“Gypsum!” Alice Savery’s loud, dictatorial tone made the noun sound like an imperative verb.
Stephanie looked bewildered.
“Gypsum,” I interjected. “It helps undo salt damage. It’s worth a try.”
Alice Savery’s icy gaze was wandering somewhere in back of us, but I assumed that she was listening, because she snorted. Before that, I’d always thought that snorters pursued their hobby strictly in private, but Alice Savery actually managed to agitate the air in her nose in some Way that produced a remarkably loud and scornful noise. If Stephanie hadn’t been there, I might even have asked her to teach me how she’d done it, just out of curiosity, of course. Scorn isn’t a reaction I often need to express, and when the occasion arises, words suffice.
“Well,” said Stephanie, “if you have any of this, uh, gypsum, I’m sure that Matthew would be glad to help do whatever one does with it, Miss Savery. He isn’t home right now, but when he gets home, I’m sure he’d be happy to help. Maybe he could... Is it any use to dig up the affected area?”
Alice Savery said nothing—it’s possible that the sight of Ruffly squatting on the lawn rendered her speechless. I touched Stephanie’s arm to get her attention. “Stephanie, uh, where do you keep your pooper-scooper? I’ll run over and get it.”
“Oh, don’t bother,” Stephanie said.
Alice Savery’s eyes narrowed. Mine probably did, too. Cleaning up after your dog is one of the basics. I wasn’t familiar with the program that had trained Ruffly and placed him with Stephanie, but the particular program didn’t matter. Every hearing dog organization drills its human students in the fundamentals of responsible ownership and emphasizes that every hearing dog is an ambassador for all hearing dogs. How could Stephanie possibly...?
She redeemed herself. Pulling a plastic bag from a side pocket of her dress, she said casually, “I’ll take care of it.”
While Stephanie was heading across the lawn, Alice Savery grumbled audibly. Her piercing eyes moved back and forth as if scanning for the presence of a sinister eavesdropper. When she spoke, her voice was rank with suspicion. “One sees what one sees.” The woman had the air of reluctantly granting me a glimpse into some vast store of secret knowledge. “One hears what one hears.” People who watch and listen often do, I thought.
22
Existentialism died this year. Or, maybe, yesteryear; I can’t be sure. Its trappings survive. Take Leah: Camus and black. But the essence perished, and what killed it was the normalization of the absurd. I must be behind the times, or, maybe, unbeknownst to me, I’m stuck in some crucial stage of the grieving process. I’m working on it, though. I’ve practiced the sentence until I can get it out fine. All I can’t do is utter it with a straight face. “Hi, I’m Holly,” I say, “and this is my swine, Luigi.”
Not that I have anything against pigs—or against any of the other pitifully inadequate dog substitutes with which the spiritually impoverished attempt to enrich their bleak, allergic lives. On the contrary, I’ve always been a fan of the theater of the absurd, and if you doubt me, consider the angst that’s plagued me ever since a neighbor of mine, Frank, acquired Leo, a Vietnamese potbellied pig. Not that there’s anything wrong with Leo. Far from it. He’s hideous, and his hoofs require rather frequent trimming, but he’s perfectly friendly. There’s nothing wrong with Frank, either. No, the sick individual in the family isn’t Leo or Frank, but Frank’s wife, a frigid woman with whom poor Frank endured five unspeakably frustrating years of sham marriage, sixty maddening months of abstinence with a so-called partner who denied him the most basic marital right of all: the right to a family dog. Her excuse? Not headaches. Sneezing. Painful, watery eyes. Asthma, I think. And when she was desperate to get out of it, hives, too. Frank’s dilemma? Roman Catholic. And, in fact, the Church is what saved his marriage: It was Father Leo Bianci, S.J., who proposed the solution—the pig. Hence, the name.
My anguish? When I told Steve Delaney about Leo, I casually added something like, “Gee, I wonder what Rowdy and Kimi will make of a pig,” and, instead of pausing to mull over the situation the way he usually does, Steve had an instant reply: “Pork chops.”
So when I arrived home from Stephanie Benson’s, I was glad to find Steve there, not only because I’m always happy to see him, but also because, ever since Leo’s arrival, I hate walking Rowdy and Kimi alone at night. In the daytime, I can always spot Leo from a distance and do a swift about-turn, but, after dark, I’m always afraid that we’ll come upon the pig suddenly and that the dogs will lunge before I can stop them. So Steve is always a good dog-walking companion, but if, God forbid, one of the dogs somehow managed to get loose and attack Leo, a veterinarian would obviously be the perfect person to have on hand.
Steve had let himself in and was sitting at the kitchen table idly fooling around with Rowdy and Kimi while simultaneously drinking Geary’s and studying an article on salivary cysts. Anyone with a delicate stomach does well to avoid veterinary medicine and, for that matter, dogs altogether, but, so far as I know, nothing actually compels vets to crave spaghetti whenever they’re reading up on tapeworms. Salivary cysts? Press on them, and what you get is brownish fluid, but don’t tell Geary’s I said so. Maine needs all the business it can get.
The evening was cool for Cambridge in early July, and pig-free, too, at least on the route we took, Concord to Fayerweather, then across Huron and up the sociogeo-graphic hill toward Governor Weld’s house and Brattle Street. Steve walked Kimi, and I took Rowdy, who suddenly becomes a one-person dog whenever he decides that Kimi is edging him out in their rivalry for my affection. As we walked, I told Steve about everything that had happened at Stephanie Benson’s, with particular emphasis on Ruffly, of course.
“What he did was very, very sudden,” I said. “One second, he was standing there, and the next second, he’d jerked his head to the side and flattened his ears. Steve, it was exactly as if someone had slapped him.”
“And what was he doing just before that?”
“Standing there, I think.”
“Alert?”
“He’s always alert. His ears were up. And if I remember it right, his tail was wagging a little. But he wasn’t reacting to one of his sounds, if that’s what you mean, and the doorbell wasn’t ringing or anything like that. I don’t know! He was just there."
“Any trembling?”
“I don’t think so. He did seem frightened, I guess, but I don’t think he was shaking.”
“And after?Anything about his gait?”
“Nothing. Why? When you saw him, did You...?”
“No.”
“You look as if there’s something…”
“I’d better get a neurological consult. Treating these assistance dogs—”
“Steve, I am telling you, it didn’t look neurological. You should’ve seen it! It just did not look medical.”
“That’s a real risky assumption, Holly. I wish I’d seen it. One of the things about treating these dogs is that the owners depend on them, so you’re real reluctant to bring the animal in for observation. If Mrs. Benson’s open to it, I’m going to stop by this weekend.”
“I’m sure she will be, and she understands about tonight.” Steve trains with Cambridge, too. Since we don’t meet in the summer, he’d assumed he’d have that Thursday evening free and had volunteered to do a rabies immunization clinic at a local shelter.
We paused to let the dogs sniff an overgrown privet hedge. Rowdy made a couple of passes at it, cocked his leg, lowered it, turned around, and hit the spot again. Then Kimi checked it out and, not to be outdone, squeezed her hindquarters against the privet and executed a full rear-end bounce. Steve laughed. A man who admires the sight of a bitch lifting both legs at once? And a vet, too? The man for me. Ah, love.
After this romantic little interlude, we returned to the topic of Ruffly, and Steve said, “Tell me about the environment.”
“What?” The request threw me for a second. Sure, that hyperintellectual Of
f-Brattle coldness is toxic. But enough to sicken a dog?
“Anything that could serve as a stimulus,” Steve explained patiently.
“I just had a thought. If there is a stimulus, then wouldn’t Morris’s dogs have shown some response to it, too?”
“It’s worth finding out,” Steve said.
“I’ll ask Doug Winer. He has Morris’s dogs. He’ll know. Also, after it happened, I went outside to see if there was anything there, and there wasn’t, really, except that Ivan, the little boy Leah’s always talking about, was right in the middle of the next-door neighbor’s lawn dumping a lot of salt there.”
“That old trick.”
“Well, with this woman, it really was meaner than it sounds, because her garden is incredible. She must work on it all the time. So it’s not like killing plants in my yard. It’s more like doing something to one of my dogs, except that the grass doesn’t actually suffer. But from her point of view, Miss Savery’s, that’s more or less what it’s like. Really, the garden is her dog! And Ivan had some friends with him, and they set off cherry bombs. Anyhow, Stephanie and Ruffly came out, and then while Stephanie was talking to Alice Savery, Ruffly messed on her lawn, and the sort of strange thing was, that’s one of the things she complains about—she actually went to the police about it; Kevin told me—but Stephanie has no idea. Stephanie had a plastic bag with her, and she cleaned up after Ruffly right away, but Alice Savery didn’t say anything to her about it.”
We reached Huron, and Steve and I fell silent until we’d crossed. Huron’s a fairly busy street, even at night, and my wolf gray dogs are so effectively camouflaged for night predation that I’m always afraid that a driver will see me, overlook Rowdy and Kimi, and inadvertently head toward them. I like to imagine that if that ever happens, I’ll hurl myself between the dogs and the car, but some dreadful survival instinct would probably make me chicken out, and for the rest of my life, I’d have to live with the knowledge that I’d failed to save the best Part of myself.
When we reached the posh side of Huron, Steve asked, “You told Stephanie about the neighbor’s complaints?”
“No. I thought about it, but I decided, why worry her? Anyway, what just occurred to me was that if Ruffly is ever loose, which I don’t believe he is, then he could be getting into something, plants or weed killer or lawn chemicals or whatever, and maybe that’s what’s causing his odd behavior. But I really don’t think he is. Stephanie is the model dog owner, superresponsible, and even if she weren’t, she needs Ruffly. There’s just no way...”
“Since we’re—” Steve broke off. “Holly, any chance this is hand-shyness?”
“Stephanie?”
“Yeah, Stephanie,” he said. “Or someone else?”
“No! No one could, really. Ruffly is with Stephanie twenty-four hours a day. And Stephanie would just not hit him, and I can’t imagine that she’d let anyone hit him, either.” I was indignant.
“When this, uh, attack occurred, exactly where were the two of them?”
“In the kitchen. She was putting something in the refrigerator. Ruffly was... Well, he wasn’t sticking his nose in the refrigerator. He was maybe, I don’t know, two yards away?”
“And you were watching...?”
“Ruffly. In fact, I even remember what I was thinking. I was thinking that he must definitely have some Papillon in him. Because of the big ears.”
“Possible.” Steve nodded. “But what I’m asking is whether you could see Stephanie or whether the refrigerator door was blocking your view of her.”
I thought back. “Yeah. It was. That’s how it opens. So, no, I guess I could see part of her, her back or whatever. But, mostly, the door was in the way.”
“So, in theory, it is possible that she—”
“Physically, yes, she could’ve done something; she could’ve given him a signal or made some kind of gesture.”
“Someone outside?”
“Someone walking through the yard? I’m not sure. If that happens, he ought do something—go to the window, point toward it, show some kind of reaction. I suppose Ivan could’ve been there. Also, look. As far as I know, Matthew was with Leah. But Matthew isn’t a stranger, so maybe when it’s just Matthew coming home... I don’t know. Maybe whatever Ruffly does then is very low-key.”
“This neighbor?”
“Alice Savery. Well, Ruffly must be used to her, because Morris’s house—Stephanie’s, now—is right next to hers, and Miss Savery’s outside all the time, working in her garden, so, to a hearing dog, she must be background noise. Except... No, it couldn’t have been, I think, because I went out only a minute or two after it happened, and by then Ivan was on her front lawn. So if she’d been outside a few minutes earlier, she’d have noticed him. That’s one of her chronic complaints, kids in her yard. If she’d been outside, she’d have seen him, and she’d have done something, believe me.”
“Huh. And then we’re back to what the stimulus was.”
“Rolled-up newspaper! Steve, I just thought of it. That’s how you make a dog hand-shy from a distance. Or some other object. Those dogs don’t cringe when you reach toward them. What terrifies them is when you stand back and raise your arm.”
“That’s a point. So who...? The son could’ve, in theory. He lives there; he has access to the animal. And the owner. She does.”
“And if Ruffly ran loose, Alice Savery, too. But I don’t believe her; I don’t think he’s ever loose. Ivan? Steve, I really don’t think he’d hit a dog. He gets himself in a lot of trouble, and, admittedly, he does hang around Alice Savery’s, but probably not as much as she thinks he does.”
“Enough to become background noise?”
“I don’t know.”
“Me, neither,” Steve said.
“If we cut down here on Reservoir, we’ll go right by there,” I suggested. “You want to see the house?”
Neither of us expected Morris Lamb’s house to tell us anything, and, in fact, it didn’t. When we reached the little path that led to the backyard, the motion sensor detected us, and the floodlights came on. If Ruffly barked, I didn’t hear him. Alice Savery’s house was entirely dark, and, except in one upstairs room—Matthew’s, I guess—so was Stephanie’s. Even so, Steve and I lingered for a few minutes to ponder the question of whether a dog writer and a veterinarian could find happiness in a neighborhood that neither could afford, even pooling resources, i In front of Alice Savery’s, I deliberately edged Rowdy toward the famous fence. “Rowdy, lift your leg!” I urged him. All he did was sniff.
Class traitor.
23
“Fyodor! Not with your fingers! And if you’d stop wiggling, the avocado garnish wouldn’t slip, would it?” Doug’s distant scolding was barely audible over the lunchtime clatter in what must have been the kitchen at Winer & Lamb. His voice suddenly boomed in my ear: “Doug Winer. How may I help you?”
“Doug, it’s Holly Winter. I’m sorry to bother you.”
“It’s bedlam here,” Doug exclaimed happily, “and the decorators are insisting on closing us down so the painters can get in, and, well, it’s a perfect madhouse!” Doug’s elation in the face of self-created chaos was weirdly and uniquely Morris Lamb’s.
“You’re redecorating?”
“Long, long overdue.” Doug sounded like an especially grim bill collector. “The competition is ferocious. If We neglect the café, we’ll go under.”
As I’d done dozens of times before, I assured Doug that everything at Winer & Lamb was always wonderful.
Then I got to the point. Had Morris’s Bedlingtons shown any behavior that even remotely resembled Ruffly’s episodes? Had Morris’s dogs had any mysterious ailments? Had there ever been anything...?
Nelson, Doug promptly reported, had once eaten forty-three dollars in cash, but it hadn’t done him any harm. Was that what I meant?
No, not really, I said. I thanked Doug, anyway. While I had him on the phone, I asked about Ivan, but Doug didn’t recognize the name. He cert
ainly knew that the neighborhood children plagued Alice Savery, but, according to Doug, Morris had never had a problem with them, and they never bothered the other neighbors, either.
“Good God! They’re not after Stephanie, are they?” Doug sounded serious and alarmed.
“No, I really don’t think so. It’s just that we’re trying to find some explanation of what’s going on with Ruffly.” I used a phrase of Steve’s. “We’re casting a wide net.”
“She’s not making herself interesting, is she?”
“Stephanie?”
“Because that’s positively the worst thing to do. Morris kept trying to persuade Miss Savery that if she’d stop making herself interesting, then the children would find someone else to torment, but, of course, Miss Savery wouldn’t listen.”
Morris seemed a wildly improbable source of that good advice. Making himself interesting was one of Morris Lamb’s great pleasures. With me, at least, he’d always succeeded. The reflection and, in fact, my entire conversation with Doug Winer, left me in a peculiar mood that interfered with my work. Even at my most productive, I’d have found it difficult to get serious about a talking dog collar (“Pat me! Pat me!” “Clip my nails? Just try it!”) or a kitchen utensil specially designed to get every last glob of pet food out of the can, and the prospect of advising the readers of Dog’s Life to buy an aerosol pet repeller was ludicrous.
My mail didn’t help. In addition to the electric bill and a bunch of dog magazines, it brought an envelope from Dog’s Life containing a letter from some guy who must have read my column without understanding a word I’d ever written. “Dear Holly," it said. “My last dog died about four months ago, and I’m starting to think about a new one. What I want is a dog that can wander around the neighborhood and make friends and not get into trouble. What kind of dog can you let run loose?”
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