Most people talk to their cat in their own language, of course, so our cats have always been addressed in English, except for an occasional word or two from Michael in French. Michael remembers receiving many years ago, in his capacity as a book publisher, “one of those bulky manuscripts that looked as if it had been written by a crazy” about talking to cats. This was before Michael had become a cat owner himself. The manuscript had all the familiar signs of mental instability and obsession—the erratic single-spaced typing, done with a faded ribbon, the frayed pages, showing the signs of having been handled by many readers, the innumerable handwritten corrections and additions in microscopic writing, filling the margins like miniature hieroglyphics, in several different colors of ballpoint pen, plus all the evidence of scholarship run amok: glossary, lengthy footnotes, bibliography, source notes, the whole nine yards. Still, as every book publisher knows, many best sellers have been written by madmen. Mere lunacy and obsession have seldom prevented a book from selling in large numbers.
The one thing Michael knew about cat books (learned from Larry Ashmead, as it happened) was that they always seemed to sell, no matter how strange or unlikely the premise, so he gave the untidy bundle to a couple of editorial assistants, both of whom were cat lovers (you could tell that by the number of photographs of their cats pinned to their bulletin boards and framed on their desks) to read. Both returned deeply impressed, with long, typed reports about how unusual the book was. The author, it appeared, not only talked to his cats, but had actually devised a special language which he claimed the cats understood perfectly. He was working now on teaching them to respond in “Catspeak,” which was proving to be more difficult than he had anticipated, but he could tell that there were signs of progress, which did not surprise him since he had devised the language based on a careful, scientific study of a cat’s ability to vocalize sounds. By the time the book was ready he anticipated being able to appear on the Tonight Show with at least one, and possibly two, talking cats. The language, they reported, seemed odd and resembled nothing they had ever seen before, with many different accent marks in improbable places and unfathomable rows of consonants joined together.
Michael took the manuscript home and read it, engrossed until he got to the first examples of “Catspeak,” at which point he started to giggle uncontrollably. The language, far from being “invented,” was simply Hungarian, admittedly one of the more difficult and unfamiliar of languages, with its strings of consonants, and rows of single and double accents! He recalled the line from My Fair Lady, when Professor Higgins’s Mitteleuropäische rival in linguistics (“oozing charm from every pore”) says of Eliza after one dance at the ball that he could tell at once she was, “A Hungarian—and not only Hungarian, but of royal blood!”
Of course anybody pretending to invent a language for cats might easily suppose that few, if any, readers at a New York publishing house would recognize Hungarian—it certainly has the appearance of a language not intended for humans, or at any rate Anglo-Saxon humans—and it would be nice to suppose that the book was eventually published, and that somewhere out there are well-intentioned cat owners patiently reciting Hungarian to their cats, in the forlorn hope of getting a reply. Or perhaps they do get a reply. You never know with cats!
(Larry Ashmead had a dog that buried his wallet somewhere in the garden. Unable to find it, he contacted a woman in Los Angeles who claimed to be able to speak to dogs. She had several conversations in Hungarian with the dog over the telephone, but the dog never revealed to her where the wallet was buried, nor did she reveal why Hungarian was the language of choice for dogs.)
In any event, Margaret certainly seemed to communicate with Irving, and had long heart-to-heart conversations with him in a low, soothing voice. After all, if it’s possible to be a “horse whisperer,” why not a “cat whisperer”? One thing you can say for cats over horses—nobody ever suffered a broken bone because a cat stepped on their foot.
One of the things Irving communicated was the strong desire not to have another cat in the house. Irving had been—whoever Margaret’s husband might be—the one and only cat of the house, master of all he surveyed. Nobody pushed him away from his feed bowl, or shared his litter box, let alone his place on the bed, where a fur coverlet was his favorite place for napping and sharpening his claws.
Once, when we were going away for a vacation, we boarded him at an establishment on the West Side that was a kind of storefront urban summer camp for cats, where they lived in what looked like a miniature-size child’s playground and were encouraged to “interact.” Irving had not looked happy at all when he was left there, and so it proved, since when we got back the two stout ladies who owned the place asked Margaret not to bring him back again. He had not, they complained, been willing to “join in” and “participate” with the other cats, or play with them—indeed he had spent most of his time hiding under a piece of cat furniture, drooling and looking miserable. He had not adapted to “the spirit” of the place, rather like a child sent to camp who refuses to engage in team sports.
One problem may have been that having been around Margaret since earliest kittenhood, Irving may have thought of himself as a person, rather than a cat—in any case, no further attempts were made to “board” him. He was our only cat, city or country, until his death, which is just the way he would have wanted it (well, he wasn’t really “ours,” he was hers). His death, when it came, was a traumatic moment for Margaret, who had come to think of Irving as a close and beloved friend, for some period of time the most stable and dependable part of her life. Unlike a husband, he did not become ill-tempered or make unreasonable demands; unlike a human friend he did not take to drink, or give unwelcome advice, or age suddenly and ungracefully. He was there for her whenever she needed warmth, companionship, and unquestioning love, which is not a small thing. At first, once Irving had passed, Margaret was reluctant to contemplate having another cat—no cat, she felt, could replace Irving—and resisted suggestions to look for a nice kitten. Still, Margaret is somebody for whom a total absence of cats is unthinkable and unbearable. Inevitably, with a certain amount of guilt, her thoughts eventually turned toward another cat—not exactly a “replacement,” since no cat could completely replace Irving in her life—but perhaps a substitute.
At that time we were living on Central Park West, overlooking Central Park, and our downstairs neighbors, Phyllis and Stanley Getzler, had become friends, in part through their ownership of a very friendly golden retriever named Missy, whom Margaret liked to take for walks. It was love at first sight between Missy and Margaret from the moment they met in the elevator, and instant friendship followed between us and the Getzlers as well, once we had been introduced by the dog. Phyllis, though not a cat person, had met Irving, and felt strongly that Margaret should have another cat as soon as possible, and that any animal would benefit from being owned by Margaret, which is true enough, and so joined her in the search. Phyllis Getzler was—and remains—a woman of strong and forceful personality, so she quickly pushed Margaret into action, and joined her in the cat hunt. Margaret was looking for an orange male kitten to replace Irving.
Michael paid very little attention to this hunt, and was therefore surprised to get a telephone call from Margaret while he was at his office, announcing that she and Phyllis had found a cat at the New York City animal shelter on the Upper East Side, or, to be more exact, the cat. It was everything she had been looking for, Margaret said on a pay phone from the shelter, young, very pretty, friendly….
That sounded terrific, Michael said. What color was it? Well, it wasn’t orange, he was surprised to hear. It was gray-and-silver striped, Margaret said, with black markings, and big blue eyes, really very attractive…. There were just a few little problems, but nothing we couldn’t learn to live with. These were, it turned out, that the cat was not a kitten, not a male, that it was full grown, that it had a suspicious large lump in the belly that might be a hernia or a tumor, and that it was missing one
foot.
Missing one foot? This was not the result of an accident, it turned out; the cat had been born with a deformed left front leg, shaped rather like a miniature seal’s flipper, with a useless paw at one end. You wouldn’t ever guess it, to see her walk, Margaret enthused—she really handled her deformity very well, and it hardly spoiled her looks at all…. Michael hung up wondering how it was possible in a place where there were dozens of four-legged cats begging to be adopted, to pick out one with a hernia or a tumor and three legs.
That she handled her deformity very well became evident when Margaret and Phyllis brought the cat back to our apartment building, in a cardboard cat carrier provided by the shelter, which bore on its side a stencil reading, “I am going home!” The bottom dropped out of the carrier in the garage as it was being lifted from the seat, and the cat vanished into the depths of the garage at a remarkable speed for a three-legged animal, or even for one with four legs. Her coloring might have been designed to aid concealment in a New York City garage, with ramps leading down to two more floors of parked cars, dimly lit from above, and hundreds of concrete nooks and crannies in which to hide. Margaret and Phyllis—soon joined by a couple of the parking attendants—went from car to car, getting down to look under each one, and making encouraging noises, but as everybody knows, a frightened cat’s instinct is to stay put and avoid contact with strangers. There was always the danger, too, that the cat, if cornered, might make a dash up the ramps and out into the street, where it was only too likely to be hit by a car. In these circumstances, as every cat lover knows, there is nothing for it but to proceed with caution and hope for the best, and the cat was eventually discovered, and brought up to the apartment in Margaret’s arms, apparently undamaged by the experience.
By the time Michael got home, the cat had not only settled in, but been given a name, Queenie, after the title (and the heroine) of Michael’s novel about his aunt, the late Merle Oberon. Like “Auntie Merle” (whose own real name had been Queenie, before she adopted a more glamorous name for her film career) Queenie’s beauty—for despite the stunted leg, she was a very handsome cat—concealed an impatient, imperial, and dictatorial nature. She did not take interfering with lightly, nor having her wishes ignored. When annoyed or challenged she gave the offender a sharp whack with her flipper, a kind of warning slap.
God knows where she had been, or how she had ended up at the animal shelter, but she settled into life at 55 Central Park West as if to the manor born, and sat long hours at the big picture windows, looking down at Central Park. As it transpired, a good deal of her life would be spent looking out of windows, even in the country, since outside she could neither defend herself, nor climb a tree, so it was dangerous to let her out. Queenie had to content herself with sitting by a window or on a screened-in porch, staring malevolently out at the birds with her stunning Paul Newman–blue eyes as they flashed by or landed in the carved stone birdbath.
No doubt she imagined herself reaching up and swiping one of them out of the sky in a cloud of feathers, but it was not to be. Her tiny front “flipper” did not inconvenience her at all, and she had developed a whole lot of ways of hiding it, so that only the most observant of cat watchers ever noticed anything wrong with her.
Queenie was, in many respects, the perfect cat. She would curl up happily in your lap while you read, or worked, or napped, or doze in a patch of sunlight while you went about your business. If she was in any way displeased, or felt that her feeding time had been delayed beyond reason, she would stomp across and slap you with her stunted front leg to remind you of your duty. She not only had personality, she achieved a modest degree of fame by appearing in People magazine, but she did not let it go to her head.
Though Margaret’s initial comment was that Queenie “was no Irving,” she stepped into the role of number one (and only) cat without hesitation. She was not quite as loving as Irving had been toward Margaret, or nearly as gentle, but she did her best, shuttling back and forth between Poughkeepsie and New York City every weekend in the back of the car like a pro, though with a tendency to use her litter tray on the floor in the back the moment the doors and windows were closed and the car was in motion. Otherwise, she was a pretty steady traveler, quite capable of going to sleep on the shelf beneath the rear window of the car. You just had to remember that she could move pretty fast for a cat with three legs, and be careful when you stopped at a tollbooth—there was always the nightmare thought that she might go leaping out the window into the traffic on the Henry Hudson Parkway, and use up all nine of her lives in one go!
As a house cat she liked company, but retained a certain aloof quality. Certain places were hers, and she disliked being evicted from them by, or for, visitors. Like most cats, she was an instinctive tactician, and thus had a marked preference for the high ground—the top of the refrigerator, for example, which placed her slightly above the level of a human head, and out of reach of vacuum cleaners, mops, the very rare visiting small dogs, strangers, and plumbers. Also, as you would expect for a creature born with a deformed limb, she had a perfected sense of strategy—she instinctively chose a position with a good view, an escape route, and some degree of camouflage. Animals that have been abused—and, alas, so many that end up in animal shelters have—almost invariably show some signs of it, sometimes nervousness, sometimes sudden aggression, as if they expect at any moment to be physically punished or attacked, but Queenie had a degree of self-possession that would have been remarkable in a person, let alone a cat, together with an imperious nature that brooked no unwelcome familiarity. She didn’t look starved, either—she was as glossy and sleek as could be, right from the shelter. Why, one wondered, had her owners gotten rid of her? Was it the stunted little flipper of a front leg, which we felt actually added to her charm and character? Did she not get along with children (we never had occasion to put this to the test)? Or had she been a touch too aggressive in enforcing her wishes? Who knows? Animals can’t talk, so we never really learn their stories about the past. We can see the physical effects of abuse and neglect easily enough, but absent these, who knows what a cat’s previous home was like, and whether it was well treated, let alone whether it misses its previous owners or not? The cat certainly isn’t going to tell us.
Most cat owners tend to assume that the previous owners of any cat from the shelter, or that turns up at the door looking for a new home, were beasts in human form, but who knows if it’s true, let alone if that’s what the cat thinks? In any case, once Queenie had settled in it was as if she had always lived with us, and it was hard to imagine waking up in the morning without seeing those bright blue eyes fixed on you, staring out of a silver, cream, and black-striped face, and wondering how on earth anybody could get rid of her. One happy result of her deformity was that she couldn’t really scratch at carpets or furniture, which made her the perfect cat for two people who were growing broke furnishing a house in the country room by room. (And this was in the days before we had a decorator, when we still drove down to Paramus to buy furniture on the cheap, hauling it home in the back of our Chevy Blazer, instead of meeting Thom von Buelow for dinner in the Grill Room of The Four Seasons, and picking antique furniture and rare—and expensive—fabrics out of the apparently bottomless Vuitton bag full of swatches, sketches, and photographs he carried with him.) Whatever other faults Queenie may have had, you could at least be sure that she wouldn’t tear your cut velvet sofas to shreds, though she might, if she felt so inclined, throw up on them from time to time. You were never woken up by the sound of a cat trying to tear a mouse-size hole in your beloved oriental carpet, or sharpening its claws on your favorite needlework cushion. No doubt had Queenie been able to indulge herself in this kind of destruction, she would have been happy to, but she wasn’t.
As we got more cats, Queenie watched them attack the furnishings with a good deal of interest, and no visible sense of outrage or disapproval, but in the meantime, there was a blessed period in which it actually seemed that we mi
ght be able to have the kind of elegant house that so many of our friends had, in which you weren’t always covering things with a blanket or a shawl to hide a hole in the fabric, and in which the backs of the chairs weren’t torn to shreds, exposing the innards. That was not, of course, going to last, though hope springs eternal, leading one to look backward and ask how in the world we ever supposed it was a good idea to have this chair or that sofa upholstered in magnificent cut velvet at God only knows how much a yard when it was always clear that we were not just going to have a cat, but cats, and that by any reasonable standard of statistical probability, most of them would have two intact front legs and, therefore, two working sets of claws.
Of course some people solve this kind of problem by having their cats declawed, but apart from the fact that it seems like a cruel, unnatural, and painful procedure, you can’t really put a cat without claws out the door in the country, where climbing up trees, gutters, and fence posts and fighting back, as it were, “tooth and nail,” are all part of the cat’s basic survival kit. It’s like keeping an unloaded pistol around the house—it may seem like a sane and safe idea to non-gun people, but gun owners take the view that in the one brief and terrible moment when you might actually need a gun, it had damned well better be loaded or it’s no use, and also that the only way to be safe around guns is to treat every gun as if it were loaded, no matter who tells you it isn’t.
The cat’s claws are its ultimate weapon, and the reason it spends such a lot of time keeping them sharp isn’t just to destroy your furniture and carpets but because if and when the cat needs those claws, they’d better be sharp. This is nothing cats need to be taught—it’s part of their genetic programming. However peaceful a cat may look dozing on your best chair, no cat is a pacifist, or in favor of disarmament—cats are predators, born to kill, vicious and determined in defense of their territory, and not afraid to draw blood. Like people, of course, some of them are more timid than others, while some are born bold, and like children in a boarding school a lot of their play has a serious purpose, which is to figure out where other cats in the immediate vicinity belong on the scale of aggression. Nice as cats may be toward humans, they can be pretty brutal toward each other, and are capable of inflicting fairly severe wounds when maintaining—or, more dangerous, challenging—their position in the “pecking order,” or defending their territory against a newcomer. Queenie was by no means timid, but her weapons of attack were limited by that useless foot. On the other hand, like a lot of cats, she had a real gift for wedging herself into a corner and puffing her fur up until she looked about twice her usual size—that, combined with a snarl that exposed her sharp fangs and a low, menacing growl, was her best and most convincing defense. She could make herself look pretty terrifying when she felt it was called for, unlike poor Irving, who had been the most peaceable of cats, without, so far as one could tell, any impulse to fight—” a quiet life,” might have been his motto, and by and large that was how he had led it.
Cat People Page 4