Secrets of the Cat_ Its Lore, Legend, and Lives - Barbara Holland [28]
What brought her, my immigrant girl? Did she see it all in a dream and go out and follow it, like a biblical figure obeying the voice of the Lord? How did George find the childless house on Primrose Street? It’s unlikely he went there begging for food; he was indecently well fed. What brings cats to my sister’s sanctuary; what changed Boston Blackie’s mind? Why did Rose, a city stray, sit for three months on Patti’s windowsill and stare compellingly in at her until finally, tired of hiding from her, Patti, who had never liked cats, let her in? Rose was right, and it turned out to be the perfect home, but how did she know this before Patti herself knew? How did Gloria, another city stray, know the exact moment Elaine and Vic began recovering from the death of Jemima, and arrive to climb screaming insistently up the back door? Is is possible that cats, so long revered as the demigods and protective spirits of the domestic hearth, can foresee a new home as well as locate an old one?
It might be.
Certainly cats, or some cats at least, have a strong sense of the home as place, as walls enclosing something more than furniture and people. In the country the Siamese Corvo went abroad to look into other people’s houses. He sat on the windowsill or perched on a low branch and looked in the window, and the people, going about their business, ironing clothes, playing Scrabble, fidgeted under his scrutiny. He didn’t want to go inside, or to be petted or fed. With miles of woods and hunting grounds at his disposal, he wanted to look into a human house instead, and absorb the sense of it. Barney, when we lived in an apartment, visited the other apartments in the building. He wasn’t visiting the people, as a dog might; he took an interest in the apartments for their own sake, scarcely glanced at the residents, and walked around in their rooms like a prospective lessee. Is there more under our roofs than we know?
Some cats people their own places with imaginary spirits. Sidney has for weeks now been very angry with the wall forming the side of the staircase at the back of the living room. Not the whole wall, but a section about a third of the way along it. He sits glaring furiously at it. He can’t pass by it without a malevolent glance, and sometimes he attacks it and tries to rend its bland unmarked surface with his claws. My cousin’s cats, Thing One and Thing Two, spent a substantial part of their lives peering nearsightedly at an area just above the baseboard of the wall in the hall, an occupation they seemed to find endlessly satisfying, like reading a good book. Colette, in The Cat, speaks of “the fixed attention she gave to things swimming about in the air in front of her eyes … ‘What is that cat staring at? Tell me. There’s nothing where she’s looking,’ ‘Nothing … for us.’ ”
In The Good Cat Book Mordecai Siegal says cats stare at the wall so people can make fools of themselves trying to figure out why.
Efforts at scientific thought are caught in a bind here. We can’t very well allow ourselves to believe in actual invisible spirits in the home, nor can we allow a cat a human imagination, so we’re left believing that some cats, normal in all other respects, are subject to psychotic delusions that manifest themselves only inside the cats’ own homes. Even at that, it’s a strain to allow something so presumably simple as a cat something as sophisticated as a delusion. A delusion of what, for heaven’s sake? What shape does it take for them, what does it mean? Why are some delusions enraging and others merely interesting? Is it a form of religion? A chemical imbalance in the brain? How is it related to the physical house itself, so that a cat with a delusion in one house has none when it moves to another, and if it is house-connected, is it part of what calls a cat home across long distances?
And can a bored cat summon up