milling around our legs. Peeling the pull-tab covers off the food, Rik knelt down and fed the cats behind the counter, giving them a can each. Taking a cue from my worker, I picked up a couple of the small tins of food and carried them to the back room…but the kittens had already left, to sit vigil in front of the rows of children’s books along the back wall of the store.
Directly in front of that children’s dictionary—
“Well if you two like it so much, it’s yours,” I said, sliding it off the shelf, and using it as a tray to carry the cans of food into the back room. I did feel guilty about not buying them any cat toys, and after Rik had bought all four cats breakfast, my guilt more than doubled. The kittens happily ate out of the opened cans, and while they noisily attacked the food, I placed “their” book next to their bedding…which was softly indented in two spots, one covered with white and black fur, the other a soft ombré of brown, tan and orange.
Glancing around the rest of the room, I didn’t see any shredded paper, nor were there any claw marks on the sides of the cardboard boxes, so I found myself saying, “If you two did come from a lab, you must be used to things being clean…just keep it that way, ok?”
I was sure the kittens only lifted their heads from their food to catch a breath of air between bits of food.…
The kittens, Rik and I settled into a new routine over the next few weeks; he’d stop by the store before it opened, to check on the Hemingway kittens, as we’d both taken to calling them, then meet me coming in as he was going out. Rik would return in the afternoon, allowing me time with the kittens—Mittens was slow to come around, far more so than Scooter, but I soon found that she loved the nesting cats…so much so that one morning I found all the solid core figures, kittens and mice alike, nestled next to her side of the blanket she and Scooter shared. Thinking that she might be getting ready to go into heat, I gently checked her teeth, but none of her adult fangs were anywhere near ready to drop down yet. Scooter’s fangs were just beginning to bud out, swelling his gum-line, so I called the vet clinic to set up a neutering appointment for him, which was scheduled for three weeks from that day.
But Rik wouldn’t have it—
“Neuter a cat like Scooter? With his smarts? And all that personality? How could you take something like that out of the gene pool?” For a college boy, he could be terribly obtuse; without trying to come across like an out-of-it old nagger, I tried to explain, “But you can see yourself that he’s defective…those paws, and that kinked tail. I’ve looked it up in all the cat books we have here—those are mutant traits. Not desirable in the least. Besides, millions of kittens are born every day…why add more to the mix?”
That narrow worry-line appeared on his forehead again, as he began patting the head of my pencil-holder cat, his rings clanging against the smooth ceramic. “But those kittens aren’t wanted…Scooter’s would be. How about we start letting the customers see him, and Mittens, to create a demand? Nothing like a pair of literary kittens to bring attention to a bookstore—”
I still wasn’t sure about letting the people see the Hemingway kittens; I was used to seeing their strange paws, but not everyone was into cats with large mitten feet. Glancing around the cat-print covered walls of my shop, I noticed that Susan Herbert and Mr. Wysocki didn’t choose to use polydactyl cats in their paintings, despite their human-like paws. To be honest, I wasn’t even sure if all my clients would realize what a Hemingway cat was…after all, Minnesota was, and still is, F. Scott Fitzgerald country.
It was almost as if Rik had read my mind, for he suddenly said, “Picture this…Scooter and Mittens in the window, with books by Hemingway and Fitzgerald, maybe even an opened copy of The Great Gatsby—it’s be a heck of a photo op, at the least. You now, free advertising.…”
College boy had me there. For more years than I cared to admit, I’d made do with a small weekly ad in the St. Paul Pioneer Press and the Star-Tribune, the cheapest one I could get, just enough to let readers know I was Out There. And while my “Barrett and Browning” cats attracted quite a bit of passer-by attention, I’d never been daring enough to try to create a window worthy of newspaper attention. I suppose it was being brought up during the age of Self-Praise-Stinks, the motto my parents drummed into my head almost from the cradle, but this was the Information Age, and I realized that Rik’s idea was a good one.…
It took a little coaxing to lure Oscar and April out of “their” window (plus the small canister of cat treats Rik bought helped), but Scooter and Mittens seemed to instinctively understand what was wanted of them.
Rik had done some searching on the Internet and found some pictures of the descendants of the real Hemingway cats which he downloaded and printed out in color, and I’d found some art-quality prints of both authors, which I mounted on poster-board. I knew the sunlight would bleach out all the pictures within a few weeks or less, but I didn’t plan to keep this particular display up all that long—Rik promised me that a friend of his who worked at one of the papers would just “happen by” and take a photo of the new window display, and just as Rik had managed to “find” me some new store-cats within hours of my asking about them, he made sure that his friend came through for me.
He photo ran on the front page of the Metro section of the Pioneer Press by the end of the week. A generous four-by-six color picture, showing the bottom half of the sign above the window, and all of the display itself.
Surrounded by easel-propped photos of the Florida Hemingway cats, and the prints of Ernest and F. Scott, Mittens and Scooter were lying before an opened copy of Gatsby, their distinctive mitten feet resting on the exposed pages, their heads cocked at quizzical angles as they “read” the words before them. The caption read, “Hemingway-0, Fitzgerald-2”. The rivalry between those two gentlemen may have been decades old, but judging by the reaction that photo generated, feelings for Hemingway and Fitzgerald still ran as fervent and deep as the on-going Packer-Vikings brou-ha-ha. Every copy of anything written by either of the two authors sold out within a couple of days, and when Rik and I weren’t waiting on customers, we were supervising photo ops with the kittens and cat-lovers who couldn’t wait to have their picture taken with one of the Hemingway kittens.
Since neither of the kittens displayed a penchant for ripping or shredding book spines, or honing their many claws on the edges of the shelves, we’d taken to leaving them out during the night…although with all the increased attention Barrett and Browning was enjoying lately, I did have qualms about letting people see the kittens at all hours—
“—suppose someone tries to break the window, and take them?”
“This is a low crime neighborhood…and that window is double-paned. Would take a lot of effort and make a lot of noise to break it. Besides, I think the kittens would be smart enough to make a run for it if anyone was after them—”
“There’s a difference between being personable and smart, Rik…look how they let anyone hold them. I just don’t know—”
“Did anyone try to get at Oscar and April? They’re just as good-looking, and personable—”
“They’re also fixed,” I reminded him, “While these two—” I cocked my head in the direction of the window, where Scooter and Mittens were busy “reading” an old opened hardbound copy of A Farewell to Arms “—aren’t. Although half that problem will be solved in a few days.”
Rik didn’t say anything, but that fine line appeared between his dark eyes again. Down one of the aisles, I heard the unmistakable sound of cat spray hitting something hard, and hurried to see what Oscar was doing, yelling “Bad cat! Bad-bad-bad!” There was a tell-tale puddle on the worn floorboards near the rack of children’s books—Oscar
