Charles Dickens liked cats.

In fact, the great Victorian novelist loved his cat Bob so much that when the kitty died, Dickens saved one of the paws, had it stuffed and then glued to an ivory blade, creating a memorable letter opener that is now on display in a museum.

Really.

In the 1960s, we weren’t a big pet family. Maybe it’s because we moved so often. Maybe it was so Mom could recover from birthing three babies in four years.

I was stunned when Mom said okay to a pair of gerbils when I was in junior high school. Harriet and Dozy didn’t last much longer than a year, though. Harriet (named for Harriet the Spy) was an aggressive dame; she regularly escaped their aquarium home and roamed the house inside the baseboard heating system. Her common-law husband was smaller and didn’t share Harriet’s wanderlust. Once, though, he saw Harriet on the loose from my bed and squeaked at her. By morning, she’d returned – on her own – to their home. True love.

By summer vacation in 1972, Harriet and Dozy were buried out in the back yard. There was soon another pet on our doorstep.

Literally.

But Mom was having none of it:

The Cat Can’t Have A Name

Boys like cats I judged, as the long afternoon
stretched out, holding the two of them together –
ginger boy and cat; the one awake and guarding
solemnly the other sleeping in the sun. Adoption
pleas surround me like a fence, and even though
I have no love for cats I do like animals; but
I resist, and painfully. The green eyes hunt
me out as well and I am prematurely opening
our tins of fish and chicken and calling to the
children to keep the cat out of the street: Cat
I call her, because although I know the perfect
name the cat can’t have a name, not now.
~ Joan Vayo August 30, 1972

The cat (it turned out she was a he) claimed us, not the other way around. And it was surprising (to me, anyway) who named the ginger kitty.

“Will somebody get Nicodemus down out of the tree?!” Dad hollered. “If we’re going to have a cat, we’ve got to take care of him!”

And so, the marmalade cat received a biblical name.

According to the Gospel of John, Nicodemus helped lower Jesus off the cross and prepare him for burial.

Nicky was a big hit with us all. Dad still managed to assert himself by bellowing, “Get that damn cat off the couch!” But we also caught him scratching the purring feline behind his ears and sharing a bite of tuna.

“Your father’s a big softie,” Mom would whisper to me with a conspiratorial wink.

The summer of 1973, we learned Dad had accepted a new job and we were going to move from Connecticut to Indiana in September. Mom assured us she would pick up a suitable cage for transporting Nicodemus during the long drive.

The vet also gave mom some kitty valium pills. I’m not sure we ever got Nick to swallow any, but maybe we should have offered them to Dad.

As we pulled out of the drive for the nearly thousand-mile trek, I whined to Mom that the vet should have provided us with a more rugged cage. She assured me the carrier – the cardboard carrier – nestled among suitcases in the back of our station wagon would be just fine for the trip.

If ever there was a time I wish I’d been wrong, it was then.

We weren’t even a mile from home when Nick’s paw poked through one of the airholes. Then – click! – out came his claws (okay, I may have imagined that sound effect). With claws fully extended, Nicky swiftly lowered his paw, tearing through the cardboard, top to bottom.

After a few minutes of panic and more than a few “damn cat” paternal proclamations from the front seat, I managed to wrap Nick in a comforter and hold him soothingly on my lap. Poor Dad, we were seated directly behind him, so it was hard for him to trust that the back of his head was safe from those claws.

With each kitty noise over the rest of the two-day trip, Dad flinched and barked, “Is that cat loose? You’ve got a tight hold of that cat, right?”

It was a long, long drive.

A few weeks after we settled into our new home in Carmel, Indiana, Nicky didn’t come home for supper. He was an indoor/outdoor cat and seemed to enjoy exploring his new environs.

“There you are, Nicky – we were getting worried about you!” I let him in the front door and he walked a few slow steps and then flopped down on his side. A pool of blood formed under his tail.

Dad came running when I called for him. He comforted Nicky while Mom ran to a neighbor’s house to ask how to reach a vet so late in the evening.

This was the only time I ever saw my dad cry. The long move to a different part of the country, his oldest child left behind to start college in Massachusetts, and now a terribly injured cat.

It was just too much.

Sadly, the vet’s best efforts couldn’t save our Nicodemus. We buried him in our backyard, which had just been seeded.

A year or two later, a friend at school asked our group if anyone was interested in taking home one of their kittens.

Thanks to precious memories of Nicodemus, the answer was yes. I picked out another ginger.

My memories of Pierre are sparse. I prepared to head off to college soon after he arrived. A year later Dad, Mom, and Bill moved back to Connecticut. Pierre le chat lived a long and well-loved life.

Years later, I found this eulogy Dad wrote for Pierre and tucked away:

According to TheGreatCat.org, Charles Dickens had another – nameless – cat companion who would extinguish the candle when the author fell asleep reading at night. Apparently, though, “the master’s cat” sometimes just wanted attention and found extinguishing the candle was bothersome to Dickens, but did the trick. He was, perhaps, the best of felines and the worst of felines.

“The Cat Can’t Have A Name” © 1972 Joan Vayo. All rights reserved.

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