by Susan Conant
Maybe John somehow looked ready to hear about death. Maybe I simply needed to talk to someone who, regardless of anything else, obviously loved dogs. Possibly I hoped that in revealing myself to John, I would persuade him that it was unnecessary to lurk around outside. As we walked our dogs, I told him about Vinnie and how I feel about old dogs: They’re messengers, my link to Vinnie and the others I’ve lost, including, foolish as this may sound, my mother, who is certainly wherever good dogs go, and if they weren’t good when she arrived, they are now. If John found my confessions strange or silly, he had the grace not to say so. Then I told him about Rita and Groucho.
“He’s the worst-acting dog I ever liked,” I said. “It’s not his fault. Rita would not do anything with him. Well, she did housebreak him, but he doesn’t even understand sit or anything. So, when you consider Rita, he wasn’t too bad, and, of course, lately, he hasn’t been able to do anything, anyway. I mean, Rita takes good care of him, food, all his shots, that kind of thing, and since he’s been sick, she’s been taking him to Steve all the time, not that there’s all that much he can do.”
“Nice guy.”
“Yeah, and a good vet, too. He’ll be back tonight.” Was that a warning? I’m not sure. I went on. “The new guy he’s hired seems okay, I guess, and everyone there knows Groucho, so he’ll get lots of attention, but … Shit. I should probably call Rita. The damn thing is, though, even if he makes it this time, he’s not going to last much longer.”
“Yeah. There you have the one bad thing about dogs.”
“It’s why I won’t get a giant breed,” I said. “Like Irish wolfhounds? I love them, but you’re lucky if they live, what? Seven years? I can’t go through that all the time. In fact, I can hardly make it through as it is. You know, if you hadn’t been there …”
“Hey, forget it. Like I told you, I know what it’s like. As a matter of fact, I went through it not all that long ago myself.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Hit by a car?”
“No, nothing like that. And the damn thing was, she was pregnant.” He jerked his thumb at Bear. “His.”
Do you have any idea how many healthy, friendly, unwanted dogs and cats are killed each year in this country in humane society shelters? About fifteen million. Shelters? God’s arms, I guess. Even so, it seemed an inopportune time to deliver my usual spay-and-neuter lecture.
“That’s awful,” I said. “I’m really sorry.”
He shrugged and looked away. “You sure this dachshund’s in good hands? You don’t want to, uh, go take a look at him? Keep an eye on him?”
“Maybe I should,” I said. “I thought about it, but, for one thing, I’m half sure he wouldn’t know I was there, and he does know the technicians and everyone. He’s not in pain. It’s not as if I could do anything.” What? Watch him die. There was that, wasn’t there?
“You trust this guy?”
“Lee? I guess so. Jesus, I hope so, because Steve’s coming to Maine with me the day before Christmas, so if Groucho makes it till then, I’d better trust him. Why? Did you hear something about him?” I paused. “At dog training?”
If you don’t do obedience, you might imagine that dogs constitute our exclusive topic of conversation. Not so. We also discuss judges, top handlers, other clubs’ instructors, traveling dog experts, and local vets. I’d heard the latest on which judges never to show under, which top handlers ought to have their AKC privileges suspended, whose classes I ought to try, and whose seminars were worth the money. But vets? Except for having accidentally overheard what I assume was a facetious proposal on how to raise funds for German shepherd rescue—auctioning off a weekend with Steve Delaney—I hadn’t been privy to the raw vet talk for a while, except for the usual complaints and debates about how much Angell charges. If human dogdom had started growling and whining about Dr. Miner, I wanted to know.
But John denied it and added, “Somebody said Delaney’s good and doesn’t charge too much. And they say he likes big dogs. You know a lot about this other guy?”
“Steve says he’s got good credentials. I know his references were good. It was mostly one of Steve’s assistants, Lorraine, who hired him, more than Steve. She pretty much does the administrative stuff. And I took Rowdy to him for ear mites, and it turned out I was wrong. It was one of those mixed bacterial things, not mites. I don’t think he’s crazy about big dogs, but lots of vets aren’t, or at least they’re nervous around the ones they don’t know. And today, he seemed fine with Groucho. In fact, he was good, as far as I could tell. With Groucho. And he was sympathetic, too.”
“Huh,” John said.
“You sure you didn’t hear something?”
“No, I swear.”
“Would you say if you did?”
He laughed.
“He doesn’t have a long-term contract,” I said. “If people are unhappy … I mean, you wouldn’t be getting him fired or anything. Is there something Steve ought to talk to him about?”
“Don’t ask me,” he said.
I took him literally and changed the subject. We were on Huron, near the corner of Reservoir. “We’re almost home,” I said. “You want to come in? You want some coffee?” The best defense?
“Can’t,” he said, “but thanks. Okay if we walk you there?”
We turned left onto Appleton and when we reached my driveway, I opened the outside gate to the yard and hustled in Rowdy and Kimi so I could say good-bye to Bear without their help. By then, the dusk had turned to murky December darkness, and the floodlight over my back door didn’t let me see much of Bear except the tawny radiance of his thick coat. In lieu of looking at Bear—or the barren lilacs—I pulled off my gloves, gave Bear my palms to sniff, then, with his permission, gently ran my hands over him. As you probably know, dog massage is trendy these days, especially something called TT.E.A.M., The Tellington-Jones Every Animal Method, which is based on TTouches with your fingers and hands. Alternatively, you can buy special pet-massage tools with plastic teeth or rubber fingers. In any case, the dogs of au courant owners are now getting systematically stroked and rubbed, so if your dog has to settle for a tap on the head and a few thumps on the back, he may justifiably feel cheated.
Anyway, I didn’t TTouch Bear or whip out a massage brush, but aimlessly ran my hands over him and gently worked my fingers into his coat from head to tail. His head felt broad and a little rounded between the ears; his neck, muscular; his ribs, well sprung. By the time I’d worked my way to his tail, he’d let its sickle curve relax a bit, and I stroked it very lightly and tentatively. Some dogs hate to have anyone touch their hindquarters. Bear, though, wagged his tail between my hands. Have you ever seen an X ray of a dog’s tail? Or an anatomical drawing of a dog’s skeleton? Well, if not, go find a cuddly, relaxed, long-tailed dog, and check out his tail from base to tip. What you’ll notice is that the tail bones near the base, where it joins the body, are large and that as you move toward the tip, the subsequent bones become narrower and narrower. Like the tails of other dogs, Bear’s started out wide at the base, but it didn’t taper. Rather, it stayed wide for maybe four inches. Then it abruptly narrowed.
“What a strange tail he has!” I said. “Have you ever noticed this? It doesn’t taper. It just suddenly gets narrow. Did something happen to him?”
John shook his head. “It’s always been like that.”
“Well, it’s very unusual. When you touch him, you can’t miss it.” I looked at John, who was shuffling uncomfortably, eager to leave.
Hey, what were you doing lurking around under my lilacs? I wanted to ask. But I didn’t want to accuse him of doing anything, especially something so silly and so weirdly menacing.
11
Last August, the Becker County Humane Society, an all-volunteer organization in northern Minnesota, helped the local sheriff to raid a puppy mill. If you swear never again to buy so much as a rawhide chew toy from a pet shop that sells dogs, I’ll spare you the details except to say that the rescued dogs include
d a malamute mother and her litter of two-month-old puppies. One of the daughters found a good home in New England, and I’d been responsible for picking her up at Logan, all of which is a roundabout way of explaining that I’m an expert on Northwest flights from Minneapolis to Boston. I’d expected Steve to call and say he was taking the one that arrives at nine-thirty P.M., but, as it turned out, he not only caught the one that gets here at six o’clock, but sat next to one of his human clients, who gave him a ride to Cambridge. I suspect that even if I’d picked him up or if he’d taken a taxi, he’d still have gone directly to the clinic instead of going home first like a normal person.
Anyway, at seven forty-five, when I answered the phone, I was surprised to hear Lorraine say brusquely, “Holly? Hold on. Steve for you.” Then I got five minutes of an AM radio station playing the end of “Away in a Manger” and the beginning of “God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen.” I’ve tried to convince Steve that, hey, this is Cambridge: The average client has had five to ten years of higher education, hence can presumably use an interlude of silence to solve the mind-body problem or decline irregular verbs in Aramaic, if it has any, while waiting to hear how little Simone and Jean Paul did in surgery. Failing that, I’ve argued, these people want Terry Gross, Beethoven, the BBC, or, in December, a tape of John Fahey or the Christmas Revels. But, as I’ve mentioned, Lorraine really runs things there.
The music cut off suddenly, and Steve said, “Holly, you there?”
“Yeah, hey—”
“I’m real sorry,” he said. “He just slipped away. I’m real sorry. There was nothing anyone could’ve done. You want to give me Rita’s number? Or you want to do it?”
If you love animals, people are always telling you that you should’ve been a vet. Come on! The first owner who asked me to euthanize a healthy pet would’ve got a swift injection of sodium pentobarbital himself. When devoted owners lost their pets, I’d have found it so hard to break the news that I’d have ended up searching the adoption wards of Angell and the Animal Rescue League for identical animals to substitute for the deceased. (“Yes, I’ve noticed, too. Fluffy’s never been quite the same since, has she? Much friendlier and almost rejuvenated, isn’t she? But we often see that happen, you know.”)
“Could you?” I said.
“Of course.”
“No. No, it’s really not fair. You have to do it all the time, and I … How do I tell her? Is there something …?”
“Just tell her what happened. Look, I’ll do it.”
“No. Really, I can do it. Were you, uh, with him?”
“Yeah. In fact, I was holding him. I’d just got in. Tell her he didn’t even wake up.”
“I don’t think she’d like that,” I said. “She’d want him to be aware. That’s very important to Rita. Not in pain, but awake. She wouldn’t want him to just vanish. I think he opened his eyes and looked at you.”
“Holly—”
“And you were sure that he knew what was happening. He took it all in. And he voluntarily decided to leave. You realized that he was making an active choice.”
“This is crazy,” Steve said. “Could you just tell her the truth? It isn’t like he died in agony. He didn’t feel anything. We did everything we could, and we lost him anyway, okay? You don’t have to lie about it.”
“I won’t,” I said. “I’ll tell her the whole truth. From Groucho’s point of view.”
“For Christ’s sake.”
“Trust me,” I said. “I know Rita, and what does it matter? I mean, he’s gone, and she isn’t, and God didn’t make me a dog writer for nothing, so just don’t contradict me, okay? It’s a small gift, but it’s what I’ve got, and I don’t intend to waste it. And I won’t lie. I’ll tell her the emotional truth. She doesn’t believe in historical truth, anyway. She believes in psychological truth. She’s always talking about it.”
“Jesus. Okay. Look, when you talk to her, ask her what she wants done.”
It took me a second to understand. “Cremated,” I said. “We talked about it.”
“Are you sure?”
“Positive. We talked it over.”
“Private?”
I didn’t want to imagine the alternative. Public cremation? God! “What?”
“Does she want his ashes?”
“No, of course not. Actually, don’t even mention it to her, because if you do, she’ll keep them here and spend years in analysis trying to decide what to do with them, and, in the meantime, she won’t get another dog because she hasn’t come to terms with losing Groucho.”
My pride in my craft compels me to admit that there was only one thing wrong with the death of Groucho: For obvious reasons, it wasn’t publishable. Imagine, if you will, the death of Little Nell collaboratively rewritten by Jack London and Albert Camus, but with a male dachshund subbing for the girl, of course. Maybe I overdid it, though: Rita was so moved that she decided to come home to say good-bye.
“Rita,” I said, “don’t you think it would be better to remember him the way he was?”
“I don’t want to … Is that what you thought? No, I don’t think I want to do that. I mean, it’s not as if … No. It’s important for me to remember that that’s not Groucho. It’s only his body.”
“That’s right,” I said.
“But I can’t stay here now, anyway. I knew I shouldn’t have come, because, you know, he did feel abandoned, and how could he not? I abandoned him. How was he supposed to feel?”
“Loved,” I said. “And not a nuisance. When he was healthy, he liked to go places. He would not have wanted to keep you stuck at home because of him. And you didn’t abandon him, Rita. He was very old and very sick. Until the last few minutes.”
The part of her argument that made sense was that her family wouldn’t understand her grief. Most people don’t. According to Rita, Freud did. He apparently realized that our love for our dogs is the only unambivalent, unconflicted, entirely positive, perfectly pure feeling we ever have. Obviously, then, when your dog dies, you lose the one being that—even deep in the disgusting depths of your unconscious—you never wished dead. And then most people expect you to keep your dinner plans for the same night, enjoy your meal, show up at work the next day, and, in short, express about as much grief as you’d feel for the last housefly you swatted. Rita said that she wasn’t going to deny her loss by “falling into the old trap of socially sanctioned, familially induced dissociation” (can that be right?) and was coming back to Cambridge. She also announced that she was going to call Steve. Fortunately, I reached him first.
Rita arrived home late the next morning. When she tapped on my kitchen door, I still hadn’t decided what to do with Rowdy and Kimi, whether to let them offer comfort or try to keep them out of sight. In the dogless month between the day Vinnie died and the evening Rowdy chose me as his companion animal, I’d found other people’s dogs a source of comfort and pain. Sometimes I’d start to feel as if Vinnie had somehow been the only dog and that, in losing her, I’d had all dogs ripped away from me. Then Groucho would jump on me, or a free-range yellow Lab that used to live down the street would appear in my yard with a tennis ball in her mouth and beg me to toss it for her, or another dog would force its way into my loneliness and remind me that they hadn’t all died, that, yes, I’d have another dog some day. Whenever the pain began to lose its edge, though, I’d be ambling through Harvard Square or waiting stuck in the traffic on Memorial Drive, and I’d see a golden retriever, any golden, not necessarily one that looked remotely like Vinnie. Tears would roll down my face, and I’d feel heartsick and furious, especially if the dog happened to be with a woman, a woman I’d hate because she’d gotten to keep her golden, but mine had died.
The presence of two big dogs would’ve been tricky to disguise, and the second Rita walked into the kitchen, I was glad I hadn’t hustled Rowdy and Kimi out to the yard or shut them in another room. Although Rita’s coat was navy blue, a color that rivals black for displaying dog hair, she sank to the floor and
threw her arms around Rowdy’s neck. Kimi, slightly less huggable than Rowdy because she was incapable of holding still, nonetheless couldn’t endure being left out; she poked her nose into Rita’s face and shoved Rowdy aside. Exactly how our species first came to domesticate the wolves that evolved into today’s dogs is one of those moot questions that keep dog writers in business, but I’m positive that as I watched Rita and my dogs, I witnessed one basis of the complementary bond between people and canidae: Dogs like the taste of human tears, and people find comfort in having their faces licked. As it happens, Rowdy and Kimi also love moisturizer and foundation makeup, a preference that’s clearly a recent product of deliberate selective breeding.
Or did they actually perceive her sadness and try to console her? I am supposed to understand dogs. I know nothing about them.
It seemed to me that the silent comfort of the dogs went beyond words, but either because she’s a therapist or because she’s not a real dog person, Rita needed to talk, and not to Rowdy and Kimi, either. Tea always feels more healing than coffee, so I made a big potful, let it steep, and filled two mugs Vinnie had won at matches when she was only a puppy.
“Vinnie won these,” I said.
“I know,” Rita said. “You’ve mentioned it.”
“Would you rather have brandy or something?”
“Holly, it’s what? Eleven-thirty in the morning?”
“It’s what you’re supposed to drink to buck yourself up, isn’t it? If you don’t want tea.”
“Buck,” she said. “What an odd word for you to choose.”
“I didn’t choose it. I just said it.”