The House Guests (9 page)

Another area of confusion in measuring intelligence in animals is our tendency to give the higher marks to the animals most willing to follow orders. (The kid who strains to do well on the I.Q. test may be of lower intelligence than the boy who, lacking sufficient motivation, drifts through it thinking of more entertaining things and makes a lower score.)

Cats are not interested in pleasing anyone by a display of obedience. They are unfailingly pragmatic, which in itself seems to denote a kind of intelligence we are not yet equipped to measure. If a cat can detect no self-advantage in what it is being told to do, it says the hell with it, and, if pressure is brought to bear, it will grow increasingly surly and irritable to the point where it is hopeless to continue. Yet, where the advantage to be gained is clearly related to the task required, the learning process is so acute as to be almost instantaneous. Once learned the feat will be repeated only when the cat is interested in the result.

Geoff was constructed in such a curiously square fashion, we could not help but notice that he had a strange habit, when sitting, of sometimes lifting his forepaws off the floor, sitting much in the manner of a ground squirrel. Sometimes he would adopt this posture for the business of face washing. When he was interested in what people were eating, he would sit near the table, and it took just a little upward gesture of the hand with a morsel in it to bring him up into his sitting position. The implied guarantee of receiving the scrap would keep him there, like a small dog.

Yet after the novelty of that wore off, we did not continue it. It was a question, I suppose, of appearances and of dignity. The cat who emulates a small, supplicant dog has somewhat the same inadvertent
ludicrousness of, for example, a small and extremely fat man. The grin of conviviality is always a little abashed. In some obscure way it shamed the three of us to shame him in a way he accepted so solemnly, and without ever having to discuss it, we all gave it up.

It was Geoffrey, when we lived on College Hill, who provided us with the most memorable example of reasoning power we can remember.

It came about this way. We used to go quite often to the Fort Schuyler Club in Utica with my parents. Johnny was popular with the staff, and they would take him out into the kitchen. One of the other guests had brought in pheasant that fall, and it was being prepared for his table when Johnny went out there. One of the chefs gave him a handful of the big tail feathers of the cock pheasants. He brought them home, and the cats were delighted with them. They could be batted about, knocked into the air, chased, clawed, bitten. They were symbolic birds. In a week or so there were only a few not completely destroyed, and these had been denuded of feathers all except that tuft at the very end which has “eye” markings much like peacock feathers. They were twelve inches of heavy, naked quill with the end tuft.

I should mention here that whereas Roger seemed to prefer co-operative play, either with brother cat or one of the people, Geoff often played alone for long periods, playing solemn and wide-ranging games of solitary field hockey, dribbling a half-bashed ping-pong ball from room to room.

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 because 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.