The House Guests

by John D. MacDonald

  Both cats frequently slept on the floor. Geoff did the washing for the two of them. It is just possible that by early 1960 Geoff had licked enough poison off the two of them to sicken him. And, of course, each time he began to feel a little better, he would go back to the washing chore and ingest more of it. It is only a guess.

  • • FOURTEEN • •

  When we picked Roger up at Buckelwood and took him home in the fall of 1960, we expected him to search for Geoff once back in familiar surroundings. But, of course, he’d had a cage to himself at Buckelwood after Geoff died. Always, except in case of illness, we requested that they be kept in the same cell.

  Roger was delighted to be home. And he seemed equally delighted to be the only cat. All food, service, and sleeping places were his alone. He seemed to understand there was no other cat there and no point in looking for one. But once in a while, not oftener than once a week, we would hear him, usually out in the screened cage, making that ah-rowr? ah-rowr? which was forever the call to game-time.

  Deprived of the customary rough-and-tumble he perfected the substitute which he had begun to devise during the previous spring when Geoff would not play. Perhaps because of the malformed feet, Roger makes an astonishing amount of noise on a hardwood floor when he runs. It is a ba-rumm, ba-rumm, ba-rumm sound, exactly like the hoof rhythm of a galloping horse. Thus the name of the game became the Flying Red Horse, a dead giveaway as to the age of certain parties who used to hear it on a radio commercial long ago. It would usually begin out in the screened terrace and still does. It is a morning game, most probably when the people are on the second cup of coffee. Having the doors open to the living room and to the studio in warm weather enhances the game. First there is the arched back, the tail slightly puffed, a feisty little sidelong scamper, as though he is avoiding some opponent visible only to him. Then there are some yammerings, and he breaks into his gallop. Some days it takes up the stairs to my work area and back down again, but always through the studio and kitchen, around and around, hoofs drumming, ears laid back. There is always at least one reckless transit under the couch, this accomplished by stretching out on the back and using the claws to dig into the underside of the low couch and pull himself along at a good pace. It always ends with his scrambling recklessly up onto the long bar, using chair back and stools to get there, running the length of the bar, then, panting, mouth open, looking terribly fierce, he reaches his claws as high as he can on the four-by-four post at the end of the bar.

  I suspect that this is a rare activity for an old party of 130. Reflexes and elasticity being not what they were, he sometimes miscalculates. Twice this past season he has misjudged the leap to the bar, scrabbled at it, slipped, fallen. The game ends there. The humiliated cat walks away.

  When the game is successfully concluded, wild passion spent, he finds himself atop the bar. He can get down, but it is a jolt to old bones and muscles he would rather avoid if possible, and cons the people into lifting him down. Not long ago, in the middle of the night, I awoke and heard him, all alone in the dark house, being a Flying Red Horse. I cannot say why it seemed so touching.

  In the fall of 1960 we depressed him by bringing a bird home. It was a male meadow lark which had been clipped by a car. Dorothy stopped and picked it up from the shoulder of the road. When we got it settled down, it showed no signs of being able to recover and fly away. When it walked, it walked in a small, tight circle, right through its water dish if it happened to be in the way. When it tried to fly it put one wing tip down and flapped in an equally small circle. We put it on the terrace and closed the doors so Roger could not get at it. It did not have sufficient co-ordination to eat, so Dorothy mixed up some suitable goo, and we fed it with an eye dropper. Roger could not understand why he was being denied the terrace, why we were keeping a bird, why he was not permitted to eat said bird. He would stare out at it and moan and drool visibly. He could taste it.

  It began to co-ordinate a little better, but if it tried to hurry it ran in a circle, and if it tried to fly it tipped to one side. A young brain surgeon visiting on the Point said it had a brain clot which might or might not become reabsorbed. The trouble was food. They eat bugs. And it was that rare time of year in Florida when bugs are hard to find. We’d leave on the front-porch floodlight for hours and get perhaps two medium moths, enough to last a meadow lark one fraction of a second. I thought of fried grasshoppers and went over to The Beach Shop at Stickney Point Road and bought a can from George Connaly. They were a success. They had been caught and fried in Japan and shipped halfway around the world, and that meadow lark had to rekill each one, pick it up, slam it down onto the stone floor, peck at it, knock it around, chase it, and eat it.

  The bird began to make longer flights and seemed to land where he intended to land. Finally we wedged the outside screen door open and herded him out. He stood on the little porch, stood on one foot and then the other, and then zoomed up over the punk trees and away. Roger, given access once more to the terrace, spent a long long time tiptoeing around, quivering, pointing like a bird dog, looking behind every leaf for that tasty bird.

  Johnny came home, awaiting acceptance to a new term at Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan. We had all noticed a strange thing about Roger. He would be walking across the room, and all of a sudden he would stop and lie down on his belly and put a forearm across his eyes and stay there motionless, often for over an hour. When he got up again he would seem shaky, and he would avoid the light, very much like a human recovering from a blinding headache. It did not seem to affect his morale otherwise, but quite obviously the animal was in pain during those periods. The bad eye had been opaque for some time, and now it looked bulged to us. The intervals of pain were becoming more frequent.

  It was Johnny who suggested we find out if it should come out. We took him over to Dr. Thomas, who examined him and said that the eye should certainly be removed; we could leave him right there, and he would do it. The bad eye had developed glaucoma and was badly distended. Though I certainly had every reason to feel confidence in the gentleman’s ability, I hemmed and hawed and asked him, clumsily, if he … ah … did very much of this sort of … uh … thing. He said, with both reassurance and a slight indignation, that he had taken a refresher course in animal ophthalmology just that past summer.

  We got Roger the next day. The eye had been removed and the furry lids sewn together, implausibly, with bright green thread. He was a very groggy cat. The general anesthetic made his rear end slump to one side or the other when he tried to walk. If I had to describe his attitude with just one word, I would say he acted thoughtful. The doctor had confirmed the idea the cat had been in severe pain.

  We had to take him back several times for treatment. I cannot imagine a treatment a cat would find any more unpleasant. Behind the sutured lids the empty socket fills with fluid. The doctor has to pick open a small vent between the stitches to let the serum escape, and press as much out as he can.

  Roger’s response was as fantastic as anything I ever hope to see. He had always despised automobiles, always mourned with every breath he drew. By the time we took him back all effects of the anesthetic had worn off. He had demonstrated at home that he was not at all groggy. And that cat sat upright on the seat between us all the way over, ears forward in that catlook of eagerness, making not a sound of complaint. And he was visibly glad to arrive there, purring as he was carried in.

  He hollered at the treatment, but he did not get frantic, and his struggles were brief and not overly violent. And he was amiable all the way home.

  The next visit a few days later was exactly the same, except that he sat on the treatment table and needed only Johnny’s hand on his shoulders to restrain him. When Dr. Thomas hurt the eye, Roger would yipe and flinch back, seem to gather himself, and then crane forward again, tilting his head, presenting the wound to the surgeon.

  There can be only the one plausible explanation that the cat made a rational adjustment to cause and effect. The eye had
been giving him constant pain which at times became much worse. He was taken to a place. The pain stopped. So he associated the place with the cessation of pain.

  As it healed, as suppuration ceased, the sealed lids sank back to form a little furry pocket. We were supposed to take him to have the stitches removed, but Roger with a hideous and savage delicacy, removed them with one rear toenail, doing himself no harm. We got to him to stop him just as he was removing the last one.

  It did bother us to look at him. Then suddenly it bothered us no more. When people see him for the first time, I often surprise a little expression of queasiness, and I have to quell my indignation by remembering how we, too, found it disturbing at first. In his best days he had that turtlehead, the high rear end, the bowed front legs, the unwashed gray of all the feet. Now the tail is shorter, an ear is ragged, the eye is gone, the front legs more bowed, the high rear end narrower, the loose underbelly swinging as he walks. And we find him exceptionally beautiful. Dorothy tells him this frequently.

  He was our solitary boarder at Buckelwood the summer of 1961. Having had one of them die, the Buchanans were afraid they might lose the other one. And having the eye gone did not make him look sturdier. When we picked him up in the fall, Mrs. Buchanan confessed that when we had left him off she had the feeling he wouldn’t make it.

  We had some other cats at the lake the next summer for a little while. Johnny was by then married to his Anne, and when they stayed with us at Piseco en route to Nova Scotia, where her parents, Brinton and Mary Colfelt, have a summer residence, they brought along two cats they had been writing us about—Jaymie, a gray tiger adolescent cat, and Grey, a kitten, a soft blue-gray like summer smoke. Jaymie was a fine cat, responsive, fabulously healthy, crouching and dashing amid the Piseco rocks, the alder and scrub maple, the tall, dark woods, playing the game of savage beast at the dawn of time, racing back to the people from time to time for approval and reassurance. Grey, still small enough to be mostly anonymous kitten, was showing the first personality traits of a kind of Rogerism, skeptical, slightly surly, intractable in the face of any kind of persuasion.

  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 l
ength 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.