Ever since Michel de Montaigne noted that he couldn’t be sure whether he was playing with his cat or his cat was playing with him, an essayist without a cat has seemed like a Hasid without a hat. Or so I came to conclude a month or so after our charming calico cat Hermione died one sad evening in our living room. Hermione’s death was jolting, and I thought that this was it, who needs the trouble, no more pets, no more livestock chez Epstein. I, though, apparently need the trouble, or at least welcome it. How else explain late one afternoon finding myself turning in to the Evanston Animal Shelter in search of another cat?
The Abbé Mugnier, the belle époque priest, friend to so many of the French writers of his day, was once asked how he, so gentle a man, could believe in hell with all its terrible tortures. “I believe in hell because my faith tells me I must,” he replied, “but I don’t have to believe there is anyone in hell.” My condition as a pious agnostic is to believe in heaven if only because the people who work at animal shelters, so many of them as volunteers, deserve a place there at life’s end.
At the Evanston Animal Shelter I met one of them, a volunteer named Christine Garvey. She walked me round the back where the cats, sitting in small individual cages, were sheltered. I was taken straightaway by another calico, sitting in her cage with what seemed to me stoical patience. Ms. Garvey brought her out to what was, in effect, a visitor’s room, for me to inspect her. The cat, whose name was Dolores, had short legs, a rich thick coat, and a figure that was, to borrow from the Yiddish for curvaceous women, zaftig, without in Dolores’s case the sensuous part. We spent 10 or so minutes alone, Dolores and I, just long enough for me to note how different, physically and temperamentally, she was from the lithe and lively Hermione. I left without committing myself.
On my second visit to the shelter I decided that Dolores was the cat for me. She was eight years old and thus not in great demand, for most people want kittens. All that is known of her history is that her previous owner left her one night in her carrier at the door of the shelter. I neglected to ask how long she had been confined in her cage at the shelter.
The first change in Dolores’s life once she arrived at our apartment was, at my wife’s sensible suggestion, a name change. The too-dolorous name of Dolores was changed to Dolly. Much better. The two, wife and pussycat, hit it off immediately. “Sisterhood,” as I have noted innumerable times seeing them companionly seated on the couch together, “is powerful.” Dolly, a middle-age cat, turned out to be in every way the perfect fit for two beyond middle-age people.
When visitors remark on Dolly’s girth, I tell them that she is “one of those fat cats from city hall.” Owing to her amplitude, she doesn’t jump any higher than our couches or our bed. A favorite spot of hers is the top of one of our couches, from where she can view the outside world, though she is otherwise curiously incurious. She spends most evenings between us on this same couch, napping and tolerating our stroking her as various English detectives work on complicated cases on the television set before the three of us. Her influence is becalming.
In the early morning, once I settle into my chair with tea and toast and a book, Dolly comes round, signals her wish to be lifted onto my lap, and takes a 20-or-so-minute petting as we both look out onto the darkened street below. I think of various writing projects I have before me, she of—who knows?—the jungle she has never known, her good fortune at being out of the cage at the shelter, the strange gray-haired creature in his pajamas who doesn’t seem to tire of petting her.
All Dolly’s days are the same: beginning on the lap of the gray-haired guy, a six-or-seven-minute brushing, five morning cat treats, a bowl of ice water and another of dry food to snack on throughout the day, naps, countless naps, sometimes broken up with a brief workout with cat toys, until the day ends with five more cat treats, and then off to bed to sleep near her sorority sister, as I have come to think of my wife. She’s been with us 19 months now, Dolly, and in her quiet way has so perfectly insinuated herself among us that life without her wouldn’t seem anywhere near so pleasant. “So take her wrap, fellas / Find her an empty lap, fellas / Dolly’s never goin’ away again.”