Geoffrey trudged. He also inherited the excess-toe gene, and he had five in back but two extra ones on each front foot placed high enough to give sort of a dew-claw effect. Unlike Roger, the extra toes seemed to give Geoffrey’s feet a curious lumpiness which altered his gait. He trudged along on straight legs, making more of a thumping sound than one properly expects from a cat. He did not look to right or left. His forehead markings gave him a visible frown. He seemed always to be headed on some somber errand requiring concentration.
For a long time I could not imagine why Geoffrey’s walk was so comically unlike the walk of any cat I had ever seen. Then one day I noticed what it was. Roger and every other cat I have ever observed have been trotters — moving both legs on one side alternately, so that when the right front is extended ahead, the right rear is extended out behind, and the feet on the left side are closest together. Geoff was a pacer, moving the legs on each side in unison.
Despite the stolid lack of grace in Geoff’s walk, he had the greater precision and agility in feats of — excuse the expression — catrobatics. When Roger was old enough to have known better, we have seen him try to chase a small object under a couch too low for him and give himself such a ringing crack on the skull that he rebounded, dazed and glazed. And then walk unsteadily away to sit and wash and contemplate space. Geoff was never that clumsy. Roger, in mad dashes through the household, was always the one who knocked things over.
And when, finally, they became outdoor cats, Geoff was the hunter. Roger had a desperate desire to catch things, and he tried very hard, but the wildlife seemed almost to laugh at him. I shall tell later of the adventures of the hunt.
When Dorothy’s brother, Sam Prentiss, and his wife, Evelyn, and their two small boys visited us that year, they decided Mandeville cats were giving birth to litters of very superior kittens. And so they obtained one. Apparently that litter had been fathered by the same tom who fathered Roger. Their male kitten was built very much like Roger, though of slightly better configuration. Like Roger he grew to be a big, long cat. His coat was a strange and beautiful lavender shade of gray. He had extra toes.
They named him Mittens. But as his personality became more evident, it soon became apparent that such a name was like calling Caligula sweetums. When it came to baleful, he made Roger look like a buttercup. His early years were incomparably surly. After making his acquaintance during a joint vacation at Piseco Lake I renamed him Heathcliffe, and the name stuck. He lived to be seventeen. In his later years when, as in the case of Roger, he adopted an astonishing benignity as a way of life, it became Heathie. Curiously enough, sold on our theory of two cats being the optimum quantity, they acquired a gray tiger named Charlie in the Albany area where they still live, and Charlie turned out to be the same sort of sturdy, amiable, loving type as Geoff.
A final note about George. We had discovered that Geoffrey could use the larger dewclaw on his front right foot much as an opposed thumb. We kept his catnip in a glass jar with a mouth just wide enough for him to stick his hand in. Roger would reach in, claw catnip out, and lap it off the floor. Geoffrey would reach in, curl his paw around a wad of catnip, hold it in place with the opposed thumb, and then eat it out of the palm of his hand, looking oddly monkey-like during the process. We had him demonstrate this talent to many visitors, and often the subsequent conversation became quite fanciful, speaking of Geoffrey as an example of a feline mutation which, in time, might lead to the use of tools and the consequent increase in adaptive intelligence. Yet if he was a mutation, he had been deprived of the chance of passing this gene along to future generations of cats.
At about this time George, between litters, was run over and killed one night on Mandeville Street near the store. With her died the chance of more males with prehensile toes, a trait they could pass along, if left their tomishness.
Cats, so survival-prone in almost all other ways, are pathetically stupid about highways. At night they become too intense about the hunt and about sex and apparently feel so fleet they believe nothing can touch them as they streak across. They make a sorry and inconsequential little thud against a front tire.
Incidentally, Geoffrey was the only cat we have ever seen make an observable adjustment to the highway problem. In 1951 we were in a rented house on Casey Key, between Sarasota and Venice. We were at a narrow part of the key. The frame cottage was on the bay side. The unpaved road went between the house and the beach. When we went over to the beach, the cats would often go with us. Our shell path stopped at the edge of the road, then continued on the other side.
Time after time we would see Geoffrey come along the path, trudge, trudge, trudge. He would come to a complete stop right at the edge of the road. He would look to the left and then to the right. These were not hasty glances. They were calm appraisals of the situation. Assured the way was clear, he would trudge on across the road and along the path. We had to keep an eye on Roger. He was a fool about traffic. But after watching Geoff’s behavior we did not worry about him.
I think that he was probably hit by a car, a nudge, or a glancing blow which hurt him without injuring him. Being a methodical cat, he could certainly relate cause and effect and did so demonstrably in many other areas during his lifetime.
Four
The winter stay in Texas without the cats requires some explanation. Along in April and May of 1946, though I had begun to sell some stories here and there, they were to pulp magazines, and the money was small. I began to think we might not make it.
I found a job as Executive Director of the Taxpayers’ Research Bureau in Utica. I made that jump a little too nervously and hastily. I spent every spare moment writing. Through the summer the stories began to sell at a greater rate and to better markets. We paid off our debts and began to build up a little surplus. By autumn I was still stuck with that job, and with an unwritten obligation to keep it for a year. There we were with the funds and the mobility to evade the misery of a Utica winter. I resigned on the basis of need to take Dorothy to a warmer climate. It was not entirely a pretext. She could have endured the winter, but she does not take cold well, and it was certain that she would spend a good portion of the winter in poor health. We arranged to go to Taos.
Dorothy’s long-widowed mother, Rita — pronounced in the Dutch manner, Right-a — was living in Poland, New York. It made sense to keep the inexpensive State Street apartment and have Rita move in from Poland for the winter and live there and take care of the cats.
We did not make it to Taos. En route we looked at that Hill Country of Texas north of San Antonio and approved immediately. In the spring Rita became ill, and we had to return before we had planned. We still had our little green prewar Ford convertible with huge mileage on it. We were towing a jeep trailer, an army surplus purchase. At anything over thirty-five miles an hour, the car gobbled both gas and oil. There had been a temporary lull in sales, and we were down to a hundred dollars and no credit cards.
I estimated that if we kept it at thirty-five, and stayed on the road fourteen hours a day, and were circumspect about food and lodging, we could make it in good season on the cash in hand.
We arrived with a little less than ten dollars to find two substantial checks waiting, Rita on the mend, the apartment closed, and the cats boarding at Dr. Sellman’s. When we went to get them we found they had ingratiated themselves with the management, and instead of being confined to the normal kennel cage, had the run of the cellar. One can imagine that if the earliest memories are of the damp and darkness of a cellar, that same environment will always be reassuring.