In violation of my mother’s dictates, I mashed a few flakes of salmon into the rice I hadn’t yet choked down, forked a bit onto my tongue, and swallowed, but when I reached for more wine, my glass was empty. The closer of the two bottles on the table stood between Doug and Rita. I tuned into their conversation and decided to settle for water. Doug had discovered that Rita was a therapist. When people find out what I do, they’re apt to ask for professional opinions, and I’m happy to advise either that Rover should be taught what he is supposed to do (How do I get him to quit jumping, barking, leash-lunging...?) or that Rover should not be allowed to run loose in the first place (How do I get him to quit chasing cars, running away…?)
Although the same two answers cover almost all dog-behavior questions, neither seemed even remotely relevant to the problem Doug was currently presenting to Rita. “Morris kept insisting, ‘Oh, just do it! Do it, and you will feel so much better!’ And his own parents were deceased, so it was easy for him, but, even so, I knew he was right, but then... I remember the moment so clearly, when this realization came tumbling down on me that it was absolutely impossible. It was Mother’s birthday, and my father and I went to the florist, and we’d selected the most gorgeous arrangement for her, from both of us, and there was a little card to go with it.” Doug paused. Rita waited. He sighed. “Instead of signing it first, for some reason, I handed it to him, and I gave him a pen.”
“And?”
“And I’ll never forget it. He wrote ‘Albert J. Winer, C.P.A.’ ”
“Oh, God,” Rita said.
“After that, what could I do? And Morris would not take it seriously. He kept making up letters for me to write. ‘Dear Mr. Winer, Your son is gay. Love, Douglas S. Winer, A.B.’ I was always half terrified that Morris would get carried away and let something slip when they were around.”
“And now?” Rita asked gently.
“And now,” Doug told her, “I’m half-terrified that I will. It would almost be better if Morris had gone ahead and done it for me.” His voice had dropped to a whisper that would never have reached Rita’s unaided ears.
“Seconds, anyone?” Stephanie asked briskly. “Thirds?”
Her human guests made noises about not having room for another thing, but as soon as we began to clear the table, Rowdy leaped to his big white paws and started to whine and ah-roo. Stephanie was all sympathy. Stephanie did not own a malamute. Give Rowdy an inch, and he’ll take 196,950,000 square miles, which, I should explain, in case you don’t happen to live with a malamute and thus haven’t been driven to find out exactly how far your dog will push you, is the surface area of the planet Earth.
“After Rowdy has settled down and behaved himself,” I told Stephanie, “then he can have a treat, but not now.”
“Well, then, Ruffly can wait, too,” she said. “After we have his cake, the dogs can share the leftovers.”
Rowdy was as likely to share food as he was to burst forth in fluent Mandarin. The doling out of treats, I decided, would be one situation that Stephanie would not control. With one of those aren’t-you-a-stingy-mean-owner, poor-darling-sweet-big-doggie looks, Stephanie settled for depositing bits of steak and bone-free salmon in a little dish that she put in the refrigerator. Ruffly eyed her and danced expectantly around, but to my surprise she held firm. “Later! I promise. Later.”
When the table had been cleared and reset for dessert, we resumed our places, but instead of resting quietly at Stephanie’s feet, Ruffly now perched on her lap, his head winningly cocked to one side, ears akimbo. The sky had darkened to the color of pale smoke, and someone had turned on the outside lights to make the deck a bright stage. The indistinguishable mounds and lumps of the backyard shrubs became our invisible audience. One of the third-floor windows of Alice Savery’s house glowed. I wondered whether she’d taken a loge seat. Stolid and expressionless, Matthew emerged from the kitchen, followed by Leah, who carried the cake, a white-iced rectangle heavily decorated with tiny American flags. The candle flames made hollows of Leah’s bright eyes. Doug led the singing. His strong, true baritone miraculously kept everyone, even me, more or less on key.
By the time we were eating our cake, the floodlights had attracted a mass of hideous brown moths that kept hurtling themselves against the hot bulbs, and I was concentrating on not scratching the mosquito bites on my ankles. Although my rural childhood should have inured me to bugs, I still hate blackflies, but urban insects don’t really bother me, and the temperature had finally dropped low enough to let me feel human again. From the way Stephanie and Rita acted, however, I concluded that Manhattan did not experience a black fly season. With Leah serving as his cheerful research assistant, Matthew took advantage of the opportunity to collect specimens for his flora and fauna unit, but the rest of us moved inside.
Stephanie had ended up with the kitchen in food-free order, so after carefully reassessing Rowdy’s on-leash response to Ruffly, I gave in and let the big boy loose. As if to confirm Stephanie’s obvious conviction that I was ridiculously mistrustful of my giant pussycat of a dog, Rowdy gave Ruffly a perfunctory sniff, ambled around, and then dashed to the living room, where people were gathering around the coffee table. Rowdy shook himself all over, fell to the floor at Stephanie’s feet, and trained one almond-shaped eye on her and the other on the table, which held a sugar bowl, a pitcher of cream, and a plate of cookies, as well as a coffeepot and our cups. Rowdy prefers his with cream and sugar, but he’d happily have lapped up the cream, and he was a master sugar-bowl thief, too. Stephanie reached down to stroke him. “What a good boy Rowdy is. Why does she say such terrible things about you?” Without even a glance in my direction, Stephanie suddenly took a cookie from the plate, fed it to Rowdy, and nearly lost her fingers. My eyes darted to Ruffly. He was lying on the floor a yard or so away from Stephanie, his head resting rather forlornly on his forepaws, his immense ears as close to drooping as I’d ever seen them. I wondered whether he remembered the promised leftovers he hadn’t received.
While Stephanie was still shaking the fingers of her hand and exclaiming happily, Ruffly abruptly jumped to his feet, barked, ran to Stephanie, pawed at her, fled through the dining room, and raced back, the perfect picture of the hearing dog at work.
“The phone,” Stephanie explained. “Excuse me.” Rising, she headed for the kitchen. Rita reached up to adjust the volume of her aids. Doug, Steve, Rita, and I looked at one another. Doug asked whether the phone had rung.
“It’s very soft,” I explained. “Before Stephanie got Ruffly, Matthew had had about all he could take of really loud phones, so now they keep it just loud enough for Ruffly to... Steve, where are you—?”
He was taking big strides toward the kitchen. “I’m going to see for myself.” I didn’t understand his smile. Curiosity sent Rita, Doug, and me after him.
Stephanie stood by the counter. Her left hand clamped the receiver of the big white phone to her ear, but she spoke to us. Her voice was angry and frightened. “As usual. Nothing but a dial tone.” As she hung up, she automatically reached into the jar of treats. Steve moved in fast. He took the jar, put it on the counter, knelt down, and gently wrapped his big hands around Ruffly’s little head. Two pairs of intelligent eyes stared at one another. “Gotcha,” Steve told Ruffly. “But no hard feelings. While it lasted, buddy, it was a real good game.”
And then Steve spelled it out: Consistently rewarded with treats for working the sound of a ringing phone, Ruffly had cleverly discovered that his performance yielded the same happy result when the phone didn’t ring. Stephanie’s perfect hearing dog had mastered the trick of working a nonexistent sound.
32
In the next ten minutes, I decided that the Being who’d applied the no-force method to Morris and Stephanie was the Supreme Trainer who binds us all in perfect heel position. Morris Lamb had died because he’d been foolish. If Morris had had a heart attack or if he’d perished in a plane crash, Doug would still have inherited Morris’s estate, and Morris’s
obviously natural or accidental death would still have banished Doug’s worry that Morris would slip up and inform the elderly Winers that their son was gay. Stephanie would still have everything she wanted. She had received no crank phone calls. The ultrasound device, if it existed at all, was a malfunctioning Yap Zap-Per that Morris had tucked away somewhere, or a neighbor’s long-range kennel silencer never aimed deliberately at Ruffly’s sensitive ears. Alice Savery was not trying to rid Highland Street of dogs; Ivan was not playing Robin Badfellow outside Stephanie’s windows; and Matthew was not trying to drive away the mother who had left his father to follow him to college. Standing outside the ring, I had discerned an elaborate heeling pattern where none existed. What I’d been observing were not, after all, the exercises of my own sport, but random drawings in a lottery that Morris Lamb lost.
“Matthew is probably murdering those helpless moths,” Stephanie was saying. “I hope he isn’t asking Leah to watch.”
My mouth tasted like bitter coffee. With his uncanny ability to read my intentions, Rowdy stood up and made a brief request that consisted mainly of rrr and www. Ruffly’s head turned. His eyes brightened. He bounced from his perch on Stephanie’s lap, and his wiry black-and-tan body shot across the room and vanished. Rowdy’s bulk followed.
“Not again!” Stephanie laughed. “The phone isn’t...?”
“No,” Doug assured her.
I looked at Steve. He shook his head. “Not a sound.”
“I’d better find out what he wants.” Stephanie rose.
“Shouldn’t Ruffly be barking?” Rita asked. “He isn’t, is he?”
“No,” I said, “he isn’t. He does his whole routine if it’s one of his sounds. Otherwise, he might just show some kind of interest. That’s why Stephanie’s supposed to watch him.”
“Probably the fireworks,” Steve said. “From the Esplanade.”
Stephanie’s voice reached us from the kitchen. She was conversing with a partner different from herself but highly intelligent, a gifted child, perhaps, or a wise and kindly extraterrestrial. “What is it? Tell me what it is,” we heard her say.
“We’d better let her know about the fireworks,” Rita said. “Steve’s probably right, and she can’t hear them.”
As Rita stood up, Doug’s face took on a look of boyish mischief. He boomed like the cannons that get shot at the conclusion of The 1812 Overture and, when Rita gave a startled glance over her shoulder, switched to the “Marseillaise.” With an upswing of his arms, he led all of us in a march toward Ruffly. Doug’s rich, trained voice was infinitely better than Morris’s enthusiastic bellowing, and Doug lacked Morris’s expansiveness. Even so, the performance was unmistakably Morris’s.
Once we were assembled in the kitchen, Doug became himself again. “Stephanie, I am so sorry. I never thought. This is unforgivable. Ruffly is working, and we’ve gone and interrupted him.”
But we hadn’t. Ruffly’s concentration was so intense that if the Boston Pops had deserted the Esplanade for Highland Street, the dog would probably have kept to his task, which consisted of posing stiff-legged before one of the glass doors to the deck while becoming all ears. The dog’s little body was so rigid that the air around him seemed to vibrate. No one spoke. To prevent Rowdy from breaking the respectful silence, I caught his eye, raised a finger to my lips, and rested a hand on his head. Ruffly suddenly quivered all over, veered around, pawed at Stephanie’s dress, gave one sharp bark, and again pointed his nose at the glass door.
“Ruffly, what is it?” Stephanie spoke exactly as if she expected a verbal reply.
Like an adept translator, Rowdy whined a question.
“Shh!” I told him.
Ruffly’s answer came suddenly and almost violently. He barked so loudly that Rita’s and Stephanie’s hands shot to their aids. His black-and-tan head twisted around toward Stephanie; his paws frantically scraped the door Panels.
“Desperate to do his doo-doo?” Doug asked frivolously.
Stephanie’s perfunctory smile was half-frown. Her hand fingered the squash blossom necklace as if she were counting rosary beads. “This isn’t how he asks. Whatever it is, he thinks it’s important. I’d better check it out. Ruffly, I’ll find out. I understand. We’ll go see what it is. My turn now. Good boy.”
She reached for the door. I grabbed Rowdy’s collar and tried to remember where I’d left his leash. Reading my mind, Steve spotted the leash on the counter, fastened it to Rowdy’s buckle collar, and handed it to me.
“Training collar?” I asked. I usually remove the slip collar and leash together. Then I remembered that to prevent Rowdy from choking himself, I’d taken off the chain when I’d tethered him to the deck post earlier in the evening. I’d probably left it outside.
Doug, Rita, and Steve had followed Stephanie and Ruffly to the deck, where Doug was bending over the gas grill.
“Doug, that’s not what Ruffly means.” Stephanie followed the determined little dog down the steps to the yard.
Rita was fiddling with the controls on her aids. “Holly, do you hear anything?”
I listened. “No. Not really. Steve, can you hear the fireworks?”
“No. Rita? Turn the volume way up on those things.”
Rita had once explained to me that the pioneers of psychology studied mental processes by examining their own inner lives. It seemed to me that if the introspective method ever came back in vogue, I could switch careers and dredge a book out of the depths of my own stupidity-Never before had it crossed my mind that Rita might hear better with her aids than I did with my so-called normal ears.
Doug straightened up. “Does anyone smell smoke?”
I sniffed. “It’s the charcoal. Could that be what Ruffly is—?”
“Probably not, unless it’s generating sound,” Steve said. “Rita, are you picking up anything?”
“Static. Loud background noise. Cars. Rowdy’s tags.” She paused. “Where’s Ruffly?”
“Down here somewhere,” Doug called from the yard.
I abandoned my search for the training collar, and Rowdy and I descended the stairs. As we did, I could smell the glowing charcoal and a lingering hint of steak and salmon. So could Rowdy, who lunged toward the Weber grills. “This way,” I told him. “And there’s nothing there. All you’ll do is burn yourself.”
The immediate vicinity of the house was bright with floodlights, but Stephanie’s voice came from the darkness. “Damn! Where is he? Ruffly? Ruffly, I know you mean it, and I’m trying. Where are you?”
Ruffly’s answering bark carried a note of exasperation. As I headed toward the back of the lot, the white of Stephanie’s dress appeared ahead of me, and as my eyes adapted to the dark, I saw that she was next to the shrub border that separated Morris’s yard from Alice Savery’s. Leaves rustled.
“Maybe he’s after an animal,” I said to Steve. “There’s an old carriage house back there, and there are supposed to be raccoons living in it.”
“There are,” Doug said. “Morris used to insist on feeding them.”
“Christ,” Steve muttered.
“That’s what I told him,” Doug said. “After all, they are wild animals.”
“Oh, God, it’s not a skunk, is it?” Rita cannot be talked out of the belief that skunks not only can direct their spray, but will aim it straight at her.
“Oh, all right, Ruffly. If we really have to. But wait for me.” Stephanie pushed her way through the shrubbery.
Doug followed her. “If someone finds us in her yard, we’re going to get a good scolding, and if someone sees a dog violating the leash law, God forbid, are we ever going to catch it. Do you know that you-know-who once tried to file an official complaint against Nelson and Jennie for playing in their own yard? Can you believe it? That woman has rabies on the brain. Her carriage house is positively crawling with raccoons, and she’s utterly phobic about fully immunized dogs being off leash.”
Rowdy and I had cleared the shrubs. I held a branch for Steve, who was in
back of Rowdy and me, and we waited for Rita, whose high heels were slowing her down. “What is this stuff?” she complained.
“Laurel, I think, or maybe azaleas,” I said. “Whatever it is, it doesn’t have thorns. Rita, why don’t you take off your shoes?”
She crashed out of the bushes. “This is horrible! If God had intended plants to grow wild, He’d never have invented pots.” She sniffed. “I smell smoke.”
“Rita, calm down,” I told her. “It’s probably just someone else’s charcoal. I mean, it is the Fourth—” But it didn’t smell like briquettes. I wished that Alice Savery’s house had motion-sensitive lights like the ones on the path beside Morris’s. I could see Rita, who was right next to me, but the others were ahead of us somewhere in the shadows. The white of Rowdy’s face stood out, and the white of his tail was waving over his back. Ahead of us, Ruffly was hard at work. His barks were increasingly urgent. I felt a surge of irrational dissatisfaction with Rowdy. His hearing probably wasn’t quite as sharp as Ruffly’s, and he lacked Ruffly’s passionate attention to sound, but he could at least make some effort to help. Rita was sputtering. “These things are set wrong!
Everything is so damn loud that I can’t hear anything. Holly—”
Doug collided with me. “It’s the carriage house,” he exclaimed. He dashed off.
“He must be going to call—” Rita began.
“Of course he is. Rita—” I was going to tell her to hurry up, but at that moment Rowdy ran out of patience.
I found myself hauled like a racing sled toward the carriage house at the rear of Alice Savery’s property. There were no lights on in the building itself, but spots mounted high in the trees of an adjoining yard revealed a distraught Stephanie. She paced in front of the tall doors of what looked like a small bam. “Ruffly, your work is all done. I’ll take over. My turn now,” she was saying. “Good boy. Thank you. It’s okay now. I’ll take over.” Ruffly, however, kept frantically barking, jumping in the air, and racing back and forth between Stephanie and the building. Catching sight of me, Stephanie asked anxiously, “Can you hear anything? He will not calm down. Is there a smoke alarm going off in there?”
Ruffly Speaking Page 22