Gaits of Heaven

by Susan Conant

  “Your father.”

  It was as if Caprice became a new person. Her eyes brightened, and her face shone. “He didn’t change his name. Before or after.”

  Kevin smiled. “How’d he react to the divorce?”

  Caprice bought time by taking a sip of what must have been cold coffee. “Pragmatically,” she finally said. “You see, Eumie was in therapy with Ted. While she and my father were still married, she went into therapy with Ted. And if you listen to them, they fell madly in love.”

  “And if you don’t listen to them?”

  “Ted slept with his patient. What else? Horrors! He violated the taboo.” Her emphasis was heavy and cynical. “But they both tried to cover it up, of course. They pretended that she’d just been in supervision with him, but everyone knew that was bullshit. That’s basically why we had to leave.”

  “And your father?”

  “Are you planning a new career?”

  “Hey, not me. It’s mothers they ask about, anyway.”

  “Corny therapist joke. Definition of a Freudian slip. That’s when you mean to say one thing and instead you say a mother. So, my father. Monty took it pretty well. He’s mellow. He takes most things pretty well.” With no prompting, she added, “He lives in Manhattan, but he travels a lot. He’s a consultant. Otherwise, I’d’ve stayed with him.”

  “He was here this past weekend.”

  “Yes. At the Charles Hotel. That’s where he always stays. I had brunch with him on Monday. At the Charles. At Henrietta’s Table.”

  “Did he and your mother see each other? This past weekend?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “Did he pick you up? Drop you off?”

  “No. I took a cab there and a cab home.”

  “How about Ted and your mother? On Monday.”

  “They both saw a few patients.”

  “On Memorial Day?”

  Caprice shrugged. “They did that. Saw people on holidays sometimes. And Monday night, they went out to dinner. To Rialto. That’s at the Charles, too. That’s why it’s open on Mondays, because it’s in a hotel. I guess they could’ve run into Monty there. You go through the lobby to get to Rialto. You’d have to ask Monty.”

  “Did Wyeth go with them?”

  “No. He was at his computer. He didn’t go out. He never does, except when he goes to Johanna’s.”

  “Did they meet someone at the restaurant? Another couple, maybe?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think so. If they were going with other people, they didn’t mention it.”

  “What time did they get home?”

  “I don’t know. I was in bed.”

  “Where was the dog all this time?”

  “Eating mail. Chewing on books. Wrecking things. Where he wasn’t was in my room.” She paused. “I took him out to the yard before I went to bed. That was at maybe eight o’clock.”

  “Was the house locked?”

  “My bedroom door was. The house probably wasn’t. I told you when we talked before. Besides, half the world had keys.”

  “There’s an alarm system.”

  “Dolfo jumps on things. Doors. Windows. He kept setting it off, so they quit using it.”

  Although Caprice was showing no signs of strain, I created a break by asking whether anyone wanted more coffee. Kevin and Caprice both accepted.

  “The, uh, prescription bottles,” Kevin said, “have the names of a lot of doctors. Maybe you could give me a sort of who’s who.”

  Caprice gave a quirky smile. “It’s a cast of thousands.”

  “Just the M.D.s. The ones who wrote prescriptions.”

  “Let’s see. My mother had an internist. I forget her name. Salzman, maybe. Dr. Salzman. And a dermatologist. A man. I don’t know his name. Her gynecologist. Dr. Cohen. Her therapist, Nixie Needleman. She’s a psychiatrist. M.D. And her psychopharm guy, Dr. Youngman. He’s Ted’s, too. Ted’s therapist is Dr. Tortorello. He’s a psychiatrist, so he probably prescribes. Ted must have a primary-care physician, but I don’t know who that is. Maybe he sees Dr. Salzman, too. And their couples therapist is Dr. Foote. Psychiatrist. I don’t know whether she wrote prescriptions for them, but she could have. Wyeth supposedly goes to a pediatrician, which he hates, but mostly he pretends to go and doesn’t actually see the doctor. His therapist is new. Dr. York. But he’s a psychologist. A few of them can prescribe, but I don’t know if this one does. My therapist is a Ph.D. She doesn’t prescribe. I don’t exactly have a primary. I just go to the University Health Services.” She went on to name three dentists and her mother’s endodontist. “She had a root canal last winter. He could’ve given her painkillers then. That’s all I can think of. Unless you count my mother’s herbalist.”

  “Is that the houseplant lady?”

  “Oh, her. No. She’s a houseplant tutor, to teach my mother to grow plants. Just for decoration. The herbalist prescribes medicinal herbs, not prescription drugs. My mother took a lot of supplements, too. She got most of them from Loaves and Fishes, not from a practitioner. Oh, I forgot the homeopath. But she wasn’t seeing him anymore, anyway.”

  Kevin looked pale and wide-eyed. I felt sure that until he’d landed in the hospital with a bullet wound and had required a surgeon, he’d had a doctor and a dentist. And that had been it. “Did any of these, uh, practitioners talk to the others? Coordinate?”

  “Probably not. Well, the psychopharm guy, Dr. Youngman, might talk to the individual therapists, I think. But otherwise…? I don’t think so.”

  “So, one hand didn’t know what the other hand was doing. Hands. So, it was more like those Hindu goddesses, you know? Like what’s her name, Colleen there, the lady with ten arms.”

  “Kali,” Caprice said.

  “Her. And all the hands got no idea about the prescriptions the others are writing.”

  “Precisely,” said Caprice. “The perfect image.”

  “I got one last question, and you don’t have to answer it if you don’t want.”

  “Okay. If I don’t want to answer it, I won’t.”

  “Trauma. I keep hearing about your mother’s trauma history. You want to say anything about that?”

  “It’s no secret,” said Caprice. “Ted wrote about it in his book. He didn’t use my mother’s real name, but it’s her story. Her father was an undertaker. When her mother died, he did the embalming. Her father embalmed her mother. He embalmed his own wife. Or that’s the story Ted tells, anyway.”

  CHAPTER 17

  On the afternoon of Thursday, June 2, the day of her mother’s memorial service, Caprice Brainard goes to the house on Avon Hill that she prefers not to think of as home. She has chosen the time because Ted has told her that this is when he’ll be taking Wyeth out to buy something appropriate to wear to Eumie’s service. Dolfo is next door at George and Barbara’s. The only people in the house are six employees of a cleaning service that has accepted the job because it has never before been hired to clean this dog-dirtied abode. Caprice’s previous departure was hurried; she had time only to grab her notebook computer and throw a few essentials into her backpack and a suitcase. This time she fills two suitcases, which she carries downstairs and out to the street, where I help her to load them into my car. When we reach Steve’s and my house, where she is our guest, I drop her off and leave to run errands.

  Alone in the house, Caprice goes to my study to take advantage of my invitation to use my desktop computer. Obeying the house rules, she is careful to shut the door so that Tracker does not escape. Startled at the entry of a stranger, Tracker leaps off the mouse pad and vanishes. Caprice seats herself at the computer in the hope that I have stored my password and that she will thus be able to read my e-mail without having to bother trying the guesses from her mental list of likely bets: Rowdy, Kimi, Sammy, malamute, 256Concord, DogsLife, our phone number, my license plate number, and so forth, all of which, I might add, would have been wrong. As it turns out, my password is stored, so she doesn’t have to guess at all.
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  The rules of Netiquette, I might mention, typically concern the form, content, and tone of the messages the sender composes. If you WRITE EVERYTHING IN CAPITAL LETTERS, the message will look as if you’re SHOUTING. In posts to e-mail lists, avoid obscenities and personal attacks. Remember that e-mail doesn’t convey tone of voice, so if you don’t want comments made in jest to be taken seriously, put in a smiley face or say that you are just kidding. Why do the rules fail to lay down as law the taboo that Caprice is now violating? Because they shouldn’t have to, that’s why. The rules of civilized conduct were written a long time ago, and it doesn’t take a Harvard education to figure out that if you’re a guest in someone’s house, you’re damned well not supposed to take advantage of her absence to read her e-mail.

  Fair is, however, fair. As payback for her act of ungrateful snooping, Caprice sees before her on the screen of my computer about ten gazillion messages devoted to one single subject, the subject being, of course, dogs, dogs, and more dogs. Pack animal that I am, I subscribe to the list for members of the Cambridge Dog Training Club, to lists about Alaskan malamutes, and to lists for dog writers and dog trainers. Since all the other subscribers are pack animals, too, and are therefore given to frequent woofing and wooing and yapping, the lists are very active, and Caprice has the chance to read message after message that has nothing to do with me and can be of no interest to her. Indeed, she doesn’t even bother to read the list mail. She does, however, come upon a piece of personal e-mail that she opens and reads.

  Subject: Cartoonbank.com E-card from Steve

  From: SDelaney@hightailit.com

  To: HollyWinter@amrone.org

  You’ve just been sent an E-card from Steve, care of Cartoonbank.com, the Internet’s premier cartoon Web site and source for New Yorker cartoons.

  There follows a hyperlink that takes Caprice to an E-card meant only for me. It shows a Booth cartoon from the New Yorker depicting a man seated at a typewriter in the midst of scruffy, disoriented-looking canines. The caption, spoken by the lady of the house is, “Write about dogs.” To the right of the cartoon is what E-card sites always call the “personalized greeting.” This one reads: “Dear Holly, I love you. From Steve.”

  When Caprice finishes with my e-mail, she carefully marks the Cartoonbank message as unread. She would have been welcome to read messages from the lists to which I subscribe. But Steve’s message is personal. It is private. Or it should have been. Steve and I make a little game of sending each other New Yorker dog cartoon E-cards with love notes. We order the same cartoons on T-shirts when we want presents for each other. We are united by dogs and laughter and love. And our union is none of Caprice’s business.

  CHAPTER 18

  At five-thirty on Thursday afternoon, Monty Brainard called Caprice on her cell phone to say that he was flying in from New York for Eumie’s memorial service. Leah and I were with her in the kitchen when she got the call, which was brief.

  “You don’t have to,” she said. “I mean—” After listening, she said, “It’s okay. Really. It’s fine. Don’t worry about it. I’ll see you there. I love you.” And then, “Bye.”

  “My father’s coming,” she announced with a smile of relief. “Holly, you really don’t have to go. I won’t be there alone.”

  “We’re both going,” Leah said.

  “Please! Leah, it’ll be gross. Please don’t. Ted will pretend she’s there in spirit. He’ll speak to her.”

  “I can handle that,” Leah said.

  “It would be embarrassing to have you hear it. Please.”

  Leah conceded. In case Caprice tried to discourage me, too, I shifted the conversation to another topic. “We need to get organized. Caprice, you have your appointment with Dr. Zinn at six, don’t you? Steve will be home any minute, and he’ll be going to dog training. Leah, are you going with him?”

  “I’ll take Kimi. For rally.”

  “I got takeout from Loaves and Fishes. Roast chicken, eggplant, asparagus, some other stuff.” I didn’t mention the green bean salad, which I’d chosen out of habit and should probably have fed to the dogs once its significance dawned on me. What stopped me, I suppose, was the knowledge that greens beans really were an excellent weight-loss food. “We’ll all have to forage. Rowdy, Kimi, and Lady have been fed, and Steve can feed Sammy and India when he gets home with them. I’ll need to get ready for the service.” I have an old-fashioned streak. In Cambridge, you can wear anything to anything, but when I go to anything even remotely like a funeral, what I wear is a dark dress.

  An unsettling little event had made me suddenly eager to pay my respects. About forty-five minutes earlier, when I’d been checking my e-mail, I’d been interrupted by the delivery of a small package from a company I’d never heard of. My work for Dog’s Life sometimes included product evaluations, and now and then an enterprising company would send samples directly to me, usually with a note expressing the optimistic certainty that my dogs and I would be so enthusiastic about the items that I’d recommend them in my column. Shamelessly lacking in even the most rudimentary sense of journalistic integrity, the dogs would have had me write a rave review of every edible bribe I was offered, but I stuck to my ethics. My product reviews were fair, and when I recommended toys, equipment, and treats in my column, it was never because I’d been bought off. For example, I bought the Buster Cube myself; my fabulous Chris Christensen 27mm pin brush with the T handle was a present from my stepmother, Gabrielle; and as to the Bil-Jac treats, for which I regularly shopped, the dogs loved the liver, peanut butter, and pizza flavors, and I liked being able to break the soft morsels into little pieces when I trained. Anyway, this package was too small to contain anything for the dogs and, in fact, turned out to hold a CD titled Guided Imagery for Performance Anxiety. My dogs weren’t the ones with ring nerves; the CD was meant exclusively for me. The gift receipt in the package included this note: I will help you to do your own personal version, but this will get you started. Gratefully, Eumie. Although the notion of a message from beyond the grave was a bit gothic for me, I still found it unsettling to realize that Eumie had taken an active step to help cure me of ring nerves. When she’d said she could help, she had not been making a vague promise, on the contrary, as soon as she’d heard of my problem, she’d ordered the CD. If she’d lived, I now saw, she’d have followed through. I had no intention of thanking her aloud at the memorial service, but I did want to attend.

  That was before we got there. Once we did, I realized that Caprice had been right: Ted Green was throwing a death party. What’s more, he must have invited everyone he and Eumie had ever known. The closest parking place I found was three blocks away, and by the time I snagged it, I was wishing we’d left the car at home and gone on foot. All the lights in the big house were on, and the front door stood open. The porch was so crowded with people taking off their shoes that we had to wait to get in.

  “Your mother had so many friends,” I said softly to Caprice.

  “Most of these people weren’t her friends, and they aren’t Ted’s. Some of them are people he wants referrals from. A lot of them are people they both wanted to impress, mostly parents from Avon Hill. They’re here out of curiosity.” A second later, her cynicism vanished. “There’s my father! Monty! Monty, I’m here!”

  When I saw Monty Brainard, I realized that I’d been expecting him to have the human equivalent of the real Monty’s malamute splendor. In reality, the only obvious resemblance between the false Monty, Monty Brainard, and the real Monty, Ch. Benchmark Captain Montague, was that both were muscular. Monty Brainard was a short, balding man with straight, medium-brown hair and small brown eyes. His only outstanding physical characteristic was a deep tan, probably natural, possibly chemical. He wore a conservative gray suit. Forcing his way through the crowd, he wrapped Caprice in his arms and said, “Daddy’s here, baby girl.”

  Baby girl. Only when Monty Brainard spoke the phrase did I take a hard look at Caprice, who was swathed in a voluminous dress o
f pale lavender. Her pale blond curls were held back with little white barrettes. Baby girl, indeed. Daddy’s plump baby girl.

  “Holly, this is my father, Monty,” Caprice said. “Daddy, this is Holly. She’s the one I’m staying with, Holly and her husband. Holly is my friend Leah’s cousin.”

  “I’m very grateful,” Monty said as he shook my hand. His late ex-wife, I suspected, would’ve thrown her arms around me, gushed about her gratitude, and told me how special I was. By comparison, Monty’s ordinary civility felt…I am tempted to say that it felt special. After all, if everything is special, what’s left to be truly special? Ordinariness.

  Caprice, her father, and I exchanged a few words. I said that Steve and I were happy to have Caprice stay with us. Monty said that he was going back to New York tomorrow after he’d taken Caprice out to lunch. Ted came rushing up to me, threw his arms around me, and told me how glad he was to see me. He wore a sage green linen suit with a shirt of what looked like unbleached, unironed muslin. “You were so special to Eumie,” he said. Diverted by the arrival of yet more people, he hurriedly pointed toward the dining room, told all three of us to help ourselves to food, and moved away to greet the new visitors.

  If I were entirely human instead of half malamute, I’d have been driven toward the dining room by my sensitivity to Caprice’s desire to have time alone with her father. In fact, the driving force was my quest for food. The dining-room table and a long sideboard held an almost incredible spread that was being neglected by most of the other guests, who, I assumed, lived the kinds of unappetizing lives characteristic of people who fail to receive daily infusions of big, hungry dog DNA. The offerings were characteristic of Jewish rites of passages but combined the typical dishes of a big Jewish wedding with those of a big Jewish breakfast. Tremendous platters contained delectable arrangements of chicken, roast beef, and grilled vegetables. There were baskets of bagels, bialys, and black bread, bowls of cream cheese, plates of lox, tomatoes, and cukes, dishes of half-sour pickles, and two supersize green salads. My initial survey also identified noodle kugel, a gigantic poached salmon, and—oh, bliss!—blintzes, which are the Jewish version of crepes, thin pancakes filled with ambrosial cheese and served with sour cream and jam. To convey my appreciation of this display of gustatory generosity, I should mention that I come from a New England WASP background and have yet to shake the expectation that the so-called food offered to fifty or a hundred mourners will consist of one small plate of 1/2-by-1/2-inch brownies and another of 1/2-by-1/2-inch lemon squares accompanied by your choice of watery tea or see-through coffee.