The House Guests (18 page)

After he had learned the delights of the stolen tablets and had been given some of his own, you had to be careful not to shake any kind of pill bottle or candy jar or Geoff would spring up from sleep and trot to the kitchen, looking pleased and expectant.

Also, he was the only cat I have ever seen who liked apricot juice.

      To dwell only upon incidents is, in a sense, misleading, because these incidents do not show how these house guests, even after maturity, continued to change in interesting ways.

For years Dorothy and Roger carried on a most curious and stubborn conflict. Things have to be done to cats. Drops for itching ears. Powder for flea time. Nails on many-toed feet tend to sometimes grow back upon themselves and start digging into the pad. Matted hair must be brushed. When cats have colds, their eyes need wiping.

Geoffrey was a stoic about these attentions. He endured them, and they were over quickly, and he bore no ill will. Roger was determined that no one was going to touch him without getting clawed ragged, and Dorothy was just as determined that he would learn to accept these necessary attentions. He would lie on his back and snarl and yowl at her, digging and biting every chance he got. I kept telling her that the cat might really hurt her some time. She was always dabbing medicine on the little nicks and gashes he gave her. For years it was stalemate. She wouldn’t quit trying, and he wouldn’t quit trying to make the whole thing impossible.

Then, over quite a comparatively short period, he mellowed. He became tractable. He became, in fact, so ingratiatingly gooey and sloppy that he began to be
known as Gladys. Though still showing the wistful urge to let someone have it, he endured unwelcome and sometimes quite unpleasant attentions. It became standard practice, when they were ended, for him to go right to his dish and wait for something special, a reward for exemplary behavior. I can account for the change which occurred only by attributing it to the eventual, reluctant exercise of reason. No matter how venomous the objection, the unpleasantness, such as the removal of a tick, would be accomplished. He did not become “tamed” in the sense of being broken to obedience. He made the rational decision to accept, and this carried over to the ministrations of veterinarians also.

At Point Crisp he showed at one point an unmistakable capacity for logical thought. When we made the addition to the main house, we removed the garage, put in a double carport, and put my work area on top of the carport as the only second-story portion of the house. The sliding glass windows above my desk area open onto a shallow screened porch. From the farthest corner of this screened porch, one can look down at an acute angle directly into the window over the kitchen sink.

It was and still is Roger’s habit to come up the stairs and pay me a visit on the average of about once every two or three days. Though he has never had Geoff’s affinity for boxes, he has had an exploratory interest in cupboards. I have dozens of them in my work area, at floor level. He comes up and picks a cupboard, tugs tentatively at it with his claws, turns, and makes a small yow of polite request. Sometimes there is no vocalization at all, just the movement of the mouth. I get up and open it a few inches. He likes to pull them open the rest of the way. He goes in and explores. He isn’t after game. He just wants to check
and see what it’s like in there. He doesn’t settle down. He prowls around and leaves.

One day he wanted to go out on the screened porch. He had been out there before. On the day in question I let him out. As it was a warm day Dorothy had the kitchen window open, and she happened to be at the sink. When movement caught her eye, she called up to him. I watched him. He stopped and stared down at her, six feet away. He tilted his head and stared at her. She continued to talk to him.

Abruptly and purposefully he turned around and came back into my office, walked diagonally across to the stairs, went down the stairs to Dorothy’s studio, walked back through the service area to the kitchen door and stood there and stared at her.

Nothing unusual here. However, that cat with the two of us observing him, repeated that trek
seven
times, without side trips, interruptions, or any lagging of attention and curiosity. Obviously the spatial relationships baffled him. Down there was the familiar food corner, the accustomed voice and greeting. There could not be a duplication. Yet how could he come so far yet remain so close? Seven times he stood on the porch and stared down at her. Seven times he went to the kitchen doorway and checked. It was not a game of hide and seek. He was doing no prancing. He was involved in solemn thought. At last he seemed satisfied, and when I next spotted him about fifteen minutes later he was sitting out in the sun in the driveway, either by accident or intent, in the precise place where he could most readily see both the upstairs porch corner and the downstairs kitchen window.

There was one interesting change of habit and attitude which seemed to be a result of the mellowing of Old Turtlehead. When he decided once and for all that no harm was intended him, he went overboard in
expanding the number of people he would trust. It was as though, discovering his own capacity for good will, he could now assume everyone felt the same.

Previously they had both been prone at times to pay visits. When we had people in the guesthouse, they would spend as much time there as at the main house. They both quite obviously enjoyed the excitements and confusions of parties we gave. Geoff in particular was the party cat, showing off shamelessly, and very deft at singling out those guests who would most willingly share the hors d’oeuvres. In his younger years I would do a party trick with him to demonstrate his trust and his amiability. I would take his hind legs in one hand, adjusting the grip carefully so as to avoid hurting his legs. Then I would lift him by the back legs and hold him at arm’s length. He would hang there, apparently quite content, front legs extended, even purring at times. Trying the same thing with Roger would have been like trying to juggle a few nests of hornets.

Incidentally, one of Geoff’s homely pleasures was to lie on his back in the shell driveway, wriggling, feet in the air and have somebody grasp his feet, front paws in one hand, rear ones in the other, and rub him back and forth on the shells, like a furry iron on a gritty ironing board. Roger’s response to this was to try to get his teeth into the nearest wrist, not in anger but in too vigorous a response to what he thought an invitation to roughhouse.

Also, both of them seemed to feel that we employed people for the express purpose of amusing the cats. For several years we had a yard man they were especially fond of. Mac was a black man with a miraculously green thumb and an extraordinary sense of design and proportion. He had such an affinity for growing things, that when he worked around the place he actually talked to the plants. And when he
was at our house, the cats were in the middle of everything he did. Later it turned out that his habit of keeping his cigarettes in his hip pocket was a fatal one. During an argument he was shot through the heart when he reached for them.

He was replaced by Arnett Baker, the husband of Rianner Baker, who has been our part-time cleaning woman from the first year we lived there. The cats knew that dusters, dustcloths, and dry mops were game things. It took Rianner some time to get used to one of Roger’s habits. He still does it, though rarely. He is stretched out on the floor in apparent indifference. If you walk within range, he reaches out and hooks you by one leg. If you are wearing pants, he uses the claws. Bare legs get a quick little tug when he hooks his arm around the ankle.

This would startle Rianner almost as much as the unexpected bite. Housework was punctuated by little gasps and yelps. Until she got used to him, I think he managed to upset her considerably. She was immediately fond of Geoffrey cat and intrigued and impressed by his responsiveness, which seemed like courtesy. Geoff was never too busy to say hello. If you walked by him twenty times in an hour, you would invariably get a greeting, a little noise which I can spell out as Yop. And whenever you opened a door for him to let him in, as he walked by you he would say his version of thank you, a strange little mumbled sound he uttered on no other occasions. A little Mermph, spoken with rising inflection.

I might interject here, about this business of opening doors, as the cats grew more elderly they would use their window when the people were unavailable. But it was an extra effort, and when there was the opportunity of doorman service, they used it.

Rianner, in time, became very amused by Roger and eventually fond of him. But he still complicates
her chores. He is especially intrigued by mop water. He likes to trot behind in it while the floor is being mopped. He enjoys lying down on a damp, freshly mopped floor or, even better, a floor freshly waxed. He gets very excited over the odor of Clorox. Geoff was indifferent to it. But to Roger that odor seems to have some kind of sexy import. Perhaps it does bear some faint chemical relationship to the odor of tomcat. But he makes a ridiculous spectacle of himself weaving around and around a bucket of Clorox water, smirking and bumping his head against it.

Having mellowed, Roger became an inveterate caller. Alone, he would visit every house on the small peninsula, thumping the screen doors, walking happily in and making a short tour of inspection, tail high. If food was offered he would accept a little graciously, but that was apparently not his objective. There are just six houses. His last stop would be the house of Bruff and Beth Olin, the house on the point nearest the mainland part of the key. There, in addition to the house, he would go out onto the dock and hop aboard their cabin cruiser and check that over. Tour finished, he would come back down the road.

One year, right after the house next to Olins’ had been rented, the woman there saw Beth in her yard and came over to tell her what had happened the previous afternoon, late. She said that a poor mother cat, obviously expecting kittens any moment, had come to the back door and asked to be let in. Once in, the cat had searched all over the house, obviously looking for a place to have the kittens. The woman had called the vet and had been told to fix a box for the cat. The woman had torn up one of her dresses to make a soft nest. The mother cat seemed to appreciate the box, purring and all, but then she began to ask to get out of the house. They had kept taking her back and putting her in the box, but finally she grew so insistent,
they let her out and she hadn’t been seen since, and the woman was very worried about her.

Beth, suddenly suspecting what had happened, asked the woman to describe the cat, and when she came to the part about something being wrong with its left eye, Beth said, “Oh, for heaven’s sake, that was Roger MacDonald!”

As male neuters grow old they develop a loose and heavy fold of flesh under the abdomen. To the uninitiated, it could look somewhat like pregnancy. We are glad she did not rush poor old mother cat down to the animal shelter.

It must have been one of Roger’s more confusing social experiences.

During those years we noticed that Roger’s left eye began to reflect light in a different way than the right one did. It grew increasingly milky and opaque. One night, when a young eye surgeon was at a party at the house, he took a look at it and diagnosed it as a traumatic cataract, probably the result of a little nick or scratch received when the cats were engaged in fierce mock battle. He said that because of the cause, it was not likely to spread to the other eye. We could detect only one way in which it seemed to bother him. When he wanted to go out into the night, he was more cautious about going out through the opened door. It took him a little longer to decide that there was nothing out there which intended to eat him.

During the day his benignity and lack of suspicion made him a little foolhardy. He would climb aboard every service truck which parked there, from the phone-company truck to the plumber’s truck, and we were afraid that while he was delving around among the tool boxes he might be driven away.

I suspect that there is no occupation in our civilization
which entities a man to more irritability than being a mail carrier at Christmas time. Yet one year, three times during Christmas week, Dorothy saw our mail carrier hop out of his truck, scoop the fool cat out of the drive, and carry him over and set him down in the shade of the pine hedge so he could turn his truck around without running over him.

The times were changing. The cats and the people were changing. Johnny went away to school at fifteen, to Oakwood School up in Poughkeepsie. When he came home for vacation and went away again, Geoffrey would search the house for him, making the calling sound, as in cat to cat, and pick Johnny’s bed as his sleeping place for a time.

With Johnny gone, Dorothy began again to paint more frequently, with Roger as content to hop up and sample paint water as he was to follow the watering pail and drink from the terrace flower pots.