Marie Taylor, Ink

Back in the old days, if families had trouble making ends meet, they might take in a border or two who would rent a bedroom and take meals with the family. When I was a little girl, we had two borders who lived with us. Both were Italian, of course, middle-aged bachelors who had steady jobs at the local steel mill, and didn’t drink, smoke or gamble to excess.

The older of the two was named Rocco. He was a short, square, silent man with fair skin, reddish hair, and a huge handlebar moustache. His room was the small one at the top of the stairs. It was seven feet wide and ten feet long, just enough room for a single bed and small dresser.

While he slept in the bedroom, Rocco’s preferred location was the back half of the cellar. I remember going down the rickety stairs, tiptoeing past the old coal furnace that sat like demonic Buddha, and peeking into his sanctuary. There Rocco would sit on a wooden rocking chair beside a scarred wooden table. The only light was a metal floor lamp with a stained yellow shade.

Rocco had a retiring disposition and no inclination towards society. He never shared a meal with us; instead, he preferred to cook for himself on the old cellar stove that my mother often used during the humid Pennsylvania summers. When Rocco cooked, he always shared his meal with a cat, a big orange tiger that mirrored his coloring and disposition.

Rocco revealed an interesting sidelight to his own history by naming the cat Garibaldi, a leader of the nationalist party in the struggle for Italian unification. Why did the short, silent, red-haired laborer name his equally taciturn cat after a firebrand revolutionary, I speculated in later years.

I loved this animal with the passion that little girls reserve for large, orange cats with long whiskers and difficult-to-pronounce names. In fact, I could not call him by his proper name, Garibaldi, and had to resort to calling him Kittybald. He shared his master’s aloof reserve, but this did not deter me. It lit a fire in me to make Kittybald my own.

My favorite pastime at that age was playing with dolls, and I had my own little baby buggy with the fold-down top. After dressing my dolls in their most beautiful clothes I would take them for rides in the buggy up and down the sidewalk around the house.

Since I didn’t have any brothers or sisters, and since there were no neighborhood children my age, Kittybald, by default, became my best, indeed, my only friend. My new game was playing dolls with Kittybald.

I would capture that elusive cat when he was sleeping, dress him up in doll clothes and after tucking him under the covers, take him for rides in my baby buggy. He never shared my enthusiasm. When he saw me coming with the buggy, he would bolt across the yard, dive into the garden, zig through the forest of staked tomatoes, zag between the peppers and zucchini, then wiggle out under the privet hedge.

One day that he zigged when he should have zagged and I caught him by his rear legs just as he was slipping through the hedge. I reeled him back in like a tuna on a line while his front claws made furrows in the dirt. But no matter how clumsily I handled him, Kittybald never scratched me.

Kittybald loved to sleep in the sun on the banister of the back porch. One day I watched him catnapping and before you knew it, he had fallen off the edge into the bushes four feet below. As I peered over the bannister to see if he was all right, he gave me a most indignant stare, apparently blaming me for his fall from grace, and with a swish of his tail, stalked off.

When my father got a job as a bartender at the Sunrise Inn, we didn’t need two borders anymore. So, it was decided that Rocco would move over to Mrs. Baggiocci’s house as one of her lodgers had moved away. It didn’t take long for Rocco to pack his two cardboard suitcases.

The same day that he left, Kittybald disappeared. He didn’t go with Rocco because Mrs. Baggocci didn’t like cats. Days later, I saw Kittybald in our alley, but he didn’t come when I called him. I cried so much that my mother finally asked Rocco to come over and see if he could coax the cat home.

He came when Rocco called him, but after he left, Kittybald disappeared again. No matter how hard I looked or how much I called him, I never saw him again — or Rocco either, for that matter. Since then I’ve had a particular fondness for large orange cats with long whiskers and hard-to-pronounce names.