Beth, suddenly suspecting what had happened, asked the woman to describe the cat, and when she came to the part about something being wrong with its left eye, Beth said, “Oh, for heaven’s sake, that was Roger MacDonald!”
As male neuters grow old they develop a loose and heavy fold of flesh under the abdomen. To the uninitiated, it could look somewhat like pregnancy. We are glad she did not rush poor old mother cat down to the animal shelter.
It must have been one of Roger’s more confusing social experiences.
During those years we noticed that Roger’s left eye began to reflect light in a different way than the right one did. It grew increasingly milky and opaque. One night, when a young eye surgeon was at a party at the house, he took a look at it and diagnosed it as a traumatic cataract, probably the result of a little nick or scratch received when the cats were engaged in fierce mock battle. He said that because of the cause, it was not likely to spread to the other eye. We could detect only one way in which it seemed to bother him. When he wanted to go out into the night, he was more cautious about going out through the opened door. It took him a little longer to decide that there was nothing out there which intended to eat him.
During the day his benignity and lack of suspicion made him a little foolhardy. He would climb aboard every service truck which parked there, from the phone-company truck to the plumber’s truck, and we were afraid that while he was delving around among the tool boxes he might be driven away.
I suspect that there is no occupation in our civilization which entities a man to more irritability than being a mail carrier at Christmas time. Yet one year, three times during Christmas week, Dorothy saw our mail carrier hop out of his truck, scoop the fool cat out of the drive, and carry him over and set him down in the shade of the pine hedge so he could turn his truck around without running over him.
The times were changing. The cats and the people were changing. Johnny went away to school at fifteen, to Oakwood School up in Poughkeepsie. When he came home for vacation and went away again, Geoffrey would search the house for him, making the calling sound, as in cat to cat, and pick Johnny’s bed as his sleeping place for a time.
With Johnny gone, Dorothy began again to paint more frequently, with Roger as content to hop up and sample paint water as he was to follow the watering pail and drink from the terrace flower pots.
Intensive writing over a long period of time is exhausting in ways I find difficult to describe without sounding somewhat precious about it. You feel disenfranchised by reality, a half step behind and off to one side of your own skin, your view oblique, with most possibilities of genuine reaction cooled by being filtered through the habitual appraisal mechanics of your trade. You find an off-hours world crammed with the enticing stimulations of good books, good art, good conversation, but that creative effort necessary to these appreciations is too much akin to the process that uses you up in your work, and so, too often, aware of sloth and guilt, you surrender to the undemanding unvarying flatulence of network television, to magazine fare styled for the lip readers, to social contact with people so curiously predictable in their attitudes you know their lines before they say them.
Amid all my periods of this self-imposed diet of off-duty pabulum there has been the bright boom of cat watching, of communicating with these supra-pragmatic entities on an honorable level of cause and effect, of seeing both the jungly graces and the owlish slapstick. It has been the one form of intensive observation and conjecture so little related to the desk hours that it has freshened and restored.
Roger, in the exercise of his single feat of obedience to command, has never failed to cheer me. Long ago, when he hovered too close, within biting range, I would put a bare foot against his shoulder, and, saying “Down!” in a loud voice, I would shove him rudely over onto his side. In time it became simplified. If I made a threatening gesture with the foot and shouted the word, down he would go.
Now the word alone suffices, but he so hates to comply, it is an absurd and lengthy process. I yell the word at the cat. He is certain I cannot possibly mean it. He starts to walk away. I move to block his escape. “Down! Down! Down, you son of a gun!”
Perhaps I will be satisfied with less. He makes a small circle, walking with all knees bent. He looks up. This is enough? “Down!” He crouches against the floor. Certainly this is enough! “Down!” With a look of being at the weary end of his patience, he dips one shoulder and flops over onto his side. I pat the cat. After total surrender, he seems mightily pleased with himself. We understand each other and all the rules of the contest.
• • THIRTEEN • •
The summer of 1957 was the last time we shipped the cats to Utica. They were in fine shape when we expressed them. They arrived at Dr. Sellman’s in horrid condition after four days in transit. It was cold throughout the East, and he said that it seemed possible that somewhere along the line they had been left out of doors, perhaps on a station platform. The once legible statements of care given them en route had deteriorated to an indifferent, incomplete, indecipherable scrawl while, over the interim, the cost had more than tripled.
The cats were eleven and twelve, too old to adjust readily to hardship and exposure, and certainly we did not feel right about risking them again to such slovenliness and indifference. Geoff wasn’t badly off, but Roger was dangerously ill. We discussed it with Dr. Sellman. I had learned during Geoff’s serious illness how to give a cat a pill. With thumb and forefinger on exactly the right place, the jaws will open. Then, using a dart-throwing motion, you throw the pill down into the upturned mouth, aiming at one side of the back of the tongue. Still keeping the mouth aimed upward, you close the jaws and hold them closed, and the cat’s throat will work as he swallows. Geoff, aside from some devious business of pretending it was gone and spitting it out later, had been very good about it. But I had qualms about Roger. Nevertheless, we all agreed that a cat so sick had a better chance of recovery in a familiar place with his own people. They readily become depressed while in kennels.
So after the doctor treated him again, we wrapped him up warmly, and Dorothy held him in her lap while we drove them up to the lake. Once there it soon became evident that giving him his pills was no problem. He became weaker and weaker, until he could hardly lift his head. He was too weak to eat. We kept him in a box near the floor furnace. Dorothy was up every night several times, spooning warm milk into him. He was a few bones and sinews in a disreputable gray sack. After a time he stopped feeling as hot, and he did seem a little more responsive, but he was still terribly weak.
Even after seven years, Dorothy still recalls his moment of recovery with a certain amount of amused indignation. One afternoon was warm and sunny. She thought it might make him feel better if she carried his box out into the sunshine for a little while. She could watch him out the kitchen window.
Suddenly she looked out and saw the slat-sided cat get out of the box and wobble off in the direction of the clearing at the side of the house. Remembering the way Geoff had crept away to either recover or die, she hurried out. She found the old fool in the clearing, with painful slowness going through the unmistakable motions of the hunt. He looked at her with his idiot grin. In view of his hunting abilities when in peak condition, it was an incredibly optimistic performance.
Thereafter he recovered so quickly that in a couple of days it was a gory chore trying to get a pill down him. His new-found benignity stopped short of having his jaws pried open.
In the autumn we risked one final railroad trip. The weather was good. Again it took too long, and that was the time the inside of their box was such a fetid horror Geoff went immediately over and stood with his face in the hedge. I put the crate in the bay weighted down and let the tide cleanse it. After it was recovered and was dried out, I put it on the burning pile.
In June of 1958 Johnny graduated from Oakwood, and his application to work that summer in Mexico with the Friends Service Committee was approved. Though it seemed to him an instance of ov
erprotectiveness, making him somewhat surly on the way down, we decided to drive him to Mexico, turn him over to the Quakers in Mexico City, and continue on down to Cuernavaca and spend the summer there after an absence of ten years. As it turned out, it was a good thing we went. Despite the required typhoid series, he acquired a galloping good case of typhoid out in the remote village where they were digging cisterns, a case that made us commuters to Mexico City, visiting him in the hospital there during his extended stay. It was severe enough to leave him with a permanently unreliable digestive system, and was especially alarming to Dorothy because her father had died of the same disease when she was fourteen.
In looking for a place to stow the cats in the summer of ’58, someone told us about the Buckelwood Boarding Kennels off in the piney flatlands five or six miles southeast of Bradenton. It is owned by a Mr. and Mrs. Buchanan, a Quaker couple who have a great affection for animals and the competence to keep animals happy and healthy.
I must say that in Quaker hands the cats fared better than the boy that year. When we picked them up they were fat, smug, and glossy and had so firmly established themselves with the management that the Buchanans seemed a bit dubious about entrusting them to us. In fact, ever since we started that relationship, we have had the feeling that we are, in some subtle manner, borrowing the Buchanan cats while we are in Florida.
We boarded both cats with them in 1959 and 1960.
In the spring of 1960 Geoffrey began to act strangely. He was fourteen years old. Dorothy noted that he was not eating well. And he began to spend a great deal of time under a particular chair. He would spend very little time away from it and always go right back. He would beg for food when there was food in his dish, using that extremely effective nasty yap he had developed over the years. She would tempt him with the things he had always been fond of, and he would eat a very little bit and go back under the chair. Often he would keep turning this way and that, as though trying to find some position comfortable to him. As the weather grew warmer, he would sometimes move out onto the terrace under the shade of a bush and then return to his place under the chair. He seemed to like attention, and, remembering the third eyelid, we gave him a lot of it.
Each time when he seemed to be getting to the point where we should take him over to Dr. Thomas, he would improve. But he had gotten so thin he had lost that square look, and his coat, instead of lying flat and glossy, was tufted and dry-looking. He did not feel hot. His nose did not run. He did not seem to have diarrhea or any significant amount of vomiting. And he purred often. It Is hard to judge what might have been the best decision.
Even more than Roger; he loathed the car and visits to the hospital. We hated to cause him discomfort when he apparently was in no pain other than the discomfort of getting up after staying too long in one position. We had taken him to Dr. Thomas when he first began to act sluggish. He had been given a vitamin shot. There was no other evident problem.
In the cat-to-human ratio of years, he was ninety-eight. Possibly the heat was bothering him. Now we both know we should have taken him to Dr. Thomas, but there is hardly anything in this life which could not be improved by hindsight.
When it came time to leave him at Buckelwood, he was having one of his better periods. We did not feel entirely easy about him, but he did seem well enough to leave, and we knew we could give him no better care than they would. We explained how he had been acting and we certainly did not expect him to die, or we would not have left him.
At Piseco we received this letter from Mrs. Buchanan:
BUCKELWOOD KENNELS REG.
Wm. and Frances Buchanan, Owners-Managers
Route 3, Manatee, Fla.
Aug. 4, 1960
Dear Mrs. and Mrs. MacDonald,
I wish I didn’t have to write this letter. I should have done it last night but I was so weary and I couldn’t find words to say that we lost Geoffrey. He was gone when I went over at midnight to give him his Terramycin. We got it from a vet here in Bradenton and for a while it sure looked like he was going to make it. He was starting to eat again since my first letter. We had him on Terramycin every six hours and he was eating raw beef ground twice and chicken livers. His elimination had improved and we had separated him from Roger just putting him in the next cage but we put them together after he started eating again and Geoffrey could walk around.
On the first of Aug. I couldn’t get him to touch anything except the chicken liver and then that came up also his medicine but then at 6 P.M. he retained his medicine but was so weak and he couldn’t eat anything and acted like he didn’t know me or anybody. At midnight when I went to check him he was gone.
After he was gone he wasn’t flat like he should have been but his stomach was large and hard like there was a growth or sponge under the skin. He never seemed to be in any pain and wanted to be petted and loved up to the night before he died when he acted like he didn’t know me.
Dr. Thomas called today and said that he didn’t think anything could have been done for him, but to please tell you that he had called.
It has been so very hot here and when he was eating I didn’t want to do anything to upset him again like carrying him all the way to Dr. Thomas in the heat and he just went so quick when he did stop again I didn’t have a chance.
Roger is doing fine—His eye seems to hurt him some and keeps watering so we got some medicine for that now. He doesn’t seem to miss Geoffrey so much it will be when he gets home again that he will be looking for him. I wish I didn’t have to write this letter. We didn’t have much chance but we tried everything we knew.
We put Geoffrey in a wooden box and marked the grave so if you would like to take him back to Siesta Key when you come south again we can try to move the box. (He is under an orange tree on a little hill.) He was a gentleman always so sweet and gentle and always so patient. When he was feeling good he still never cried at feeding time or scratched at his door like so many other cats do. He would always wait his turn and since he always had a choice of two or more things he ate what he liked best usually kidney and left the rest until later. He was so sweet it just doesn’t seem possible he is gone.
I hope you can read this—some of it as I read it over again doesn’t make much sense.
Sincerely yours
Frances Buchanan and Roger.
Dr. Thomas sent us a nice note also.
Certainly one weeps for a cat, as for any good thing spanning so many good years of a family. Especially vivid and sad to me is what happened about the third evening after we heard about him. I wandered out into the kitchen. Dorothy was fixing dinner. What happened needs a certain amount of background. In Dorothy’s childhood her family was close and physically demonstrative. In the Scots household of my youth, I was on a handshake basis with my father at tender years. Physical habits condition the human animal. The buddy-boy male who drapes a hearty arm across my shoulders gives me the squirms. And though I have tried very hard to loosen up, and think sometimes I have achieved a fair imitation, Dorothy can detect in response to the casual affection of pat or squeeze, a woodenness consonant with a dour heritage.
Johnny was in the Greek islands that summer. Old Rog, despite mellowness, would set up a patient agitation to be put down whenever he was picked up, the change being that he would try to fumble free rather than rip his way clear.
I went into the kitchen, and Dorothy sniffed, and I knew it was about Geoff again. I tried for a comforting word, and she turned with wet eyes and edge-of-sobs expression and said with a tremulous dismay, “Now I’ll have nothing left to hug.”
As I did not want the Buchanans to think we blamed them in any way, I wrote them this letter:
8 August 1960
Dear Mrs. Buchanan,
We got your letter about Geoff in this afternoon’s mail, and we have been grieved and depressed ever since, and will be for some time to come. He was a significant part of our household for over fourteen years, and we will miss him very much.
We know y
ou did everything and more than anyone could expect, and we truly appreciate it all, as well as the concern, detail and understanding in your letter. As long as it had to happen we do wish he could have been at home with us when it did, but otherwise we’re glad it happened there, where he was known and appreciated.
We do not yet know what we will wish to do, if anything, about moving him. We shall leave that up to our son. We are sending him your letter. In the very limited sense that one can “own” a cat, Geoff belonged to Johnny, and Roger is mine. We know you feel badly that this should have happened. We have been telling each other that he had a very long and successful career and died with his awareness of being treated with love and respect intact.
We shall, of course, wonder how Rog adjusts to this emptiness in his familiar environment, and we would very much appreciate it if you could drop us a note a little later and tell us how he is acting.
Sincerely
We do not know what killed him. Elderly cats seem subject to malignancies of the liver. We do have one ironic suspicion. Some years earlier we had decided the Florida routine of the regular visit from the spray man who goes about the house fizzing his bug juice into the corners and cracks is not only overly costly but moderately ineffectual. And so we had arranged to have the house sprayed with deadlier chemicals while we were gone in the summer.
We remember that when we came back from Piseco in the autumn of ’59 the job seemed most effective. It had had a good chance to air out, but there was enough residual effect to fell newcomers in their tracks.
The House Guests Page 14