Tomcat

From the memoir-in-progress, “One Wild and Precious Life”

by Val Hallinan

I’d almost forgotten about the fourth member of our family, the tomcat, who claimed squatter’s rights to the old house long before we arrived. He was worn and scarred, at one with the weathered clapboard and peeling paint. The old tom came and went as he pleased, a phantom on the perimeter of our lives; we never even gave him a name. He tolerated our presence and ate the food we gave him as if he were entitled.

Sometimes I wished for a cuddly kitten or a rollicking puppy, like the ones on “The Captain Penny Show.” After all, black cats were bad luck and witches’ companions. On rare occasions I petted him, gingerly and for just a few moments, because I sensed he didn’t want to be touched. He sat there and endured, shifting his paws uneasily as I stroked his back, neither warming up to me nor shrinking away. I was in awe of his self-possession and the quivering current of energy I felt beneath his fur. All muscle and sinew, he moved with grace and single-mindedness, his eyes fixed straight ahead. I wanted to know his secrets, where he went and what he did when he disappeared, only to return, tattered and bloody, a couple of days later.

I liked to sit on the kitchen floor and empty out my favorite drawer. I’d take out the pots and pans, stack and unstack them, put the lids on, take the lids off. Sometimes I crawled under the kitchen table and hid among the legs of the chairs. The tomcat sat nearby, aloof, licking his paws like a stud getting ready for a night on the town, glancing at me now and then with a hint of defiance in his brilliant green eyes. One day, my mother was cooking something at the stove and accidentally dropped a pot lid, which landed with a clatter. The tomcat yowled and darted away. My mother and I laughed. We had never seen him lose his composure.

On weekend nights, after the cat had been fed and my mother finished the supper dishes and hung up her apron, my father set out for a walk to Charlie’s Tavern to have a beer with his buddies, and the tomcat went off to prowl the night. My mother and I stayed home and did sit-ups, the bicycle, and other exercises on the living room floor. We brushed each other’s hair one hundred times so it would shine, just like the Breck girls in Ladies Home Journal, and tried out different hairstyles. My mother showed me how she rolled her long hair into pin curls and fastened them with bobby pins. We stayed up late, ate potato chips, watched “The Jack Paar Show.” I never knew whether the tomcat would be home when I woke up the next morning.

One cold, gray Sunday afternoon, after the tomcat hadn’t shown up from his nightly wanderings, our next-door neighbor, Mrs. Marsh, called. “She says something smells bad and it’s ruining their party,” my father said. “It’s coming from underneath their front porch, and they think it’s our cat.” This wasn’t the first time Mrs. Marsh had complained about the cat prowling around her yard. My father didn’t seem to like Mrs. Marsh, who “had money.” He’d wanted to buy the property she owned next door to our flower shop, but, he said, she wouldn’t come down in price.

Cursing, my father crawled underneath our neighbor’s porch while I watched for awhile from the living room window and then looked away, afraid of what my father would discover. As far as I knew, no one else had ever told my father what to do, and for the first time he seemed to be less than I’d thought him to be; in fact, we all seemed, quite suddenly, to be less than we thought ourselves to be.

My father said the cat had eaten poison. I didn’t like to think that the old tomcat died alone in that dark place, yet it seemed fitting. It was the way he did things.

We didn’t bury the cat with no name. My father told my mother and me that he put the cat in the garbage and seemed relieved to be done with the affair. I didn’t say anything, but I was upset by my father’s callousness. I thought the tomcat deserved a burial and a bit of ceremony, and I wanted a grave to remember him by. My mother must have grieved, because she loved animals. And we must have talked about the cat going to animal heaven. But at the time it seemed as though no one mourned except for me, though in a hidden part of myself I scarcely acknowledged.

I was curious about the smell our neighbor had mentioned, but I didn’t dare go near the garbage can. I’d seen a dead bird or two in our backyard, and their utter stillness frightened me and made me lonely. They were just bodies whose spirits had vanished. I wasn’t ready to meet death face to face again. I was afraid seeing the lifeless tomcat would sever our connection, one we shared even when he roamed far out of my reach; perhaps, if I didn’t look, that bond would remain, stretched thinner, still invisible, but as strong as ever.

*****

Writer Online Talks Briefly with Val Hallinan About the Process of Writing a Memoir

WOL: What would you say is the greatest challenge to the memoirist?

VH: When one writes fiction, the challenge is to fill the blank page from the imagination. When one writes memoir, the challenge is to sort through the infinite number of memories, feelings, and impressions one has stored away, make choices, and craft those choices into art.

WOL: How do you tap into your memory? When crafting a memoir, the writer often reaches back several decades and more, correct?

VH: Yes. That's true. And I often begin with a strong image, such as the tomcat, one that seems to take center stage, and, usually, those strong images become a way to enter my story that leads to a rich vein of material, some of which I may even believe I've forgotten.

WOL: To some readers, "Tomcat" may awaken similar memories, and motivations, which they might have forgotten. Was this something you planned-a part of the structure of the piece?

VH: There's a lot of story in the subtext of "Tomcat," a lot going on underneath the surface that I wasn't conscious of when I wrote it. I think that, though short, the piece resonates, and, within the context of the entire memoir, there are some interesting connections and correlations.

WOL: What sorts of connections and correlations?

VH: Sexual correlations, power correlations. The tomcat, I see now, possessed a kind of power that intrigued me. He isn't the sort of creature one might expect a little girl to be attracted to, but females want power and independence as much as males; they want to tap into that sexual energy, that power, and, at least for me, the iconoclastic, misfit figure of the tomcat held a lot of attraction.

WOL: And how does that translate to the writing of memoir, or any form of creative writing, for that matter?

VH: If we have those instincts--the ones I allude to in "Tomcat"--they find expression in one way or another, even if we try to suppress them. So, through writing, I'm finally using some of that power. Maybe the tomcat is a metaphor for the creative instinct (no "maybe" about it), an instinct that has to fight for survival out in the world.

*****

Copyright 2003 by Val Hallinan