Eventually Selesta’s parents moved to Hoboken, New Jersey, she started school, and our Monday afternoons and the adventures of the store cats were no more.
It was a few years later, when she was eight or nine, that Selesta first asked me how her mother and I had become friends. It was the Wednesday after her birthday and I’d just taken her to see a matinee performance of Cats on Broadway. That had been her wish, and her mother had no objection.
The kick in taking a kid to the theater is seeing and sharing her unbridled wonder. Afterward we discussed the show and let the crowd carry us to the Times Square subway station. I noticed that Selesta now had her mother’s green eyes flecked with gold.
“My favorite part was the end where the cat goes up to heaven,” she said.
“On the old rubber tire,” I replied. “That’s the way it always happens with cats.”
“My mother says she has allergies so I can’t have a cat or dog.”
This sudden swerve in our conversation took me by surprise. “She is allergic, honey,” I said automatically and immediately regretted it. Kids are uncanny. Selesta knew I had lied, just as she suspected that her mother was lying.
She followed it up by saying, “Once when I was little you told me you and Mommy lived in a house with a mystery cat. Like Macavity in the show.”
Macavity, the villain of the musical, seemed to me too over-the-top to be very scary. The animal Selesta referred to had been very quiet and quite real.
“That was long before you were born or even thought of,” I said as the matinee crowds carried us down the subway stairs.
It bothered me that I had no recollection of ever having told her about the cat or about Anise’s Place on East Tenth Street. That was the semi-crash pad where her mother, Joan Mata, and
I first met back in those legendary times, the late 1960s.
“What was the cat’s name?”
By then we were waiting amid a crowd of commuters at 33rd Street for the PATH train to Hoboken. I began the story, and as I did, she listened with exactly the same rapt expression she’d had at the show.
“He was called Trebizon. That was an ancient city far away on the Black Sea. Anise, his owner, was a lady who had started to get a doctorate in history before she became a hippie and decided to let a bunch of people come live with her.”
“You and my mother were hippies!” The idea amused her.
“I guess I was. You’d have to ask your mother if she was.” Back then, my foothold in the city had been fragile. A stupid romantic quarrel, the kind a young man has at twenty-one, had put me out of the place where I’d been living and sent me crashing at Anise’s. But I didn’t go into that.
“What was Trebizon like?”
“He was a big old orange cat who seemed very smart.” I didn’t tell her that the people living in that neighborhood and in that apartment had achieved a really rarefied degree of psychic awareness and mind expansion. Apparently Trebizon shared this.
“It seemed he always had a favorite. When I first came to stay there, he spent every night on the chest of a very quiet stranger, a kid from the South who slept on the living room couch. Anise joked that the cat had adopted him.
“All of a sudden, every time a newcomer entered the apartment, the cat would get off his chest and sit and watch. The kid would take off all his clothes, kneel down on the floor in front of the new arrival, and kiss his or her feet.”
“He kissed your feet?” She was amused.
“It was creepy and embarrassing. But I noticed other people were pleased when it happened. Like they said to themselves, Finally, people are kissing my feet. I also saw that Trebizon acted like an owner whose pet had done a clever trick.
“I guess word got back to the kid’s family. Because one day his parents appeared and took him home.”
“What did Trebizon do?”
“Found someone else who lived there, a dreamy kind of girl who was studying to be a dancer. The cat slept beside her in this bed in a little alcove near the kitchen. We called her the Flower Girl because she brought home the single roses that gypsy ladies sold in bars and little sprays of lilies of the valley, potted geraniums.
“Then it escalated. She began coming in with bridal bouquets, with boxes of red carnations, huge bunches of violets. The crash pad began to look like a funeral parlor. Trebizon prowled among them, chewed the ferns, and batted the petals that fell to the floor.
“The Flower Girl started to look furtive, haunted. One time she came home with two shopping bags full of yellow daffodils. Another time it was orchids. Stuff she’d probably stolen. She’d put them on the floor around her bed, and Trebizon would lie there like it was his altar.
“Eventually the police nabbed her as she was ripping off a bank of tulips from the Macy’s garden show. With her gone, Trebizon began to notice me.”
The train arrived right then, and we didn’t get seats. I held on to a pole, and Selesta held on to me. We sang scraps of the songs from Cats. She knew a lot of the lyrics. The other passengers pretended we weren’t there.
I hoped my goddaughter would forget what we’d been talking about. Telling the story had reminded me of what it had been like to be young and confused and with no place to hide when a demon closes in.
But as soon as we hit the platform of Hoboken terminal Selesta asked, “Where was my mother when the cat came after you?”
Hoboken twenty years ago was still such a compact, old-fashioned, working-class city that in my memory it’s all black and white like an old newsreel. We walked from the station to Newark Street, where a sign in the shape of a giant hand pointed its finger at the Clam Broth House.
On the way, I told Selesta, “Right when the cat began to stalk me was when your mother appeared. Trebizon sat in the doorway of the room where I slept and stared at me. I had no other place to go and I sat on my bed, wondering what I was going to do.
“Then I looked up and there was this girl a little older than me, wearing the shortest miniskirt in the world. She put her bags in the alcove where the Flower Girl had stayed. Her name was Joan Mata. She looked taller than she was, and she had amazing eyes — green and gold like yours. Your mother had been in Europe for the summer. She and Anise had met at Columbia, and she knew Trebizon from back then.
“I didn’t even have to tell her what was happening. She gave one look at Trebizon, and he ran and hid in the kitchen.”
What Joan had actually done was let out a low growl. Trebizon’s reaction was like that of the cobbler’s cat and the deli cat when Mimi was carried past. His nose and ears twitched; he looked around, scared and confused, like he sensed a cat but couldn’t see one.
Trebizon never came back out of that kitchen. Anise knew something was wrong, but she and the cat were both a bit afraid of Joan.
“Why didn’t Trebizon make my mother allergic?” Selesta asked suddenly.
Before I could think of a reply, a voice said, “The allergies developed later, honey.” Joan Mata stood smiling at the front entrance of the sprawling block-long maze of dining rooms that was the Clam Broth House.
Joan was a designer. She was married to Selesta’s father, the architect Frank Gallen. He was out of town. Their town house was like a showcase for his work and hers. Some part of it was always being rebuilt or redesigned. That week it was the kitchen.
So we ate at the restaurant, which Selesta always loved. The three of us were seated. When Joan put on her glasses to glance at a menu, they seemed to alight on her face for a moment. Like a butterfly.