The House Guests (10 page)

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.

      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 start 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.

Bruja fared better. We found her a home with an acquaintance, a lady who lived alone in a large house with swimming pool and staff of servants. We learned later that Bruja was living on tinned chicken breast and cream and wore a little collar with her name on it.

We received a letter from our tenants saying they had found a house they wanted to buy. They gave us notice and asked what they should do with the cats. We wrote them to take them to Dr. Sellman in Utica, and we wrote him to expect them. That was in the spring of 1949.

In the summer we gave Pancha to the MacNairs and headed home. Later we heard that Pancha’s fertility served to quench Van’s new enthusiasm for cats and, indeed, even made Scottie look slightly grim. In a very short time La Casita was bulging with cats, Pancha producing them faster than the MacNairs could place them.

We stayed at the Clinton house just long enough to sort all our possessions, dispose of a lot of items, and put the rest in storage. Whenever we started to fill an empty box, we would find Geoffrey in it. The cats showed no effects from being deserted so long. They did a lot of looking for a dog who no longer lived
there. Johnny toted Geoff around by the hour during the first days of reunion.

There was one change in Roger which requires explanation. As a very young cat he had picked up a strange habit. He would bite. But certainly not out of malice or bad temper. I believe it was originally related to his habit of washing brother cat and, in the midst of that ceremony, taking a tentative nip. Roger’s bite was an expression of pleasure and affection. Dorothy had always gotten the worst of it, as she is barelegged more often than I am. Roger would wind around your ankles, purring, nudging his head against you, and all of a sudden he would bite. Riding your shoulder he would take a nip at the side of your face. He bit legs because they were handiest. He would not bite through cloth. He had to have a little bare skin handy. We were members of his community, and by God, anybody was entitled to bite anybody in that same spirit of affectionate fun. The difficulty was that Roger would bite anybody, anyone, that is, who was in his house. If they were there it meant we all accepted him or her, and they were biteable.

I contributed to this strange social habit by, when Roger was purring and nudging me, hoisting a pant leg to give him a target area. We remember the time a young doctor paid a house call on State Street to look at Johnny. Roger rubbed against his leg and was ignored. Then, standing with his front feet to one side of the doctor’s shoe and his hind feet over on the other side, he curled his neck around, gently hoisted the doctor’s pant cuff with his muzzle, and bit him just above his short sock.

In chopping at people’s knees with his little red rubber hammer, the doctor never achieved a reflex action as good as the one Roger gave him. Roger sailed all the way across the room. We tried to explain.
The doctor said it was perfectly all right, hadn’t broken the skin. But he kept a wary eye on the cat the rest of the time he was there.

We believe that as he grew older, Roger developed into a connoisseur of the reactions of strangers to an unexpected cat bite. He stopped giving the advance warning of the nudging and leg-twining and began to favor the back of the leg a few inches above the ankle. A sudden leap, a hearty yelp, a spin, and a stare of disbelief seemed the most satisfying.

When we brought the cats home from Dr. Sellman’s we discovered that Roger still bit. However, the procedure was changed. Whereas before he would bite and then stand in calm friendly appraisal, now he would bite, leap three feet away, bend all his four knees, lay his ears back, and obviously wait for the expected whack. Evidently our tenants had thought they could cure him by returning a whack for every bite. But Roger had driven his own bargain. Bite away, and endure the whack, and bite again another day.

Though over the years this conditioned reflex has almost disappeared, there is still a slight suggestion of it left. After the bite there is the slightest crouch, a faint flattening of the ears, a moment of watchful waiting for what might come next.

Also, after almost a year, he remembered the sock game. This originally came under the heading of tormenting the cat. Some mornings he would be so interested in giving me a friendly nip as I was getting up, before I could get my trousers on, that in self-defense I quickly shoved a sock over his head. In horror he tried to back out of the darkness, the foot part dangling and swinging like the misshapen trunk of some strange little hairy elephant. He backed into a corner and then clawed the sock off, gave me that cat look, and walked out of the bedroom.

On subsequent mornings I did the same thing. It depressed him less each time, though he continued to make a great effort to avoid it. In time he learned that he could see through the weave of the sock, and then he became intrigued. He would walk around, looking through the sock, and when he tired of it, he had only to step on the foot end and pull his head free. Thus it became ritual, and when I picked up a sock he would stand still and wait for me to put it on his fool head.

He remembered this game and still does, though now it is a very seldom thing. He is rarely up before we are, and when there is a chance for the sock game it is a kind of ancient reassurance, though as he stands wearing it, purring audibly, I wonder just who is humoring whom. These days I pull the sock off, and that is the only variation.