I saw Irving in a pet store window on Columbus Avenue,” remembers Margaret. “There were several other kittens but he sat to one side on his own. He was orange and looked vulnerable. I went in and bought him and carried him home inside my coat. We made lots of small excursions together in the beginning around New York. Down to the drugstore, the supermarket, my friend Mayo’s apartment, to visit the vet, to Blooming-dale’s, and to the occasional movie.
“As time went by and we became inseparable—not a healthy thing, my then husband said when he was around, which was not often—we made longer and more adventuresome trips. Sometimes with him too, a trio. I remember staying in a suite at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel in Los Angeles. I had called in advance to inquire about their policy toward having pets in the rooms. The person to whom I spoke said they allowed small dogs and couldn’t see that a cat would be much different. They obviously knew little about cats! Irving had a great time with the floor-to-ceiling drapes, especially the lining, which seemed irresistible to him. When we checked out we were asked not to bring the cat back again. Burt, my husband, seemed a little unnerved—he was, in his world, somewhat of a celebrity—and unaccustomed to negativity at check-out time, quite the opposite in fact, eager hotel staff wanting to know the date of a possible next visit. He approached Irving and me, in a fog of cigar smoke, cameras and light meters swinging from his neck. ‘What the fuck did he do? I’m telling you, kiddo, it’ll take a miracle to get back in here next time.’
“We came back to New York on American Airlines, and in those faraway days, they had an area in the rear of the plane called the Piano Bar. It was cozy and Irving came out of his travel box and spent the flight on my lap.
“In the early seventies we took a house every winter in Cuernavaca for a month. I was not going without Irving and announced this at one of our black-tie dinners for twelve, among which were several couples who were planning to spend some time with us. The chatter stopped, eyes swung around to stare at me, Burt inhaled on his cigar, and when he could speak, he said, ‘Never going to happen, kiddo, the airlines, the Mexican authorities, getting him back into this country, you name it, no way.’ Some guests, anticipating a dinner table squabble, added their thoughts. What about cat food, litter, how would he travel? My friend Mo, who was going to drive down from Washington with her husband, said quietly, ‘Oh, we’re taking the food and litter, whatever he needs.’ ‘No problems with traveling,’ I said. ‘I already called Air France, they have the best flight, stops in New York en route from Paris to Mexico City, and they said they did not care what I brought along, provided I got it onto the plane, I could bring a cow if I wanted. And I thought I could find some sort of collapsible cardboard box to use as a litter tray during the flight, and Burt could put a plastic bag of kitty litter in one of his carry-on camera bags.’
“There were some shifty looks around the table and a nervous laugh from one guest. ‘I’m not carrying any goddamn cat shit stuff in with my cameras, kiddo, are you crazy?’ Burt said.
“‘We’ll see. Let’s have coffee, shall we?’
“Irving went to Mexico several times.
“He also went to the Okefenokee Swamp for a long weekend. We traveled by overnight train from New York, via Washington where John Chancellor, who was then the anchor for NBC’s Nightly News, and his wife, Barbara, joined us, arriving at Mekong, Georgia, the next morning. I didn’t take Irving out on the boat in the swamp, a bit too risky, but he loved the train ride, sitting on top of the seat above my head, watching the country roll by. We went to Lexington, Kentucky, and up to Martha’s Vineyard. But my life changed and I traveled less and so did Irving.
“In the end, once Burt and I were divorced, and Michael and I bought a farm in the country, Irving’s trips were reduced to driving back and forth to Dutchess County, where he finally settled. For all his travels, he was an indoor cat and unused to the outside. I often wonder what he thought, going from pet shop window to ‘trains, planes, and automobiles,’ and finally from an apartment on Central Park West to quiet retirement in a country house.”
Irving had his faults, but he was the most faithful of cats, and totally devoted to Margaret, to the exclusion of all other interests. By the time Michael entered his life he was a cat of firmly fixed habits, and used to life as an apartment dweller. When we bought our house in the country, as a weekend retreat at first, Irving disliked the drive there and back almost as much as he had disliked Burt’s cigar smoke. He did not suffer in silence—he yowled, drooled, moaned, and threw up all the way from Central Park West and 65th Street to our farm on Friday nights, and did the same on the way back on Sunday nights. Very often, he threw up before we had even left the garage or the driveway. It sometimes seemed as if he spent the entire week living in dread of the two-hour drive to Dutchess County.
Saying, “Oh, well, he’ll get used to it” (as we did several times every weekend), about any cat, by the way, is generally a mistake. Cats seldom get used to things they dislike. Like the Bourbons, on their return to France after the long years of exile during the Revolution and Napoleon’s empire, of whom Talleyrand said, “They forgot nothing and they learned nothing,” cats have a good memory for anything that has been done to them that they resent or dislike, and very little capacity for forgiving and forgetting. Nor are they easily bribed. With cats, first impressions count, and the cat’s initial meeting with a person is likely to imprint itself on its mind permanently.
In Irving’s case, age, or perhaps disappointment that when Margaret left Burt, Michael would eventually arrive to replace him—Irving would certainly have preferred to have had Margaret to himself, and never made any secret of the fact—had soured him on travel. After all, at one time in his life he had been a well-traveled cat and not even the longest of trips had dismayed him, so it’s hard to see why he should have taken such a dislike to a piddling little two-hour commute to the country. Or perhaps it was just that he was used to traveling first class on airplanes, and being fussed over by flight attendants, rather than being chucked onto the backseat of a car, together with his box and a litter tray, and regarded it as a distinct comedown in the world, having traveled to the Okeefenokee Swamp by train in a private sleeping compartment and stayed in a suite at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. In those easygoing days, airlines accommodated easily to cats, at any rate in first class, and Irving flew the skies with his own litter tray, dinner dish, and water bowl, back when airplanes had piano bars, and Braniff stews wore miniskirts and patent leather boots designed by Courrèges. In short, Irving was used to the best, and no doubt brooded wistfully over the days when he had roamed the world with Margaret in style.
And why not? After all, cats have standards too. As easily as they revert to the wild, they get used to a certain pattern of comfort. The wrong kind of cat food, a change in the way the furniture is arranged that eliminates a favorite place to nap, a break in the household routine, is more than enough to send them into a snit, or give them a bad case of the sulks. What’s more, they are skilled at making their “owner” (Does anybody really “own” a cat?) feel guilty. Cats may not be able to smile, but they certainly know how to look aggrieved, and can resist or ignore any attempt at reconciliation for a very long time indeed. Nor are they easily bribed. Stroking them, scratching them behind the ears, offering them a particularly succulent treat, will rarely do the trick. Only a prolonged campaign of apologies will bring forgiveness, which won’t come until the cat is good and ready to offer it, and not a moment sooner.
Cats rarely attack people except in what they see, no doubt, as self-defense (though there are exceptions, as you will see when you meet a cat of ours named Mrs. Bumble, named after the object of the parish beadle’s affections in Oliver Twist), but even the nicest of cats will signal displeasure by a quick swipe with the claws, when all other measures have failed or been ignored, and we keep a bottle of Mercurochrome or iodine on hand upstairs in the bathroom and downstairs in the kitchen, and of course a box of Band-Aids, for just such moments. Ours mostly express dissatisfaction by means of a series of graduated acts of low-level vandalism, designed to attract attention. First they will knock over small picture frames, then, if that fails, they scratch the screens—a noise which resembles that of a fingernail on a blackboard after a few minutes. Then they move on to heavier stuff—sharpening their claws on expensively upholstered furniture or the better rugs and carpets, pushing over bowls of flowers or their own water bowl, making a diligent attempt to scrape the wallpaper off the walls, etc. By that time, no matter how determined we have been to sleep in a bit on a Sunday morning, we are both up and ready to go downstairs and open cans of cat food. And that’s forgetting such guaranteed waker-uppers as prolonged yowling or throwing up on the faux-oriental carpets.
Smaller and younger cats can chase each other at high speed around the bedroom floor, leaping up and down off the bed, and landing on furniture with a terrific thump that dislocates every item on it and sends glasses, pens, and books flying, but the older cats don’t have to bother with physical exertion—a good, long session of strumming tunelessly at the screens with a claw will do just as well, they have learned, if not better, and hardly requires any effort at all.
Well, living with cats is a compromise, after all, and most of the compromising inevitably has to be made on the human side, since cats don’t compromise easily, and tend to regard your turf as theirs. Cats have a genuine sense of entitlement—even when they are on the outside looking in, as strays, most of them do not stoop to looking wistful or appealing; rather than grovel like dogs, their approach is usually demanding. A photograph of one of Margaret’s all-time favorite cats, Jake, looking in through the kitchen window on a winter’s day makes that clear. The expression on his face is haughty, mildly impatient, and slightly censorious, as if he were saying, “You can see I’m out here in the cold waiting to be let in, how long do I have to wait here?” One look at him is enough to tell you that there will be no fawning gratitude from him when the door is finally opened. If he could speak, he would no doubt say, “About time, too!,” and stomp off grumpily to sharpen his claws on the dining-room carpet.
Cat people, almost by definition, have learned to compromise with their cats, which is sensible, since the cats are unlikely to do much in the way of compromising back. But this is the feline way, and perhaps part of the cat’s appeal to human beings, who are generally used to getting their way with animals. You can search through history, newspaper files, and literature in vain for the cat equivalent of the traditional heroic dog story—the feline equivalent of Lassie, or Rin Tin Tin, or Balto (the brave sled dog that brought the serum to Nome, Alaska, and who is immortalized in a life-size statue in New York’s Central Park, as well as by a popular brand of French cigarette), or the Seeing Eye dog, simply does not exist. There are stories aplenty of cats who find their way home from hundreds of miles away (usually because they have been dumped or forgotten when the family moved), but none of a cat bravely sacrificing its life to save its owner’s, or plunging into the flames to rescue a child, or being used by the police to detect narcotics or explosives.
The standard newspaper story about cats, quite the contrary, is when the fire department has to be called out to rescue a cat that has climbed so high up a tree that it can’t get down, and even then, it usually manages to scratch its rescuer once it’s been reached by ladder—in short, the typical cat story is when a lot of valuable equipment and the time of a whole lot of firefighters, police officers, and animal protection officers are spent to rescue a cat from someplace where it shouldn’t have gone in the first place, and get no thanks for their trouble from the victim. Humans go to large-scale heroics on behalf of cats, but cats generally don’t go in for heroics on behalf of humans, and that’s that—it is hard to imagine that even a whole room full of cats would attack a burglar. Judging from ours, they would open one eye, then go back to sleep—certainly they would not guard the family silver or the jewelry box or the gun cabinet with teeth bared. On the other hand, cats will go back into burning buildings to rescue kittens—they are quite capable of heroism on behalf of other cats.
Even geese are better at guarding things than cats—as the Romans knew, when they surrounded the capitol with geese, which would let off an ungodly row of cackling and honking at the approach of a stranger at night. Of course geese have their downside, as anybody who has ever stepped in goose shit can testify, and neither their bathroom habits nor their quarrelsome tempers make them easy to keep as pets, but if you want animals that will sound the alarm loud and clear and attack an intruder fearlessly, geese might be worth considering—a full-grown goose coming for you in a rush, wings flapping and beak snapping aggressively, is something before which even the staunchest burglar might retreat.
But cats don’t do that. Admittedly, some of their bigger relatives—lions, tigers, leopards—are as fearsome as an animal gets, but your average domestic cat is definitely not a substitute for an attack dog, though there are cases on record of cats waking up their owners when the house is on fire or a burglar has broken in.
Cats are by no means simply useless or decorative animals. If you happen to have a mouse around, most cats will do their best to kill it for you (though you will not necessarily appreciate the mess they make, since cats are neither neat nor tidy killers), but even mousing, when performed indoors, is pretty much dependent on the cat’s appetite (outdoors they may do it for le sport). Given two squares a day and a frequently filled bowl of dry food for between-meal snacks, a cat’s desire to kill mice diminishes rapidly to zero.
Our own have actually been seen to nap while a mouse darts boldly across the room in front of their noses. They may open an eye to give it a curious glance, but if they’re not hungry, they’re apparently willing to live and let live, and the mouse seems to know it. When we first moved to the country the equation seemed to us simple: cats = no mice. But that has not proved to be the case. We have, over the years, invested countless dollars in electronic signals that are either supposed to drive mice mad or away, mousetraps from the most sophisticated to the simple, old-fashioned ones (baited, according to local custom, with peanut butter or Kraft cheddar singles), and various kinds of poison that are supposed to be harmless to domestic animals, not to speak of lining the drawers with sheets of tin. But still, in the long winter nights, we can hear the mice scampering around in the walls and overhead in the attic, while the cats sleep soundly, indifferent to the patter of innumerable tiny feet. “Nothing to do with me,” seems to be their motto, when it comes to mice. Or birds in the house. Or bats.
Our cats, it will be surmised, share our lives, pretty much on their own terms, take it or leave it. We may see ourselves, from time to time, as having played a benevolent role by giving them a decent home and regular meals, but the cats don’t seem to see it that way at all. On the contrary, they see us as the privileged ones, whom they have honored with their company. And perhaps they’re right—humans can learn a trace of humility from the way cats see them. No bad thing!
Every once in a while one reads of another chapter in the long debate of cats vs. dogs. A dog lover had written in to a pet magazine determined to prove that dogs are smarter than cats, one of her illustrations being that whereas dogs quickly learn to recognize their own name and respond to it, cats don’t. But is this really so? Nonscientific observation seems to indicate that cats do indeed recognize their own name, but unlike dogs, feel it’s beneath their dignity to respond to it. After all, our name for a cat may not be its name for itself, to begin with—just because you’ve decided to call her “Tulip” or “Kit Kat” doesn’t mean the cat has accepted that name—then too cats do respond to the name they’ve been given by humans, but only if it’s to the cat’s advantage. We can stand at the front door at night shouting “Hooligan!” over and over again until we’re hoarse, without seeing a trace of Hooligan (who being jet black simply vanishes when it’s dark), but if you add to her name the magic words “din-din” (for dinner, needless to explain), Hooligan will emerge out of the night into the light of the front porch in a few seconds. She recognizes her name all right, but unlike a dog she’s not about to coming running at the sound of it—unless, of course, it’s accompanied by the promise of dinner.
From which one might conclude that, in fact, cats are smarter than dogs, and also don’t make a fetish of obedience.
Ours sometimes seem very smart indeed.