The House Guests (19 page)

Intensive writing over a long period of time is exhausting in ways I find difficult to describe without sounding somewhat precious about it. You feel disenfranchised by reality, a half step behind and off to one side of your own skin, your view oblique, with most possibilities of genuine reaction cooled by being filtered through the habitual appraisal mechanics of your trade. You find an off-hours world crammed with the enticing stimulations of good books, good art, good conversation, but that creative effort necessary to these appreciations is too much akin to the process that uses you up in your work, and so, too often, aware of sloth and guilt, you surrender to the undemanding unvarying flatulence of network television, to magazine fare styled for the lip readers, to social contact with people so curiously predictable in their attitudes you know their lines before they say them.

Amid all my periods of this self-imposed diet of off-duty
pabulum there has been the bright boom of cat watching, of communicating with these supra-pragmatic entities on an honorable level of cause and effect, of seeing both the jungly graces and the owlish slapstick. It has been the one form of intensive observation and conjecture so little related to the desk hours that it has freshened and restored.

Roger, in the exercise of his single feat of obedience to command, has never failed to cheer me. Long ago, when he hovered too close, within biting range, I would put a bare foot against his shoulder, and, saying “Down!” in a loud voice, I would shove him rudely over onto his side. In time it became simplified. If I made a threatening gesture with the foot and shouted the word, down he would go.

Now the word alone suffices, but he so hates to comply, it is an absurd and lengthy process. I yell the word at the cat. He is certain I cannot possibly mean it. He starts to walk away. I move to block his escape. “Down! Down! Down, you son of a gun!”

Perhaps I will be satisfied with less. He makes a small circle, walking with all knees bent. He looks up. This is enough? “Down!” He crouches against the floor. Certainly this is enough! “Down!” With a look of being at the weary end of his patience, he dips one shoulder and flops over onto his side. I pat the cat. After total surrender, he seems mightily pleased with himself. We understand each other and all the rules of the contest.

      The summer of 1957 was the last time we shipped the cats to Utica. They were in fine shape when we expressed them. They arrived at Dr. Sellman’s in horrid condition after four days in transit. It was cold throughout the East, and he said that it seemed possible that somewhere along the line they had been left out of doors, perhaps on a station platform. The once legible statements of care given them en route had deteriorated to an indifferent, incomplete, indecipherable scrawl while, over the interim, the cost had more than tripled.

The cats were eleven and twelve, too old to adjust readily to hardship and exposure, and certainly we did not feel right about risking them again to such slovenliness and indifference. Geoff wasn’t badly off, but Roger was dangerously ill. We discussed it with Dr. Sellman. I had learned during Geoff’s serious illness how to give a cat a pill. With thumb and forefinger on exactly the right place, the jaws will open. Then, using a dart-throwing motion, you throw the pill down into the upturned mouth, aiming at one side of the back of the tongue. Still keeping the mouth aimed upward, you close the jaws and hold them closed, and the cat’s throat will work as he swallows. Geoff, aside from some devious business of pretending it was gone and spitting it out later, had been very good about it. But I had qualms about
Roger. Nevertheless, we all agreed that a cat so sick had a better chance of recovery in a familiar place with his own people. They readily become depressed while in kennels.

So after the doctor treated him again, we wrapped him up warmly, and Dorothy held him in her lap while we drove them up to the lake. Once there it soon became evident that giving him his pills was no problem. He became weaker and weaker, until he could hardly lift his head. He was too weak to eat. We kept him in a box near the floor furnace. Dorothy was up every night several times, spooning warm milk into him. He was a few bones and sinews in a disreputable gray sack. After a time he stopped feeling as hot, and he did seem a little more responsive, but he was still terribly weak.

Even after seven years, Dorothy still recalls his moment of recovery with a certain amount of amused indignation. One afternoon was warm and sunny. She thought it might make him feel better if she carried his box out into the sunshine for a little while. She could watch him out the kitchen window.

Suddenly she looked out and saw the slat-sided cat get out of the box and wobble off in the direction of the clearing at the side of the house. Remembering the way Geoff had crept away to either recover or die, she hurried out. She found the old fool in the clearing, with painful slowness going through the unmistakable motions of the hunt. He looked at her with his idiot grin. In view of his hunting abilities when in peak condition, it was an incredibly optimistic performance.

Thereafter he recovered so quickly that in a couple of days it was a gory chore trying to get a pill down him. His new-found benignity stopped short of having his jaws pried open.

In the autumn we risked one final railroad trip. The
weather was good. Again it took too long, and that was the time the inside of their box was such a fetid horror Geoff went immediately over and stood with his face in the hedge. I put the crate in the bay weighted down and let the tide cleanse it. After it was recovered and was dried out, I put it on the burning pile.

In June of 1958 Johnny graduated from Oakwood, and his application to work that summer in Mexico with the Friends Service Committee was approved. Though it seemed to him an instance of overprotectiveness, making him somewhat surly on the way down, we decided to drive him to Mexico, turn him over to the Quakers in Mexico City, and continue on down to Cuernavaca and spend the summer there after an absence of ten years. As it turned out, it was a good thing we went. Despite the required typhoid series, he acquired a galloping good case of typhoid out in the remote village where they were digging cisterns, a case that made us commuters to Mexico City, visiting him in the hospital there during his extended stay. It was severe enough to leave him with a permanently unreliable digestive system, and was especially alarming to Dorothy because her father had died of the same disease when she was fourteen.

In looking for a place to stow the cats in the summer of ’58, someone told us about the Buckelwood Boarding Kennels off in the piney flatlands five or six miles southeast of Bradenton. It is owned by a Mr. and Mrs. Buchanan, a Quaker couple who have a great affection for animals and the competence to keep animals happy and healthy.

I must say that in Quaker hands the cats fared better than the boy that year. When we picked them up they were fat, smug, and glossy and had so firmly established themselves with the management that
the Buchanans seemed a bit dubious about entrusting them to us. In fact, ever since we started that relationship, we have had the feeling that we are, in some subtle manner, borrowing the Buchanan cats while we are in Florida.

We boarded both cats with them in 1959 and 1960.

In the spring of 1960 Geoffrey began to act strangely. He was fourteen years old. Dorothy noted that he was not eating well. And he began to spend a great deal of time under a particular chair. He would spend very little time away from it and always go right back. He would beg for food when there was food in his dish, using that extremely effective nasty yap he had developed over the years. She would tempt him with the things he had always been fond of, and he would eat a very little bit and go back under the chair. Often he would keep turning this way and that, as though trying to find some position comfortable to him. As the weather grew warmer, he would sometimes move out onto the terrace under the shade of a bush and then return to his place under the chair. He seemed to like attention, and, remembering the third eyelid, we gave him a lot of it.

Each time when he seemed to be getting to the point where we should take him over to Dr. Thomas, he would improve. But he had gotten so thin he had lost that square look, and his coat, instead of lying flat and glossy, was tufted and dry-looking. He did not feel hot. His nose did not run. He did not seem to have diarrhea or any significant amount of vomiting. And he purred often. It Is hard to judge what might have been the best decision.

Even more than Roger; he loathed the car and visits to the hospital. We hated to cause him discomfort when he apparently was in no pain other than the discomfort of getting up after staying too long in one
position. We had taken him to Dr. Thomas when he first began to act sluggish. He had been given a vitamin shot. There was no other evident problem.

In the cat-to-human ratio of years, he was ninety-eight. Possibly the heat was bothering him. Now we both know we should have taken him to Dr. Thomas, but there is hardly anything in this life which could not be improved by hindsight.

When it came time to leave him at Buckelwood, he was having one of his better periods. We did not feel entirely easy about him, but he did seem well enough to leave, and we knew we could give him no better care than they would. We explained how he had been acting and we certainly did not expect him to die, or we would not have left him.

At Piseco we received this letter from Mrs. Buchanan:

Dr. Thomas sent us a nice note also.

Certainly one weeps for a cat, as for any good thing spanning so many good years of a family. Especially vivid and sad to me is what happened about the third evening after we heard about him. I wandered out into the kitchen. Dorothy was fixing dinner. What happened needs a certain amount of background. In Dorothy’s childhood her family was close and physically demonstrative. In the Scots household of my youth, I was on a handshake basis with my father at tender years. Physical habits condition the human animal. The buddy-boy male who drapes a hearty arm across my shoulders gives me the squirms. And though I have tried very hard to loosen up, and think sometimes I have achieved a fair imitation, Dorothy can detect in response to the casual affection of pat or squeeze, a woodenness consonant with a dour heritage.