Relay: Here, Puss, Here, Puss
We were having dinner at the home of friends when the conversation segued from the relatively safe subject of politics to the unfailingly dangerous one of cats.
People who know me know to let their cats out before I come visiting, or, better yet, shut them up someplace so they don’t lurk about in the pitch dark waiting for me to trip over them as I’m leaving. A banished cat always knows who to blame.
My aversion to creatures of the feline persuasion is longstanding, traceable, maybe, to my mother’s fear and loathing of mice and everything associated with them, though I don’t recall her being afraid of cats. Not that anyone we knew ever had one. I was an only child and happy to be one; I used to end my nightly prayers with “and please, God, don’t let them get a brother or sister. Or a pet.”
Fast forward a few decades and Sidney and I have bought the Amagansett house we’re still living in many years later, and are having a dinner party of our own. From outside comes a faint sound. Meow? Meow.
“Your cat’s wanting to come in,” someone says.
“It’s not our cat. We have no cats. I don’t even like cats.”
But my husband, Mr. Tenderheart, gets up, goes to the kitchen, and comes back with a bowl of tuna fish (solid white albacore) and a dish of milk.
“Aaaack. What are you doing? They say if you feed a cat it never goes away. Aaack!”
Too late. On the porch now, a starved-looking creature is already halfway through its first good meal in heaven knows how long. And what the old wives say turns out, of course, to be true. The cat adopts us.
It could have been worse. It happened on a Memorial Day weekend, with a whole long hot summer ahead, which meant the cat could live outside and I wouldn’t have to look at it. Much. It was a head-turning cat, though; surely one of the ugliest specimens on God’s green earth, a black-and-white pipestem of a body on four stovepipe legs. The kids wanted to call it something cuddly, I forget what, but no, I said, we’ll call it Puss. With any luck, I was thinking, the cat will walk down the street and some kind soul will say, casually, “Here, puss, here, puss,” and it will follow them home. End of story.
It never happened. And too soon, Labor Day was on the horizon. There was no such thing as year-round weekending back then; you closed the house, drained the pipes, put big wooden shutters on the windows, and went back to the city until spring. No way was I taking the cat, but nor did I have the heart, much though I loathed it, to leave it to fend for itself. What to do?
The answer arrived disguised as a bicycle.
That summer, Sidney had won a case for a client who manufactured bicycles. Short on cash, the man offered to give him five of his top-of-the-line bikes instead, one for each member of the family, one to spare. It was that bonus bike that solved the Puss predicament.
We put an ad in The Star: “We will give a brand-new bicycle to whomever will give our cat a good home.”
A lot of people came to the house, every one of them eager to see the bike. We took all their numbers and promised to call. Finally, toward the end of the day, a woman arrived looking worried. Had anyone taken the cat, she asked. “No, not yet.” Could she see it? “There he is.”
She held her hand out. “Here, puss. Here, puss.” And Puss got up and stretched and went right to her.
“I’d like to take him now,” she said. “I live in Sag Harbor. Is that okay?”
Okay? It was glorious. “But wait,” I said. “What about the bicycle?”
“The bicycle? Oh yes, the bicycle. Well, I don’t really want a bicycle. Only a cat.”
And away they went. Goodbye, Puss. You were one lucky feline.
Irene Silverman is The Star’s editor at large.