A cat’s death

There are cat people and there are dog people. Men are not supposed to prefer cats, but I always have. In fact, I resent the implication that, as the subtitle of a self-congratulatory little book had it a few years ago, there is a mysterious connection between women and cats. Of course, men don’t have a mysterious connection to much of anything. The problem with dogs, to my mind, is that they esteem just everyone; you have to go far out of your way to earn a dog’s mistrust and fear. Besides, almost any dog is a better man than I—more loyal, more resolute, more fearless. But cats depend on no man. They go their catty way, utterly indifferent to your opinion of them; and to earn a cat’s regard, then, is to achieve something.

My patch tabby Isabel—named after the pretty and independent heroine of The Portrait of a Lady—died earlier today of kidney failure. She was eighteen years old. She first attracted my notice in a College Station pet store when she was a scrawny kitten, the runt of the litter. While her siblings clamored for attention, she hung back, aloof and self-contained. I immediately claimed her.

Although she never weighed much more than six pounds, she could be fierce when called upon. Late one night, during Christmas vacation, when the Texas A&M students had left College Station deserted, I awoke to the sound of Isabel’s snarling. I lived in a shotgun apartment in those days, and when I leaped out of bed, Isabel was backing up in the hallway outside my bedroom door, unwillingly yielding ground, inch by inch. “What the hell is going on?” I shouted, and slammed the door.

Feeling guilty about shutting her out and unable to fall back to sleep, I climbed out of bed and went looking for her in the living room. A draft of winter air chilled me, and I turned to find that my front window had been crowbarred open so violently that the latch was torn out of the frame. I had slept through a break-in. But Isabel hadn’t. And she had stood off the burglar, who was probably brandishing the crowbar, trying her fiercest to keep him at bay until I awoke and frightened him off. If I had stirred only a few seconds later I might have received the crowbar across my forehead.

In short, my life was saved by a cat. Over the next fifteen years Isabel could do little wrong. She approved my choice of a wife, and took to sleeping on Naomi’s pillow instead of mine. She decided that her favorite was three-year-old Isaac. He was infinitely tender with her from a very early age, and she responded with gratitude. My daughter Mimi, now a year-old toddler, never learned not to hit her, but Isabel never reacted with anger. She bent her head against the onslaught, and when she saw her chance, skittered away.

Cats have not inspired the amount of literature that dogs have. There is nothing like Albert Payson Terhune’s Lad (1919) or Eric Knight’s Lassie Come-Home (1940) for cats, and thank heaven there is nothing like J. R. Ackerley’s My Dog Tulip (1965). There is a flourishing subgenre of cat mysteries, but I doubt that I shall ever read one. The witty British poet D. J. Enright published a book called The Way of the Cat in 1992, a year after Isabel was born. I know nothing about it, but perhaps I will seek it out and read it in her memory. Requiescat in pace.