Secrets of the Cat_ Its Lore, Legend, and Lives - Barbara Holland [71]
The Korat, native of Thailand, is silvery with green or amber eyes. For centuries it could not be sold, only presented as a gift to a deserving friend because of its great luckiness, signifying wealth and crops and happy marriages.
The Russian Blue, in the more exalted version, came straight from the Imperial Palace; more prosaically, it came to England on cargo boats trading with Archangel in the far north, on the White Sea, a charming place for a cat to come from. They have dense, double-layered fur suitable for such northern cats, and graceful, delicate, long-boned bodies with long tails and big pointy ears. Their eyes are green. Saha, in Colette’s The Cat, was a Russian Blue, exquisite, sensitive, and adoring, whose master had to choose between her and his bride, and chose her.
Colette’s own last cat was a Chartreux. The Chartreux is a French gray, and a country sort of cat, good-natured and simple, Méry says, solid and stocky and round-faced, with short legs and woolly fur and great enthusiasm for mousing. It’s been around since the Middle Ages, and is said to have come from southern Africa with Carthusian monks who named it for their first monastery, La Grande Chartreuse.
The British Blue is a British citizen type, neat and sturdy-looking, with orange, yellow, or copper eyes. Some English experts think it’s the same as the Chartreux, a notion patriotically ridiculed by the French. And some writers refer to both the British and the Russian as Icelandic cats.
Georges I, II, and III were all gray; Flanagan is gray; Al and Leila and their kittens are gray. Gray alley cats, American cats, melting-pot cats. Not blue, because born at random to cats of great ordinariness working plebeian breeding ranges: gray. Gray with a plushy density of fur, all the same length like sheared beaver. Gray with silvery edgings and highlights about the paws, the ears, the twinkling testicles. Gray with eyes as yellow as suns. Loyal. Cheerful. Enormously likable cats, cats for the daily living, the long haul; cats as sound and friendly as a loaf of good bread. Solid cats, but with a touch of delicacy as they come toward you across the morning grass, putting one foot tidily in front of the other like Siamese, tail high, happy to be there.
Geneticists would scoff, and say there is no gray cat, only a genetically diluted manifestation of black, but this isn’t true. Grays are good for you. They make you feel better about life.
They’re easy to love. Teddy Roosevelt’s gray cat Slippers was always allowed at important diplomatic dinners, and the sixteenth-century poet du Bellay wrote in anguished mourning:
My heart is almost breaking in me
When I speak or when I write
For Belaud my small gray cat.
The Sidneys of the world, the random patches of black and white, represent an interesting genetic battle in which the white moves in an orderly progression. First the locket under the chin, perhaps a bikini-pants crescent, then the bib, then the white toes. The bib spreads down along the stomach and the toes creep up into stockings. Fingers of white extend up the sides, broadening into peninsulas. It always moves up from below; we never see a cat white on top and black or gray or striped below. A cat in the next block to me represents a late stage, white all over but for four or five roundish black spots along the spine, more doggish than cattish. And in a pet shop I saw the very last stand, a white cat with a single brush-stroke of black on the top of the head, between the ears; in the genetic chess game of black against white, white has won.
Black-and-whites come in some pleasant patterns, like Sidney’s big clear butterfly over the head, and in some cluttered and unappealing ones, and the cats themselves are various. In Judy’s colony they form an astonishing majority, their arrivals all quite unrelated, and their only common trait is that they either love their home, or are inordinately fond