The House Guests

Seven

Though it was certainly not long ago, shipping pets by Railway Express was a far more plausible venture in the late forties and first half of the fifties than it is today. The cost of shipping two big cats in a big plywood crate with wire windows at either end was not exorbitant. You would cover the box floor with tom paper, fasten their water dishes and food dishes solidly into the corners, tack a sack of canned food with can opener to the outside, and glue simple feeding instructions to the outside. Railway Express would fasten a card to the crate upon which employees en route would write the day and time they were fed and watered, and sign their names.

The cats would ride from Utica to Florida and back in an average two and a half days and arrive in a state so mildly traumatic that a couple of hours would see them back to normal.

But each year the rates went up, and each year the train schedules worsened, and each year the men along the way seemed to give less of a damn about a pair of damn cats, and they arrived in increasingly worse condition until, finally, it became impossible.

So this, too, relates to the myth of our ever increasing standard of living. We live in a culture where service is increasingly slovenly, surly, and reluctant, where schedules mean less and less, where every species of life including the human animal is held in less esteem each year, where all the glossy gadgetry disintegrates at an ever increasing rate, where mediocrity in all things has become a goal — with all excellence suspect.

There is nothing mysterious, of course, about this accelerated decline. My sixth-grade geography teacher told us that the individual life was cheap and cruelly used in China because of the terrible population density of four hundred millions of them. Today we approach half that number in less than half the space, so that the mass insularity of the anthill is the inevitable result. Thirty-seven witnesses can watch a woman murdered. Millions of kids can learn group adjustment as if it were a commendable skill. Over half the humans in the world have no memory of World War II. In an acceleration of the technologies, it is cheaper to repeat experimentations than to conduct a search for previous results. As life gets ever more inconvenient, trashified, and irritating, it is possible to convince through electronic repetition the brand-new millions that everything is, in fact, getting better and better and better.

It is still possible to ship pets. One purchases an approved crate constructed of light metal. One drives the necessary distance to a major airport where there will be a direct flight to the major airport nearest the destination. One makes the air-express arrangements, confirms the loading, then phones someone at the far end to go to the airport and arrange to receive the animals. It is wise to get the proper tranquilizers from the vet so the animals’ response to extreme trauma will be dulled. And be prepared for heavy expense. This is yet another one of the conveniences of the jet age.

A pleasant voice over the telephone told us that a box of cats had arrived, and we drove at once to the Railway Express office in Clearwater, put the car top down, and loaded the rather fetid crate into the back seat. It mewed in a dreary way. Back at Acacia Street we set it down in the driveway, and I undid the hasp and opened it, and the cats arched out, blinking at the bright sun. Their first response, then and thereafter, was to find a place of dust or powdered marl and roll and roll. Then, as always, exploration was carried on in shoulder to shoulder formation. Always, after they had been in a crate together, or after they had been at a boarding kennel in the same cage, they tended to stay very close together for a period which related directly to the length of time they had shared confinement. It seemed to represent both habit and security.

And both of them would holler. They would walk around and, at intervals of two or three minutes, give a yowling and forlorn cry. We were never able to figure out why they did this. It is possible that when a wild feline moves to a new part of the forest, instinct requires this announcement of the new address, but one would think it might make prospective meals harder to catch.

We recall one time, one of the last times we had them shipped down by rail, after service had deteriorated badly. It had taken four days. One or both of them had been sick and had diarrhea. Their crate was horrid. I opened it in the driveway of our Point Crisp house. Geoff hopped out and with his lumpy, purposeful stride walked directly to our thick hedge of Australian pine, stuck his head into it, and just stood there for a long, long time.

After their tandem tour of the premises in Clearwater we introduced them to their kitchen corner where their first Florida snack was served, and then to their window. After much washing, hollering, investigating, they settled down to the long naps of tired tourists, sleeping so close they were in familiar contact.

There was record heat that fall in Clearwater. The cats searched for relatively cool corners. At times they panted audibly like dogs, pink tongues lolling. They ate lightly, drank often, and except in the cool of early morning, made no unnecessary movements. The big tree outside our bedroom windows was full of noisy birds.

We noticed that Geoff wasn’t doing very well. He became very unresponsive. He ate less and less. His chunky sides sagged until his backbone began to look scrawny and pathetic, and at times there would be a milky film over his eyes.

A veterinarian with an establishment near the St. Pete dog track was recommended to us, and we took Geoffrey there. The pleasant man examined him and asked us questions about him.

At last he gave his surprising diagnosis. Geoffrey was psychologically depressed. When cats become depressed they show what is called the third eyelid, a milky membrane that comes up from under the lower lid. He just simply did not care for Florida. He was homesick for a terrain he had found more agreeable. Recommendation: Give him a great deal of attention, coddling, affection. Try to keep him entertained. We had been respecting what we thought was ill health by trying not to bother him too much, and this apparently was further contributing to his state of depression. It further confirmed our own estimate of the complexity of these furry house guests to have what was apparently an eminently practical and businesslike D.V.M. tell us that cats in this condition will actually sometimes become weaker and more withdrawn and eventually die.

Old Turtlehead got unexpected benefit from Geoff’s therapy. There had always been a perceptible jealousy. From the beginning, if we paid too much exclusive attention to Roger, Geoff would trudge gloomily away. If we paid too much attention to Geoff, Roger — in exasperation — would bite him. So we all had the habit, if we patted one cat in passing, we patted the other if he was nearby.

Geoff endured the attentions for a time and then gradually became more responsive. He began to eat better. The third eyelid was seen less frequently and then not at all. He filled out again, and that lumpy pacer’s stride took on the purposeful porkiness of old. He found a good hunting area in an overgrown vacant lot nearby. He brought in a huge, indignant bluejay who, when released, spent a good part of the afternoon on a low limb screaming obscenities and evidently accusing Geoff of unfair tactics. Both cats filled the house with lizards. That was something Roger could catch, too, though not in the quantity Geoffrey achieved. Roger could never quite comprehend the standard tactic of the small green ones. When they would try to scurry away he would plant a foot on their tail. The lizard would keep on going and the little green tail would writhe for a little time and then grow still. He would stare at the tail, snuff at it, look at the lizard’s escape route, then cock his head to one side and then the other. Cats and dogs express bewildered curiosity in exactly the same manner.

We learned that the housebound lizards could easily be induced to run into the open mouth of a brown paper bag after the cats had lost interest. We did miss some of the little green ones, and later we would find their bodies clinging to window screens in the high corners between screen and sash. Totally dried and darkened, they looked far more prehistoric, savage little symbols of the frightful giants of the quaking earth an aeon ago. Johnny began saving the perfect ones, along with fishbones and bird skulls and the empty hulls of giant insects, shark teeth, oddly shaped stones. When, not too many years later, he began to draw with serious intent, began to show that almost ruthless unconcern toward other activities which is the plight and the strength of the artist, he turned to these things as models as he trained eye and hand.

The cats brought in another kind of lizard, which none of us cared for and which even the cats seemed reluctant to fool with once they released them in the house. These were larger ones, fat, thick, black, damp, and short-legged. Their escape efforts on hardwood or linoleum were more snakelike than lizard-like, and when Geoff brought one in he would have his lips pulled high in his gesture of distaste.

Having heard that some of the small Florida lizards were poisonous, having been told horrific tales of crazed and paralyzed cats, we were worried about what might happen. But they certainly had no inclination to eat the lizards. Roger, for several days, had a swelling and infection which could have come from a lizard bite, but we could not be certain that was the cause.

At Piseco and at College Hill we had learned that our cats loved to accompany us on walks. Geoff was happy to plod along at our speed, staying several steps behind us like a small dog, pausing sometimes to investigate some interesting scent along the way, then hurrying to catch up to his self-assigned position. Roger made a vast, nutty game out of it, hiding until we had passed, then rocketing by us and hiding again to either pounce out as we passed, or to repeat the previous performance. If walks became too long it was usually Roger who would lose interest first and go on about his own affairs.

At Acacia Street this habit became a nuisance. After Geoff had recovered his morale, Dorothy and I fell into the habit of, after dinner, walking through the pleasant night to a little bar several blocks south and over on the other side of Mandalay Road, the main street on Clearwater Beach. The cats thought this was a splendid ceremony and tried to go along with us. But there was too good a chance of their getting run over on Mandalay either going over there with us or wandering around the area after we had gone inside. So we would close the cat window if they were in the house. If they weren’t, we would walk and keep an eye out for them and then con them into coming close enough for capture so we could take them home and shut them in.

But you cannot safely con a cat very many times. They arrived at a catlike solution. When we were ready to leave for our pair of cold beers and game of table shuffleboard, the cats would be outside. Calling them was useless. They were invisible. So we would start out and look back and see the pair of them, night after night, walking together along the sidewalk following us, a half a block away. We would see those two conspirators under the street lights, and if we called, they would stay just a half block behind. If we went back, they would melt into the darkness to reappear again, a half block behind us after we gave up the hunt. When we started home, after a half block or a block, both cats would suddenly be underfoot, perfectly willing to be picked up and carried across Mandalay and set down again, and they gamboled and horsed around all the way home.

Roger chilled us to the bone one night on the way home. At a cross street near the house we stopped on the corner to let a slow-moving car go by. Just as it was reaching the corner, Roger pulled his idiot trick of rocketing past us. It was under a street light. He cut it so fine he actually had to add a little extra curve to get around the far front wheel of the car. We yelled at him, I think after he was out of danger, it happened so fast. When we crossed with Geoff, he was waiting over there with that cat grin of high spirits, fun and games, prancings in the night.

In the spring at Acacia Street, mockingbirds nested all over that area. At another time and another place I had acquired considerable respect for one mockingbird talent. We had stopped on a Saturday night at a motel in southern Texas near Harlingen. There was a navigable stream behind it. At dawn Sunday morning some jackass began cutting hardwood boards with a power saw. I complained at the office when we checked out. The man at the desk said it was a mockingbird, who had learned the noise from a small boat yard nearby. I did not really believe it until finally I tracked the sound down and located the creature in a treetop being a power saw.

Just last fall at Point Crisp there was another startling example of the mockingbird art. Roger had a hairball he had been trying to get rid of for several days. In his attempt to disgorge it, he would crouch and make an unmistakable gasping, wheezing, creaking sound of nausea that would go on and on without satisfactory result It was a rhythmic, repetitious noise. He didn’t seem very well last fall, and the effort would leave the old boy shaky. It was warm and the doors onto the screened terrace were open. I had come downstairs from my office, and as I walked through Dorothy’s studio I heard him straining away out on the terrace, so I went out there to check on him. I didn’t see him anywhere. I went into the living room and saw him asleep on the couch and thought I had imagined it all. Then, behind me out on the terrace the sound started again. I looked out and saw a large mockingbird sitting on a low limb of a bush just outside the screening and perhaps three feet above ground level, being a sick cat. Roger would often go out there to be sick, and the bird was as close as he could get to the place Rog usually went. As he made the noise he was cocking his head this way and that, peering in through the screen, quite obviously looking for the cat. I called Dorothy, and she listened to him, to the uncanny precision of the imitation, and we decided that the bird was, in what he construed as an accurate manner, calling the cat.

In the warm spring nights on Acacia Street the mockingbirds sang all night long, repeating their improvisations in series of four, adding fragments of cardinal, bluejay, mourning dove, gull, heron, red-winged blackbird. It could get to be compulsive, counting the series of four and listening for an eventual repetition. I managed to teach one of them a wolf whistle and, sooner or later, that would also crop up in that interminable serenade of nesting time.

The cats learned respect for an entirely different attribute of the nesting mockingbird. Jays would make an endless squawking fuss at such piercing volume that often they could drive a cat back indoors by getting on his nerves. Other types of birds would, like the jays, make tentative passes at the cats, staying at a safe distance. But those mockingbirds, during the nesting season, actually pecked hell out of both cats. When either cat crossed an open space by daylight, a mockingbird would take a bomb run from behind the target, come in low and hard and fast, administer one good knock on the skull, and zoom straight back up out of reach. The experience was not only painful, but it was a horrid indignity. Both cats had three and four little peck holes on top of the head centered in little bald, gray, circular patches half-dime size where hair stopped growing. Both of them learned defensive tactics, though it seemed to pain them. In daylight they would walk under the protection of hedges and bushes or walk very close to the side of the house. When one of them came to the end of his protection of the moment, he would stop, select the next shelter, look around with obvious anxiety, then run across the open space. The holes healed, and the hair grew back, and in time they learned how to take advantage of all shelter without looking so nervous about it — in fact, giving the impression the entire procedure was entirely accidental.

There are not as many mockingbirds these days, and with the decrease in numbers their boldness has lessened. Their preferred diet is bulky insects, and their clan has not prospered on the fare of poisoned bugs we have provided for them in our ghastly and futile efforts to eliminate mosquitoes. Mosquitoes, adjusting quickly to poisons, achieving immunity to one dire brew after the next, are bigger, huskier and more numerous than ever, and now thrive all year round in Florida. For the first time in modern history the spraying equipment in the Fort Myers area was used so intensively all winter that by spring when the millions turned to billions, there had been no chance to dismantle, clean, and maintain their hard-pressed and increasingly futile equipment.

Ten and twelve years ago, both at Piseco Lake and in Florida, in the long dusks of hot weather there were shimmering legions of dragonflies, darting, wheeling, feeding on the mosquito, the gnat, the sand fly — such numbers of them that sometimes they would perceptibly darken the sky. But we poisoned them with the sprays, and they are gone. Now, at Piseco, we get stung all season rather than just up to about the eighth of July on the average, and in Florida we get welted all year round instead of from April to October.

Rachel Carson made a profound objection on the basis we are poisoning all the living things on our planet. I object on the basis we are far worse off now than we were when we started. Ask the ranchers who, in these recent years of incomparable progress have had thousands of head of cattle killed by mosquitoes so dense the young beef have choked to death and the mature animals have, in panic, run themselves to death. I think the mockingbirds would vote for immediate federal control of this stupendous idiocy presently conducted for the most part by self-styled experts who can’t even read the warnings on the container. The mosquito-control man in Sarasota County, Mel Williams, is one of those rarities, a valid expert, who feels that spraying is a questionable and partial answer. He gets results by eliminating the breeding areas, but we can do nothing about the clouds of trillions of them which blow in from less enlightened counties when wind and weather are exactly right.

One point has never been properly emphasized in this endemic condition of overspraying by local governmental bodies throughout the country. Capital expenditures are made on a low-bid basis, and under these conditions there is small chance for any squeeze, grease, or rakeoff. But the lethal goo for the spray equipment is purchased as are other “supplies,” and here it is tradition in thousands of counties and thousands of communities that the men in office get their little sweetening in the form of kickbacks from the suppliers, thereof be the item paper clips, liquid soap, prison potatoes, or compounds so lethal that children have died after playing with the containers they came in months after they have been emptied. So when Joe Courthouse needs pocket money, he will cheerfully drench his community with another thousand dollars’ worth of bird-killer, explaining that he is fighting the good fight against noxious, disease-bearing bugs. If they buy a hundred-year supply of liquid perfumed soap for the city hall washrooms, they are in trouble. But you never pile up an incriminating stockpile of poison. You can spread it as fast as you can buy it, and so can the man who beats you in the next election. And the more attractive the kickback, the bigger the volume. No wonder it has become such a huge, profitable industry in an astonishingly short time.

Federal licensing of compounds and federal permits for each spray project based on prior saturation of the area would take a lot of the beguiling charm out of this gravy train.

Also, in Florida, it would be very interesting to find some way of hamstringing the arrogant and powerful citrus industry so that the terrifying discovery of four or five Mediterranean fruit flies would not immediately result in the air-dropping of untold tons of poison of unknown side effects on humans, birds, and animals in densely populated areas. Fellows, how come they manage to have so much fruit in the places the fruit fly comes from?

The cats reached another point of evolvement during residence on Acacia Street. Roger perfected his con-artist technique and became a shamelessly lazy slob. In the very beginning he did all the washing of himself and the kitten brother. Somewhere along the line there must have come a time when he did half. But by that winter he arrived at the permanent minimum. After eating they would wash each other’s faces. Rather, Rog would give Geoff a couple of apparently diligent licks to get Geoff started. They would sit facing each other. Roger would suffer himself to be thoroughly washed, returning not a lick, fatuously enjoying every moment of it. As soon as Geoff began to show signs of stopping, Rog would give him another couple of swipes, and that would get Geoff going again. Roger, that winter, began to wear the visible signs of the con artist — a shining white face and tattle-tale-gray feet. Cats do not wash each other’s feet. Geoff was always tidy. He took care of himself in his spare time.

A cat — fed, clean, content, and pleasantly tired from outdoor adventure — seems to have a curious ability to find some place to rest which will put it on display in a pleasing fashion. It is such a subtle trait it is most difficult to detect. Cats like high places. They like soft places. Often these are also artistically pleasing to the human eye when adorned by a resting cat. Except in the very hottest weather, a cat’s sleeping and resting positions are graceful. When it is very hot, the trusting cat will sleep on its back, hind legs splayed, front legs sticking up in the air, bent loosely at the wrist. We had an opportunity for many years of observation of these two animals, and we are both convinced that given a choice of two places of equivalent cat comfort, more than 50 per cent of the time the cat will select the one where it looks the best. For example, if there is a dark couch with two dark cushions and one cushion in a bright, clear color, all equally soft, the cat will spend 60 per cent of his couch time on one or another of the dark cushions, and 40 per cent on the bright one, thus showing a preference though not a consistent and invariable one.

Both cats broke things. Roger would bust them in reckless, racing cat-games. Geoff had a far more deliberate procedure. Resting quietly on a mantel, a bureau, a table, a breakfast bar, he would reach out and start gently patting some frangible thing toward the edge, moving it a quarter of an inch per pat. When it fell and shattered, he would hang over the edge and stare down at all the pieces, then stare at whoever was chewing him out with a sort of What-do-you-know-about that! expression. Sure broke, didn’t it?

As the school year drew to a close we realized we could spend our first full summer at Piseco. We had been in correspondence with Floyd Abrams about the camp, and it had been well started, and we could be there for the rest of the work. We made arrangements to rent a small camp not far along the lake shore from Wanahoo, almost directly across the lake from the new camp. We wanted to return to Clearwater, but the house on Acacia Street was too small. Before we left we found a larger house on Bruce Street, several blocks further north along the island, where there would be less traffic than on the Acacia corner, and acquired it long enough before we left so that we could carry things over and store them there, little by little.

A neighbor on Bruce told us during one of these trips that there were cats living under the house, a female and a litter of half-grown kittens too wild and scary to get close to. She said she had been feeding them, but she was going away and did not know how they would manage. She said that there was also a tremendous black tomcat in the area, equally homeless and unapproachable. This is a too-common situation in Florida. Sappy tourists who stay for a few months acquire the pretty kitty for the kids, then deliberately abandon it when they leave rather than take it with them or deliver it to the animal shelter. As a result there are thousands of cats in a semi-wild state, living in uncleared lots and in wild areas of the keys, scavenging for a living and doing badly at it. There is no point in railing at the class of human who will do this. Theirs is an insensate stupidity beyond the possibility of shame or blame. If you, reading this, have a vague uneasy memory of having abandoned a vacation cat somewhere, rest assured that darling kitty did not find a nice home. It ended in the brush, railthin, scabrous, and scared, wondering what the hell happened to the darling people. Cats hang around a long, long time before they finally give up. They have a powerful sense of place — a den-affinity. To be locked out of the den is beyond comprehension. It is only the transients like ours who learn to unpack their suitcases anywhere.

We borrowed a cat trap from the humane society, an oblong cage with a trigger-place for the food which would drop the wire gate down. We would set it in the evening and go over and check it in the morning. One at a time we caught the female and her half-grown brood. The terror of the trap loosens the bowels. It was an untidy chore driving them to the shelter, hosing the trap down, resetting it. The animal shelter would try to place them, and, failing that, mete out a swift, painless death.

After we had cleaned out the colony under the house, we kept setting the trap and baiting it. But it remained empty. I caught a glimpse of that tom disappearing into a palmetto patch, looking back over his shoulder at me. The sun caught the high gloss of his black coat. He did not slink or cringe. He prowled, obviously foraging successfully, too savvy for box traps. Soon it was time to go, and we gave up the futile attempt, imagining that when we returned two and a half months later, black tom would no longer be around.

We checked outgoing train schedules, airmailed Dr. Sellman when to expect the cats, took the nervously mewling crate down to Railway Express, and sent it out, with food and instructions, prepaid.

Thus was devised the system we followed for years. Dr. Sellman would hold them until we announced our arrival and send them along. We would ship them back and he would hold them until we could pick them up and take them to Piseco.

From time to time during that period, Dorothy and Johnny would try with a carefully plausible argument to talk me into taking them north in the car — a nest amid the luggage, mild tranquilizers, maybe collars and leashes for roadside relievings, smuggle them into motels. But I never fell into the trap of being obliged to come up with a logical refutation of each point. I merely expressed vast astonishment that two otherwise intelligent people could even pretend to propose such chaos.

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.