Gaits of Heaven

by Susan Conant

  When I’d told Caprice to help herself to food, I let Rowdy and Kimi out in the yard and brought Sammy into the kitchen. Sammy had a hearty appetite, but he wasn’t the horrendous food thief that Rowdy and Kimi were. Sammy, I should mention, was a vessel spilling over with joy. He curved his body around Caprice’s legs and treated her to what really was a smile. He, too, got almost no response. In prescribing for his patients, Quinn Youngman probably had the same sort of experience I was having: when he’d had three drugs fail, he, too, probably tried a fourth. I replaced Sammy with India. Perhaps what Caprice needed was exactly the sense of safety, protection, and order so notably missing at home. India, ever dignified, approached Caprice, studied her, and stood calmly about a yard away. Caprice ignored her.

  Not everyone loves dogs or even likes them. Take Dr. Vee Foote: phobic. But Caprice was not such a person. She did respond to one of our dogs, my fifth drug, the smallest of the dogs, our delicate, trembling little pointer, Lady. Anxiety is not a typical characteristic of the breed. The pointer belongs to the American Kennel Club’s Sporting Group and, as the name suggests, was originally bred to indicate the presence and location of game by pointing. In the field, pointers also retrieve and otherwise perform as all-purpose hunting dogs. Because they should be able to run tirelessly through fields and woods from daybreak to sunset, they are supposed to be strong and athletic. A top-notch pointer from field lines may vibrate with energy in the manner of a Mercedes engine, but in both bench and field lines—show dogs and hunting dogs—it is undesirable to have a pointer, or any other breed, for that matter, quiver with apprehension in response to life itself. Viewed objectively, Lady was anything but a model of the breed. Exception: in pointers, any color is acceptable. Lady was what’s unappetizingly called “liver and white ticked,” that is, white with brown marks, including “ticks” or spots. As to her other physical features, love demands silence. Fortunately, Steve and I viewed her subjectively, and from our angle, she was a sweetheart. Do dogs feel gratitude? Lady had been left at Steve’s clinic for euthanasia. She always acted as if she knew he had saved her life.

  So, there was Caprice, weighing perhaps two hundred pounds, bleary-eyed and sluggish, newly bereft of her mother, and there was Lady, thin despite good nutrition, shaking like Jell-O, each needy, each hurt. Holding an English muffin in her right hand, Caprice allowed the left to dangle, and Lady took advantage of the unattended hand by placing her head under it and moving slowly forward so that the hand’s owner, Caprice, involuntarily stroked the dog from crown to tail. To my astonishment, Caprice, observing this maneuver, burst into bubbly laughter.

  “We call Lady ‘the self-patting dog,’” I said.

  “She is so sweet!”

  “She is the perfect pet. She really is.”

  So, I got the medication right on the fifth try. Still, if I’d been offering one dog after the other as a sort of woofy projective test, a canine Rorschach, I’d have preferred a strong response to one of the big, strong, self-confident dogs. But any positive response was far better than none. There was hope for Caprice after all.

  If I’d been designing a behavioral intervention for Caprice, she’d have spent the rest of the day with Lady. In particular, she and Lady would have taken a long walk. As it was, as soon as Caprice finished breakfast, she called her human therapist, Dr. Missy Zinn, and arranged an emergency appointment for that same afternoon. When she went upstairs to shower and get dressed, Lady tagged along. Caprice could only have been flattered.

  While Caprice was upstairs, Ted Green called to cancel our dog-training and canine-grief-counseling appointment. “Ai-ai-ai,” he said, “the cops are making life hell for me. They’re all over the house. Here I am, traumatized by the loss of my wife, and these schmucks are retraumatizing me.”

  “Ted, what I really think is that it’s important for everyone to know exactly what happened.”

  “I know what happened. Eumie’s trauma history clouded her judgment. She mixed up her meds. Wyeth and Caprice and I need a peaceful, loving environment to process our loss. So does Dolfo. And these dummkopfs won’t listen. What they need is a program to sensitize them to trauma. That would be a fitting memorial to Eumie. But I’m not ready yet.”

  I bristled. What Caprice didn’t need, of course, was the environment created by Wyeth and Ted. Furthermore, even before Kevin Dennehy had sustained the indubitable trauma of being shot in the chest, he’d had an intuitive, if burly, kindness that no sensitization program would have been able to instill. And I damned well didn’t like having him or his colleagues referred to as schmucks and dummkopfs. Fortunately, Ted ended the conversation quickly. He had to rush off to see Dr. Tortorello and, after that, Vee Foote.

  When Caprice came downstairs, she looked awake. Her eyes had lost most of their puffiness, and her hair was a halo of pretty curls. She wore a long black linen skirt and top that had picked up only a few stray dog hairs. I offered to drive her to therapy, but she explained that Missy’s office was actually a block away on Concord Avenue.

  The location wasn’t the coincidence it might seem. My stretch of Concord Avenue had an alarming number of buildings that appeared from the outside to be ordinary single-family and multi-family houses but were, in reality, psychotherapy office buildings. The discrepancy between appearance and reality struck me as underhanded and deceptive. I mean, if you were naively to start out at the corner of Concord Avenue and Huron and innocently walk a few blocks toward Appleton, you’d pass by house after house—hah!—that tried to pass itself off as the wholesome Cantabrigian abode of graduate students, Harvard faculty, families with children, and so forth, but was actually teeming with psychiatrists, psychologists, clinical social workers, and other practitioners who, instead of devoting themselves to writing dissertations, preparing lectures, and pursuing domesticity, were delving into the dark and impulse-ridden depths of the human psyche. Fact: those few blocks of Concord Avenue, from Huron to Appleton, contained fifty-four psychotherapy offices. Fifty-four! I didn’t count them. Rita did—before she rented her new office, which was, I hesitate to say, in the very heart of those shrink-infested waters. So, the presence of Caprice’s therapist, Missy Zinn, there in my own neighborhood was no coincidence. I have, by the way, a religious theory (goD spelled backward) about why psychotherapists have been drawn to the area near my house. It is my belief that the powerful, healing presence of my very own woofy, furry incarnations of the healing spirit, my beloved Creatures Great, acted like magnets in attracting human beings who charge money to apply the mental balm that dogs freely and joyously give away all the time.

  Anyway, once Caprice had left to see one of the fifty-four surrogate dogs, I tried to reach Kevin Dennehy. If, as Ted had told me, the police were conducting a full investigation of Eumie’s death, Caprice was bound to be questioned again, and I wanted Kevin himself to do the interrogation. Having managed only to leave messages for him, I went next door to see Kevin’s mother, who had more influence with him than I did. Kevin was fond of describing his mother as a religious fanatic, by which he meant that she had left Roman Catholicism for Seventh-Day Adventism and consequently wouldn’t allow meat or alcohol in her house. In reality, I’m the religious fanatic, but the tenets of Canine Cosmology permit me to give refrigerator space to other people’s meat and beer, and the provision of storage space was the original basis of my friendship with Kevin. It was also the origin of Mrs. Dennehy’s prejudice against me, a bias that she abandoned when Kevin started dating Jennifer and I married Steve. In brief, Mrs. Dennehy, who dislikes Jennifer more than she used to dislike me, adores Steve, whose deep kindness she senses and respects and whom she views as a buffer between her son and my refrigerator. Kevin still keeps hamburger and Bud here, but he hesitates to drop in as often as he used to, and, in any case, his mother would rather have him eat meat and drink beer than breathe in the vicinity of Jennifer Pasquarelli.

  Although Mrs. Dennehy had softened toward me, her appearance remained as severe as ever. In
particular, her hair was pulled so tightly into a knot on her head that she must have had a permanent headache. When she opened the back door, I could see that she was busy. A vacuum cleaner sat on the linoleum, and by the sink were a bucket and mop.

  “I’m sorry to interrupt you,” I said, “but I need a favor.”

  Mrs. Dennehy tried to supply me with a cup of herbal tea, which I managed to weasel out of accepting. Still, at her insistence, I took a seat at her kitchen table and outlined my concerns about Caprice. “This was her mother who died,” I said, “and I want Kevin to be the one who talks to her. He questioned her yesterday, just after the mother’s body was found, but someone is going to want to talk to her again, and it really should be Kevin. Not that someone else would be brutal. But this young woman is very vulnerable.”

  “‘Suffer the little ones,’” said Mrs. Dennehy.

  My face must have reddened. “Actually, that’s part of the problem. Caprice is horribly overweight. I’m sure it’s a response to the problems in her family.” My manipulation was worthy of a malamute: Seventh-Day Adventism places a high value on health and on family life.

  “The poor girl,” Mrs. Dennehy said. “I’ll have a little word with Kevin. Love thy neighbor. He’s a good boy. He understands that.”

  “I’ve left messages for him,” I said.

  “He’s being driven crazy! By these psychiatrists.” She stretched out the word and put a heavy accent on the first syllable: PSY-chi-uh-trists.

  “I’ve met them. They are a little…trying.”

  Two minutes after I returned home, the United States Postal Service thrilled and then disappointed the dogs, who were convinced that every package we received contained toys and treats and was thus theirs and not ours at all. The delivery wasn’t a package. It was an overnight Express envelope, inside which was a second envelope, much smaller than the first, thick and cream-colored, with my name written on it in blue ink. Inside was a note in the same ink on matching paper. I recognized the handwriting and hence took offense at the most conventional of greetings, namely, Dear Holly. Dear! How dare that fiend call me dear? I read on. I am very sorry for any harm I have caused, and I am willing to make amends even though I cannot think of a way to do it.

  Well, then, why mention it?

  The note was, of course, signed Anita Fairley.

  I was furious. Make amends? As if she’d broken a teacup and were willing to replace it but couldn’t find one in the right pattern. I immediately acted on the agreement Steve and I had that either of us would let the other know if we heard from the Fiend. I caught him between patients. He had received an almost identical note. He told me to ignore the whole business. I couldn’t. Consequently, I called the other person who seemed a likely recipient of one of these missives, my stepmother, Gabrielle, whom Anita had helped to defraud of a large amount of money.

  Gabrielle, too, had received a note. “Something is up with her,” she said in that warm, sultry voice of hers. “This nonsense isn’t something Anita would ever have come up with her own. In fact, I’d bet anything that someone has put her up to it.”

  “Who?”

  “Do you suppose she’s become alcoholic? I don’t remember that Anita ever drank, did she? Not to the point of alcoholism. But this business of apologies and amends is very AA.”

  “Yes, it is, now that you mention it.”

  “Maybe it’s some other kind of recovery program. There are twelve-step programs for everything.”

  “Being a vile human being?”

  “For all we know, yes. But whatever it is, Anita obviously hasn’t committed herself wholeheartedly to the steps.”

  “The hypocrite! That business about amends made me want to throw up.”

  “She’s obviously insincere,” Gabrielle said temperately. “As usual. Making amends to you and Steve would be difficult of course. But to me? If she’d really wanted to make amends to me, it would’ve been easy. She’d have enclosed a check.”

  CHAPTER 14

  I have an image of Johanna Green, Ted’s ex-wife and Wyeth’s mother, as she examines her face in what is all too accurately known as a fright mirror. The magnification confirms her sense that her lower lashes do an inadequate job of hiding the tiny scars from her eye job. Furthermore, in the four years since her last major cosmetic surgery, gravity has been at work. Jowls!

  After resolving to recommit herself to aesthetic dermatology and cosmetic surgery, Johanna turns to her professional work, which at the moment consists of feminist linguistic research on grammatical gender in Hebrew, Verdurian, and various other languages in which verbs as well as nouns are masculine, feminine, or, in some instances, neuter.

  Under Rita’s influence, I am forced to wonder about the emotional meaning of Johanna’s choice of topic. Does she find it nervy and greedy of languages to extend masculinity and femininity beyond the province of the noun to the vast territory of the verb? Or maybe the hidden source of Johanna’s scholarly pursuit lies in her feelings about her ex-husband, Ted Green, who is forever saying that he wishes he knew Hebrew but has never bothered to learn its rudiments or to visit Israel. Or if she thinks about Ted, perhaps it is with regard to the third category of nouns and verbs, the neither feminine nor masculine group, the desexed or sexless one, so to speak: neuter.

  CHAPTER 15

  As soon as Caprice returned from her therapy appointment, she went upstairs to take a nap. Without Lady. Or any of the other dogs. I decided that her therapy hour had been a waste of time. Rita would’ve disagreed about the specifics, but she’d have agreed with the general proposition that if therapy doesn’t teach you to give and accept love, what good is it?

  While Caprice was napping, I took a break from work to check my e-mail and simultaneously to visit my cat, Tracker, who inhabits my study, in which I almost never write, never mind study. Tracker is mine because no one else wanted her. She has a torn ear, a birthmark on her nose, and, worse, a tendency to hiss at everyone but Steve and to scratch everyone but him, too. My efforts to teach Rowdy and Kimi to accept her had been less than the sort of success that would have made for a great article in Dog’s Life: “Malamute Lions Lie Down with Feline Lamb.” Rowdy and Kimi were far calmer in Tracker’s presence than they’d once been, but I still didn’t trust them. Consequently, when they were loose, she was not. My study did offer her as much stimulation as one room could provide, including a tall cat tree and a myriad of toys, and she sometimes had the privilege of sleeping in our bedroom on Steve’s pillow. Even so, I felt guilty about her and made a point of socializing with her, or trying, whenever I used my desktop computer.

  Unfortunately, Tracker took the word mouse literally. She was asleep on it when I entered the room, and when my presence awakened her, she glared at me and hissed. When I finally got to sit at my own desk, I found my usual thousand e-mail messages from my malamute lists and dog writers’ lists and an invitation from Ted Green to attend Eumie’s memorial service at eight o’clock the following evening at his house. His message included this passage:

  Eumie’s mortal remains will not be available, but she is still and will always be very much with me in all possible senses and will be present in spirit at this gathering as we celebrate her life and especially her loving relationships with all of you. Each of you was very, very special to Eumie. Although her background was Protestant, her true religion was the nurturance of caring relationships. Consequently, I hope that each of you will speak to all of us and to Eumie herself about the memories of her that you cherish most and the lessons you learned from her.

  I had met Eumie only twice—postmortem didn’t count—and knew from experience in personal invitations to funerals that I was being invited only in case Dolfo acted up. If he did, I could be counted on to settle him down. My memories of Eumie weren’t exactly cherished, so I had no intention of speaking about them, and, as for lessons she’d taught me, what could I possibly say? Never buy a dog on the Internet? I hadn’t learned that one from Eumie. I’d known i
t for a long time. Still, although Thursday evenings were usually sacred to the training of the Sacred Animal, I e-mailed back an acceptance. Caprice would have to attend, and she couldn’t be allowed to go unprotected.

  Leah, who’d been up early, returned from work at five o’clock. Her face bare of makeup, her red-gold hair tumbling from a ponytail, she looked healthy and beautiful and was bubbling with exciting news about hyperthyroid cats, hypothyroid dogs, and two healthy ferrets who’d been at the clinic for routine exams but were nonetheless noteworthy because of their charm. Leah changed out of her green scrubs and into shorts and a T-shirt, and left to take Kimi for a run. Caprice was evidently still in bed. The contrast between her lethargy and Leah’s energy was worrisome. If sleep was Caprice’s means of handling loss and stress, it was preferable, I thought, to overeating and to a great many other possible coping mechanisms. Did she always go to bed early, sleep late, and nap for most of the afternoon? Or was the pattern a response to her mother’s unnatural death? I had no idea. Did she have a chronic illness? Or, as I’d wondered earlier, could she be drugging herself into oblivion? I’d ask Rita, who was going to have dinner with us. Steve’s clinic was open until nine on Wednesday evenings, so I’d be cooking for only four people. If it hadn’t been for Caprice, we’d probably have had nature’s most perfect food, pizza, but I couldn’t bring myself to serve Caprice something so high in calories. On the other hand, tonight’s vegetable would not be green beans, squash, or any other dog-weight-loss staple, either, even though Rita kept herself on a permanent diet. As I was about to leave for our local whole-foods market, Loaves and Fishes, Caprice made her way downstairs.