The House Guests (4 page)

I was dubious. I had the cat-lovers tagged. There were four categories. The traditional lonely spinster, of course. And that strange clan of hard-jawed, intensely competitive female who breeds for show purposes cats who look like squirrels, monkeys, Pekingese dogs—like almost anything except a cat-cat. Also the eerie eccentric with eleven million dollars in tin cans and pillow slips, who lives in rancid squalor, scavenges trash cans, and keeps thirty-one cats. Lastly the slender-wristed chap with some esoteric relation to the arts, who plays a recorder, decorates with monk’s cloth and chicken wire, seats guests on the floor, and buys tinned breast of chicken for his cat.

Kittens were always fine. Mature cats had always seemed to me to be almost spectacularly unrewarding. Prince had despised them.

But perhaps I felt a little guilty about cats. Long ago I had been an apprentice assassin. Or possibly the better phrase would be timid accessory. It happened in Sharon, Pennsylvania. Perhaps I was nine years old. We lived at 215 South Oakland Avenue. My father worked for the Standard Tank Car Company. I knew a boy named Ralph, who lived a block away. He was not a friend. He was twelve years old. That age difference put him well out of the reach of friendship.

I was awed by him. He seemed very large and constructed in a crude and ominous way. He had big hands, big knuckles, a great many large, yellowish teeth, and a raw-boned, shambling, go-to-hell manner. He had the reputation of being a dangerous and merciless fighter. He was hero-villain, the ambivalent image. The only attentions I had ever received from him were unexpected punches on the arm upon the brick-paved playground of the public school. He had developed the knack of hitting at just the right angle and just the right place—about an inch below the point of the shoulder—in such a way it would deaden the entire arm for an hour. When the numbness went away, the ache would begin. He created an entire legion of smaller boys who always revolved slowly when they stood in one place, to prevent anyone drifting up behind them. Ralph had an unwashed smell, an exceptionally pungent vocabulary, and a seemingly perpetual post-nasal drip, which he turned to advantage with a startling WHONK sound, followed by a wha-THOO of deadly accuracy.

Under normal circumstances we would have never shared any exploit, be that the word for caticide (felinicide?). But one weekend afternoon in the early fall, after school had begun again, on my way to find my standard pack of friends, I ran into Ralph walking alone toward the viaduct carrying a black cat in his arms, a mature cat which did not seem completely
enchanted by being toted along by Ralph. I imagine he felt the need to explain such an effete act as cat-carrying, and he told me gruffly he was taking this old cat down into the viaduct to teach it how to hunt stuff. Did I want to come along?

I must explain the viaduct. It was a natural gorge which ran through that residential part of town. A bridge crossed it at South Oakland Avenue. It was respectably deep there, a small stream winding along the bottom of it. It had, I know now, a potential natural beauty, but it suffered the abuse one would expect in a small industrial city. People threw junk into it. Kids set fires. I remember the familiar commands: You stay off that bridge, you hear me? Stay out of the viaduct. There are terrible old drunken bums down in those bushes.

The viaduct wandered down the slope toward town and then broadened out into a trashy, cindery area before it reached the railroad yards. I was delighted to be asked to go anywhere with Ralph. It was a status situation. It entitled me to shamble and whonk and say bad words and wish I were not forced to bathe so frequently.

We approached the steep bank after traversing the cinder alley that ran behind the houses on the other side of South Oakland from ours. (It ran behind Brindle’s house, the one right across the street from ours. I was in love with Carribelle Brindle, and later with Doris King, and later with Florence Heintz, but we moved away when I was ten years old, before I had a chance to acquaint them with this emotional condition.)

The cat, uneasy enough at level transit, became agitated when we went sliding and scrambling down the steep slope to creek level. At that time in that culture it was pronounced crick. Wash was pronounced warsh. Forty years later I sometimes hear myself revert.

As we reached the creek the cat made some convulsive efforts to escape. Ralph had hold of it firmly, but it hooked him. When he shifted his grasp, it bit him. It bit him on the thumb. He roared and yelled son-of-a-bitch and hurled the cat into the center of a natural pool. The creek entering and leaving the pool was only about three feet across and quite shallow. The pool was an irregular oval perhaps thirty feet across and forty feet long, three or four feet deep in the middle, with a gently sloping shore all the way around it. The tall trees that grew down in the viaduct were leafed out still, the leaves just beginning to change. The afternoon was sunny and cool. There was a city around us, but we were out of sight, as completely as we would have been in a virgin wilderness.

The cat disappeared in the middle and popped up at once, swimming strongly. Ralph raced around to the place where it was planning to emerge. The cat wanted no more association with people. It turned around and headed back across the pool. At Ralph’s command I ran and headed it off. At first it required agility because the cat was making good time, but it was expending energy at a dangerous rate and was soon swimming so slowly we could almost saunter to the estimated landing point. “Going to drown him,” Ralph announced.

Immediately I lost my stomach for the game. It had been just a game, a curious form of tag. I would like to say that I made violent objection, that I put forward good arguments in favor of mercy, even that I made an attempt to rescue the cat. But this was Ralph, a
big
boy, a whonker, an arm numb-er, a celebrity in my small culture. Protest was as unthinkable as was going away and leaving him there. I backed off a little way and watched with a sickly fascination.

By then the cat’s anxiety to avoid Ralph was less
than its need to reach land. Looking half-asleep, moving quite slowly, it would swim right to Ralph’s feet. He wore what was then called hightops, those tough shoes which came to just below the knee, were laced with rawhide, and came with a buckhorn pocketknife which fit into a little snap-fastener pocket on the outside of the right calf. I seemed to have a hundred reasons for feeling inadequate those days. One was that my feet were too tender for those shoes. When wet they stiffened, and one attempt had given me such horrible blisters upon blisters in the futile attempt to swagger rather than limp in them that my mother said never again.

He did not kick the cat. When it came crawling onto the shale, he would gently work the toe of his hightop under its belly, get it in balance, then project it out into the center of the pool. It returned many many times. The cat made no sound. Ralph made no sound. I merely stood and watched. What seemed most curious to me was the way that the cat, with the entire shore line to choose from, came right toward Ralph every time. Possibly in that extremity of its exhaustion, it thought that half-seen figure was help rather than death. It was eerie to see and to remember later, the way it returned to him. Finally, when slung back, it made some aimless motions and then was quite still, turning slowly in the movement of the current through the pond. This was my look at death, the soaked black fur, the scrawny, irreversible stillness.

“Guess we taught that son-of-a-bitch not to bite,” Ralph said.

Indeed we did. He wanted to leave it there. I said I thought burial would be nice. My conscience was beginning to require something. He was patronizingly tolerant. We threw stones to wash it close enough to reach with a branch. He dragged it by the tail to soft
ground. I began digging with a stick. Ralph lost interest and wandered off. I hastened the ceremony, prodding the cat into the hole before it was deep enough, then covering it with a hasty layer of dirt, leaves and small stones. I hastened after Ralph and caught up with him when he was halfway up the steep slope. I walked along the alley with him.

“What are you going to do now?” I asked him.

He stopped and gave me a look of total contempt. “Look. You wanna follow me around all day? Stop following me, kid.”

I went home through Brindle’s yard. I do not remember weeping about that cat. I remember that night in bed feeling soiled, sick, and unworthy. The heroes in my books would never have permitted it. All I could do was wish I had left the house five minutes earlier or later, and then I would never have met him with the cat. I could remember too vividly the early chances I had to let the cat escape. I could have fallen down on purpose. But I couldn’t kid myself. That cat knew there were two of us. I knew there were two of us.

I do not know whether it left any mark at all on Ralph. It left a mark on me which has lasted forty years. Not that I am innocent of subsequent crimes of omission. We accumulate remorses the way sea creatures build their shells, so that at last the carapace is an armor, protecting the tender parts from the minor wound. But that was the first time I had faulted my own image through silence, and that was the first time I had realized that death is not a saccharine sleep, but the horrid silence of forever, a black smear of fur in green water.

Now there was a kitten in the house, and a faint uneasinenss in me because I had forfeited an obligation to the entire race of Cat.

(There is another cat somewhere in memory, a
country kitten which I think my sister Dorrie had for a time. I see it only as a cat half-grown, absurdly clad in doll clothes, sidling apprehensively away from the game, looking back with patient, depressed anxiety, stumbling over skirts and sleeves.)

Kittens are fine. And, like very small children, anonymous. They use the big muscles, are endlessly curious, play the games of run and pounce and pretend, are either violently active or deeply asleep. When healthy and unafraid, they are enchanting, batting the victim spool about with a comedy ferocity, climbing into a lap for the drugged, trusting sleep.

As I accepted the underfoot reality of kitten, I had no intimation that one day, in a curious symbolism, in perhaps an act of cancellation or a reprieve, I would have to kill another black cat, and, in killing him in a manner more grotesque than any invented scene, rid myself of the last guilt about the drowning.

I have no idea why we named the kitten Roger. Perhaps it was out of a mutual impatience with precious names for kittens. Or terribly clever names. Or lit’ry allusions. Or folksy names. Roger seemed a name with an acceptable dignity. He had been weaned on scraps from meat eventually served on the best tables in town. His mother had personal dignity. At the time we knew two Rogers, one a banker and one an attorney, and though he was not named
after
either of them, perhaps their status conditioned our choice of name.

Roger had inherited George’s tendency to a multiplicity of toes. Twenty-six, to be precise—six apiece in front, seven in back. He was tiger, black markings on gray, with white feet, a white bib, belly, and muzzle, a nose that started pink and remained pink except for one small brown spot near one nostril. This nose later provided a reliable color-clue to the state of
his health. When he is the sickest, it fades to a pink so pale it is almost white.

Tiger markings on house cats are curiously consistent throughout history. And the same markings occur all over the world. The most ancient drawings show this same racial camouflage, the striped alternations of dark and light that, at dawn or dusk, can make the animal almost invisible in a grassy field. The black guard hairs make a line down the spine. The faint dark pattern wrinkles the forehead, stripes the cheeks in a way which seems to make the eyes more expressive, and rings the tail and legs.

We did not know that Roger—and his half brother—would become exceptionally large cats—fourteen pounds and better during their hardiest years—so large that visitors would stare at them and inquire what breed they might be. We learned to say that they were pure Mandeville. But such pretention eventually came to seem a little too smart-ass, so we re-established their dignity by saying the breed was alley cat.

In these days of the huge flourescent basketry of the supermart, the grocery store is no longer the prime source of house cats. Yet, up until a few years ago, Syd Solomon, the painter, who lives ten minutes away from us in Sarasota, devised a system of his own invention which for a time reversed this trend. He and Annie had several cat families living in their compound on the shore of Philippi Creek. Being naturally squeamish over the chore of bagging up new litters and drowning them in the creek, Syd would don an old hunting jacket with huge pockets, put kittens in the pockets, and go grocery shopping at Marables Market down on Osprey Avenue. The trade there was, and still is, both social and affluent. It is a supermarket. Syd would find an empty aisle, set a kitten down, and hastily walk away. Minutes later a woman would come across the little thing mewling
along in confusion, after several more resolute women had passed it by, and her heart would be touched. Ah, the pore little
thing.
The pore little darling thing! She would pick it up, ask where it had come from, and, of course, neither the staff nor Eddie Marable would have the faintest idea, and she would take it home. One suspects a wide-flung cat dynasty in south Sarasota and on the keys. Pure Philippi? Or pure Marable. (Pronounced marra-belle.)

In the spring of 1946 Dorothy came home from the Mandeville Market with a kitten from George’s next litter. Two cats are better than one. Their reaction to each other adds an extra dimension of cat-watching. Then would not three be better than two? I do not think so. I think that at three and beyond they tend to set up a social order which diminishes the importance to them of their relationship with humans, and thus lose a certain responsiveness, tending more to become cat’s cats rather than people’s cats. In other terms, the cat by instinct tends to establish itself with a co-operative living arrangement known as a pride when one speaks of lions. With proper trust established, the cat will make the unnatural adjustment of accepting the huge, two-legged beasts as members of the pride. Two cats will accept and confirm this disparate relationship, but when there are three or more there is enough quantity for the formation of the instinctive community which can then consider the nearby humans as bond servants, furniture, and infrequent sources of clumsy entertainment.