The House Guests (2 page)

It would be a strange injustice to the breed to write a sentimental book about Roger and Geoffrey. House cats are implacable realists. Their affections are as honest as their lust for the hunt. Their vanity is not diluted by any lack of confidence. Their codes of behavior are based upon an essential dignity which, in careful proportion, demands and awards respect.

Portions of this book may strike the pretty-kitty set as being unnecessarily unpleasant. Without apology I say that life for any mammal from mouse to man is a precarious and bloody gamble wherein, despite the most astute management of resources and shrewdness of play, the house percentage will eventually win.

I am beginning this account in the spring of 1964. Roger the Lodger, sometimes known as Gladys, is downstairs drowsing on the corner of the sill of the picture window overlooking a blue mile of Little Sarasota Bay. Should he survive until September of this year, he will be nineteen years old. His half brother, Geoffrey, died during the summer of 1960, a few months past his fourteenth birthday.

Dorothy and I, in talking over the episodes and impressions which make up this book, are aware of our tendency to anthropomorphize these house-guest beasts, to attribute to them awareness and responses beyond their capacities. In so doing, we have perhaps made too generous interpretations of observed behavior. Such generosity is inevitably a product of affection. As is so true of children, the cherished cat is inevitably exceptional.

Though it is considered bad artistic judgment to state bluntly the theme of any book, and quite possibly pretentious to infer that a pet book can have such a weighty increment, I herewith state my pot of message: When any higher order of animal is given security, attention, affection, and treated in a consistent and predictable manner, that animal will respond with a continuing revelation of those factors of intelligence and personality which differentiate it from the norm of the breed. This is especially true of both cats and people. The barn cat, in the hard bargain of shelter in return for mousing, withdraws to that standardized catness which the uninitiated think typical of all cats regardless of vocation. Were a Martian to observe us only in throngs, during our surly passages to and from work, he might think us a sorry and unrewarding species indeed and generalize about us in an unflattering way.

Though the house cats will respond to a trusted environment in astonishing ways, their reactions will be related to varying quotients of intelligence and personality, even as you and I. If Roger seems to take over more than his share of the episodic account, it is not because he was the first acquired and has survived longest, nor is it because his intelligence is greater than was Geoffrey’s, but rather because his personality—clown, neurotic, reckless hero, inept hunter, nag, hypochondriac, experimenter—shows
more deviation from the anticipated norm than did Geoffrey’s.

Another aspect is worth comment. With half of the world’s billions on such short rations that a few hundred calories can make the difference between survival and disaster, there is an effete and trivial overtone to the pet-keeping habit. Yet I cannot help but sense herein some supra-historical instinct more constant than the contemporary economics of starvation. We and our domesticated animals have shared hundreds of thousands of years of a precarious mutual existence on this whirling mudball, have tested the scents borne on ancient winds, died in the same rude tempests, bled the same color, feared the same darkness, protected our young with the same desperate instinct. We have shared this journey, and now in a world where we are busily interposing more layers of plastic, paper, transistors, and asphalt between ourselves and reality, where we are poisoning the air, the earth, and the waters in our hot wars against insects and our cold wars against each other, it is a needful reminder to have, close at hand, that striped, furry camouflage, that functional honesty of fang and talon, the sleekness of the muscles of the hunt. In its best form the relationship is ceremonial-symbiotic, composed of grave courtesies and considerations, a sharing rather than an ownership structure. In its worst form, wherein the dignity of both species is degraded, it is suffocatingly pooty-tat.

I can not properly dedicate this book to the two cats. In 1960 Simon and Schuster published a suspense novel of mine entitled
The End of the Night.
As a result of a momentary attack of the quaints, the dedication reads, “To Roger and Geoffrey, who left their marks on the manuscript.”

In an abashed penance, I dedicate this book to all those doctors of veterinary medicine who, despite all
the cutenesses of the pooty-tat trade, have retained a respect, liking, and consideration for animals on their own primitive terms. In these affluent days of the teeny cashmere sweaters, tiny electric blankets, pedicures, exotic diets, and dear little kitty-coffins, such gentlemen are becoming ever more rare. The ones mentioned in this account are included in this dedication.

Sarasota, Florida
April 2, 1964

      I grew up with a smooth-haired fox terrier named Prince. He was acquired before I started school and was still living when I went off to college. When I was little, he was very much the country dog. We lived in Sharon, Pennsylvania. We had a summer cottage on the Pymatuning River in Orangeville, Ohio.

Much to my mother’s indignation and despair, Prince buddied up with a jovial pack of farm dogs and would run off with them on a periodic debauch, which involved hurrying down to a country slaughterhouse and rolling in some pungent horror, and coming home wearing a bashful and guilty smirk. The invariable procedure was to put on gloves, take him out along the boathouse dock, and eject him into the river. After this was repeated three or four times, the stench was diminished to the point where he could be washed. He came to expect this as the inevitable end result of fragrant holiday and as a price which, though he made a great show of reluctance, he was willing to pay. It was a canine variation of a night in the drunk tank. When he was at last clean, his morale was excellent.

My maternal grandfather was an avid hunter of the Ohio woodchuck, and Prince became of such value in this patient sport my grandfather bragged about him to anyone who would listen.

When my father went with another company, we moved to Utica, New York, and Prince made the transition from country dog to city dog. We lived on Beverly Place in Utica, and across the street lived a rugged Airedale named Mike. He belonged to the Robinson Family. My kid sister, Doris, later married Bill Robinson. It became Mike’s mission to kill the overconfident fox terrier across the street. Their brawls were loud, bloody, and in deadly earnest. Prince was outclassed. We managed to separate them in time, every time.

My grandfather developed an effective system. There was an old turret-top refrigerator in the back hallway at that time. He kept a supply of very loud flash crackers and kitchen matches atop the refrigerator. At the first sounds of combat he would run out, light a firecracker, and toss it into the snarling turmoil. The bang would send both dogs screaming in opposite directions. In time truce was established, and thereafter they ignored each other, with the infrequent exception of a mild sneer at long range.

With his learning process accelerated by being bowled over without serious injury by a passing car, Prince took over that porky-wise manner of the city dog, the broadchested little trot, the obvious preoccupation with destination, interrupted by the routine examinations of light poles and tree trunks.

A friend phoned us once and told us of Prince’s solution to the traffic-light problem. We followed him and saw how he managed it. At the foot of the Beverly Place hill, a block away, Beverly Place crossed Genesee Street, US Route 5, a four-lane street, heavily traveled, with a traffic light at the corner. Prince would stop at the corner and begin to bark. Sharp, peremptory barks, widely spaced. The light would turn. Traffic would stop. He would thereupon trot across the wide street staying within the pedestrian
stripes, quite obviously convinced that he had demanded a favor and that, as always, it had been granted.

I am convinced that after I went off to the University of Pennsylvania my subsequent relationship with Prince was a disappointment to my parents. After all, this was A Boy and His Dog, reunited during school vacations. But I had to force more enthusiasm than I felt, and his response also seemed somewhat stylized. I used to wonder if I was lacking in capacity for this sort of affection. I realize now that the world had broadened for both of us. We had gone separate ways and had other things on our minds. I was learning to bark at another kind of traffic light. Our relationship was mildly affable and slightly nostalgic.

When I met my wife-to-be at Syracuse University in 1936, Dorothy owned a cowardly black cocker spaniel whose registered name was Shadowfall Chloe. Chloe was utterly convinced of imminent disaster from almost any direction. On leash, when the horrors got too much for her, she would scrunch onto her belly and have to be either picked up and carried or dragged along with an ugly grating of toenails. If I reached slowly to pat her during our early acquaintanceship, she would run, screaming, and hide in the most remote corner she could find. Her eyes rolled white amid that black hair and she would pant with terror. Asleep she whined constantly, legs twitching as she fled the demons.

After Dorothy and I were married, Chloe gave me a dubious acceptance.

In our innocence of the wiles of dogdom, we had her bred at a kennel other than the one of her origin, with a pick-of-the-litter arrangement for the sire. When her time came, we took her to the kennel and left her there for the birthing. When we returned an
attendant showed us one very tiny dead blond cocker in a tin can and said that she had given birth to just one, and that was it. Sorry. It was dead because she had gotten out somehow and had it in the cold. Sorry.

We now know that a litter of one is so improbable as to be a fair indication of hankypanky. Perhaps Chloe’s conviction the world is a deadly place was justified. After all, they did steal her children.

In 1938 Dorothy and I and Chloe were living in a fourth-floor walk-up apartment in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in what had once been a Harvard dormitory. Its doubtless apocryphal claim to notoriety was that during its dormitory days one Lucius Beebe, with the assistance of some interested companions, had dropped a piano down the stair well onto the tiled ground-level floor to see what the impact would sound like.

I was attending the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration. Dorothy was pregnant with our only child, now twenty-five. She was working for the Kelling Nut Company with an assigned route which included an eerie number of urban and suburban drugstores. We were trying to either break our lease or get permission to sublet from the brothers who then owned the building. The obstetrician had advised us strongly to move out of a fourth-floor walk-up. In presenting this problem to one of the brothers at his office I had been somewhat disheartened to have him say to me, “Listen, you, if you’re both dead we collect from your estate. You gotta lease.”

It was a weekday evening. Dorothy was napping. I was working on a case assignment for a class. Dorothy woke up and said, “John, this building is shaking. It must be a hurricane.”

It was a chunky brick building. This was obviously some imaginative nonsense associated with pregnancy.
They never have hurricanes in New England. I told her it was nonsense. She told me to turn the radio on.

The radio said, “… and martial law has just been declared in Worcester. Winds are now upward of eighty miles an hour and the storm center moves …”

We had a little black tudor Ford sedan parked down in front, and as it was not permitted to leave it there all night, I always took it over and put it in the lot across the river behind the Business School and usually combined this errand with the one of walking Chloe. So I snapped Chloe’s leash onto her harness ring and left at once. The winds seemed very strong, but not alarmingly so until I got onto the Charles River Bridge. Then I was broadsided with such violence I nearly lost control.

I put the car behind the Business School. I got out As soon as I got a few feet away from the car, the wind got a good purchase on me, and before I could brace myself or grab anything, I was off and running, clutching the leash, Chloe bounding and sliding and screeching along with me. I came up against the woven-wire backstop of the tennis courts. Over the impressive and constant scream of the wind I heard an ungoldly banshee howl that went rowwarowwerrooee and soon identified it as a sound made by huge sheets of metal being ripped off the roof of one of the Business School buildings and flying by, spinning in flight, about fifty feet over my head. I think that it was at this moment Chloe’s defeat became total. All her life she had known of pending horror.

I could not pick her up. I needed both hands to hold onto things. Later we learned that was the absolute peak of wind velocity, unmeasured because everything it could have been measured by was blown away. The velocity was measured by the damage done in that hour I was gone from the apartment.
With the loop of the dog’s leash over my right wrist, I struggled homeward, crouching and crawling, seeking shelter, zigzagging from one precarious hand hold to the next. When we got to the bridge the wind was picking up solid water and dumping it on the bridge. It ran ankle-deep at both ends. I stayed below the shelter of the rail. I had to drag that damned dog. She was flattened, legs tucked under, eyes shut. When I reached the corner at the Harvard College side, every last one of those huge elms had come down since I had driven under them not long before. They lay blocking the road, three and four feet in diameter, with big slabs of sidewalk uptilted by the towering root structure. They did provide a windbreak. I had to lift Chloe over three of them. When we got to the sidewalk the wind was behind me. Chloe was rigid, inert.