Channeling the Cat's Meow

AT the Algonquin Hotel there is a popular saying: "Dogs have owners. Cats have staff." In the case of a fleecy, blue-eyed Birman named Matilda II, the hotel's current cat-in-residence, that staff now includes a ghostwriter.

Matilda, 10 years old, is the most recent of a long line of felines that have had carte blanche at the hotel since the 1930's.

She is, however, the first of the hotel's cats to have her own e-mail address: [email protected]. And for the last 18 months, the task of answering Matilda's fan mail from around the world has been left to someone with opposable thumbs. That would be Alice de Almeida, the executive assistant to the general manager, Bill Liles. (He, sad to say, is allergic to cats.)

When Ms. de Almeida, 60, was hired for the job at the Algonquin, she had no idea that one of her main duties would be to act as the mouthpiece for a mouser. But after two decades of doing administrative work at hotels in Manhattan, including the Peninsula and the Parker Meridian, she jumped at the chance.

"I thought it was just great that the hotel had a cat," said Ms. de Almeida, whose desk features photographs of her own rescued strays: Puddy Tat, Al E. Kat, Spitz, Einstein and Rags. "And then when I found out that I was actually her voice, I died and went to heaven."

Slender and impeccably dressed this day in a pale gray linen suit, Ms. de Almeida is no stereotypical cat lady, though she deals with her fair share of them. Every two weeks, one woman mails a package to Matilda containing cryptic collages; recent ones have featured images of a rabbit on a moped and of the Geico gecko.

Particularly unsettling for Ms. de Almeida was a letter to Matilda from an inmate on death row. "You know, there was the Birdman of Alcatraz," she said. "We don't need the Catman of Wherever."

For the most part, the people who send e-mail messages to Matilda are animal lovers looking for a lark. Some are literary types who wax poetic about the hotel's famous Round Table. Others are past guests who thank Matilda for serving as their pet away from home. A visitor from Japan deemed her a cat with "dignity, patience and discretion," before apologizing to Matilda for smelling like catnip but not bringing any.

Last year, a woman from Wichita Falls, Tex., shared this memory: "You sat in the flower pot next to where I stood. It was winter of 2000, and my husband had just passed away. ... 'I've seen worse than you,' you seemed to tell me. I thought about it, and, yes, there were worse things than me. So I decided then and there to pick myself up and try to feel better about things."

Ms. de Almeida seems as happy putting her love of writing to good use as she is being the spokeswoman for a cat. Although she never attended college, she notes proudly that she was an honors English student at Taft High School in the Bronx, a few blocks from the apartment on 176th Street off the Grand Concourse where she grew up.

In answering correspondence, Ms. de Almeida eschews intimacy in favor of cat puns and Matilda's keyboard signature (two circumflexes for ears, periods for eyes and opposing brackets for whiskers). Still, she knows what it's like to lose a loved one and to find comfort in a pet. She adopted her first stray kitten in 1992 after her son died at 17 of a heart-related illness.

And though Ms. de Almeida keeps her e-mail replies sweet and simple, she also identifies with the urge to open up to a stranger. "It's like sitting at a bar and telling a bartender your story, or in the beauty parlor and telling the hairdresser," she said on a recent afternoon, between answering phones in the sales office. "You can say things to strange people that you don't want to share with your friends and family. You can get things off your chest."

The cat's cyber-admirers will be sure to congratulate Matilda come fall, when she is to be honored as 2006 Cat of the Year at the Westchester Cat Show. A few have already asked to help celebrate her birthday, which is tomorrow. Ms. de Almeida is on vacation, but she was planning to leave a message behind for the well-wishers — something, she said, like "Matilda is off on safari."