The Little Friend

Edie was good with animals, and she often thought that she would have made an excellent veterinarian or even a doctor if girls had done such things in her day. She had nursed all sorts of kittens and puppies to health, raised baby birds fallen from the nest, and cleaned the wounds and set the broken bones of all manner of hurt creatures. The children knew this—not only her grandchildren, but all the children in the neighborhood—and brought to her not only their own sick pets but any pitiful little strays or wild things they happened to find.

But, fond as she was of animals, Edie was not sentimental about them. Nor, as she reminded the children, was she a miracle worker. After brisk examination of the cat—who indeed appeared listless, but had nothing obviously wrong with it—she had stood up and dusted her hands on her skirt while her granddaughters looked hopefully on.

“How old is this cat, anyway?” she asked them.

“Sixteen and a half,” said Harriet.

Edie bent down to stroke the poor thing, which was leaning against the table leg with a wild, miserable look in its eye. She was fond of the cat herself. It had been Robin’s kitty. He had found it lying on the hot sidewalk in the summertime—half dead, its eyes hardly open—and had brought it to her, gingerly, in his cupped palms. Edie had had a devil of a time saving it. A knot of maggots had eaten a hole in its side and she still remembered how meekly and uncomplainingly the little thing had lain while she washed the wound out, in a shallow basin of lukewarm water, and how pink the water was when she finished.

“He’ll be all right, won’t he, Edie?” said Allison, who was even then close to tears. The cat was her best friend. After Robin died, it had taken up with her; it followed her around, brought her little presents it had stolen or killed (dead birds; tasty bits of garbage; once—mysteriously—an unopened package of oatmeal cookies); and ever since Allison started school, it had scratched on the back door every afternoon at two-forty-five asking to be let out so that it could walk down to the corner to meet her.

Allison, in turn, lavished more affection on the cat than on any other living creature, including the members of her own family. She talked to it constantly, fed it pinches of chicken and ham from her own plate, and allowed it to sleep with its stomach draped over her throat at night.

“Probably he ate something that didn’t agree with him,” said Harriet.

“We’ll see,” Edie said.

But the following days confirmed her suspicion. There was nothing wrong with the cat. It was just old. She offered it tuna fish, and milk from an eyedropper, but the cat only closed its eyes and spat out the milk in an ugly froth between its teeth. The morning before, while the children were at school, she had come into the kitchen to find it twitching in a kind of fit, and she had wrapped it in a towel and taken it to the vet.

When the girls stopped by her house that afternoon she told them: “I’m sorry, but there’s nothing I can do. I took the cat to Dr. Clark this morning. He says we’ll have to put him to sleep.”

Harriet—surprisingly, for she was quite capable of flying off the handle when she felt like it—had taken the news with relative equanimity. “Poor old Weenie,” she had said, kneeling by the cat’s box. “Poor kitty.” And she laid her hand on the cat’s heaving flank. She loved the cat nearly as much as Allison did, though it paid little attention to her.

But Allison had turned pale. “What do you mean, put him to sleep?”

“I mean what I say.”

“You can’t do that. I won’t let you.”

“There’s nothing more we can do for him,” said Edie sharply. “The vet knows best.”

“I won’t let you kill him.”

“What do you want to do? Prolong the poor thing’s suffering?”

Allison, lip trembling, dropped to her knees by the cat’s box and burst into hysterical tears.

That had been yesterday afternoon at three o’clock. Since then, Allison had not moved from the cat’s side. She had eaten no supper; she had refused pillow and blanket; she had simply lain all night on the cold floor wailing and crying. Edie, for about half an hour, had sat in the kitchen with her and attempted to deliver a brisk little talk about how everything in the world died and how Allison must learn to accept this. But Allison had only cried harder; and finally Edie had given it up and gone in her bedroom and shut the door and started an Agatha Christie novel.

At last—about midnight, by Edie’s bedside clock—the crying had stopped. Now she was at it again. Edie took a sip of her tea. Harriet was deeply absorbed in Captain Scott. Across the table, Allison’s breakfast stood untouched.

“Allison,” Edie said.

Allison, shoulders shaking, did not respond.

“Allison. Get over here and eat your breakfast.” It was the third time she had said it.

“I’m not hungry,” came the muffled reply.