Buddy

by Brian McGrory

  We were forced to live apart just once, and it didn’t go well. I had just returned to Boston to write the column for the Globe, relegated for a month to a dark and depressing corporate apartment that didn’t allow dogs. Harry went to my sister Carole’s, which was going to be fine because they had, for years, openly adored each other, offering no indication that their bond would fray with extended proximity. But fray it did.

  At first, my very regular check-in calls with Carole were uncharacteristically short and muted. “He’s, um, he’s good,” she’d say, with no elaboration or much inflection. “He’s eating. He’s getting exercise.” No “He’s wonderful.” No “This dog is hilarious.” No “I’m going to miss him so much I’ll need to get my own when he’s gone.”

  Finally, a week or so in, I probed deeper, hesitantly—is he sleeping, is he having fun, are you? There was a long, somewhat agonizing, only partially unexpected silence. “I didn’t want to tell you this,” Carole finally said, “and I don’t want you to feel bad”—and there her voice lowered—“but every time we go out, he scratches so hard at the front door that I’m afraid he’s going to hurt himself.”

  “You can’t be serious,” I replied, unable for the life of me to picture that calm and dignified creature panicked or destructive. “Harry?”

  “Harry,” she said, more firmly now that she had finally shared the news. I could tell her patience was wearing thin—and she’s a famously patient person.

  “Is your door okay?” I asked, expecting her to say that it was nothing.

  Again, another pause, before she finally said, “I’m sure it’ll be fine when we sand it down.” She didn’t sound so sure.

  As I took it all in, she added, tellingly, “He’s constantly moping around.” Another pause, and then “Brian, I think he really misses you.”

  That immediately ended that. Within an hour, I had picked him up to begin his illicit stay in my temporary housing. I don’t think he ever scratched at anything again in his life, save for the occasional tick he picked up from walks in the woods in Maine. Not that I’m casting judgment on his behavior. The truth was, I was out of sorts in his absence as well. I’d get up in the morning for those couple of weeks that he was gone, shower, and drive silently to work, realizing, as others filtered into the newsroom, that it could be 9 or 9:30 and I hadn’t spoken a word yet that day. After spending more time at work than usual, I’d have dinner out, return to the grimness of the corporate apartment, and silently go to bed. I had become the working drone that I had so adamantly, fastidiously avoided being. There were no early-morning walks through an un-crowded city, random encounters with friendly strangers, late-night trips to the ice cream shop where every customer doted on the absurdly well-trained dog who held court at the door.

  It probably makes sense how close we had become, given how the relationship had been forged in the fiery collapse of my marriage. Harry, not to overstate it, had served as my ballast when things came apart, the receptacle for so much emotion during what was an uncommonly emotional time in my otherwise straightforward life. God knows what might have happened, where I might have gone, what I might have done, if I hadn’t needed to be home every evening for a long walk, a slice of pizza at the local shop, an hour on the stoop, me with a magazine, him with his paws dangling over the top step contentedly watching the world go by. But needed is the wrong word. No, I wanted to be there.

  There was something enlivening about being with Harry, something lightening about it as well, the mutual dependence, the channeling of each other’s emotions, the unimpeachable confidence that he would always be there when I needed or wanted him, qualities that undoubtedly took on outsized importance because of the way my marriage dissolved.

  Episodic celebrity did nothing to change him. My late cousin, the great Washington Post writer Mary McGrory, featured Harry in a couple of columns, describing him as “an elegant and amiable creature, with just a dash of con man and pol.” She first wrote about how he’d climb into holes in her garden that we had just dug for impatiens, later about how he had people gushing over him on our Sunday-afternoon walks through Cleveland Park, and finally on the time I asked her to wait with Harry in the vestibule of Lord & Taylor in Boston on a particularly frigid Christmas Eve afternoon while I furiously grabbed last-minute gifts. Frazzled shoppers at the very end of their holiday-season rope turned to him for a moment of calm.

  “Harry,” Mary wrote, “had a miraculous effect on them. Everyone spoke to him. The most clouded countenance lifted and broke into a smile at the sight of him. People who obviously did not have time to breathe stopped to scratch his ears and whisper endearments. They wished him a Merry Christmas, often graciously including me in the greeting.”

  His fame was not limited to print. Harry appeared on the popular Boston evening television magazine show Chronicle, slowly padding down the sidewalk of our street, an agile—and beguiled—cameraman backpedaling in a crouched position in front of him, the camera hanging just a few inches from the ground. The segment was supposed to be about me and one of my novels, but every call I got on it was about my dog.

  And his fame was not limited to the media. When I was the Globe’s White House reporter, I covered Bill Clinton’s vacations to Martha’s Vineyard, including the summer in which the Monica Lewinsky story broke. Harry was where he often was on those trips, which was lying at my feet in the press center in the old-fashioned gym of a local school, occasionally sighing in abject, you-really-owe-me-a-long-fetching-session-at-the-beach boredom, as I typed a say-nothing story on another uneventful day with a Clinton family whose members weren’t really speaking to one another. Suddenly, in a whir of commotion, White House Press Secretary Mike McCurry came striding to the podium, tapped the microphone to see if it was on, and said he had an announcement. The president, the grim-faced McCurry declared, had ordered bombing runs against Afghanistan and Sudan in retaliation for the attacks on two U.S. embassies in Africa earlier that month.

  The room surged with sudden energy. Reporters who had been napping or playing computer games a few minutes before were now shouting urgent questions. Cameramen were cuing up shots. Young producers were barking into cell phones. National security advisers gathered just out of range to brief small groups.

  All Harry saw was a guy he genuinely liked—McCurry—standing but a few feet away in a pretty good position for a game of indoor fetch. Finally, someone to play with. So he struggled to his feet, sashayed toward the podium, and dropped his tennis ball at McCurry’s feet. The spokesman ignored him as he ticked off a litany of facts on the bombing runs, the planes used, the number of troops employed, the munitions dropped. Harry would have none of it. He announced himself with a low, guttural, playful growl, picked the ball up, and dropped it on McCurry’s shoes.

  “Not now, Harry, not now,” McCurry said, squelching a laugh as I tried to collect my dog outside of camera view. Harry looked at me as though I had completely lost my mind while I tugged him back to my desk. Years from now, as historians struggle to define the Clinton Doctrine, they’ll undoubtedly listen to the tapes and read the presidential transcripts and look at this mysterious aide, Harry, as holding the answers that are so elusive.

  But back to the package in my foyer in Boston. There was no limit to the number of suspects—at least in my own mind. Who had I made smile? Could it be the woman I was currently seeing? That wouldn’t be much fun. Could it be any number of the aforementioned ex-girlfriends making a dramatic bid to get back into the picture? Hey, why not? Could it have been someone I casually knew from the neighborhood, someone from the coffee shop, the gym? Yes, yes, and yes.

  I didn’t share this grand development with everyone, though I might have let on to a few people that I’d gotten a little something in the U.S. mail, enveloped in mystery, and wasn’t it insane—as I waited for them, always in vain, to tell me it wasn’t. The larger problem, even for an experienced truth seeker like myself, albeit one who was seriously and somewhat suddenly full of himself, wa
s that flushing out information on such a delicate topic did not prove entirely easy. There was the direct method, involving the straightforward question “Hey, did you by any chance send me the nicest tie with the most touching note?” The one and only time I tried it, I was told, “You cannot possibly be serious!” followed by gales of laughter. Let’s just say I crossed that person off my list of suspects.

  So I summoned some diplomatic skills that were as uncommon as they were uncharacteristic, rang up a few other women I knew, and, in a casual conversation about nothing in particular, innocently dropped word of my secret admirer. Oddest thing came in the mail the other day. I mean, c’mon, who has time for any of this nonsense? They certainly didn’t, at least from the responses I got, which ranged from “What case of arrested development would pull that stunt?” to “Are you sure it was your name on the envelope?” Everyone, everywhere became my suspect, but they all did a wonderful job of not acting even remotely suspicious. What had begun as an ego boost was quickly turning into a shot at my ego, yet it still gnawed at me just the same—who, why, what?

  It gnawed until the evening I walked through my condominium door and found something I didn’t want to see, and that, in every way, changed everything.

  5

  It’s funny, though not in a humorous way, how life can assault you when you’re expecting nothing more than its usual passive-aggressive indifference. In this case, it was a toss-away Tuesday in the beginning of January, that painful month in Boston when the beauty of a New England autumn is too distant to remember and the relief of spring is too far away to see.

  That particular day defined nothingness—an average column in the paper, lunch with a boring politician, a lethargic workout at my gym, a night with no sports on television. My only salvation was a walk with my dog, followed by a pressed turkey sandwich at the local sub shop, which in my neighborhood they referred to as a “panini shop.” Such days happen. Life is better when they don’t happen all that much.

  In terms of context, Harry was always waiting at the door when I came through it. I’ve never been sure if he could sense me coming down the street, knew the unique noises I made in the building foyer, or simply lunged to his feet from a deep slumber when he heard the key in the apartment lock. Once I came in, he would quietly squeal, squirm repeatedly through my legs, and sit directly in front of me, making penetrating eye contact until I kissed his forehead. To miss the greeting was like Donald Trump missing the chance to use the word I. It simply never happened—until that night.

  There was no Harry, no squeals, no nothing. It was bizarre, this open expanse of absolute quiet. “Har?” I called out nervously. The thought struck me that maybe he was at Carole’s house and I had simply forgotten about it in a haze of boredom, but that wasn’t likely. Maybe he was just getting old and was zonked out on my bed, but I doubted that, too. “Har!” I yelled again, my voice dissolving into the dimly lit expanse of the living room like milk into black coffee.

  With my gut in a tight knot, I finally saw him. He was lying beneath the table inside the bay window, his favorite spot, his head up, his tail down, none of the thumping I usually got just by looking his way. His eyes bored into mine, filled with fright.

  “Har? What’s the matter, handsome?” I asked gently.

  He lifted his snout up a little higher and blinked rapidly. I assumed he had done something that he thought was wrong, had maybe knocked down a picture by mistake or had had a sour stomach and left some unpleasant deposit on the bedroom rug. But I couldn’t see or smell anything amiss.

  “Har, what’s going on?” I approached him, slowly, still expecting him to get up and greet me, everything all right, as if I had woken him up and he only needed to shake the cobwebs out of his regal head. Instead he kept staring, his eyes locked on mine, searching me for answers to questions that hadn’t yet been asked. As I pulled to within a step of him and crouched down, he did something utterly amazing, though not really surprising. He rolled over on his back and splayed his hind legs. In that motion, he revealed a raw patch of blood on his lower stomach, bright and oozing. Harry wanted me to see the problem, the reason he hadn’t gotten up. My dog, I must say for roughly the billionth time in his life, was brilliant.

  I pressed my face against his snout, still not wanting to seem panicked, and told him everything would be all right. I rubbed his head, his ears, his neck, and gently worked my way down to his injury, which I could see was some sort of puncture that he had probably been gnawing at all afternoon, something very un-Harry-like. He wasn’t a dog that needed one of those ridiculous Elizabethan collars whenever he got stitches at the vet. If I asked him not to chew on himself, he didn’t, plain and simple. To act any other way would have been deeply beneath him.

  I told him to stay put while I got a cloth with warm water and returned to wash his wound, which seemed to be excruciatingly sensitive to the touch, though still he let me do it. I don’t believe I’d ever seen this innately confident creature this frightened, which told me that the situation was somehow even more severe than it looked—and it didn’t look good to begin with. When I coaxed him to his feet, he toddled uncertainly, then slammed himself back onto the floor. He did that again and again, leaving me no doubt that we had no choice but to get him to a doctor. I swooped him up in my arms, felt his head come to rest on my shoulder, and lurched uncertainly—he was about seventy-five pounds of pure muscle—out the door and down the block toward my car.

  Harry’s vet was closed at that hour, so we drove straight to Angell Memorial Hospital about fifteen minutes away, fifteen minutes of hell as I tried to mask my own anxiety with constantly soothing talk to my best friend in the backseat. “Everything’s going to be okay, Har-Bear. You’re going to be fine. Nothing’s going to go wrong here, you good boy.” I only wished I believed it myself. He didn’t exactly look as if he was on board with it, either, staring down or straight ahead rather than watching the passing scenery as he usually did. At Angell, we registered at the front desk with a receptionist who couldn’t have seemed any less impressed with the situation, then were directed to a vast waiting room filled with a cacophony of mewing, chirping, barking, and various forms of grumbling. The animal kingdom on its best day is a chaotic place. The animal kingdom in distress, in the charmless environs of a hospital anteroom, is another matter entirely. Harry wanted no part of it. He squeezed between my legs, hid partly under the worn bench, and morbidly waited, wide-eyed over his situation and aghast over our location. I kept a hand on his head, caressing his ears, quietly telling him that he was going to be okay.

  An hour or so later, we were taken into an extraordinarily plain exam room where an overtired resident who must have been about a day out of college absently said, “Everything good?” as she flipped through our registration sheets.

  Yeah, things are great. I just wanted to get some home decorating ideas and I really like these lamps bolted to the wall. That’s not what I said. I didn’t actually say anything until she looked up from the clipboard a few minutes later, and I explained, “This is Harry. He’s a pretty remarkable dog.” As I said it, I realized that pretty much every dog owner who comes through the doors of this hospital must say—or at least think—that exact thing. “When I came home tonight, he wasn’t right. He didn’t meet me at the door. And he showed me this wound on his lower stomach.”

  Harry, by the way, wanted exactly no part of her. He was well aware of where we were, what she was there to do, and what might lie immediately ahead, so he had positioned himself very firmly on the floor between my legs. As I finished my synopsis of the situation, I crouched down, placed my hand against his shoulder, and rolled him over. His eyes got a little wild, but he knew why I did it.

  She took a long look, running her fingers around the outside of the small, bloody area. As I continued to hold Harry down, she grabbed some sort of instrument and extracted a small piece of the wound, causing Harry’s legs to cycle furiously until I let him go.

  “He’s okay now,�
�� she said, but she wasn’t referring to his health. She pressed a stethoscope against various parts of his sides and chest, peered into his big brown eyes, and opened his mouth to look inside.

  “I’ll be back in a few minutes,” she said.

  It was more like thirty, each of them a little more anxious than the one before. When she stepped back into the room, I sat on a metal stool. Harry cemented himself to the floor between my legs. The doctor leaned against an exam table and said in a startlingly casual way, “We should get this tested, but I can almost guarantee you that it’s mast cell cancer.”

  I could feel the blood drain out of my face. Cancer. I looked down at Harry to catch his reaction, forgetting that cancer wasn’t part of his sprawling vocabulary. He just kept looking straight ahead, all but willing himself to be back home, resting on the rugs or the hardwood floors that were so familiar, all his sounds, around his stuffed toys. As I tried to get my bearings, she continued to talk, either indifferent to my emotions or lacking the time to deal with them. Either way was okay.

  “—most common type in a large dog like this, and with a very high cure rate,” I heard her say. “But we should do surgery almost immediately, sometime this week.”

  Two surgeries (they found a second tumor) and a few days later, Harry was milking his recuperation in full Harry fashion, accepting visitors at our condo and delicately nosing through the bowls of chicken and rice I made for him each morning and night in search of the most overdone pieces of meat. There was good news in that; just five or so years into owning the condo, I was already using my stove.