Creature Discomforts

by Susan Conant

  As if to demonstrate their radical difference from my father, Rowdy and Kimi eyed me with delighted fascination. We were now indoors, where I’d made myself a cup of sweet, milky tea and treated each dog to a chunk of cheese. Thus the rapt attention. As an aside, let me mention that it’s a damn shame that food training doesn’t work as well on parents as it does on dogs.

  “But you know what?” I continued. “The difference is still there. Food or no food, it’s still real. When you found me freezing to death out on the miserable rock, you noticed me! You were glad to see me! And even though I didn’t have a clue who you even were, you knew you were my dogs!” Running my eyes over Rowdy’s and Kimi’s thick, stand-off wolf-gray coats, admiring their heavy bone, smiling at the over-the-back wagging of their white tails, looking into the deep chocolate of their almond-shaped eyes, I added, “Not that I blame him for paying attention to you. Love me, love my dogs, love my dogs, love me. One and the same. And I am hardly in a position to blame him! This dog thing is obviously hereditary. And if he is totally infatuated with Gabrielle, wonderful! If he has any sense, he’ll marry her now while he’s still her hero and before she comes to her senses, and you’ll woo-woo-woo at their wedding, because he will definitely make sure you’re there, and I might or might not dance, depending on whether he remembers to invite me, which it is painfully clear he might very well not because he might completely forget my entire existence. After all, I’ve forgotten most of it! Why shouldn’t he?”

  Dogs take everything personally. When I quit ranting about how my father failed to pay attention to me and finally noticed the dogs’ bewilderment and hurt, I promptly apologized. In tones of sweet comfort, I said, “You are good dogs. You have not done anything wrong. I am very sorry that I got carried away.” I bent down, pulled their two big heads together, and nuzzled. “We will get through this,” I promised them. “We just aren’t going to get the help I thought we were, that’s all.” My brain tickled in a familiar-feeling way. “As the saying goes,” I said, “Dog helps those who help themselves.”

  Not that it was the most hysterically funny thing anyone has ever said, although Rowdy and Kimi pranced appreciatively. No, the important thing about the bit of foolishness was that it felt familiar in a new and splendidly specific way: As soon as I spoke, I knew I’d just said the kind of thing I would say. Reveling in the unfamiliar sensation of feeling even a tiny bit like myself, I exclaimed, “In Dog we trust!” Carried away, I cried, “Dog is my copilot! A mighty fortress is our…” I stopped there. Sacrilege wouldn’t offend my canine listeners, who wouldn’t hear it as such. But when you’re on the brink of horrifying yourself, it’s time to quit.

  Fired up by my anger at Buck and the renewal of my normal religious fervor, I dumped the tea remaining in my cup into the kitchen sink and even remembered—remembered!—to wash the cup to discourage the dogs from filching it, licking off the traces of milk and sugar, dropping it on the floor, and breaking it, thereby leaving sharp pieces that might cut their pads. Then, incredibly, I also remembered, if rather belatedly, to investigate the contents of Rowdy’s saddlebags, which I’d carried into the cottage and left on the table. With one exception, the contents of Rowdy’s pack were uninformative. Instead of weighting his pack with rice, as I’d done with Kimi’s, I’d padded his pack with hand towels and loaded it with bottles of spring water. In a zippered bag clipped to the top of the pack, however, were a green steno pad and a ballpoint pen. Oh, Lord! Was I the kind of obnoxious writer who is always prepared in case inspiration strikes? If so, the muse had barely whispered. Only the first few pages of the pad had been used, and what I’d written on those was not writing, properly speaking, but indecipherable scrawl culminating in a rebus that I must have used as a form of idiosyncratic shorthand.

  It had three elements: two hopelessly inartistic efforts at pictures linked by a remarkably clear equal sign. The rudely triangular image on the left, short scratches emanating from a vertical line, was a childish rendition of an evergreen tree. The figure on the right was a sort of wobbly diamond with two interior lines connecting the opposite points. A kite? Possibly a kite with no tail and no string. Maybe not? By comparison, the tree was an obvious tree. And the meaning of my rebus? Maine is not the Pine Tree State because it’s thick with coconut palms; I wouldn’t have written myself a shorthand note about the presence of pines in Acadia National Park. A pine tree is…? The Pine Tree Foundation! The kite, however, stumped me. The Pine Tree Foundation can go fly a kite?

  The Pine Tree Foundation, Gabrielle Beamon, the late Norman Axelrod, Horace Livermore, arsenic, Anita Fairley, Steve Delaney, and my father could all go fly kites! With an excess of energy that I see as symptomatic of a new phase, I scurried around creating order in the cottage. I scrubbed the kitchen and bathroom sinks, took out the trash, vacuumed dog hair, and neatly stacked some ratty-looking magazines and Acadia brochures that Rowdy and Kimi had used as chew toys. To keep me company while I did housework, I turned on the radio, which must have been set to an N.P.R. station. An educated voice expressed gratitude for grants from the Ford Foundation, the Pew Charitable Trust, the John D. and Catherine T. Mac-Arthur Foundation, the Joyce Foundation, and the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, for reporting on biological resource issues, but not to the Pine Tree Foundation for Conservation Philanthropy. Did Pine Tree make grants? What exactly did it do, anyway?

  I’d just finished showering, drying my hair, and changing into clean jeans and a navy T-shirt with a dog team racing across the front when the call of the paternal moose (“Aaarrrg!”) sounded at the kitchen door. Before I’d even managed to shove past the dogs to open it, Buck charged in and, without even greeting the dogs, demanded to know why I’d rolled belly-up for that goddamned ambulance chaser my vet had taken up with.

  “If you mean Anita Fairley,” I said, carefully avoiding the point of his roaring, “she isn’t an ambulance chaser. So far as I know, she doesn’t do personal injury law. She must do corporate law, taxes, real estate, uh, that kind of thing. Conservation law. She’s the Pine Tree Foundation’s attorney. Admittedly, I don’t like her, but she’s perfectly respectable. She’s Malcolm Fairley’s daughter.”

  Raising his thick eyebrows, my father said, “It’s not like you to try to weasel out of something, Holly.” He didn’t go on to say that he was disappointed in me; he didn’t need to. “When I ask you a direct question—”

  “I have other things to think about right now,” I interrupted. “And Steve Delaney isn’t my personal property.” I paused. “Obviously.”

  “He was yours, last thing I heard.”

  “Well, your knowledge is out of date. And people are not each other’s property, anyway. We’re all free to—”

  “Cambridge!” he groaned.

  “It’s only dogs who are forever. If you want a permanent bond…”

  “Get a dog,” he finished. “And get married.”

  “Which of us are we talking about?” I demanded. “It must be you, because there’s no one I’m about to marry, and so far as I know, there’s no one interested in marrying me.”

  “How many times you turn him down?”

  “Who?”

  “Your vet!”

  “I don’t know,” I answered truthfully. “Maybe I never turned him down at all. Maybe he never asked.”

  That drew another groan.

  “You’ve seen Anita Fairley! She’s beautiful!”

  “When’ve I seen her?”

  For the second time within minutes, I reminded my father of something I assumed he already knew. “Anita is Malcolm Fairley’s daughter,” I said irritably. I’d presented that family credential once, hadn’t I? But Buck evidently hadn’t paid attention.

  “I’ve never even met this goddamned Malcolm Fairley, and when I do, he’s going to be—”

  “We’ve known him for years. You have. And I… I’ve known him…” My voice trailed off. “Or at least he’s known us.” The question popped out. “Hasn’t he?”

&n
bsp; Buck stared at me with fierce alarm. “What the hell is wrong with you? You haven’t been using drugs, have you?”

  “Of course not.” Aside from addiction to dogs in general and the Alaskan malamute in particular, this was true.

  “You know, Holly,” Buck said sadly, “the last thing I ever want to do is pry into your personal life.”

  In retrospect, I have a monosyllabic comment to make about the claim: Hah! But the anxiety in his face and voice touched me.

  “I have not been using drugs,” I assured him. As if announcing comparatively wonderful news, I added, “I cracked my head on a rock.”

  As I have learned by observing other people’s families, normal fatherly behavior in this kind of situation consists of doing whatever it takes—requesting, cajoling, insisting, or even applying physical force—to get the child, including the adult child, to a hospital as fast as possible.

  Buck, in contrast, assumed that my injury was attributable to my having switched to an unsuitably strong breed of dog. “With goldens, it never would’ve happened,” he asserted before going on to suggest several other breeds, the Border collie, for example, that I had the bulk and muscle to handle. In conclusion, he said, almost in passing, “You did get the vet to take a look.” The remark was ludicrously perfunctory. He sounded exactly, and I mean exactly, as if the first thing any sensible human being would do in response to a crack on her skull would be to rush to the nearest veterinarian. It is hideously possible that in the forgotten days of my infancy, my doting parents immunized me against numerous dog diseases that people can’t catch. Of course, if my relationship with Steve Delaney had been different from what it was, I’d naturally have had the common sense to get him to check me out.

  “I’ll be all right,” I said evasively.

  “How bad was this crack on the head?” I shrugged.

  “Where did this happen?”

  “Dorr. Near the top of the Ladder Trail. And no, I didn’t take the dogs on the ladders.”

  “I’m not worried about the dogs,” he said, probably for the first time in his life. “Are you seeing double?”

  “No. My vision is fine.”

  “No bones broken.”

  “No.”

  “How bad is this memory loss?”

  The relief of having someone else recognize and acknowledge it was so tremendous that I couldn’t help smiling. “I can’t even remember what I’ve forgotten,” I said lightly.

  “This slimy bastard,” he said. “Malcolm Fairley.”

  “If he’s a slimy bastard,” I said, “it’s news to me.”

  “Everything about him ought to be news to you, young lady. You just met him. He just met you.”

  “No. That’s not so. We have, uh, friends in common.”

  “What friends?”

  “Gabbi. And Ann. I have a letter from Ann that says how sweet Gabbi is.” I omitted the bossy part. “Ann thinks Malcolm is difficult. And charming. They miss him.”

  Buck’s expression was frighteningly serious. “No mention of Bentley?”

  I was smug. “You see? We do know Malcolm. Yes, Ann says that a Trophy Edition is a Bentley. I didn’t quite get that part.”

  “Jesus Christ!” Buck exclaimed. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I just did.”

  “Holly, let me see the letter.”

  When I’d found it and given it to him, he skimmed it and said, “Why’d you think you’d written this in the margin? God spelled backward?”

  “I had the feeling it was a, uh, family saying.”

  “It is. But why’d you think you’d written it here?”

  “Force of habit?”

  “Oh, Christ, you poor kid. Holly, you wrote it there because this letter’s not about Gabbi Beamon and Malcolm Fairley. It’s from your friend Ann Ratcliff, and what it’s about is her malamutes! You never even knew Malcolm. He died before you met Ann and Bruce. The ones you know are Gabbi and Bentley.”

  “I thought maybe I drove one,” I said pitifully.

  “Drove what?”

  “A Bentley. Never mind. But I see what you mean. New people with the names of my friends’ dogs. God spelled backward.” The rest of the world, of course, would’ve said, Weird coincidence.

  “So, what else have you forgotten?”

  I burst into tears. “Everything! I read the dogs’ tags, and I didn’t even recognize my own name. I forgot Rowdy and Kimi! Daddy, I didn’t even know they were my dogs.”

  I always call him Buck. Always have. But not now.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  I DID MY BEST to tell Buck everything I’d observed and discovered since I’d awakened yesterday on the mountain: my injuries; my sense of mission; Malcolm Fairley’s account of Norman Axelrod’s fatal fall; my fragmentary recollection of Fairley’s conversation with someone; Bonnie’s message and my notes about arsenic; Axelrod’s belief that Horace Livermore was not only dosing the show dogs he handled with arsenic, but was smuggling some unknown contraband to Canada; the dead man’s antagonism to the Pine Tree Foundation and to environmental causes in general; the almost universal gratitude to Malcolm Fairley for combining charity and profit in satisfying the Pine Tree Foundation’s investors; Axelrod’s habit of needling Gabrielle about using the Beamon Reservation as a tax dodge; the flouting of the rules at the Beamon Reservation; Gabrielle’s friendship with everyone, including Axelrod and even Opal and Wally Swan, the developers; Fairley’s recruitment of Wally and Opal as volunteers on the Homans Path reclamation project; Quint and Effie’s mistrust of Wally and Opal; my evidently false impression of acquaintance with Malcolm Fairley; Anita Fairley’s nasty behavior to Steve’s pointer, Lady; and on and on. I even dug out the steno pad and showed Buck my shorthand hieroglyphics that seemed to equate the Pine Tree Foundation with a kite.

  He whacked the steno pad against the table. “And you don’t remember a damned thing about this?”

  “Nothing. I’m sorry.”

  “You never could draw,” he said. “Or sing,” he added unnecessarily.

  “I’ve discovered that. Could we get to the point?”

  “Which one?”

  “Any. It isn’t just that I can’t remember things. I also can’t make sense of what I know. I can’t put things together.”

  “Look,” he said, “you got dragged into this because that goddamned Norman Axelrod wrote a letter to Dog’s Life, and Bonnie—that’s your editor—didn’t want to publish it. What’d happened was that Axelrod had been using Horace Livermore, and he fired him. You know that. Axelrod said he had proof. About the arsenic. Maybe he’d had some samples analyzed. Bonnie had the sense not to go and publish the letter because, first of all, she knew Axelrod was a crank, and second of all, she didn’t want Livermore suing for slander.”

  “Libel,” I corrected.

  “Jesus. You may have lost your memory, Holly, but you haven’t lost your personality.” “Thank you,” I said.

  “So Bonnie handed everything over to you. You were supposed to be working on an article about dosing dogs with arsenic. She told you to start with Axelrod. You talked to him on the phone, and you decided there was something in it, because you wanted to meet him. That’s how I heard about it. Truth is, you wanted to get out of Cambridge. And you wanted to know if I knew a place you could stay near Bar Harbor.”

  “So you asked Gabrielle.”

  “Yeah.”

  “And I decided to work on some other articles, too. I have notes about that. Backpacking with dogs. That kind of thing. Okay. I write about dogs. I’ve figured that much out. Is that it? That’s what I write about?”

  Buck looked mystified. “What more do you want?”

  “Malcolm Fairley seemed to have the idea that I was a, uh, journalist.”

  “You are!” Buck proudly informed me.

  “Well, what do I write about besides dogs?”

  “Shows,” Buck answered promptly. “Judges. Breeders. Training. You wrote a book about Morris and Essex.”


  I shrugged my shoulders.

  “Mrs. Dodge,” he prompted. “Geraldine R. Dodge.” He waited.

  “Foundation,” I said. “The Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation. I just heard that on the radio.”

  “America’s First Lady of Dogs. Geraldine Rockefeller Dodge.”

  “It’s not ringing any bells,” I confessed. “I know who the Rockefellers are. But I don’t remember writing a book. I don’t yet.”

  “That’s my girl.” He might have been praising a puppy for a nice straight sit.

  “Malcolm Fairley seems to think… I got the impression from him that…I’m trying to remember. It was last night, at Gabrielle’s clambake. You know about that. She had this clambake for the Pine Tree Foundation. And for some reason, she invited me. I went. I was pretty disoriented. I’m trying to remember. Okay. Malcolm Fairley or someone else was talking about the benefactors. The Pine Tree Foundation has these benefactors, philanthropists, who just donate to it, I guess, to support conservation. They’re not investors. They’re donors who give money, and that’s what makes it possible for the investors to get such high returns. Anyway, the point is that the benefactors want to remain anonymous, but they’re obviously from the old families that have been giving money to preserve land on Mount Desert for years and years. And even for me, it wasn’t too hard to guess…I mean, the book is here in the cottage. Mr. Rockefeller’s Roads. It’s your copy. It has your name in it. But I do remember, uh, background information, I guess you’d call it. It’s the foreground that’s all gone.”

  “And?”

  “And? Oh, someone was about to say a name, Rockefeller, probably, and Malcolm Fairley started half joking about not naming names of the foundation’s benefactors because I might publish them, and the benefactors had to be kept anonymous. It was the same thing he said to whoever was with him on Dorr. One of his benefactors, probably. But at the clambake, he made it sound as if I was in a position to—”