Two
It was an old and shabby neighborhood, those few blocks along State Street between Oneida Square and the knitting mills. But our windows looked out at the leaves of the old elms, and Dorothy had redecorated that upstairs apartment into a cheerful brightness.
It had one overwhelming advantage. I had decided to try to make our living by writing fiction. We had a few dollars saved, plus my terminal-leave income — four months’ pay as a lieutenant colonel. We expected it to be precarious. And that two-bedroom apartment was under rent control, frozen at a monthly rate of $23.50.
State Street sloped downhill toward the mills. The next street down was Mandeville Street, and just around the corner on Mandeville was the Mandeville Market, owned and operated by Howard Ehrenspeck, a good friend then and now. He and Jenny are now over on the east coast of Florida, where Howard is in the insurance business. Once upon a time, when food was half today’s cost, he let a very nervous and insecure writer run up a grocery bill of three hundred dollars. People came from all the best parts of the city to trade there. Howard and his employees had been most kind to Dorothy and Johnny. And so it got to be a pleasant habit to take a break and walk over to the market to get a pack of cigarettes and have a soft drink.
That was the way I happened to meet George. At the time I met her, George was one very busy female cat, providing for some six kittens in the basement of the market. George had huge paws. She had six toes on one front foot and seven on the other.
George had her litter in early September in the cellar under the Mandeville Market, in an old grocery carton of her choosing. I met her in October when she was in the process of weaning them. The market was renowned for the quality of the meat. There was a huge chopping block, scrubbed pale, curved to a shallow concavity by long use. There was sawdust on the floor behind the meat counter. On the floor against the back wall near the doorway to the walk-in cooler was the scrap basket, a bushel basket lined with butcher paper into which the meat cutters tossed the trimmings.
The cellar door was propped ajar a few inches, enough room for George to come though. A cellar window was fixed the same way to give George access to the outdoor world, for night ventures and the pursuit of status.
The first time I saw George, she came from the direction of the cellar with a air of purpose, went directly to the scrap basket, hoisted her front feet up onto the rim, and stared down into it, studying the contents. Next, braced by her left front paw, she used the hooks on her right paw to sort down through the scraps of meat. She was very intent and much like a housewife at a melon bin. When at last she found the piece suitable for her children, she leaned in delicately, picked it up in her jaws, reared around and walked back to the cellar stairs with it. Howard told me that sometimes she would come up, sort through the basket, find nothing suitable, give them all a brief, icy glance, and go on back down. And then some very tasty scraps would be tossed into the basket to await her next shopping mission.
George was diligent in the acceptance of her responsibilities. She did not seem to feel that the scrap basket was in any sense a handout. It was there, and because she was doing her part without sloth or complaint, she expected it to be maintained adequately. She was pleased to have people clump down into the cellar and admire the kittens. She would purr extravagantly. A meat-market cat is not inclined toward a pessimistic view of humans. The kittens were lively and healthy.
Not long thereafter Dorothy came walking home from the market with a male kitten from the litter. She was quite tentative about it. We were dog people. If anybody objected, he could be returned to George. She had gone down to the cellar and picked the one most responsive. She said that after such hideous luck with dogs lately, maybe...
I was dubious. I had the cat-lovers tagged. There were four categories. The traditional lonely spinster, of course. And that strange clan of hard-jawed, intensely competitive female who breeds for show purposes cats who look like squirrels, monkeys, Pekingese dogs — like almost anything except a cat-cat. Also the eerie eccentric with eleven million dollars in tin cans and pillow slips, who lives in rancid squalor, scavenges trash cans, and keeps thirty-one cats. Lastly the slender-wristed chap with some esoteric relation to the arts, who plays a recorder, decorates with monk’s cloth and chicken wire, seats guests on the floor, and buys tinned breast of chicken for his cat.
Kittens were always fine. Mature cats had always seemed to me to be almost spectacularly unrewarding. Prince had despised them.
But perhaps I felt a little guilty about cats. Long ago I had been an apprentice assassin. Or possibly the better phrase would be timid accessory. It happened in Sharon, Pennsylvania. Perhaps I was nine years old. We lived at 215 South Oakland Avenue. My father worked for the Standard Tank Car Company. I knew a boy named Ralph, who lived a block away. He was not a friend. He was twelve years old. That age difference put him well out of the reach of friendship.
I was awed by him. He seemed very large and constructed in a crude and ominous way. He had big hands, big knuckles, a great many large, yellowish teeth, and a raw-boned, shambling, go-to-hell manner. He had the reputation of being a dangerous and merciless fighter. He was hero-villain, the ambivalent image. The only attentions I had ever received from him were unexpected punches on the arm upon the brick-paved playground of the public school. He had developed the knack of hitting at just the right angle and just the right place — about an inch below the point of the shoulder — in such a way it would deaden the entire arm for an hour. When the numbness went away, the ache would begin. He created an entire legion of smaller boys who always revolved slowly when they stood in one place, to prevent anyone drifting up behind them. Ralph had an unwashed smell, an exceptionally pungent vocabulary, and a seemingly perpetual post-nasal drip, which he turned to advantage with a startling WHONK sound, followed by a wha-THOO of deadly accuracy.
Under normal circumstances we would have never shared any exploit, be that the word for caticide (felinicide?). But one weekend afternoon in the early fall, after school had begun again, on my way to find my standard pack of friends, I ran into Ralph walking alone toward the viaduct carrying a black cat in his arms, a mature cat which did not seem completely enchanted by being toted along by Ralph. I imagine he felt the need to explain such an effete act as cat-carrying, and he told me gruffly he was taking this old cat down into the viaduct to teach it how to hunt stuff. Did I want to come along?
I must explain the viaduct. It was a natural gorge which ran through that residential part of town. A bridge crossed it at South Oakland Avenue. It was respectably deep there, a small stream winding along the bottom of it. It had, I know now, a potential natural beauty, but it suffered the abuse one would expect in a small industrial city. People threw junk into it. Kids set fires. I remember the familiar commands: You stay off that bridge, you hear me? Stay out of the viaduct. There are terrible old drunken bums down in those bushes.
The viaduct wandered down the slope toward town and then broadened out into a trashy, cindery area before it reached the railroad yards. I was delighted to be asked to go anywhere with Ralph. It was a status situation. It entitled me to shamble and whonk and say bad words and wish I were not forced to bathe so frequently.
We approached the steep bank after traversing the cinder alley that ran behind the houses on the other side of South Oakland from ours. (It ran behind Brindle’s house, the one right across the street from ours. I was in love with Carribelle Brindle, and later with Doris King, and later with Florence Heintz, but we moved away when I was ten years old, before I had a chance to acquaint them with this emotional condition.)