Black Ribbon

by Susan Conant

  “Does it ever!” Marie groaned.

  “Does it ever!” I agreed. “But if a judge is really bad, all the spectators complain to AKC, and if it’s just a matter of losing a few points you should’ve kept, you have to think that the next time, maybe you’re going to keep a few points you should’ve lost. So, if you avoid the really bad judges, in the long run, it all evens out.”

  “The voice of experience,” Cam told Marie. “But what I’m wondering about is Eric Grimaldi, because he’s a breed judge, and that’s where you’re more likely to get exhibitors with real grudges.”

  True. Obedience and tracking judges follow detailed sets of rules. In contrast, breed judges pick the dogs they like, and that’s pretty much it; they’re supposed to interpret breed standards, but there aren’t any rules about how they’re supposed to interpret them.

  (Still lost? Sorry. Let’s get this straight. Breed: conformation. How well does the dog conform to the breed standard? Like Westminster? On TV? That’s breed. In fact, that’s a dog show. What confuses newcomers is that obedience trials are often held in conjunction with dog shows, and when they aren’t, they tend to be small events that the general public never hears about. And tracking, I’m afraid, just doesn’t make it as a spectator sport, because each dog follows a track across a field—and, at advanced levels, through woods—and if the public were allowed to go galumphing after the dog, the scent and commotion would obviously ruin the dog’s work. Also, tracking tests have small, limited entries, so the casual visitor who expects anything like Westminster is going be extremely disappointed.)

  “Except,” I said, “in tracking? TDX tests”—that’s Tracking Dog Excellent—“are hard to get into, so it’s possible that if someone had some problem with a judge.…” I faltered. My real source of uncertainty was the high esteem in which I hold tracking judges, who are a remarkably dedicated, fair, straightforward, congenial, and altogether likeable group of people, most unlikely targets for anyone’s rancor. I thought, for example, of Ginny Garabedian; it was hard to imagine anyone wanting to do something mean to her. Unless, I suppose, you counted the five dead husbands.

  “WELL, THAT SETTLES THAT.” Cam plunked her bowl of Indian pudding on the table and sat down. Neat and efficient in all things, Cam had cleaned her plate and gone for dessert while the rest of us were still eating dinner. “Eric didn’t get one.”

  Or hasn’t yet, I thought.

  “Cam,” I said, “Mrs. Abbott is right about AKC, isn’t she? In theory, if someone harasses an AKC judge in a place like this, not at a show, is that still grounds for suspension or a reprimand or something?”

  Let me note that a reprimand is what it sounds like—and so is a fine, another form of discipline. Suspension, however, whether temporary or permanent, is far worse than it sounds: It’s total excommunication. A person whose AKC privileges have been suspended can’t register a dog, show a dog, or even set foot on the grounds of an AKC show. For the duration of the suspension—three months, six months, five years, life—the excommunicate is dead in dogs.

  “It’s still misconduct against a judge.” Cam dipped her spoon into the ice cream on top of the pudding and filled the spoon by pushing it away from her. I wondered whether her mother had taught her the rhyme about little ships going out to sea. “And it’s obviously conduct prejudicial.” The full text: conduct prejudicial to the best interests of pure-bred dogs, dog shows, obedience trials, field trials, or the American Kennel Club. “And, of course, once someone prefers the charge, AKC is obligated to investigate. But even if Phyllis knew who sent that card, the question would be whether she was harassed in her position as a judge, I think, or whether it was a strictly personal matter.”

  “So it wouldn’t necessarily be—”

  “Well, Phyllis could prefer the charge, but AKC might not agree. If everyone at camp got harassed, then the complaint probably wouldn’t be sustained, because it wouldn’t really have anything to do with AKC. But she could still prefer charges, and if the complaint wasn’t sustained, all Phyllis would lose would be the ten dollars it cost her to make the complaint in the first place.”

  Michael, he of the Akita tattoo, spoke up. “That’s just judges?”

  Almost everyone else answered in unison: “No.”

  Cam expanded. “In theory, anyone can prefer charges against anyone. But it has to have to do with shows or whatever—with AKC—which it does if it takes place on show grounds. Otherwise, it depends. The typical case where charges are sustained is, like, two exhibitors get in a fight at a show, or someone gets caught abusing a dog on show grounds. Or the judge hands out the ribbons, and some guy who doesn’t like how he did starts swearing at the judge and saying he only looks at faces.”

  Michael’s went blank.

  Kathy, a slight blond woman who’d hardly spoken before, translated: “Human faces. Looks to see who’s handling.”

  “Plays politics,” I said. “Cam, is Indian pudding the only dessert?”

  “No, there’s chocolate cake.”

  I carried my plate to a hatch that opened into the kitchen and joined a long line of people waiting for dessert and coffee. My place in line put me right near a table at which Eva Spitteler was addressing Joy, Craig, and some other people on the subject of lure coursing, which, as Eva was explaining, and as I’ve already mentioned, is a sport in which dogs course after a lure. As an AKC performance event, it’s limited to sight hounds—borzois, whippets, Afghan hounds, and other sight-hunting breeds. Camp offered the opportunity, relatively rare in this part of the country, for dogs of any breed or no particular breed to give it a try.

  “Any dog’ll do it,” Eva proclaimed. “Any dog that’ll go after a lure.”

  The lure, by the way, is artificial, usually a plastic bag. Field coursing is another matter. That’s the one with live rabbits.

  The line inched ahead. A couple of steps placed me in back of Joy, who was writing in what proved to be an address book. She raised her head, shook her blond curls, and handed the book to Eva.

  “My catalog’s coming out in October,” Eva told her. She looked around the table. “Did I get all your addresses?”

  One woman seemed to avoid Eva’s gaze. Everyone else nodded. I didn’t really blame Eva for trying to drum up business. It’s hard to make a living in dogs. The small mail-order companies that survived in this highly competitive market did so by providing a narrowly defined clientele—Border collie owners, dogsledding enthusiasts, obedience competitors—with the very best equipment, supplies, books, videos, and odds and ends within a concentrated range of interest. I wondered what specialty Eva could possibly have devised that would interest pet owners like Joy and Craig. A nasty thought came to me: Maybe Eva specialized in clients who didn’t know enough to order from someone else.

  At the dessert buffet, I ran into Ginny, Michael, and the three women from my table, who invited me to take my dessert and coffee to the TV room of the lodge to watch Bernie Brown’s training tape. I declined. I own the tape, or rather, my cousin Leah does. Leah is a Bernie Brown no-force-method fanatic. I’d watched the tape a couple of times, and I’d heard it in the background at least a hundred times that summer. When I got back to the table with a double serving of chocolate cake topped with a triple dollop of whipped cream, Cam was alone there scraping her bowl clean. With a hard-to-read expression on her face, she turned her head a little, gave a meaningful look at a far corner of the dining room, and asked, “You catch that?”

  My eyes followed Cam’s. At what was apparently the VIP table, far from the kitchen, near a window that overlooked the lake, sat Max McGuire, Eric Grimaldi, Phyllis Abbott, and three others, all of whom, with one exception, were giving Phyllis Abbott the rapt attention I elicit only from dogs and, even then, only by baiting with liver treats. The exception was Don Abbott. He’d pulled his chair back from the table and was speaking into his portable telephone.

  I exclaimed, “But there’s a pay phone right out in the lobby! And besides—”r />
  “He always does it. He does it at people’s dinner tables. At a show a while ago, I saw him standing right next to a pay phone—a pay phone no one was using!—and talking into his portable one.”

  “Doesn’t that cost a lot extra?” The only thing I knew about cellular phones was that I couldn’t afford one. As I’ve said, it’s hard to make a living in dogs.

  Cam had the satisfied look of a person getting exactly the response she wants. I almost expected her to tell me what a good dog I was. “Sure does.”

  “Is he a broker or something?” I clarified the question. “A stockbroker?” Let me amend something else. It’s hard to make an honest, self-respecting living in dogs. Brokers—puppy brokers, the middlemen who buy from puppy mills and sell to pet shops—are the pimps of the American commercial puppy industry and its chief financial beneficiaries. Cam’s first take on broker would be the same as mine: something that ought to be scooped up, sealed up, and deposited in the nearest trash receptacle.

  “Don makes light fixtures. He runs the company. They make industrial lamps, that kind of thing. But that’s not what he’s doing. What he’s doing is, he thinks that if he stays off the phone for ten minutes, AKC’ll go kaput.”

  “On Sunday night? They aren’t even open.”

  “Yes, but the wheels still turn.” Cam said it again: “The wheels still turn.”

  I ate some cake.

  Cam spoke into my ear. “Their therapist sent them here. That’s what Don’s doing at camp, and that’s why Phyllis is so stressed out. All that about harassing judges is true, but I don’t think that card had anything to do with Phyllis or with Phyllis being a judge, either. She just took it that way. Phyllis is a very sensitive person.”

  “But why would a therapist …?” I was dumbfounded. My good friend and second-floor tenant, Rita, is a therapist who treats individuals and couples. I couldn’t imagine Rita’s suggesting joint attendance at dog camp as a way to save a marriage.

  “It was part of an agreement they worked out,” Cam said. “Some kind of contract. But if you ask me, the only reason Don agreed was the usual.”

  I felt lost. “I just met him.”

  Cam’s expression became serious. I realized that she’d been fooling around. Now, she adopted a heavy mock-foreign accent and said, “Come the revolution …”

  “Cam, you’ve lost me.”

  “One of these days,” Cam said in normal English, “we’re going to get rid of all that deadwood at AKC, and Don Abbott knows that, and when it happens, he’s going to need Phyllis, who is a dog person, and if Don gets really desperate, he might even be driven to getting a dog himself. But in the meantime, he hears what’s blowing in the wind, so he needs Phyllis’s credentials, and he needs to start looking like he’s at least half interested in dogs, of all things, and not just in more playing politics.”

  It is possible to be in dogs without, in fact, owning a dog. It’s even possible to be in dogs without ever having owned so much as a stuffed toy puppy. Anyone at the AKC is, by definition, in dogs; yet there are rumored to be people there who don’t live with them. This wasn’t the first time I’d heard someone complain about that supposed state of affairs, about which, I should say, I reserve judgment. Among other things, the New York offices of the AKC are at 51 Madison Avenue, and Manhattan isn’t a great place to keep a dog. Also, the AKC is a big, complicated organization; maybe it really does make sense to hire superb administrators who don’t happen to have dogs. For all I know, the Vatican has dozens of employees who aren’t Roman Catholic.

  “So here he is,” I said, meaning, of course, that here Don Abbott was at camp. As it turned out, though, I’d no sooner spoken than Don and Phyllis appeared at our table. Don must have stashed the phone in his pocket. The only thing he carried in his hand was a wineglass like the ones on our table. Let me say that I’m no expert on wine. We’d had a choice of red or white. But maybe the VIP’s at Maxine’s table had been offered something special that any oenologist would have recognized immediately, an amber-colored wine that smelled exactly like Scotch. Don took a sip of it and made a big show of greeting Cam and being introduced to me.

  “We’re in the same cabin,” I told him. “I have the other unit in yours, I think.” I was, of course, dead certain. Remembering Rowdy’s effort to play up to Don Abbott, I said, “I have a malamute.”

  Quick to address Don’s real interest, Cam added, “Holly writes for Dog’s Life.”

  “Maybe you knew my mother,” I said. “Marissa Winter.”

  Don nodded. “Gracious lady.”

  It was Phyllis who remembered my mother as she would have wished: “Very nice dogs. Goldens. So Marissa was your mother!”

  God help me, I thought. If Marissa had been an easy mother, maybe losing her would have been a little simpler than it was. Is.

  “Gracious lady,” Don said again. Then he asked Cam how John R.B., her husband, was, and Cam said he was fine, thank you.

  “Not here?” asked Don, draping an arm around a startled-looking Phyllis.

  “He couldn’t get away.”

  “Hasn’t got dogs on the brain, huh?” Don remarked.

  I examined the back of Cam’s neck to see whether her short-clipped hair was rising. Neither it nor her face revealed any response. “Like I said, he couldn’t get away.” Her fingers slowly curled into tight fists.

  Don turned to me. “Great guy, John R.B. I knew his father. Gracious old gentleman.”

  With a nod of approval, Phyllis seconded Don: “Very nice dogs.”

  “English setters,” Don told me.

  Phyllis frowned.

  “Pointers,” Cam said. “R.B. had pointers. Elizabeth still does.”

  At the mention of Elizabeth, whom I presumed to be the widow of Richard Burton White, I could practically see the word gracious start to form on Don Abbott’s lips. I looked down at my plate, on which remained a half slice of chocolate cake and a big blob of sinking whipped cream that I was saving for last. I felt tempted to mention my father, Buck, who has somehow managed to keep a remarkable number of friends at the AKC and whom the Abbotts probably knew as well. I almost did it, just as an experiment. There are lots of adjectives to be applied to my sire, but no honest man could call Buck gracious. I resisted.

  “Elizabeth,” Don said. “Gracious lady. Lovely family,” he informed me. “R.B. had a farm in Connecticut, gentleman’s farm, stables, kennels, twenty-room house, entertained all the time. Course, John R.B.’s kept up the tradition—nice little place he and Cam have. Phyllis and I both admired what they’ve done with it.”

  If Cam had been a long-pointy-nails type, the palms of her hands would have been oozing blood. She thanked Don, rose from her seat, and politely prepared to bolt. She’d been up since four A.M., she said; it had been a long day, and she was going to bed. As the Abbotts must have known, Cam was the kind of dog person who thinks nothing of driving eight hours to a show, and once there, spends the whole weekend catching up with people, showing her dogs, and making the rounds of the vendors’ booths, and wastes hardly a moment on sleep before driving eight hours home. When no one challenged her white lie, I offered a legitimate version of the same excuse: I really was tired. In the lobby, the Abbotts lingered to talk with Eric Grimaldi. Cam and I walked back to the cabins together.

  The night air revived me, and in any case, Rowdy needed a final outing before bed. I leashed him and, after a stroll and cleanup, wandered toward the lake, where the broad white path of beckoning moonlight made Apollo 11 seem like a total waste of time: Swim till you smell green cheese. Rowdy and I clambered down the slope to the dock. I had no intention of violating the ban on night swimming by heading for the moon or even by taking a quick skinny dip; I just wanted to dabble my feet from the end of the dock. As I led a reluctant Rowdy over the wooden boards, my shoes and the pads of his feet thumped the dock. Far out on the lake, a loon suddenly laughed. The freakish yodel echoed over the water.

  When we reached the end of the dock,
the last echo died. A soft splashing took its place. Someone was swimming a steady breast stroke across the little cove toward the dock. Swimming alone really is dangerous, especially after dark. The swimmers most at risk are those made overconfident by natural buoyancy and long practice. The steady stroke, powerful kick, and smooth timing were the ineradicable marks of hours of drill for competitive swimming. I took off my shoes and socks, sat down, and stuck my feet in the cold water. Rowdy whined. “Settle down,” I told him. He lowered his body, rested his chin on the dock, and glowered at me. My belief in the buddy system was one thing I couldn’t explain to a creature who’d never voluntarily enter water either alone or in the company of a dozen lifeguards. I stroked Rowdy’s head and watched the water. I wasn’t sure what I’d do if the swimmer suddenly vanished. Scream for help? The time I’d taken Red Cross lifesaving, I’d flunked out by towing the pretend victims to the bottom of the pool.

  Within a few minutes, the swimmer surged close to us, threw out a hand, and grabbed the dock. As I scrambled out of the way, a woman’s round-bellied body in a dark tank suit rose from the lake.

  “Whew! Caught breaking my own rule!” Maxine McGuire exclaimed cheerfully. “Were you going to snitch on me?”

  I laughed nervously. “Of course not. I was just soaking my feet and enjoying the night.”

  Maxine pattered down the dock, picked up a towel I hadn’t noticed, and started to give herself a rubdown. “I never get a chance to swim anymore, but after dinner, ten people started pawing and nipping at me like teething puppies, and I said to myself, ‘What the heck! It’s my camp.’ And I feel a lot better now.”

  “They were upset about the sympathy cards?”

  “Oh, yeah, that and those darned silly brochures. Some joker left a lot of stuff about pet cemeteries and things, all mixed up with the dog magazines I put out. It’s just someone’s dumb idea of a practical joke. You watch. Next thing, he’ll go around short-sheeting the beds. It’s camp; you’ve got to expect it.”