He was our solitary boarder at Buckelwood the summer of 1961. Having had one of them die, the Buchanans were afraid they might lose the other one. And having the eye gone did not make him look sturdier. When we picked him up in the fall, Mrs. Buchanan confessed that when we had left him off she had the feeling he wouldn’t make it.
We had some other cats at the lake the next summer for a little while. Johnny was by then married to his Anne, and when they stayed with us at Piseco en route to Nova Scotia, where her parents, Brinton and Mary Colfelt, have a summer residence, they brought along two cats they had been writing us about — Jaymie, a gray tiger adolescent cat, and Grey, a kitten, a soft blue-gray like summer smoke. Jaymie was a fine cat, responsive, fabulously healthy, crouching and dashing amid the Piseco rocks, the alder and scrub maple, the tall, dark woods, playing the game of savage beast at the dawn of time, racing back to the people from time to time for approval and reassurance. Grey, still small enough to be mostly anonymous kitten, was showing the first personality traits of a kind of Rogerism, skeptical, slightly surly, intractable in the face of any kind of persuasion.
When summer ended and they went back to Michigan, to Cranbrook Academy of Art at Bloomfield Hills, where Johnny and Anne were to get a bachelor’s and master’s respectively, the following June, they rented a little frame farmhouse on seventy-eight acres of land, about a forty-minute drive from the school.
When we got back to Sarasota in the fall of 1962, we got our elderly party out of his summer resort. He was glossy and solid and in good spirits, but the Buchanans reported that he was drinking an extraordinary amount of water, and they did not like the way the remaining eye would sometimes catch and reflect the light.
We observed him carefully as he settled into his Point Crisp routine. He certainly was drinking a great deal of water, and the toilet in the east bathroom was his water hole. He did not want water which had been sitting there quietly for any length of time, nor the water in his water dish. He wanted it fresh-flushed, and quickly learned how to con both of us, so that whoever was nearest would flush it for him. He would get up onto the seat and circle it until he was at that position where he could step down with his front feet onto the porcelain slope above the water level. Prior to that winter it had been an infrequent occurrence to see that high, scrawny back end sticking up out of the plumbing, but in the winter of 1962–63 it was a standard scene.
We could not detect any sign of ill health. His nose was a hearty pink. His coat was glossy. He was a Flying Red Horse from time to time. He bit. He adored. He yaffled. He appeared, sometimes, for the sock game. He flopped onto his side on command, after the usual reluctance and half measures. He went calling. We both imagine that this water-hunger has been an adjustment to one of the customary degenerative diseases of ancient cats. Heathcliffe, before he had to be killed by the vet, had a great deal of kidney and bladder trouble and became sporadically more incontinent. Roger apparently keeps his water system in top shape by overworking it.
We watched that eye. It did not have the milky look we remembered as the first sign of trouble in the other eye. But when the light would catch it just right there would be, for an instant, a slight opacity. I suspect, and there would seem to be no good way to check it, that there are just enough dead cells in the eye fluid to create this effect under the right conditions. We have many birds on the Point, from the wading yellow-eyed fish-stalkers to the smallest warblers. And old Rog, from inside the house, will at times look through the glass doors, through the terrace screening, between the branches of the fringe of water oaks, and cat-watch an immature heron on a little oyster bar a hundred feet off our back shore, his ears slanted forward, body very slightly crouched and motionless, tail tip flickering. It takes us so long to spot what is interesting him that we do not worry about the efficiency of that eye. If it is slowly fading, it is at a rate which will make it last longer than the rest of him.
That fall his increasing deafness became more noticeable. He seemed to hear me more readily than he could hear Dorothy, so we can assume that he was losing the higher cps range. When he slept in one position too long, it seemed difficult for him to get up and loosen old muscles. Dr. Thomas recommended the occasional shot of cortisone. It limbers him nicely and, to our surprise, improves his hearing for several weeks after he has a shot. When we have to be away for just a few days it is simpler to board him with Dr. Thomas than way off at Buckelwood, and so when we leave him there now, we ask for the cortisone shot as a matter of course.
That was the winter he gave up going out at night. It was his decision. He would ask to go out. Someone would hold the screen door open for him. He would stop halfway out and apparently try to use his nose, his eyesight, his hearing, to check the blackness out there. I suspect that it was being unable to hear anything which made the night more fearful to him. Silence can be something waiting. He would think it over, back into the house and wheel around, and plod out through the kitchen to the studio and from there out through the door we left wedged open for him onto the screened terrace. Incidentally, it took both cats two or three seasons to become absolutely convinced the terrace was entirely enclosed and that nothing could get at them out there. The birds using the feeder just beyond the screen were quicker, apparently, to comprehend that cats could not get out.
Yet this is an area where it is often erroneous to attempt to gauge the extent of comprehension of a cat. Observation is a faulty tool in the face of a cat’s apparent delight in frightening itself. It seems to be one of those functional games to keep the adrenalin perked up. When a visiting dog has been prowling around the house, snuffling his way past the terrace, we have seen Geoff give every evidence of wanting to get out there through the screen and teach that dog what for, apparently saying, “Boy, if I could just get out there...”
Then a day or so later, when he would see something he thought he might be able to catch, there was no problem. He would freeze, stare at it, then whirl and go through the studio, kitchen, living room, hallway, into the dressing room, and out his window in a low, silent run.
As they seemed to play these games of terror and pretend, they also had a very shrewd judgment when it came to actual danger as opposed to bluff. One time Mary, Dorothy’s first cousin, came to Piseco with her husband, Eugene Hubbard, a Utica attorney, and their dachshund, named Fritz. Fritz was visibly appalled at the size of the resident cats. But when he discovered they planned to politely ignore him, he made a serious miscalculation and tried to push his luck. He began to trot around with ever increasing jauntiness and began to yap at them. He confused tolerance with timidity. When he began to get on their nerves, one of them waited for him just around a corner of the house, and when he came trotting around the corner, a horror was standing there, inches away, a cat standing so tall and haired up it was the size of a bushel basket. It showed long white fangs, satanic green eyes, and made a sound like a broken steam valve. Fritz went plunging and yodeling through the woods and ran all the way out the length of our eighty-foot dock, a narrow structure on sunken sawhorses, and cowered at the far end, screaming about what he had seen. The cats had made not the slightest attempt to follow him. They came strolling onto the dock in front where the people were, lounged about, and began buffing their fingernails on their lapels and whistling tunelessly. Fritz had to be carried to the safety of their car and enclosed there before he ceased moaning and muttering.
However, one day while the guesthouse was being built, the young architect who had designed it came to check on the work, bringing in his convertible his big, rangy cat-killing black poodle. When he brought the dog he would put a leash on it and leave it tethered inside the car. That day as he reached to snap the leash on it, the dog spotted Roger in the side yard. It vaulted out of the car and went after Roger in deadly and purposeful silence. The cat-killers waste no time barking and circling. When he had been interested in the osprey, Roger had found an intricate way to climb up to the garage roof. When the poodle came at him he went right up the side of the house, and we cannot understand how he managed it, and he might never have been able to do it again, but it saved his life.