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The cat that wasn’t there

KIPLING’S CAT:
A Memoir of My Father
By Anne Cabot Wyman
224 pp. Protean Press $24.95

Reviewed by Ruth Douillette

I had to keep reminding myself that Anne Cabot Wyman was no spring chicken when she wrote Kipling’s Cat, because from beginning to end she was a little girl who wanted her daddy. And she has reason.

Wyman is a professional, educated, well-travelled woman who stands solidly on her own two—probably at this point, arthritic—feet, and yet she craved and competed for paternal attention until her father’s death. Probably craves it still.

Consider the implication of the title, Kipling’s Cat, a reference to “The Cat Who Walked By Himself” in Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories.

... when the moon gets up and night comes, he is the Cat that walks by himself, and all places are alike to him. Then he goes out to the Wet Wild Woods or up the Wet Wild Trees or on the Wet Wild Roofs, waving his wild tail and walking by his wild lone.

“My father was just like that,” says Wyman, and through her eyes we watch her father saunter away, twitching his tail in her face. Repeatedly.

Her father, Jeffries Wyman, born in 1901, was a Harvard educated scientist who, along with his work in thermodynamics and mathematics, made a significant contribution to our understanding of hemoglobin, which led to a new branch of biochemistry—allostery.

He was a force, a presence, a Boston Brahmin who took the good life for granted during the years when Boston families “wintered” and “summered” in glamorous places. A painter and a poet by avocation, he was a man who let his emotions dissipate safely through his art. And he was a world traveler, “walking by his wild lone” across the continents until he died abroad in 1995, having spent the last forty years of his life there.

The author, who started as a reporter for the Boston Globe in 1961, became their chief editorialist, but before that she was a travel writer—wandering in the footsteps of her father, visiting the far-flung places he’d left his prints. Wyman was raised a blue-blooded child in a family whose surnames—Cabot, Wyman, Forbes—still resonate in Boston. There were private schools, sailing and music lessons, vacation homes, and servants. She lacked for nothing.

Then, when she was 13, her mother died of Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Almost immediately, her father left her and her brother in an aunt’s care and “went off on a ten-day walking trip in the Smoky Mountains of North Carolina.” Soon after, he took a leave of absence from Harvard to join the Navy, where he worked on smoke screens and sonar during WWII. Running from his grief, he left his children behind. Of the day her mother died, Wyman writes, “There was no time to grieve. It was the opening day of school. I went as though nothing had changed.” But, of course, everything had.

The relationship Wyman and her father shared is enigmatic— she felt abandoned, and yet, it could be said, her father was closer to her in many ways than fathers who share the family home. Her memoir cites more quality time spent with her father, more communication—written or otherwise—than most of us have with our parents. But it was his daily presence she craved. Wyman never felt she had the indefinable something—attention, affection, and acknowledgement—she sought. No doubt her father’s abandonment so soon after her mother’s death left an emotional crater too deep to be filled.

“I think Father, like Rudyard Kipling’s vanishing cat, hoped to elude us all... .” Wyman, determined not to be left behind, spent her life seeking her father’s attention. She wanted to “follow his trail, find out who he was and understand how he shaped my life.” Perhaps this is no different from what any child wants, although most don’t have to travel to the ends of the earth to discover the man who gave them life. In the end, she became like her father both in personality and lifestyle; it’s one way—maybe the only way—she can hold him close.

There is something a bit surreal when reading memoir—a life reduced to 200 pages, memories admittedly faded, hindsight freely allowed, a father who, encapsulated in a daughter’s words and perceptions, might look entirely different through other eyes—his son’s, one of his three wives, his colleagues’. But this is Wyman’s truth. There is judgment, but there is also acceptance. And much love with the hurt. Few tears seems to have been shed—anger, petulance, and fiery temper were Wyman’s method of coping with the “disconcerting sense that [her] own needs were rarely seen or heard.”

There is the sense upon closing the book that, all told, Wyman had a solid relationship with a father, who, while physically distant, gave her more than she is yet able to see. “On the whole, I think he taught us well, “ she concludes.

Still the mind can’t accept what the heart doesn’t feel. And is it not the heart where truth resides?

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Ruth Douillette retired after 35 years as a middle school teacher, and now freelances as a writer and photographer. Her essays have been published in the Christian Science Monitor, Cup of Comfort, Chicken Soup for the Soul, and Under Our Skin, an anthology about breast cancer. Her photography has been featured in flashquake's gallery of art. Ruth is a member of the National Book Critics Circle. For a sample of her writing and photography, visit Upstream and Down~.

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