Paws before dying

by Conant, Susan

  “Oh,” I said again, unimpressed. A mere cousin? Why, Rowdy and Kimi are direct descendants of Ch. Gripp of Yukon. But I didn’t tell Edna. It might have made her feel inferior.

  “And on Mitchell’s side, the Johnson side, there’s a Clark and a French.” Her face had brightened up, and her little eyes changed from flat to beady. “And, of course, his mother was a Dale, and his grandmother was a Mitchell.”

  In lieu of saying something—what?—I got up and took a look at the framed diagram. Like Rowdy’s and Kimi’s pedigrees, it consisted mainly of precisely arrayed names, but neither of their pedigrees has a tree sketched around it, and the lines aren’t embellished with tiny oak leaves. Anyway, I didn’t have trouble deciphering the two most recent generations in the Johnson-Smith pedigree: Mitchell Dale Johnson had married Edna Elizabeth Smith, and they’d produced three sons. The youngest was William Smith Johnson, and—I swear I am not making this up—both of the others were named Mitchell Dale Johnson, Jr. Yes, both. The American Kennel Club, for God’s sake, won’t let you register two dogs under the same name. Who protects children?

  “What did you say your name was?” Edna sounded as if I might not have one.

  “Holly Winter,” I said.

  “Winter,” she repeated suspiciously.

  “Winter.”

  Rufous Winter fought in the American Revolution. Consequently, I’m eligible for the DAR, but damned if I’ll ever join, and damned if I’d tell Edna Johnson, particularly because I knew what she was going to ask me next, and I had the perfect answer all ready. My mother coached me on it. Edna was about to ask, “Oh, and what kind of name is that!” Marissa taught me to smile politely and answer: “A kennel name.”

  But I didn’t have the chance. Willie rushed into the room, slammed to a halt, and looked first at me and then at the brown paper bag on the floor near my feet. “Ma, your stuffs in the kitchen,” he told Edna, who obediently scurried off. He looked at me and said, “Yeah?”

  “Willie, Leah is only sixteen,” I said. “She hardly knows you. This is really a generous present, but, um, it’s a little too much. I just can’t let her take it.”

  He put on the same look he'd had when he told Jack that he was sorry about Rose, stiff and apologetic, but this time, I realized that whatever manners he’d learned he’d got from TV or the movies and that he wasn’t surprised to find that he’d got something wrong.

  “I know it’s really a good, uh, one,” I said with that stupid adult fear of using a dated word to someone not all that much younger. “And you’re welcome to come and visit, or whatever. It was really generous of you. It was nice of you.”

  Preoccupied as I was with my own prissy insensitivity and the look of stolid, repeated hurt on Willie’s face, I didn’t hear either Edna or Dale, but when I’d assumed that she’d gone to the kitchen to unpack the groceries, she’d evidently gone in search of Dale. They stood in the front hall looking at us, the

  mother half hidden behind the oafish son. Edna looked confused and frightened. Although she never left the house, her face said that, even so, she felt a terrifying uncertainty about where she was and, probably, who she was and who these other androids were.

  Dale, though, understood. “My brother’s not good enough?” He puffed himself up and folded his arms across his chest.

  “You probably just heard me telling him we’d be glad to see him,” I said.

  “You know how much he paid for that?” Dale demanded.

  “A lot,” I said.

  He proceeded to tell me how much. He also told me how hard his little brother worked and how much overtime he put in. I was pretty sure that at the fun match from which he’d been evicted, he’d been too far away from me to notice or remember me, but it was clear that he’d at least connected Leah, dog training, and me, because he started making the same accusation Leah had made earlier, that I was a snob, and went on to damn everyone else who trained dogs, too. His little brother was good enough for anyone, he said. Then I thought I heard him say that Leah and I were both Japanese, but a second later I decoded the acronym. JAPs, he’d called us, Jewish-American princesses.

  A happy look of comforting recognition crossed the empty perplexity of Edna’s face, and she finally asked the big question that Willie’s arrival had cut off: “What kind of a name is ‘Winter,’ anyway?”

  Before I’d decided whether to let her think it was Jewish or to tell her the canine truth, Willie, who’d been cringing in silence, said sharply, “Mom, enough.”

  “Willie, shut up and stay the hell out of this,” Dale growled at him. He turned on his brother just as fiercely as, seconds before, he’d defended him.

  Although Dale hadn’t actually threatened me, I’d imagined that if I tried to cross the hall and reach the front door, he might block my way. Maybe it was cowardly and opportunistic to take advantage of his rapid switch to targeting Willie, but I did. Never step into a same-sex dog fight. You’ll only get bitten.

  “Willie, I’m sorry,” I said lamely.

  I brushed past Dale and the pathetically cowering Edna. As I undid a dead bolt and pulled open the front door, I heard Dale laughing at Willie. Then, of all things, Dale started singing an old Beatles song. His voice wasn’t bad. The effect was freakish and weirdly poignant, partly because he was right. You can’t buy love.

  Chapter 12

  “SO is that sick or what?” I said to Rita, who was curled up on her couch with Groucho, her rapidly aging dachshund, on her lap.

  Leah, Ian, Seth, Miriam, a mollified Jeff, and four or five of Leah’s other best friends had taken over my place to study the immortal James Dean (double feature: Rebel Without a Cause, East of Eden) on Rita’s VCR. She and I were drinking gin on the rocks in her maturely furnished and frigidly air-conditioned living room, which is a floor and a cut above mine.

  I went on telling Rita about the Johnsons. “The same names! Three Mitchell Dale Johnsons! I mean, people think that, in a way, my family is sort of eccentric. And I was embarrassed, once I got old enough to really understand that if you heard ‘Holly Winter,’ especially if you heard my middle name, you’d assume I was a dog. What else could you think?”

  When Rita took a sip of her gin, the gold bracelets on her wrist clanked, and Groucho’s eyes opened. “What is your middle name?” she asked. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard it.”

  “Good,” I said. “Anyway, I went through a phase of being ashamed of having a name that sounded like a dog’s, but that isn’t half as bad as having exactly the same name as everyone else. So why would anyone do that? I mean, why name your first two kids after yourself? And the only rational explanation is that the guy Mitchell, Senior, was really determined to have a son named after him, and he did it twice in case one of them died. And the first didn’t, or at least he hasn’t yet. So wouldn’t the second one feel like sort of a spare part? Wouldn’t he end up saying to himself, Well, they had me in case the first one got broken? But since the first one didn’t, they’re probably thinking that they’re sorry they wasted their time and money on me. Sick, right?”

  “It depends.” The more gin Rita drinks, the more everything depends. “Narcissistic. But pathological?”

  “Come on. How would you like it?”

  “You think I’m kidding? It does depend. Sometimes it’s clearly pathological. I once saw a family where the mother, the daughter, and the dog were all named Alice.” When a therapist says she saw a family, she doesn’t mean that she just looked at them. “Fact. Alice. All three.”

  “Oh,” I said. “What kind of a dog was it?”

  “Holly, really. The point is, it was a dog. As a matter of fact, it was a cocker spaniel.”

  “Oh.”

  “What does it matter?”

  “Some breeds are more sensitive than others,” I said authoritatively. “So what happened to the three Alices?”

  “You don’t want to know.” She looked down at Groucho and patted his head. I hoped she couldn’t see how frail he’d bec
ome.

  “Yes, I do,” I corrected her. “How come they ended up with you?”

  “They put the dog to sleep, and the daughter got the message. What happened was that one day she got home from school, and the dog wasn’t there, and they told her they’d taken it to the vet and had it put to sleep.”

  “They murdered a dog named after...? Jesus. So what happened?”

  “So the daughter became more and more reclusive, developed a severe school phobia. And, naturally, insomnia. ‘Put to sleep’ was the parents’ phrase. And she had a psychotic episode. The business with the names and the dog wasn’t their only problem, of course.”

  “Names aren’t the Johnsons’ only problem, either. Another is what I was telling you before, that the house is like some dirty aquarium. Anyway, another thing is that Edna never leaves home. She has whatever that phobia is.”

  “Agoraphobia?”

  “Yes.”

  “And how old are the kids?”

  “They aren’t. Willie is eighteen or so, I think, and Dale— that’s the second Junior—is older. The birth dates were on the family tree. Dale is maybe twenty or twenty-one. And the oldest one is somewhere around twenty-five.”

  “They all live at home?”

  “You know, you really have a prejudice about that. There are lots of perfectly nice, ordinary families where that’s normal.”

  “Sometimes it is,” Rita said. “It depends.”

  “Jesus.”

  “I’m serious. It depends on whether they don’t leave or they can’t. There’s a big difference.”

  “Well, I hope Willie can. And does. Although...”

  “Although?”

  “Although they both, Willie and Dale, they both treat her as if she’s not all there, not compos mentis, which is true enough, if you ask me. I feel awful. I didn’t mean to, but I really did make things worse for Willie. I shouldn’t have done that.”

  People who don’t have a therapist as a friend and tenant sometimes imagine that therapists are always telling everyone not to feel guilty about anything, but those people don’t know Rita. “No, you shouldn’t have,” she said. Then she added, “But how were you to know?”

  The next morning after I fed and walked the dogs and gave them some water, I took both of them back outside to the driveway and used a shedding tool, a wire slicker brush, a metal comb, and three or four hairbrushes to remove what I guessed was enough woolly undercoat to make one mitten or a narrow scarf. After that, starting in the kitchen, I vacuumed up the fur in every room except Leah’s—she was still asleep—and finished by redoing the kitchen, because the baseboards and comers were already starting to fill up again. As I vacuumed, I thought about what would happen if you crossbred poodles, which don’t shed, with malamutes. If you planned it right, you see, you’d get the ultimate perfect dog, the French-Alaskan poolamute: a nonshedding, weight-pulling sled dog of wolflike appearance that would become an Obedience Trial Champion and say woo-woo instead of ruff-ruff. But will the American Kennel Club recognize the breed?

  When Leah finally got up, I said to her, “Hey, since you’ve basically taken over Kimi’s training, and since they’re both really starting to shed, I wonder if maybe you could take over grooming her? I mean, since she’s more or less your dog for the summer.”

  “Sure,” Leah said, and with a mock-Spanish accent added, “No pro-blem,” exactly what Jeff, Ian, Emma, Noah, and all of the others kept saying and exactly how they kept saying it.

  “And help with the vacuuming?”

  “No pro-blem.”

  “Good. Kimi’s been out and fed, so don’t let her convince you she hasn’t had breakfast, because she has. I want to do an article about Rose, a memorial thing, and probably it’s not national enough for Dog’s Life, but one of the local ones might take it, and I just feel like doing it. Anyway, I need to go look something up, and then I’ll be back.”

  The famous person-obedience academy down the street from me has the largest university library system in the world, but its canine collection is limited. That’s okay. Although the AKC library is inconveniently located in New York City, the Stanton Memorial is right on my own Appleton Street, and dogs are allowed. By the time Rowdy and I crossed Huron Avenue, the heat was getting to Rowdy, and at the Stanton he sprawled on his side and slept under the long oak table in the reference room while I looked up the old stats on top obedience dogs and top obedience poodles. Rose Engleman’s last poodle, Vera, had just under a thousand lifetime points, and in the last year she was listed, about a hundred more than Heather Ross’s last poodle. On the other hand, Panache, the poodle Heather had now, was in the top twenty-five by points earned last year, and Caprice wasn’t, maybe because she was younger than Panache, and also because Heather hit a lot more trials than Rose did. In the Delaney System, which recognizes only the dogs that place first through fourth in an obedience class and in which the dog gets one point for every dog it defeats in its class and... Well, never mind. Anyway, over the years, in the Delaney System, Rose and Heather looked close enough so that if I’d been as competitive as Heather, I’d have felt relieved to know that statistics for next year would show Panache a comfortable few hundred points ahead of Caprice, if not a lot more.

  I also chanced to notice that the top dog in the Delaney System, O.T.Ch. Shoreland’s Big Harry Deal—a golden, what else?—had 5,042 points, whereas the highest ranked Alaskan malamute, Northeast’s Tahkela Amarok, C.D., had 44. So, 5,042 points? Would I kill for that? Would I kill for 44? Well, no. Malamutes are malamutes, and nobody would kill for 44 points. But poodles aren’t malamutes, and the top poodle had 3,456 points and came in third in the Delaney ratings, and I couldn’t help thinking that although I wouldn’t actually murder someone for 3,456 points and third place, I might be slightly tempted to do some harm. And if I might, what about Heather?

  Chapter 13

  MALAMUTES believe that summer is your fault. On the ninety-plus-degree sidewalk outside the library, Rowdy glared at me and pulled his statue-of-Balto act. I had to make him heel to get him to move at all, but when I released him on my block of Appleton, a few houses from home, he bolted to the back steps, flew up them, and then eyed me impatiently while I unlocked the door. When I did, I knew right away that Leah had gone out: The phone was ringing. Whatever other household tasks people her age may fail to perform, one they never, ever neglect is answering the phone.

  I picked up in the kitchen, held the receiver to my ear, and with my free hand, turned on the cold water tap, filled Rowdy’s bowl, and lowered it to the floor.

  “Holly?” The female voice was familiar.

  I said yes.

  “Lisa Donovan. From dog training? ’Member I said I’d talk to my neighbor? The one that weaves?”

  “Sure.”

  “Well, she’s interested. Her name’s Marcia Brawley.” When she’d spelled it for me and given me a phone number, we spent forty-five minutes talking about dogs and trading information about upcoming shows, obedience judges, and show sites. We weren’t just gossiping. It’s a waste of time and money to enter a dog if the obedience rings are jammed together next to the dumpsters on a broken-asphalt surface and the judge hasn’t read the AKC regulations for ten years because he knows what he likes.

  As soon as I got off the phone with Lisa, I called Marcia Brawley. I’ll admit that by that time, I was hoping she wouldn’t want to talk about dogs, but she did. She was feeling guilty because a border collie needs to work, and she was afraid that hers, Rascal, was becoming neurotic because he lacked a sense of purpose. What did I think about getting him a pair of sheep so he’d have something to herd? And, of course, she could use the wool, speaking of which, was it a scarf I had in mind? And did I want pure malamute wool or sheep blend?

  “Oh, pure,” I said. Just the idea of the blend put me off, mostly, I suppose, because it suggested crossing a malamute and a sheep, in other words, a nightmare: the strongest, stupidest animal on earth, and given the predator-prey conflict in
herent in its hybrid genes, one that would probably go for its own throat. “Unless there’s some reason...?”

  “Not really. It’s a matter of what you like. You want to look at some samples? I’ve got a nice Akita wall hanging, but they’re picking it up tonight, so if you want to see it, it’d better be today.”

  The Brawleys’ big mauve Dutch Colonial was on the street across from the park, and the sun-room that ran along one side of the house was Marcia’s studio. A loom about the size of a baby grand piano sat at one end, and except for the two chairs in which we were sitting and the worktable between us, the remaining contents consisted almost exclusively of natural fibers. Underfoot was a rough-woven woolen rug in the colors of Joseph’s coat. Hand-loomed curtains kept out the sun. Neatly arrayed along all nonglass wall surfaces were spools, bobbins, and rolls of yam and thread, most in natural shades of brown, gray, and off-off-white, but a few in loden, berry, and heather.

  I’m so used to Cambridge that I seldom notice the absence of makeup—you’re deported to the suburbs if you’re caught with blue eye shadow—but Marcia Brawley’s invisible lashes were more emphatic than any mascara, and her Scandinavian hair accented her sun-damaged skin.

  She’d carefully wrapped the Akita hanging in tissue and was now spreading out a long, wide muffler woven in six or eight different shades of brown. “What about something like this? Only not this color, of course. Unless you want it dyed. You don’t want it dyed, do you? You want it natural.”

  “I think he’d like that better,” I said. I pulled a tightly sealed plastic bag from my purse and handed it to her. “This is just what’s coming out now. My dogs both have white undercoats.

  Kimi has some tan, but not much. But once they start losing the guard coat, it’ll be gray—some dark, some light—and black, and more white...”

  “Of course.” She opened the bag and, like a baby rubbing a blanket ribbon, ran the fur between her fingers.