The House Guests

Three

I have no patience with those crypto-primitives — who are almost invariably of the moneyed leisure class — who seem to believe there is something effete or degrading to the animal in altering a male house cat.

The tomcat is a damned nuisance. He pursues his specialty to the almost complete exclusion of other interests. His is a nocturnal existence so rigorous, he spends his days flaked out, stirring once in a while to go see if anybody has put anything in his dish. He shreds upholstery in the serious business of keeping his claws and shoulder muscles in fighting trim. He develops a voice which will shatter glassware at twenty paces. His eerie howls of challenge disturb the neighborhood. He roams far and is sometimes gone for days in a row, returning sated, surly, smug, and bearing the wounds of love and combat. He stakes out his territory with extraordinary pungent little driblets of urine, and will occasionally stake out the house where he lives, either just for the hell of it or because another animal has been there during his absence. Owning a tomcat is curiously akin to working in some menial capacity for one of the notorious Lotharios of show business.

On the other hand, waiting too long to fix a cat results in an end product equivalently unattractive. The hormones have had too much chance to alter body chemistry, and then when the animal is deprived of this source, its physical adjustment is to become a eunuch cat, fat, slow, sedentary, sleepy, and not at all playful. A glutton cat, inclined to flatulence and timidity.

The ideal, in view of the ultimate personality of the cat, is to have him castrated just as soon as the testicles are sufficiently apparent to make it possible. Body chemistry will not have altered. He will remain lithe and active. He will be responsive and retain some portion of the psychology of his kittenhood all his life. And, as this account will show, he will not be cowardly or lack a sense of adventure. The younger the cat the more minor the operation and the quicker the recovery. We took them in turn, waited, brought them home. They were cross and slightly baleful for about one day.

Roger lost his tomhood before one of his secondary sex characteristics had time to develop. He never has acquired an adult cat voice. Except in combat, or just before he vomits, Roger has a kitten mew, an entirely futile device for getting doors opened or his dish filled. In the stress of war or nausea, he can make ululations rather like a drunken lyric soprano with the croup.

Geoffrey achieved mature vocal chords. There is a curious sidelight to this difference in voice. As we have always followed the sun, there have always been screened doors. We have always arranged a window with cat shelves fastened to the outside of houses so the cats could come and go as they pleased. But sometimes their window would be closed. Roger soon learned to beat on the outside of the screen doors with his fists, making a racket like that off-stage thunder achieved by shaking a piece of sheet metal. For about the first six years of his life, Geoffrey took the traditional approach of sitting outside the door and bellowing for it to be opened. Sometimes they would both be out there, one thumping and one shouting. I would judge each method equally effective.

But quite suddenly Geoff switched to Roger’s system. He was six years old. He was in fine voice. It is impossible to guess what manner of reasoning was involved. Certainly he did not give up the use of his voice for other demands. In fact, he perfected it. During his last years, possibly through trial and error, he finally achieved the ultimate effectiveness in demanding food. I can define it only as an abrupt, abused, stentorian whine. Human nerve ends could take no more than thirty seconds of that. It could have been stupendously effective in getting doors opened. But he knocked on doors, as his brother did.

There was one sound they made which was almost identical, Roger’s just slightly weaker and pitched a few notes higher. It is a distinctive and recognizable sound all cats use. It means, “Where are you?” It means, “Come and play.” Ah-rowr? Ah-rowr? Ah-rowr? The accent is on the second syllable, which ends on a rising inflection. There is a two- to three-second pause between each questioning call. If humans and cats are indeed part of the same pride, they will call humans and can be called by them with this portion of the standard vocabulary, though generally it is a cat-to-cat affair. They quickly become skeptical of people who go around making too many cat noises. So do I.

While we were still on State Street and the cats were small, an acquaintance named Hank sat in the kitchen and deliberately broke the end of Roger’s tail about three or four vertebrae from the tip. I do not remember exactly what brief high-level conversation preceded it, something like, “You wanna see how you can make a cat make a hell of a funny noise?” And before anyone could object he had reached and pinched the end of Roger’s tail. Roger made a sound ranging from the top limits of audibility right up into supersonic range and ran in place for several seconds until he got enough traction on the linoleum to scoot off into the other room. Hank chuckled merrily. We did not know he had broken the tail at that time. Apparently he got the tail between the thumb and the first two fingers, held the fingers a little apart, and pinched the tail into the open space.

I am glad that we did not know. We let it be known quite forcefully that we saw nothing funny about hurting a cat. (Or about picking up beagle pups by their ears.) But Hank acted as if we were very odd people. I know he did not do it out of willful cruelty. The world is full of Hanks. They know that animals are living creatures, but their knowledge is not in any way subjective. Impoverished in some curious way, they have no empathy toward animal pain, and cannot really understand why other people do not feel just as they do. It puzzles them, because they feel no lack within themselves.

It would have done no good to have ordered Hank out of the house or to have made any attempt to explain to him.

For some time thereafter Roger did not care to have anyone touch his tail. Perhaps a month later, with Roger once again tolerant about tail-touching, Dorothy called to me in some astonishment and had me come and feel of the cat’s tail. About an inch and a half from the tip it angled off at about a twenty-degree angle. His fur concealed this little bend. The angle of the bend was fixed and rigid. Suddenly we both remembered Hank and realized for the first time the tail had been broken and had healed in this fashion.

It did not seem to bother Roger. He could lash the tail. He could carry it high as a banner when registering affection, twining around the legs of the people. And, unlike Geoff at that time, he had given up the kid stuff of suddenly chasing it, grabbing the tip, tumbling over and over with it.

Geoff, otherwise sedate in so many ways, chased the tip of his own tail all his life. It was a very infrequent game. You would hear a scrabbling, scurrying sound and look down, and there on the linoleum would be Geoff whirling in solemn frenzy. He even did it once during the weeks he was enfeebled by the sickness he died of, at fourteen. On a day when he was feeling a little better, he performed the solitary celebration of catching that elusive tail.

Roger’s broken tail did serve in a functional and handy way for years. When you came upon one of them in the dark, you had only to finger the tip of the tail to make the quickest and most efficient identification of which one you had.

Ten years later, in Sarasota, I came home from some errand one afternoon, and Dorothy announced that Roger had lost his tail. My immediate mental picture was considerably eased when I saw the cat and saw that he had lost that inch or so beyond the old break. The loss did not enhance his already dwindling beauty. He seemed to have no trauma, in fact no awareness he had become, overall, a shorter cat. The tail looked squared off, with the squared end unpleasantly ragged. This was no discernible wound, no infection. I believe that circulation eventually ceased beyond the break. The nerves were dead, probably, from the time of the break. The tip atrophied and finally dropped off.

A little later I saw Dorothy going slowly by the windows outside, staring at the ground, a thoughtful expression on her face. When she came in I asked her what she was doing, she said she was searching for Roger’s tail. She never found it.

Within a matter of weeks the way the hair grew at the end of the truncated tail changed completely, forming itself into the same glossy terminal tip as before. No one could guess it had ever been longer.

I have talked of the hurting of animals, and because this book is about the relationship between cats and people, I should at least make mention of our ambivalent attitude in these matters, though I have no hope of explaining it. I do not hunt. We do not kill snakes. Dorothy carries housebound bugs into the great outdoors for release but is pure hell on a clothes moth. We trap whitefoot mice in our Adirondack camp and hate doing it. We both enjoy sports fishing. And we are both aficionados of the bull ring. Were the horses unpadded, we wouldn’t be. I am not interested in arguing these inconsistencies with anyone.

As Geoff became less helpless, Roger gave him an increasingly hard time. Right in the midst of washing him, Roger would bite him. Geoff would squall and run, and when Roger came bounding after him, Geoff would roll onto his back and defend himself from that position. It set the pattern for all the rest of their time together. Geoff would always yell as though he were being savaged to death. When he was the smaller we would separate them when it seemed to get too rough. Eventually we learned, after they were of a size, that Geoff’s vocalized anguish was part of the game. And he started as many incidents as did Roger.

For years their most predictable time of play-battle was in the morning while we were having breakfast. After a certain amount of chase and flight, it always settled into the same pattern, Geoff on his back, paws ready for defense, while Roger, ears laid back, would make half circles around him, getting ever closer, looking for the chance to either spring in and take a nip at some unprotected place and bounce back out of range, or to find a major advantage, a moment of un-wariness, and come piling on, going for the neck, while Geoff would apparently try to disembowel him with his hind claws. You could hear the thuds as they hit each other with their paws. Little tufts of torn hair would drift in the morning sunlight. And Geoffrey would scream of murder being done. Never once were their roles in this mock battle reversed. Roger attacked; Geoff defended. As they grew older the invitations to battle became more considerate and ceremonial. No longer did one or the other crouch in hiding and spring upon the unwary. The victim cat might not be in the mood. An explosive exhalation, more huff than hiss, was adequate warning to stay the hell off. The rejected cat would walk away, sit, and begin to wash. This indicates awareness of a social error. It is the cat response to inadvertently falling, or being laughed at, or being slung off a chair, or letting a mouse escape. A man might start a tuneless little whistle and rock on his heels and fiddle with his necktie and stare into space. Cats go a little distance away and sit and start grooming themselves, starting with a few licks at the shoulder, never glancing back toward the place where the humiliation occurred.

As they matured, the invitation to the game was expressed by washing the face and neck of the other cat and, during this process, chancing the tentative bite. If there was no response, the cat making the query could save face by continuing the washing chore as though nothing had happened. If the nip was returned, the game was on.

As they changed from all the anonymous energies of kittenhood into the gangling specifics of teen-age cats, their personalities and their reactions to people became increasingly perceptible and distinct.

Roger wanted all relationships to be on his terms. He despised being picked up, and would begin a struggling that increased in intensity until he was put down. He would let you know when he wanted to be stroked, and then his engine-voice acceptance of it was a kind of gluttony. He was incomparably stubborn, egocentric, over-confident, often vile-tempered. But of the two he had the greater curiosity, and figured things out more quickly.

Geoff was more placid. He accepted what seemed to be expected of him at any time. He was content to be held. There were always children in the house, Johnny and his friends, visiting nephews, children of our friends. I wonder how many times we said, “The one with the white face will bite.” Roger would play with the kids, but when the game got to be a little too much, there would come that venomous huff, claws unsheathed, the ears laid back, and too often the yelp of a scratched child before Roger stalked away. Geoff never once bit or scratched a child, though I can remember once seeing him being used as a sort of roller under a sturdy small boy, with enough pressure on him, I swear, to make his eyes bulge. When Geoff had enough he would quietly and persistently disentangle himself and go away and hide. He seemed to trust children in a way Roger apparently found incomprehensible. Roger did not trust anyone too much but preferred adults.

In some gradual and unplanned way, Roger became “my” cat, and Geoff became Johnny’s. Perhaps Roger and I shared some kindred abrasive quality in our personalities. I seemed to intrigue him, particularly when I tormented him in minor ways. Some of these torments became ritual games between us. I will tell of these later on.

Dorothy fixed up an office for me in a very small room off the living room. It was about seven by nine, with one window, and had been some sort of clothes closet and storage room. It got me out of the dining room where, after school hours, small-fry traffic was dense. Roger became my office cat, sprawled atop a low file cabinet, sleeping and watching me by the hour. When he felt the need of a little action he would hop over to my desk and start batting things off onto the floor deliberately. But he did not do this often enough for any serious nuisance value. I think it was at that time I began to think of Old Turtlehead as a kind of mascot. We had acquired him during the first full month I tried to write for a living. Things were beginning to move and pay off. Possibly writers are as superstitious as baseball players or circus performers. All three professions are concerned with the interaction of skill and luck, and to both ballplayers and writers, slump is one of the truly horrid words in the language.

Though Roger did not care to be held, he vastly enjoyed riding around on anyone’s shoulder. I learned the wisdom of making no sudden moves or turns. Twenty-six claws can anchor a cat very solidly.

Roger’s joy in being toured about the house in this manner led to one interesting discovery. Morning or evening, when you were bent over the bathroom lavatory brushing your teeth, Roger delighted in leaping from the floor to your back, landing high on the back of one shoulder or the other. If your back was bare, he would land with uncanny lightness and delicacy, without a claw protruding. Yet if you wore just one covering of fabric, no matter how light, he would land with all claws seeking purchase. This could be such an unforgettable experience, we all became bareback toothbrushers.

Johnny toted Geoff about endlessly, a limp, happy, purring bundle of adoration. There was one aspect of this which seems contrary to instinct. If Geoff started to slip he would not grab with his claws to prevent falling. He would just keep on slipping, in total confidence that he would be grabbed and hiked back up where he belonged.

In their very walks the two cats seemed to express the variations in personality. Roger’s front legs were bowed. He placed one front paw in direct line with the previous step. (Now, in old age, this has become so exaggerated that there is an actual overlap, the right foot being placed further to the left than the left foot will be on the next step. It is a strange, cross-legged gait.) This, plus the greater length of his hind legs and the consequent height of his rear end, gave him a very slinking gait, and he looked constantly from side to side, as though pretending to be a tiger on the prowl.

Geoffrey trudged. He also inherited the excess-toe gene, and he had five in back but two extra ones on each front foot placed high enough to give sort of a dew-claw effect. Unlike Roger, the extra toes seemed to give Geoffrey’s feet a curious lumpiness which altered his gait. He trudged along on straight legs, making more of a thumping sound than one properly expects from a cat. He did not look to right or left. His forehead markings gave him a visible frown. He seemed always to be headed on some somber errand requiring concentration.

For a long time I could not imagine why Geoffrey’s walk was so comically unlike the walk of any cat I had ever seen. Then one day I noticed what it was. Roger and every other cat I have ever observed have been trotters — moving both legs on one side alternately, so that when the right front is extended ahead, the right rear is extended out behind, and the feet on the left side are closest together. Geoff was a pacer, moving the legs on each side in unison.

Despite the stolid lack of grace in Geoff’s walk, he had the greater precision and agility in feats of — excuse the expression — catrobatics. When Roger was old enough to have known better, we have seen him try to chase a small object under a couch too low for him and give himself such a ringing crack on the skull that he rebounded, dazed and glazed. And then walk unsteadily away to sit and wash and contemplate space. Geoff was never that clumsy. Roger, in mad dashes through the household, was always the one who knocked things over.

And when, finally, they became outdoor cats, Geoff was the hunter. Roger had a desperate desire to catch things, and he tried very hard, but the wildlife seemed almost to laugh at him. I shall tell later of the adventures of the hunt.

When Dorothy’s brother, Sam Prentiss, and his wife, Evelyn, and their two small boys visited us that year, they decided Mandeville cats were giving birth to litters of very superior kittens. And so they obtained one. Apparently that litter had been fathered by the same tom who fathered Roger. Their male kitten was built very much like Roger, though of slightly better configuration. Like Roger he grew to be a big, long cat. His coat was a strange and beautiful lavender shade of gray. He had extra toes.

They named him Mittens. But as his personality became more evident, it soon became apparent that such a name was like calling Caligula sweetums. When it came to baleful, he made Roger look like a buttercup. His early years were incomparably surly. After making his acquaintance during a joint vacation at Piseco Lake I renamed him Heathcliffe, and the name stuck. He lived to be seventeen. In his later years when, as in the case of Roger, he adopted an astonishing benignity as a way of life, it became Heathie. Curiously enough, sold on our theory of two cats being the optimum quantity, they acquired a gray tiger named Charlie in the Albany area where they still live, and Charlie turned out to be the same sort of sturdy, amiable, loving type as Geoff.

A final note about George. We had discovered that Geoffrey could use the larger dewclaw on his front right foot much as an opposed thumb. We kept his catnip in a glass jar with a mouth just wide enough for him to stick his hand in. Roger would reach in, claw catnip out, and lap it off the floor. Geoffrey would reach in, curl his paw around a wad of catnip, hold it in place with the opposed thumb, and then eat it out of the palm of his hand, looking oddly monkey-like during the process. We had him demonstrate this talent to many visitors, and often the subsequent conversation became quite fanciful, speaking of Geoffrey as an example of a feline mutation which, in time, might lead to the use of tools and the consequent increase in adaptive intelligence. Yet if he was a mutation, he had been deprived of the chance of passing this gene along to future generations of cats.

At about this time George, between litters, was run over and killed one night on Mandeville Street near the store. With her died the chance of more males with prehensile toes, a trait they could pass along, if left their tomishness.

Cats, so survival-prone in almost all other ways, are pathetically stupid about highways. At night they become too intense about the hunt and about sex and apparently feel so fleet they believe nothing can touch them as they streak across. They make a sorry and inconsequential little thud against a front tire.

Incidentally, Geoffrey was the only cat we have ever seen make an observable adjustment to the highway problem. In 1951 we were in a rented house on Casey Key, between Sarasota and Venice. We were at a narrow part of the key. The frame cottage was on the bay side. The unpaved road went between the house and the beach. When we went over to the beach, the cats would often go with us. Our shell path stopped at the edge of the road, then continued on the other side.

Time after time we would see Geoffrey come along the path, trudge, trudge, trudge. He would come to a complete stop right at the edge of the road. He would look to the left and then to the right. These were not hasty glances. They were calm appraisals of the situation. Assured the way was clear, he would trudge on across the road and along the path. We had to keep an eye on Roger. He was a fool about traffic. But after watching Geoff’s behavior we did not worry about him.

I think that he was probably hit by a car, a nudge, or a glancing blow which hurt him without injuring him. Being a methodical cat, he could certainly relate cause and effect and did so demonstrably in many other areas during his lifetime.