Dewey's Nine Lives (22 page)

And for some reason, that made Vicki smile. And then, because she was smiling, she started to laugh. Here she was, an avowed cat hater—or at least cat ignorer—for most of her life, and she had chosen to bring her kittens instead of her daughter on a life-changing five-hundred-mile trip. Instead of Sweetie, she was sitting on the floor of an empty apartment with a cat and her kittens for company. And not just any cat—the cat her stalker had used to win her back. A cat that, in a way, represented the worst betrayal of her life. But a cat she loved just the same.

Some people say loving a cat is about circumstance. The right cat, the right time, the right story. It’s about projecting our desires; it’s about having a crisis big enough to create a need. But that’s not true. That’s not true of Christmas Cat, the first cat Vicki loved. That’s not true of Dewey, who won me over not by launching my career but with a playfully obstinate disposition and a sweet and abiding love. That’s certainly not true of Shadow, who had appeared in Vicki’s life at the wrong time and, more important, for the wrong reason.

We don’t love cats out of need. We don’t love them as symbols or projections. We love them individually, in the complex manner of all human love, because cats are living creatures. They have personalities and quirks, good traits and flaws. Sometimes they fit us, and they make us laugh in our darkest moments. And then we love them. It’s really as simple as that.

All her adult life, Vicki hadn’t wanted to own a cat. She was divorced; she was a single mother; she didn’t want to be
that
lady. But leaving her daughter behind to make room for her cats . . . sitting in an empty apartment and laughing at their antics . . . she was clearly
that cat lady
now.

And it was okay. She wasn’t beaten. Sitting in that dark apartment, with the rain slamming the window, and the kittens mewling on the floor, she knew she was going to make it. As she wiped the tears from her cheeks, there was no doubt in her mind. She would move out of the dumpy apartment. She would go to the office and fire the smallest number of people possible and then sit down with the others and lead them to success. At the end of the summer, when everything was in order, she would bring Sweetie to Wasilla and raise her as a proud single mother. Nothing is ever a given; Vicki Kluever had always known that. She had learned, more than once, that things could be taken away. But things don’t matter. The importance stuff—your faith, your dignity, your will to succeed, your ability to love—those are yours until you choose to let them go.

The next day, she found a better apartment. She fired two employees but managed to keep four. Within five months, the Wasilla office was turning a profit. Eighteen months later, she was standing in front of an audience of her peers, accepting her award for affiliate of the year. And even now, eighteen years later and two thousand miles away, I am proud of her, because I know how hard she worked for that honor and how far she had come.

 

 

The next three years, from a professional standpoint, were the best of Vicki’s life. Sweetie, at first reluctant to move, soon met two lifelong friends and learned to love Wasilla. Ted called a few times, but Vicki ignored him. He couldn’t get to her now, not even emotionally, and eventually he stopped trying. She kept two of the kittens from Shadow’s litter, the black and orange runt and a jet-black kitten who looked just like his mother, and when Shadow died of cancer at the age of nine, Rosco and Abbey kept Vicki company. She had owned several cats by then, most of them pure black, and although none moved her like CC the Christmas Cat, she loved every one. Ten years after leaving Kodiak, she broke the pattern and married the right man: one her cats and Sweetie loved, and who loved them all in return.

“Please don’t see nor portray me as a victim or some poverty-stricken person,” she begged me after our initial conversation. “Yes, there were lots of tough times, but doesn’t everyone have tough times? Based on some of the people I worked with during my career, I see my life as a cakewalk!”

A cakewalk? Not really. A successful life well lived? Absolutely. By 2005, when she retired because she no longer believed in the practices of the mortgage industry she had spent twenty-two years championing, Vicki Kluever was one of the most accomplished Alaskan women in her field. She had coauthored and implemented a statewide program to help disabled adults secure discounted financing; she had managed several offices to unprecedented success; she had mentored a generation of female mortgage officers; she had spent her career, she felt, helping thousands of families make their dreams come true.

She lives with her husband now in Palmer, Alaska, another bedroom community of Anchorage. She is happy. She has the marriage she always wanted: the kind that strengthens instead of maims. She has the freedom to spend as much time as she needs in Kodiak, where the salt air, the heartbeat of life in a fishing town, and the sight of boats in the morning sailing off to the deep waters continue to energize and inspire her. Her daughter Adrienna lives two thousand miles away, in Minnesota, but mother and daughter talk all the time. After some rough years when she was a teenager, they are now the best of friends.

And through it all, there have been the animals: eleven cats for this former cat hater, and even a couple of dogs. They were always there whenever Vicki needed them, just as Christmas Cat had always been. Until 2006, that is, when Shadow’s kittens Rosco and Abbey both passed away within months of each other at the age of sixteen. Nine months later, Choco, a dog Vicki had nursed through severe injuries after he was hit by a car and who had remained devoted to her for the rest of his life, died at the age of twelve. For the first time since she pulled CC from the water almost twenty-five years before, Vicki had no critters around her. It was an empty feeling, especially with her daughter in Minnesota and her husband often away on long business trips, but one she felt ready to endure. Perhaps even enjoy. Then, on a trip to Kodiak to care for her aging mother, a friend introduced her to an elderly dog whose owners had recently died. Bandit, a loving and energetic Border collie mix, now sleeps in her bed every night. In her heart, she knows, she couldn’t possibly love a dog more.

And yet, on those dark Alaska nights, when Vicki Kluever sits in her bentwood rocking chair with the woodstove lit against the long cold hours, a cup of Russian tea in her hand, her husband reading a book on the couch with Bandit at his side, it is the memory of CC the Christmas Cat to which she returns. His lush black fur. His mischievous eyes. The way he would disappear into the forest behind the back fence. The way he would run to her and hold her cheeks and nuzzle his head against her chin. You never forget your first love, I suppose. Especially when his personality embodied everything you believe in. Especially when he taught you to love, when so much of your previous love, outside of family, had been misplaced and flawed. Especially when you saved his life on a quiet Christmas Eve.

SIX

T
his is a New York City story,which maymake youthink it’s as far from Spencer, Iowa, as you can possibly get. But it’s not. In a way, it’s right next door. Because this is not the kind of New York City story you’re used to hearing. It’s not the kind with famous people, crazy prices, arrogant financial tycoons, or glitzy signs for Broadway shows. I admit, there’s nothing quite like standing in Times Square, looking at those glitzy signs. And there’s nothing like walking into Grand Central Station, standing on the upper deck, and seeing the night-sky constellations painted on the ceiling. I was standing near the MetLife Building, just outside Grand Central, when my friend turned to me and said, “You know, before this, I’d never seen a building more than twelve stories tall.” I looked up and the building, which seemed to be tipping over on us, was bigger than the sky. There’s nothing like New York City to make you feel small—or a part of something enormous and splendid, whichever you prefer.

But that’s not New York City. That’s Manhattan. New York City has about eight million people, and apparently only about 20 percent of them live in Manhattan. That’s what this story is about: the other New York. The city over the bridges and past the waterfronts of Brooklyn and Queens, past LaGuardia Airport and the baseball stadium and the site of the 1964 World’s Fair, past even the last stop on the subway lines. This story is about Bayside, a middle-class community near the Long Island Sound, where the traffic is relentless and the houses are crowded thirty to a block, though they still have porches and little front yards. It’s the kind of place a librarian might live in a room of her own, with her cat curled up in a window and sunlight falling on the floor. Which makes Bayside the perfect place for this New York story.

Or at least the perfect place to start, because Bayside is where Lynda Caira’s grandparents settled when they emigrated from Italy to the United States in the first decades of the twentieth century. In 1927, they bought a piece of land in what was essentially farm country and built a house. There weren’t many people in Bayside, Queens, then, but anyone who came by was welcome at the Caira table. When the WPA built the Long Island Expressway on the edge of their land, Lynda’s grandmother gave the men free coffee every morning—then paid off the cost of the land and house through the tips she made on her free hot breakfasts. When the expressway was complete, she cooked breakfast for the truckers who stopped by when they saw her light on at 4:00 A.M. Even in the 1950s, when Lynda was born, the house was often full of bags of corn and onions the truckers gave her in exchange for a meal. Often, when Lynda came down for breakfast, she would find a stranger or two at the table. It just wasn’t in her grandmother’s heart to turn anyone away.

When the city divided Bayside into urban lots, her grandmother (who ran the house after her husband’s early death) kept four plots just off a highway exit in the heart of the community. Lynda called it the Farm, because there were a hundred tomato plants, a vegetable garden, a grape arbor, and a small grove of peach, apple, and fig trees. Lynda’s family lived on the ground floor with her grandmother, who made wine and tomato sauce and still got up every morning at 4:00 A.M. to cook. Lynda’s aunt and uncle lived upstairs. Other relatives were constantly around for a visit. In the case of some relatives from Italy, the visit lasted five years, but her grandmother never considered doing anything other than rising early to cook for them all. Lynda’s father’s parents, also Italian immigrants, lived a short walk away. Other relatives were scattered on neighboring blocks. Bayside was filling up with houses, most bought by young families, so the backyard barbeques were always smoking and the streets were full of kids. The neighbors watched out for one another; the shopkeepers greeted the children by name. But the defining characteristics of Bayside, at least for Lynda Caira, were her family events: the large Italian meals, the communion dresses, and the week set aside every August for canning tomatoes.

At fourteen, Lynda went to work down the road at Gertz department store. After high school, she trained to become a medical technician. She got married, moved to a tiny four-room town house in the Bell Boulevard section of Bayside, about a mile from her grandmother’s house, and worked for a local pediatrician. Two years into the marriage, she gave birth to a daughter and gave her the most popular American name of the 1970s: Jennifer.

After seven years of marriage, Lynda Caira got divorced. The divorce was the right thing to do, and she never questioned her decision. Her parents took the news hard at first, but her grandmother, then in her eighties, told her simply, “If this is what you need, then I support you.” With her grandmother’s blessing, Lynda’s “sin” was absolved and, in time, her parents came around. She even kept two of her best friends: her former mother-in-law and sister-in-law, who sided with her in the divorce.

But that didn’t mean the divorce was easy for Lynda’s five-year-old daughter, who was old enough to know her life was changing but too young to understand why. Lynda’s neighbor suggested she adopt a cat to help Jennifer with the transition. The neighbor worked in a bakery, and the bakery cat—despite the health code, cats live in many of the small neighborhood bakeries in New York City to keep the mice away—had just given birth to kittens. There was a runt in the litter, and the mother cat refused to take care of her. If she didn’t find a home, the kitten was going to die.

“Sure,” Lynda told the neighbor. “Bring her home for me.”

The next day, the neighbor arrived with a tiny gray dust ball of a kitten. She was tennis ball-size and fuzzy, with little ears and big green eyes. She even trembled a bit as she stared around the unfamiliar room, her eyes wide with fear. How could anyone push this baby away? Lynda wondered. How could her own mother leave her to die?