Evil Breeding

by Susan Conant

  The front steps of Mr. Motherway’s house consisted of massive slabs of granite. Before I had a chance to ring the bell, fierce woofing from the opposite side of the door loudly announced my arrival. I rang the bell anyway. The door opened to what looked like a museum of Early American decorative arts and furnishings. Without saying a word, a tall woman in her early fifties with broad, stooped shoulders and pale skin ushered me inside. She was not dressed in colonial attire. Furthermore, to my relief, she did not wear a black dress with a frilly white apron. Maids in mufti are less intimidating, I think, than maids in uniform. In any case, this woman’s appearance and manner were so unthreatening that even if she’d been in full regalia, with a frilly white cap on her head, she wouldn’t have scared me at all. As it was, she wore a plain white blouse, a blue denim skirt, clean white running shoes, and a pair of yellow rubber gloves. She should have been five foot ten or maybe even six feet tall, but her head dropped forward, and she had what in dogs, maybe in people, too, is called a “roach back.” In dogs, however, the problem does not stem from the postural efforts of tall teenage females to shrink themselves to the median height of their peers. Her odd shape could have resulted from untreated scoliosis or possibly osteoporosis, I suppose, but the cowed expression on her face suggested a sincere desire to squeeze herself into less space than nature had intended. Her pale blue eyes blinked rapidly, and she kept her rather full lips puckered, as if she were trying to suck them inside her mouth. Her long, straight brown hair was shot with gray. It parted itself down the middle, and was unflatteringly secured at the nape of her neck by a wide elastic band.

  The dog who’d been barking now lay silently but vigilantly just inside the door on what I thought must be his rug. I had the impression that in dropping to this down-stay, he had obeyed no one but himself. He was a large black shepherd. To my eye, he looked oversized, but I am no expert on the breed. The shepherd I know best, India, belongs to my vet and my lover, Steve Delaney. India has her UD—Utility Dog obedience title—and is working on her UDX. The X stands for excellent, which is what India already is in all possible respects. She defines her work as taking care of Steve by doing whatever he wants. India is beautiful, intelligent, obedient, well trained, protective of Steve, friendly to almost everyone else, and good with other dogs. Also, as does not go without saying in her breed, she is blessedly free of congenital joint disease. India is such a paragon that she’d be almost intolerable if it weren’t for her infectious interest in everything. If she could speak English, her characteristic utterance would be a buoyant, “I wonder what this is? And this! And that! Oh, and what’s that over there!” Like India, this big black male monitored his surroundings. India’s eyes and ears, however, are alert with curiosity. This fellow had a guarded, wary expression. He didn’t growl. His hackles weren’t up. Still, I reminded myself to do everything he expected and nothing he didn’t. My pockets were, as usual, full of dog treats. I didn’t offer him one.

  “I’m Holly Winter,” I told the woman. “I have an appointment with Mr. Motherway.”

  She still said nothing, but nodded pleasantly before picking up a plastic bucket and a spray bottle of all-purpose cleaner and heading up the staircase that rose opposite the door. In her absence, the black dog continued to observe me. Normally, if you were to set me in the middle of the Louvre and turn loose some scruffy, mangy little street dog, I’d be on my hands and knees making friends with the fascinating creature, and I’d be subsequently unable to remember a single art object in that particular gallery or maybe in the entire museum, because the living work would have stolen my rapt attention.

  Now, reluctant to make eye contact with the black shepherd, I studied the hallway and admired the living room, visible through a doorway to my left. The house had the low ceilings and uneven floors of its era. The walls of the long, wide hallway, which stretched to the rear of the house, were covered with what looked like the original flower-patterned paper, miraculously preserved. The paper simply had to be a reproduction of an authentic pattern, didn’t it? Except to install electricity and radiators, no one had done any visible updating since about 1800. All the woodwork, including the banister, doors, door frames, baseboards, and window trim, must have been stripped to the raw wood and freshly painted in these bright and unusual shades of blue, green, yellow, and a soft, rich red. The furnishings were American antiques. On the walls were American primitive paintings, including the kinds of oil portraits done by traveling artists who turned up at the doors of prosperous colonists with painted canvases missing only the particular faces of the family members to be immortalized. Displayed on tables and in cabinets were not the rustic, rusty kitchen implements it’s become fashionable to collect, but pieces of silver and pewter that had certainly been valuable in their own time. On the sparkling floors lay the kinds of Oriental carpets imported for wealthy colonists who wanted their establishments in the New World to look as much as possible like gentlemen’s residences in England. Everything looked scrubbed, dusted, vacuumed, shaken out, ironed, or polished, as needed. I don’t share the popular objection to a house that looks like a museum; the absence of a VCR and a mess of old newspapers in the living room didn’t bother me at all. I was wowed. By comparison with Mrs. Dodge’s Giralda Farms, I reminded myself, this place was practically a hovel. I was still wowed. And if the black male shepherd didn’t ooze charm, he at least refrained from oozing bodily fluids and leaving chew marks on his master’s show-place.

  Footsteps sounded overhead. The feet and long legs of a man began to descend the stairs. Mr. Motherway was tall, lean, and fiercely upright. He had a bullet-shaped head and thick white hair cropped almost to his scalp. His eyes were a deep, bright cobalt blue. His unobtrusively well-tailored gray wool suit struck me as the perfect attire for an American Kennel Club judge on an important assignment. Reaching the bottom of the stairs, he stepped forward, extended his hand, and said, “Miss Winter, a pleasure. Jocelyn should have asked you to take a seat. You shouldn’t have been left standing here.”

  As we shook hands, the dog rose and went to Mr. Motherway’s left side. Even in his master’s presence, this was not an ears-up, eyes-bright animal. The shepherd held his head low and moved as if completing a boring but necessary mission.

  I said that I’d been enjoying myself admiring his house. I’d always liked American primitive paintings, I added. I liked the sweetness and the naïveté. What I actually liked, although I didn’t say so to Mr. Motherway, was the depiction of dogs in American primitives. I loved the ones that showed a child or a group of children cuddling a stiff-looking, formal lapdog. Mr. Motherway didn’t have any of those, at least that I’d seen. I settled for saying that he had a wonderful collection.

  “Family legacy,” he replied modestly as he led me into the living room. “My stepfather collected in a small way. He introduced me to dogs, too. He had shepherds. He was the one who first took me to Morris and Essex, as I may have mentioned on the phone.” The reference to his stepfather caught me off guard. Barbara Altman, the fellow dog writer who’d put me on to Mr. Motherway, had warned me that he’d had a sister who died in Germany in the thirties. He never discussed her; the topic was off limits. I’d somehow assumed that the taboo extended beyond the sister to the rest of Motherway’s family—obviously, I’d been wrong.

  Mr. Motherway motioned me to a love seat that faced the immense fireplace. He took a wooden chair by the hearth. The dog lowered himself to rest at Mr. Motherway’s feet.

  “Do you remember what year that was?” I asked.

  “Well, it must have been 1928. I know it wasn’t the first year. Compared to what Mrs. Dodge did later, it was small. But even back then, it was an exhibitor’s show. She always went out of her way to make everything convenient. The trains that brought in the dogs had special baggage cars, and she arranged to have the dogs and the exhibitors transported from the trains. The estate, Giralda, was … Well, I wasn’t much more than a boy, and to me it looked like a castle out of a fairy tale.
In later years, it got … Well, the word is spectacular. She kept enlarging the polo fields to make room for more rings and more tents, and the lawn would stretch as far as you could see. And there’d be trees all around, dogwoods blooming. It was extraordinary. Everything was tented. There was a luncheon tent. If you showed, Mrs. Dodge provided lunch for you. Don’t see much of that these days, do you?”

  On cue, I laughed. “These days, you’re lucky to be able to park in walking distance of the rings.”

  Mr. Motherway smiled. He had good teeth, obviously his own. “One year, can’t remember just when, she had a special area reserved for toys.” Toy breeds, I should perhaps add. Little dogs. “Special parking area,” he continued, “right by a big tent reserved for toys, right next to the rings, so no one had to lug anything. And the whole area was at the edge of the field, in the shade, as I recall. The show was always in May, late May, and it can get good and hot and humid in New Jersey in May, so she had tents everywhere and these orange beach umbrellas. There was a tower for the photographers to go up to get panoramas of the whole scene. I talked my way up that tower one time, and it was a sight to see: the trees, the acres of lawn, thousands of cars, fifty or sixty rings, dozens of tents, umbrellas, dogs, exhibitors, gawkers. Even from the ground, it was a remarkable site, like a giant carnival.”

  “I’d give anything to have been there,” I said truthfully. “What did she give the exhibitors for lunch?”

  Mr. Motherway looked taken aback. “Well, don’t know that I recall. Chicken, I suppose. It must have been chicken.”

  I’d always been curious about those lunches. These days, the club sponsoring a dog show provides a good lunch for the judges and either the same lunch or a less lavish one for the stewards, the volunteers who help the judges. Exhibitors pack their own picnics, or eat at cafeterias or concession stands. I couldn’t get over the idea that Mrs. Dodge had served a civilized lunch, presumably a delicious one, to everyone who entered her show. Before I could press Mr. Motherway for details about the menus, a loud, horrible scream rang through the house. If the black dog hadn’t still been motionless at Mr. Motherway’s feet, I’d have assumed, I hate to admit, that he’d dug his teeth into someone, probably the maid, Jocelyn. There was something elusively female about the scream.

  Mr. Motherway rose from his chair by the fireplace. “My wife,” he explained. “Christina is dying at home,” he added with dignity. “Everything possible is done for her here. If you’ll excuse me, I’ll see that Jocelyn is with her. Jocelyn has orders to stay within close hearing distance of Christina, but she does not always follow orders.” Glued to Mr. Motherway’s left side, the shepherd followed him from the room. The dog hadn’t shown any reaction to the startling cry. He must have been used to it. To some extent, I was, too. My Rowdy is a certified therapy dog. We visit a nursing home. A few of the very old and ailing people there cried out now and then in a way that had initially alarmed me; I thought I was hearing shrieks of pain. Some may have been. Others were not. One day I took Rowdy to the bedside of an ancient, frail woman named Betty whose mind wandered. On some days, she loved to see Rowdy. I’d guide her thin hand through the safety bars that surrounded her bed, and she’d rest her palm on top of his big head and finger his soft ears. Occasionally he’d gently lick her fingers in what I took to be a canine effort to heal a wound. One day when Betty’s mind was somewhere else, I tried to rouse her by following our usual routine. I guided her hand to Rowdy, who must have sensed that she was failing and decided to help. The second his damp tongue touched her skin, she broke into wails of terror. Someone should never have done something, she screamed. Never on earth! Never on earth! She cried out to God to save her. Hauling Rowdy with me, I ran for a nurse. What Betty suffered now was an attack of ancient psychic pain revived by her illness and dementia. I felt terrible about having unintentionally aroused some mental monster.

  Having apparently restored his dying wife to comfort, Mr. Motherway returned. Over coffee supplied by the still-silent Jocelyn, we had a long talk about Morris and Essex. Mr. Motherway had actually been there in 1935 when Johnny Aarflot, the famous Norwegian breeder, judged Norwegian elkhounds. In 1935, Mrs. Dodge brought from England Mrs. Cecil Barber, who judged Scottish terriers, and Mme Jeanne Harper Trois-Fontaines, who judged Great Pyrenees. In 1937, Forstmeister Marquandt, president of the Dachshunde Club of Germany, drew a big entry: nearly three hundred dogs.

  Mr. Motherway also wandered into tales of his youth. In the thirties, he’d led student tours of Europe. He’d been teaching art history at the prep school from which he was now retired, and in the summers he and a band of students would wander in France, Italy, Spain, and Germany. It was hard to connect the freewheeling character he’d evidently been with the staid, upright gentleman I saw now. In the summer after his sophomore year in college, he informed me, he’d gone to Montana with a party of friends. “On a dare,” he confided, “I entered a rodeo. Had no idea what I was doing. I ended up on a wild steer, and darned if I didn’t ride it to the finish!”

  “That’s amazing,” I said.

  “Won my spurs in range fashion! Foolhardy. I was lucky to get off without breaking my neck.”

  “But you’re glad now you did it?”

  He beamed. “Shall we meet again? Somewhere, I’ve got a few pictures from the old days that might interest you. I’ll dig them up.”

  “That would be great.” I also had some questions I hadn’t been able to fit into my allotted time. “How would next Friday be? At ten or so?”

  “Ten,” he said firmly. I should have realized that he wasn’t an or-so type.

  Before I left, he offered me a tour of his kennels. I accepted. I expected him to show me around himself, but he departed in search of someone called Peter, to whom he was evidently delegating the task. This time, the black shepherd stayed by the hearth when his master left. I hadn’t seen Mr. Motherway give any signal to the dog. He certainly hadn’t issued a spoken command. The dog apparently did what he felt like doing, and since he mostly just put himself on long down-stays, there was no reason for anyone to object.

  Jocelyn appeared carrying an empty tray that she rested on a side table. I picked up my cup and saucer and started toward the tray, but she rapidly took the china from me. Mr. Motherway’s cup and saucer lay on what I think is called a piecrust table, a small side table with the top fluted around the edge. The black shepherd was still on his voluntary down by Mr. Motherway’s chair and directly in front of the table. When Jocelyn leaned over him to get the cup and saucer, he stirred, eyed her, and growled. The cup and saucer rattled in her trembling hand.

  I couldn’t keep my mouth shut. “He shouldn’t be allowed to get away with that,” I told her.

  “It’s not my dog,” Jocelyn said meekly.

  “So what? No one should have to tolerate being growled at.”

  “If I stay away from his places, he doesn’t do it. It was my fault. I put my foot too close to—”

  “You should be able to tell him to get up and move. He is a dog. You are a person. If you need him to move, he should move, and he shouldn’t growl at you. There’s no excuse for that kind of obnoxious behavior.”

  Before I could ask Jocelyn whether she had ever discussed this situation with her employer, he reappeared with a sullen-looking man at his side. “Peter will do the honors,” Mr. Motherway said pleasantly. Before excusing himself to sit with his wife, he said how happy he was to have the opportunity to reminisce about the grand old shows and how glad he was that we’d be meeting again.

  Peter glared at Mr. Motherway’s retreating form. He might as well have said outright that he resented being stuck with me. He was a wiry man in his fifties, I guessed, shorter than either Mr. Motherway or Jocelyn, with sun-reddened skin, blue eyes, and blond-gray, scraggly hair that fell to his shoulders. He wore work boots, dark-green work pants, and a matching work shirt too hot for the spring day. His expression suggested that since he had yet to meet a human being he liked, I shouldn�
�t waste any effort in trying to make myself the first. I trailed after Peter as he stomped by the row of sixteen or eighteen spacious, sturdy chain-link kennel runs attached to the freshly painted barn. The shepherds, being shepherds, ran to the ends of their runs to baric at me. Peter made no effort to silence them. Rather, he ignored them as diligently as he ignored me. The dogs made so much noise that even if I’d wanted to ask a question or make a comment, I wouldn’t have been able to make myself heard. The kennels had concrete floors and were as clean as any I’d ever seen. The dogs looked healthy and were as clean as their living quarters. In the distance, I noticed two more outbuildings, also with kennel runs attached, but Peter didn’t offer me a tour of those, and I didn’t ask.

  When I’d driven up, the doors to the big barn had been shut. I’d parked my car on the gravel by the side of the house. Now the barn doors stood open to reveal not only the interiors of the dog runs and a collection of farm and kennel equipment, but an old black Ford pickup, some sort of unpretentious little foreign car, a luxurious black sedan that stopped maybe a few inches and a few thousand dollars short of being a limo, and exactly the kind of shiny new van that would let the dogs and me travel to shows in safety, comfort, and style.

  I thanked Peter, who was already too far away to hear me, climbed into my old Bronco, and hoped it would start. It did. On the way home, I kept seeing glimpses of my battered car, my modest house, and, indeed, myself through the unflattering eyes of the rich. Whenever I signaled a turn, the car’s wipers swept across the windshield. The upholstery had triangular rips on both front seats. The tape player would work for weeks and then unpredictably destroy a cassette that I couldn’t afford to replace. When I opened the windows, dog hair flew out, but the dog smell stayed. Pulling into my own driveway again, I wished that I had a garage and that I occupied all three floors of my house instead of just one. Brushing undercoat off my denim skirt, I wished I’d had something better to wear to Mr. Motherway’s than an outfit almost identical to his maid’s. The back stairs to my house needed painting. I’d have to do the job myself. As I put the key in the lock, I realized that I had the hands of what I often was: a manual laborer. And I wished for something I’d ordinarily have laughed at: a professional manicure.