Dewey's Nine Lives (5 page)

When I became the director of the Spencer Public Library, my first priority was to make the library more open, accessible, and friendly. New books and materials were part of my plan, but I also wanted to change the attitude. I wanted people to feel comfortable in our space, like they were part of a community instead of visitors to a municipal building. I had the walls painted brighter colors and the imposing black furniture replaced with more comfortable tables and chairs. I started a fund to buy artwork for the walls and sculpture for the tops of the shelves. I instructed the staff to smile at every visitor and say hello. When Dewey appeared in the book return box less than six months later, I saw immediately he would fit perfectly with the plan. I knew he was a calm kitten; I knew he would never cause problems. But I thought he would just be background, like another piece of artwork to make the library feel like a home.

But Dewey had no intention of being background. From the second his paws healed (he suffered frostbite in the book return box) and he could walk the library without discomfort, Dewey insisted on being front and center. The paradox for a librarian is that, for a library to work, you can’t be
too
friendly. You want people to feel welcome, but you don’t want them to feel hassled. A library is not a social environment. You can enter anytime, but you only have to be as involved as you want. It’s your choice. If you want conversation, you can chat all day. If you want anonymity, the library promises that, too. Many people, especially those who are marginalized or nervous in social situations, love the library’s mix of privacy and public space—the chance to be surrounded by people without the pressure of interacting with them.

This can create a conundrum for librarians in the case of, for instance, Bill Mullenberg. For decades, Bill was the principal of Spencer High School, a job that was not only respected and important but required him to talk with hundreds of people every week. I know retirement was difficult for him, because it is always hard to leave behind your life’s work. But Bill’s transition was made much harder by the death of his beloved wife.

After she died, he started coming to the library every morning to read the newspaper—and I knew it wasn’t to save the subscription cost. Bill was lonely at home by himself, and he wanted a place to go. What was the staff to do? We said hi, but it would have been against the ethos of a library to force the conversation past small talk. Besides, we were busy. Spencer didn’t pay us to be friends or therapists; everyone on staff had to work forty hours every week, at least, just to keep the place running.

That’s when Dewey waltzed in. As a cat, he didn’t have the social limitations of a librarian. And as our social director and official greeter, he didn’t have other work to keep him busy in the back offices. Dewey thought nothing of walking up to strangers and jumping on their laps. If they pushed him away, he’d come back two or three times, until he got the message he wasn’t wanted. Then he’d walk away, no harm done. A pushy cat, after all, is not nearly as annoying as an overly “helpful” librarian, because there’s no feeling that they are judging you or pressuring you or asking you about things you’d rather not share.

The effect when a visitor embraced Dewey’s presence, however, was profound. Within a month of Bill accepting Dewey as a lap mate, Bill’s demeanor changed. For one thing, he was smiling. I think the first time I’d seen him smile since his wife died was the second or third time Dewey jumped into his lap, pushed aside the newspaper, and demanded affection. Now he was smiling all the time, just as he had in his old job. He was interacting more with the staff, and he was staying longer each morning to hang out and chat. Watching Bill, I realized for the first time that Dewey was more than fuzzy artwork walking around the floor.

After Dewey arrived, visits to the library increased dramatically. I’m not sure he brought people through the door for their first visit, but I think he convinced them to come back. Yvonne, for instance, didn’t visit the library until Dewey was four or five months old. She had read the article about him in the
Spencer Daily Reporter
shortly after his rescue, but it wasn’t until summer that she decided to stop in. By then, Dewey was half grown. With his bushy tail, brilliant copper fur, and magnificent ruff, he already looked like the pampered, patrolling King of the Library. Which he was. Cool, confident Dewey was completely at ease in his surroundings. The first time Yvonne saw him, he was strutting around as if he owned the place.

What a beautiful cat
, she thought.

I don’t know how they met. I assume Dewey approached Yvonne, because that’s what he always did, but she may well have been drawn to him. He was easy to talk to, for lack of a better phrase, since there’s no social pressure in petting a cat. It wasn’t until they were well into their relationship that I noticed, in passing, that Dewey was usually at her side. He rubbed her leg, sniffed her hand when she petted him, listened to her whispered greetings. When she wadded a piece of paper into a ball and threw it to him, he pounced on it, rolled on his back, and kicked it into the air with his back legs. So she threw more.

She bought him trinkets at the mall, the same toys she bought for Tobi. She liked to hold the toys out at different heights and make Dewey leap for them. One day, she held a toy at head height, about five feet off the floor. “Come on, Dewey,” she told him. “You can do it.”

Dewey stared up at the toy, then looked down.
He can’t do it
, Yvonne thought. Then Dewey turned and sprang—like a rocket, as Yvonne remembered it,
just like a rocket
—and grabbed the toy out of her hand. She stared at him in amazement, then started to laugh. “You fooled me, Dewey,” she said. “You fooled me.”

In November, she came to Dewey’s first birthday party. She’s not in the video, but I’m not surprised. Yvonne is one of those people who stands beside you for an hour until you look over and say, “Oh, I didn’t see you there.” She is the quiet but industrious worker who never seems to come out of his office; the neighbor you rarely see; the woman on the bus who never looks up from her book. It’s wrong to think of this as sad, or unfulfilling, because who are we to judge anyone’s internal life? How are we to know what a person’s days are like? Emily Dickinson’s neighbors thought of her as a sad spinster living quietly in her parents’ house, when in fact she was one of the greatest poets in the history of the English language and a frequent correspondent with the most accomplished writers of her day. Shyness isn’t a problem, after all; it’s a personality type.

Dewey, of course, was exactly the opposite. Watching him in that birthday video is to see a true ham at work. Children were crowded around him, jostling for position, but Dewey never seemed startled. No matter how much they grabbed and shrieked, he enjoyed the attention. He lapped it up almost as fervently as he licked his mouse-shaped, cream cheese-covered cat food birthday cake. Dewey didn’t have a problem biting into that cake right in front of his adoring crowd. And I bet, after the video was turned off, he did something just as magical: He walked up to Yvonne—or at least made eye contact with her—and made her feel special for coming.

I know for a fact that happened a year later, at a library party in 1989. About two hundred people came to celebrate the reopening of the library—it had been closed briefly for remodeling—and I was busy giving tours of the improvements. Yvonne was there, on the edge of the crowd, probably feeling like she was back in high school, because anonymity in a library is a blessing but anonymity at a party is awkward and unsettling. Her discomfort ended, however, when she saw Dewey weaving through the crowd. No one was paying attention to him, and that fact clearly irked him to no end. Then he spotted Yvonne and waltzed over. She picked him up. She held him to her heart. Dewey put his head on her shoulder and started purring.

“Someone took a picture of us,” Yvonne told me several times in our conversations. “I don’t know who it was, but they took a picture of us. It was only my back. It was Dewey’s face. But there was a picture of us together.”

 

 

I don’t want to make too much of Dewey’s relationship with Yvonne. I don’t want to imply that her life was centered around the library. I know she led a circumscribed existence, and I know she was no Emily Dickinson, but I also know that Yvonne Barry has kept a large piece of her soul hidden from view. I know she corresponded regularly with friends. I know, like most of us, she had a love-hate relationship with her job. She was proud of her work but increasingly frustrated at being passed over for higher-paying positions. I know she loved her family, and beneath their silences was a complex and multifaceted web of relationships. What those facets were . . . they’re hers to keep, as she has chosen, for herself alone.

What she shared with me was Tobi. I think Dewey, perhaps because he was so different from her, was Yvonne’s social outlet. Tobi was Yvonne’s best friend. She loved to be
with
Dewey, but she loved Tobi. And Tobi loved her in return. More than anything in the world, Tobi cared about Yvonne Barry, and she was excited whenever Yvonne walked through the door. Tobi and Yvonne weren’t opposites, you see, they were soul mates. When Yvonne told me, “She was a quiet cat. She was gentle. She never wanted to get in any trouble with anybody; she just wanted to live and let live, you know what I mean?” my first thought was,
She could be talking about herself
.

They were also dedicated to each other. “I never took any trips overnight,” Yvonne told me, “because I couldn’t bring myself to leave Tobi.” They traveled together once, to visit her sister Dorothy in Minneapolis. For the first fifteen miles, Tobi screamed and slammed her face against the bars of her cage. It wasn’t until Milford, Iowa, that she realized she wasn’t going to the veterinarian’s office and settled down. For a few miles, she meowed at Yvonne, as if hoping for an explanation. But how can a cat understand a concept like Minnesota? Eventually, she slunk to the back of her carrier and lay down . . . for five hours. In Minneapolis, Tobi went straight to the guest bedroom. She used her litter, ate her Tender Vittles, and hid under the bedcovers until Yvonne came in each night. Then Tobi climbed up and nestled against Yvonne’s neck, overjoyed to have her best friend back. “I love you, Tobi,” Yvonne whispered, snuggling up to her cat. Except for the drive, it was like any other weekend of their lives.

It’s tempting to say that’s the reason Yvonne love Tobi so much: The cat was the only constant in her life. But, in reality, I think Yvonne’s life was mostly constants. The same job on the assembly line, doing the same task. The same errands. The same meals. The same silent evenings at home with her parents. Even her life with Dewey had a comforting familiarity because she knew he would always be there. They may not have had a lot of excitement, but Tobi and Yvonne had their routine. They had each other. And that was enough.

But there’s one thing about cats we must all face: Most of the time, we outlive them. Thirteen years of love was a small slice of life for Yvonne, but it was a lifetime for Tobi. By 1990, the cat was visibly slowing down, and her arthritis made it difficult to climb up and down the stairs. Her fur thinned, and more and more often, Yvonne came home to find Tobi curled so tightly in their bed that she didn’t want to wake up.

Around the same time, Yvonne discovered the Bible. She says the catalyst was the buildup to the first Gulf War. The threat of violence made her anxious and unsure about the future, and she felt unhappiness bearing down like a weight. I have no reason to doubt that, but there might have been other pains more difficult for a quiet person to discuss. Like her frustration with the Witco plant, where management refused to promote her to a better position even though she knew she could handle the work. And the soreness in her knees, caused by standing for eight hours a day at the assembly line. And her mother’s deteriorating health. And couldn’t part of it have been, with as much as Tobi meant to her, the inevitable and obvious decline of her beloved cat?

As war approached, and Tobi’s health faltered, Yvonne’s religious reading increased. She had initially been drawn to biblical prophecies of war and destruction, but it was the hope and comfort of the Lord that ultimately inspired her. Six months after picking up the Bible for the first time, as the troop carriers rolled across the Iraqi border and explosions blackened the Baghdad sky, Yvonne Barry knelt beside her bed and asked Jesus to enter her heart.

“I felt like I had stuck my finger in a light socket,” she said of that moment. “I felt so different, and after that, I had the most peaceful night’s sleep of my life. And I knew something had changed.”

Yvonne began reading her Bible for at least an hour every day. She started attending First Baptist Church twice on Sundays and every Thursday for prayer group. There was often a group activity of some sort at the church, and Yvonne found herself drawn to their communion. On quiet nights at home, she sought comfort in the Book. Sometimes Tobi was there, curled at her side, but the cat spent most of her time sleeping in a hooded basket, which Yvonne filled with sheep’s wool to keep her warm. Yvonne heard Fancy Feast helped cats live longer, so she started buying Fancy Feast instead of Tender Vittles, even though she couldn’t really afford it. She adored Tobi; she cared for her as she always had. But after dinner, instead of spinning Tobi in her swivel chair, Yvonne went back to her Bible, leaving Tobi more and more on her own.

And then, a year after Yvonne became a Christian, Tobi started stumbling. One summer evening, she fell in the bedroom and urinated on herself. She looked up at Yvonne, scared to death, begging her to explain. Yvonne took her to Dr. Esterly, who gave her the bad news. Tobi’s liver had failed. The vet could keep her alive for a few days, but she would be in a great deal of pain.

Yvonne looked at the floor. “I don’t want that,” she whispered.