It must have been the same day, because I had Barry and Sally, that we stood, craning our necks, with people passing by smiling at us, three country innocents gaping at the topless towers of the Empire State Building.
“See?” I said to Sally.
She shook her head mournfully. “Poor New York people,” she said. “Going around saying this is the tallest.”
“Well, it is,” I said.
Sally sighed. “When even a little girl like me can come here and see lots taller right in the same city.”
“It says in the books—”
“How do books know? Just looking around anyone can see lots taller, and wider too.”
“Well,” I said compromisingly, “maybe you better just not say anything about it. It’s not polite to come here from Vermont and start finding fault. And if the people here want to think this is the tallest, it’s not up to a little girl like you to get them all upset about it.”
“But if I tried to tell someone that Daddy was the smartest man in the world and it said so in a book, you would say I was not telling the truth? Why do they have all those cars in the street but everybody walking? Can Barry and I each have a present because we’ve been good? Can Barry have a little fire truck?”
I had Sally with me most of the time because it made her father very nervous when she was talking because he had no answers for her questions, but when she was not talking he was always worrying over what she was probably thinking. Consequently, it must have been on the third day of our visit that Laurie and his father and Barry were on a ferryboat, and I agreed to Jannie’s eager proposal that we take Sally to lunch in the Automat. Once, for a very brief period of my life, I worked selling books in Macy’s, and although they have remodeled the book department since my time, and I can no longer direct anyone to the section devoted to books on psychiatry and reincarnation, I can still recall, poignantly, the rare flavor of the cafeteria lunch. I was able to explain to Sally, standing before the cafeteria rail in the Automat with the usual little group of amused cynics listening, how you got something to eat in a cafeteria. Sally accepted the concept of a cafeteria, with reservations, but when I then directed her to the little cubbyholes with their glass fronts she balked absolutely. “No,” she said.
“I’ll show you,” I said.
“No,” Sally said flatly, regarding a nesselrode pie. “It won’t work.”
“Other people—”
“Like that tall building. They just think so, is all.”
“But look at Jannie.” Jannie’s tray held a little pot of baked beans and a glass of milk; she was going slowly back and forth before the fairyland of desserts, eyes bright and nickels clutched firmly.
“Jannie’s just lucky,” Sally said. “They didn’t grab it first.”
“Who didn’t grab what?”
“The people in the cages,” Sally said. “On the other side of that glass where the people are, in the cages.”
“There are people back there, surely. But they put things in. We take them out.”
“Well, they’re not going to get any of my nickels,” Sally said. She reached up and opened the little glass door and took out the piece of nesselrode pie.
“No,” I said. “Sally, no, that’s not the way. You have to put the nickels in.” I flapped my hands helplessly at the little glass door, swinging open. “Put it back,” I said.
“No,” Sally said. “On the other side, in the cage, they put their nickels in, and I just reached and grabbed fast. If I,” she added complacently, “had of put my nickels in first, and if they’d been quicker, then they—”
“Jannie,” I said, and skidded down to where Jannie was trying to balance a piece of chocolate nut cake and two cinnamon buns on her tray. I took the tray away from her and got it to a table, and she followed me, insisting, “Wait, wait, I didn’t get half the things there were, I got to get—”
I told her to stay right at the table and not move, and went back for Sally, who was remarking patronizingly to a gentleman trying to get to a parkerhouse roll, “—might think it’s the tallest, but even a little girl—”
• • •
There came one moment in our New York visit when we all sat wearily in the hotel room together. I had taken my shoes off, and my husband was trying to read his paper by the bedlight. Laurie, flung over the desk chair, observed suddenly that, golly, tomorrow night was band rehearsal at home. Jannie said that she hadn’t practiced “Flow Gently, Sweet Afton” for days and days and days. Sally lifted her head from her jigsaw puzzle to ask if people in New York stayed there all the time, or only came when we did, and Barry, on the floor pushing his fire engine half-heartedly, said, “You know there was a big white house where we used to live before we lived here and maybe sometime we can go and visit there again for some days in a little while.”
My husband telephoned his coin-collector friend that night and offered him an ancient silver dollar if he would meet us in Albany the next afternoon.
When I walked in through our own front door and Yain and Gato came to cross back and forth between my ankles I put my little black suitcase down on the floor and said to my husband, “You know, I didn’t get to the dentist after all.”
In the morning, at my own breakfast table, where the coffee was decently strong and the toast was hot and crisp, I told my husband that we had come off pretty well, considering. “We lost Sally’s hat, of course,” I said, “and that glove of mine and the bottom half of Barry’s pajamas in the hotel room.”
“I forgot to mail the postcards,” my husband said. “You’ll have to drive around today and deliver them.”
“Dikidiki went on a train,” Barry said.
“We only saw two movies,” Laurie said. “I figured we’d see more.”
“Sally,” I asked, “did you have a good time in New York?”
Sally lifted her chin from the edge of the table. “Where?” she said.
• • •
The next morning was Monday and everyone went off to school again, world-bemused travelers. I picked up Toby at the kennel, which of course meant that on Monday we had two cats and one dog. Toby is actually the second oldest child in the family, being, we estimate, one year younger than Laurie. He has been Laurie’s personal dog ever since the bright spring morning when Laurie was four and a half and we were still recovering from the impact of our first Vermont winter. When Laurie came through the back door that sunny morning, asking as he came, “Can I have a dog?” my husband and I both, staring at the great embarrassed creature trying to edge through the door behind him, said, with one voice, “No.” “Don’t let that beast in here,” my husband said, putting down his coffee cup; “Shoo,” I said. The dog, horribly upset, tried to curtsy ingratiatingly, put his left hind foot into an empty milk bottle, mistook the dining room doorway for a way out, and, hurrying, sideswiped a dining room chair, skidded on the milk bottle, and brought up sprawled flat against the buffet, wagging his tail and smiling in a sheepish manner.
“I want to name him Toby,” Laurie said, regarding his dog with pride.
When my husband attempted to herd the dog outside again, the dog clearly interpreted the anxious, brushing motions as friendly overtures; with a wriggle of pure delight he rose, put his front paws on my husband’s shoulders and put his head down and licked my husband’s ear.
“Go away,” my husband said, looking up into the dog’s face. “Heel. Play dead.”
“Down, sir,” I offered.
“Come on, Toby,” Laurie said. “I’m going to teach you some tricks.”
After nearly ten years, Laurie was still trying to teach Toby some tricks. Toby was amiable, sentimental, and desperately anxious to please, but the simplest command got lost somewhere in that big head. We had a neighbor with a female dog and a glass-paned back-porch door, and one night my husband figured out that what with the amount Toby ate, and rep
lacing the glass panes in our neighbor’s back door twice a year, Toby’s mean annual cost was only slightly less than Laurie’s, even figuring in Laurie’s allowance.
When I got Toby back from the kennel on the Monday after we came home from New York, I had to pay for the wire fence he had broken down, and the vet remarked wanly that although Toby was getting on in years he really seemed to be getting bigger. I disengaged myself from Toby’s welcoming embrace and said tartly that we were none of us getting any younger, although when I got Toby home I could not help noticing that he was getting to be a venerable old man, with touches of gray at his temples and a little extra weight around the middle. I pointed this out to my husband and he put back his shoulders and pulled in his stomach and said that you had to figure that every year of a dog’s life was equal to seven years of a person’s life, so that Toby was nearly seventy. I said that Toby had followed the car when I went shopping one afternoon recently. Just out of curiosity I had checked him going up the big hill and he could still run thirty-five miles an hour, and I just hoped that when I was seventy I could run thirty-five miles an hour going uphill. My husband said it would probably depend on what I was chasing.
On Tuesday the senior cat, Yain, absent-mindedly turned his back on the spaniel from across the street, and Laurie and I took him to the vet’s to be hospitalized for a mangled ear. Laurie swore that he saw the junior cat, Gato, walk down to the end of the driveway and shake hands with the spaniel, but I was inclined to doubt this, since Gato did not usually trouble himself to walk any farther than the distance between wherever he happened to be sleeping and the dish where he got his food.
On Wednesday, Toby was badly frightened by the last grasshopper of the season and took the back screen door off its hinges trying to get in fast and crawl under the piano, where he hid whenever he was attacked by fiends, such as grasshoppers, wedging himself in head first with his eyes tight shut, hoping that no one would notice the piano shaking and the great dog feet tucked in under the pedals.
On Thursday I went into the kitchen and opened the drawer where I kept hair barrettes and odd buttons and skate keys; I was looking for a pair of shoelaces for Barry, and when I opened the drawer a mouse jumped out. I was considerably startled, probably because it had been so long since I had seen a mouse in the kitchen, and I gave a kind of a howl and slammed the drawer, catching the mouse by the tail so that he hung head down, cursing and waving his fists at me. Although a mouse hanging upside down by the tail and calling names was not something I saw every day, I left the kitchen in some haste, reeling through the dining room and crying out something incoherent which may very well have been “Help, help!” as Laurie maintained. It sent Toby scuttling under the piano and brought my four children, armed with baseball bats, parasols, and rocket guns, into the kitchen.
“Get a cat, for heaven’s sake,” Laurie yelled, and while he stood with his baseball bat raised menacingly, I tiptoed across the kitchen—there was actually no need to tiptoe, as I realized later, since of course the mouse could see me perfectly well; he was by then smiling tightly and tapping his fingers irritably against the drawer—and poked around in the washing machine until Gato put his head out, yawning, and looked at me inquiringly. I pulled him out and, still tiptoeing, carried him over to the drawer, told him, “Look, Gato, mouse, mouse,” and set him down on the floor. Laurie opened the drawer, I howled, and the mouse fell on Gato’s head. There was a musical crash as Jannie’s first-year exercise book fell off the piano rack onto the keys. Barry giggled, Sally and Jannie clung to one another wordlessly, and Laurie put his baseball bat down very gently onto the kitchen counter.
“Boy,” he said at last, turning to look at Gato fastidiously washing his head on top of the refrigerator. “Boy, what a cat, a positive carnivorous wild beast. Get down off that chair,” he said to me. “You look silly.”
“I was just standing here,” I said, coming down much slower than I went up. “Where’s the mouse?”
Laurie gestured at the kitchen cabinets, where there was a great stirring and squeaking, as of some smart-aleck mouse telling his guffawing friends about the funny thing that happened to him a few minutes ago. “Boy,” said Laurie helplessly, and he took up his baseball bat and went out to hit practice grounders.
On Thursday evening I went into the kitchen about eleven o’clock to make my husband a cold pot-roast sandwich and when I reached for the light cord a mouse ran down my arm and my husband had to come into the kitchen and lead me out. Gato, who had been sleeping on the waffle iron, arose in great indignation and went upstairs to sleep on Jannie’s doll bed, after several pointed remarks about people who kept decent cats awake all night with their mice.
On Friday morning there was a mouse in the breadbox and around lunchtime on Friday my husband discovered a mouse on the dining room buffet eating a dish of salted almonds my husband had been saving for himself. It was at that time that the question of a new cat first arose. My husband announced shrilly that he personally would be prepared to pay any amount of money for a cat who was a cat and caught mice instead of spending all his time sleeping in the oven and eating his head off. This provoked Gato into coming out of the oven with icy courtesy and going across the kitchen and upstairs without even a glance at any of us. He spent the rest of the day sulking in Sally’s toy box and therefore did not attend the animated family meeting which began almost immediately.
“A cat,” my husband said over and over. “A cat that will catch and kill and get rid of mice. A cat, not a furry lounge lizard.” He shook his fist wildly after Gato.
“Well, how about a dog, then?” Laurie asked.
“Oh, yes!” Jannie clasped her hands ardently. “He could help Toby guard the house, and we could teach him cute little tricks—”
“A tiny puppy,” Sally said with joy.
“A tiny puppy,” Barry confirmed, “and I will teach him to play baseball.”
“Females are the best mousers,” I said, as one who has spent years of study on the subject. “Besides,” I went on, “maybe a pretty lady cat would be so gentle and nice she would influence Gato and Yain and they would stop quarreling all the time.”
“Well, a dog, now,” Laurie said.
My husband was looking at me curiously. “Is it your opinion—” he began.
“—tricks?”
“—that females of any species whatsoever—”
“—and dress him in doll clothes and a little bonnet—”
“—have any such effect?”
“—and name him Pal.”
Discussion continued through lunch. Then, as the result of a wholly dispassionate vote in which my husband and I were inevitably outnumbered four to two, I drove in to the local newspaper office and left two advertisements for the paper. The first ad read:
Wanted to buy: female cat, kitten or half grown, good mouser. Call 5679.
The second ad read:
Wanted to buy: puppy, mongrel large breed preferred. Call 5679.
The paper came out at two o’clock on Saturday afternoon. At about two-fifteen Laurie’s friend Rob came by on his bike and dropped off our copy of the paper. While we were all gathered around the kitchen table, admiring the appearance of our ads in print, the phone began to ring.
On Saturday evening, then, we had two dogs and three cats. One dog, Toby, was under the piano. One cat, Yain, had been unexpectedly returned, convalescent, by the vet, who said he was to be kept warm and quiet and away from other animals, since he was still extremely touchy on the whole subject of ears and spaniels. Yain, then, was down cellar, where I had hurried him without attracting Gato’s attention. Gato was pacing ceaselessly back and forth, talking to himself, in front of the door which led to the back apartment. In the back apartment was an elegant gray golden-eyed lady cat. In the barn, howling remotely, was a great wriggling grinning brown puppy who gave irresistible evidence of planning to grow up to be exactly lik
e Toby. Laurie had put a sign on the barn door saying “Do not open!! Dog!!” and Jannie had put a sign on the kitchen door into the back apartment saying “Do not open cat” and Sally had put a sign on the cellar door saying “DO K SALLY THIS IS FROM ME.”
The next morning the children were up early, to take the puppy his breakfast, and they got me out of bed rather before my usual Sunday morning hour of arising to report that the puppy would not eat cornflakes. When I came unwillingly downstairs Gato was lying in a great black heap on top of the broom closet, which commanded a full view of the door to the back apartment; he glanced at me with a look that said clearly that after he had taken care of the gray cat he would have a word or two to say to the rest of us, and it crossed my mind that Gato did not know, yet, about either the puppy or Yain’s return.
I put milk into Gato’s dish and into Toby’s, and then took down three more bowls and filled them with milk. While Gato and Toby were drinking their milk I gave Laurie one bowl to take out to the puppy in the barn, and eased the cellar door open a crack so Jannie could squeeze through and take a bowl of milk down to Yain. However, when I opened the door of the back apartment to let Sally go in there with the third bowl of milk the gray cat slipped through and into the kitchen, where she went directly to Toby’s dish and began to drink his milk while Toby stepped back, looking with indignant anger from me to the gray cat and back again. Gato lifted his chin and stared incredulously, and the gray cat began a growl that started somewhere near the floor and broke off in a high register as I grabbed her up and carried her, struggling, back into the back apartment to her own bowl of milk. The barn door slammed as Laurie backed out, and down cellar Yain began to howl dismally.
“That was a dirty trick,” Jannie said, shocked. “That cat scared Toby.” Toby sniffled in corroboration.
“Why’d we get all these cats and dogs, anyway?” Sally asked. “Seems like it would be easier just having mice for pets.”