The House Guests

Sixteen

They took Knees back to Michigan. She had made some casual attempts to build a nest in the grass near the Piseco dock. Back in Michigan, each night, they put her on a small screened porch. She built a nest at the foot of the porch steps at one side. One morning Anne found Knees running back and forth in front of the screen door in considerable agitation. It was a cold morning. Anne opened the door, Knees ran out, plumped herself into her grass nest and stood up moments later to reveal a large, steaming goose egg. One has eggs on the nest, not on the porch.

They came down to visit us last Christmas. They boarded Knees with a very sympathetic veterinarian they know, and by Christmas they had replaced Jaymie and Grey with five cats and brought them all along.

I shall not go into the characters, habits, traumas, and inter-personal relationships of Lisa, Gimli, Abishag, and group, except to say that I would rather burn bamboo under my fingernails than drive three thousand miles with five cats.

It is too bad Roger was in sorry shape while they were there. The minor athletics of the water hole had become too much for him, and he had settled for a yellow water dish under the bathroom lavatory, which he kept conning one or the other of us to empty and refill with fresh. He slept a great deal, had difficulty getting onto his feet, walked like an old, old man, and was not interested in going outdoors even in the daytime. No Flying Red Horse. Meager appetite.

As far as appetite is concerned, Roger never hollered for his food. During Geoff’s lifetime he never had to. Geoff hollered for two. After Geoff died, Roger’s procedure was to go to his kitchen corner when Dorothy was getting a meal and merely sit and stare up at her with a total, fixed, placid expectancy. Every time she glanced down, he was looking into her face. Unlike Geoff and most other animals, Roger has never been reluctant to stare you right in the eye. And, if there is a face on his level, as when he is atop the bar, he likes to tuck his chin under, purr, and press his furry forehead against yours.

During this past year Roger has added one new little trick to a lifetime of improvisation. Dorothy almost always wears barefoot sandals. When she is at the sink and has not noticed him for what he considers too long a period, he moves closer to sit with one front paw resting on the top of her foot. It is a trusting and gentle reminder. Here is your cat. It is not something which could be an accident. It is too consistent. It establishes physical contact and, as such, is related to affection. For an old cat it seems that the food relationship becomes somewhat ceremonial, with a customary pattern of asking and receiving, even when it ends with but one small mouthful and the plodding return to the soft couch.

Though he was not well last Christmas, the welter of visiting cats stimulated him, and he tried to respond. The little ones were wary of him, and in choosing up sides for the games did not need him. Once, while they were there, he assayed a rather enfeebled rendition of Flying Red Horse, but unfortunately his route brought him face to face with a waspish female with a sore mouth named Lisa, and after an abrupt stop, he turned and walked away with what little dignity was left him.

After kids and cats had left, Roger became worse. I found I hated one thing most of all. I hated to go out into the living room in the morning and see him asleep there and be on his bad eye side, with him too deaf to know I was up. Sooner or later he would sense some presence, perhaps, through the transmitted vibrations of my footsteps, and give a sudden start and snap his head around and stare, then give the curl-tongue morning yawn, the slow, careful stretchings, then the hesitant descent from the low couch to come over and bump a head against a leg and get a morning scuffle of neck hair and under the white chin. Cats are so vibrantly alert, it seems some manner of indecent cheating to be able to come up on one in such inadvertent secrecy.

We thought it was the end of him, the machine wearing down. It was depressing but inevitable.

We have a phonograph record we have played once or twice a year for many years. It is a musical designed just for the record — archy and mehitabel with Carol Charming. There is a part where archy has said good-by forever, and, after a long absence, one morning they find that, during the night, that little cockroach has come back and has started leaving messages in the office typewriter.

Roger came back, and we could accept it with the same surprise and joy as in Carol’s voice at the return of archy. He didn’t come back overnight, but it was swift. Once more the muddy paw prints on the toilet seat, the great, noisy galloping, the clownishness, the imaginary horrors, the office visits to inspect the cupboards, the daytime walks, the exquisitely sensuous reactions to being brushed, the unexpected bites, the paw reaching to grab at the passerby, the sock game, the distant bird observed, the disdainfully easy cowing of any visiting dog. In all the ways a cat can communicate, he keeps saying, “I feel good!”

The top of the back of a living-room couch is level with the sill of a picture window, forming a fine cat place, where he can loll and look benign and see everyone who comes.

A few weeks ago a woman stopped at the house. She was very intense about the cat. She did not use baby talk exactly, but with a very dramatic delivery, expressing pathos and tragic concern, she exclaimed, “Oh, the poor old thing! Oh, the poor old thing! Oh, the poor, old thing!”

One could imagine, from her tone, that the next question would be why we didn’t have him put out of his misery. It surprised me to find out how much that approach irritated and offended me. There was no way to tell her that Roger is not a tragic figure. No matter how he must look to the casual visitor, he is by his own terms, and reactions, a gutsy broth of a boy, a scampering youth, a canny con artist — and, at the same time, a pillar of the only community he knows.

I owe a strange debt to both cats. We got them when I was trying to learn how to write. There were the fifteen years of Geoffrey, and, by this coming fall, nineteen years of Roger. With no intention of seeming intolerant, I would like to say that I do not believe the dependent adorations of dogs could have formed the same necessary kind of emotional counterpoint. The elegant complexity of cats, the very formality of their codes of behavior, their unbribed response of sporadic demonstrations of affection in return for their demanded measure of household equality, their conservative insistence on order, habit, and routine — these attributes seem more congruent with lengthy creative effort, more contributive to that frame of mind which makes such effort sustainable than could be any doggy devotion.

There is a morality equation involved also, which might be better left unstated, but I cannot resist attempting it. The theme has been, of course, that the animal — given trust, security, affection, attention — will respond in ways which demonstrate an individuality, a uniqueness, a reasoning power which otherwise would remain hidden behind that traditional unresponsive façade of the unaffiliated cat. The equation says that the continuous exercise of the attitude which causes the cat to reveal himself is, in time, self-revelatory as well.

Roger is at Buckelwood. Dorothy and I came down here to hide away and get in a full month of intensive work. I drove him out to Buckelwood before we left. Mrs. Buchanan hugged him, and Roger looked triumphantly fatuous. Once in his high cage, he immediately checked the food dish and the water dish and settled down, narrowing his eye in the sleepy expression of the contented purr.

In June, Johnny and Anne will arrive with their tribe of cats and move into the guesthouse until they find a place of their own. They, along with another couple, are opening a fine-arts press setup. We shall stay in Sarasota well into July to see them settled and organized before we leave for the camp in the Adirondacks.

We shall have a chance, before leaving, to see how well Roger, now in good health and spirits, fits into the cat tribe. If the adjustment is good, we shall leave him with them for the summer. But it well may be that though a herd of young ’uns might be an interesting diversion for an elderly gentleman, he might find the continuing stress too wearing after these sedentary years and be glad to be returned to Bucklewood when we leave.

The debt to cats is herewith partially discharged with this, my fiftieth published book.

Everglades Rod and Gun Club

Everglades, Florida

May 19, 1964