by John Donovan
Father lives near Central Park, so Fred has his first genuine New York treat. From the way he begins to whimper in the taxicab when we get within a few blocks of the park, I have the eerie feeling that he knows where we are going. It’s not as warm as it was last week, but there are still a lot of people in the park. It is quiet there, almost like the country. The roads are blocked off to automobiles on weekends, so Father and I decide that it is OK to let Fred off his leash. He bolts away as though he had been kept in a cage for years. For half a minute I get worried that he will run off and get lost, except I can see that Fred keeps looking to see me and zooms back to run a wide circle around me if he gets too far away from us. Fred goes batty; he is having such a good time. He keeps throwing himself on the ground to roll over in one delectable smell after another. I can guess what he is going to smell like after the sixth or seventh roll. He is having such a good time though that I don’t want to stop him.
A little kid runs over to pet him, and he jumps up and licks the ice-cream mess left around her lips. She thinks that is the funniest thing she ever saw and falls onto the ground so that Fred can get better licks. The kid’s mother doesn’t think it’s funny though.
“Pooky!” the lady yells. “Dirty girl! What are you doing with that dirty dog?”
She grabs the kid from the ground and whacks her rear end. Fred is mystified. The kid begins to cry and babble away about the doggie at the same time. She is looking back at Fred and holding her arm out toward him as her mother drags her away. Fred runs right along with them until the lady yells at him to go away. Fred is surprised and growls a little. When I hear this, I run right over to him.
“The dog should be on a leash!” the lady shrieks. “It’s against the law to have him off the leash. There’s no telling what he might have done to Pooky!”
“I’m sorry,” I mutter as I bend down to Fred to hold him back from his new friend, who wants him even more now that her mother has told me she’s going to send me to jail if I don’t watch out. I pick up Fred and carry him over to my father. In half a minute the lady and the kid have disappeared down a path in the opposite direction, so I put Fred down and my father and I have a good laugh. Fred jumps all over us, which is, I guess, his way of laughing.
We mess around in the park for a long time. My father is all the time picking up sticks, pieces of branches from trees, and throwing them twenty or thirty feet in front of him. Fred wants to chase after them, but he won’t do it until I say “Go get it, Fred. Bring it here.” I hope my father doesn’t mind if Fred won’t run after the stick unless I tell him to. And when he brings it back, it’s to me, not Father.
A lot of dogs are off leash in the park, and Fred enjoys running up to big ones in particular and barking at them as though he is going to take them apart. A great dane starts to get frisky with Fred, who proves to be a real coward and zooms back for the protection he thinks I give him. The great dane follows Fred and jumps all over me and licks me like Fred, except that his tongue is about six times the size of Fred’s and he’s so strong that I’m almost on the ground before his master calls him back. When he is a safe distance away, Fred starts barking and growling at him again. I tell Fred he’s all noise and no action. He doesn’t understand and walks along next to us like a real hero protecting the defenseless.
We are near the zoo now. I see that among the many things prohibited in the zoo are dogs.
“They would excite the animals,” Father says.
“Fred?” I ask.
“You know how he can bark.”
“What if I put his leash back on?” I do that in spite of my father’s dubious look, and we march into the zoo. No one stops us or looks at us strangely, so we decide that it’s OK as long as Fred doesn’t start acting crazy. We walk past a couple of zebras in their cages and a lot of deer. Fred loves the smell, and I think he would be delighted if we would let him spend the rest of the day there. Some kids are holding out their hands to feed junk to the deer, even though there are signs everywhere telling you not to feed the animals. I conclude that a lot of sign painters paint a lot of signs no one pays any attention to. Including me.
I drag Fred away from the deer, past a camel. I don’t think Fred sees the camel, he is so tall, because Fred doesn’t even nod in that direction. We turn the corner, and there is a row of wolves and wild dogs and things like that. Fred’s hackles bristle right away, so I decide that we shouldn’t walk down that row. We go instead to a big pool in the middle of the zoo to look at the seals. There are four of them. Two of them are sunning themselves on a concrete island in the middle of the pool, and two of them are swimming around in the water. People are standing there laughing at the seals for no particular reason. In a minute, after my father and I have stood watching them, we start to laugh too. I don’t ask myself why, except that the seals on the island remind me of Fred. They are staring in my direction, looking me squarely in the eye.
“You want to see your cousins, Fred?” I say. Fred is so low down that he can’t see over the edge of the pool, and he’s whining away to get a look at what everyone else is looking at. I pick up Fred at just the moment one of the seals lets out a high creepy honking sound which delights Fred. He lets out a sound almost like it. I’ve only heard Fred bark and whine before. I’ve never heard him honk. I’m surprised for a second.
“Was that you?” I ask Fred, who’s squirming in my arms.
The seal honks again, and so does Fred. By now, all the people on our side of the pool are looking at Fred and laughing at him more than at the seals. Fred is trying to wiggle out of my arms and into the pool to have a long honk with his friend on that island, I guess, so I put him down on the ground. He immediately jumps up to the rim of the pool, which must be three times his height. I’m so surprised that I almost lose hold of his leash. Father just manages to grab Fred before he jumps into the pool.
The seal and Fred continue to honk away at each other, and it is no small effort to drag Fred out of the zoo. He keeps tugging at his leash to get back to the pool, and it is almost ten minutes before we can get him to calm down and behave himself.
“Honk for Stephanie,” I keep urging Fred when we get to my father’s apartment. “Show Stephanie how you honk.”
Fred doesn’t know what I am talking about, and when I try to make a honking noise myself to demonstrate what I want him to do, he tilts his head to indicate that he thinks I am crazy. Stephanie thinks Fred is funny and that what happened in the zoo was funny and that the way Fred licks her is particularly funny, so she has a good time rolling all over the floor with Fred. I guess Fred thinks she’s the Queen of Sheba, because he won’t pay any attention to me and my father as soon as he has rolled around with Stephanie awhile. Of course, it helps that she keeps going into the kitchen every so often to look at some meat she is roasting. Maybe Fred thinks she’s making his supper.
In a way she is. When it comes time for dinner, Fred sits himself right next to Stephanie’s chair. He has been taught never to beg food from the table, so he doesn’t forget himself to the extent of doing anything as terrible as that. He just keeps his eyes fastened on Stephanie, who wants to know how I resist feeding him when he looks as though there is nothing in the world that would make him happier than a piece of roast beef.
“Sure,” I tell her. “It would make him happy all right. But you’d have to keep on making him happy. If he gets you to give him some stuff, you’ll never eat another mouthful without having him look at you like you were robbing it from him. Isn’t that right, Fred? Don’t I know you?”
Fred knows I’m talking about him, so he ignores me. He just keeps on looking at Stephanie. He has sized her up right. When she is about half-finished with her roast beef, I can see her cutting up the rest of it into small bite-size morsels. Fred hears her too. He stands up and practically pushes Stephanie out of her seat. She takes her plate to the kitchen. If she had broken her strid
e into the kitchen, Fred would have bashed into her in half a second, he is so close to her. In a minute I can hear his jaws smacking together as Stephanie gives him the best part of her dinner.
“It sounds like real love,” I say to my father.
“They make a noisy couple,” my father says.
“Just at dinner time.”
“I guess they’d be noisy if they started barking at each other too.”
“Stephanie doesn’t bark,” I say.
“You don’t think so?” my father says. “You should come around more often if you believe that.”
“OK. I will.”
“You can come around as often as you wish, Davy,” my father says. “We want to have you with us whenever you want to be.”
Stephanie comes back into the room, followed closely by her new admirer. She says, “I wish I had had two homes in New York when I was thirteen. That’s the way to look at it, Davy.”
“OK,” I say. And then no one says anything. “It’s OK with Fred too.”
The three of us sort of laugh. Fred has taken himself to a new position, next to my father’s chair. I have the feeling that in a minute I’m going to hear my father cutting up the rest of his meat.
fourteen
“What did Stephanie have with her roast beef, Davy?” Mother asks and asks again after I tell her that she had a lot of stuff.
“What kind of stuff?”
“You know,” I tell her, “vegetables and bread and that stuff.”
“What vegetables?”
“I don’t know. Vegetables!”
“Did she have potatoes?”
“I don’t think so,” I say. “No, she didn’t. She had beans, I think.”
“Beans! What kind? Yellow? Green?”
“Green.”
“How were they prepared?”
And I tell my mother that I don’t know how they were prepared. They were just beans. Beans are beans. What does she think I did, go out in my father’s kitchen and watch Stephanie make the supper? And Mother says that all she wanted to know was if they were fresh beans or were they frozen. I tell her how do I know? She gets mad and says it’s all right not to tell her anything if that’s the way I want it. What did I come to New York for if it wasn’t to have a good time with her and to share everything together?
“I’m sorry, Mother. I don’t know about all that stuff in the kitchen. Ask Fred. He spent most of his time out there with her.”
I think that’s kind of funny, so I bend down to Fred and ask him to tell Mother what kind of beans Stephanie had with the roast beef tonight and how were they prepared? And did he see her take them out of a frozen package or did they come out of the big bean garden they have growing in the back part of my father’s apartment?
Mother doesn’t think I’m such a funny fellow though. “That’s all right, young man,” she says. “It probably doesn’t mean anything to you that I was home here alone all afternoon and that I had dinner by myself, knowing that it was important for me to give up my evening so that I would be here when you came home. The least I could have expected from you was for you to share with me what appears to have been a very pleasant day.”
“Come on, Mother,” I say.
“Don’t ‘come on’ me, Davy! You’re just lucky you have a home to come home to and a loving mother waiting for you! You’re just lucky …”
She starts to go on, but I guess I look at her with surprise mapped out all over my face.
“Oh, dear, Davy,” she goes on, “I didn’t mean it like it sounded. Of course you have a home. Of course I’ll wait here for you. You know that, don’t you, dear?”
“Sure,” I say. We look at each other without saying anything for a long time. The trouble with a New York apartment is that there isn’t anyplace you can turn to to wait for something like what was happening between Mother and me to pass. Mother turns away and then back. She says she’ll get a cold drink for me if I want one. Do I want one? she asks me two times, and I say No. The third time I say Yes, and she tells me she knew I did. She wants to get it for me. She wants one too.
She messes around out there in the kitchen. I can hear two or three ice cubes hit the floor, followed by Mother’s kitchen oaths. Oath time usually comes with the cocktail hour for Mother, and I guess from the way she smells and from her lively curiosity about Stephanie’s dinner, Mother has been sitting around having a lot of cold drinks.
“Dear Davy,” Mother starts when she gets back in the room, “I’m sorry I sounded so harsh a minute ago. You know that I get carried away at times, don’t you, dear?”
I tell her that sure I do, and I’m sorry that I didn’t answer her questions about dinner when she asked them, and that in addition to beans Stephanie had a green salad, rolls from Pepperidge Farm, and carrots with some goo on them. I tell her that they drank a bottle of wine and I had Diet Pepsi because I didn’t feel like having milk. We had fancy peaches for dessert.
Mother just says, “Oh,” and that’s all. The great desire to hear about the meal has dissipated itself, and we both take big swallows of our cold drinks.
“She’s big around the middle, don’t you think?” Mother says.
“Who?”
“Stephanie, of course. She’s always seemed rather bovine to me, don’t you agree?”
I ask her what she means by bovine, and she says she means that Stephanie looks like a big cow. Would I agree? I don’t say anything. I think about Stephanie for a minute and remember that she rolled all over the floor with Fred. I don’t think Mother would do that. I don’t think.
“Would you roll over the floor with Fred?” I ask Mother.
“What?”
“Would you get down there with him and roll around?”
“I would not,” Mother says. “Isn’t it enough that he lives here?” She makes a big dent in her drink once again and goes back to the kitchen to fix it. “What a silly damned question,” Mother calls back from the kitchen. “What on earth would I want to roll around the floor with Fred for?”
“Oh, I don’t know. I wondered if you would.”
“Davy!” Mother yells from the kitchen. “She didn’t!” Mother runs back with a new drink. “Did Stephanie roll around with Fred?”
I sort of shrug my shoulders, as noncommittal as I can be.
“She did!” Mother goes on. “The big toadie! She rolled around with Fred just to make you think she liked him. And you fell for it!”
Mother thinks that she’s saying the funniest things in the world, and she laughs like a TV comedian laughing at his own jokes. I don’t say anything, because if I said what I wanted to say, Mother would toss her drink in my face. No, she wouldn’t do that. It’s too precious. But she might bop me over the head with today’s paper. I sit on the floor next to Fred.
“It isn’t such a big deal, getting down here with Fred,” I say. “All you have to do is sit on the floor. He must get kind of sick of looking up all the time, don’t you think? He probably gets a crick in the neck from looking up at people. Right, Fred? Is that the way it is?” Fred jumps up and licks my face. He moves himself around so that he plops himself solidly in place in my lap. He is the perfect adapter. His body is so long and flexible that whenever I move a muscle he is able to move one too. I lie back on the floor.
“Get up, Davy,” Mother says. “It’s dirty on the floor.”
I don’t say anything.
“Davy,” she says with emphasis, “I think you should get up.”
Fred has crawled up over my body and arranged himself all along my chest and below my waist, stretched out like one of those animal statues guarding an Egyptian tomb. He lowers his head so that his nose is up against my chin, and he pretends to be asleep, sure he has found a bed for the night. I close my eyes too.
“Davy,” Mother s
ays, “I want you to get up! You understand that, don’t you?”
I don’t say anything. I put my arms around Fred, and he makes a purring sound. I remember that I have told him before that I think he’s part cat, so I smile. I can hear Mother rush into the kitchen to get herself another drink. When she comes back, she isn’t as shook up as when she left. I have opened my eyes, and we are looking at each other. It is straight now between us. I have never looked at anyone like I look at Mother, and I wonder if she has looked at anyone in this way before either.
“Do you want me to love your Fred?” Mother asks. “Is that all there is to it?”
“Not if you don’t.”
“I don’t, Davy. He’s part of you. So I want him in my home.”
“You could learn to love him.”
“Some people aren’t animal people.”
“You could learn.”
“It’s unnatural, sweetheart. You don’t love unless you can be loved back.”
I hold Fred tighter, as though to ask don’t you think this doggie loves me?
“Don’t measure me against Stephanie because I don’t roll around with Fred,” Mother says.
“Come down to Fred,” I urge my mother. We are still looking at each other as though we have never seen one another before.
“No, baby,” she says. She plays around with her cold drink, rattling the ice in it, and then drinks half of it.
fifteen
It had taken us longer than a week to write the script for Miss Stuart’s production of Julius Caesar, and in the middle of the second week we had been working on it we had still not managed to come to the point in the play when all the senators murder Caesar. So Miss Stuart said it was time we stopped talking about our respective characters and did something about the play to move it along faster. Altschuler spent so much time convincing everyone that Caesar was an old bastard that the good-looking kid playing Mark Antony, who was dumb, couldn’t think up any reasons for honoring Caesar’s memory. The play would end with my death, everyone agreed. Everyone but Miss Stuart. She said we had to follow Shakespeare’s plot because that was the whole reason for putting on the play this way in the first place. Altschuler said that the only fair thing was to vote, so the class voted in favor of the play ending when Caesar is killed. The only ones voting against that ending were me and Malcolm, whose sympathies always seemed to be with the underdog. Even Mark Antony voted for the new ending, so Miss Stuart said OK, and we put on the play for the whole school on the second Friday I was there. I was pretty good. The little kids booed me a lot, so I know that I played Caesar just as Altschuler wanted. Altschuler got a big hand at the end. Miss Stuart said it was a waste of her time because Brutus isn’t supposed to be the hero. Altschuler told her life is filled with surprises.