The House Guests (13 page)

I can imagine, for example, how they would react to leashes. Once we were able to give up the toilet-box-system on State Street and give them continuous access to the out of doors, we never saw them go, except very, very rarely and then through the accident of taking a walk and coming across one of them in a remote place. It was a private and fastidious affair, one that they certainly would not undertake while at the end of a string.

 … In the last couple of years the infirmities of age have at last led Roger to consider comfort more important than total privacy. Our screened terrace at Point Crisp is very large, with numerous planting areas full of peat moss and heavy growth. He began to use a far corner of it, behind a screen of dwarf banana. We have made it more suitable with a frequently replenished layer of kitty litter. Last Christmas Johnny and his wife, Anne, drove down from Michigan in a VW bus bringing their five cats with them—thus proving his nerves are better than mine have ever been—and they spent the holidays in our guesthouse. They had one adult cat, two almost
adults, and two kittens. (The smallest female kitten was named Abishag after the biblical virgin taken into bed to keep the venerable king warm.)

Their cats were trained to kitty litter in big, shallow plastic pans. They put one in the guesthouse and one in the studio near the door to the terrace, which was propped ajar so Roger could get out there when the need arose. The weather was cold and uncomfortable for an ancient cat, and he was feeling unwell during the holidays. He took advantage of the convenience placed there for the new generation. As it had been almost eighteen years since he had used such a device, and because he is a very large cat, his first attempt was a total failure due to his getting only his front feet into the plastic bin. But from then on he was ept, and after the kids and their cat-colony had departed and the weather stayed cold, we continued the arrangement. When the weather warmed, Roger, by his own decision, reverted to his familiar area beyond the dwarf banana trees.

In addition, I knew exactly how the cats would react to a collar. When Geoff was small he was limply content to have our small boy dress him in improvised garments. Johnny also, without damage to his eventual unmistakable masculinity, owned a doll bed when we lived on State Street, and Geoff would sleep happily therein, head on the pillow, blankets tucked around him, a rather startling sight to come across in the living room when you were walking through with your mind on other matters.

As Geoff reached maturity, his attitude changed. He would endure having people put things on him, but it depressed and humiliated him. He would stand somewhat in the position of a steer with its rear end toward a blue norther, and look patiently, enduringly miserable. When he was disrobed or de-hatted, his relief was apparent.

Roger, on the other hand, has always been the clown cat. And has always relished attention. Having anything put on him was his signal to prance and race and show off.

That would have been our roadside tableau—Geoff standing utterly hangdog, and Roger deciding we wanted him to climb the leash hand over hand.

Regarding motels, I remembered too clearly a tale my sister told, of one night in a motel with Buckethead. The cat slept a couple of hours, awoke feeling all too spritely, having been shut up in the car all day. The room walls were of that kind of pressed composition board she could get her nails into. So she invented a game of running up the wall, springing backward into the air, turning, and landing in the middle of either Dorrie or Bill. In about twenty minutes of that, Buckethead had the whole show back out on the road, and Dorrie recalls that before they left Bill spent quite a while pressing the little triangular tear marks in the walls back to invisibility with his thumbnail.

I was obdurate. There were vast reaches of Georgia and the Carolinas sufficiently depressing without the tireless ululations of car-hating cats.

      The cats had their first full summer at Piseco in 1950, and they were busy the entire time. In Florida they were more indolent. At Piseco there seemed to be a flavor of industrious self-importance about them. They would hurry in and eat and hurry out. They were working at the trade of being cats. Those summers, from 1950 through 1957, were the summers of their prime, when they were both at their heaviest, their pelts the glossiest, their agility and condition at peak. They ate hugely and with minimum selectivity and ran it all off. Always, at Piseco, their rich coats had an incomparable smell, a sweet, fresh, airy odor related in some way to washing which has been dried in the fragrance of a spring wind.

Their transient life kept their automatic control mechanism for the density of the coats in perpetual confusion. Before we left Florida, they would begin to shed winter coats, but the coolness at the lake would slow this process. Toward fall they would begin to grow a winter coat apparently planned for an Adirondack winter. They would come down then into the really suffocating heat and humidity of Florida in September, and, after a shocked pause, they would shed with such profusion our environment seemed adrift with cat hair which adhered to everything within range—furniture, clothing, and moist people.

We have one charming picture of the two of them that summer at the rented camp. Nephew John Gilbert Prentiss, Sam’s younger, was about six years old, and, trolling along the lake shore with his father, he personally caught and boated a fine small-mouth bass a little over three pounds. I took his picture on the narrow front porch of the camp. John Prentiss wears a red shirt and a wide, proud grin. He holds up his big bass. One cat is on the railing beside him, looking at the bass with pleasurable anticipation, and the other winds around the boy’s ankles, just the banner of the upright tail visible in the photograph.

Just before the school year started we drove on down to Clearwater Beach, to the house on Bruce, sent for the cats, and settled in. We fixed a window for them in a living-room corner which opened onto the carport. They made their thorough inspection of the area, inside and out, noting the food corner in the kitchen, selecting temporary sleeping places. Cats have the habit of sleeping in one place for a month or so, then changing to another place. When there are two of them, after a little while there are several cat-places where claims have been staked at one time or another.

This is as good a moment as any to describe one of the formal courtesies cats extend to each other. Reading about it in the cat book James and Pamela Mason wrote some years ago made us more aware of it. If a cat is on some comfortable elevation, such as a has-sock, and the other cat wishes to join him, the other cat leaps up and asks permission by giving a lick at the face of the resting cat. Permission is expressed by a return of the lick, and the new arrival thereupon settles down. If the response is a sulky snarl or even a hiss, the visiting cat will leap down again and find some other place. This joint sharing of any restricted
area was always more of a trial to Roger than to Geoff. Geoff pushed. He could push even when apparently asleep, exerting a continuous pressure. He filled up each inch he gained thereby, and kept right on pushing. He used this device on people as well as on brother cat. Many times we have seen Roger grant Geoff permission to join him only to find, twenty minutes later, that Geoff had worked him so near the edge his only choice was to jump down and walk indignantly away.

Cats have a habit of leaping up into the laps of those visitors least likely to enjoy providing comfort for a cat. Their nervous, habitual reaction is to stroke the cat. The cat interprets this as permission to settle down and does so immediately, then seems baffled to be set back down on the floor. If the cat is not touched he will quite often hesitate for a few moments and then jump back down of his own accord.

During the second or third evening of their residence at that house, both cats suddenly came catapulting back into the living room through their window from the night outside. Their tails were huge, spine hair ruffed up, and they ran in a half crouch. Never, before or since, have we ever seen them so frankly terrified. At Piseco they had sometimes come home in an unseemly haste after encountering some sort of goblin, but they seemed to make a pretense at indifference. This time they scuttled close to the people and whirled and stared back toward their window. The sound came out of the night, a great tomcat cry, savage, threatening, and of exceptional volume. Our cats flattened. The tom circled the house for some time, making chilling and explicit threats of murderous intent. We knew it was the big black one we had failed to trap.

Toms will kill male neuters who stray into their territory. They will also, on rare occasion, rape them.
One night in Brookview, New York, Heathcliffe cat came home in hideous shape, dragging himself along. He had been mercilessly chawed and had so little use and control of his back legs, they thought he could have been clipped by a car and had his spine damaged. They took him to a vet, who, after examination, said Heath had been raped by a tom and had perhaps a fifty-fifty chance of recovery. He was a very sick and helpless cat for weeks and finally began to recover and eventually became entirely well.

We knew the black tom was a mortal danger to our two, so we closed their window, fixed a cat box for them, ignored their night pleas to be let out. We left the window open in the evenings while we were still up. They had responded so respectfully to the tom, we believed they would not wander far and would come racing back in at the first sign of danger. But we also suspected that if the house was dark and we were abed, the tom might very well come through their window to kill them in the house.

Two evenings later, just before Johnny’s bedtime, the cats came dashing in through their window in panic, and the big black tom followed them right into the house, right into the living room where we all were. He was enormous and so intent on murder he did not even seem to notice us. I saw the chance to rid ourselves of the problem and circled quickly and slammed the cat window down. Only then did the tom realize he was trapped, and he ignored our cats completely. He raced swiftly around the room, a big, black, shadowy menace, looking for some way out. Our pair stood against the wall in awed silence, staring at the frightful intruder. Finding no way out, he raced down the long hallway which bisected the one-story house, and I saw him disappear into the darkness of our bedroom through the open door. I followed him, reached in and turned on the room
lights, backed out, and closed the door. We were all awed, but Roger and Geoffrey most of all. They were both shaped like Halloween drawings, made not a sound, and moved very slowly, picking each foot up to an unaccustomed height and setting it down again with the care they might use if they were on a ledge a thousand feet in the air.

Dorothy, Johnny, and I had a conference, and we decided I had better kill it. It seemed the only practical solution, and I believe we arrived at it because I thought I had the means to do it with a minimum of fuss, mess, and difficulty. There was no legitimate firearm in the house. But I had a pellet gun, an air pistol with a built-in lever and plunger which, when pumped enough times, could build up a considerable force, enough to imbed the pellet into a board. Suspecting that it might stun him rather than kill him, I selected an additional weapon, a miniature baseball bat given Johnny by Frank O’Rourke, the writer, when we had lived on Acacia Street. If the pellet only stunned the cat, I would administer the
coup de grâce
with the bat.

Thus equipped for safari, with the other four members of the pride waiting anxiously in the hallway, I entered the bedroom and closed the door behind me. We had twin beds. I squatted and spotted the tom crouched under the further bed, staring toward me. I had loaded the pistol and pumped it up to its recommended maximum. It was quite accurate at short range. I knelt and aimed carefully under one bed and over to where the cat lay under the other. Its eyes glinted in the reflected lights of the bedroom. I felt slightly ridiculous, and had no relish for the job. The tom was an extraordinarily handsome animal, and quite the biggest cat of the house-cat breed I ever saw.

I aimed right between his eyes and about a half
inch above them and fired. The cat gave a great twitch, a yowl of pain, rage, and warning, and with no slackening of agility moved further away. I reloaded, pumped, fired again with exactly the same result. I was merely torturing the poor, damned beast. I tried four or five more shots, getting as close as I could. I no longer felt ridiculous. I felt sick and helpless and disgusted with the idiocy of my brilliant idea. I decided I had better run him down with the bat. About ten seconds later he showed me how poor an idea that was. He came leaping from floor level, up through the narrow space between the twin beds, leaping right at my face, going for my eyes. I fell back and away and took a futile swipe at him, and he was back under a bed before the bat finished the swing. When he had hung for a moment in the brighter light in mid-air I had seen the old scars, the ragged edges of the ears, and a wet and matted place on his forehead above his eyes, a dark shine of blood in the black fur. Dorothy was calling questions to me through the closed door. I took out my frustration on her by roaring at her to leave me alone. She heard the squall of the cat at each impact and had heard me thudding around when he had jumped at me.