The House Guests

by John D. MacDonald

  We had finished dinner. Johnny had gone to bed. Roger was sacked out. Dorothy was doing something in the kitchen. I was reading in the living room. She came in and in a hushed voice asked me to come and see what Geoffrey was doing. I went with her and stood quietly in the kitchen doorway and watched him. It was a very long and narrow kitchen. Geoff had invented a game with one of the remaining pheasant feathers. He would circle it and then carefully pick up the quill end in his teeth, adjusting it so that it stuck straight out in front of him. He would flatten himself into the position of the stalk, and then, ears flattened, tail twitching, he would stalk the tuft end of the feather down the length of the kitchen. When he stopped, it would stop. When he moved, it would move. Six feet from the end of the kitchen he would release it, pounce upon it, slide and roll and thump into the wall at the end, biting and kicking the hell out of it. Then he would get up, walk slowly around it, studying it, and pick it up again by the quill end and repeat the same performance. I kept count. I watched him do it seven times, and at the end he left it there and walked out of the kitchen. We could never entice him into doing it again. We wanted witnesses. When we told about it, people looked at us with that tolerant skepticism which is so infuriating. They seemed to think we thought we had seen Geoff do that. He would never do it again because I imagine he felt he had exhausted the possibilities of that game.

  A year or so ago I read a newspaper account of a game invented by some bottlenose dolphins in one of the Florida aquariums. Scientists have recently become very much intrigued by the physiological complexity of the brain of the porpoise, their learning speed, their intricate sounds of communication, even their sense of fun. Several years ago a porpoise inhabiting the outdoor tank at Marineland near Daytona Beach invented a way to amuse himself. A brown pelican was in the habit of filling his belly, then drifting and drowsing in the tank. When he seemed the most off guard, the porpoise would come slowly up under him from behind, then make an explosive underwater turn and, with an upward sweep of his powerful tail, propel the pelican a good twenty feet straight up into the air, flapping and gasping.

  But not long ago, in solemn tones, the professors announced they had seen the porpoises at play in a game of their own invention. They had a white sea-bird feather. They would grab it in the lips, take it over to the place where water was constantly pumped into the big tank at high velocity. They would release it in the stream, then chase it and catch it. The professors said this was a reasoned use of a tool, a perfect example of a creative intelligence unsurpassed among all mammals lesser than man, not only because it was of their own devising, but because it was purely for the sport of it, unlike the simian use of objects to knock down food or pelt their enemies.

  I like to imagine that those porpoises keep right on playing their feather game. Geoffrey outgrew it after one lengthy session.

  Roger, that fall, managed to do something distantly related to the pelican-tossing bit. A woman visited us. She was very afraid of cats. We respect this aberration, and are quite willing to imprison the cats for the duration of such visits. But this woman, being excessively polite, asked us please not to go to such trouble. Geoffrey went off somewhere, but Roger took a great interest in the woman. Roger was always more interested in visitors. He sought all sources of potential amusement. In this case he kept slowly circling the room, staying close to the baseboard, eyeing the woman. It made her nervous enough to frequently lose touch with the conversation. She was in a wing chair.

  Finally Roger stopped in the corner behind her. For the poor woman, this was worse than being able to see him pacing and staring at her. She began, trying not to be conspicuous about it, to lean to one side and then the other, casting quick glances around the back of the chair, trying to see where he was. The back of the chair was not high. I estimate it came to about the level of her eyes as she sat there erect, increasingly nervous.

  At last she turned all the way around to try to look over the back of the chair. I guess Roger could see her head. At any rate he chose that moment to leap straight up into the air. He did not try to jump onto the back of the chair. He just went up and, with the ballon, the levitation of the great male dancers of classic ballet, seemed to stay suspended in the air, a monstrous fright-cat, a foot from the woman’s face. We never saw him do that again. He was grabbed and hustled away and shut in a room. But that woman was through. She was close to hysteria. She was pallid and sweaty. Controlling herself with visible effort she left, never to return. The fiend-cat had detected her cowardly heart. When she was gone and we let him out, he went immediately to the living room to look for her. He jumped into the chair, snuffled about, and then sat and began to wash. If a cat can smirk, Roger smirked.

  I suspect that this identification by cats of this common phobia is not as mysterious as legend insists. Fear has an odor. Their noses are keen. Fear is the smell of the victim. And here, intriguingly, is something afraid which is far too big to kill and eat. But there could be sport involved if it could only be induced to run. I think that was what Roger was attempting, to startle the scared thing into flight. What a picture it would have made, that lovely chase around and around the house and over into the tall grass of Saunders Strip.

  That fall we had the incident of the Great Bloat. The cats were full-grown. They were neither nocturnal nor diurnal but trying to get the best of both worlds.

  One morning we got up to find Roger visibly distended and in deep sleep. He looked so odd we woke him up. He did not seem ill. He awoke reluctantly, stretched, yawned, and went back to sleep. He slept all that day. Sometimes he would arise with ponderous effort, go drink some water, go outside for a few minutes, come back in, and collapse again. Geoff was entirely normal. We wondered about taking Rog to the vet. Yet he did not feel overly hot. He would not eat, yet he would purr readily when awakened. His coat looked fine. The gloss disappears almost immediately when a cat is not well. We were puzzled. As far as we could tell he slept all that night, and the next day was a repetition of the first, though he did not seem as swollen.

  Sam and his boys had been hunting rabbits west of Albany earlier and had discovered that the rabbit feet, properly dried, made cat toys which were used with great enthusiasm. They had sent us four for our cats, and the reception lived up to the advance billing. By the time of the Bloat, two of them had suffered such hard wear Dorothy had thrown them out. The other two, hard as little lengths of fur-covered wood, were in kitchen corners where the cats had batted them.

  On the second day of the Bloat I wandered into the kitchen from my office late in the day to make a drink. Geoff was there, so I bent over and picked up a rabbit foot to throw it to him. To my queasy astonishment, it was soft. For a moment I thought one of the dried ones had unaccountably softened. Then I saw that the fur was a paler tan, and that the severed place was ragged and stained dark with dried blood.

  Mystery solved. Bloated Cat was showing the visible effects of his one single-minded attempt at gluttony. From the size of the foot we estimated the rabbit had been about half his size, and from the look of the cat he hadn’t shared any of it. There is the possibility he caught it. This might account for the heroic attempt to eat it all. We searched and could find no other remnants of rabbit. It was curiously eerie that the foot should be left in the kitchen where the other two were. One could not say whether it was accident or design.

  He was a mighty somnolent cat for yet another night, another day, and another night. And then he was a lethargic cat for several days after he had returned to normal size and had begun, sparingly, to eat. We read into his subsequent manner an increase in assurance and perhaps a smiling tendency to reminisce.

  Rita became mortally ill that winter. We set up a hospital bed in the living room, and for long, exhausting weeks Dorothy nursed her, administering shots every four hours day and night.

  On the day she died, after her body had been taken away, we took a long, aimless drive through that rolling country and knew it was time to get out—not only bec
ause Dorothy so badly needed a change of scene, but also because it had been a bad choice of environment for us. We had found there many good and pleasant people, but instead of the intellectual stimulation we had anticipated from a college community, we had found a carefully established pecking order, with status often achieved and maintained through the elegancies of entertaining rather than any quality of wit or insight. As far as other outsiders resident down in the village were concerned, Dorothy treasures a ghoulish memory of a Save The Children meeting she attended whereat it was decided that those village women who wanted to work at this charity but were not quite socially acceptable could be put in some sort of affiliated setup whereby they could work but would not be entitled to attend the teas. She attended no further meetings. We also discovered that we were the unwelcome targets of an avid and undisciplined curiosity. It is a mistake, unless you have an actor’s flair and a poseur’s inclinations, to be The Writer in a small community. No matter how limpid your normal behavior, how rotarian your tastes and habits, your every move will be examined and so interpreted that it fits the myths the townspeople choose to believe.

  For example, not long ago four of us in the writing profession sat at lunch on a Friday in the Plaza Restaurant in Sarasota and figured that between us we represented 129 years of marriage, each of us to but one spouse, and had Joe Hayes and Wyatt Blassin-game been there, also writers who reside in the area and often come to Friday lunch, we could have added another bunk of years under the same stipulation, fifty or more. And not an alcoholic or an addict in the lot. The same kind of statistic would apply to the better-known professional painters who live there.

  There are so many writers and painters along the west coast of Florida, the community considers us as normal as if we were real estate brokers or insurance agents.

  It makes for a restful environment, but in all the less sophisticated communities of America the mythology will not countenance such dullness. They want the heady moral indulgence of finding something of which they can disapprove.

  Also, though we were managing to stay even, we were not able to accumulate any reserve. Mexico seemed a good answer. Unless we could save something, we could not start the camp at Piseco.

  We rented the College Hill house to a pleasant couple who asked for and received permission to pursue their pigeon-keeping hobby in one of the three garages, and for a ridiculously small rent discount for food, they agreed to harbor our cats.

  The three of us set off towing the same cargo trailer, this time behind a newer black Ford convertible, learning Spanish words all the way down by means of flash cards. Our destination, Cuernavaca, was made inevitable by our both getting hooked on that superb novel Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry. It was 1948.

  That previous winter was the only time we saw our cats exposed to snow, and indeed the last time they had a snowy out-of-doors to cope with.

  Their reactions to dirty weather were quite different. Roger despised snow. He hated to put his feet into it. He acted as though he were being forced to walk upon some incredible nastiness. Yet he has never minded light rain. He goes out into it, drinks out of puddles, comes in matted and happy.

  Geoffrey hated rain in any degree, and at Clinton he developed his rain procedure. Going to his window and finding it spattering off his cat shelf into his face, he would back away and go to a closed door and start hollering. The door had to be opened so he could look out and see that it was raining out there too. He would go to the next door and repeat the request. That house had many doors. Satisfied it was raining everywhere, he would either stay in or, under physiological compulsion, brace himself, go out his window, and race for shelter.

  We both remember the time much later in Florida when, after we had told him for years that he was an idiot, he proved his point. The summer rains in Florida are often so brief and so concentrated, it can be raining on one side of the street and quite dry on the other. One day at Point Crisp, Geoff started that door-to-door nonsense, backing away from the heavy rain each time. He hollered at the back door, and Dorothy opened it for him, and it was dry and bright out there. He plodded on out with that matter-of-factness which seemed to say that he had always known it would work one day.

  But snow did not bother him as it did Roger. When it was quite deep he would bound through it with as much aplomb as any rabbit, in fact leaving tracks which resembled rabbit tracks. In his youngest days at State Street he would go out onto that flat part of the roof and sit in the snow.

  Seen from the rear while in normal sitting position, Geoff was a ludicrous sight. The way he sat gave him a perfect pear shape. He was a hairy schmoo, with those tufted ears on top. I treasure one memory of him out on the terrace at College Hill. I happened to glance through the glass doors and saw him out there, sitting with his back toward the doors. He was in about four inches of snow, and he had been there so long his body heat had melted him down into it.

  • • SIX • •

  At Cuernavaca we found a small brick house behind a wall. It was at 8 Jacaranda Street, a long block east of the main highway, about five miles north of the city, and with a view of the volcanoes from our small front porch.

  We acquired a part-time gardener for the small yard and garden, and a full-time maid named Esperanza. We located a private school for Johnny. Dorothy coped with the public market. Our neighbors on either side were a Mexican dentist and a Mexican colonel. Much later, when I computed our total expenses for the best part of the year we were there, I found that the total for everything—including entertainment, side trips, and typewriter ribbons—averaged out at $115 a month.

  There were savage dogs in our neighborhood. One, owned by a mystery woman who lived diagonally across the street and was reputed to be the mistress of some important Mexico City politico, was so damned large and unpleasant that when we ventured outside our gates at night on foot, I carried a rock or a club.

  We suspect that this dog inflicted the wound on Pancha, the bleeding, terrorized cat who came scrabbling under our closed gate one day with a deep, fresh wound in her back. We gave her care and refuge, and she responded with warmth and trust. She was a pretty and dainty little cat, and she obviously had no intention of ever going back out where the dogs were. She was so obviously hardly more than a kitten that we could not believe she was pregnant. But with an increasing obviousness, she was, beyond doubt.

  As her time grew near and she began a rather absentminded investigation of dark corners and closets, Dorothy fixed her a box and introduced her to it, and she seemed content with it.

  One morning I got up before dawn and drove with a friend down to Lake Tequesquitengo and fished for bass. We came back at noon, and I stopped at his place and had some Oso Negro gin with local ginger ale. John Commerford was a good fishing companion, but he made those drinks heavy.

  (John’s wife, Pearl, was taking Spanish lessons, but John insisted sign language could get him anything he wanted. He went into town one day to buy a fly swatter and stopped at a likely shop on the narrow street leading to the public market. Making random, fluttering gestures with his left hand, and saying, “Zzzzzzzzz,” John held the imaginary swatter in his right hand, then struck, saying “Pow!” After about two solid minutes of this the totally blank expression of the proprietor turned to a beaming grin of comprehension. He ran into his storeroom and returned proudly with a box of ping-pong balls. John joined La Perla for the language lessons.)

  I wobbled two blocks home through a garish unreality of daylight, undone by the early hours, the drive, the fishing and the gin. Dorothy had gone marketing. I stretched out on my back on the bed and fell asleep. About an hour later I was awakened by cat claws needling into my side. My right arm was outstretched, and Pancha had nestled into my armpit. She was purring very loudly and became louder when I stroked her. Every so often she would stop purring, dig her claws into me, then begin purring again. It seemed odd behavior. I had my hand on her the next time it happened, and I felt a strange rippling which seemed to st
art at her shoulders and go down to her back heels. I lifted my head and stared down at her and suddenly realized what was going on. My first impulse was to hustle her to her box, but then I thought that if she had that much trust, if she had selected that particular place to have her kittens, then the least I could do would be go along with it.

  By the time I heard Dorothy arrive, we’d had the first kitten. Pancha was very tidy and efficient about it. She had three, and one was dead. Except during the labor pains, she purred every moment. Birthing done, she was content to be moved into the box with her damp, blind family. The kittens were a male and a female, and we named them Brujo and Bruja—he-witch and she-witch.

  By then we had become friendly with Van and Scottie MacNair, who lived one diagonal long block away in a little house called La Casita, just off the main highway. Their boys, younger than Johnny, were in the same school. Van was also free-lancing in magazine fiction. We became close, and despite subsequent geographical dislocations, have remained close. Van is now Director of Public Relations for the Los Angeles County Museum.

  Their boys wanted a cat, and in due time we gave them Brujo. Van had a studied and skeptical indifference to the whole idea, an attitude which reminded me strongly of my own back on State Street.

  It was not long before Scottie reported that Brujo had become Van’s cat, accustomed to staying with Van in the room where he worked and watching him companionably from the couch. Van maintained his amused tolerance for a respectable amount of time, and then at last admitted that it was one hell of a fine cat, and he had never known a cat intimately before, and they were splendid animals indeed.

  One evening after Brujo was almost full-grown, Van came wandering dejectedly over in the early evening to tell us that Brujo had been missing and they had all gone calling for him, hunting for him, searching the highway ditches and the fields, and had at last found him fifty yards or so behind the house, tom to pieces by dogs. The whole MacNair family was crushed.