MAN’S BEST FRIEND
Every morning at seven-thirty, Dr. Edmund Fenton left his apartment in the east sixties and headed for Central Park with his German shepherd, Baldur. After a brisk walk of half an hour or so, they went home to breakfast—Baldur on the warm milk and dry toast prescribed in the dog book, and Dr. Fenton on orange juice, dry toast, and coffee. At nine o’clock, Dr. Fenton arrived at his office on Lexington Avenue with Baldur, who lay all morning in the well under Dr. Fenton’s desk, patiently awaiting the break at one o’clock for the walk home and lunch.
At six and again before bedtime, Dr. Fenton took Baldur for walks either in Central Park or down Madison Avenue. He followed to the letter the instructions for rearing in his dog book, and under the fine care, Baldur grew strong and handsome. He had a rich black stripe down his back, blending through brown to a pale buff on belly and legs. His manners were perfect. He never barked and never tugged at his leash. He did his teething on the leather toy that Dr. Fenton provided for the purpose. In elevators, if he was standing at the rear, Baldur always waited until everybody else was off before he moved. He behaved, indeed, in a more civilized fashion than most people. Once, when Dr. Fenton had given a party and some of the guests had stayed until the small hours, delaying Baldur’s nightly outing as well as preventing his sleeping, Baldur accompanied the guests to the door finally with a more genuine friendliness than had Dr. Fenton, whose hospitality was wearing thin by that time. One of the guests, Bill Kirstein, even said something about it.
“Awright, Ed, we’re leaving,” he had said. “You don’t have to throw us out. Why don’t you learn some manners from that dog of yours?”
The remark had hurt Dr. Fenton, falling as it did on a part of him already wounded—his pride. It had hit all the more directly because, in the previous week or so, the same idea had crossed Dr. Fenton’s mind: that Baldur’s general comportment put his own to shame. Baldur could wait in a butcher’s shop, for instance, with better grace than Dr. Fenton could, especially if there were a couple of garrulous housewives ahead of him. Dr. Fenton had once tried to sneak his order in out of turn, a woman had said something to him about it, and he had slunk from the butcher’s shop feeling like a criminal.
Looking back on it, Dr. Fenton felt that his unhappiness dated from the time of Bill Kirstein’s remark. From then on, he took no pleasure in Baldur and no real pleasure in anything. He began to feel inferior to the dog. He tried to improve his own manners, made himself also wait at elevators, and removed his hat more often, but he never felt that his courtesy matched Baldur’s, which was apparently inborn, since Dr. Fenton had devoted no time at all to training Baldur in etiquette. Baldur’s face, too, had a dignity and intelligence that made him look as if he regarded the man in the street—and even his master—with a profound and uncompromising judgment from behind a cordial exterior. Dr. Fenton began to feel the dog knew why he had been given him and knew Dr. Fenton’s particular faiblesse, a sense of failure. After all, the dog had been a present from a woman who had rejected Dr. Fenton’s proposal of marriage six months ago.
It had happened like this: for five years, Dr. Fenton had been mutely in love with the wife of his friend Alex Wilkes. Theodora Wilkes was a tall, good-looking woman of about thirty-five, with sleek black hair drawn into a roll at the back of her neck, and long beautiful hands which, though they did nothing, looked as if they could cope with any situation. Theodora liked people around her, and it was seldom that Dr. Fenton had been able to speak with her alone, except in the corner of a room at a cocktail party. When he was in a corner with her and free to utter a few shy banalities, he felt in the presence of a goddess of love, happiness, and savoir vivre—in short, a goddess of all that Dr. Fenton was not. Dr. Fenton had never been married. A son of poor parents, he had worked his way through dental school, and being modest and unaggressive, he had not capitalized on his abilities as he might have done, so that even with an office at a good address, he was earning no more than twelve thousand a year at the end of his first ten years of practice, and much of this had to go for overhead. And after five years, his abject love of Theodora had made no progress, either. But his dreams had grown bolder and bolder. If he could marry her, he dreamt, his income would quadruple, his skill would increase, and even his voice would change for the better.
Then something happened that Dr. Fenton had never dared dream: Alex Wilkes died suddenly of a heart attack. Tactfully, Dr. Fenton had begun his courtship of Theodora. After three months, he had asked her to marry him. The moment when Theodora had looked at him tenderly, and said she must take some time to consider, had been the happiest of Dr. Fenton’s life. Then, at their next meeting, she had told him she could not marry him. No, it did not mean that she would never marry, she said, and the inference was clear: she would never marry him. Dr. Fenton had dragged through several weeks on the brink of suicide from depression. Then one day Theodora had called him and they made an appointment to see each other. Dr. Fenton, who had hoped for a change of heart in Theodora, had gone home after the interview with nothing but a four-month-old German shepherd puppy, Baldur von Hohenfeld-Neuheim. She had wanted to give him something alive, she said. The puppy would be a companion to him and would get him out-of-doors more often.
Dr. Fenton did not want to see Theodora again, even the memory of her long hands was painful to him, yet he had been inspired to take especially good care of Baldur, because he had been a present from her. And being a man of some mental discipline, he had managed to combine his nurture of the puppy with an exclusion of brooding, negative thoughts about Theodora. Still, she had rejected him, and the wound remained.
A knowledge of this was what Dr. Fenton felt he could see in Baldur’s brown eyes as the dog lay watching him sometimes, particularly at dinner, which Dr. Fenton ate at the end of a white enamel table in his kitchen. He felt the dog was saying as he stared down his long nose: “You failure, you poor excuse for a man! Now I see you in your proper setting, eating your miserable dinner in shirtsleeves at the end of a kitchen table.” There would swim before Dr. Fenton’s eyes Baldur von Hohenfeld-Neuheim’s pedigree, with all the Grosseltern and Urgrosseltern, all the Odins and Waldos and Ulks von this and that and their respective prizes. Dr. Fenton had finally rolled his sleeves down and put on his jacket, and then set up the bridge table in the living room to eat on. Now he set the bridge table every evening with a tablecloth. Baldur moved into the living room and lay nearby on the rug, regarding him calmly, not ever begging, not commenting in any way except with those eloquent and majestic eyes, which for all Dr. Fenton’s efforts still seemed to scorn and condemn without pity. When Dr. Fenton offered him the bone from his steak or chop, Baldur accepted it with the formal, distant air of royalty accepting a purely symbolic tithe.
Yet Dr. Fenton could not have said that the dog was not loyal, reasonably affectionate, and all that a good dog should have been. On Thursdays, when Dr. Fenton worked at a clinic and could not take him along, Baldur greeted him at the door at six o’clock and seemed to shrug off Dr. Fenton’s apologies for not having been able to take him out since morning. But Dr. Fenton saw in the dog’s unfailing courtesy, which he felt cloaked an inner contempt, the same attitude he had seen or imagined so often in Theodora. For instance, Theodora had often pressed him to stay on when the hour was late, which he knew now she had done for politeness’ sake and not because she wanted his company. Dr. Fenton was no longer at ease in his own house, for the same reason he would not have been at ease had Theodora been living in the apartment with him on some incredible platonic basis.
Dr. Fenton never sat around his apartment in shirtsleeves now, much less in pajamas, even on Sundays. He almost never saw any friends, but he talked sometimes with Baldur. He would ask Baldur if he were ready to go out—Baldur would signal with a wag or droop of his tail—and asked him what he preferred for his dinner. Baldur knew the names of several kinds of meat, liked liver once a week, and signaled for
hamburger most of the time. Truthfully, Dr. Fenton would have loved to be free of him, but the dog’s keen intelligence, which Dr. Fenton believed amounted almost to clairvoyance, kept him from even thinking of this. His depression deepened, and he brooded on suicide.
He was brooding on it very late one night as he walked the Queensboro Bridge with Baldur. He released the dog with a command to run ahead of him. With a leap, Dr. Fenton cleared the iron balustrade. Another step or two and he was at the edge of the girders that hung above the river. Then he felt himself yanked backward and he fell, grasping instinctively at the girders under his hands. Baldur was standing over him, looking at him bewilderedly but with wagging tail. Dr. Fenton’s mood had passed, and he proceeded on his way home.
The following weekend, he read in the Sunday Times of the marriage of Mrs. Theodora Wilkes to Robert Frazier II of Pennsylvania. Dr. Fenton had never heard of him, but his very name evoked a picture of a handsome, cultured Main Liner, a man of leisure and means. He imagined Theodora and her new spouse on a long honeymoon, perhaps a ’round-the-world cruise, their friends the cream of society. He took Baldur out for a long walk to try to change his thoughts. A man stopped him in Central Park, said he was a dog dealer, and asked if Dr. Fenton possibly wanted to sell Baldur. Dr. Fenton flinched at the words. If he didn’t want to sell, then he certainly wanted to enter him in a few shows, didn’t he? The man told Dr. Fenton of a dog show in New Jersey in three weeks, in which Baldur could take first prize in the German shepherd class hands down.
“Of course. It really wouldn’t be fair to the others to enter him,” Dr. Fenton murmured nervously, and walked on.
His practice was declining. He made two bad blunders—in both cases forgetting to remove some medicated cotton in the bottom of a cavity before filling it—and he slept wretchedly, expecting at any hour the ringing of the telephone and the voice of some agonized client. His drooping posture reflected his spirits and contrasted with Baldur’s fine bearing. When they walked on the street together, Dr. Fenton felt he could read in the eyes of passersby what they thought of the two of them. He no longer had the pride to care. His one objective was to care for the dog to the best of his ability. On Baldur’s first birthday, he gave him a new chain collar and leash and Baldur had a steak at a fine restaurant. Then they went to an open-air concert of Viennese music.
Dr. Fenton had come to dread his weekends, because he could never escape the dog’s disapproving eyes. And with delayed reaction, he had begun to brood over Theodora and to imagine her life with Robert Frazier II. On long Sunday afternoons, his imagination expanded in wild arabesques. He saw Theodora wrapped in clouds of happiness and tobacco smoke, covered with jewelry he would never have been able to buy her, smiling contemptuously down on him. He had the form of a small skunk or a vermin-ridden rat, cringing at her feet, while Baldur cavorted mockingly around him, nipping him and laughing.
It was on a dismal Sunday afternoon that Dr. Fenton made his second suicide attempt. He sealed his kitchen window with adhesive tape, then persuaded Baldur into the bedroom and closed the door. He sealed the door of the kitchen, and turned on all the gas jets of the stove. Then he sat down in front of the oven with his head resting on the open oven door and inhaled deep, delicious drafts of the sweet, dizzy-making gas. For the first time in many months, he felt happy.
Dr. Fenton awakened slowly and found himself surrounded by blurry human forms. His head felt as if it were being crushed in a vise.
“You’ll be all right,” one figure said. “We heard your dog barking. He nearly broke the door down. Good dog . . .”
Dr. Fenton saw Baldur’s handsome face peering down at him, and realized he was back in the old world again.
Later, he learned that Baldur had opened the bedroom door, which had no key for its lock, then had yanked the kitchen door open, despite its adhesive tape sealing, dragged him into the air, then barked and barked until some neighbors had called the superintendent and gotten in. Baldur was photographed by every newspaper in New York, and Dr. Fenton was interviewed thoroughly about him, his personality, what he ate, what tricks he could do, and so on. No one asked Dr. Fenton a single question about himself. The next day, Baldur’s face smiled out from the front pages of two tabloids, while inside there was a reenactment of the rescue in six consecutive pictures, which Baldur must have obliged with while Dr. Fenton had been shunted off to bed by the doctors. Even the more conservative papers gave two columns to the story with a photograph of Baldur. “A Man’s Best Friend,” they called the dog. Dr. Fenton was called “Dr. Benton” in one newspaper, “Mr. Fenton” in another, and “an obstetrician” in another.
For days afterward, people stopped and petted Baldur on the street, and Dr. Fenton was asked if he were really Baldur. Baldur acknowledged the pats and praise with tail wags, but as time passed he acted impatient with the acclaim, as if he knew when the excitement should be wearing off. Dr. Fenton felt that Baldur kept a sharper eye than ever on him, and he decided to give up the idea of suicide as long as Baldur was with him. He felt trapped, but from the time of his decision not to attempt suicide again, he felt also reconciled. His feeble instinct of self-preservation began to stir again, and showed first in his holding his head up when he and Baldur walked on the street together. He also squared his shoulders and walked with a quicker step. Now, at least, Dr. Fenton thought, passersby could not say that he looked so much worse than his dog.
Dr. Fenton tried hard to take pride in his work, too. He did not know if his work improved, but three weeks passed without his making a mistake. Evenings after his dinner, he plunged into books of philosophy and history. He bought Berlitz School records and studied French. His mind, trained in dental school to attack facts and retain them, assailed his French grammar the same way. To improve his fluency, he chatted with himself in French under the shower and while he shaved. Studying and reading until midnight or later made it difficult for him to fall asleep once he went to bed, so he kept his radio on softly all night, tuned to an FM station that played only classical music, which he knew Baldur preferred to dance music. Mozart and Richard Strauss Dr. Fenton found he liked, too, and he bought some long-playing records of their music for the phonograph that he had not touched for two or three years.
When the Kirsteins called him up to invite him to a Saturday night poker game, Dr. Fenton politely begged out on the grounds of having another engagement. Actually, he preferred to stay home with his books, he realized, and the prospect of Bill Kirstein’s loud laughter, of losing twenty or thirty dollars, which he always did, and of having a hangover Sunday besides was not attractive to him. He had used to see the Kirsteins out of loneliness, but he no longer felt so lonely. After all, there was Baldur, and he felt that the dog regarded him less critically since he had taken up French and classical music, but perhaps it was only that Baldur was glad himself of quiet company every evening. It had been weeks now since Dr. Fenton had even gone to a movie.
His practice slowly began to pick up. There were no more empty hours and half hours in the day. His old clients had always sent a few new ones to his office, but now they arrived at the rate of half a dozen a week. Dr. Fenton raised his prices very slightly. He was still below the price level of the majority of dentists of his ability—two or three of his clients told him so themselves—and he knew that people would respect him more if his prices were not rock bottom. That was human nature. With the extra money, he bought new carpets for his office, some attractive Cézanne and Matisse reproductions for his walls, and finally even had his office repainted a dark, pleasant green.
All this put him on a different footing with Baldur. At first, he had thought he only imagined it, but now he was sure. Baldur really smiled at him when Dr. Fenton proposed a walk in the park. When he ate his dinner, with a book propped in front of him, the dog lay quite close to his feet and no longer stared at him with a covert disgust. And in fact Dr. Fenton did not see how the dog could vi
ew him with disgust at dinner now, since the table was always impeccably set, lit with candles, and the food was no longer out of a can, either. In the last months, Dr. Fenton had been reading a French cookbook by way of familiarizing himself with the phrases found on French menus, and was experimenting with many of the recipes. There were evenings when his cooking was so good, he wished he had invited a friend to dinner. This wish lasted only while he was eating. He was glad enough to have the rest of his evening to himself.
One morning he received a telephone call in his office from Theodora. For an instant, his blood ran cold and a kind of panic made him tongue-tied. The Robert Fraziers II stood for a Medusa-like monster that he had been trying to keep at the very back of his mind, since to think of them even briefly was to paralyze himself, to demolish the ego that he had been so painfully rebuilding. Fortunately, during the minute he felt tongue-tied, Theodora kept talking. She said in a very kind tone that she hoped he had been well the last year, and that she was calling to ask if he would come to a cocktail party that she and her husband were giving the following Friday.
“I—well, I think I am free, yes. That’s very—”
“Good! Bring Baldur, too, Ed. We’ve got a Briard and they can keep each other company.” She laughed her gay, easy laugh, and gave him the address.
When he hung up, he was trembling. He had accepted before he realized what he was doing. If he’d only had some warning, so that he could have prepared a courteous, convincing statement as to why he could not come! He thought of calling back that evening and declining, but it seemed cowardly. No, face it, he told himself. Keep your head up the way Baldur does, face it for half an hour and take your leave.
Nothing That Meets the Eye Page 29