Connections: A Colossal Cat

Ten years ago this June, my eldest granddaughter fell in love with a kitten at the Animal Rescue Fund’s shelter. I can’t imagine what my daughter-in-law, Lisa, was thinking when she took her there on a lark as a fourth birthday treat: Lisa is allergic, and their household has always been something of a dog menagerie to begin with, without much spare room for extra sets of paws.

To be fair, I suspect that other members of the family remember the circumstances of the infamous birthday trip to ARF differently — a case of the Rashomon effect. But as I recall it, anyway, on a June day in 2001, a certain little girl walked away from ARF in a flood of tears, told she could not keep “her cat.” But she was also determined. She called her Aunt Bess and begged her to adopt the kitten. At the time, her aunt was living in a small apartment in Brooklyn, and wasn’t at home in East Hampton too much. Then the birthday girl asked me.

And so it came to pass that my husband and I agreed that Adelia could adopt the kitten, and we would be its surrogate parents. She could visit to take care of or play with it whenever she liked. A white-and-gray striped tabby, he had white boots, and that’s what Adelia named him: White Boots. With the passage of time, naturally, the intensity of the 4-year-old’s interest in White Boots waned to some degree.

White Boots — or, as some of the family called him, Bootsie Baby — was a pleasant fellow. To begin with, anyway; he could be a bit ferocious to small children on occasion. (“Don’t get too close to Bootsie Baby!” mothers warned at family gatherings.) It soon became apparent that Bootsie Baby would be very hard to keep indoors, and, despite qualms about the terrible things cats sometimes do outdoors, we decided to let him go in an out at will. He availed himself, most nights, of three different beds to sleep on. And although there was one desperate incidence when we had to get rid of fleas, we enjoyed a friendly, peaceful relationship. He was a funny fellow, and king of his roost. It may be a matter of selective memory, but I recall only two occasions when he did what cats are known to do to birds. 

I guess I have to admit he was fairly ordinary, in other words, except for one thing: He grew to be the biggest cat I, or anyone else I know, had ever seen.

He was vast. He was gargantuan. 

One night last week, White Boots started howling. His intermittent cries, either of pain or for help, kept us awake and worried. We had noticed that he hadn’t hopped up onto our bed to settle down to sleep that night, and gradually we realized that there was a reason why he had stayed on the floor: His back legs were paralyzed. We watched as he pulled himself around, clawing at rugs and using only his front legs.

In the morning, getting ready to take him to the vet’s, I put an open pet carrier in front of him and he pulled himself in. Did he remember that the carrier had taken him to the vet’s before? Or was he just looking for a dark, comfortable place to curl up? It was a moment of cat heroism, the most astonishing thing White Boots had ever done.

Poor White Boots. A blood clot, we were told, was responsible for the paralysis, and an X-ray showed congestive heart failure and fluid in his lungs. The vet lifted him, limp and listless, onto a scale. His final claim to fame was that even in old age and in a state of failing health he weighed 22 pounds.