The Big New Yorker Book of Cats

by The New Yorker Magazine

  “To this day, I can hear my mother’s voice—harsh, accusing. ‘Lost your mittens? You naughty kittens! Then you shall have no pie!’ ”

  “Tell Andrea,” she said, “that I’ve never felt right, as a woman, off this place. There’s magic in the soil, I do believe it. Two days away, and I used to get the most terrible cramps.”

  “My kids, Mother. They’ve been raised New York suburban.”

  This was before Nancy had married and Max dropped out of Dartmouth. “It’s not too late to fix that,” my mother said. “When they were smaller they used to love it here.”

  I sighed, and we dropped the subject, knowing that I was the problem. I was the one to whom the farm meant crabgrass and poison ivy, and bushwhacking that would be invisible the next summer, and indoor plumbing that was forty years out of date, and a pack of asthma-inducing cats at the back door.

  I didn’t call Amy Reidenhauer for weeks, and when I did she sounded vague. “I know he went out and looked the situation over,” she said.

  “But did he trap any?”

  “He has the traps right now in his other truck, I think he told me. Anyway, he didn’t see any cats.”

  “None? What time of day was he there?”

  “I guess around their dinnertime,” she said, with an audible smile in her voice. I saw her clearly, her pale lips half open on her moist teeth, sitting at her tidy desk in Emmetstown, with the wild ducks on the wall and the door leading back to the concrete-floored cages—a genie I had conjured but could not quite control, through some little glitch in interstate communications.

  “I’d be happy to drive over,” I told her, “but I don’t see how it would do any good.”

  “No, Frank,” she said sadly, as to a former lover. “I don’t either.”

  Yet the persisting fact of the cats gnawed at me; at night I would wake up, with my mother’s ghost wavering in the room, over where Andrea had dropped her white bathrobe on the back of a chair, and want to scream, in shame and helplessness. The runny-eyed kittens, staggering with hunger. Why had they been called into life? My mother, with more courage than I had, used to drown them, pressing one bucket down into another bucket half-filled with water and their peeping cries. My mother’s humming returned to me, marking waltz time with the handle’s rhythmic chunking noise, and with it came the whole sweet-and-sour aroma of the kitchen, the way she had shaped it with her life, all those mornings of rising alone, making coffee and pouring cereal, and ceremoniously feeding the cats, while the mantel clock sounded its gulping gong.

  One morning, before I was really awake, Amy, taking pity, called me. “Well, he’s been busy,” she told me. “He must have brought two or three in every evening now for nearly two weeks. But, as he says, the others get more and more wary, so it may be a case of diminishing returns.”

  “Still, that’s terrific progress. I’m very grateful. At that rate there can’t be too many left.”

  “That’s right,” she said, “and the young ones you can count on dying of natural causes, especially now that we’re having frosts.”

  I couldn’t quite bring myself to say that I was grateful for that, too.

  At the beginning of hunting season, Dwight called and told me he and Adam had posted my land. Did I mind? He knew, of course, that one of my mother’s eccentricities was to leave her land unposted, to the annoyance of her neighbors. “They just want the shooting for themselves,” she had explained to me. “Especially they don’t want the Philadelphia blacks coming out here and finding any land to hunt on. One year, when I still had legs under me, I walked around and tore Dwight’s signs down myself. No Hunting, except for him—it made me see red.”

  “No,” I said. “I don’t mind.”

  “I’m glad to hear it, Frank,” Dwight said. “If I see any of those cats still around, I promise they won’t live to tell the tale. Hunting season doesn’t bode well for cats. Hunters see them as competition.”

  The last days of owning the farm were strange. It was as if I had a phantom limb; I could feel it move, but not see it. The papers were being signed the first day of December, and I thought I should go over the day before, check out the house and barn for any last remnants of our years there, and spend the night in a Reading motel. Thinking there might be a little last-minute brush-clearing or dirty lifting, I hung my suit in the car and put on a wool-lined olive-drab jacket, from an Army-surplus store, that my father used to wear on weekends, and that my mother inherited and would wear in winter, with not too bad a fit. I hadn’t had the heart to leave it for the auctioneers to clear away. I put on the jacket and threw a pair of loppers and work gloves in the car.

  But by the time I got away from my wife and my students, and made my way around Philadelphia, not many hours of daylight were left. The place when I pulled in was still—still as a picture. Green was gone from everything but the pines and the two holly trees, the male and the female. The orchard grass was an even slope of tan striped with shade. The woods beyond stood tall and silvery, the stalks of darkness between the trunks thickening in the four-o’clock light.

  When I slammed the car door, it echoed off the barn wall in a way I had forgotten. When we first moved here, I used to stand in the yard and shout, marvelling at the echo, like the voice of a brother I didn’t have.

  The absence of an owner showed in a dozen little ways. I had paid a boy to keep the lawn mowed, but he had lazily left tousled fringes along the edges, and where the black walnut had dropped its pulpy shells on the lawn hadn’t bothered to mow at all. I put on the coat and carried the loppers, though I doubted I would find much to do—perhaps just check the fragile weeping cherry tree for fallen branches, and cut some raspberry canes out of the hosta beds my mother had planted when we moved. As I drifted across the lank grass, a few shadows filtered out of the orchard and flickered toward the house, eagerly loping. Several more materialized from the direction of the woods. The cats had survived. They thought I was my mother and good times had returned.

  | 1996 |

  DAY AND AGE

  Skimming by,

  the milky spill of my old eye,

  the mute white cat

  now skirts me at the store.

  Retarded and alert.

  What good are instincts anymore?

  Who does the math

  for lengths of desperation

  and how far to the door?

  A woman, pregnant

  like a red wool bud,

  is circling the rink.

  Catastrophe, I think.

  —DANA GOODYEAR | 2003 |

  A CAT IN EVERY HOME

  * * *

  KATHARINE T. KINKEAD

  Robert Lothar Kendell, the president of the American Feline Society, Inc., and perhaps the world’s most tireless defender of the cat, is an advertising man by profession. The latest agency list of the McKittrick Directory of Advertisers, a standard work of reference in the field, shows his firm, a one-man organization called Continental Advertising Associates, to have eleven accounts. Three of these—Grapho-Institute, a correspondence graphology course; the Kendell Company of America, a manufacturer of public-address systems; and the Sivad Press, book publishers—are inactive businesses of Kendell’s. Seven of the remainder range from chinaware to apparel, and a substantial share of the fees Kendell receives from them goes to help operate the eleventh, the American Feline Society, described by McKittrick’s as a charity. The Society’s deficit for 1950, according to its most recent annual report, signed early this year by Kendell, was more than seven thousand dollars, and its cumulative loss over the past five years has been nineteen thousand dollars. As a client, the Society would not appear to be one in which the ordinary advertising man would take much pride.

  A copy of the Society’s annual report having fallen into my hands, I called Mr. Kendell up and made an appointment with him, hoping to learn something about the organization’s aims and activities. This resulted in my making my way, one recent blustery afternoon, to his place of bu
siness, at 41 Union Square West, which turned out to be an old-fashioned building devoted mostly to small suites for small businessmen. A creaky elevator let me out at the ninth floor, and I approached Mr. Kendell’s office down a long, dim corridor scarcely four feet wide. At the far end of it was a glass door lettered with the names of his advertising firm, of the American Feline Society, and of his three inactive businesses. Through the door came the steady thump-thump of a typewriter. There was a suggestion of soft but importunate haste in the machine’s sound. It stopped at my knock, and a man’s well-modulated voice bade me enter. I did so, and found myself in a small room, facing its only occupant, a man in shirtsleeves, who rose from his typewriter desk and introduced himself courteously to me as Mr. Kendell. He is a rather handsome, thickset man of about fifty, with hazel eyes, a sparse mustache, a gentle, if rather nervous, manner, and a barrel chest, implying an abundance of physical energy. It required no great exercise of the imagination to see him as an executive in a midtown advertising office, nursing his ulcers, and holding his clients by his quiet, intense manner.

  It was at once apparent from Mr. Kendell’s surroundings, however, that somewhere along the line he had missed connections with the Madison Avenue crowd, and that his interests had been sharply diverted. The room I was standing in, only about eight feet by twelve and somewhat overheated, was lit by a single window, against which, from time to time, the wind blew in gusts, rattling the panes and giving the place a feeling of lonesomeness that was in no way lessened by a view of gray, bare rooftops. The office had the atmosphere of a forgotten storeroom, being jammed with tattered, haphazardly piled cardboard cartons. The walls, from floor to ceiling, were lined either with shelves, from which protruded literature about cats and accessories for cats, or with bulletin boards displaying innumerable photographs of cats—cats yawning, cats playing, cats sleeping, cats pouncing, cats watching birds, cats smirking over spreading ribbon bows, cats looking bored or supercilious, cats suffering the gingerly fondling of movie stars clad in bathing suits or evening gowns, cats staring in amazement out of airplanes. It was impossible to avoid their gaze. Hanging from wall to wall near the ceiling was a large, faded red, white, and blue banner reading, “Help Save America’s Cats!” Most of the room’s contents, including the banner, were covered with a fine layer of dust.

  “Didn’t I see you on YouTube riding a Roomba?” (illustration credit 8.2)

  In the midst of all this stood Mr. Kendell, smiling. “Our headquarters,” he said proudly, and waved a hand about him. Then, realizing there was no place for me to sit, he hastily removed from a chair several large boxes, which, he said, contained shipments of food and medicine awaiting distribution to needy cats, and, relieving me of my wraps, seated me at a desk facing his. Before resuming his own seat, he went to a small basin by the window and carefully washed his hands, a performance he repeated several times during my stay, whenever he had touched any of the cartons stacked around the room.

  I told Mr. Kendell that I was interested in finding out about the objectives of the American Feline Society, and, to my surprise, his cordiality lessened a bit. His answer was formal and measured. “Young lady, I doubtless could give you exactly the information that you want,” he said. “But first I must ask you a question. Are you an aelurophobe?”

  “A what?” I asked, not sure that I had caught the word.

  “An aelurophobe—a cat-hater,” he said.

  Under Mr. Kendell’s watchful scrutiny, I was glad that I could truthfully give a negative reply. “Of course not!” I assured him.

  “Good,” Mr. Kendell said, his manner relaxing to its earlier gentleness. “Aelurophobes are not welcome in this office. You’d be surprised how they disguise themselves. Doctors, scientists, garden-club women, and wildlife conservationists are some of the worst.” Even the humane societies, he told me, are among the sworn enemies of cats. “Why, in this city alone, the A.S.P.C.A. last year, according to its own published records, killed over a hundred and sixty-three thousand cats,” he said. “Criminal! Criminal!” he added, lowering his voice in sadness.

  As we sat talking in the close, curious little office, I discovered that Mr. Kendell is a man with a staggering amount of information about cats. Although his feelings on the subject are obviously strong, he spoke, for the most part, softly, which lent effectiveness to what he had to say. Only occasionally did he betray the depth of his emotion.

  “In ancient Egypt, cats were embalmed and placed in golden urns,” Mr. Kendell said. “In pioneer days, they rode as honored guests in covered wagons, protecting our forefathers’ grain supply from the innumerable rats that followed the caravans across the Western plains. Today, they are murdered. Of the twenty-one million cats that I estimate there are in this country, half, or ten and a half million, are strays—hungry, unloved, persecuted. Dogs all have strong organizations behind them. But does the cat, the noblest of animals? No! He lacks even an official position in our culture.” It is the foremost aim of the American Feline Society, Mr. Kendell told me, to smooth the path of life for the nation’s ten and a half million homeless cats—a group that, he declared, had had no sponsor whatever until the Society came along. “By the way,” he said, peering at me suddenly, “never say ‘alley cat.’ Say ‘short-haired.’ ”

  I promised Mr. Kendell I would remember that, and asked about the size of his organization. “We have approximately three thousand members, eighty percent of them women,” he said. “Our members live in forty-seven states, Alaska, Hawaii, and Puerto Rico, and also in Canada, Costa Rica, France, Mexico, New Zealand, and Switzerland. The roster includes college professors, stockbrokers, housewives, veterinarians, river pilots, bohemians, and Miss June Havoc, who recently joined. Most of our members are in the subscription class, paying five-dollar annual dues—that’s the lowest of the four types of membership, which go up to the two-hundred-and-fifty-dollar life membership. Therefore, in theory, we have a neat nest egg with which to start operations each year, but in practice, unfortunately, this is not so. Some members’ offerings arrive in pitiful dribs and drabs—nickels and dimes, the only way they can pay. Many never pay more than part of their dues, and others are habitually in arrears.” Mr. Kendell told me he combats the tendency of the Society to fall apart financially by increasing his own contributions to it and allotting it more and more of his time. He has succeeded, against what must often have seemed discouraging odds, in building an international organization, and in this country has set up a nationwide network of non-salaried vice-presidents—one each in Brooklyn, Chicago, Knoxville, Los Angeles, San Antonio, and Flint, Michigan. “This arrangement frequently helps our work,” he said. “For instance, a couple of years ago, when I read in the papers that the four cats of Angus Ward, the American Consul General at Mukden, were Stateside-bound with their master aboard the Lakeland Victory after being imprisoned in Communist China on starvation rations, I instantly ordered our Los Angeles vice-president to send thirty pounds of cat food direct from that city, via Pan American Airways, to be held for the refugees’ arrival when their steamer docked in Yokohama—a mercy flight that gained invaluable time by getting its start on the Pacific Coast.”

  Notwithstanding the vice-presidents, and a board of directors that meets once a year in New York, Mr. Kendell is the man who holds the Society together. “I am a publicist, and the Society needs that kind of leadership just now,” he said. “Because it’s necessary to sell cats, as a package, to America.” When I inquired how he went about selling cats as a package, he sighed. “It’s a big job,” he said. “I keep the editors of newspapers, wire services, magazines, and radio networks constantly informed as to the care, protection, and betterment of living conditions of the short-haired cat wherever it may be found throughout the world. Furthermore, I instantly attack in these same quarters any defamation of the short-haired cat by knowing or unknowing enemies, no matter who they are. With local editors, I do this by telephone, and with more distant ones by sending out publicity relea
ses that I write up and have mimeographed under the Society’s letterhead.” Mr. Kendell added that his reading of newspapers, magazines, and books is voluminous, and I gathered that his reaction to any reference to cats he may come across is highly individual and given swift circulation. In a single week, he said, he sometimes issues releases to over three thousand newspapers and other periodicals, a hundred and forty-six wire services and syndicates, and the country’s four major radio networks—a feat that he is as likely as not to repeat the following week. In these communiqués, he stresses such inequities or indignities as that throughout the whole country only the forward-looking city of Seattle requires licenses for cats, that Maine’s personal-property tax on them is unenforced, and that, in contrast to the legal protection afforded dogs and human beings, no state in the Union has a law designed specifically for the protection of cats. On occasion, the bombarded editors reverse the process and write to Mr. Kendell, requesting information about cats, which he supplies promptly. Moreover, he keeps the Society’s members informed by mail of his activities, and asks that they, in turn, let him hear news of cats, thereby immeasurably broadening his outlook. “Sooner or later,” he told me reflectively, “all cat facts pass through this room.”

  Mr. Kendell observed that one of his recent chores was the compilation of the world’s largest list of friends of the cat—some ninety-two thousand presumed aelurophiles, whose names and addresses he acquired from the newspapers he himself has read or from clippings sent to him by members. To the more promising-sounding cat-lovers on this huge list, he annually posts news of the feline world, as well as a cordial invitation to join the Society. Another job he has just finished, after two years of labor, is the preparation, for the convenience of his members, of a complete card catalogue of the more than one thousand manufacturers of cat accessories in this country—a formidable inventory that includes the makers of brushes, deodorants, jewelry, toys, blankets, trophies, bells, mats, and so on. “The alpha and omega of purveyors to cats!” murmured Mr. Kendell triumphantly, holding up a box full of file cards. In addition to all these activities, Mr. Kendell said, he daily performs half a dozen or so “service operations for the short-haired”—special attentions of one kind or another to the needs of individual cats.