The House Guests (20 page)

Johnny was in the Greek islands that summer. Old Rog, despite mellowness, would set up a patient agitation to be put down whenever he was picked up, the change being that he would try to fumble free rather than rip his way clear.

I went into the kitchen, and Dorothy sniffed, and I knew it was about Geoff again. I tried for a comforting word, and she turned with wet eyes and edge-of-sobs expression and said with a tremulous dismay, “Now I’ll have nothing left to hug.”

As I did not want the Buchanans to think we blamed them in any way, I wrote them this letter:

We do not know what killed him. Elderly cats seem subject to malignancies of the liver. We do have one ironic suspicion. Some years earlier we had decided the Florida routine of the regular visit from the spray
man who goes about the house fizzing his bug juice into the corners and cracks is not only overly costly but moderately ineffectual. And so we had arranged to have the house sprayed with deadlier chemicals while we were gone in the summer.

We remember that when we came back from Piseco in the autumn of ’59 the job seemed most effective. It had had a good chance to air out, but there was enough residual effect to fell newcomers in their tracks.

Both cats frequently slept on the floor. Geoff did the washing for the two of them. It is just possible that by early 1960 Geoff had licked enough poison off the two of them to sicken him. And, of course, each time he began to feel a little better, he would go back to the washing chore and ingest more of it. It is only a guess.

      When we picked Roger up at Buckelwood and took him home in the fall of 1960, we expected him to search for Geoff once back in familiar surroundings. But, of course, he’d had a cage to himself at Buckelwood after Geoff died. Always, except in case of illness, we requested that they be kept in the same cell.

Roger was delighted to be home. And he seemed equally delighted to be the only cat. All food, service, and sleeping places were his alone. He seemed to understand there was no other cat there and no point in looking for one. But once in a while, not oftener than once a week, we would hear him, usually out in the screened cage, making that ah-rowr? ah-rowr? which was forever the call to game-time.

Deprived of the customary rough-and-tumble he perfected the substitute which he had begun to devise during the previous spring when Geoff would not play. Perhaps because of the malformed feet, Roger makes an astonishing amount of noise on a hardwood floor when he runs. It is a ba-rumm, ba-rumm, ba-rumm sound, exactly like the hoof rhythm of a galloping horse. Thus the name of the game became the Flying Red Horse, a dead giveaway as to the age of certain parties who used to hear it on a radio commercial long ago. It would usually begin out in the screened terrace and still does. It is a morning game,
most probably when the people are on the second cup of coffee. Having the doors open to the living room and to the studio in warm weather enhances the game. First there is the arched back, the tail slightly puffed, a feisty little sidelong scamper, as though he is avoiding some opponent visible only to him. Then there are some yammerings, and he breaks into his gallop. Some days it takes up the stairs to my work area and back down again, but always through the studio and kitchen, around and around, hoofs drumming, ears laid back. There is always at least one reckless transit under the couch, this accomplished by stretching out on the back and using the claws to dig into the underside of the low couch and pull himself along at a good pace. It always ends with his scrambling recklessly up onto the long bar, using chair back and stools to get there, running the length of the bar, then, panting, mouth open, looking terribly fierce, he reaches his claws as high as he can on the four-by-four post at the end of the bar.

I suspect that this is a rare activity for an old party of 130. Reflexes and elasticity being not what they were, he sometimes miscalculates. Twice this past season he has misjudged the leap to the bar, scrabbled at it, slipped, fallen. The game ends there. The humiliated cat walks away.

When the game is successfully concluded, wild passion spent, he finds himself atop the bar. He can get down, but it is a jolt to old bones and muscles he would rather avoid if possible, and cons the people into lifting him down. Not long ago, in the middle of the night, I awoke and heard him, all alone in the dark house, being a Flying Red Horse. I cannot say why it seemed so touching.

In the fall of 1960 we depressed him by bringing a bird home. It was a male meadow lark which had
been clipped by a car. Dorothy stopped and picked it up from the shoulder of the road. When we got it settled down, it showed no signs of being able to recover and fly away. When it walked, it walked in a small, tight circle, right through its water dish if it happened to be in the way. When it tried to fly it put one wing tip down and flapped in an equally small circle. We put it on the terrace and closed the doors so Roger could not get at it. It did not have sufficient co-ordination to eat, so Dorothy mixed up some suitable goo, and we fed it with an eye dropper. Roger could not understand why he was being denied the terrace, why we were keeping a bird, why he was not permitted to eat said bird. He would stare out at it and moan and drool visibly. He could taste it.

It began to co-ordinate a little better, but if it tried to hurry it ran in a circle, and if it tried to fly it tipped to one side. A young brain surgeon visiting on the Point said it had a brain clot which might or might not become reabsorbed. The trouble was food. They eat bugs. And it was that rare time of year in Florida when bugs are hard to find. We’d leave on the front-porch floodlight for hours and get perhaps two medium moths, enough to last a meadow lark one fraction of a second. I thought of fried grasshoppers and went over to The Beach Shop at Stickney Point Road and bought a can from George Connaly. They were a success. They had been caught and fried in Japan and shipped halfway around the world, and that meadow lark had to rekill each one, pick it up, slam it down onto the stone floor, peck at it, knock it around, chase it, and eat it.

The bird began to make longer flights and seemed to land where he intended to land. Finally we wedged the outside screen door open and herded him out. He stood on the little porch, stood on one foot and then the other, and then zoomed up over the punk trees
and away. Roger, given access once more to the terrace, spent a long long time tiptoeing around, quivering, pointing like a bird dog, looking behind every leaf for that tasty bird.

Johnny came home, awaiting acceptance to a new term at Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan. We had all noticed a strange thing about Roger. He would be walking across the room, and all of a sudden he would stop and lie down on his belly and put a forearm across his eyes and stay there motionless, often for over an hour. When he got up again he would seem shaky, and he would avoid the light, very much like a human recovering from a blinding headache. It did not seem to affect his morale otherwise, but quite obviously the animal was in pain during those periods. The bad eye had been opaque for some time, and now it looked bulged to us. The intervals of pain were becoming more frequent.

It was Johnny who suggested we find out if it should come out. We took him over to Dr. Thomas, who examined him and said that the eye should certainly be removed; we could leave him right there, and he would do it. The bad eye had developed glaucoma and was badly distended. Though I certainly had every reason to feel confidence in the gentleman’s ability, I hemmed and hawed and asked him, clumsily, if he … ah … did very much of this sort of … uh … thing. He said, with both reassurance and a slight indignation, that he had taken a refresher course in animal ophthalmology just that past summer.

We got Roger the next day. The eye had been removed and the furry lids sewn together, implausibly, with bright green thread. He was a very groggy cat. The general anesthetic made his rear end slump to one side or the other when he tried to walk. If I had to
describe his attitude with just one word, I would say he acted thoughtful. The doctor had confirmed the idea the cat had been in severe pain.

We had to take him back several times for treatment. I cannot imagine a treatment a cat would find any more unpleasant. Behind the sutured lids the empty socket fills with fluid. The doctor has to pick open a small vent between the stitches to let the serum escape, and press as much out as he can.

Roger’s response was as fantastic as anything I ever hope to see. He had always despised automobiles, always mourned with every breath he drew. By the time we took him back all effects of the anesthetic had worn off. He had demonstrated at home that he was not at all groggy. And that cat sat upright on the seat between us all the way over, ears forward in that catlook of eagerness, making not a sound of complaint. And he was visibly glad to arrive there, purring as he was carried in.

He hollered at the treatment, but he did not get frantic, and his struggles were brief and not overly violent. And he was amiable all the way home.

The next visit a few days later was exactly the same, except that he sat on the treatment table and needed only Johnny’s hand on his shoulders to restrain him. When Dr. Thomas hurt the eye, Roger would yipe and flinch back, seem to gather himself, and then crane forward again, tilting his head, presenting the wound to the surgeon.

There can be only the one plausible explanation that the cat made a rational adjustment to cause and effect. The eye had been giving him constant pain which at times became much worse. He was taken to a place. The pain stopped. So he associated the place with the cessation of pain.

As it healed, as suppuration ceased, the sealed lids sank back to form a little furry pocket. We were supposed
to take him to have the stitches removed, but Roger with a hideous and savage delicacy, removed them with one rear toenail, doing himself no harm. We got to him to stop him just as he was removing the last one.

It did bother us to look at him. Then suddenly it bothered us no more. When people see him for the first time, I often surprise a little expression of queasiness, and I have to quell my indignation by remembering how we, too, found it disturbing at first. In his best days he had that turtlehead, the high rear end, the bowed front legs, the unwashed gray of all the feet. Now the tail is shorter, an ear is ragged, the eye is gone, the front legs more bowed, the high rear end narrower, the loose underbelly swinging as he walks. And we find him exceptionally beautiful. Dorothy tells him this frequently.

He was our solitary boarder at Buckelwood the summer of 1961. Having had one of them die, the Buchanans were afraid they might lose the other one. And having the eye gone did not make him look sturdier. When we picked him up in the fall, Mrs. Buchanan confessed that when we had left him off she had the feeling he wouldn’t make it.

We had some other cats at the lake the next summer for a little while. Johnny was by then married to his Anne, and when they stayed with us at Piseco en route to Nova Scotia, where her parents, Brinton and Mary Colfelt, have a summer residence, they brought along two cats they had been writing us about—Jaymie, a gray tiger adolescent cat, and Grey, a kitten, a soft blue-gray like summer smoke. Jaymie was a fine cat, responsive, fabulously healthy, crouching and dashing amid the Piseco rocks, the alder and scrub maple, the tall, dark woods, playing the game of savage beast at the dawn of time, racing back to the people
from time to time for approval and reassurance. Grey, still small enough to be mostly anonymous kitten, was showing the first personality traits of a kind of Rogerism, skeptical, slightly surly, intractable in the face of any kind of persuasion.