by Thomas Lynch
It was in March, a gray day I remember, near the vernal equinox, I first encountered the word grimalkin: “gri-`mo(l)-kenn: a domestic cat; especially: an old female cat.” The use in a sentence was unremarkable, but the bit of detail on the back was this:
In the opening scene of Macbeth, one of the three witches planning to meet with Macbeth announces, “I come, Graymalkin!” Shakespeare’s “graymalkin” literally meant “gray cat” and figuratively referred to the familiar, or spirit servant, of the witch. The “gray” in “graymalkin” is, of course, the color; the “malkin” was a nickname for Mary, Matilda, or Maude that came to be used in dialect as a general name for a cat (or other animal) or an untidy woman. By the 1630s, “graymalkin” had been altered to the modern spelling “grimalkin.”
I am a slave to words. I am their servant. The acoustics and meanings, their sounds and sense, sometimes make me shiver—the precision, the liberties, the health and healing in their meanings. Language is the first among God’s many gifts. To name and proclaim makes us feel like gods. To define and discern, to clarify and articulate, to affirm—surely this was what our maker had in mind when we were made in that image and likeness. Not the beard or lightning bolts or bluster. It was no big bang. It was a whisper. It was a word made flesh—our Creation. And the real power of Creation is the power of words to guard us like angels, to protect and defend and define us; to incite, and excite, and inspire; to separate us from the grunting, growling, noisome, wordless, worthless meowing things. Thus when I came upon this word grimalkin—this “gray cat,” this “familiar of a witch,” this “untidy woman”—I saw it as the gift of my personal savior. Not, mind you, the accidental kindness of a random god. No, this was a word with my name on it, sent from a heaven where my name was known, by a God who knew the hairs on my head the way the First Baptists have always claimed He (for they think of him as a He) did. By a God who said to Himself, that poor crazy hopeless case down there doesn’t need a good word, he needs this good word: grimalkin.
I sat at my desk with a blank sheet of paper, filled my best pen with fresh black ink and in my best hand wrote at the top of the page, GRIMALKIN.
As all good words do, it incited such a riot in my brainy parts that bits of verse began to spark all over. Of a sudden the world took on a clarity and reason. Everything in Creation began to hum with the sense of it. The divisions in my psyche were made as one. I was speaking in dactyls and iambs and trochees. Things began almost to rhyme. The acoustics of even the most humdrum words took on the vaulted, echoey tone of prayer and incantation. I began at once to write it down.
The cat was working its way across the living room carpet, crying out its customary discontent, strutting the well-known facts of the matter that because I loved the boy who loved her, I had to abide its miseries, its contemptuous green eyes fixed on me with long-established indifference. The first line came to me immediately:
One of these days she will lie there and be dead.
How had this profound comfort kept itself from me these long, silent years? All I had to do was outlive the thing. How long can a cat live, I asked myself? Nothing that miserable can enjoy a long life—the black bile, the yellow bile, would certainly kill it. And then?
I’ll take her out back in a garbage bag
and bury her among my son’s canaries
Oh, happy thought! Oh, blessed harbingings!
the ill-fated turtles, a pair of angel fish,
the tragic and mannerly household pests
that had the better sense to take their leaves
before their welcomes or my patience had worn thin.
Michael came in for lemonade and, seeing the strange glee in my eyes, asked, “What are you writing, Dad?”
“A poem about your cat.”
“Deep down inside you really love her, don’t you, Dad?”
I said nothing.
“Be sure and put my name in it.” Mike was jealous of his sister, whose name appeared in the title of my first collection.
For twelve long years I’ve suffered this damn cat.
While Mike, my darling middle son, himself
twelve years this coming May, has grown into
the tender, if quick-tempered manchild
his breeding blessed and cursed him to become.
And only his affection keeps the cat alive
It was true. Michael, like his brothers and sister, was the making of his mother and his father, blessed and cursed by both of us with talents and tendencies, gifts from God, each one of them. And like all things made by God and humankind, a combination of love and rage, beauty and beastliness and benignity.
though more than once I’ve threatened violence:
the brick and burlap in the river recompense
for mounds of furballs littering the house
choking the vacuum cleaner, or what’s worse
shit in the closets, piss in the planters, mice
that winter indoors safely as she sleeps
curled about a table-leg, vigilant
as any knick-knack in a partial coma.
I hated the cat. And I had good reasons. And saying them out loud, writing them down, giving them voice, made them sound convincing.
But Mike, of course, is blind to all of it—
the gray angora breed of arrogance,
the sluttish roar, the way she disappears for days
sex desperate, once or twice a year,
urgently ripping her way out the screen door
to have her way with everything that moves
while Mike sits up with tuna fish and worry,
crying into the darkness, “Here kitty kitty”
mindless of her whorish treacheries
or of her crimes against upholsteries—
I loved that rhyme, treacheries, upholsteries. Such gifts were signs that God was on my side. I wrote as if I had a mission, as if I were the channel of Creation and the Truth.
the sofas, loveseats, wingbacks, easy chairs
she’s puked and mauled into dilapidation.
I have this reoccurring dream of driving her
deep into the desert east of town
and dumping her out there with a few days’ feed
and water. In the dream, she’s always found
by kindly tribespeople who eat her kind
on certain holydays as a form of penance.
Mike came in asking for lunch, but, seeing in my eyes the dull glaze of creation, decided, wisely, not to press the matter. He took up his cat, who looked at me with its own feckless wisdom, and both of them went back outdoors.
God knows, I don’t know what he sees in her.
Sometimes he holds her like a child in his arms
rubbing her underside until she sounds
like one of those battery powered vibrators
folks claim to use for the ache in their shoulders.
And under Mike’s protection she will fix
her indolent green-eyed gaze on me as if
to say “Whadaya gonna do about it, Slick?
The child loves me and you love the child.”
How to loathe something your child loves? How to rid the planet of the thing? How to do the perfect crime? And not get caught?
Truth told I really ought to have her “fixed”
in the old way, with an airtight alibi,
a bag of ready-mix and no eyewitnesses.
But one of these days she will lie there and be dead
Blessed assurance—there in that line—oh, what a foretaste of glory divine! This was my story, this was my song. The miserable cat’s life wouldn’t be long.
And choking back loud hallelujahs, I’ll pretend
a brief bereavement for my Michael’s sake,
letting him think, as he has often said
“Deep down inside you really love her don’t you Dad?”
I’ll even hold some cheerful obsequies
careful to observe God’s never failing care
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for even these, the least of His creatures,
making some mention of a cat-heaven where
cat-ashes to ashes, cat-dust to dust
and the Lord gives, and the Lord has taken away.
Yes, yes, I’d let Nature take its course! Patience and tolerance would win the day. I could be an example of forbearance to my children—a good father, a good man, good for something, after all!
Thus claiming my innocence to the end,
I’d turn Mike homeward from that wicked little grave
And if he asks, we’ll get another one because
all boys need practice in the arts of love
and all their aging fathers in the arts of rage.
The poem was written in a day—a gray spring day gone blue, the buds on the magnolia busting loose, the boys out shooting hoops in the driveway, their sister sleeping in, whilst I was indoors disabusing myself of long years of contained contempt. It became the title poem for my second collection. Its words in my mouth were a kind deliverance from the yellow bile and the black bile and the disabling rage. I could live with the cat, or live without it. I could take or leave the thing and either way I didn’t have to like it. And though I was left with the old dilemma—how not to love something your child does—all I needed to preserve was a home in which Michael could love the cat and love me, a thing he’d been managing well enough all along.
The children of divorce learn such divisions. I remember Michael in the first months of his parents’ disaffections. We’d be out for groceries or riding down Main Street and he’d always want me to buy his mother flowers, or bring her home a gift, some surprise. He wanted me to woo her, to win her love back, to draw the distance in his little heart the nearer, to return his “selves” to himself by restoring the accord between his creators. Or he would say something really nice about his mother, about how she was the best at this or the best at that, and then he’d wait and watch and listen for my agreement—some hook on which to hang the little hope that we would not destroy the world he occupied. No doubt he did the same things with his mother. And as much as we loved him and his brothers and sister, as much as we would have done anything we could to spare them any hurt, in the end, we could not find a way to love each other anymore.
In the wars of divorce, it is children who pay the piper. Among the whole lies and half-truths my generation tells itself are the ones that say the kids are better off, or the kids will be fine, or that time heals all wounds. The kids are damaged. Some wounds won’t heal. They may survive and thrive and learn to love themselves, but the harm that is done them is very, very real. Most divorces are not done to save lives or end abuses, or remedy interminable pain. There are those terrible few tinged by violence and madness, or persistent abuse or neglect, but the garden variety, amicably upmarket, suburban no-fault procedure common to my generation and our times, has less to do with life and death than with love and faith and fear and faithlessness. Most divorces are difficult choices in a world that applauds the exercise of choice, even the bad ones. And to have good reasons for divorce—as I did, as my former spouse would, no doubt, say she did, as we always do—does not make divorcing good. At its best it is the lesser of evils, a way to cut our losses, a way to say we couldn’t keep the vows we made but we are still “okay.” Whatever else it is, it is a shame that love contracted publicly with drinking and dancing and dressed to the nines is quit so quietly—a paper shuffle in the attorney’s office, the grim facts filed with the county clerk, a hush long fallen over the crowd. It is the children who pay, for the two sets of parents and households, holidays and disciplines. However equal and amicable they might be, they are always separate, covertly at odds, subtly competing, quietly instructing in the separate and subversive dialects of love.
And though my former spouse got what she wanted and I got what I wanted, our children got, for the most part, divided between the love of their mother and the love of their father and the promises we made, in front of God and all those people, but did not keep. The parents got what they deserved. The children deserved some better than they got. And though I’ve heard and read every cheery argument to the contrary, I’d have to say it was like they were hobbled by it, the divorce, a kind of ball and chain they limped along with, then learned to walk with, then learned to run with, then ignored.
Though they learn to live with the damage, the damage done is permanent. It is not that their parents don’t love them, it’s that their parents do not love each other. Thus the children become beings divided against themselves. One parent’s patience, the other’s smile; Dad’s sense of humor, Mom’s sense of style—these incarnations become liabilities in the children of parents who no longer love each other. “You’re just like your father” goes from appreciation to disparagement. What good to have your mother’s eyes when your father does not love them?
ALL THAT WAS years ago now, the sadness and anger, the love and rage. The boy has grown into a man; his brothers and his sister likewise have grown lovely and capable, out beyond the orbit of their parents’ choices. The cat is uglier, untidier, unrepentant as ever. The kids can vote and go to bars and fall in love and get their own credit. They live within the gravity of their own choices now. The cat roars and whines and will not be comforted. My gratitudes so far outnumber any grievances that most days and nights all I say is thanks to whatever God is listening for the safety of my sons and daughter. The cat is curled most days into a kind of fetal slumber between the legs of a table in the living room. It sleeps now more than anything. The boy who loves it most comes and goes. The cat remains.
Last year Mike was petting the cat and noticed some lumps in her hindquarters. “Cancer,” I said, perhaps too gleefully, and said to take her to Dr. Clarke, the vet. I reckoned he’d recommend euthanasia. But Mike returned, bearing the cat like a newborn in his arms, saying it was only burrs and fur balls and such. They’d shaved the cat from the midsection back so that it came out looking like the Lion King, its little bald rump a spectacle. It cost $160 to find out the cat was badly groomed and was not dying.
Last spring it was nearly finished. I’d been emailing Mike for weeks at school, telling him about the cat’s bad leg, how the arthritis seemed to be especially vexing to her, how her cataracts were becoming more cloudy, her deafness more pronounced, her miseries more noisome, her toilet habits more free-ranging. I told Mike something merciful would have to be considered. He said nothing. It hurt me to think of how it would hurt him. Still, he understood the difficult decisions that were facing him.
I called Dr. Clarke. There followed a highly professional discussion on the nature of pain and palliative care and incapacity. The poor cat, I told him, could hardly move and was puking and oozing from every orifice and that Mike was coming home for the Easter break and that “the right thing would have to be done.” Dr. Clarke, ever the empathist, ever the compassionate professional, set an appointment for Saturday at one P.M.
And everything was going more or less according to plan. The cat looked especially haggard. Mike was sad and resolute. It was the doctor’s last appointment for the day. It was a good day for the cat to die. I’d ordered in a wee box for the occasion and even had a stone cut with the cat’s name and dates—1978–1999—a tasteful little twenty-by-ten-by-four-inch memorial in a dense eastern granite, to mark the space already dug in the back garden where all of Mike’s more normally mortal pets were buried. The cold granite waited in the garage, the box beside it, everything in readiness. I’d left an eleven o’clock funeral service early to go with Mike. I wanted to “be there” for him, the way that dads are supposed to do. Even the cat seemed resigned to her fate.
And Dr. Clarke, a boon to man and beast alike, was saying all the right things about how “nothing lives forever” and how Mike had been such a “loyal friend” and how he’d have to do the “right thing,” however painful, here at the end. And they were both nodding their heads in sad consensus, and the cat’s head was nodding too, and I was nodding mi
ne as well, and Mike’s brave face was reddening and his eyes were welling up, and maybe it was the sight of this big, abundantly handsome young man holding his cat, holding back the big sob, and one tear working its way down his cheekbone, that was more than even Dr. Clarke and his attendant nurse could handle. I don’t know, but whatever it was I heard Dr. Clarke stammer something about “perhaps a shot of cortisone,” how maybe that would offer some “relief,” how maybe it would give her some “quality of life,” and I was thinking that it had better be one massive overdose of cortisone, because inside my head I’m screaming NO, NO—IT’S NOT QUALITY OF LIFE WE CAME FOR, because I’m counting on the cat to be dead tonight. I’d all but ordered up the cake and coffee. But Mike, with this little hand of hope extended, was nodding, yes, yes, that would at least give him time to finish the semester at school, you know, and spend more quality time with the cat, and I was still thinking the vet was just kidding about all of this when the nurse returned with Kleenex for Mike and a hypodermic that was given to the cat and the cat didn’t die, not then, not since, and, in fact, she has begun to get a little bounce back in her limp and she shits in the kitty litter now and the old toms are appearing at the back door again and she sleeps all day and roars all night and grins at me as if she knew all along that the pardon and reprieve were set.
But here’s the thing. The thing she doesn’t know. The stone is cut. It is out there in the garage with her name and dates on it, and 1999 is what it says.
And I’m not one to make a liar out of stones.
Which is why if she won’t die by natural causes or some household calamity, then, by all that’s holy, the last thing I’ll do in this millennium is drop that blunt lump of gray granite, all fifty or sixty pounds of it, on that godawful gray cat before the New Year turns. Whether the ball drops in Times Square, planes fall from the sky or lights go out around the globe; whether banks fail, phones fall silent; whether the world ends with a bang or a whimper; whether the earth or sea give up their dead; whatever happens or doesn’t happen, call it mercy or murder, call me crazy or Katvorkian, by the first dawn of the New Age the old cat will be out of my life and times forever. I promise. By the time you read this the cat will be dead.