The House Guests (5 page)

Roger spent about thirty seconds reacting to the newcomer as though it might be an exceptionally large and dangerous bug. Roger was beginning to be a boy cat, rangier and more agile. We could not guess what his response would be. He astonished us by becoming almost idiotically maternal. He washed the kitten day after day into a strangely sodden state. He
was almost consistently gentle with it, enduring its fierce little needle-toothed games, but sometimes his own kittenhood would get out of control, and he would bat the little fur ball across the kitchen floor until it yelled with consternation and alarm.

I remember how we named the new one. I had a dictionary with lists of first names in the back. We went through the list of male names to find one which might fit properly with Roger. We did not have to go very far down the list. To Dorothy, to Johnny, and to me the name Geoffrey had precisely the right ring.

A different tom had fathered that spring litter. In vastly oversimplified terms, Roger was a long blue cat and Geoff was a square brown cat. It never failed to astonish us that some people had difficulty telling them apart.

Geoffrey became a chunky cat, his shoulders and forearms considerably more massive than Roger’s. His face was broader, forehead higher, nose dark. The short fur on his face had a definite red-brown tinge. His ears had Lynx tufts Roger’s did not. His belly fur had a pale buff tinge. The shape of his jowls was more leonine. Roger’s head configuration can best be described by saying that sometimes he is known as Old Turtlehead. Where the line of Geoff’s back was quite straight, Roger’s narrow hind quarters stand higher than his shoulders. People who despise cats always found it easier to despise Roger, even though—if it is the distillation of catness they so instinctively fear—Geoff was the more primitive, the one ever more aware of the obligations of his profession.

All three of us were, I must confess, thinking of these cats as temporary. Not that we had any idea of disposing of them, but rather because we had the dual pessimism of thinking that something always happens to cats—and something always happens to
our animals. We had the feeling cats are temporary despite the example of Nicky, a husky, square, black and white, businesslike cat owned by Dorothy’s paternal grandmother in Poland, New York. Nicky was then in his teens, and, whether he was at home at the old house in Poland, or up at the family cottage at Piseco Lake in the summer, it was his nightly habit to slay his quota of rodents—moles, shrews, mice—and place them in a curiously neat array on the porch, side by side, heads all pointing in the same direction. Nicky, a mighty hunter, had elected himself provider and made it his business to forage for his pride, his community. That the offerings were not accepted in the spirit they were acquired made no difference to him. He had all the quiet confidence of a master woodsman.

We knew of Nicky’s durability but thought of him as an exception. Our cats would not last as long. We were sure of that.

Dorothy brought them home, and they became a part of life. As we were on the second floor, and traffic was heavy on State Street, and dogs prowled the neighborhood, we did not let them out. They quickly accepted the shallow box filled with newspaper tom into strips. When they were more sure-footed, we let them out onto a small flat area of the roof, too high for jumping.

I was involved in the desperate business of trying to wrest a living out of free-lance fiction for magazines. The first story, written while overseas, had sold to Whit Burnett for
Story
Magazine. During those first four months of effort, I wrote about 800,000 words of unsalable manuscript, all in short-story form. That is the equivalent of ten average novels. Writing is the classic example of learning by doing. Had I done a novel a year, it would have taken me ten years to acquire the precision and facility I acquired in four
months. I could guess that I spent eighty hours a week at the typewriter. I kept twenty-five to thirty stories in the mails at all times, sending each of them out to an average of ten potential markets before retiring them.

Except for Dorothy, everyone thought I was a read-justment problem. Even today I do not know how much of her confidence in me was genuine and how much was a calculated effect devised for my morale. But I do know that her attitude was that it would be absurd to think of spending my life in any other way.

In the fifth month, in February of 1946, I sold my second story. For forty dollars. It brought my lifetime earnings from writing up to a total of sixty-five dollars. I had a wife, a son, two cats—and almost one thousand form letters of rejection.

But as this account is of cats rather than of writing, let me say that by the last day of 1946, the total was over six thousand dollars, and we were living in the Hill Country of Texas, in Ingram (“The Only All Rock Town in the U.S.”), in a hillside cabin.

      I have no patience with those crypto-primitives—who are almost invariably of the moneyed leisure class—who seem to believe there is something effete or degrading to the animal in altering a male house cat.

The tomcat is a damned nuisance. He pursues his specialty to the almost complete exclusion of other interests. His is a nocturnal existence so rigorous, he spends his days flaked out, stirring once in a while to go see if anybody has put anything in his dish. He shreds upholstery in the serious business of keeping his claws and shoulder muscles in fighting trim. He develops a voice which will shatter glassware at twenty paces. His eerie howls of challenge disturb the neighborhood. He roams far and is sometimes gone for days in a row, returning sated, surly, smug, and bearing the wounds of love and combat. He stakes out his territory with extraordinary pungent little driblets of urine, and will occasionally stake out the house where he lives, either just for the hell of it or because another animal has been there during his absence. Owning a tomcat is curiously akin to working in some menial capacity for one of the notorious Lotharios of show business.

On the other hand, waiting too long to fix a cat results in an end product equivalently unattractive. The hormones have had too much chance to alter
body chemistry, and then when the animal is deprived of this source, its physical adjustment is to become a eunuch cat, fat, slow, sedentary, sleepy, and not at all playful. A glutton cat, inclined to flatulence and timidity.

The ideal, in view of the ultimate personality of the cat, is to have him castrated just as soon as the testicles are sufficiently apparent to make it possible. Body chemistry wil not have altered. He will remain lithe and active. He will be responsive and retain some portion of the psychology of his kittenhood all his life. And, as this account will show, he will not be cowardly or lack a sense of adventure. The younger the cat the more minor the operation and the quicker the recovery. We took them in turn, waited, brought them home. They were cross and slightly baleful for about one day.

Roger lost his tomhood before one of his secondary sex characteristics had time to develop. He never has acquired an adult cat voice. Except in combat, or just before he vomits, Roger has a kitten mew, an entirely futile device for getting doors opened or his dish filled. In the stress of war or nausea, he can make ululations rather like a drunken lyric soprano with the croup.

Geoffrey achieved mature vocal chords. There is a curious sidelight to this difference in voice. As we have always followed the sun, there have always been screened doors. We have always arranged a window with cat shelves fastened to the outside of houses so the cats could come and go as they pleased. But sometimes their window would be closed. Roger soon learned to beat on the outside of the screen doors with his fists, making a racket like that off-stage thunder achieved by shaking a piece of sheet metal. For about the first six years of his life, Geoffrey took the traditional approach of sitting outside the door
and bellowing for it to be opened. Sometimes they would both be out there, one thumping and one shouting. I would judge each method equally effective.

But quite suddenly Geoff switched to Roger’s system. He was six years old. He was in fine voice. It is impossible to guess what manner of reasoning was involved. Certainly he did not give up the use of his voice for other demands. In fact, he perfected it. During his last years, possibly through trial and error, he finally achieved the ultimate effectiveness in demanding food. I can define it only as an abrupt, abused, stentorian whine. Human nerve ends could take no more than thirty seconds of that. It could have been stupendously effective in getting doors opened. But he knocked on doors, as his brother did.

There was one sound they made which was almost identical, Roger’s just slightly weaker and pitched a few notes higher. It is a distinctive and recognizable sound all cats use. It means, “Where are you?” It means, “Come and play.” Ah-
rowr
? Ah-
rowr
? Ah-
rowr
? The accent is on the second syllable, which ends on a rising inflection. There is a two- to three-second pause between each questioning call. If humans and cats are indeed part of the same pride, they will call humans and can be called by them with this portion of the standard vocabulary, though generally it is a cat-to-cat affair. They quickly become skeptical of people who go around making too many cat noises. So do I.

While we were still on State Street and the cats were small, an acquaintance named Hank sat in the kitchen and deliberately broke the end of Roger’s tail about three or four vertebrae from the tip. I do not remember exactly what brief high-level conversation preceded it, something like, “You wanna see how you
can make a cat make a hell of a funny noise?” And before anyone could object he had reached and pinched the end of Roger’s tail. Roger made a sound ranging from the top limits of audibility right up into supersonic range and ran in place for several seconds until he got enough traction on the linoleum to scoot off into the other room. Hank chuckled merrily. We did not know he had broken the tail at that time. Apparently he got the tail between the thumb and the first two fingers, held the fingers a little apart, and pinched the tail into the open space.

I am glad that we did not know. We let it be known quite forcefully that we saw nothing funny about hurting a cat. (Or about picking up beagle pups by their ears.) But Hank acted as if we were very odd people. I know he did not do it out of willful cruelty. The world is full of Hanks. They know that animals are living creatures, but their knowledge is not in any way subjective. Impoverished in some curious way, they have no empathy toward animal pain, and cannot really understand why other people do not feel just as they do. It puzzles them, because they feel no lack within themselves.

It would have done no good to have ordered Hank out of the house or to have made any attempt to explain to him.

For some time thereafter Roger did not care to have anyone touch his tail. Perhaps a month later, with Roger once again tolerant about tail-touching, Dorothy called to me in some astonishment and had me come and feel of the cat’s tail. About an inch and a half from the tip it angled off at about a twenty-degree angle. His fur concealed this little bend. The angle of the bend was fixed and rigid. Suddenly we both remembered Hank and realized for the first time the tail had been broken and had healed in this fashion.

It did not seem to bother Roger. He could lash the tail. He could carry it high as a banner when registering affection, twining around the legs of the people. And, unlike Geoff at that time, he had given up the kid stuff of suddenly chasing it, grabbing the tip, tumbling over and over with it.

Geoff, otherwise sedate in so many ways, chased the tip of his own tail all his life. It was a very infrequent game. You would hear a scrabbling, scurrying sound and look down, and there on the linoleum would be Geoff whirling in solemn frenzy. He even did it once during the weeks he was enfeebled by the sickness he died of, at fourteen. On a day when he was feeling a little better, he performed the solitary celebration of catching that elusive tail.

Roger’s broken tail did serve in a functional and handy way for years. When you came upon one of them in the dark, you had only to finger the tip of the tail to make the quickest and most efficient identification of which one you had.

Ten years later, in Sarasota, I came home from some errand one afternoon, and Dorothy announced that Roger had lost his tail. My immediate mental picture was considerably eased when I saw the cat and saw that he had lost that inch or so beyond the old break. The loss did not enhance his already dwindling beauty. He seemed to have no trauma, in fact no awareness he had become, overall, a shorter cat. The tail looked squared off, with the squared end unpleasantly ragged. This was no discernible wound, no infection. I believe that circulation eventually ceased beyond the break. The nerves were dead, probably, from the time of the break. The tip atrophied and finally dropped off.

A little later I saw Dorothy going slowly by the windows outside, staring at the ground, a thoughtful expression on her face. When she came in I asked her
what she was doing, she said she was searching for Roger’s tail. She never found it.