Buddy

by Brian McGrory

  My nerves were only slightly calmer when I pulled into the cargo terminals at Logan International Airport as dark was falling on a cold December afternoon. The wind off Boston Harbor was damp and merciless. Jet engines roared in the near distance. I climbed the few concrete steps to the entrance of the warehouse-style building and walked into a small reception area with cement floors, a Formica counter, and a couple of burly men in dark shirts with USAir patches on their chests, the heavy metal door shutting loudly behind me.

  “I’m here to pick up a dog,” I said, faux casual, as if it were no big deal, as if I were picking up shirts at the dry cleaners.

  One of the guys glided his pen up and down a clipboard in silence, shaking his head in an almost imperceptible way. “No, I don’t see any dog deliveries,” he replied. “You know the flight number?”

  It was at that moment that a massive garage door opened at the far end of the warehouse with a clack and a gush of cold air. A truck backed in with a flurry of high-pitched beeps. A man I couldn’t see shouted, “Animal crate in the shipment!”

  “I guess this is it,” the guy at the counter said, unemotional at this turning point in my life. He disappeared for a moment and returned with a small plastic container, which he put on the counter with a thud that made me wince.

  If there was a previous moment in my thirty-two years on this Earth as thick with anticipation, I couldn’t remember it—not my wedding (I had already met the bride), not college graduation (it felt more like an end than a beginning), probably not even my first day at the Globe (I was conceited enough to assume I’d do well). I peered through the metal grates and saw golden fur but nothing else, so I fidgeted nervously with the springs until the door swung open and the dog came triumphantly out for a memorable introduction that we would both cherish forever.

  Except he didn’t. I waited, and waited some more, and my reporter friend, Tony, who had driven me there and had just come inside, was now standing behind me waiting as well. So were the guys at the counter, passively curious, if only to see whether I got a manly breed or some sort of white puffball with bulging eyes and a shrill bark. I peered inside the carrier and saw that the fur was shaking. The frightened puppy was scared and trembling amid the shredded paper that filled the base of the crate and this bizarre series of events in his life. His little water bottle was still filled, meaning he had been too scared to drink on his hours-long journey. So I reached in, groped around for his shoulders, and gingerly pulled him out, maneuvering and manipulating his various parts to get him through the small opening.

  And there he was, aloft in front of me, his four legs dangling in midair, his luxuriant blond fur tousled in a way that would later become his trademark, his jowls loose, his jet-black nose set off against deep brown eyes that carried a mix of fear and—I swear I saw this—relief. The very sight of him nearly made me cry, and I’m not a crier by nature, except at the end of Planes, Trains, and Automobiles and, okay, sometimes Home Alone. All those years, all those hopes, so many false starts, too many reasons not to make it happen, and here he was in front of me, softer and more handsome than I ever would have allowed myself to imagine. As I pulled him tight and pressed his face against mine, the airline workers, who couldn’t have been more bored a few minutes before, had come out from behind the counter and were waiting to stroke him. “Hey, Jimmy, you’ve got to see this!” one of them shouted. And then there were more workers and more still, workers exhausted from the day, workers with knee pads on, tough men, men’s men, gathered around in a loose circle cooing at this ridiculously charming dog.

  It gave me my first realization that dogs, like people, either have charisma or they don’t. Some men and women can stand in a room and never be noticed. If they are, it may not be for the reasons they’d like. Other people are like magnets. I don’t know if it’s the look in their eyes or the shape of their face or the aura and tone they project to the world around them. But this yet-to-be-named puppy was an absolute traffic stopper in every possible way.

  What was odd was that he didn’t squirm. He didn’t whine. He didn’t squeak or squeal or really express any immediate needs or desires at all. What he did was rest passively—or peacefully—in my arms, his eyes constantly glued to mine with the oddest look of trust. For my part, I couldn’t take my eyes off him, his wispy ears that were darker than the rest of his face, his fleeting whiskers, his blocky midsection. I didn’t know then, couldn’t know then, just how amazing the whole thing would be, but I already knew I would love it.

  I knew he wasn’t a child. I knew he wasn’t my own likeness, carrying my blood, my genes, my hopes. But he was what I had, what I’d always wanted to have, and in that moment, in many future moments, he was what I needed. I cradled the pup in my arms, Tony grabbed his small crate, and we made for the door amid a flurry of good-byes and good wishes.

  “You two be good to each other,” one of the men called out. He had no idea.

  He planted his little puppy behind on the carpet of the vestibule of my town house condominium building and, with his ears pressed tight against his head, looked at me as though I were completely out of my mind. The grand staircase above him was wide and steep, and there was no way he planned to climb it to my third-floor apartment.

  “All right, already,” I said, swooping him up in one arm, balancing the crate and a hatbox in the other, trying not to make any noise. Upstairs, Caitlin, my wife of a little more than a year, had utterly no idea what was about to walk through the door.

  On the dimly lit third-floor landing, I gently placed the puppy inside the box and slowly covered it, whispering “Only for a minute, honest.” He didn’t like it, but he didn’t fight it. I left the crate in the hall, unlocked the door, and let myself in.

  The television was on, the volume playing softly. Our Christmas tree was illuminated in the windows. Caitlin was on the couch reading magazines and drinking Diet Coke, unwinding after work. She knew something was up from the moment she saw me, not only because I was home abnormally early for me or any other reporter but also because I wore what must have been the goofiest look any man has ever had. I don’t do secrets particularly well, even less well when the secret changes pretty much every part of my entire life. And also, there was the matter of a box I was gripping with both hands as if I were carrying a heart to a transplant operation.

  “I couldn’t wait to give you your Christmas present,” I said, without the benefit of any salutation. Even the tone of my voice, the very words, were absurd. She looked at me funny, got up off the couch, and said, “Aw, you got me a hat.”

  “You’ll see.”

  She took the box. “Be careful,” I said reflexively.

  “Heavy,” she said. She put it down on the coffee table and regarded it for a long moment before pulling off the top. In that brief span, as if on cue, as if he had been rehearsing this moment all eleven weeks of his young life, the puppy pushed his golden head up, pushing the top off the box, and meeting her stunned gaze. He clumsily began climbing out of the box, all rumpled fur and oversized paws. She looked at him and then at me and then at him again and then at me, and finally she picked him up and hugged him tight, her face against his just as mine had been. And when she sat down on the couch, the content dog still in her arms, her cheeks were soaked by a stream of silent tears.

  If you could bottle a moment, relive it, borrow against it, grow from it, things might have turned out different in the months and years ahead. But for us, for Caitlin and me, it wouldn’t get any better than that Tuesday night in the throes of a pine-scented Christmas season in our Back Bay apartment with a brand-new dog that represented a life together we would never have. The shame—and regret—stayed with us both for a long time to come.

  3

  We named him Harry, partly for my favorite children’s storybook, Harry the Dirty Dog, but also because he just looked like a Harry, thoughtful and dignified, with a tendency to furrow his brow and become snaggle-toothed as he tried to get his very large brain ar
ound the rare situations that didn’t quite make sense. Sometimes, staring at me as I got my coat, his analytic mind working at a hundred miles a minute to figure out if we were going for a walk or a ride, he would squint and take on the appearance of a well-preserved older man reading a dinner menu in a dimly lit bistro.

  More often, he was as centered and serene as any creature—human or animal—that I had ever met, fully immersed in what he nearly always regarded as a very worthwhile moment. He was a city dog who never required a leash, a characteristic that gave him the aura of celebrity in my Boston neighborhood, sashaying, as he did, down busy sidewalks or along the tree-lined pedestrian promenade on the Commonwealth Avenue mall, pretty satisfied with who he was and doing little not to let people know it.

  When he was a puppy, we worked at that, mostly because I regarded a leash as beneath him, a choke on his freedom, and soon enough so did he. First, still on leash, I made him stop and sit for several long moments at every curb, curb after curb, week after week, until he got into the routine of it. Then we would rise especially early for training exercises. We’d walk along the curb, Harry in a training collar, and I’d casually toss a dog treat into the road. The first time I did it, he stepped off the curb after it. I snapped him back with the leash. He looked at me annoyed. I did it again, and he tepidly made a motion as though he was going to retrieve it. I snapped. He looked at me. The third treat I tossed he regarded absently and kept walking. He wouldn’t have gotten more praise from me if he had just won the Nobel Prize for tennis ball retrieval.

  Speaking of which, that was the next step, because he was a much bigger fan of the ball than he ever was of food. I’d toss a ball into the road. He’d go up to the curb and virtually quiver, he was so tempted, but ultimately he’d look back at me for the permission he knew he wasn’t going to get. We did it again and again. The final exam occurred at a little after six on a gorgeous Sunday morning in May. There were no cars at that hour, so I pulled off the leash and, when he least expected it, bounced a brand-new shiny green tennis ball that still had that fresh can smell into the street. He tensed up, watched it roll teasingly along the sun-splashed pavement to the opposite curb, and finally put his head down and walked toward me.

  “Good boy! You good, good boy!” I rubbed him all over. He squeezed between my legs. He looked at the ball out of the corner of his eye as we kept walking. We did it again and then again, and when we got home that day, I declared to Caitlin that we had an off-leash dog, and I was right. I don’t think that Harry stepped off a curb without me ever again.

  I learned just how disciplined he was a couple of months later. Newbury Street is the Back Bay’s main shopping avenue, Boston’s Rodeo Drive or Worth Avenue, filled with trendy boutiques and upscale national chain stores. It was one of those delightfully warm days when the sidewalks were swarmed, and Harry and I were running errands—more of the hardware store variety than anything else.

  We were stopped at a curb, waiting for the traffic light to change, and when it did, we walked. Except when I looked for him as I stepped onto the opposite curb, Harry wasn’t with me. Panicked, I looked ahead, but no dog. I whirled around, and there he was, still sitting on the curb I had just left, his eyes bulging with fear, searching through the mass of humanity for me, almost willing me to show up, but never lifting his tail off the ground. When I went back to get him, he tried to act casual about it, but we both knew we had given each other a world-class scare.

  Harry’s calling card was his sheer dignity, manifest in his calm, methodical gait, more a tail-swishing swagger than anything else. Whenever I stopped to talk to a neighbor or acquaintance, Harry would sit patiently beside me, as if part of the conversation, or, if he realized from my tone that it could go on for a while, he’d find a stick, sprawl in the grass, and chew on it. He had just two demands in life: always count him in, and make sure I had a tennis ball at all times. When he spied someone he knew, he would turn to me expectantly with a look that said, “Give me the damned ball.” And when I placed it in his jaw, he would just hold it in his teeth, as if the passerby would have somehow been disappointed if it wasn’t there.

  On every walk, at every stop, Harry attracted the kind of crowd that was foreshadowed in the USAir cargo terminal that December afternoon, partly for his looks but more for his demeanor. If he was appreciative of the attention, he wasn’t always demonstrative in return. Truth is, Harry could be a pretty aloof dog, and with some people, he literally looked past them as they rubbed his head or talked baby talk or made frantic motions as if they were trying to play. He would often just gaze at me with an expression that said, “What an idiot.”

  Others, he liked, especially women, and he would subtly circle around them, ball in his mouth, before calmly moving on. His one doglike indulgence: squirrels. He could spy one from a hundred yards away in the early-morning light of the Public Garden. He’d freeze, slowly lift his front leg in pointing fashion, and squint toward the rodent with his restaurant-menu face (“Maybe I’ll try the steak frites tonight with a whimsical Pinot Noir”), breaking the reverie long enough to slowly turn in my direction for the sign—a simple nod—that it was okay to engage in pursuit. If I shook my head no, he broke the trance and resumed real life.

  What I found in this dog was a capacity—my capacity—for unadulterated love. I’d shoot out of bed in the morning looking forward to the solitude and serenity of our hour-long romp in the Public Garden. I’d race home from work at day’s end so that Harry, Caitlin, and I could walk the Commonwealth Avenue mall as a trio, Harry in his glory striding between us, the journey being as good as any destination. Before I got a dog, I knew well the various buildings of my Boston neighborhood, the stores, and the restaurants. Once I got a dog, I got to know the people, and they were better than I would have imagined—the brilliant, eccentric woman named Marie whose mane of gray hair blew in the breeze as she rode her bike, the kindly neighbor named Frank who not only looked exactly like his yellow lab, but also had the same side-to-side gait as his dog. It was pure joy, all of it: Harry on walks, Harry beside me as I wrote newspaper stories or pecked at a novel at home, Harry curled up between the couch and the coffee table as we watched TV, Harry climbing slowly onto our bed and falling asleep at day’s end with a long, satisfied sigh. There is nothing in this world warmer than a bed with an exhausted dog in it.

  Yet, amid the joy, something was going wrong, something that I either didn’t grasp or, more likely, didn’t want to. Work couldn’t have been better. The Globe had promoted me to the position of roving national reporter, a journalistic dream job, my only charge being to jet around the United States in pursuit of interesting and offbeat stories that would splash color on our front page. I was in the Pacific Northwest writing about a flock of sea lions that was eating all the salmon, in El Paso writing about Mexican train bandits, in Montana writing about cattle ranchers facing falling beef prices. But at home, in our apartment, amid the spates of happiness, there was too much silence too often broken by trivial arguments. Caitlin became moody. Instead of addressing it head-on, I lived more and more on the road, away for a week, in Boston for a week. When I was home, she wasn’t there as much. The whole thing, the uncertainty, fed on itself.

  Harry emerged, among other great things, as the sinecure—so much joy in one hilarious package, single-handedly able to ward off the growing pit in my stomach with his ritualistic dances over a pig’s ear, his boundless enthusiasm chasing a tennis ball, or the way he slept so deeply and completely at my feet. He made it impossible to feel lonely. I loved that dog even as my life was taking some strange and unsettling turns.

  I sat in a room at the Fairmont hotel in San Francisco one Saturday morning arriving at the stark realization that things were not going as I had planned and that I was at least partly to blame. Caitlin and I were missing—not missing each other, just missing, as in not connecting, and that disconnect was beneath us. It felt as though the only thing we held in common was our mutual refusal to address it.
Maybe I wasn’t fit to be married, or maybe she wasn’t. Maybe there was a reason it had taken us seven years of dating to tie the knot. Why’s everyone always in such a rush, I used to joke; now it didn’t seem all that funny. Regardless, picking at a room service breakfast on the other side of the country, feeling lonelier than I could ever remember yet unclear what I was lonely for, I decided it was time to confront it.

  I wasn’t scheduled to fly back until Sunday morning, giving me plenty of time to file my story for the Sunday paper. But I woke up before dawn Saturday, wrote as fast as my fingers would skim across the keyboard of my laptop, and rushed to the airport to catch a morning flight heading east with a connecting flight through Philadelphia. I would surprise her, but, more important, I would insist that we face whatever awkward, evil forces had infected our relationship.

  In Philadelphia, I picked up a pay phone and gave her a call, realizing that things would be worse—at least for me—if I walked into an empty apartment. We exchanged the typical surface talk that had come to characterize all our conversations, and at the end I said, “I’ll see you in a couple of hours.”

  “Tonight?”

  “Yes, I’m in Philly. I got out of San Francisco early.”

  “You’re really coming home tonight!” She sounded legitimately excited, which took me aback for a moment. Actually, she cheered in a way that didn’t seem remotely fake. And what was better was what happened next: when she hung up, she missed the receiver, leaving the phone to sit on the shelf where we kept it, our connection inadvertently kept alive, which was maybe kind of ironic.

  “Harry! Harry! Brian’s coming home!” I heard her shouting. “Tonight! Harry! He’s coming home tonight!”