Лилиан Браун - The Cat Who Said Cheese

"We'd like you to attend a meeting."

Qwilleran avoided editorial meetings whenever possible. "What's it about?"

"Dwight Somers is going to brief us on the Great Food Explo. He's spent a few days in Chicago with the master-minds of the K Fund, and he'll be flying in on the three-fifteen shuttle."

Qwilleran's petulance mellowed somewhat. The K Fund was the local nickname for the Klingenschoen Foundation that he had established to dispense his inherited billion. Dwight Somers was one of his friends, a local public relations man with credentials Down Below. "Okay. I'll be there."

"By the way, how's Polly?"

"She's improving every day. She's now allowed to walk up and down stairs - a thrill she equates with winning the Nobel Prize." Polly Duncan was a charming woman of his own age, currently on medical leave from the Pickax Public Library, where she was chief administrator.

"Tell her Jody and I were asking about her. Tell her Jody's mother had a bypass last year, and she feels great!"

Thanks. She'll be happy to hear that."

Qwilleran returned to his typewriter and pounded out another few sentences:

Collecting nobodies makes a satisfying hobby. Unlike diamonds, they cost nothing and are never counterfeited. Unlike first editions of Dickens, they are in plentiful supply. Unlike Chippendale antiques, they occupy no room in the house.

The telephone rang again. It was a call from the law firm of Hasselrich Bennett & Barter, and Qwilleran groaned. Calls from attorneys were always bad news.

The quavering voice of the senior partner said, "I beg forgiveness, Mr. Qwilleran, for interrupting your work. No doubt the Qwill pen is penning another quotable column."

"No apology needed," Qwilleran said courteously.

"I trust you are enjoying these fine autumn days."

"There's no better season in Moose County. And you, Mr. Hasselrich?"

"I savor every moment and dread the onslaught of winter. And how, pray, is Mrs. Duncan?"

"Progressing well, thank you. I hope Mrs. Hasselrich is feeling better."

"She recovers slowly, one day at a time. Grief is a stubborn infection of the spirit." Eventually the attorney cleared his throat and said, "I called to remind you that the annual meeting of the Klingenschoen Foundation will be held in Chicago at the end of the month. Mr. Barter will represent you as usual, but it occurred to me that you might like to accompany him, since you have never appeared at one of these functions. You would be warmly welcomed, I assure you."

To Qwilleran, corporate meetings were worse than editorial meetings. "I appreciate the suggestion, Mr. Hasselrich. Unfortunately, commitments in Pickax will prevent me from leaving town at that time."

"I understand," said the attorney, "but I would be remiss if I were to allow the invitation to go untendered."

There were a few more polite words, and then Qwilleran hung up the receiver with smug satisfaction; he had avoided one more boring meeting with the financial big-wigs. Upon first inheriting the Klingenschoen fortune, his financial savvy was so scant that he needed to consult the dictionary for the number of zeroes in a billion. Wealth had never interested him; he enjoyed working for a living, cashing a weekly paycheck, and practicing economies. When the billion descended on him, he considered it a burden, a nuisance and an embarrassment. Turning the vast holdings over to a foundation was a stroke of genius on his part, leaving him happily unencumbered. He returned to the typewriter:

How do you recognize a nobody? You see a stranger performing an anonymous act of kindness and disappearing without a thank

-you. You hear spontaneous words of wit or wisdom from an unlikely source. I remember an elderly man walking with a cane in downtown Pickax when the wind velocity was forty miles an hour, gusting to sixty. We sheltered in a doorway, and he said, "The wind knocked me down in front of the courthouse, but I don't mind because it's part of nature."

When the telephone rang for the third time, Qwilleran answered gruffly but changed his tune when he heard the musical voice of Polly Duncan. "How are you?" he asked anxiously. "I phoned earlier. but there was no answer."

"Lynette drove me to the cardiac clinic in Lockmaster," she said with animation, "and the doctor is astonished at my speedy recovery. He says it's because I've always lived right, except for insufficient exercise. I must start walking every day."

"Good! We'll walk together," he said, but he thought, That's what I've been telling her for years; she wouldn't take my advice. "I'll see you tonight at the usual time, Polly. Anything you need from the store?"

"All I need is some good conversation - just the two of us. Lynette is going out. A bient“t, dear."

"A bient“t." Before returning to his treatise on nobodies, Qwilleran took a moment to relish Polly's good news. He still remembered her late-night call for help, her frightened eyes as the paramedics strapped her onto a stretcher, his own uneasy moments outside the Intensive Care Unit, and his long wait in the surgery wing of a Minneapolis hospital. Now she was convalescing at the home of her sister-in-law but yearning for her own apartment. After preparing a cup of coffee, he wrote:

I began my own collection of nobodies Down

Below, my first being a thirteen-year-old boy who did all the cooking for a family of eight. The next was a woman bus driver who set her brakes, flagged down another bus, and escorted a bewildered passenger onto the right one.

The next interruption was a call from John Bushland, the commercial photographer. "Say, Qwill, do you remember the time I tried to shoot your cats in my studio? We couldn't even get them out of their carrying coop."

"How could I forget?" Qwilleran replied. "It was the battle of the century - between two grown men and two determined cats. We lost."

"Well, I'd like to take another crack at it - at your house, if you don't mind. There's another competition for a cat calendar. They'd feel more comfortable on their own territory, and I could try for candids."

"Sure. When do you want to try it? In daylight or after dark?"

"Natural light works better for eye color. How about tomorrow morning?"

"Make it around nine o'clock," Qwilleran suggested. "Their bellies will be full, and they'll be at peace with the universe."

Eventually he was able to stretch his thesis to a thousand words, ending with:

One word of caution to the novice collector of nobodies: Avoid mentioning your choice collectibles to the media.

If you do, your best examples will become celebrities overnight, and there's no such thing as a prominent nobody.

Having worked against odds, the writer of the "Qwill Pen" finished in time for the meeting at the newspaper office. He said goodbye to the Siamese as he usually did, telling them where he was going and when he would return. The more one talks to cats, he believed, the smarter they become. His two Mensa candidates responded, however, by raising groggy heads from their afternoon nap and giving him a brief glassy stare before falling asleep again.

He walked downtown. No one in Pickax walked, except to a vehicle in the parking lot. Qwilleran' s habit of using his legs instead of his wheels was considered a quaint eccentricity - the kind of thing one could expect of a transplant from Down Below. He walked first to Lois's Luncheonette for a piece of apple pie.

The proprietor - a buxom, bossy woman with a host of devoted customers - was taking a mid-afternoon break and chattering to coffee-drinking loiterers. She talked about her son, Lenny, who worked the evening shift on the desk at the hotel and also attended classes at the new college. She talked about his girlfriend, Anna Marie, who was enrolled in the nursing program at MCCC and also worked part-time at the hotel. Students, she said, were glad to work short hours, even though the skinflint who owned the hotel paid minimum wage without benefits.