Was it my imagination, or did my mother hum as she revolved the handle, like some primitive, repetitive musical instrument? She emptied one gelatinous cylinder of cat food after another into the set of old cake tins that served the cats as dinnerware on the cement back porch. Feeding these half-feral animals amused and pleased her—quite improperly, I thought. Their mounting numbers seemed to me a disaster, which grew worse every time I paid a filial visit, in spite of the merciful inroads of various feline diseases and occasional interventionary blasts from the shotguns of interested neighbors. Some neighbors threatened to report her to the humane society, and others, furtively, dropped off unwanted kittens in the night.

Being my mother’s son, I could follow her reasoning right into this quagmire. If you didn’t feed the cats, they would eat all the birds. She loved birds, that was why she had begun to feed the cats. Sitting right in the house with its closed windows, talking away on the sofa, she would cock her head and say, “The towhee is upset about something,” or, “The mockingbird is telling a joke,” or, at night, coming into my room in her white nightgown, her eyes going wide as if scaring a child, “Listen to Mr. Whipporwill.”

In deference to my asthmatic tendencies she had never let the cats in the house, but on the day after she died they could hear me through the screen door as I churned away with the can opener. I spoke aloud to them, much as she had. “I know, I know,” I said. “You’re ravenous. The lady who used to feed you is dead. I’m just her son, her only child. I don’t live here, I live in New Jersey, I teach Eurolit at Rutgers, I have a four-bedroom house, an elegant wife called Evelyn, and two grown children, one of them with a child of her own. I don’t want to be here, I never did. And if you can think of a better place, go to it, because, my fine feline friends, the dole is ending. The cat food is down to its last case, and I’m here for just two more days. What are you going to do then? Beats me—it’s a real problem, frankly. Well, you shouldn’t have gotten sucked into the system.”