Over the years, they mount up, the strays who have arrived and stayed, the ones who have arrived and moved on elsewhere, the ones who never quite worked up the courage to appear at the door. After Chutney, Jake was Margaret’s favorite. There was no courtship with Jake, no hanging about in the weeds, or the woods, or under one of the outbuildings waiting to be let in. In Margaret’s words, “He was at the front door with a companion one morning. He was that lovely gray, like a Russian blue, his friend was a hodgepodge of shades; they were gaunt and very hungry. He was game to come indoors immediately, with his snaggle tooth and little goatee. I named him at once. I felt this might be pushing my luck, so I put them both in the garage. A good move, as when I picked them up, I discovered they were full of ticks. A part-time woman who was working in the barn said she would love to have the female, and took her home that day, but three weeks later brought her back, saying she was going to have kittens. ‘Lucky you,’ I said. ‘They’ll be loads of fun.’ ‘I don’t want her,’ she said. So I took her down to Mike Murphy. It was a long time ago, and his small animal practice was just starting, and the waiting room walls weren’t covered with photos of cats and kittens looking to be adopted, as they are now. ‘She’s a nice cat, I can find her a home,’ he said. ‘Just don’t tell anyone, or I’ll be swamped with strays!’ Jake did not pass his vet exam with flying colors, but I kept him anyway, telling Michael, ‘He’s terminal, he’ll only be here a short time.’ Over the many years that Jake was with us, Michael repeated over and over again the ‘he’s terminal’ story, pointing out each time that Jake was still with us. ‘And,’ Michael would add, ‘he still has scurf!’
“Jake was very nurturing of anyone, and he would appear from anywhere in the house at the first hint of a sigh, a moan, or a tear, butting his big head against you, walking along one side and down the other if you were lying down, purring loudly and frequently touching your arm with a paw. When Michael arrived home from cancer surgery, Jake was in his element. ‘Get him away from me,’ Michael whispered. ‘He hates me, he always has, he’s going to sit on my head and smother me, get him away!’
“Jake was very attached to me. Possessive, sleeping pressed against my side, or, when Michael was away, against my back. He would walk beside me outside, like a dog. He grew extremely fat, to the point where he could get up into the hay loft, but not down, so we learned to keep a fence board handy to act as a runway for him on the descent. Michael says you can always tell ‘a Korda cat’—they have small heads and huge bodies. Jake’s body let him down in the end. I cried for days.
“Mr. McTavish (also known as ‘Mr. McT,’ ‘Mr. McTiggy,’ or ‘The Thug’) appeared in our driveway one winter morning. Maybe someone had dumped him from their car or truck, or like Hooligan his owner had moved away and left him behind here, or some place nearby. He was a black and white short-haired cat, with big yellow eyes, definitely an adult male. He would come and go—weeks went by sometimes without my seeing him. I fed him whenever he was here. But he grew thinner and thinner. Fleas, worms, and ticks, no doubt. His eyes were runny, his coat dull. Then one June evening he appeared and I let him into the kitchen and fed him a large meal. Michael—and the other cats—were bug-eyed. ‘You can’t do this,’ Michael said. ‘It’s madness. You can’t expose our cats to him, and what about me? He could have—’
“‘Everything,’ I said, ‘but it’s only for a minute. I’m going to put him in the garage overnight, and take him down to Mike Murphy in the morning.’
“For the first three weeks, he lived behind the washing machine and dryer, he ate little, and was very smelly. Our housekeeper at the time did not like him, but she didn’t stay long. Finally, he came out from his hiding hole behind the appliances, started to eat, his coat bloomed and he grew in every direction, but he did not make friends, especially with Jake and Mumsie, who was frightened of him. ‘He’s a thug,’ Michael said. He never wanted to go outside until very late at night, rather like a vampire, appearing on the front porch roof and staring in the bedroom window. ‘He can spend the night out,’ Michael would say. ‘It’ll be good for him, freshen up his coat, he’ll get scurfy like Jake if he spends all his life inside.’ Needless to say, he never spent a night out. Over the years, he eased himself into Jake’s spot in the order of cats, and as Jake’s health failed, McTavish became dominant. Years later, love appeared in McTavish’s life, but that’s another story.”
Once they put on some weight, both Jake and McTavish were bigger than Mumsie, but, as is so often the case with neutered male cats, they were on the whole more peaceful and inclined to let the world go by without fussing. Jake was affectionate, at any rate to Margaret, and had the size and the heft to push his way close to her, but he was not inclined to fight, nor, given his size, was it often necessary for him to. He looked, in fact, more threatening than he was, a Mike Tyson with a sweet nature.
For a good many years, until the arrival of Mr. McT, Jake was the only male cat in the house, and rather like a male lion, he expected to be looked after and deferred to by the ladies, and on the whole was. Bulky and dignified, he always chose the most comfortable chair, the plumpest cushion, the place closest to Margaret, for his nap, and expected not to be bothered. His routine included a generous portion of naps. A good night’s sleep, followed by breakfast, followed by a good long nap in a warm place, was his idea of time well spent, and although he had the feline equivalent of AIDs, he had a hearty appetite and put on a lot of weight—enough so that the only proper word to describe him was “portly.” His small goatee, his long whiskers, and his expression, all combined to give him a certain malevolent look, which was, in fact, deceptive—push come to shove, despite his impressive size, he was chiefly interested in his own comfort, and his relationship with Margaret. Everything else seemed to him beneath his dignity. He did not sweat the details or let small things bother him unduly. At night you could hear him wheezing and breathing loudly on the bed, and the moment he decided Michael was asleep he would move inexorably up toward the pillows, trying to get between us and push as close to Margaret’s face as he could, but beyond a certain disdain for careful grooming he had no bad habits.
Of course, one couldn’t help noticing that we had gone from being a one-cat couple to a four-cat couple (counting only those cats who lived in the house), and with no end in sight, for the woods and fields were still alive with cats, and hardly a week went by without some newcomer turning up on the porch at night, waiting to be fed. We had not yet reached the stage of our cat-loving neighbors the Lynns, who bought kitty litter by the hundredweight and cat food in bulk, but four is still a lot of cats, particularly when they all get together in one room, or when it’s time to feed them. In the morning, when one woke up, it was to see pairs of pointed, triangular ears in every direction, as the cats woke and thought of breakfast, and cleaning the litter trays turned from being a minor chore to a major one.
Nor was feeding them as easy as one might have supposed, since each of them, once they were no longer actually starving, developed a strong preference for one brand or kind of food only—though, like all cats, they were fickle, and often changed their mind on the subject just after you’d bought a dozen cans of what they’d liked before.
One of the odd things about cats—and another of the ways in which they strongly resemble human beings—is that cats will eat anything they can find or kill to support life when they’re on their own in the wild, from frogs and snakes to small birds and rodents, only to become finicky gourmets the moment they’re indoors and being fed two squares a day from the A&P. It’s as if they went from a state of starvation to being a fussy client in a restaurant or a hotel overnight. You might suppose that they would feel grateful for what they were offered, like the children in the parish poorhouse in Oliver Twist, but that is to underrate a cat’s power of recovery, as well as its strong individuality. Yes, when they’re still starving (and eager to please) you can put any old kind of food in a dish and leave it on the porch and they’ll wolf it down, including leftovers, but the moment they’re inside the house, they will turn their nose up at what they don’t like, and walk away from their plate rather than touch it.
Go figure! Why does a cat which has been perfectly content to eat, say, Fancy Feast Flaked Trout for weeks—won’t touch anything else, in fact—suddenly decide it won’t touch flaked trout, or even look at it? The fickle appetite of cats has made the manufacturers of cat food rich, and doubtless always will. As every cat owner knows, saying, “Oh, he’ll eat it when he gets good and hungry,” is a delusion. Once a cat turns its nose up at something, that’s it. It can (and will) sit there until hell freezes over, or until you give in (which is likely to come sooner, given a cat’s ability to provoke guilty feelings in its owners).
Of course none of our cats is exactly starving, even at mealtimes, since we have three bowls of dried cat food in the house, always kept filled, just so the cats never go short of a between-meals snack. It goes without saying that each of the dried foods that goes into the mixture is especially chosen because it’s good for cleaning their teeth, or rich in vitamins and minerals, or specially formulated for aging cats, or for preventing problems of the urinary tract, though the cats don’t know this, since they can’t read the labels on the bags. Some of the fussier ones go to the trouble of picking the kind they like out with a paw, and flicking the rest onto the floor, but even if they don’t stop for a mouthful, the fact that there is food available at all times seems to have a relaxing effect on them, though it doesn’t prevent them from screaming like banshees when it’s time for their dinner.
Jake, it has to be said, was neither a fussy nor a discriminating eater. He ate slowly—perhaps as a result of tooth problems—seriously and solidly, whatever was presented to him, bringing to the act of cleaning off his plate the solemnity of a prayer meeting. Some cats are easily distracted when they’re eating; not Jake—when it was time to eat, he ate. After eating, he liked a healthy nap, for better digestion. Unsurprisingly, he grew huge. His tail seemed small for such a large body, and he walked with the kind of slow, dignified grace that certain fat men used to cultivate, in the days when no guilt or shame attached to being fat. He bore, in fact, a certain resemblance to Orson Welles in his later years, even to the expression, which was mildly suspicious, and slightly devilish.
Though Jake was “terminal,” dying was not on his agenda, so it came as a surprise when he began to fail. Various treatments were tried, but the effects never lasted long, and in the end it seemed cruel to subject him to visits to the vet and injections for no real purpose. Not that Jake wasn’t stoic, in his own way. One evening, he had turned up at the back door with blood dripping out of his mouth, a sad sight, and had to be rushed to the twenty-four-hour-a-day animal emergency clinic, wrapped in a towel, silently drooling blood. It turned out that he had broken a tooth somehow, but he faced dental surgery with a good deal more calm than his owners, and afterward seemed none the worse for wear, though the emergency vet expressed amazement that he had been eating roast beef! Some cats hate a visit to the vet, and fight back tooth and nail, but Jake wasn’t one of them. He tended, on the contrary, to go limp, like a protestor in the hands of the police; on the other hand, he clearly didn’t like the experience, and doubtless would have liked it less had he known how hopeless his case was.
Jake’s end was eventually the result of a kind of coup. He had never really fought for the position of Top Cat, it was more his sheer size and Margaret’s affection for him that kept him at the top of the pyramid. The ladies were not a threat to him, though he took good care not to provoke them, and Mr. McT, while he suffered from a certain jealousy, and glared at Jake from time to time through narrowed, yellow eyes, did not actually challenge the only other male in the house. But as Jake’s strength ebbed, and he grew thinner and more listless, Mr. McT became bolder, and more eager to take his place. Mr. McT began to jostle and push Jake, until finally, he managed to attack the big gray cat and mutilate one of his paws. Dripping blood, Jake had to be taken back to the vet, but the defeat and the injury at the hands of Mr. McT seemed to strip Jake of his will to live, and, in the end, as his immune system collapsed, he simply gave up.
Margaret adds: “Cat bites and scratches can be serious for people too. I remember early one morning when I was having my breakfast, Queenie jumped up on the table and when I picked her up to put her down, she bit my finger. I didn’t pay too much attention to it apart from washing it clean and putting on a Band-Aid, but by late afternoon, it was throbbing and very swollen, so I drove myself into Poughkeepsie to Vassar Brothers Hospital, where of course I waited for ages in the ER, a reason one is often making for not going when one should. Eventually the necessary forms were filled out and I found myself in one of those little curtained cubicles. A very young intern came in with my form in his hand and said that he had noticed that I was allergic to penicillin. ‘How allergic?’ he asked. ‘Try death,’ I said. He sighed, ‘What a pity, it would have been the best treatment.’”
Mr. McT slipped effortlessly into Jake’s place—no doubt where he had always wanted to be—put on weight, bulking himself up almost to poor old Jake’s size, and replaced Jake on Margaret’s side of the bed.
“The king is dead. Long live the king!” With cats, as with human society, the business of life and succession go on in an orderly way. Whether cats feel grief or not is hard, of course, to say. Certainly they miss a friend when he or she is gone, though by human standards they recover swiftly from grief, but then again Jake’s friendship had been reserved for Margaret, rather than his fellow cats.
In any case, it was Mr. McT’s moment, and he made the most of it.