“I always wondered if the poor soul had any relatives.” That’s what Mom
says when I tell her about Kate’s telegram. “And now she’s lost her only
brother. That’s sad.”
“I think it’s sad she never talked to him for twenty years. All these
years I’ve wished I had a brother,” I say.
“If it’s her only brother, she’s going to have to do something about his
estate,” says Pop. That legal mind, it never rests. I guess he’s got a
point about this, though. How is Kate going to deal with lawyers, or
undertakers, or anyone? She can’t hardly stand to _talk_ to people like
that.
“What’ll she have to do?”
“Maybe I better go see her tomorrow,” says Pop. “There can be lots of
things—see if he left a will, if he owes any taxes, if he has property
that has to be taken care of or sold. You can’t tell.”
“Kate said he was a miser. Maybe he left her a million. Say, that’d be
great!”
“Don’t be a dope!” Pop snaps, and he really sounds angry, so I pipe down.
The next morning Pop tells me to go over and see how Kate is. “The way she
feels about people, I don’t like to just barge in. I’ll come by in ten
minutes, like I was picking you up to go to a movie or something.”
I saunter round the corner onto Third Avenue and stop short. There are two
newspaper cars pulled up in front of Kate’s building, one red and one
black, and a sizable knot of people gathered on the sidewalk. I move in
among them.
“That crazy cat lady ... he musta been a nut too ... left her about a
million ... a lotta rich cats, how d’ya like that....”
So I guess he did leave her money, and all of a sudden I see it isn’t
“great.” It’s going to be trouble. I push through the people and go
upstairs without anyone stopping me. When I open Kate’s door, old stray
tomcat shoots out. He’s leaving, and I can see why.
Kate’s room is tiny, and it looks like it’s filled with a mob. Maybe it’s
only half a dozen guys, but the photographers are pushing around trying to
get shots and the reporters are jabbering.
Orange kitten sticks his head out of the box. Then out he comes, into the
sea of feet. I drop him back in and try to get across to Kate. She’s
pretty well backed into a corner and looking ready to jump out the window.
She has her arms folded in front of her, each hand clenching the other
elbow, as if to hold herself together. A reporter with a bunch of scratch
paper in his hand is crowding her.
“Miss Carmichael”—funny, I never even knew her last name before—“I just
want to ask one or two questions. Could you tell us when you last saw your
brother?”
“No, I couldn’t,” she snaps, drawing her head down between her shoulders
and trying to melt into the wall.
“Watcha going to do with the money?” a photographer asks. He picks up a
cat, one of the big stray kittens, and dumps it on Kate. The cat clings to
her and the photographer says, “Hold it now. Just let me snap a picture.”
He takes two steps back.
At the first step the room is silent. At the second step a shattering
caterwaul goes up. He has stepped on the adventurous orange kitten.
The scream freezes us all, except Kate. She shoots out of her corner,
knowing instantly what has happened. The kitten is jerking slightly now,
and bright, bright blood is coming out of its mouth. With one violent,
merciful stroke Kate finishes it. She picks the limp body up and wraps it
neatly in a paper towel and places it in the wastebasket.
The room is still silent for one congealed instant. Kate seems almost to
have forgotten the crowd of men. Then two of them make hastily for the
door. The photographer shuffles his feet and says, “Gee, m’am, I didn’t
mean ... I wouldn’t for the world....”
Kate whirls and screams at him: “Get out! Get out, all of you! Leave me
and my cats alone! I never asked you in here!”
At that moment my pop comes in the door. Of course he doesn’t know
anything about the kitten, but he takes in the general situation and herds
the two remaining newspapermen to the door. He gives them his card and
home address and tells them to look him up a little later.
My knees suddenly feel weak and I slump onto the sofa, and my eyes swivel
round to the little package in the wastebasket. It would be the strongest
one. I really never saw anything get killed right in front of me before.
It hits you.
Pop is trying to calm Kate down. She’s facing him, grabbing each sleeve of
his coat. “What am I going to do? What can I do? I don’t want his money. I
don’t want anything from anyone. I just want to be let alone!”
“Take it easy, Kate, take it easy. You don’t have to let anyone into your
apartment. About the inheritance, well, I’ll have to look into that.” Over
his shoulder Pop signals to me to go home and get Mom.
I go home and explain the situation to Mom, and she comes back with me.
One photographer and a couple of reporters are still hanging around, and
the guy snaps a picture of me and Mom at the door. Mom scoots on up. Bad
as I feel, I still get a charge out of getting my picture taken for a
paper.
“Hey, kid,” one of the reporters shoves in front of me, “about this Miss
Carmichael. Does she act pretty strange, like talking to herself on the
street and stuff?”
I see the story he’s trying to build up. While it’s true in a way, if you
really know Kate it’s not. Anyway, I’m against it. I say, “Nah. She’s all
right. She’s just sort of scared of people, and she likes cats.”
“How many cats she got?”
There have been up to a dozen on a busy day, but again I play it down.
“She’s got a mother cat with kittens. Sometimes a stray or two. Don’t get
sucked in by all that jazz these dumb kids around here’ll give you.”
“She gets all that money, you think she’ll buy a big house, set up a home
for stray cats?”
I shrug. “I don’t know. She doesn’t want the money anyway. She just wants
to be let alone.”
“Doesn’t want the money!” the photographer chips in. “Boy, she must be
_really_ nuts! I’m going back to the office.”
The reporter says he’s going to wait and talk to my pop, and I go on
upstairs to see what’s doing.
Kate is sitting on the sofa, sniffing and wiping her eyes and muttering,
but looking calmer. Mom is making tea. Pop is looking out the window,
scratching his head.
Kate gulps and draws a big breath. “Tell them I don’t want his old money.
Tell them to give it to someone else. Tell them to leave me alone. I just
want my own place and my cats. They can’t make me move, can they? I’ve
lived here thirty years. I couldn’t go anyplace else.”
She gulps and sniffs some more, and Mom brings her a cup of tea. The stray
kittens jump up to see if it’s anything good and nuzzle into her lap. Kate
takes a sip of tea and asks Pop again, “They can’t make me move, can
they?” This seems to be what worries her most.
“No-o,” says Pop, “it’s only....”
He’s interrupted by a knock on the door, and I go open it a crack. A guy
says he’s the landlord. As soon as Kate hears his voice, she yelps at him,
“I paid my rent, first of the month like always. Don’t you come bothering
me!”
“It’s about the cats,” he says. “People outside saying you got a dozen
cats in here. There’s a law, you know.”
He’s a seedy-looking, whining kind of a man, and he looks real pleased
with himself when he says there’s a law about cats.
Kate jumps right at him. “I’m not breaking any laws. I know you. You just
want to get me out of here and rent the place for more money. You leave me
alone!”
The man whines, “There’s a law, that’s all. I don’t want no violation
slapped on my building.”
Pop comes over and tells the man there’s just a mother cat with kittens.
“There’s a couple of strays here, too, right now, but I’ll take them home
with me.”
“There’s a law, that’s all. Also, I got a right to inspect the premises.”
Pop shows no signs of letting him in, and he shuffles and grumbles and
goes away.
“Lock the door,” Kate snaps. “I keep it locked all the time.”
Pop says he’s going home to make some phone calls and try to figure out
what’s going on. He takes down the name and address of Kate’s brother and
asks her if she’s sure there are no other relatives. She says she never
heard of any. Pop goes, and Kate insists that I lock the door after him.
She gets up and starts stirring around getting food out for the cats. She
buys fish and chicken livers for them, even though she hardly eats any
meat herself. She listens at the back door a moment to make sure no one’s
out there, then opens the door and puts out the garbage and wastebasket.
There goes the adventurous kitten. You got to hand it to Kate. She has no
sniffling sentimentality about her cats. Kitten’s dead, it’s dead, that’s
all. She doesn’t mope over the limp mite of fur. In fact, anything to do
with cats she’s got sense and guts. They’re her family. I don’t know that
I could have put that kitten out of its misery.
Just as long as the world doesn’t throw any stray fortunes at her, Kate
does fine. But when people get in her way, she needs someone like Pop.
Mom says she’ll stick around a while and tells me to take the two stray
kittens home, just in case the landlord comes back trying to make trouble.
“O.K., great—Cat’ll have some company!”
Kate sniffs. “He’ll hate it. Cats don’t like other cats pushing into their
house.”
She’s right, of course. I put the kittens down at home, and Cat hisses at
them and then runs them under the radiator in the kitchen. Then he sits
down in the doorway and glowers at them, on guard.
Things simmer down gradually. Mom and I and sometimes Tom, who’s right at
the flower shop on the corner, take turns checking on Kate and doing
shopping for her, or going with her so she doesn’t get badgered by people.
But pretty soon everyone in the neighborhood forgets all about her and her
inheritance. They see her buying just the same old cat food and cottage
cheese and fruit, and they probably figure the whole thing was a phony.
It wasn’t though. Pop finds out her brother did leave a will. He lined up
his funeral, left something to his housekeeper, something to a little
restaurant owner way downtown—apparently that was his one big luxury, a
decent meal twice a year when he went down to buy more stocks—and the rest
to Kate.
Pop says it may take months or years to clear up the estate, but he says
Kate can get her share all put in trust for her with some bank, and
they’ll take care of all the legalities and taxes and just pay her as much
or little as she wants out of the income. And she can leave the whole kit
and caboodle to a cat home in her will if she wants to, which will
probably make her tightwad brother spin in his grave. I asked her once,
and she said maybe she’d leave some to the Children’s Aid, because there
are a lot of stray children in New York City that need looking after, as
well as cats. She’s getting to think about people some.
17
[Illustration: Mary calling from phone booth at Macy’s.]