The House Guests (21 page)

When summer ended and they went back to Michigan, to Cranbrook Academy of Art at Bloomfield Hills, where Johnny and Anne were to get a bachelor’s and master’s respectively, the following June, they rented a little frame farmhouse on seventy-eight acres of land, about a forty-minute drive from the school.

When we got back to Sarasota in the fall of 1962, we got our elderly party out of his summer resort. He was glossy and solid and in good spirits, but the Buchanans reported that he was drinking an extraordinary amount of water, and they did not like the way the remaining eye would sometimes catch and reflect the light.

We observed him carefully as he settled into his Point Crisp routine. He certainly was drinking a great deal of water, and the toilet in the east bathroom was his water hole. He did not want water which had been sitting there quietly for any length of time, nor the water in his water dish. He wanted it fresh-flushed, and quickly learned how to con both of us, so that whoever was nearest would flush it for him. He would get up onto the seat and circle it until he was at that position where he could step down with his front feet onto the porcelain slope above the water level. Prior to that winter it had been an infrequent occurrence to see that high, scrawny back end sticking up out of the plumbing, but in the winter of 1962–63 it was a standard scene.

We could not detect any sign of ill health. His nose was a hearty pink. His coat was glossy. He was a Flying
Red Horse from time to time. He bit. He adored. He yaffled. He appeared, sometimes, for the sock game. He flopped onto his side on command, after the usual reluctance and half measures. He went calling. We both imagine that this water-hunger has been an adjustment to one of the customary degenerative diseases of ancient cats. Heathcliffe, before he had to be killed by the vet, had a great deal of kidney and bladder trouble and became sporadically more incontinent. Roger apparently keeps his water system in top shape by overworking it.

We watched that eye. It did not have the milky look we remembered as the first sign of trouble in the other eye. But when the light would catch it just right there would be, for an instant, a slight opacity. I suspect, and there would seem to be no good way to check it, that there are just enough dead cells in the eye fluid to create this effect under the right conditions. We have many birds on the Point, from the wading yellow-eyed fish-stalkers to the smallest warblers. And old Rog, from inside the house, will at times look through the glass doors, through the terrace screening, between the branches of the fringe of water oaks, and cat-watch an immature heron on a little oyster bar a hundred feet off our back shore, his ears slanted forward, body very slightly crouched and motionless, tail tip flickering. It takes us so long to spot what is interesting him that we do not worry about the efficiency of that eye. If it is slowly fading, it is at a rate which will make it last longer than the rest of him.

That fall his increasing deafness became more noticeable. He seemed to hear me more readily than he could hear Dorothy, so we can assume that he was losing the higher cps range. When he slept in one position too long, it seemed difficult for him to get up and loosen old muscles. Dr. Thomas recommended
the occasional shot of cortisone. It limbers him nicely and, to our surprise, improves his hearing for several weeks after he has a shot. When we have to be away for just a few days it is simpler to board him with Dr. Thomas than way off at Buckelwood, and so when we leave him there now, we ask for the cortisone shot as a matter of course.

That was the winter he gave up going out at night. It was his decision. He would ask to go out. Someone would hold the screen door open for him. He would stop halfway out and apparently try to use his nose, his eyesight, his hearing, to check the blackness out there. I suspect that it was being unable to hear anything which made the night more fearful to him. Silence can be something waiting. He would think it over, back into the house and wheel around, and plod out through the kitchen to the studio and from there out through the door we left wedged open for him onto the screened terrace. Incidentally, it took both cats two or three seasons to become absolutely convinced the terrace was entirely enclosed and that nothing could get at them out there. The birds using the feeder just beyond the screen were quicker, apparently, to comprehend that cats could not get out.

Yet this is an area where it is often erroneous to attempt to gauge the extent of comprehension of a cat. Observation is a faulty tool in the face of a cat’s apparent delight in frightening itself. It seems to be one of those functional games to keep the adrenalin perked up. When a visiting dog has been prowling around the house, snuffling his way past the terrace, we have seen Geoff give every evidence of wanting to get out there through the screen and teach that dog what for, apparently saying, “Boy, if I could just get out there …”

Then a day or so later, when he would see something he thought he might be able to catch, there was
no problem. He would freeze, stare at it, then whirl and go through the studio, kitchen, living room, hallway, into the dressing room, and out his window in a low, silent run.

As they seemed to play these games of terror and pretend, they also had a very shrewd judgment when it came to actual danger as opposed to bluff. One time Mary, Dorothy’s first cousin, came to Piseco with her husband, Eugene Hubbard, a Utica attorney, and their dachshund, named Fritz. Fritz was visibly appalled at the size of the resident cats. But when he discovered they planned to politely ignore him, he made a serious miscalculation and tried to push his luck. He began to trot around with ever increasing jauntiness and began to yap at them. He confused tolerance with timidity. When he began to get on their nerves, one of them waited for him just around a corner of the house, and when he came trotting around the corner, a horror was standing there, inches away, a cat standing so tall and haired up it was the size of a bushel basket. It showed long white fangs, satanic green eyes, and made a sound like a broken steam valve. Fritz went plunging and yodeling through the woods and ran all the way out the length of our eighty-foot dock, a narrow structure on sunken sawhorses, and cowered at the far end, screaming about what he had seen. The cats had made not the slightest attempt to follow him. They came strolling onto the dock in front where the people were, lounged about, and began buffing their fingernails on their lapels and whistling tunelessly. Fritz had to be carried to the safety of their car and enclosed there before he ceased moaning and muttering.

However, one day while the guesthouse was being built, the young architect who had designed it came to check on the work, bringing in his convertible his
big, rangy cat-killing black poodle. When he brought the dog he would put a leash on it and leave it tethered inside the car. That day as he reached to snap the leash on it, the dog spotted Roger in the side yard. It vaulted out of the car and went after Roger in deadly and purposeful silence. The cat-killers waste no time barking and circling. When he had been interested in the osprey, Roger had found an intricate way to climb up to the garage roof. When the poodle came at him he went right up the side of the house, and we cannot understand how he managed it, and he might never have been able to do it again, but it saved his life.

During their Christmas holidays, Johnny and Anne drove to Florida, bringing Jaymie and Grey. Jaymie was the complete cat, and Grey was the adolescent. The size and the look of Roger alarmed them. Grey, at Roger’s delicate, inquisitive, placating approach, backed swiftly under a couch and made a noise unlike any they had yet heard him make. Except for his permanent feud with Heathcliffe, Roger has never made objection to other cats in the house. With small cats there is a reversion to that maternal urge. And he wants to play with the larger ones. While they are still uneasy about him, he will pounce elaborately upon some long-ignored catnip mouse and bat it about as they watch him, as if he were trying to demonstrate his innocent intent.

They became accustomed to him, and the three cats romped, but Roger could not keep up the pace. About five frantic minutes would do him in and he would leave the game and go get some rest. And, in action, they were a little too speedy and agile for him, so that he wound up often cuffing at the empty place where a cat had just been.

He enjoyed having them around. Johnny, Anne,
and the cats lived in the guesthouse. The cat window was returned to service. In the dressing room there is a small, low chest of drawers. The top of it is eight or nine inches below the window sill, just the right height for Roger to sit on the chest with his forearms resting on the sill while he stares out at the night through the hole cut in the screen.

Night after night after the visiting cats were gone, we would wonder where Roger was and go look for him and find him sitting in the dressing room in the dark, an absurd and touching sight from behind, like a tired woman at a tenement window looking out at the street. He did not want to go out into that darkness, but he sat there waiting for those other cats and looking for them.

Here are some passages from a letter Johnny wrote us the following April (written on a Saturday after Jaymie had been gone since the previous Monday):

We have looked and called and combed the roadsides, but he blended into the grass so well we could step right over him without seeing. We have gone through many theories and only one seems to fit. Two weeks ago we heard real wildcats screaming behind the house. We think nine pound Jaymie could cope with anything that moved except a forty pound Jaymie.… He died at night, not by human agency of car or gun, but in his own world; so, as our friend Tullio said, ‘He may have been beaten, but he wasn’t confused.’ … Anne is up to her nose in degree furies. I am simply waiting for James.

      Johnny and Anne had acquired other livestock that spring—rabbits, some ducks, a pair of goslings. The geese adopted them as parents. By the time the geese were half grown, Johnny and Anne had become so enchanted with their responsiveness, intelligence, fastidiousness, and the ducks, by comparison, seemed such mindless, offensive, noisy, sloppy gluttons, they began to dine on duck.

Geese are fantastically effective watchdogs. In the middle of one night there was a horrible racket out back. By then the wildcats had cleaned out most of the small creatures in their wood lot. That night they or it came to eat goose. They slew the gander and opened a long gash in the neck of the goose, before the kids were able to get out there and drive it away. Johnny and Anne had named the female Knees, a name which will seem apt to anyone who has stared with any objectivity at the knees of a goose. She was understandably agitated, and they brought her into the house, bandaged her neck, finally got her settled down.

When they took walks, Knees and Grey would accompany them. Geese are not constructed for walks in the woods. They cannot see where they are stepping. She would do the best she could and wait noisily to be picked up and hoisted over obstacles she
couldn’t manage. There were references to Knees in every letter. We felt that a goose could be nothing other than a rather absurd-looking idiot.

They wrote us of leaving Knees alone outside one day when they went on an errand. When they came back she was gone. As they were looking for her, the phone rang. A farmer nearly a half mile down the highway had her, and they drove down to find the farmer and his wife and Knees standing on the porch. Knees acted nervous and gave them elaborate greetings.

The farmer said that he had seen this here white goose going across that back lot out there, flat out, wings spread, running like hell, apparently with something chasing it. Thinking he might scare off whatever was after it, he had given a yell, whereupon Knees had spotted him, veered, and come directly to him to stand and lean against his leg, staring out into the field and talking a blue streak. Considerably rattled, he had headed back to the house with the goose practically underfoot, talking every step of the way. There it had climbed the steps to the porch, and damn if it didn’t act as if it knew they were going to come after it.

Knees and Grey were at the camp when we got there last summer. Johnny and Anne had arrived first and opened it up.

There is room for Knees in this cat book, because this book is concerned with how living creatures display their separate personalities only when there is trust and security and, most of all, attention.

She was almost full-grown when she first saw water she could swim in. She went into it at once and headed off until she was a tiny white spot. At first she was a bad swimmer. She couldn’t stroke properly. Each thrust would swing her tail over toward the side opposite the thrust, so that instead of gliding she
wobbled from side to side. When Anne went down to the dock and called her, Knees came heading back from far away, giving a resounding, triumphant QUONK every fifty feet.

That first night she spent a happy hour in front of the floodlight by the deck, snapping moths out of the air with that multi-purpose beak. The kids were planning a trip very soon and were testing a tent they had erected under the pine trees back of the camp. When they went off to bed, they called Knees, and she went waddling along with them, keeping up a continuous conversation.