The House Guests (7 page)

I found a job as Executive Director of the Taxpayers’ Research Bureau in Utica. I made that jump a little too nervously and hastily. I spent every spare moment writing. Through the summer the stories began to sell at a greater rate and to better markets. We paid off our debts and began to build up a little surplus. By autumn I was still stuck with that job, and with an unwritten obligation to keep it for a year. There we were with the funds and the mobility to evade the misery of a Utica winter. I resigned on the basis of need to take Dorothy to a warmer climate. It was not entirely a pretext. She could have endured the winter, but she does not take cold well, and it was certain that she would spend a good portion of the winter in poor health. We arranged to go to Taos.

Dorothy’s long-widowed mother, Rita—pronounced in the Dutch manner,
Right
-a—was living in Poland, New York. It made sense to keep the inexpensive State Street apartment and have Rita move in from Poland for the winter and live there and take care of the cats.

We did not make it to Taos. En route we looked at that Hill Country of Texas north of San Antonio and approved immediately. In the spring Rita became ill, and we had to return before we had planned. We still had our little green prewar Ford convertible with huge mileage on it. We were towing a jeep trailer, an army surplus purchase. At anything over thirty-five miles an hour, the car gobbled both gas and oil. There had been a temporary lull in sales, and we were down to a hundred dollars and no credit cards.

I estimated that if we kept it at thirty-five, and stayed on the road fourteen hours a day, and were circumspect about food and lodging, we could make it in good season on the cash in hand.

We arrived with a little less than ten dollars to find two substantial checks waiting, Rita on the mend, the apartment closed, and the cats boarding at Dr. Sellman’s. When we went to get them we found they had ingratiated themselves with the management, and instead of being confined to the normal kennel cage, had the run of the cellar. One can imagine that if the earliest memories are of the damp and darkness of a cellar, that same environment will always be reassuring.

In fact, during all of Geoffrey’s life, he had a special thing about cardboard cartons. Roger liked them, but not to the same degree. Nothing could be unpacked without Geoff establishing himself in the empty box moments after it became empty, looking fatuously content. Though when well he was not interested in sleeping in a box, he definitely wanted one when he was sick. He was restless when sick, and a box was the only thing which would stop his roaming from place to place trying to get comfortable. To Roger a box was more of a game place, a place to hide and pounce from. To Geoff it was ancient security.

We took them back to the apartment and they re-explored
every corner of it and settled back into their routine.

At just about that time we were dislodged from our low-rent haven. It was still under rent control, but the house was sold, and the new owner elected to move into our apartment. That was the only legal way we could have been cast adrift.

After dreary rounds of overpriced and depressingly gloomy apartments, we decided to buy a house. Believing in our innocence that a small college town might provide a pleasant atmosphere for the writer, we looked extensively around Clinton, New York, near Utica, where Hamilton College is located, and at last found a large and very pleasant house up on the Hill, almost surrounded by college property. It was being sold by a Mr. Prettyman, the Athletic Director, who had built most of it himself and had not gotten around to finishing off the upstairs, a factor that kept it within our rather optimistic price range.

College Hill, that spring, was the cats’ introduction to the out of doors at ground level. They were tense and apprehensive. It was one hell of a lot of space for small animals. It was full of unfamiliar scents and shapes. Geoff, though the first to adjust, retained a certain wary conservatism about the potential dangers. Roger, after a few exploratory ventures, became entirely foolhardy. I believe that if a bear had appeared, Roger would have made his typically clumsy attempt at stalking it. He seemed to have that quality of egocentricity which made him think nothing would dare eat him.

It was there that we arranged the first cat window for them. You cut a square hole of sufficient size in a window screen, trim the removed portion down a bit, and hinge it back on with two small pieces of wire. A piece of plywood as tall as the exit and as long as the rest of the window opening keeps too much wind
from entering on cool days. To the outside of the house, depending on the height above the ground and the agility of the cats, you affix one or two cat shelves in place with angle irons. It helps to have another at sill level, just outside their exit. On cool days when the sun is just right they will take their ease on the shelves, watching the world from a benign height, knowing the retreat hatch is handy.

Roger came and left in silence. Geoffrey left in silence, but would always announce his return. Rahr? Rahr? He would stump through the house toward us, saying, Geoffrey is here. If that announcement was curiously distorted or muffled, it was wise, we learned, to pay attention. He would have a mouthful of victim.

Dorothy and I have tried to make a reasonably accurate estimate of the number of birds Geoff slew in his lifetime. We think that twenty would be the absolute top, and that ten is a more likely figure. Many of those were killed because he caught them before Dorothy learned a system of taking them away from him. We thought the birds were being mangled, and when we leaped at Geoff with shrill cries of consternation, accusation, and dismay, he would give one emphatic crunch and the bird would be dead. I imagine nothing is more futile than trying to convince a cat he is morally wrong to catch birds.

Soon we discovered that the shocked and bedraggled look of the birds was a product of the actual capture, and that Geoff held them in his mouth with an uncanny delicacy. The curve of the fangs held them in place. He was inflicting no wound or bruise.

The proper procedure was to admire him extravagantly, and in the right tone of voice. Geoff, you are a great cat. Stroke his head. Tell him it is a lovely bird. Then he would, more often than not, lay it down gently. If he did not, you could stroke him again and
bring thumb and finger around for gentle pressure on the hinges of the jaw. Then you could pick up the undamaged bird, shocked into immobility, and put it in some high, safe place, usually in a shallow cardboard box atop a car or high hedge or edge of a low roof. After minutes of shock-induced lethargy, the bird would suddenly jump up, stare around, and go rocketing off, yelling about its horrid experience.

The well-fed cat is not terribly interested in eating a bird. And apparently the instinct is to bring the game home undamaged. A few times, a very few times, when we were not at home, Geoff would eat a bird. We would find a few feathers by his dish. He was the methodical cat. If you are going to eat something, you take it to where you always eat, and you eat it there. I think we averaged about ten or fifteen birds a year released undamaged.

We cannot remember Roger ever catching a bird. Maybe he grazed a few. He exhibited extreme nervous enthusiasm when Geoff would bring one home, and the problem was to keep him from falling upon it when Geoff set it down.

There was a considerable difference in their hunting technique. I have watched Roger trying to sneak up on something. He worms along on his belly, ears flat, tail thrashing. I think it was the tail which made him so ineffectual. Secrecy seems improbable when the tail is whacking the grass and the brush. And possibly his breathing was audible. It might have seemed to any bird that a rackety little steam engine was slowly approaching. Roger’s proficiency level limited him to bugs and beetles, small hoptoads, the infrequent butterfly, and, on a very few triumphant occasions, a rodent. It would please me to give him credit for one entire rabbit, but the implausibility of it would seem to make Geoffrey the captor and donor.

We were privileged several times to witness Geoff’s
curious and effective hunting method. I suspect that it was only one of his methods. I believe that it was the result of his lumpy feet, odd gait, and unexpected agility. I think he invented the system, finding that he was not very apt at sneaking up on things.

He would go trudging across the lawn, frowning, staring straight ahead, obviously unintersted in anything around him. His route would take him under small trees. Birds would scold him and, growing bolder, come down into the small trees to cuss him out at close range. One of them would get just a little too close. That solemn, square cat could suddenly, without warning, without even seeming to break stride, go five feet into the air and clap those two front feet onto the abusive bird just as it took off from the limb it had thought safely out of reach. In effect, he was using himself as a lure. Perhaps this system is not unique, but I have never heard of any other cat using it.

Our property was bordered on one side by what was known as the Saunders Strip. This was where a Professor Saunders, a delightful old man with astonishingly young eyes, bred tree peonies in great profusion, huge sizes, and uniquely beautiful colors.

One day Dorothy called me from my typewriter to see what Roger was doing, and there was enough urgency in her voice to bring me on the run. There was Roger in the taller grass of the Saunders Strip beyond our lawn, stalking a magnificent cock pheasant larger than himself. Stalking is not exactly the word. He was following it, using the posture and attitudes of the stalk, about six feet behind it. But the bird was entirely aware of him. It would stop and look back at him with assured, beady malevolence, and Roger would stop. When the bird moved on, he would follow.

It is, of course, totally pointless to call a cat when it is intent on the chase. They are deaf to the interruptive nonsense of humans. They are on cat business, totally serious and involved.

Dorothy called Roger.

He lifted his head, stared toward us, and came bounding out of the field and across the lawn right to us. Did someone want the cat? Did someone call me? He came when called only when it pleased him to come, and so it could not have been more obvious. That big bird was making him terribly nervous. He had not known how to break off the relationship, how to extricate himself from impasse. He had leaped at this chance of retreat with honor. (Damn it, if they hadn’t called me just then, I would have caught that thing, whatever it was.)

One day when there were several adults and a batch of kids out in the driveway, Geoff came walking out of the tall grass in our back lot making a very curious sound. He had a grass snake in his mouth, an extremely active little snake about eighteen inches long and as big around as a lead pencil. He was holding it by the middle, with both ends writhing about Obviously the taste and texture displeased him, as he had his lips pulled back from his teeth in a fixed sneer of distaste, accounting for the strangeness of the sound he was making.

When he reached the group he put it down immediately and backed away, making little tasting motions, lapping his jaws. Roger was there and witnessed how Geoffrey was commended for skill and valor as the snake fled rapidly off into the grass.

Not five minutes later Roger came out of the grass with a snake of his own. Not the same one. This one was smaller. He came bounding out of the grass, dropped his snake, batted at it a couple of times, and
watched it flee. I realize all the dangers of imputing more awareness to these animals than they had. But when Roger sat and began sedately to wash, it was as though he was saying, “See? I’m pretty good at that sort of thing too.”

Geoff soon became a very proficient mouser at College Hill. And generally he preferred to eat them. He hardly ever made them the objects of that game humans think so cruel and horrid, of grasp and toss and bat about, almost but never quite permitting escape. He would bring his field mice back to the yard or into the house, and if they tried to leave while he was getting ready to eat, he would make a lightning movement of one paw and hold them down. When he was ready, his precision was surgical—the nip of the spine which killed instantly, the long abdominal slit to permit removal of the tiny gall bladder, and then swift, efficient ingestion.

Once in a while he would let Roger have one of his mice. He would sit then and watch Roger play the horrible game. Roger was not interested in eating them. But there seemed to be two inevitable results. Either he became too rough and inadvertently killed them or in trying to work the narrow escape bit let the mouse genuinely escape. In either event, Geoff would get up and trudge away, as though anxious to disassociate himself from the whole clumsy mess.

This mousing reputation of the younger cat came to the attention of our neighbors on the other side, Professor and Mrs. John Mattingly. There was a small barn behind their house. That year John had constructed a corral and purchased a middle-aged, five-gaited show horse named Blue Genius. We had a small terrace on that side of the house which overlooked the corral. Blue Genius was an incurable ham. When he was aware that he had an audience, he
would go around and around the perimeter of his corral, neck arched, springing nicely, exhibiting his gaits. Then he would come to the nearest portion of the railing, stick his head over, blow, and wait for the applause. If the quantity pleased him, he would repeat the whole business.

John asked me if they could enlist the assistance of Geoffrey in ridding the small barn of mice which were eating the grain. I said certainly, and a day or so later he asked if I could bring Geoff over to be introduced to his duties. I did so and found that Professor Mattingly had cut a small and perfect Gothic arch in the sliding door of the barn, about a foot above the bottom sill. He felt we should acquaint the cat with this mode of access. As Geoff was accustomed to the window system, I was certain it would take but one trip in and out through the arch to give him all he needed to know. John went into the barn and closed the door. I passed Geoffrey through. John picked him up and sent him back out through the arch. At John’s insistence, we repeated this at least a dozen times. Geoff endured it with his usual obliging stoicism, but I can imagine he must have thought we had both gone mad. After the final passage into the bam, John picked Geoff up and dropped him into a grain bin. There was a scuffle of about two seconds duration, and Geoff arched out of the bin with a mouthful of mouse, leaped handily through his arch, and trotted on home. John was delighted. Thereafter Geoff apparently made it a standard part of his rounds because the mouse trouble diminished slowly to zero.