He was replaced by Arnett Baker, the husband of Rianner Baker, who has been our part-time cleaning woman from the first year we lived there. The cats knew that dusters, dustcloths, and dry mops were game things. It took Rianner some time to get used to one of Roger’s habits. He still does it, though rarely. He is stretched out on the floor in apparent indifference. If you walk within range, he reaches out and hooks you by one leg. If you are wearing pants, he uses the claws. Bare legs get a quick little tug when he hooks his arm around the ankle.
This would startle Rianner almost as much as the unexpected bite. Housework was punctuated by little gasps and yelps. Until she got used to him, I think he managed to upset her considerably. She was immediately fond of Geoffrey cat and intrigued and impressed by his responsiveness, which seemed like courtesy. Geoff was never too busy to say hello. If you walked by him twenty times in an hour, you would invariably get a greeting, a little noise which I can spell out as Yop. And whenever you opened a door for him to let him in, as he walked by you he would say his version of thank you, a strange little mumbled sound he uttered on no other occasions. A little Mermph, spoken with rising inflection.
I might interject here, about this business of opening doors, as the cats grew more elderly they would use their window when the people were unavailable. But it was an extra effort, and when there was the opportunity of doorman service, they used it.
Rianner, in time, became very amused by Roger and eventually fond of him. But he still complicates her chores. He is especially intrigued by mop water. He likes to trot behind in it while the floor is being mopped. He enjoys lying down on a damp, freshly mopped floor or, even better, a floor freshly waxed. He gets very excited over the odor of Clorox. Geoff was indifferent to it. But to Roger that odor seems to have some kind of sexy import. Perhaps it does bear some faint chemical relationship to the odor of tomcat. But he makes a ridiculous spectacle of himself weaving around and around a bucket of Clorox water, smirking and bumping his head against it.
Having mellowed, Roger became an inveterate caller. Alone, he would visit every house on the small peninsula, thumping the screen doors, walking happily in and making a short tour of inspection, tail high. If food was offered he would accept a little graciously, but that was apparently not his objective. There are just six houses. His last stop would be the house of Bruff and Beth Olin, the house on the point nearest the mainland part of the key. There, in addition to the house, he would go out onto the dock and hop aboard their cabin cruiser and check that over. Tour finished, he would come back down the road.
One year, right after the house next to Olins’ had been rented, the woman there saw Beth in her yard and came over to tell her what had happened the previous afternoon, late. She said that a poor mother cat, obviously expecting kittens any moment, had come to the back door and asked to be let in. Once in, the cat had searched all over the house, obviously looking for a place to have the kittens. The woman had called the vet and had been told to fix a box for the cat. The woman had torn up one of her dresses to make a soft nest. The mother cat seemed to appreciate the box, purring and all, but then she began to ask to get out of the house. They had kept taking her back and putting her in the box, but finally she grew so insistent, they let her out and she hadn’t been seen since, and the woman was very worried about her.
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.