case it is white of Mr. Terhune, and shows that at least he tries to keep an open mind.
I am inclined to resent his other statements, though, and would like to discuss them for a moment, with special reference to Dillinger, the cat who thinks she’s Gloria Swanson.
In the first place, women do not like Dillinger, although she admires them passionately. There is something about a richly upholstered beauty which inspires in Dillinger a perfect frenzy of admiration and yearning. It is unfortunate that her love usually expresses itself in a frantic attempt to climb up their legs, but it is impossible not to admire her persistence in the face of repeated and often painful rebuffs. Nor, in spite of Mr. Terhune, is there anything mercenary in Dillinger’s courtship. She wants nothing from these ladies, neither food nor affection. She loves only, I’m sure, the way they smell.
In another paragraph of that misguided interview, Mr. Terhune says, “A cat simply does not know what loyalty is. I have a warmer kitchen and more milk and liver. Your cat will gladly come to my kitchen and desert you.” In the case of Dillinger, who wouldn’t be found dead in any man’s kitchen and undoubtedly imagines that liver and milk are the staples of a baser order—of dogs, perhaps—it is hard to apply Mr. Terhune’s conditions, but I understand his point. It is perfectly true that Dillinger would leave me instantly for more caviar and thicker cream, for softer pillows and larger vistas, but there would be no disloyalty in that. Dillinger is an epicure, serenely removed from such soft and bourgeois considerations as loyalty and disloyalty, and her only anxiety in life is to better herself aesthetically. It seems to
me that people like Mr. Terhune have wasted a great deal of sympathy on dogs that have starved to death in hovels rather than leave their masters. They are the socially inefficient, and they deserve what they get.
I think, though, that Mr. Terhune is most misguided when he talks about the economic uselessness of cats. Never, he told the reporter, had he heard of a cat’s pulling a child out of a river by the seat of its trousers (an almost routine performance among Mr. Terhune’s collies) or even balancing a ball on its nose in a vaudeville act. To me there is something offensively utilitarian in any such attitude, and the captious might even suspect that Mr. Terhune doesn’t want a pet as much as a sort of combination lifeguard and acrobat. Dogs, like all weak and sentimental characters, are highly susceptible to suggestion, and they, too, have come to accept this unfortunate conception of themselves. They have been quite willing to learn foolish tricks and run pointless errands, forfeiting their dignity and diffusing their personalities, until the average dog today is a sorry creature, functioning adequately neither as a guest in the house nor a servant.
Cats, on the other hand, have character and independence. They are realists, and they understand perfectly their position in domestic life, which is decorative and nothing else. Cats don’t work, and I suspect they look on dogs, who do, as scum. In all the time I’ve known Dillinger, she has never shown the slightest interest in justifying her existence, and when you think about it, this is as it should be. After all, she was a lioness when the Terhune collies were wolves, or worse.
| 1934 |
THE SMOKER
Fiction
* * *
DAVID SCHICKLER
The Big New Yorker Book of Cats Page 5