Evil Breeding

by Susan Conant

  With a second jolt, it hit me that Mr. Motherway hadn’t been the only character in this drama with the perfect cover. Those famous foreign judges? The experts Mrs. Dodge had imported to officiate at Morris and Essex? Mrs. Dodge’s German judges had visited Giralda with the blessing of the Third Reich. Those judges had returned to Nazi Germany. No one would have suspected a bunch of harmless dog nuts. How suspicious had the U.S. government been in the thirties, anyway? Not nearly suspicious enough, it seemed in retrospect.

  Geraldine R. Dodge could not have sympathized with the Nazis, I reminded myself. Her support of the eugenics movement, I told myself, must represent a hideously naive lapse of judgment. But it was just possible that she had been used: It was remotely possible that my book about the Morris and Essex shows would require a chapter about German spies.

  Chapter Fourteen

  ON FRIDAY MORNING at ten-thirty when Rowdy and I arrived at the Gateway for our weekly therapy-dog visit, I found a note from the director of social services pinned next to my volunteer’s badge and sign-in sheet on the cork bulletin board in the nursing home’s office. “Maida Garabedian,” the note said. “Room 416. Likes dogs.”

  The characterization proved to be an understatement. After moving upward through the nursing home to visit Rowdy’s regular customers, we took the elevator from the fifth and top floor to the fourth, and made our way to 416, which was a private room at the end of a corridor. A new-looking plastic plaque near the door frame read M. GARABEDIAN. Before I had a chance to poke my head through the open doorway to make sure we’d be welcome, the tiny, dark, and ancient woman in 416 caught sight of Rowdy and burst forth in a high-pitched peal of glee. Experience at the Gateway had taught me the wisdom of double-checking my reading of every initial response, no matter how enthusiastic it appeared. A few residents were so heavily medicated that they greeted everyone and everything with a calm, bland smile that could swiftly turn to a grimace of terror when a big dog suddenly loomed. Some of our regulars found Rowdy’s size and wolflike appearance so overwhelming that they preferred to admire him from a distance. Others longed for the primary, primitive contact of touching the soft hair on his ears and digging fingers into the depths of his thick coat. Several real dog people wanted nothing more than to have their faces scoured by his clean pink tongue. The universal friendliness that made Rowdy a natural therapy dog sometimes led him to overestimate people’s eagerness for close contact. I always held Rowdy back until I’d asked, “Do you like dogs?”

  In response to my question, Maida Garabedian clapped her tiny, gnarled hands together and then patted her lap invitingly with her open palms. When I let Rowdy take a few steps toward her, her face vanished in a mass of grinning wrinkles. “This is Rowdy,” I told her. “I’m Holly.” She had eyes only for him. As she stared at Rowdy and made smacking sounds with her lips, my task became clear: I was going to have to prevent Maida Garabedian from enticing Rowdy to leap into her lap. She’d have to settle for cradling his head; the weight of the whole dog would have crushed her frail bones to powder. “Easy does it,” I cautioned Rowdy.

  We spent about ten minutes with Maida, who caught Rowdy’s name and addressed him by it again and again, but gave no sign of understanding anything else I said. At first, I tried out a few topics of conversation. “Maida is such a pretty name. Do you remember the children’s books about Maida? Maida’s Little House? Maida’s Little Zoo?”

  My childhood reading was heavily concentrated on dog books. What now struck me as the absurd premise of the Maida series had, however, taken my fancy. Maida was a little invalid whose widowed father, Jerome Westabrook, a Boston financier, cured his daughter’s loneliness and, eventually, her limp, by recruiting poor children to live on his fabulous estate. Each book was devoted to a new and yet more extravagant project that Mr. Westabrook arranged for his indulged daughter and the fortunate young objects of his beneficence: Maida’s little house, little shop, little houseboat, little island, little theater, and any other obscenely expensive little thing Maida craved, I guess.

  Maida Garabedian, however, hadn’t read the series, had forgotten it, or had lost her capacity to chat about it. What took her fancy was feeding treats to Rowdy one at a time from her open hand. “Like a horse!” I instructed, in what was probably an unnecessarily loud voice. Although Rowdy is gentle, it’s risky to offer him a tiny bit of food pinched between a finger and thumb, unless, of course, you happen to have taken a violent dislike to the tips of your digits. Maida had no trouble in mastering the correct technique. Every time Rowdy’s tongue swept a bit of dog cookie off her hand, she burst into laughter, then offered me her palm for a refill. Playing my limited role, I found myself thinking that, damn it all, locked somewhere in Maida’s brain cells were vivid sensory memories of the era just before World War II, the days of the great Morris and Essex shows, shows that this woman who was now feeding my dog had had the glorious opportunity to attend. Had she availed herself of it? I didn’t even know whether she’d ever owned a dog or gone to a dog show in her entire and exceedingly long life, never mind made the pilgrimage to Giralda. For a moment, I envied Rowdy’s animal capacity to link with her. Had I been able to do the same, I’d have tapped her recollections. And found … ?

  Unexpectedly, the question led to a sort of negative epiphany. Is there such a thing? Yes. I had one. For all I knew, this Maida’s experience of the thirties had less to do with the foreign judges, the top dogs, and the sterling silver trophies of a lavish dog show than with the breadlines of the Great Depression. What came to me as I longed for a direct line to Maida Garabedian’s memory was an image from my own recent memory, an image in a photograph I’d looked at only a few days earlier. There’d been a dog in the picture, a shepherd that had belonged to Mrs. Dodge. It wasn’t the dog that bothered me. It was the vehicle in which he rode. While people by the thousands, including some of the people I now visited at the Gateway, had stood in breadlines, voted for FDR, and labored for the WPA, the lucky dogs of Geraldine R. Dodge had traveled in comfort and style. These days, exhibitors either drive their dogs from show to show on superhighways or ship them rapidly by air. In the twenties and thirties, dogs and people alike poked along on slow roads or traveled by rail. Unwilling to subject her dogs to the discomforts endured by plebeian canines, Mrs. Dodge commissioned a Cadillac touring car, a maroon stretch limo that took three men more than three years to custom-build. It had eight doors and carried as many as a dozen dogs. Wide-eyed, I’d studied the photo of this wonder. Now, fed by the reality of people at the Gateway who’d survived the Depression, nurtured by the chance association of a name, Maida, the image assailed me. Belatedly, the photo spoke of decadence. Or maybe it sang the theme song of the Depression: “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?”

  As Rowdy and I drove home from the Gateway, I found myself taking pride and pleasure in everything that was wrong with my old car. Instead of cursing the windshield wipers for senselessly leaping to life whenever I signaled a turn, I interpreted the malfunction as proof that no matter how well my dogs lived, no one could accuse me of decadence when I was at the wheel of so blatantly proletarian a clunker. Arriving home, I reminded myself that in 1937, the Dodges’ country estate had covered seven thousand acres, making it larger than my lot at the corner of Appleton and Concord in Cambridge by more than 6,999 acres. Furthermore, in contrast to the Dodges, who had lived in separate mansions, I rented out my upstairs apartments. Rowdy, Kimi, Tracker, and I occupied only the first floor, I did most of the repairs and maintenance myself, and if I’d been fortunate enough to own another house, I wouldn’t have let it become an eyesore like Mrs. Dodge’s neglected town house at 800 Fifth Avenue. The premise of the Maida books wasn’t so ludicrous after all, I decided. What had Isabella Stewart Gardner really done with her inheritance from her stinking-rich father? What had Geraldine R. Dodge done with hers? Maida’s Little Museum, I thought. Maida’s Great Big Dog Show. And if Geraldine R. Dodge was me with money, just what did that make me?


  A lucky person, I decided. Yes, Mrs. Dodge and I shared a passion, but she had the means to carry that passion to excess. I didn’t. In pursuing the love without the money, I was doubly blessed.

  With the peculiar sense of having clarified and deepened my relationship with the long-dead Mrs. Dodge, I felt free to work on the book, perhaps because I’d overcome a lingering fear of discovering facts I didn’t want to know. Liberated, I made myself a cup of strong coffee and settled at the kitchen table with both dogs snoozing at my feet. The material I’d been avoiding consisted of New York Times articles that I’d hastily copied from microfiche and deposited largely unread in a manila folder labeled “Wartime Hiatus.” Because the book was supposed to focus on the Morris and Essex shows held before World War II, I’d had a handy rationalization for poring over the Times articles from that era while neglecting the contents of the folder I now opened. Still, in the time I’d frittered away exchanging e-mail and surfing the Web in search of anything whatever about Mrs. Dodge, I could practically have memorized the articles about the wartime cancellation of Morris and Essex. After all, how much had there been to report about shows that hadn’t been held? One sentence a year would’ve been adequate: “The Morris and Essex Kennel Club has announced the cancellation of its annual show.” End of story. But the real articles didn’t stop there. As I remembered from the skimming I’d done before copying the articles from microfiche, the New York Times went on to express a low opinion of the cancellations; between the lines, the paper blamed Mrs. Dodge.

  The first of the hiatus articles, as I thought of them, had been published on January 28, 1942. Mrs. M. Hartley Dodge, president of the Morris and Essex Kennel Club of Madison, New Jersey, had announced the cancellation of the organization’s annual all-breed dog show because of war conditions. The unanimous decision, based on the recommendation of Mrs. Dodge, had been made at the club’s yearly meeting at Giralda Farms. The Times described the club’s action as the “first major break in the big show circuit ascribed to war conditions.” The article went on: “Both the United States and England in the first world war found that sports contributed to sustaining army and civilian morale. Great Britain, despite terrific bombing, has continued to carry on in sports as far as possible. Many organizations all over the United States have voted to continue.” The final paragraph noted a “sharp contrast” between this cancellation and the determination of other kennel clubs in the United States to hold their shows as planned. The implication was clear: Whereas the Westminster Kennel Club, the Eastern Dog Club, and other major dog organizations were patriotically following the British example of carrying on, Morris and Essex was letting our side down. Furthermore, since Mrs. Dodge practically was Morris and Essex, the failure was her fault.

  In a letter to the Times published on February 2, 1942, a patriotic dog fancier took Mrs. Dodge and her club to task for delivering a “body blow.” According to the writer, instead of following the weak example set by Mrs. Dodge and the Morris and Essex Club, other dog people and other clubs should boldly carry on and rally round in the inspiring fashion of the British. As I interpreted the letter, it went on to accuse Mrs. Dodge of weakness, cowardice, and stupidity. She must have read the letter, too. It had not changed the club’s decision.

  As sharp as the contrast between Morris and Essex’s caving in and the struggle of other dog clubs to charge ahead was the contrast between the tone of Times articles before and after the ’42 cancellation. From 1928 on, as Mrs. Dodge’s shows grew larger and grander, the coverage in the Times grew increasingly extensive and laudatory. Separate articles, most under the byline of Henry R. Ilsley, announced plans for the show, oohed and ahed about the judges, reported on the number of entries expected, and raved about the trophies and prizes. Year after year, the Times heralded Morris and Essex with a long article about elaborate preparations and glorious expectations, and the next day, reported with wild enthusiasm on the excitement and splendor of the event. In 1936 the show was “one of the most notable sporting pageants ever staged.” The next year it was “the greatest outdoor canine exhibition ever to be staged in any land.” The show was “an institution” the fame of which had “spread to the ends of the canine world.” It was “a pre-eminent pageant as well, unrivaled in the beauty and color of its environment, unsurpassed in the perfection of its staging.” In 1939 this “fixture,” Morris and Essex, was “the greatest dog show of all time.” In 1941 it was “the world’s greatest canine congress.” Interestingly enough, in those years, Mrs. Dodge was always the “president” of Morris and Essex; after the war, when the shows resumed on a limited scale, she was the show’s “sponsor.” Furthermore, those who assisted her, the other officers of the club and the men who managed her kennels, became her “lieutenants.” Was I making much of nothing? Possibly so. Beginning in 1946, when Morris and Essex resumed, a new byline appeared, that of John Rendel, who likened the show to a country fair, a carnival, and a circus, steps down, it seemed to me, from Ilsley’s metaphors. But maybe Rendel was less extravagant than Ilsley; maybe the new tone reflected nothing more than a change in the correspondent who covered the event. And, of course, after the war, the show, in fact, never recaptured its prewar size and splendor.

  But of the tone during the hiatus, during the war, I had no doubt, especially because the byline was consistently Henry Ilsley’s. In 1943, according to Ilsley, exhibitors were “hungry for shows,” and many dog clubs, including Westminster and Eastern, met the demand, whereas Morris and Essex did not. The difficulties were considerable. Gas rationing, for example, impeded travel to shows. Indeed, Morris and Essex was not the only club to cancel, and small-time exhibitors, the “little fellows,” as the Times called them, sometimes found it impossible to show. In 1943 there were thirty-four fewer dog shows than there’d been the year before, and the number of entries dropped as well. Furthermore, a ruling of the War Committee on Conventions limiting shows to exhibitors and dogs from local areas directly conflicted with an established rule of the American Kennel Club stating that if entries were restricted, no championship points could be awarded. In 1945 the AKC lifted that rule for the duration of the war; as the Times proclaimed, dog shows were thus “saved.”

  Some things never change; I knew exactly how dog people had felt. From the viewpoint of the hard-core dog-show person, the aficionado, the distinction between the salvation of dog shows and the salvation of Western civilization had been nonexistent. What was freedom for, anyway? Life, liberty, and the pursuit of championship points!

  And how had Geraldine R. Dodge contributed to the effort to make the world safe for dog shows? And for the other hallmarks of peace? The answer was plain: Just when her grand show, Morris and Essex, was needed as a morale-boosting model of bold opposition to the forces of evil, she had, in effect, rolled belly up to the enemy and remained belly up for the duration of the war.

  And before the war, had she done worse than that? Morris and Essex had, I thought, offered the opportunity for agents of the Third Reich to slip back and forth between Nazi Germany and the United States in the guise of innocent dog people. But had that potential become a reality? I couldn’t believe that Mrs. Dodge had been knowingly complicitous in treason. Had she been an unknowing accomplice?

  In cultivating suspicions about Nazi infiltrators, I had, at a minimum, caught the national paranoia of the wartime years. That anti-Dodge letter to the Times? February 2, 1942. Printed next to it was a letter reporting the removal, presumably by vandals, of the signs marking the first three miles of the Doodletown Ski Trail on Bear Mountain, New York. Park authorities would now have to replace the signs. Would the Times remind its readers to leave the new signs alone? Honestly, if you want to caution vandals against repeating their misdeeds, why address the civilized, well-behaved readers of the New York Times? But what interested me was the editorial note that appeared after the letter. “It sounds like sabotage on the Doodletown trail,” wrote the Times. “Watch out for fifth columnists on skis.”

&nbs
p; “And if on skis,” I said to Rowdy and Kimi, “why not in the show ring? If on skis, why not behind a judge’s badge? Why not on the wrong end of a leash?”

  Chapter Fifteen

  “I AM SHOCKED!” Rita thumped her wineglass on my coffee table. We were, for once, sitting in my living room instead of at the kitchen table. “Holly, I have a cousin who went to Elmira College!”

  “It’s no reflection on your family,” I assured Rita. “Besides, it happened a long time ago. Elmira College has probably shaped up by now.”

  The incident was this: On July 2, 1964, when Mrs. Dodge was in her eighties, Elmira College, located in upstate New York, sued her guardians for ownership of her art collection. According to Elmira, in 1958 Mrs. Dodge had agreed to give the college her paintings, tapestries, jades, bronzes, and other items in her collection at Giralda and in her Fifth Avenue town house. Here’s the sneaky part: The objects were to become Elmira’s when Mrs. Dodge “could no longer continue to enjoy them.”

  “Listen to this!” Rita brandished the copies of the articles from the Times as if representatives of the college had materialized in my living room and were about to be whacked across their greedy faces with the evidence of their misconduct. “Listen!” She read, “‘On the strength of the agreement, a large estate in Elmira was purchased, to be named the Geraldine R. Dodge Center.’ It goes on. I can’t believe it. ‘Mrs. Dodge, who became a trustee of the college in 1961, gave two hundred thousand dollars toward a two-hundred-fifty-thousand-dollar pledge for the purchase and maintenance of the center, and gifts of porcelains and bronzes valued at about a hundred and twenty thousand dollars.’ The nerve of those people! She’d given them three hundred and twenty thousand dollars, and they couldn’t wait until she was dead to get their hands on more!”