The Cat Who Had 14 Tales

So they tore down the theater and excavated a whole city block on the East Side for the new skyscraper. They had just started constructing the foundation when the city put a stop to the work. Not only was the concrete substandard, but the engineering concept was found to be faulty! Also, one of the principals in the scheme embezzled a lot of money, and there were criminal trials, exposes of political graft, lawsuits, and a suicide. It dragged through the courts and across the front pages of the newspapers for years. Meanwhile, they put a fence around the excavation—and then a strange thing happened. All the wild cats and stray cats of the city discovered that big hole filled with chunks of concrete—just as they discovered the cemeteries in Paris and the ruins in Rome. Have you been to Europe, my dear? You should go while you are young.

What was the public reaction to this invasion?

Why, people started wandering over to the East Side to watch the scores of cats cavorting in the excavation, and it became a genuine tourist attraction. That’s when one of the local columnists named it Cat Canyon, and the city built a special viewing fence.

What is a viewing fence?

This one was just a wooden fence with three horizontal rails, but the top rail was a wide shelf, so sightseers could lean on it comfortably. It was also a handy place to set a lunch-box and thermos, and persons working in the vicinity spent their lunch hours there.

The commercial buildings around the Canyon were four or five stories high, with no elevators! There were little hotels, nice restaurants, dress shops, art galleries, millinery shops. No doubt you have never seen a millinery shop, my dear, but in those days they were more important than filling stations. We all wore hats, but not many of us had automobiles.

The advertising agency was upstairs above an art gallery, overlooking Cat Canyon, and on my first day at work I could hardly wait for lunchtime so I could take my sketch pad to the viewing fence.

The excavation was deep but cluttered with concrete posts and slabs and ledges, with weeds growing in the cracks. All kinds of cats were jumping around like mountain goats and chasing each other and nibbling the weeds and washing themselves in the sun.

There was one fluffy white cat who was different. She was young, I could tell, but she didn’t frolic with the other kittens. She sat on an elevated ledge in the sun—very calm and aloof, like a princess on a throne.

I was standing at the fence, sketching her, when a young man walked over and looked at my drawings. “You’re very good,” he said. “Are you from one of the art galleries?”

“No,” I told him. “I’ve just started to work at the advertising agency. I adore this fence. It’s such a clever idea.”

“Thank you,” he said. “My firm designed it. I’m an architect.” He was a nice young man, and I thought architects were terribly glamorous. He was taking snapshots of the Canyon with one of those little box cameras that sold for a dollar. And for your information, my dear, they took better pictures than some of today’s complicated contrivances.

The young man said: “I never get tired of looking at the abstract architecture of this excavation—the planes and angles and massing and elevations and depressions. It’s like a miniature medieval city—two cities, really, with a battlefield in between.”

He told me how the cats on one side of the hole never mingled with those on the other side, except at night. When the moon was in a certain phase, the two tribes met on the concrete slab in the middle and engaged in horrendous battles.

The cats on the other side were rather drab—mostly gray—but on our side there were orange, black, calico, gray-and-white, all kinds of mixtures. The architect—his name was Paul—called them the Grays and the Motleys.

He said: “If you come here often enough, you can figure out who is the king of each principality, and which cats are his warriors. The king of the Motleys is that fierce-looking black-and-white tomcat.”

Then I said: “That little white one sitting on a ledge is a princess. She never does anything common—like chasing butterflies or wrestling with the other kittens. She just sits on her throne and thinks beautiful thoughts. Whenever she steps down, she walks slowly in a regal way.”

And now, my dear, here comes our tea . . . . Thank you, Marie . . . . I hope the cookies are chocolate-chip . . . . Yes, they are! We didn’t have this delicacy in the twenties.

What did the cats do for food?

Food? Oh, they climbed out of the Canyon and begged at the back doors of the restaurants. I’m sure they caught rodents in the alleys and explored garbage pails. And, of course, they shared the lunches of visitors at the viewing fence. I saw cats gobbling doughnuts, grapes, olives, peanut butter sandwiches, hard-cooked eggs—everything anyone would offer them.