Lost Cat

Caesar and his sister Natalia are now twelve and sixteen respectively. When we met them in 2002, they were six and ten. We met him first. We met him through the Fresh Air Fund, an organization that brings poor urban children (nearly all of whom are black or Hispanic) up by bus to stay with country families (nearly all of whom are white). The Fresh Air Fund is an organization with an aura of uplift and hope about it, but its project is a difficult one that frankly reeks of pain. In addition to Caesar, we also hosted another little boy, a seven-year-old named Ezekiel. Imagine that you are six or seven years old and that you are taken to a huge city bus terminal, herded on to buses with dozens of other kids, all of you with big name tags hung around your neck, driven for three hours to a completely foreign place, and presented to total strangers with whom you are going to live for two weeks. Add that these total strangers, even if they are not rich, have materially more than you could ever dream of, that they are much bigger than you and, since you are staying in their house, you are supposed to obey them. Add that they are white as sheets. Realize that even very young black children have often learned that white people are essentially the enemy. Wonder: who in God’s name thought this was a good idea?

And here is one more element to consider: we wanted to love these children. I fantasized about serving them meals, reading to them at night, tucking them in. Peter fantasized about sports on the lawn, riding bikes together. We were aware of the race-class thing. But we thought we could override it. You could say we were idealistic. You could say we were selfish and stupid. I don’t know what we were.

We were actually only supposed to have one, and that one was Ezekiel. We got Caesar because the FAF called from the bus as it was on its way up full of kids and told us that his host family had pulled out at the last minute due to a death in the family, so could we take him? We said yes because we were worried about how we were going to entertain a single child with no available playmates; I made the FAF representative promise that if it didn’t work out, she would find a backup plan. Of course it didn’t work out. Of course there was no backup plan. The kids hated each other, or, more precisely, Ezekiel hated Caesar. Caesar was younger and more vulnerable in every way: less confident, less verbal, possessed of no athletic skills. Ezekiel was lithe, with muscular limbs and an ungiving facial symmetry that sometimes made his naturally expressive face cold and mask-like. Caesar was big and plump, with deep eyes and soft features that were so generous they seemed nearly smudged at the edges. Ezekiel was a clever bully, merciless in his teasing, and Caesar could only respond by ineptly blustering, ‘Ima fuck you up!’

‘Look,’ I said, ‘you guys don’t have to like each other, but you have to get along. Deep down, don’t you want to get along?’

‘No!’ they screamed.

‘He’s ugly!’ added Ezekiel.

‘Dry up Ezekiel,’ I said. ‘We’re all ugly, okay?’

‘Yeah,’ said Caesar, liking this idea very much. ‘We’re all ugly!’

‘No,’ said Ezekiel, his voice dripping with malice, ‘you’re ugly.’

‘Try again,’ I said. ‘Can you get along?’

‘Okay,’ said Caesar. ‘I’ll get along with you Ezekiel.’ And you could hear his gentle, generous nature in his voice. You could hear it, actually, even when he said, ‘Ima fuck you up!’ Gentleness sometimes expresses itself with the violence of pain or fear and so looks like aggression. Sometimes cruelty has a very charming smile.

‘No,’ said Ezekiel, smiling. ‘I hate you.’

Caesar dropped his eyes.

*

I don’t mean to suggest that while I was in Italy I was heartbroken about the children. I didn’t yet realize how much I had to be heartbroken about. I sent them postcards; I bought them little gifts. We were in Florence for a week. It was beautiful, but crowded and hot, and I was too full of sadness and confusion to enjoy myself. Nearly every day I pestered the vet, calling to see how Gattino was. ‘He’s fine,’ they said. ‘The dog isn’t there any more. Your cat is playing.’ I wasn’t assuaged. I had nightmares; I had a nightmare that I had put my kitten into a burning oven, and then watched him hopelessly try to protect himself by curling into a ball; I screamed in pain to see it, but could not undo my action.

Peter preferred Ezekiel and Caesar knew it. I much preferred Caesar, but we had made our original commitment to Ezekiel and to his mother, whom we had spoken with on the phone. So I called the FAF representative and asked her if she could find another host family for Caesar. ‘Oh great,’ she snapped. But she did come up with a place. It sounded good: a single woman, a former schoolteacher, experienced host of a boy she described as responsible and kind, not a bully. ‘But don’t tell him he’s going anywhere else,’ she said. ‘I’ll just pick him up and tell him he’s going to a pizza party. You can bring his stuff over later.’

‘Okay,’ I said, and then promptly took him out to a park to tell him. I said, ‘You don’t like Ezekiel, do you?’ and he said, ‘No, I hate him.’ I asked if he would like to go stay at a house with another boy who would be nice to him, where they would have a pool and— ‘No,’ he said. ‘I want to stay with you and Peter.’ I couldn’t believe it – I did not realize how attached he had become. But he was adamant. We had the conversation three times, and none of those times did I tell him he had no choice. I pushed him on the swing set and he cried, ‘Mary! Mary! Mary!’ And then I took him home and betrayed him.

Peter told Ezekiel to go into the other room and we sat Caesar down and told him he was leaving. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Send the other boy away.’

Ezekiel came into the room.

‘Send him away!’ cried Caesar.

‘Ha ha,’ said Ezekiel, ‘you go away!’

The FAF woman arrived. I told her what was happening. She said, ‘Why don’t you just let me handle this.’ And she did. She said, ‘Okay, Caesar, it’s like this. You were supposed to go stay with another family but then somebody in that family died and you couldn’t go there.’

‘Somebody died?’ asked Caesar.

‘Yes, and Peter and Mary were kind enough to let you come stay with them for a little while and now it’s time to—’

‘I want to stay here!’ Caesar screamed and clung to the mattress.

‘Caesar,’ said the FAF woman. ‘I talked to your mother. She wants you to go.’

Caesar lifted his face and looked at her for a searching moment. ‘Lady,’ he said calmly, ‘you a liar.’ And she was. I’m sure of it. Caesar’s mother was almost impossible to get on the phone and she spoke no English.

This is probably why the FAF woman screamed, actually screamed, ‘How dare you call me a liar! Don’t you ever call an adult a liar!’

Caesar sobbed and crawled across the bed and clutched at the corner of the mattress; I crawled after him and tried to hold him. He cried, ‘You a liar too Mary!’ and I fell back in shame.

The FAF lady made a noble and transparently insincere offer. ‘Caesar,’ she said, ‘if you want, you can come stay with me and my family. We have a big farm and dogs and—’

He screamed, ‘I would never stay with you lady! You’re gross! Your whole family is gross!’

I smiled with pure admiration for the child.

The woman cried, ‘Oh I’m gross, am I!’ And he was taken down the stairs screaming, ‘They always send me away!’

Ezekiel darted around, actually blocking the exit at one point as if he did not want Caesar to be carried out, his body saying, please don’t do this, but his mouth spitefully whispering, ‘Ha ha! You go away! Ha ha!’

I walked outside and watched Peter carrying the sobbing little boy into the woman’s giant SUV. Behind me Ezekiel was dancing on the other side of the screen door, incoherently taunting me as he sobbed too, breathless with rage and remorse.

If gentleness can be brutish, cruelty can sometimes be so closely wound in with sensitivity and gentleness that the cruel one winds up deforming and humiliating his own soul. Animals are not capable of this. That is why it is so much easier to love an animal. Ezekiel loved animals; he was never cruel with them. Every time he entered the house, he greeted each of our cats with a special touch. Even the shy one, Tina, liked him and let him touch her. Caesar, on the other hand, was rough and disrespectful – and yet he wanted the cats to like him. One of the things he and Ezekiel fought about was which of them Peter’s cat Bitey liked more.