Dog House

by Carol Prisant

  Except for Jimmy Cagney.

  That little dog was becoming more and more like his namesake. Not your George M. Cohan in Yankee Doodle Dandy, but the psychopath from White Heat. My Jimmy had begun to bite not just dogs but people, which was very bad and very scary and worse, possibly actionable. And which I accepted as my own fault for coddling the cutest puppy that ever was and letting him think I was Cody Jarrett’s ma. He’d bitten a friend and another friend’s baby, neither badly, but I wasn’t about to wait for badly.

  For at long last, it had become clear to me that all those Cassandras were right; the Jack Russell wasn’t the breed for me, no “probably” about it. And the problem was never really with the dogs. As the naysayers had more than hinted, the problem was with me: for expecting too much; for loving a breed and a physical type and a personality rather than knowing myself.

  How could I have actually thought I was feisty like my Jacks, when in truth, I was mild, citified, cowardly and at times, possibly, even, sweet? I’d hoped—assumed—my dogs would be like me, and I’m told that there are many more Jacks that are these days (well, maybe not so cowardly). But the Jacks I’ve owned, at least, ought to have come with a warning: For Advanced Owners Only. Or For Households That Include Deep-Voiced, Leather-Gloved Men. Or maybe just For Households with Men.

  I missed mine.

  With aching regret but a budding hope of imminent relief, I phoned Jack Russell Rescue. (In the fourteen years since we’d loved Cosi, some fine and noble soul had created Jack Russell Rescue—which reinforced my suspicion that I wasn’t the only owner who’d turned out to be “wrong for the breed.”) But even JRR wouldn’t take a biter.

  Friends—mostly cat friends—suggested I put him down, the awful answer for aggressive dogs.

  But wait a minute. He wasn’t tearing anyone’s throat out. He wasn’t rabid. He was still the most adorable Jack in the world.

  And just as I was getting a little panicky and had stopped speaking to my cat friends, I learned about a Long Island newspaper that didn’t charge an advertising fee to people giving dogs away. So I tried an ad in the Pets section:

  Male Jack Russell terrier for adoption; cute, neutered and small; wants a home with no children and needs to be an only dog” (Oh all right. He’d been attacking Diva and Juno, too.)

  In case you need further proof that the average person doesn’t read, I got six calls from people with kids, plus one woman who wanted to know what a Jack Russell was, and was it a dog? She asked this in spite of the fact that she’d obviously gotten my number from the “Dog” section of Pets.

  And then, magically, I got a call from a young woman: a schoolteacher. Her father had just lost his mean little Yorkie and was looking for a substitute. Could she come to see my Jimmy?

  When can you come? Today?! Come today!

  And when she showed up at the door, young, sweet and good-natured, but canny, too—she was a teacher, after all—I asked her to wait in the living room while I went to get The Little Rat, who was confined to the kitchen because, when the doorbell rang, he might have attacked her, or me, or Juno, or less threateningly but more messily, merely piddled on her leg. Leaving none of this to chance, I tucked his square little body securely under my arm, carried him out to where she was sitting on the sofa and set him gently on the floor at her feet.

  His white bottom wriggled in sheer delight.

  “What an adorable little boy,” said the unsuspecting schoolteacher, leaning toward him to scratch his ears.

  I held my breath.

  With which, Jimmy Cagney rolled over on his back and peed straight up in the air.

  Oh god, I thought, running to the kitchen.

  Where are the damn paper towels?

  But can you believe it! She wanted him! She loved him! She—WOW!

  And as I tore through the house, gathering up his toys, his bed, his leash and bowl (maybe she wanted my own bed and toys, too?), I could scarcely believe my luck. She was taking him. To her father. To Queens. To far away.

  And the moment her car pulled out of the driveway, I called Barden.

  “Are you sitting down? Someone just adopted Jimmy Cagney!”

  After a measured silence, Barden replied, “Listen, Mom. Leave the house right now, go out for dinner and then to a movie and don’t come home until it’s really, really late.”

  And I took his advice. You’d better believe I took his advice. Though for the next two or three weeks (well, for most of the following year) my heart stopped any time the caller ID showed the Queens exchange. But she kept him. And it tickles me now to think of her father—in my imagination, one of those gray-haired, mustachioed men in a woolen cap and maybe with a cane, an American version of the Country Life gents—taking the air in Queens with a bandy-legged velociraptor named Jimmy Cagney.

  So here’s a confession: About ayear and a half after Millard died, I tried to adopt myself out as well.

  I went online.

  What attracted me to the online dating services was that they offered an absolutely expenditure-free shopping opportunity while simultaneously exercising my novelty-seeking gene. Naïve as I was, I actually expected salvation to come from one of those new online dating services: something on the order, say, of a six-foot-four, handsome, witty, smart, younger (?) man of sufficient means, who’d also—by the way—love me. What I found instead, and I know this isn’t news, were endless and flattering pictures of old men in baseball caps (hmm), old men in sailboats, old men in T-shirts in front of the Louvre, old men in shorts at the Taj Mahal, old men with many, many grandchildren, old men with dogs (hmm). And mainly ... old men. A lot of plump, a lot of comb-overs, a lot of facial hair and they all looked alike. Would I have found any of them attractive back when? And who really cared? Because what I wanted was my marriage back.

  Still, among all those ostensibly unmarried men out there, among all those thousands, you’d think there might have been one—only one—as fine as the man I’d lost. Would you believe it, I somehow didn’t remember that in the forty-two years Millard and I had been married, I’d never once met another man I liked even half as well as the one I had. Because other men were boring or unintelligent or not handsome enough or overbearing. (Or not argumentative enough?) Which meant that the odds of my finding a man like Millard at this late date were nil.

  I talked on the phone with several contenders, though. We small-talked endlessly about their incredibly wicked former wives, their ungrateful children, slobbery mastiffs, why my callers loved sailing, why I didn’t like sailing and I even talked with one man who, after an hour and a half of mildly promising conversation, confessed that he had an STD. I didn’t actually know what that was. Uncool, long-married me.

  I even took a few of the shinier prospects out for a trial spin (not Mr. STD), learning, in the process, more than I ever wanted to know about the rules of cricket, the life of a sixties CIA operative, long walks on the beach and fine wines, and New York’s divorce courts. Some of them were even fairly nice; some took me to dinner at a diner, and you know I like diners. But I usually eat a grilled cheese sandwich and a Coke, and when they accepted my offer to pay for myself ... well, hey. Some, for one long-married “virgin,” were a little too anxious to get physical (I missed that seventies moment), and one wanted a producer for his play. The one I should never have gone out with at all was the one who told me that in his youth, he’d been madly in love with Gina Lollobrigida in Trapeze. (See author photo.) None of them cared to know much about me, and at the end of the day and the evening, I contented myself with the truism that after a certain age, a woman has a choice: be either a nurse or a purse. Though honestly, I would have been thrilled to be either or both for a Millard. But they weren’t making them like that anymore. What a rare breed he seemed to have been. A breed that was, sadly, extinct.

  You’re out there shaking your finger at me, aren’t you? Reminding me of what I’ve been telling you for the last two hundred pages about replacing a love you’ve lost.

>   Casting around for love’s smaller crumbs, and more out of loneliness than smarts, I decided finally to go ahead and adopt that greyhound I’d always wanted.

  Hell with the road.

  I’d be super-watchful.

  And besides, in researching the breed, I’d discovered that some of the males are almost as big as a man.

  In truth, I’d been edging up on my greyhound even before Millard died.

  That last year, we’d made some money in the stock market and had impulsively decided to spend some of it on a pair of life-size lead statues of greyhounds. They were tremendously heavy, hundreds of pounds, and they’d go outdoors, of course. But they were far from the sort of decorative objects you carry around while trying to decide where to put them because they were so heavy, it took three of us just to move them: Millard, me and Alan, the saintly, patient dog trainer who’d been trying to help me turn Jimmy Cagney into a domestic pet. Alan was good with all the dogs, in fact, and had been working with Juno and Diva on the “sit” and “come.” Jimmy, you might have guessed, did neither.

  I’d picked two good potential spots for our sculptures, the first of which was wrong, naturally. So after about an hour of struggling and being insanely careful not to bump either of their long, thin, very much in-the-way tails, we managed to maneuver the two statues into what looked like a brilliant position just near the entrance to the house. And in fact, they looked beautiful there. Composed of softish, dove-gray lead and backed, now, by gray house paint and green-black ivy, they were (almost) as beautiful as the McCoy.

  That’s when Alan stepped back and considered the dogs and their placement.

  He looked at us. We looked at him.

  We looked at them. We nodded.

  “Stay,” he said.

  So they did.

  My new and soulful real dog, whom I found being fostered by a Connecticut greyhound adoption group, was a loser. Racing greyhound puppies (whose ears are tattooed with their birthdates and litter numbers) are customarily grown-on for a year, trained for a year, and raced for a year. After that, if they’re not winners or if they’ve broken a leg or hate to run, they’re euthanized.

  They are.

  But greyhounds make divine house pets. They simply want to lie around on lots of pillows. I’ve heard, too, that many are good with cats and hamsters and even birds. Nevertheless, because their early training reinforces their prey drive—i.e., they’ve learned to chase small furry things like rabbits, squirrels, cats, and um ... little dogs—people who own Norfolk terriers are well advised to be circumspect. Which is why, when I drove up to the leafy environs of Hartford to choose my life’s second largest companion, I took Diva along for a test. Carolan, my bridesmaid and funniest friend, rode shotgun, for company and for laughs.

  Diva hated cars as much as Cosi had loved them and upchucked the whole way there; and when there was nothing left to chuck, she retched. Let me assure you that I never would have subjected her to such misery except for safety’s sake. Millard’s Diva wasn’t going to be anyone’s dinner. I’d had my fill of blood and tears.

  When we arrived at the modest ranch house where lovingly modest “parents” fostered incoming ex-racers, I was offered a choice of eight handsome, sad dogs, and after peering into several dark crates at gorgeous, scruffy greys, I winnowed it down to a “final three” based on their reputed gentleness, their sex, and—well, you know me—their beauty. Then the finalists were muzzled and leashed and brought out to the front lawn to meet Diva, who—still reeling from her miserable ride—was more than a little subdued. Three long, tall racers, never having met a small dog before—or seen mirrors, windows, water or a loving hand—showed intense interest in Diva. They approached her, heads down, noses working, and as they neared, my frazzled Diva, taxed well beyond her minim of terrier patience, backed off, lifted her tiny head, and reached for her high C. Only one of those dogs—the largest—leaped in the air and tried to hide.

  That was my man.

  So Ajax (I’m improving, don’t you think? His track name was Crabby Jeff) huddled in the far corner of the backseat, away from the crated but threatening Diva and threw up the whole way home. Which was why, from Hartford to Long Island, Carolan and I sang him terrible Tony Ben-nett songs and poorly harmonized Christmas carols. Which didn’t help.

  And I thought he might just throw up again when he saw the stairs to my front door. Track dogs, you may not know, have never seen stairs, and it took us fifteen minutes or so to shove him, coax him with biscuits (wholly ineffective as bribes, since he’d never seen biscuits either) and eventually to hoist all eighty, gangly pounds of him into the house.

  It took Ajax an extraordinarily long time to get used to living somewhere other than in a crate. On the other hand, if there can be any advantage at all to a greyhound’s growing up in a crate and being allowed out only to relieve himself and race, it’s that housebreaking is a virtual snap. So Ajax housebroke immediately (such a blessing in a big dog) and was as good with Juno as any other of our dogs had been—which meant that he ignored her. But he adored Diva. He loved putting her entire head in his mouth best of all.

  Shall I compare him to a summer’s day?

  Ajax is tall. My hand at my side finds his head just beneath. He’s muscular. Or he was then. He’s less so now that he no longer runs. But his coat, with its stripes like a tiger’s on tawny fur, is beautiful; nowhere near as dull and dusty as when he first came to me. It’s silky and short and healthy and sleek. He’s quite long, so he moves like a tiger, too, and has trouble making turns in narrow halls. He’s scarred, as all track dogs seem to be, because racers fight, though I hope not over food. He shares Juno’s I’m-dying shriek, but he’s effortlessly elegant. Except when he sleeps, and his head drapes over the rolled arm of his oversize bed and his long pink tongue hangs sideways out of his mouth. Or when he’s cleaning his nether parts and gets his hind leg stuck on his head behind his ears and doesn’t know how to get it off.

  Ajax talks to me, sometimes, as well. He whimpers and stares with his grave black eyes—but not to tell me how he loves me. Usually just to let me know the door to the john is closed and he needs to get a drink. (Which tells you what a long way I’ve come since Fluffy.) His eyes are so expressive. I loved the way they widened at his first taste of pizza “bones” or peanut butter. He speaks to me with his eyes and his bruised and tender heart, so I pity his terror of thunderstorms and of other dogs, but I love that in all the years we’ve been together, he’s never learned how to put those long front legs up on a counter to eat my dinner while I’m preparing it. (Juno does that.) And he doesn’t get up on sofas or chairs either (Juno does that) and is happiest in my bed or by my side. Just like Millard.

  Right after I brought Ajax home—within the first two weeks, in fact—the gate to the dog run was left open and he disappeared. Perhaps I haven’t mentioned that track greyhounds have never crossed streets or seen cars? So when I discovered him gone, mindless and shaking, I filled my car with treats, grabbed for his leash and drove around our local streets yelling, “Ajax! ! ! Ajax! ! !” Everyone within earshot certainly thought I was selling kitchen cleanser door to door. But sitting on my heart was fate and death; because this dog—this gone-missing dog—barely knew my voice, let alone his own name. And there was that terrible road. And he was speed itself.

  But remember that he’d never seen water? My next-door neighbors had a pond, and happening to look out their window, they’d noticed this large, panicky animal floundering in their pond. Ajax had tried to run across it.

  I took him home, dripping and bewildered, and double locked the gate.

  So it was me and Norah and the dogs now. And a big house that wasn’t all that hard to keep. I’d been well trained, remember. Norah did the inside, and John and I did the out—and the house held its own. I gave Norah Millard’s huge old station wagon. She was so small she could barely see over the steering wheel, but it made it so much easier for her to get to her family and the thrift shops that
she loved. Still, as several seasons came and did their weathery thing and passed us by, the house seemed less and less fun to live in. In spring and summer, the roses grew and bloomed, the wisteria climbed, the morning glories that Millard loved seeded themselves and wound carelessly around windows and porch posts. But I didn’t care to work in the garden alone. I stopped going out on our porch; the gorgeous sunsets across the water made me so melancholy I thought I’d die. Good friends visited and called, and some stayed and some invited me to dinner and to lovely parties and cheered me. For a while.

  And it was winter, and Norah and I dug my car out of the snowdrifts on the driveway. And it was fall, and we found a snake in the laundry room and she courageously swept it out while the three of us—Norah, me and the snake—writhed and cringed as I bore it to the driveway in a horribly small dustpan and threw it in the general direction of the grass.

  It was another beautiful, beautiful spring and I cried.

  And the only marvelous thing was my grandchild.

  For here’s my second confession.

  Between late July, when Millard was diagnosed, and early November, when he died, I hadn’t been big on reality, but now and then, I’d let some creep in. Once or twice, I’d even thought ahead.

  In 2000, Barden and Catherine had been married for nine remarkably happyyears, and they were having so much fun just being together that, very reluctantly and painfully, I’d given up the golden idea of having a grandchild. Of course I couldn’t talk to them about it. Mothers and mothers-in-law, you must have heard, need to become really good at smiling a lot and wearing brown.

  But with Millard so ill, it came thudding home to me that nothing but a grandchild could continue the thread of his life. Dog-loving genes and novelty-seeking genes were nothing to me now. Millard’s genes were the ones that mattered.