My father is always talking about how a dog can be very educational for a
boy. This is one reason I got a cat.
My father talks a lot anyway. Maybe being a lawyer he gets in the habit.
Also, he’s a small guy with very little gray curly hair, so maybe he
thinks he’s got to roar a lot to make up for not being a big hairy tough
guy. Mom is thin and quiet, and when anything upsets her, she gets asthma.
In the apartment—we live right in the middle of New York City—we don’t
have any heavy drapes or rugs, and Mom never fries any food because the
doctors figure dust and smoke make her asthma worse. I don’t think it’s
dust; I think it’s Pop’s roaring.
The big hassle that led to me getting Cat came when I earned some extra
money baby-sitting for a little boy around the corner on Gramercy Park. I
spent the money on a Belafonte record. This record has one piece about a
father telling his son about the birds and the bees. I think it’s funny.
Pop blows his stack.
“You’re not going to play that stuff in this house!” he roars. “Why aren’t
you outdoors, anyway? Baby-sitting! Baby-talk records! When I was your
age, I made money on a newspaper-delivery route, and my dog Jeff and I
used to go ten miles chasing rabbits on a good Saturday.”
“Pop,” I say patiently, “there are no rabbits out on Third Avenue. Honest,
there aren’t.”
“Don’t get fresh!” Pop jerks the plug out of the record player so hard the
needle skips, which probably wrecks my record. So I get mad and start
yelling too. Between rounds we both hear Mom in the kitchen starting to
wheeze.
Pop hisses, “Now, see—you’ve gone and upset your mother!”
I slam the record player shut, grab a stick and ball, and run down the
three flights of stairs to the street.
This isn’t the first time Pop and I have played this scene, and there gets
to be a pattern: When I slam out of our house mad, I go along over to my
Aunt Kate’s. She’s not really my aunt. The kids around here call her Crazy
Kate the Cat Woman because she walks along the street in funny old clothes
and sneakers talking to herself, and she sometimes has half a dozen or
more stray cats living with her. I guess she does sound a little looney,
but it’s just because she does things her own way, and she doesn’t give a
hoot what people think. She’s sane, all right. In fact she makes a lot
better sense than my pop.
It was three or four years ago, when I was a little kid, and I came
tearing down our stairs crying mad after some fight with Pop, that I first
met Kate. I plunged out of our door and into the street without looking.
At the same moment I heard brakes scream and felt someone yank me back by
the scruff of my neck. I got dropped in a heap on the sidewalk.
I looked up, and there was a shiny black car with M.D. plates and Kate
waving her umbrella at the driver and shouting: “Listen, Dr. Big Shot,
whose life are you saving? Can’t you even watch out for a sniveling little
kid crossing the street?”
The doctor looked pretty sheepish, and so did I. A few people on the
sidewalk stopped to watch and snicker at us. Our janitor Butch was there,
shaking his finger at me. Kate nodded to him and told him she was taking
me home to mop me up.
“Yas’m,” said Butch. He says “Yas’m” to all ladies.
Kate dragged me along by the hand to her apartment. She didn’t say
anything when we got there, just dumped me in a chair with a couple of
kittens. Then she got me a cup of tea and a bowl of cottage cheese.
That stopped me snuffling to ask, “What do I put the cottage cheese on?”
“Don’t put it on anything. Just eat it. Eat a bowl of it every day. Here,
have an orange, too. But no cookies or candy, none of that sweet, starchy
stuff. And no string beans. They’re not good for you.”
My eyes must have popped, but I guess I knew right that first day that you
don’t argue with Kate. I ate the cottage cheese—it doesn’t really have any
taste anyway—and I sure have always agreed with her about the string
beans.
Off and on since then I’ve seen quite a lot of Kate. I’d pass her on the
street, chirruping to some mangy old stray cat hiding under a car, and
he’d always come out to be stroked. Sometimes there’d be a bunch of little
kids dancing around jeering at her and calling her a witch. It made me
feel real good and important to run them off.
Quite often I went with her to the A & P and helped her carry home the cat
food and cottage cheese and fruit. She talks to herself all the time in
the store, and if she thinks the peaches or melons don’t look good that
day, she shouts clear across the store to the manager. He comes across and
picks her out an extra good one, just to keep the peace.
I introduced Kate to Mom, and they got along real well. Kate’s leery of
most people, afraid they’ll make fun of her, I guess; my mom’s not leery
of people, but she’s shy, and what with asthma and worrying about keeping
me and Pop calmed down, she doesn’t go out much or make dates with people.
She and Kate would chat together in the stores or sitting on the stoop on
a sunny day. Kate shook her head over Mom’s asthma and said she’d get over
it if she ate cottage cheese every day. Mom ate it for a while, but she
put mayonnaise on it, which Kate says is just like poison.
The day of the fight with Pop about the Belafonte record it’s cold and
windy out and there are no kids in sight. I slam my ball back and forth
against the wall where it says “No Ball Playing,” just to limber up and
let off a little spite, and then I go over to see Kate.
Kate has a permanent cat named Susan and however many kittens Susan
happens to have just had. It varies. Usually there are a few other
temporary stray kittens in the apartment, but I never saw any father cat
there before. Today Susan and her kittens are under the stove, and Susan
keeps hissing at a big tiger-striped tomcat crouching under the sofa. He
turns his head away from her and looks like he never intended to get mixed
up with family life. For a stray cat he’s sleek and healthy-looking. Every
time he moves a whisker, Susan hisses again, warningly. She believes in no
visiting rights for fathers.
Kate pours me some tea and asks what’s doing.
“My pop is full of hot air, as usual,” I say.
“Takes one to know one,” Kate says, catching me off base. I change the
subject.
“How come the kittens’ pop is around the house? I never saw a full-grown
tom here before.”
“He saw me buying some cans of cat food, so he followed me home. Susan
isn’t admitting she ever knew him or ever wants to. I’ll give him another
feed and send him on his way, I guess. He’s a handsome young fellow.” Kate
strokes him between the ears, and he rotates his head. Susan hisses.
He starts to pull back farther under the sofa. Without stopping to think
myself, or giving him time to, I pick him up. Susan arches up and spits. I
can feel the muscles in his body tense up as he gets ready to spring out
of my lap. Then he changes his mind and decides to take advantage of the
lap. He narrows his eyes and gives Susan a bored look and turns his head
to take me in. After he’s sized me up, he pretends he only turned around
to lick his back.
“Cat,” I say to him, “how about coming home with me?”
“Hah!” Kate laughs. “Your pop will throw him out faster than you can say
‘good old Jeff.’”
“Yeah-h?” I say it slowly and do some thinking. Taking Cat home had been
just a passing thought, but right now I decide I’ll really go to the mat
with Pop about this. He can have his memories of good old Jeff and rabbit
hunts, but I’m going to have me a tiger.
Aunt Kate gives me a can of cat food and a box of litter, so Cat can stay
in my room, because I remember Mom probably gets asthma from animals, too.
Cat and I go home.
Pop does a lot of shouting and sputtering when we get home, but I just put
Cat down in my room, and I try not to argue with him, so I won’t lose my
temper. I promise I’ll keep him in my room and sweep up the cat hairs so
Mom won’t have to.
As a final blast Pop says, “I suppose you’ll get your exercise mouse
hunting now. What are you going to name the noble animal?”
“Look, Pop,” I explain, “I know he’s a cat, he knows he’s a cat, and his
name is Cat. And even if you call him Honorable John Fitzgerald Kennedy,
he won’t come when you call, and he won’t lick your hand, see?”
“He’d better not! And it’s not my hand that’s going to get licked around
here in a minute,” Pop snaps.
“All right, all right.”
Actually, my pop sometimes jaws so long it’d be a relief if he did haul
off and hit me, but he never does.
We call it a draw for that day, and I have Cat.
2
[Illustration: Dave looking at Cat locked in cage.]