by Susan Conant
As if reading my thoughts, Eumie said, “We were going to call, but Dolfo is a very special dog, you see, and we’re in a crisis. We need help now.”
My pockets are dog training kits. After raiding my supply of Gooberlicious peanut butter–flavored treats, I’d lured Dolfo off me and was helping him to love the feel of concrete on his paws. He was licking my hands and bouncing around. He didn’t try to force the treats out of my hand, and he didn’t growl at me. Furthermore, although Steve, Rowdy, and Sammy were now approaching, Dolfo stayed focused on the food in my hand. If a dog is going to display aggression toward any other dogs, he’ll usually show it to Alaskan malamutes. The stimulus isn’t malamute behavior but what’s called “breed type”: as big dogs with ears up, plumy tails waving over their backs, and thick coats standing off their bodies, malamutes register as potential threats even when they are behaving like ladies and gentlemen. But as I’ve said, Dolfo didn’t react.
“Beginners’ classes start on the first Thursday of the month,” I said, “and it’s too late to enter the one that’s already begun. You’ve missed too much, and it’s full, anyway. There won’t be another beginners’ class until September. I’m sorry. But you’re welcome to come in and—”
As I’d been apologizing, my dog training buddy and my plumber, too, a guy named Ron Coughlin, had opened one of the armory doors. The club was lucky to have the use of the parking lot behind the armory. People who parked there entered through the back doors, as Ron had done; I’d noticed his van turning in. Ron was a nice guy and an excellent plumber. I’d known him for ages. We’d both served on the club’s board, we’d trained dogs together, he owned a perfect male golden retriever I’d helped him to adopt, and we’d hung out together at obedience trials. He’d recently done a lot of plumbing for Steve and me when we moved my friend and second-floor tenant, Rita, to the third floor and converted her second-floor apartment and my original ground-floor apartment into one big unit for ourselves. Still, when I ran into Ron, I didn’t fly up to him and give him a hug, and I didn’t shriek.
That’s just what Eumie Green did. “Ron!” she squealed. “What a surprise! What are you doing here?” When he finally escaped, his normally ruddy complexion was outright red, but he managed to mumble the obvious, namely, that he was training his dogs.
“The Greens won us at the Avon Hill auction,” I told Ron. “Their dog needs a collar and a leash so they can come in and observe. Do we have—”
Ron was now expressionless. “Dolfo,” he said, “doesn’t wear a collar.”
“Ron, vee geyts? Ron does our plumbing.” Ted spoke with just a hint of a southern accent. “He’s one of the family. He and Dolfo are old friends.” Ron later told me that Ted and Eumie had waited six months to pay the last bill he’d sent them. Ron was a friend of Steve’s and mine, too, but he wasn’t one of the family. Consequently, we always paid him promptly.
“Well,” I said brightly, “tonight is going to be a new experience for Dolfo.” The dog, I should say, was perfectly happy on leash. In fact, he was always happy. Bizarre-looking, yes, and uncivilized, but wonderfully cheerful.
Ted and Eumie exchanged glances and then reluctant nods. “Nisht gut,” said Ted. “But we’ll try it for a few minutes.”
By then, handlers and dogs were arriving, so I hustled Dolfo into the entrance hall, where people were checking in and paying, but before Ron even had time to borrow a collar and leash from the club’s equipment box, the Dolfo experiment failed. To avoid getting graphic or disgusting, I’ll just report that right there in the middle of the entryway, Dolfo staged a large and smelly demonstration of what happens when owners fail to housebreak a dog. Instead of apologizing, cleaning up after their dog, or helping me to get him outside, Ted and Eumie decided that Dolfo was responding to stress.
“This whole situation is traumatic for him,” Ted announced.
Far from acting traumatized, Dolfo was merrily sniffing the evidence of his crime.
“Good boy,” Eumie told him. “We’ll take you home right now.”
“Eumie,” said Ted, “you’re forgetting the crisis.”
“We’ll find another housekeeper,” she replied. “We always do.”
“And she’ll quit, too.”
“We need to discuss this matter outside,” I said in my dog-trainer voice. As I led Dolfo out, he raised his leg on a doorjamb. Then he turned around and jumped on me. When I’d finally lured the Greens all the way to their brand-new silver Lexus SUV, which was parked in an illegal but nearby spot on Concord Avenue, I again apologized for what I called the “misunderstanding” about the auction item. “You probably paid a lot of money for dog training classes, and we can’t offer you anything until September. And Dolfo really can’t be loose. I know you don’t like to restrain him, but it’s a club rule. And it’s necessary. For the safety of all the dogs.” Ted opened the door to the backseat, and Dolfo jumped in. I reclaimed my spare leash and rubbed his ridiculous ears. “He’s really very cute,” I said.
“I’ll bet you don’t know what breed he is!” Eumie exclaimed.
“I can’t begin to guess,” I said truthfully.
“You probably thought he was a mongrel,” she said. “Or a Goldendoodle. We hear that a lot.”
There were so many Goldendoodles, Labradoodles, and cockapoos around these days that I’d learned to identify them, but my new skill hadn’t convinced me that they were anything other than costlypoos. Still, I said, “People always think that my malamutes are Siberian huskies.”
“Dolfo,” said Ted, “is a golden Aussie huskapoo. We found him on the Web.” With warm condescension, he added, “It’s a new breed.”
I refrained from asking how much Dolfo had cost. My bet was at least twice what Steve had paid for Sammy, who was a show-quality puppy out of a champion sire and dam, my Rowdy and American and Canadian Ch. Jazzland’s Embraceable You. I later learned that the Greens had actually paid four times Sammy’s cost, which goes to prove that I know less about dogs than I like to imagine. “Golden retriever, Siberian husky, poodle, and Australian cattle dog?” I asked. Because of my heritage, I can usually spot even a trace of golden retriever in a mixed-breed dog. I couldn’t see or sense any golden in Dolfo, but I wouldn’t have guessed the other parts of the mix, either.
Ted was delighted. “Australian shepherd,” he corrected. His face fell. “But the breeder told us that they practically house-train themselves.”
“The crisis,” I said.
“Our housekeeper quit,” he said.
“We’re well rid of that one,” Eumie said. “She really wasn’t very nice to Dolfo. Not that she was mean. We wouldn’t have allowed that. But she just didn’t give him the affection he needs. And she complained about him. She was not a self-reflective or self-actualizing person.”
Horrors!
“All she ever did was kvetch,” Ted agreed. “But we have to have someone.”
Job description: Help wanted: self-reflective, self-actualizing housekeeper willing to give affection to unhousebroken dog.
“We lead very busy lives,” Eumie said. “We work a lot. We’re both therapists. We have patients to see.”
Rita, our tenant and friend, is a psychotherapist. Consequently, I was wary of raising a matter to which Cambridge psychotherapists pay what strikes me as pitifully little attention. The small matter was reality. “Housekeepers,” I said bravely, “aren’t going to keep cleaning up dog urine and dog feces. So, you’ve got a choice. Either you can get by without a housekeeper, or you can teach Dolfo to go outdoors. Which is it going to be?”
A word about my courage. The Alaskan malamute is universally considered to be a challenging breed. I not only lived with Alaskan malamutes but showed them in obedience. The dogs and I didn’t get the high scores that I used to get with my golden retrievers, but we did get titles. More to the point, as does not go without saying, after repeated experiences of entering American Kennel Club obedience rings with malamutes, I was still alive, a conditio
n I attributed more to God’s mercy in forgiving my false promises than to the behavior of the dogs. Again and again as I’d waited outside the ring, I’d vowed that if God spared me the heart attack I was about to suffer, I’d never enter a malamute in an obedience trial again. I’d lied. And been forgiven, doubtless because even God had to admire a woman with my guts. In the past few months, my ring nerves had been acting up, and I hadn’t shown a dog in any competitive event, but when it came to speaking up, I was as bold as ever.
Ted, being a Cambridge therapist and therefore phobic about reality, evaded my question about housekeepers versus housebreaking. “I have to tell you that I am feeling disillusioned. Really, what I’m feeling is anger. When Eumie and I bid on dog training, we were told that the methods here were positive.”
“They are.”
“Leather straps are not positive.”
I quoted the bumper sticker. “‘Love is a leash.’ That’s another way to look at it.”
“The atmosphere did not feel positive,” Eumie complained.
“Look,” I said, “there are ways to train dogs totally off leash using completely positive methods, but a big dog-training club with group classes doesn’t lend itself to that kind of approach. Among other things, we’d have dog fights. We use lots of food and lots of praise, but we can’t take the chance of having untrained dogs or aggressive dogs starting trouble or getting themselves in trouble. We don’t want anyone to get hurt. Besides, we’d get sued.”
“I have to say that I feel that we were misled,” Ted told me.
As I’ve mentioned, the presence of Ted, Eumie, and Dolfo was my fault. And my responsibility. “I can’t train Dolfo for you,” I said. “But I can get you started. We can work on housebreaking. Is your yard fenced?”
They nodded.
“Then we can do it off leash.”
The real reason I offered was neither guilt nor responsibility. I didn’t do it out of loyalty to the club or a desire to protect the club’s reputation. The real reason was that I hate to see a dog do bad things only because no one has taught him to be good. In other words, I’m a total sucker for dogs.
CHAPTER 2
In my mind’s eye, I see relief on Eumie’s face as Ted steers her new SUV into the traffic on Concord Avenue. The source of the relief, which is to say, the relief I imagine Eumie to feel, is not Ted’s miraculous luck in escaping an accident: she is so used to his terrible driving that she barely notices it. If he had in fact sideswiped the little Saab he’d missed by an inch or two, her luxury truck would have kept her safe—it is only slightly smaller than a Hummer—and if he had totaled her car, she’d have bought a new one. Because Eumie died an unnatural death on the Monday night following her brief appearance at the armory on that Thursday evening, my imagination tempts me to attribute at least a little of the relief to a sort of emotional precognition, a fleeting feeling of happiness that she is not going to die right now, but I don’t believe that Eumie glimpsed the future. As a general principle, I reject the notion of fortune-telling and thus won’t allow it in what is, after all, fantasy, albeit fantasy that is as realistic as imagination can make it. No, the source of Eumie’s relief is the sense that her beloved dog, Dolfo, is going to be in capable hands, which is to say, my hands, and that she is thus going to be able to hire a housekeeper who won’t abandon her the way the last one did. Eumie would, I think, have agreed with this portrayal of her. She’d have acknowledged that safety and money were important to her.
“Dolfo developed an immediate bond with Holly, don’t you think?” she says to Ted in her squeaky but weirdly sweet voice. “A special bond. There was something so tender about the way he looked at her.”
In the backseat, Dolfo responds to the sound of his name by beating his bizarre tail on the leather upholstery. His face wears the smug look of a dog who understands that life has landed him in an altogether cushy situation.
“I know who she is,” says Ted. “Holly Winter. She’s married to the ex-husband of one of my patients. Anita Fairley. Anita’s that lawyer I told you about. Beautiful woman. Very traumatized. The ex-husband must be that guy with the huskies.”
“The hunk.”
“He’s a vet.”
“Gulf War?” Eumie asks.
Ted smiles. “Veterinarian.”
CHAPTER 3
I had no opportunity to talk to Steve during our class, which was the second in a series of four workshops on rally obedience. By comparison with the rigid formality of traditional obedience competition, rally-O was relaxed and easygoing. Obedience zealot that I am, I’d initially assumed that since rally failed to demand precision heeling, there was something morally suspect about it; and when I’d learned that rally handlers were supposed to talk to their dogs during the exercises, I’d decided that it was outright heretical. Imagine a Roman Catholic of fifty years ago who dutifully attends mass only to be told that there’s no need to go to confession and that it’s fine to eat meat on Fridays. The new sport turned out not to be sinful. For one thing, I’d found it surprisingly difficult. I was used to having a judge give orders, whereas in rally, the handler receives directions from a series of signs that mark a course. Some signs were readily interpretable: Halt. Others consisted of lines and arrows depicting, for instance, the route to follow around orange traffic cones or the manner in which the team should execute an about-turn. For another thing, rally classes turned out to be fun, and I’m convinced that the heavens smile on any sport that makes handlers laugh and dogs wag their tails. But would the lighthearted atmosphere of rally cure my ring nerves? I had no idea.
For the first rally workshop, which I’d attended a week earlier, I’d taken Rowdy, who was an experienced obedience dog and as such had left me free to concentrate on decoding the cryptic signs. Steve had been absent because of an emergency with one of his patients, a dog that had been hit by a car after running away from an off-leash playgroup. Tonight, Steve had intended to take India, his highly accomplished German shepherd bitch—a clean technical term here in the dog world—but she’d developed a limp at the last minute, so he’d ended up with Rowdy, and I’d boldly decided to take Sammy, whose only qualification for rally was that he and the sport were both about play. At the age of about sixteen months, Sammy was an adolescent puppy, and even for a young Alaskan malamute, he was wildly exuberant and thoroughly exhausting.
As Steve, Rowdy, Sammy, and I left the armory for home, I said, “Rally is perfect for Sammy. It’s high energy. Do one exercise, rush to the next one, zip through that, lots of bounce and chatter. The one thing that bothers me is that no one ever comments on how good Sammy is. All anyone ever says is, ‘Wow! What a beautiful dog!’”
“He is a beautiful dog,” Steve said.
Sammy had started out as Steve’s puppy. A few years earlier, Steve and I had split up, in part because I’d repeatedly refused to marry him. He’d soon married someone else, Anita Fairley, the human fiend who, in my opinion, had been incapable of loving Steve or anyone else but had wanted a husband as good-looking as she was. And for that matter, still is. The bitch. Nontechnical term. Not that I myself objected to Steve’s appearance. He’s tall and lean, with wavy brown hair and eyes that change from blue to green. So, it’s my view that Anita the Fiend had made what Rita, my psychotherapist friend and tenant, calls a “narcissistic choice,” meaning that Anita had wanted a husband who enhanced her already spectacular looks. But perhaps I’m in no position to criticize the Fiend on that account. After all, I believe in the old maxim that it’s just as easy to love a beautiful dog as it is to love a homely dog, and if Anita felt the way about husbands that I do about dogs, so what! So what? The difference between us is that Anita is incapable of loving anyone except herself. In other words, she is a person of bad character, by which I mean that she hates dogs and, worse, instead of simply avoiding them, goes out of her vile way to be outright nasty to them. During her brief marriage to Steve, she’d known better than to target Steve’s shepherd—GSD, German shephe
rd dog—India, but had directed her venom at his timid, vulnerable pointer, Lady, whom I had actually seen her kick. So, India and Lady had immediately caught on to Anita, but Steve hadn’t been all that far behind them. To his credit, having married in haste, instead of repenting at leisure, he’d separated and divorced in haste, too. It was during his separation from Anita, and from me as well, that my Rowdy had been bred to American and Canadian Ch. Jazzland’s Embraceable You, the beauteous Emma, who had produced a splendid litter of puppies, one of which Steve had bought. And that’s how Sammy—Jazzland’s As Time Goes By—had entered our lives: by bringing us back together. So now you know how Casablanca should really end: instead of packing Ilsa onto the plane with boring, noble, sexless Victor, Rick entices her to stay by buying a malamute puppy. Rick goes to veterinary school, Ilsa joins the Dog Writers Association of America, and they get married and set up housekeeping in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Ilsa becomes the dog’s co-owner and foolishly persuades the Cambridge Dog Training Club to donate lessons to the Avon Hill School’s auction, and…