Evil Breeding

by Susan Conant

  The principal difference between these parallel universes is that the dog equivalent costs ten times as much or is ten times as intense as the human version. You can get a hair dryer for yourself at any discount drugstore by plunking down just about exactly one tenth the price you have to pay for the sturdy forced-air blower you need for a show dog. To trim your own nails, you need a file or an emery board. For a dog, you need either manual nail clippers, costing maybe ten dollars, or an electric nail grinder, say, fifty dollars. On my own hair, I use a comb and brush. On Rowdy and Kimi, I use undercoat rakes, wire slicker brushes, natural boar-bristle brushes, finishing brushes with stainless-steel pins, and a variety of combs specially designed not to damage the dogs’ hair. The dogs absolutely require a grooming table. I stand on the bathroom floor. The same goes for everything else: ten times as expensive, ten times as intense. Dog politics? The jockeying for power within the American Kennel Club makes the Knesset look like a Buddhist monastery occupied by a lone monk who’s taken a vow of silence. Madness? You haven’t met a lunatic until you’ve met a real dog nut. As to social class, why breeding is what it’s all about, my dears.

  To demonstrate the omnipresence of parallel universes, let me add a couple of examples that have nothing to do with dogs, namely, head lice and human mortality. The proposition we’re considering is, I remind you, that if something exists in one universe, it exists in others. So, on to politics in the world of head lice. The National Pediculosis Association is now, as we speak (as we itch and scratch?), vying publicly with a rival head-lice organization that has obviously won the first round of the battle for America’s scalps by discreetly calling itself Sawyer Mac Productions, instead of, say, The American Louse and Nit Foundation. Imagine the graphics on the letterhead stationery. Anyway, it’s easy to see that just as national political parties divide themselves into conservatives and liberals, so, too, do external human parasitic parties. Truly, the National Pediculosis platform calls for the traditional, conservative reliance on a fine-tooth comb, supplemented in emergency cases of all-out war by the pesticide-shampoo defense, whereas the liberal Sawyer Mac agenda demands immediate, global comb and pesticide disarmament and proposes instead the near-pacifist policy of dousing louse-ridden heads in olive oil.

  Human mortality. Delicacy, compounded by a profound and blissful ignorance of exactly what undertakers do to dead bodies, restrains me from pointing out what I am sure are exact parallels between the preparation of show dogs for the ring and the grooming of deceased human beings for open-casket viewings, but I am sure that the parallels are there. Ah, but politics? Cremation versus burial? Funeral services: In the conservative approach, a member of the clergy says flattering things about someone who may have been a total stranger. The liberal preference is for spontaneous eulogies delivered by family and friends, who are encouraged to celebrate the life of the departed by relating cheerful anecdotes of generous deeds, amusing pranks, revealing witticisms, and lovable quirks. A strength of the conservative approach is that the clergyperson usually admits aloud that the subject of the eulogy is dead.

  Have I digressed? No. Parallel universes. If it exists, it exists in nations, dogs, lice, and human mortality. Politics. Grooming. Social rank. Art! Dog art. The art of head lice? Indeed. The letterhead stationery? And mortuary art, as is evident at Mount Auburn Cemetery, where the alert visitor may admire everything from immense stone edifices like the Mary Baker Eddy Monument, to quaint, homey cottages like the Gardner family vault, to intricately carved angels, crosses, and sheepdogs, to unadorned granite slabs. Old money rests peacefully in or under, as the case may be, the vaults and statuary on the artificial hillsides and next to the miniature man-made lakes of Mount Auburn’s grand neighborhoods. Mature trees of exotic species soften the landscape. The section occupied by deceased parvenus suffers by comparison. With its skimpy, adolescent trees, its newly paved streets, and its unadorned slabs of rock, each barely distinguishable from all others on the block, it is the tract housing of death. There lay Christina Motherway and her son, Peter.

  When I pulled up near the Motherway plot and parked behind a battered black Ford pickup truck, Jocelyn was kneeling by the brand-new headstone of her mother-in-law and, to my surprise, of her father-in-law, too. The stone was a thick, substantial double model reminiscent of twin beds shoved together to form a king. Christina slept on the left, at least according to the name carved there. B. Robert’s name had already been carved on the right. His late wife’s headboard had two dates: birth and death. His had no date at all. The omission seemed odd. He didn’t know exactly when he was going to die, but his birth date wasn’t going to change, was it? If something is figuratively carved in stone, why balk at the literal? In contrast to his mother’s grave and his father’s grave-to-be, Peter Motherway’s final resting place had no stone. I assumed it hadn’t been delivered yet. Although Mount Auburn must have strict zoning codes to ban the headstone equivalent of hovels, I had the feeling that Peter’s grave marker would be a thin and vaguely shoddy single-bed slab. I toyed with the idea that if Jocelyn were buried in the same plot, she wouldn’t get so much as half a gravestone for herself. She might not even get a separate grave. Rather, Peter’s would be opened, and his wife would be laid to rest directly above him. I imagined Jocelyn’s posthumous astonishment at the radical transformation in her conjugal relationship. In life, I suspected, she’d never been on top.

  Delayed by trouble in starting my car and then by commuter traffic between Newton and Cambridge, I’d taken a shortcut by turning off Greenough Boulevard, zipping uphill, and going straight ahead on Grove Street until reaching the gate that served as the cemetery’s back door. Since I’d had no time to take Rowdy home, he was in his crate in the back of the Bronco instead of in his usual sneaking-into-Mount Auburn position flat on the floor, but no one stopped me to enforce the no-dogs rule. Maybe a dog crated in a car was perfectly welcome.

  Before leaving Althea’s, I’d sealed the photocopies of the mysterious mailings in a big manila envelope I’d taken with me. Now, getting out of the Bronco, I held the envelope prominently in my right hand as a reassurance, a false one, of course, to Jocelyn. I might as well not have bothered. Like the tattooed man at the Gardner kneeling before the John Singer Sargent portrait, Jocelyn was on her knees before Christina’s half of the gravestone. Her hands were tightly wrapped around a wicker basket that held an arrangement of pink tulips and white daffodils. Her eyes were closed. Her lips moved in what could only have been prayer. After a moment or two, she placed the basket on the new turf in front of the stone. Her late husband’s fresh grave was bare. Any wreaths, sprays, or bouquets left there after the funeral on Saturday must have withered and been cleared away, or had perhaps been moved to other graves by mourners doubly stricken by grief and poverty. In any case, although it was Peter Motherway’s barren, unmarked grave that seemed to call for flowers, Jocelyn paid tribute only to Christina.

  When she rose, I could see tears running down her cheeks. Without handing her the envelope, I said gently, as if speaking to an injured animal, “Jocelyn, I don’t know the details of the situation you’re in, but I know you need help. I have a good friend who will know what to do. I want you to come home with me. We’ll find a safe place for you.”

  My offer succeeded only in provoking another freakish smile. “The only safe place,” Jocelyn said bitterly, “is right here with Christina.” Like a dog snatching an unguarded steak from a kitchen counter, she grabbed the envelope from my hand, dashed to the old Ford pickup, and drove away.

  With no reason to linger, I returned to the Bronco, which started on the first try. Heading for the main gate, I reached the old part of the cemetery, where I slowed to a safe crawl to avoid endangering the birders, fitness walkers, and other visitors who were taking advantage of the early-summer evening to enjoy the garden cemetery as its founders had intended. When I neared the main gate, I could see Jocelyn’s old black truck, which had halted with its brake lights on and its left-turn
signal blinking. One of the buses or trackless trolleys that run along Mount Auburn Street must have discharged a throng of passengers; pedestrians were passing along the sidewalk in front of the truck. When the sidewalk cleared, Jocelyn edged ahead, but had to wait for a break in traffic. Tonight, Mount Auburn Street was jammed with commuters heading home to Watertown, Belmont, and Newton, and after-work shoppers going to and from the big Star Market a block away from the cemetery gate, on the opposite side of the road. A group of tourists clutching maps of the cemetery crossed in front of my car.

  As I started to move forward, an ordinary-looking beige car emerged from one of the cemetery streets that join at the main gate. It pulled in back of Jocelyn’s truck. With the pavement ahead of me clear, I added my Bronco to the little two-car line. I signaled for a right turn, thus activating the windshield wipers. Now that I was directly behind the beige car, I could see that it was a Mercedes. Its left-turn signal was blinking. Its wipers were not embarrassing its driver by sweeping nonexistent rain off a dry windshield. I confess to the impulse to shove my foot on the gas and slam my dented, malfunctioning Bronco into the nearest vehicle that had cost more than my yearly income, a vehicle conveniently located about a yard ahead of my front bumper. And the rich S.O.B. had a car phone, too! He was using it right now. The Mercedes probably had a fabulous sound system instead of a tape player that ate tapes. Posh upholstery. Air conditioning that did ninety degrees to sixty-five in ten seconds. If so, the driver evidently had it turned off or was wasting gas and money by running it while a window was open. The driver had ended his call and was now stretching. His left hand and forearm appeared through the window. On the arm was a large tattoo. The driver had dark, curly hair. Easing ahead, I strained to look into the rearview mirror of the Mercedes. I managed to catch sight of the driver without locking eyes. His head was turned to the left. In fact, he seemed to be admiring the tattoo, or maybe just the muscles of his arm. I was too far away to see the tattoo in detail, but even at the Gardner, when I’d taken a close look, I hadn’t been able to tell what it was supposed to represent. But I recognized the man, the art student, as I persisted in thinking of him. I’d seen him at Mount Auburn before. Once, he’d been alone. The second time, he’d been at Peter Motherway’s funeral. Now, his car was directly behind Jocelyn’s truck. Like Jocelyn, he was signaling for a left turn. I rapidly switched my turn signal from right to left. Jocelyn finally pulled into Mount Auburn Street, with the Mercedes on her tail and my Bronco close behind.

  Maybe Jocelyn’s terror was justified. As Rita, the psychologist, always says, just because you’re paranoid, it doesn’t mean you’re not being followed.

  Chapter Twenty-five

  ON THE LAST DAY of his life, Peter Motherway drove to the cargo area of Logan Airport, where he shipped three puppies. Peter never made it home. The terminally ill Christina Motherway also perished during what was, in another sense, a journey home. A third member of the Motherway family, Jocelyn, was now heading home. Or so I assumed.

  After failing to persuade Jocelyn to accept whatever sanctuary Rita and I could find for her, I’d resolved to enlist Kevin Dennehy’s help. Jocelyn was, it seemed to me, too acutely terrified and too chronically cowed to act in her own interest. If she wouldn’t voluntarily seek refuge from the violence she obviously feared, then she belonged, I decided, in protective custody. I had no idea how protective custody worked or what it meant for the person in its grips, but it couldn’t be worse than what Jocelyn faced alone. If she were taken to a police station for questioning, or even arrested and locked in a jail cell, she’d be in the care of people whose job it was to make sure she didn’t share her late husband’s fate. Just how rational or irrational was Jocelyn’s panic? Indeed, how rational or irrational was the woman herself? Her husband had in fact been brutally murdered; his body had been propped against the Gardner vault at Mount Auburn.

  There was, however, no comparable evidence that Christina Motherway’s death had been unnatural; the notion might be Jocelyn’s delusion, a symptom of her need for psychiatric help. In mailing a series of mysterious packets to a near stranger, Jocelyn had acted senselessly. A person of sound mind seeks help by enlisting the aid of someone qualified to provide it; Jocelyn, instead of cogently relating her suspicions to a police officer, a private detective, or a psychotherapist, had sent cryptic messages to a dog trainer! The choice was crazy. What was I supposed to do about the whole mess? Housebreak it? Peter’s widow had not imagined his murder. Still, the true meaning of everything she’d sent me might not be murder, after all, but her own madness. Yes, the Motherway family evidently had secrets that its members wanted kept as just that, family secrets. So did every other family! Wasn’t it characteristic of the mad to fabricate sinister connections between unrelated events? To quake at inner demons projected outward?

  In Harvard Square was a wild-acting man who alerted passersby to evil schemes concocted by professors, including his stepfather and his own mother. The man’s demeanor undermined his credibility. If he’d been hell-bent on convincing people that the sun rose in the east, he’d have turned all eyes westward at dawn. When he was in an agitated mood, he planted himself in the middle of the street to bellow warnings about electrical currents and laboratory rats. At other times, he lingered in doorways to stage-whisper bits of his secret knowledge. The man was blatantly deranged.

  As I followed the Mercedes that tailed the old Ford truck, I had to wonder whether I was now being taken in by a subtle madness that I’d failed to see for what it was. Jocelyn Motherway’s appearance was unremarkable; she was a tall, dowdy woman with poor posture. She didn’t block traffic or accost strangers. Or did she? To me, a near stranger, she’d mailed what were, in effect, tangible bits of secret knowledge. It was I who had fought to discover sinister connections, I who had enlisted Althea in my efforts. Althea, of all people, the fanatical Holmesian whose greatest delight came from following, or in this case from concocting, a sinister plot!

  Just beyond the Star Market, Belmont Street forks to the right. Jocelyn bore left, staying on Mount Auburn Street, with the Mercedes and my Bronco trailing after her truck. For a second, I saw the three vehicles as a mockery of a funeral cortege. As an empty hearse trailed by mourners, the old black pickup was a bad joke. There were no flowers, no tears. And far from driving toward a cemetery, we were crawling away from one. Caught in rush-hour traffic, we moved from Cambridge to Watertown with funeral slowness. Jocelyn got stuck at a red light. When it turned green, our procession moved through an intersection, but was soon brought almost to a standstill near Kay’s Market, an Armenian greengrocery that also sells tenderly fresh Syrian bread, exotic spices, pistachio nuts, taramosalata, Greek olives, and other specialty foods so literally attractive that hordes of customers are forced to double-park.

  When one of the double-parked cars pulled out between my Bronco and the Mercedes, I thought about taking its spot. For all I knew, the unfortunate Jocelyn suffered from delusions of persecution so severe that the Motherway family hired someone to keep an eye on her whenever she left home. Maybe the family’s determination to keep Christina out of an institution had been innocent and kindly. If so, family feeling might extend to an equally strong determination to keep Jocelyn out of a mental hospital. Her terror was unquestionably genuine. Its source? I’d seen her as the potential victim of violence. Was she in reality its source? Tormented by guilt, criminals sometimes surrendered to satisfy an underlying need for punishment. True? On television and in movies, anyway. Jocelyn was strong enough to have garroted her husband and strong enough to have carried or dragged his body a great distance. She had no alibi. Maybe Kevin Dennehy’s view of marriage as murder was justified after all. If so, there was no reason for me to follow the Mercedes that tailed her truck. Its tattooed driver might be an odd sort of bodyguard, an eccentric, of course, a man with a bizarre crush on Isabella Stewart Gardner, but a guard nonetheless, a hireling whose task was to prevent Jocelyn from committing new acts of violence.
B. Robert Motherway had shown no affection for Peter. But would he shield the woman who had murdered his son? As I’d heard myself, Christopher had quarreled bitterly with his father. And as Jocelyn’s son, Christopher might protect her. All along, what I’d seen as Jocelyn’s oppression, her relegation to the status of household help, might represent the family’s weird effort to contain her violence. On the other hand, genuflecting before the John Singer Sargent portrait of Mrs. Gardner wasn’t exactly what Rita always calls “appropriate behavior.” Jocelyn’s inner demons might not be the only threat she faced; now and then, paranoia coincided with reality. If the man in the Mercedes planned to waylay her, my presence as a witness should deter him.

  In the heavily congested approach to Watertown Square, a feat of Boston-driver maneuvering landed me in the right-hand lane, still with only one car between mine and the Mercedes. By now, the driver of the Mercedes had a teal minivan between his car and his quarry’s truck. Jocelyn’s right turn onto Main Street supported my assumption that she was heading home. Main Street in Watertown would lead her to Main Street in Waltham. A half mile or so past the center of Waltham, she could take Route 117 or veer left staying on Route 20. Either road would take her home.

  By obeying what is evidently a Massachusetts traffic law, I interpreted the yellow light as an injunction to pick up speed, and thus managed to jam the Bronco among the other cars clogging Watertown Square. After that, the traffic eased a bit. The teal minivan remained between Jocelyn’s truck and the Mercedes, which made no effort to pass. I deliberately let a second car slip between mine and the Mercedes. After what seemed like hours, we crossed a railroad bridge and descended to the part of Main Street in Waltham that’s thick with pizzerias, storefront offices, and discount this-and-thats. A working-class town and proud of it, Waltham is also home to lots of high-tech companies, but the impressive new office and industrial buildings cluster along Route 128, America’s Technology Highway. Ages ago, Waltham was Watch City, USA, but you’d never call it a Little Switzerland; these days, in downtown Waltham, there’s not much to watch.