Harvey’s disappearance from Port De Lys' Pilsner neighborhood was the talk of the Friday after-work crowd at Hadley’s Cork Off. The conversation was dominated by worrisome wine bar speculation about Harvey's whereabouts, his absence now into a second month, his many adoring friends and admirers wondering aloud, "Where could the old boy be?"

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They could not understand what could be behind his straying, Pilsner being a place which had become a feline nirvana,  especially for so striking a cat as Harvey, duded up as he was with bright white jump suit, charcoal gray cap, matching boots and sauntering stride.

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For most of its history and until recent years, Pilsner had been a quiet, gritty, industrial district near the riverfront of "the old smokestack city" – dog eat dog, even for cats. It was named for the local brewery that produced what was reputed to be the most diluted, budget beer in America.

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“Drink Pilsner, pocket change” was its slogan.

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Nearly everything in the neighborhood, except the local brew, had been cleaned up and gentrified over the past decade. Thick mortar joined old brick with new money. Old row houses, warehouses and long shuttered machine shops were transformed into luxury brownstones and artist lofts, some reborn as $$$ eateries, and, yes, a wine bar. Harvey thus lived a soft life of carefree movement, amid a camouflage of the cash rich urban comfort and tenderhearted millennials and retirees whose trash pails were filled with gourmet scraps.

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But it is a truth universally acknowledged that domestic cats have been endowed by their Creator with an unfettered prerogative to move about, move on and live where they please, as they please, for as long as they please.

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That’s the reality Whitmore Landon Stuart had come to accept. “Whilst,” as he was known to family and friends, was a Pilsner stalwart and Harvey’s main man. More than a decade had passed since Harvey made his Pilsner debut as a stray kitten. He appeared one evening at Whilst’s doorstep on Pilsner’s outskirts, and ever since laid claim to Whilst and Whilst’s family.

 

Whilst, as a young man, had formed an alliance with Annabelle Lang, a lean, lovely, cheerful lady of intellect, imagination and pedigree. Whilst and Annabelle had hippie sensibilities grounded in freedom. It was exemplified by their having never married, their believing that freedom is a product of daily commitment, and commitment is proved by actions not ceremonial pledges or promises. Simply put, they believed and they would say they didn't need marriage. Their partnership had proved durable, having reached and surpassed its thirtieth year and having produced a beloved child, a daughter, Frances, now grown with a partner of her own.

 

Harvey's first arrival on the scene coincided with Frances’s taking leave of the family home for college, and thenceforth returning only for brief visits. Harvey's companionship thus had filled a part of the void of Frances’s absence.

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Whilst, already a quiet man, had become withdrawn over the weeks without Harvey in his life. He was retired as chief actuary for Continental Accident and Life. Unlike the Hadley's crowd, Whilst by his nature and experience interrogated Harvey’s disappearance with rigorous empiricism.

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Here’s what cheered Whilst: the feline mortality and morbidity data show that cats almost always find their way back unassisted. They aren’t lost and they aren’t found. They aren’t rescued, and they seldom turn up in shelters. They come home on their own, when they want and if they haven’t decided to settle elsewhere.

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There was more. The literature showed that most mixed-breed cats live out nine lives and then some. The incidence of run-aways who stay away also is comparatively rare. Few cats elope long term from stable domestic situations. When they go missing, they almost always fare well, and stay away for fairly brief periods or for as long as 90 to 180 days.

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How Whilst had enjoyed over the years calling for Harvey at supper, each evening, waiting for Harvey to scoot, scale and then peek over and gracefully tightrope-walk along the top of the cedar stockade privacy fence. Whilst would set out a dish of chow and refreshed the bowl of water on the patio. He had installed a cat door and kept a cat bed in the mudroom at the back of the house, to which Harvey would sometimes retreat in cold or inclement weather.

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Annabelle had been allergic to cats since childhood. She appreciated Harvey but kept her distance. She understood what Harvey meant to Whilst.

 

One early evening more than a month after Harvey's last sighting, while Whilst was idling in the small attic room which he kept as his study, Annabelle was working the wrought iron glider on the patio, daydreaming, enjoying the quiet summer evening.

 

She recalled a memory dating back long ago when she and Whilst spent a month on a vacation island fourteen miles off the New England coast. They rented a small cabin situated in the Island’s back country, in those days sparsely populated even during the high tourist season. There they looked to the moon and Milky Way when walking the darkened country road from an evening in town. One summer, they attended a strange lecture at the local Congregational Church. Annabelle had learned of it from a flyer on the ferry. The program was being put on by a self-styled “feline parapsychologist,” and was advertised as having to do with the nocturnal vision of cats and how it enabled and affected cats’ ability to “channel” other species -- essentially, to “know their minds” for purposes of survival.

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It seemed ridiculous, but irresistibly so.

 

The church where the talk was held was a simple clapboard building, situated by the bluffs. About 20 people had come to hear the talk. The lecturer was a tiny young woman, soft spoken, with downward cast eyes. Her talk lasted less than 20 minutes.

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Cats’ astonishing capacity to see in near complete darkness is an evolutionary mechanism, the young scholar argued. Looking up at her audience for the first time, she paused and said:

“With this nocturnal visual acuity they are empowered to discern the motivations, read the intentions, and predict some say even influence by telepathy the future actions of other species.”

 

Annabelle was moved by this memory and was surprised she hadn't recalled it sooner. She lifted her feet to let the glider slow to a stop. She stood, straightened, and set off out the back gate to the alley. She was determined to do something about Harvey. She resolved to do some scouting, She decided to walk the street and alley, to stroll and survey a block or two around the house, to see what she could see.

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The alley looked like an alley in an old city neighborhood should,  a mess of busted-up, pot-hole pocked and hastily patched asphalt running behind back yards many of which also were a mess,   littered with dilapidated rabbit hutches, chicken and pigeon coops, shamblings of garages and sheds relegated to the stowage of rusting paint cans, seized up lawn mowers, blank wooden doors, stacks of old millwork, and mason jars full of rusted bolts, screws, tacks and nails.

 

For Annabelle, there was something comforting about the disorder of these collections and accumulations; and though she was aware of having no affinity with cats (other than Harvey, and then only out of love for Whilst),  Annabelle had feline sensibility when it came to noticing and seeing order in things, even things that to the ordinary observer appeared to be in a tangle.

 

Annabelle moved with care past property lines marked by vine-covered chain link and weather-beaten snow fences, porous barriers behind some of which lurked suspicious but mostly harmless and noisy dogs. She continued down the alley past where it emptied onto Division Street, and as she crossed to the other side, her attention was drawn to four widely spaced street lamps whose lights had just come on for the evening.

 

Annabelle recognized the lights as projecting the soothing yellow of old sodium bulbs that had been in place throughout the city for nearly a century but only a few of which remained in service. The sodium lights had steadily been removed city wide. Now, except for the stand of old lights such as that Annabelle had just discovered, Pilsner had become illuminated by what everyone called the “white lights.”

 

The new lights had critics who argued they robbed the nighttime city of its cinematic richness and imposed on it the visual equivalent of a cheap security monitor, the kind that filters out all but the rudiments of life and falsely renders as visible only that which is hard, bleak and cold.

As Annabelle stood in the night alley two blocks from her own home with the legacy illumination of a yellow streetlight, recalling the evening talk in the Island church long ago, she looked up and there he was, Harvey, not fifty feet away. He lay at the corner of the roof of an abandoned filling station, looking alertly over the edge, his front paws turned inward and tucked under his chest, and his tail was waving back and forth. He looked directly at Annabelle, wearing something more than his usual impassive expression. He too was bathed in a small oasis of light created by the vestige stand of sodium lamps. For the moment, Annabelle and Harvey saw eye to eye. Then he turned away, halted, paused, and looked back over his shoulder at Annabelle. Then he slipped away into the night.

 

Annabelle would tell Whilst she had seen Harvey in the alley by the old filling station. She would say Harvey appeared to be content and well,  that he had stayed for just a moment before running off, but that his being present and conspicuous in the darkness was for a purpose, and that purpose was illuminated by the old school street lights.

 

And so, she stood before Whilst, who was seated in his upholstered chair.

 

She reached out with both hands and took his hands in hers.

 

"Will you marry me?" she asked.

 

Whilst rose to his feet. He smiled a wide smile and nodded yes.

 

In time, Frances officiated at a simple ceremony for her mom and dad on the brick patio.

 

Whilst and Annabelle continued to put out bowls of chow and water in the evening, which occasionally would be found depleted in the morning.

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Over the weeks that have followed, there have been periodic reports of sightings elsewhere in Pilsner and environs. None yet confirmed.