Getting Harry up took some doing. A kiss or a pet might or might not wake him. Once he opened his eyes, his expression changed from trusting to suspicious to defiant. He never, ever, had any intention of starting his day when I started mine. He clearly preferred Carol’s hours. Most mornings, he’d take one look at me and wriggle to whatever part of the bed was hardest for me to reach. I usually had to put my arms around him and haul/drag/push all sixty-something pounds of him along the duvet to the foot of the bed, then help him down to the floor.
Getting Minnie up in the morning was even harder than getting Harry up. She informed me daily that she was not a morning person. I’m quite sure she thought she was a person. I’d pull back her blankets and nudge her. No response. I’d nudge her again. No response. I’d pet her, scratch her ears. After three or four tries, maybe she’d raise her head and give me one of her indignant, put-out looks before pretending to go back to sleep. I’d try to lift her to a standing position. As often as not, she’d collapse back down again. When she finally deigned to leave her bed, on her terms, she’d arrange herself frog-dog style on a nearby rug and do several elaborate stretching exercises.
Breakfast. Not mine, Harry’s and Minnie’s. I ordered Harry’s three kinds of prescription diet dog food online and had the shipments sent to my office, since delivery services can’t get into the building where I live unless someone’s home to buzz them in. A case of twelve cans and two eight-and-a-half-pound bags of dry food. Heavy. I took them home six cans or a bag at a time on the bus, so it took four days per shipment. I became a dog-food packhorse. In the morning, I mixed together some of each, plus big spoonfuls of Greek yogurt and canned pumpkin. I hid Harry’s six different types of pills in wads of raw ground sirloin. Harry happily gobbled up his meals.
Minnie refused to eat unless she was hand-fed. She often refused to eat at all when I was away on assignment. She got bored with the same menu every day, so every couple of weeks, I pushed my grocery cart to the Barking Zoo and hauled home a fifteen-pound bag of something called Hund-n-flocken and an assortment of cans with such names as Grammy’s Pot Pie and Santa Fe Skillet, in addition to plain old beef or venison or lamb. There was barely room in my pantry for what I planned to eat. Minnie, too, had yogurt and pumpkin with her breakfast, the pumpkin something new when Harry arrived. She seemed to like it, to the extent that she admitted to liking anything other than mangoes. Like Harry, she got her various medicines wrapped in meat. I found myself going through about six pounds of ground sirloin a week.
Hearing the litany of services rendered daily, a friend told me I must have a sign on my back, invisible to humans, that says FOOL FOR DOGS.
A walk. It was late fall and cold by the time Harry settled in, so after their breakfasts, I had to get both dogs into their sweaters or jackets. Harry cooperated. Minnie saw me coming and always ran around and around the apartment until I cornered her. If dogs can scowl, she was scowling.
Coffee in one hand, leash in the other, I urged the two of them down the front stairs to the street.
It was still dark when we went out. Sometimes, on clear mornings, as we made our way to Chelsea Piers and the park along the Hudson, I could see the moon just above the rooftops about to set, or a colossal cruise ship as tall as a building looming in front of us as we reached the water. I loved watching the ships glide by in the gloom on their way upriver to dock. Every day, I’d stop and sit on a particular bench so that I could say good morning to the Statue of Liberty in the distance, a bit hard to make out, but her raised arm and the white light of her torch unmistakable. Harry caught on quickly that this was our treat stop. Three treats, no more, except when I fell for the starving-dog act. Harry and Minnie had refined looking pitiful and hungry to an art, Minnie ever the actress. Harry was happy to be her leading man, especially if it meant a few extra treats.
I got into the habit of having my phone with me wherever I happened to be with the dogs. After Carol told me it would break her heart if I brought Harry to see her, I couldn’t miss chances to take pictures to send her. Examples: standing at my feet in the kitchen looking up with expectation in their eyes; sitting together at the top of the stairs to the garden; lying on the floor, their bodies touching, her paws on his; Harry in bed; Minnie in bed; Harry and Minnie together in bed; Harry in his biker jacket; Harry in his varsity jacket covered with pins; the two of them tied to the wrought-iron fence across the street surrounded by a sea of fallen yellow ginkgo leaves; side by side squatting to pee directly in front of a sign with a picture of a dog in a circle with a line through it; three little birds perched inches away on the bench where I sat to hand out treats; Harry, his chin on the bench, eyeing the bag of treats just beyond his nose. That sort of thing.
Knowing I had to find pictures to take made me look around on our morning walks. I watched seagulls and cormorants bobbing on the river, riding a fast tide toward the ocean. Looking east, I saw a pink sky above a cubist cityscape, the Empire State Building a familiar face in the crowd, not the tallest but still tall in the geometry of dark buildings. As the sun came up, for a few minutes it turned the far side of the river, the New Jersey side, bright gold, the construction cranes and half-built high-rises transforming the New York side silver. Dawn felt spiritual. I needed those mornings.
For a few weeks, I saw a young red-tailed hawk every day. It would soar above the trees, then plunge suddenly, disappearing into the bushes before rising again, moments later, sometimes with a rat writhing in its beak. Often, it landed on a streetlamp overlooking the path the dogs and I took through the park. I never managed to get a good picture, but even in my sorry little snapshot, you recognize that this was a creature uninterested in the likes of us, its haughty profile silhouetted against the sky, its beak and head turned away.
On the walk home I strained to look in the windows of the art galleries. I checked out the posters advertising rock concerts and weird, trendy clothes plastered all over the plywood used to board up what was a restaurant before Superstorm Sandy destroyed it in 2012. New posters were slapped over old posters, their edges framed by an ooze of hardened glue. I couldn’t pass the building without remembering what it looked like when the flooding drained away, the high-water mark left behind a foot above my head. Now homeless people slept in the shelter of the scaffolding that supported it.
The dogs had their own landmarks. Strange stones maybe three feet high, each one paired with a tree, line the 500 block of West Twenty-second Street, as if short druids had left behind proof they inhabited Manhattan once. In fact, part of a 1980s art installation, the stones have been repurposed. Peed on by practically every dog passing by, they are now the daily record of canine activity in the area. Harry and Minnie sniffed them, one after another, long and hard, reading them like a newspaper.
The more I looked, the more I was amazed by the extraordinary things there were to see on an ordinary walk.
Snacks. We came home and ate fruit together, something I’ve done with all my bull terriers. After I’d exercised, showered, and dressed, it was time for bite-size shredded wheat squares dipped in honey-roasted peanut butter.
Red kisses. Before I left for work or a trip, I’d give Harry and Minnie big, red lipstick kisses and tell them I loved them, some superstitious part of me hoping I was inoculating them from harm.
Dinner. Most nights, when I wasn’t traveling, I’d get home from work around eight o’clock, say hello to the dogs, check the mail, change clothes, and then make dinner. If I lingered a little too long before heading into the kitchen, standing at my dining table opening bills or leafing through a magazine that had just arrived, Minnie—with her sidekick, Harry, in silent support—would bark at me, a loud, indignant, get-in-there-now bark. No ambiguity about her message whatsoever.
It’s not as if the dogs were wasting away. My au pair made them dinner long before I got home. They wanted more dinner, some of my dinner. I would deposit bits of leftover meat or fish into their upturned mouths. With Minnie and Harry, I couldn’
t decide whether it was more like feeding baby birds or snapping turtles.
* * *
THE FARMERS MARKET. I was giddy on the Saturday Minnie and Harry and I set off for the farmers market together the first time, Harry wearing his red bootie. It was at the end of October, a few days after Stephen’s emergency call asking me to take Harry for a few days; in fact, just a few hours before I found out he would be staying with me for good. There were again three of us heading to Union Square. Harry was lazy and had to be urged along. Minnie pulled a little. I had to be careful so that my grocery cart didn’t run over their feet. It was a glorious morning, the market filled with apples and grapes, beautiful squashes and flowers, everywhere the colors of fall.
Arriving with Harry reminded me of going to school or work after getting a radically different haircut and feeling self-conscious, wondering what people would say or if anybody would even notice? I’d told a few regulars about Carol and Harry. Right about where I’d run into Stephen on that day in July, I now ran into Sunny and his owners, Mike and Julia. Minnie, as usual, ignored Sunny. Sunny lifted his head and wagged his tail slowly when he saw Harry. They eyed each other and stood nose to nose. Carol once told me that Harry knew another bull terrier when he saw one. So, it seemed, did Sunny. Mike and Julia beamed.
At Cato Corner Cheese, the tall, lanky man who always cuts my slab of Dutch Farmstead into a tic-tac-toe of cubes to give to the dogs tipped a pile of free scraps into my palm and announced he was happy to make Harry’s acquaintance. People did notice, and I wondered why it mattered so much to me that they knew the story and cared enough to be sad for Carol and glad for me.
fifteen
THE BUS AND THE RAIN
My memory of the last weeks of Carol’s life is of near-constant rain. By mid-November, it was dark by four-thirty. At six or so, as I stood at the bus stop waiting, the wind and the wet and the cold, the night, made me angry. I hated trips to Bellevue. They were like going to hell on public transportation. I took the M57 crosstown to Second Avenue, then ran for the M15 heading downtown. Expressionless commuters dressed for winter sat in a fluorescent glare against fogged windows, their umbrellas dripping. I would try to stand just behind the bus driver, so that I could see where we were through the windshield. The wipers cleared arcs in the slick. It could easily take an hour or more to get from my office to the hospital, to the blue line on the floor. Why did I resent that line? It was just there to help people find their way. But following it on and on made me feel lonely and sad. I dreaded what I would find when I reached the seventh floor, when I got to the Haven, even though, for a while, visiting Carol seemed more like a gathering of friends enjoying one another’s company than a death watch.
Usually, Lissa was there. One night, when I walked into Carol’s room, Stephen was pulling photographs out of a folder. He had made eight-by-ten prints of a dozen or so of the pictures I had taken of Harry and Minnie. Carol was sitting up in bed, laughing, oohing and aahing over them. She had emailed me, “I live for these photos. Thank you.” She said it again that night. The next time I visited, the prints of Harry and Minnie lined the wall across from her bed, taped so they were at eye level when she was lying down. The framed photograph of the mah-jongg group wearing their togas and gold laurel wreaths was propped against a box of tissues on her tray table. The lamp on Carol’s nightstand was wearing her wreath. It circled the shade like a crown.
The following Sunday afternoon, when I got out of the elevator on the seventh floor, I was followed down the hall by several severe-looking people wearing drab clothing with equally drab looks on their faces. They stopped at the room next to Carol’s, gathered around the bed, and began to sing softly. I couldn’t make out the words or recognize the song, but I heard harmony and a hint of a descant above it, a pure sound, soothing, as sweet as the singers seemed sour.
Carol’s door was closed. A handwritten sign was stuck to it: NO CLERGY, NO MUSIC, NO THANKS. FERTIG, C. Hmmm, I thought to myself. I knocked. I heard movement behind the door and then Lissa’s voice: “Who is it?” “Martha,” I called out. She let me in and shut the door after me. “What’s going on?” I was perplexed.
“I don’t want any of those people knocking,” Carol said. I wondered which people. “Did I tell you about the Catholic priest?” she asked me. “No.” “Well,” she said as she raised the back of her bed. I could see that look in her eye, the old, pre-hospice Carol warming up to tell me a good story. “The other day, I was feeling really crappy. I was exhausted. At some point, a priest came in. I didn’t even notice him. I must have been asleep. All of a sudden, there he was. He asked if I happened to be Catholic. I said no, I’m nothing. I practice no religion whatsoever, but I told him I was of Jewish origin.”
Lissa had obviously heard the story. She started shaking her head, incredulous still at what I was about to hear. “Guess what happened next?” I said I had no idea, knowing Carol fully intended to tell me. “He said to me, ‘I’d like to give you a big blessing.’ I said no. An emphatic no. I closed my eyes expecting him to leave. And then, I felt his hand touching my face and water running down my cheeks and neck. I heard him say, ‘I baptize you in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.’ What on earth? I was shocked. I said, ‘Get out, now.’ I was furious.”
Okay, that explained the NO CLERGY on the sign.
“Then, the same day, somebody comes in here and asks whether I’d like some music. I wondered what kind of music? You won’t believe it.…” Carol looked straight at me through her big black glasses, a wicked glint in her eyes. She paused so I would be ready for the answer. “A harp!”
I laughed out loud, though snorted might be a better word. Lissa joined in. Carol made a face and started laughing, too. “Harp music for the dying. Is that preposterous? They want to get me ready for the pearly gates!”
So NO MUSIC, NO THANKS, I figured, was an attempt at politeness, or not.
Over the next hour or so, Stephen stopped by and left. Lissa took a break and went to the family room down the hall to call home. I sensed some tension with her family over how much time she was spending at the hospice.
I was alone with Carol. Suddenly she reached for her kidney-shaped basin, held it up to her mouth, and began to retch. I said nothing as her retching turned into gagging. A minute went by, then two, maybe more. “This is a mess, such a mess,” she whispered finally.
I said, “You’re very brave.”
“How so?”
“Because you’ve been clear-eyed about everything and because you’ve kept your sense of humor.”
sixteen
THANKSGIVING
I stopped at three corner bodegas and rooted through all their flowers before buying an armload of hydrangeas to take to Carol. I stood clutching them at the bus stop, glad for a reason to hug my arms to my chest. It was damp and cold and gray, bone-chilling, bleak. The city seemed empty. Normally, I love the quiet of Thanksgiving in New York. Where was everybody? Hunkered down, cooking, gone out of town, watching the Macy’s Parade on television or maybe the dog show? I watched the dog show for years, pumping away on my exercise bicycle, waiting and waiting to see the bull terriers being judged, but they were never shown. Maybe, if I looked hard, I’d see one or two BTs in the distance trotting around the ring with all the other terrier breeds. Enough was enough, so I gave up and stopped watching in protest.
The bus took forever to come. Hardly anybody got on or off. There was no traffic, so it raced across town, with so few passengers, shaking and rattling as it sped along. It deposited me and my hydrangeas at First Avenue in less than ten minutes. Walking toward Bellevue, I dreaded having to pass the driveway where the Medical Examiner’s Office’s refrigerated body trucks were always lined up, like a mobile morgue. That day, though, I saw something beautiful there. A drift of fallen leaves had collected against the front tires of the closest truck, enormous sycamores. I picked one up. It was at least a foot wide, gold with brown speckles. I wondered whether I should take it to Carol,
this perfect thing, this sunny embodiment of the autumn she was missing, her last. I admired it, but after a minute or two put it back down on the pavement and moved on. To this day, I wish I hadn’t.
The plan was that I would visit Carol in the morning, and Stephen would come by in the afternoon. When I reached her room, someone else was there. The lights were off, and the shades were pulled down, so I couldn’t quite see what was going on. Carol was propped up. She was groaning. Someone, a woman, was bent over her. With both hands, she appeared to be working a skinny rolling pin over Carol’s neck and shoulders.
“I’ve got a crick in my neck,” Carol announced. The rolling pin turned out to be a battery-operated massage device, the woman wielding it, Ann Rittenberg, another of Carol’s friends from her building.
Carol was alert and in a good mood, but I was startled at how she’d changed since I’d last seen her just four days before. She seemed much, much weaker, slightly desiccated, shrunken. Her skin looked tight on her face, the muscles in her neck sinewy. They stood out when she turned her head. Her eyes, behind the big black glasses, were glittery.
The three of us talked about Thanksgiving. Carol said, “Thanksgiving was always my favorite holiday.” She used the word was.
I told the story of the first time I cooked Thanksgiving dinner for friends. It was 1974. I was working at a television station in Miami. My dining table sat four comfortably. I had four chairs. I had the little starter set of pale blue porcelain dishes for four my mother had given me, and cutlery for four, but I had invited nine people for a total of ten including myself. What was I thinking? I couldn’t afford to spend a lot of money dealing with my predicament.
It happened that I was assigned to cover a school board meeting. On the way there with the cameraman, I noticed a shop window filled, and I mean filled, from bottom to top, side to side, with stacks of white china. A restaurant supply company. I shouted, “Stop!”
When Harry Met Minnie Page 14