Douglas Nelson - Cat On A Blue Monday

Clank! A feeble, interrupted knock. So she was announced to the suspicious face revealed by a sliver of Open door.

"Hi. I'm Temple Barr. Your niece, Peggy Wilhelm, asked me to come over and help you feed your cats."

"Why isn't Peggy here?" an elderly, suspicious voice asked.

"She had a . . . problem with one of her cats at the show and can't leave."

"Those dratted show cats. Not worth the powder they put on 'em, a shame to pamper those creatures when there are plenty of homeless cats to go around. Do you have a cat?"

"Sort of, He comes and goes."

"What's the name of Peggy's sick cat?" the old woman asked suddenly.

"Minuet!" Temple answered with alacrity, as if she were standing by a blackboard and someone like a teacher had demanded a right answer and she had better give it as if her life depended on it.

Open, Minuet, The door yawned almost wide enough to admit her. The yellow cat slithered through.

"Well, come in, then, Paul, too. No, Peter! We've got an extra mouth to feed, I see, so I can use help. I guess you're not a scam artist trying to bilk an old woman."

"No, I'm a P.R. woman."

"P.R., huh?" In the dim entry hall, the old lady turned to regard her and lifted an incredibly carved cane from the floor. It almost seemed that a long, thin totem was admonishing Temple. "Let's hope that stands for 'Pretty Reliable.' "

Humbled, Temple followed her guide deep into the bowels of the house. She had an impression of massive, old-fashioned furniture jousting the walls and each other, of magazines in table-high piles. Area rugs scattered hither and yon raised wrinkles to trip Temple's high heels, but not her hostess, who clumped through the clutter like a safari guide in darkest Africa.

Another impression took Temple by the shoulders and shook her. Pet odor: a thick, heavy aura composed of cat, litter box, shed fur, dander and sour milk--and a whole ozone layer somewhere near the ceiling of Tuna Breath, big time.

Temple struggled to breathe through her mouth and talk at the same time without sounding asthmatic. "How mandy cats do you have? I mean--" breath "--many."

"Oh, I don't know." A switch clicked. Overhead fluorescent lights flickered like heat lightning, then burst into artificial brightness.

They stood in an ancient kitchen that had battered wooden cupboards and a dangerously heaving quarry-tile floor. Newspaper clippings and notes covered every cupboard, and all of them fluttered from their Scotch-tape anchors like tattered sails under the lazy rake of an ancient ceiling fan. No expensive, computerized Casablanca models here. No Humphrey Bogart in a sweat-stained ice-cream suit, either, just counter-tops cluttered with bags and boxes of cat food, and cats, just cats on the floor. Cats atop the cupboards, Cats in the sink, Cats on the old olive-green refrigerator, Cats probably inside the old olive-green refrigerator.

Temple sneezed. "Oh, excuse me."

"You're not allergic to cats?" the old lady asked with even more suspicion.

"Not that I know of," Temple said, taking advantage of the light to study Peggy's aunt, Blandina Tyler. Never married, never sorry. Now eighty-four and still upright except for the aid of her cane. Canvas open-toed shoes over fish belly-pale white feet--oops! She was doing it again. Conducting a look-see from the feet up instead of vice versa. Bad habit.

Okay. White hair that had been that way for so long that it was tinged yellow as well as gray, gathered into a loose braid clown her back. One of those shapeless plaid cotton zipper-front housedresses old ladies who are not too svelte always wear. Comfortable and suitable for the mailbox out front or the nearest convenience store. Miss Tyler's hands were ridged with veins, but capable looking. Right now she had the cane hooked over one sinewy wrist and was tearing open a Yummy Tum-tum-tummy box.

"Stupid manufacturers, always make these boxes harder than Capone's safe to break into. And this is nothing compared to an ordinary aspirin bottle. I swear, it's a conspiracy to get old people off Social Security by having them get heart attacks trying to open these child-safe bottles. You can see who everybody cares about, and it isn't the 'aging population.' "

Temple hurried over to help, tripping on an assortment of rag rugs and lazy cats, but not fatally. She could tell that Blandina Tyler wasn't big on home safety.

"Say, kid, you can't do a thing with those fancy nails."

"You'd be surprised." Temple punctured the box's dotted line with a lacquered crimson thumbnail and ripped the top off, much to the amazement of Blandina Tyler, and perhaps to the round-eyed litter of Siamese kittens pictured in full yowl on the box cover.

"Put 'em in the foil pie tins you see around," Miss Tyler ordered gruffly.

To fulfill this simple instruction took about half an hour and many trips back to the kitchen to wrestle open other boxes. Miss Tyler took to leaning against a counter and watching Temple trot back and forth while eluding outstretched cats. For all the old lady's grumpy refusal of assistance, Temple guessed that she needed it.

Certainly a twice-daily run around the Tyler house--up- stairs, downstairs, in my lady's chamber, bending and stooping, carrying and pouring--would match any aerobics routine in the city. Then came litter detail; in a word, box dredging. Miss Tyler used the clumping kind of litter, from which waste was removed with a slotted spoon. Carrying an empty plastic garbage bag like an out-of-stock Santa, Temple then made her obeisance at the foil roaster pans scattered as lavishly through the house as the feeding stations. By now, her nose was numb to all scents, and she was sneezing liberally from litter dust.

"Are you sure you haven't got a cold?" Miss Tyler asked narrowly on one of Temple's many unhappy returns to the kitchen. "l don't want my cats catching anything."

Temple studied the assembled felines, ranging from milling, meowing gangs to complacently dormant lay abouts. She blew out a stream of warm air to lift her short curls from her damp forehead, and then took another clattering run through the house. At least the rooms were air-conditioned. She spotted ventilation grilles in the old plaster walls and figured that Blandina Tyler, who apparently had lived here forever, had gone to the expense of having the house cooled.

"That's a good girl," Miss Tyler said in the tone a person uses to a docile animal when Temple returned to the kitchen, food box empty and all pie tins filled. "Sit down and have a ginger cookie." She indicated a table piled with magazines, and cats, that was draped in a yellow-checkered piece of vintage oilcloth.

Temple pulled a fifties' dinette chair over a tag rug as wrinkled as brain coral and three inconvenient cats' tails, and sat down gratefully. These shoes weren't made for walking, and especially not for running in the Feline Feeding Marathon.

Miss Tyler came over, limping a bit now that her cane was still swinging from her wrist, and offered an open cellophane package of those oblong store cookies with a lush layer of white icing. Temple hadn't had one since she was . . . well, knee-high to a kitchen stool.

"Thanks," she said, trying not to think of how many cats had been slobbering over the open bag.

Yet, as far as she could see, the house had been cleaned and dusted, if cluttered.

"Have you always had cats?" she asked.

Blandina Tyler leaned a weary hip against a chrome kitchen stool. With the weight off her feet, her hands were free to roam the Braille of the hand-carving on her cane, which they did with absent familiarity. Temple could tell that she loved that cane, that carving, almost as much as she must love her cats.

"No," the old woman startled her by saying. "I never intended to have a single one. I'd lived alone in this house for many years and was content to do so forever. Then some boys down the street came by one night making a racket to wake the dead, and they . . . threw a litter of kittens on my doorstep. Kittens they'd gotten drunk on beer."