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.
Roger spent about thirty seconds reacting to the newcomer as though it might be an exceptionally large and dangerous bug. Roger was beginning to be a boy cat, rangier and more agile. We could not guess what his response would be. He astonished us by becoming almost idiotically maternal. He washed the kitten day after day into a strangely sodden state. He was almost consistently gentle with it, enduring its fierce little needle-toothed games, but sometimes his own kittenhood would get out of control, and he would bat the little fur ball across the kitchen floor until it yelled with consternation and alarm.
I remember how we named the new one. I had a dictionary with lists of first names in the back. We went through the list of male names to find one which might fit properly with Roger. We did not have to go very far down the list. To Dorothy, to Johnny, and to me the name Geoffrey had precisely the right ring.
A different tom had fathered that spring litter. In vastly oversimplified terms, Roger was a long blue cat and Geoff was a square brown cat. It never failed to astonish us that some people had difficulty telling them apart.
Geoffrey became a chunky cat, his shoulders and forearms considerably more massive than Roger’s. His face was broader, forehead higher, nose dark. The short fur on his face had a definite red-brown tinge. His ears had Lynx tufts Roger’s did not. His belly fur had a pale buff tinge. The shape of his jowls was more leonine. Roger’s head configuration can best be described by saying that sometimes he is known as Old Turtlehead. Where the line of Geoff’s back was quite straight, Roger’s narrow hind quarters stand higher than his shoulders. People who despise cats always found it easier to despise Roger, even though — if it is the distillation of catness they so instinctively fear — Geoff was the more primitive, the one ever more aware of the obligations of his profession.
All three of us were, I must confess, thinking of these cats as temporary. Not that we had any idea of disposing of them, but rather because we had the dual pessimism of thinking that something always happens to cats — and something always happens to our animals. We had the feeling cats are temporary despite the example of Nicky, a husky, square, black and white, businesslike cat owned by Dorothy’s paternal grandmother in Poland, New York. Nicky was then in his teens, and, whether he was at home at the old house in Poland, or up at the family cottage at Piseco Lake in the summer, it was his nightly habit to slay his quota of rodents — moles, shrews, mice — and place them in a curiously neat array on the porch, side by side, heads all pointing in the same direction. Nicky, a mighty hunter, had elected himself provider and made it his business to forage for his pride, his community. That the offerings were not accepted in the spirit they were acquired made no difference to him. He had all the quiet confidence of a master woodsman.
We knew of Nicky’s durability but thought of him as an exception. Our cats would not last as long. We were sure of that.
Dorothy brought them home, and they became a part of life. As we were on the second floor, and traffic was heavy on State Street, and dogs prowled the neighborhood, we did not let them out. They quickly accepted the shallow box filled with newspaper tom into strips. When they were more sure-footed, we let them out onto a small flat area of the roof, too high for jumping.
I was involved in the desperate business of trying to wrest a living out of free-lance fiction for magazines. The first story, written while overseas, had sold to Whit Burnett for Story Magazine. During those first four months of effort, I wrote about 800,000 words of unsalable manuscript, all in short-story form. That is the equivalent of ten average novels. Writing is the classic example of learning by doing. Had I done a novel a year, it would have taken me ten years to acquire the precision and facility I acquired in four months. I could guess that I spent eighty hours a week at the typewriter. I kept twenty-five to thirty stories in the mails at all times, sending each of them out to an average of ten potential markets before retiring them.
Except for Dorothy, everyone thought I was a read-justment problem. Even today I do not know how much of her confidence in me was genuine and how much was a calculated effect devised for my morale. But I do know that her attitude was that it would be absurd to think of spending my life in any other way.
In the fifth month, in February of 1946, I sold my second story. For forty dollars. It brought my lifetime earnings from writing up to a total of sixty-five dollars. I had a wife, a son, two cats — and almost one thousand form letters of rejection.
But as this account is of cats rather than of writing, let me say that by the last day of 1946, the total was over six thousand dollars, and we were living in the Hill Country of Texas, in Ingram (“The Only All Rock Town in the U.S.”), in a hillside cabin.
Three
I have no patience with those crypto-primitives — who are almost invariably of the moneyed leisure class — who seem to believe there is something effete or degrading to the animal in altering a male house cat.