by Susan Conant
“It’s your father’s first name.”
“No, it isn’t,” I said.
“Okay. It’s what everyone calls him.”
“Yes,” I said. “So what?”
“Never mind. Anyway, I don’t want to buck myself up, and I don’t see how getting drunk before noon would do it, anyway.”
“Sorry,” I said. “I was only trying to help.”
“Well, more denial won’t do it.” Her eyes were dry now, but red and tired. She rubbed at them. “It went on for so long, you know, that I started to let myself think it wouldn’t ever end. It’s ridiculous. What did I think? That he was going to live forever? On the way back, on the plane, I was looking at an old picture of him, and it hit me that I hadn’t looked at it for a long time. If I had, I couldn’t have kept on refusing to see what was happening. You’ve seen it for a long time, haven’t you?”
“What? That he was old? Of course he was old. Rita, you knew that. And you also knew he was sick. But the truth is, he could’ve died last year, and he could’ve lived another year. Or more. It just wasn’t predictable.”
“Oh, yes, it was,” she said.
“Rita, he did not die because you left him.”
“He did, you know,” she said. “That isn’t why he got liver disease, but it’s why he died now and not some other time.”
“Possibly,” I said. “But what were you supposed to do? Cancel your life?”
“Stay with him,” she said quietly.
“Look, Rita. Maybe you know some word for it that I don’t, but to anyone except you, it’s fairly obvious that what you’re doing is taking all your grief and turning it into guilt. You could have held him in your lap and never left the house, and one of these days, he would’ve been too sick to keep going. You did not kill him, no matter how it feels now. And he didn’t die all alone. Steve was with him. I told you all about it. He didn’t feel any pain. He didn’t suffer.”
“I know. I really do know that.” She sighed.
“Rita, is there anything I can do to help? Do you want to take one of my dogs? For a day or two?”
“Thank you,” she said, “but I don’t think that would help.”
“Is there anything that would? Anything I can do?”
“Well,” she said, “this may sound stupid.”
“Okay,” I said.
“Actually, maybe it won’t. To you.”
“It probably won’t,” I said. “I’ve done a lot of mourning for dogs. Are you thinking about another one? Is that what it is?”
“God, no. Of course not. Not now.”
“Well, it does help,” I said. “It’s the only thing that really does.”
“Maybe sometime. But not now. He isn’t a replaceable part, you know. He isn’t some appliance that broke.”
“Did I say that? Of course not. No dog you love is ever replaceable. You might not even want to get another dachshund. It might be better to get some breed totally different from Groucho.”
“Holly, look. I am not ready to think about another dog. I am nowhere near ready, and I’m not going to be for a long time, okay? I have a lot of grief work to do first, which is what … This is going to sound silly, but I don’t think it is. Anyway, it feels right.”
“Good. What is it?”
“I can’t just let him disappear. I leave, then I come back, and he’s just gone? He’s vanished? If I leave it like that, then basically, it’s more denial. I can feel it. I half expect to walk upstairs and find him.”
“It’s always like that,” I said. “Everybody goes through that.”
“No,” she said. “Or if you do, you need to do something about it, which is where rituals come in.”
My voice was very soft. “Rita, do you want some kind of funeral for him? Because, if you do, I’m the last person to think that that’s stupid, you know.”
She started to sob, then reached into her purse, pulled out a tissue, and blew her nose. “I told Steve that I didn’t want the ashes.”
I nodded.
“And now I do. Do you think it’s too late?”
“Probably not. I don’t know. But, you know what? I’ll find out. I’ll ask Steve. I’ll take care of it. Is there anything else …?”
“Well, there is one thing. It’s just something I’ve been wondering about.”
“Yeah?”
“How did Steve know that Groucho was making a decision?”
“He’s very intuitive about dogs,” I said.
12
As soon as Rita went upstairs, I phoned Steve at the clinic.
“Look, this is very important,” I said. “I know Rita said just routine final care, but now she’s decided she needs Groucho’s ashes, and if it’s too late, don’t tell her. Just give her some ashes.”
“No,” he said. “Anyway, it’s not necessary. The body’ll still be here.”
“So you can.…”
“Yeah, we can do it. This’s happened before.”
“Steve?”
“Yeah?”
“Where is …?” I should’ve known, but there are certain matters upon which no dog lover likes to dwell.
“In the freezer,” he said matter-of-factly. “In a plastic bag. Lorraine’s brother hasn’t been here yet.”
The company that employs Lorraine’s brother—yes, indeed, nepotism—is called Perpetual Pet Care, and if the name strikes you as silly, you’re clearly a newcomer to dogdom, otherwise known as the land of foolish euphemism. I mean, there actually exists a liquid worming product called Evict. Prefer pills? You can buy, I swear to God, Good Riddance.
“So you can ask him to, uh …” I said.
“We’ll have to tag it,” Steve said. “But it’s okay. Don’t worry about it. Owners change their minds now and then.”
“So …?”
“So if she wants private cremation, I need to find the right bag and put an ID tag on. That’s all.”
“They aren’t …?”
“They aren’t clear plastic,” he said.
“So somebody has to open—? Look, don’t. It’s not really necessary, is it? I mean, how’s she going to know?”
“Hey, Holly, we’ll take care of it. Don’t let it bother you.”
Then, as if to prove that the topic and task weren’t really unappetizing, he suggested that we go out to dinner that night, and we did. To celebrate his return, we ate at Michela’s, probably the only expensive restaurant in Cambridge worth the cost, which is more than Steve or I can afford. If we’d gone to one of the little Thai or Indian places, he might have told me about that business with Groucho. As it was, although Michela’s is not pretentious, you still get the message that you should probably discuss something other than body bags and canine cadavers over the house-cured bresaola with caponata and roasted potatoes. Also, the tables aren’t crowded together, but our neighbors might still have overheard, and if they had and then had lost their pesce, I wouldn’t have blamed them and might even have joined them.
So, having said something vague like, “It’s all taken care of,” Steve told me the big news: Jackie Miner had left Lee.
“She took Willie, didn’t she?” I said. It’s one thing to walk out on a husband, but what kind of woman deserts her dog?
“I didn’t think to ask,” Steve said.
“You didn’t ask?”
“Well, he wasn’t the one who told me,” Steve said. “And if he had—”
“Who did? Did she?”
“No. This was while I was gone. Lorraine told me.”
Michela’s bakes what is undoubtedly the best bread in Greater Boston. Steve tore off a piece of it, dunked it in the plate of olive oil you get there, and ate it. Does that sound disgusting? It isn’t. He wasn’t being uncouth, either. That’s what you’re supposed to do. In Cambridge, peasant is forever in.
He swallowed and said, “Lorraine says Lee told her he thinks Jackie’s with Oscar Patterson.”
“What?”
“Lorraine says that’s what Le
e said, and then he told her to forget it.”
“I guess he doesn’t know Lorraine very well yet.”
Should you ever find yourself vetless in Cambridge with a dog that’s contracted an embarrassing social disease, let me reassure you that you may safely go to Steve. Neither Lorraine nor Pete, the most talkative of the aides, ever violates the confidentiality of animal patients or human clients. Steve isn’t a client, of course, and they apparently distinguish between me in my capacity as dog owner and the other, discussable me, so to speak.
“In this case, it doesn’t make any difference,” Steve said, “because Geri’s got the same idea. Patterson’s, uh, friend. It seems like she’s been treating the whole thing like some kind of last fling, but now she thinks it’s not so funny. She’s coming down here to check it out.”
“Really? Everyone was so sure. But how did she …?”
“How’d she find out about Jackie? For all I know, Lorraine called her. Lorraine’s the one who told me about it.”
We talked about Lorraine, then about Jackie and Lee Miner. I said nothing about John Buckley. When Steve turns protective, he overreacts.
When you hear how I slept that night, don’t blame the food at Michela’s. If you need to blame something or someone, blame Admiral Byrd. At about three A.M., I awoke from one of those long, confused dreams that seem to have been produced, directed, and cast by some maddened Cecil B. De Mille. I was in Little America, Antarctica, and I was frantically searching for a lost dog. The landscape was vast, white, and semidark, but lurid images of green and blue castles filled the sky. Burly figures in bulky, fur-trimmed parkas wandered among shabby huts and drifted off on brief and evidently futile treks. Admiral Byrd lounged in a doorway. Although heavy fog and thick sheets of falling snow hid most of the faces, I somehow knew that this was Byrd’s first expedition, but I wasn’t surprised to recognize Oscar Patterson and Jackie Miner among the wanderers. The shriek of the wind blended with human voices crying: “Gone! Gone!” A man who looked like John wept for his lost dog. I felt very cold.
Then I was fully awake but still cold, and the howling hadn’t stopped. Steve lay on his back with one knee bent upward to form a sort of tent frame for the top sheet, blankets, and comforter. I was lying naked. The radiator in my bedroom doesn’t work very well. The temperature in the room may have been as high as forty-five degrees. I climbed into Steve’s tent, fastened my chilled fingers around the edges of the bedclothes, and yanked. Then I nestled up to him, pressed my icy body against the hard heat of his, and hoped that the dogs would shut up.
Even for a malamute, Rowdy had always singled himself out as a howler of feature-soloist caliber, but he and Kimi rarely performed, and I have no idea what got them going that night. They didn’t like being locked out of the bedroom, of course, but they were used to it, and it was absolutely necessary, because the murmurs, cries, and odors of human lovemaking drive them completely wild, and when they get wild, they yowl, yip, and bay even more loudly than they were howling that night. Mostly, though, malamutes are people: Making love in their presence feels like some kind of perverse group sex. So maybe they’d heard a cruiser or an ambulance with some extraordinary lupine siren. Or maybe, in fact, they were singing a lament for Groucho.
Even if they weren’t, I had to make them stop. In a way, it seemed a shame. Their voices were melodious, their tones happy, not at all mournful, but that’s not how their calls would sound to Rita, whose apartment is, of course, directly above mine. The wood floor of the bedroom felt like permafrost under my bare feet, and even when I’d grabbed a robe from the closet, shoved my arms in the sleeves, and knotted the belt tightly around me, I was shaking. As soon as I opened the kitchen door, though, the dogs quit howling and ran over to me. I hated to set a precedent by rewarding them for the middle-of-the-night chorus, but what choice did I have? In a high cupboard over the sink was a collection of brand-new chew toys. I tore the heavy plastic wrapping off two Souper-size Nylabones, thrust them into the gaping but silent jaws of the dogs, and stumbled back to bed. As you’ve probably gathered, Steve can sleep through almost anything, but by that time, I was so desperately cold that I did a bad and inconsiderate thing: I eased my hands under him and wedged them between the small of his back and the warm bed underneath.
“Jesus Christ!” he hollered.
I removed my hands and slithered to my own, cold side of the bed. “I’m sorry,” I said, still shaking. “I’m frozen, and I had a bad dream. You took all the covers, and the dogs were howling, and I dreamed I was in Antarctica.”
His voice was low and bleary. “It’s all right. Come back here. Give me your hands.” He wrapped them in his and pulled me toward him, then under him. Is it possible that missionary women were simply the ones who had to get up with the dogs?
13
“It was a terrible dream,” I said over breakfast.
“Sounds awful,” Steve said. “You were cold, and you heard the dogs.” Rita says that on a psychological-mindedness scale running from zero to infinity, he would score zero.
“I like hearing the dogs, if they aren’t bothering anyone. The bad part was Antarctica. And the lost dog. And the man crying. And that son of a bitch, Byrd.”
“Hey, okay,” he said soothingly.
In August of 1928, the dogs of Byrd’s first expedition traveled by train from Wonalancet, New Hampshire, to Norfolk, Virginia, where they were loaded onto the Norwegian whaler Sir James Ross Clark for the voyage to New Zealand. In Dunedin, New Zealand, the dogs were transferred to the City of New York for the final leg of the trip to Antarctica. Ninety-seven dogs left Wonalancet, or maybe only ninety-five. No one seems to know for sure. At least four died on the way to Antarctica. No one kept count, but about twenty-six surviving pups were born in Little America, which makes about a hundred twenty-seven dogs, right? Some died in dogfights. Some froze to death. At least twenty-five were killed and fed to their teammates. Of the seventy-seven still alive at the end of the expedition, seventeen were shot, and only sixty taken on board the ship. Our national hero, Richard E. Byrd. Steve knows about all that.
“It’s not okay,” I said, reaching for a piece of toast and then tearing it up. “It’s a nightmare. Hey, Steve? I just realized something. That crying man? You know who that was? The one who looked like John. That was Arthur Walden. And the lost dog was Chinook. That’s what the dream was about. It was about looking for Chinook.”
If this were the 1920s, I wouldn’t have to explain who Chinook was, or Arthur Walden, either, because Chinook was the most famous dog in America, and Walden, his owner, was pretty famous, too. Walden wrote a popular book, A Dog-Puncher in the Yukon, and he and his Chinook dogs—the famous sire himself and a team of his offspring—won the first Eastern International Sled Dog Derby in 1922.
“Did they ever find him?” Steve asked.
I shook my head. “Chinook died in Antarctica. They never even found his body. That part of the dream was true, that he wandered away, and that they looked for him, but he was gone. And Walden never got over it, I guess, even though he had the other dogs, the rest of the team. He took a whole team of Chinooks, sixteen, I think, and probably there were more back here. But I guess it just tore his heart out when he lost that dog.” Then I made the connection. “I have to call my father.”
“Your father’ll just get you more worked up,” Steve said. “He’s worse than you are about it.”
“No, it’s not about Byrd,” I said.
Even so, I waited until Steve had left before I called my father. Their relationship is complicated. Buck raises wolf dogs, whereas Steve maintains that hybridizing wild and domestic animals is a big mistake. Steve is right, but Buck is my father. That’s one complication. Another is this: Despite Buck’s prejudice against veterinarians (“thieving charlatans”), every time Steve and I go to Owls Head, Buck wants Steve to examine the dogs, clean their teeth, immunize them against everything, and perform miscellaneous minor surgical operations. Buck’s requests would b
e okay if he had only three or four dogs, but he has eighteen: seventeen hybrids and one golden retriever puppy. My parents raised goldens, but this is the first one Buck’s had for a long time. Her name is Mandy, she looks like a stuffed toy come to life, and I hope she’s a sign that Buck is finally coming to terms with my mother’s death. It’s been more than twelve years since Marissa died. Vinnie was her parting gift to me. If a golden retriever puppy could console me for the loss of either of them, I’d get one tomorrow.
Anyway, ten minutes after Steve left, I was saying to Buck, “So I have this vague memory about their tails.…”
Buck swore a lot about the deficiencies in my knowledge of God’s Country, the beautiful State of Maine, home of the Perry Greene Kennels. He also cursed out Perry Greene and thus explained this gap in my expertise about my home state and Chinook dogs.
“And,” my father bellowed, “the fellow maintained a monopoly! A monopoly on the breed! You know how Perry Greene billed himself? ‘World’s Only Breeder of Purebred Chinook Dogs.’ And that’s how he kept it. The only dogs that left there were males and spayed bitches, so he didn’t get a lot of competition, did he?”
“Evidently not,” I said.
“Nearly exterminated the breed. And God help you if you wanted to buy one.”
“You had to spend the night there, right?”
“I didn’t,” he said defensively.
I corrected myself: “The potential owner. If Perry Greene didn’t like you, you didn’t get a dog. I heard that. Or I read it somewhere.”
“No, no,” Buck said scornfully. “It wasn’t if he didn’t like you. It was if the dog didn’t like you! Or if he decided the dog didn’t.” I have heard Buck refuse to part with puppies on precisely the same grounds.
Do you ever have moments of sharp recognition about your parents? I don’t mean flashes of insight into feelings or character, but swift, clear perceptions of simple facts that are probably obvious to everyone else. Perry Greene, I suddenly realized, had once refused to sell Buck a dog. Furthermore, Greene’s explanation had been an intolerable insult: He’d said that the dog in question didn’t like my father. I’m convinced that it happened. Buck, I am sure, agonizes over the possibility that, after all, Greene might have been right, that in this universe of Buck-loving canines, one dog just didn’t take to him.