Brute Strength (9 page)

‘She marries an old man!' I exclaimed. ‘And a bossy, critical, controlling old man, too. Not that Knightley is a terrible person. In a lot of ways, he's a good friend to Emma, but the point is that he should stay that way. He's a paternal friend who compensates for the inadequacies of her father. And she marries him?'

‘And what about twenty years later?' Vanessa demanded. ‘When Emma is still a vigorous woman, Knightley is going to be in his dotage. What happens to all those country walks then?'

‘Emma gets a dog,' I said. ‘That's my only other complaint about the book, really. I mean, Emma
needs
a dog. A papillon, I think. I see her with a toy breed, something she could pick up and carry on a long walk. Of course, in Jane Austen's time, the whole phenomenon of pet ownership wasn't what it is now. Still. But there's no such excuse for Knightley. The age difference is just too great.'

‘Like our dear neighbors,' Vanessa said. ‘Isaac can't keep up with Elizabeth. Not that he's condescending or moralistic the way Knightley is. Not at all. But the age difference!'

‘I don't think that Elizabeth minds,' I said. ‘And it's only recently that the age difference matters. Even now, Isaac isn't in his dotage. He's as sharp as ever, and he's active.'

‘But for how long? He has terrible arthritis. He lives on anti-inflammatories. And he has some kind of heart problem. Oh, God! I sound like my father. Leave it to Tom to know everything about everyone's infirmities. And remedies.'

‘It's just his way of getting to know people,' I said charitably.

Sounding grateful, Vanessa said, ‘Tom can be a dreadful old bore, but he is a dear man. He's generous to a fault. He overindulges all of us. He truly does want us to have whatever we want. We really cherish him. All of us do. And there's nothing actually wrong with him, you know. He'll be with us for a long time.'

Not ten seconds later, Tom Oakley appeared at one of the glass doors to the kitchen. Easing it open he said, ‘The two of you! You'll get pneumonia sitting out there.'

Vanessa rolled her eyes. ‘We're perfectly comfortable. Did you and Elizabeth have a nice walk?'

‘Very pleasant. I'm getting to know the neighborhood. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm getting out of this draft. And I'd advise the two of you to do the same.'

When Tom had shut the door to the kitchen, Vanessa said, ‘He's been keeping Elizabeth company when she walks Persimmon. As I said, Isaac can't keep up with her.'

‘Oh, that's just their usual division of labor. Isaac trains their dogs, and Elizabeth walks them.
Dog
, I should say. Singular. Persimmon is the only one they have now. Sammy, here! I should get going. We'll have to do this again soon.'

‘Absolutely! Tomorrow? Or are you going to a dog show?'

‘We're not entered,' I said as I snapped Sammy's leash to his collar. ‘Rowdy and Sammy are out of coat, Rowdy more than Sammy. I'm not crazy about the judge, anyway.'

Looking hesitant, Vanessa said, ‘Well, if I wouldn't be in your way, I'd love to tag along sometime. I've never been to a dog show.'

‘You've . . . you've never been to a show?' I stammered. ‘Never? No, you've been in Vermont, but there are . . .' Barely knowing where to begin, I broke off and thought fast. For good reason! Indeed, there I was confronted with a heathen who was telling me that she'd never so much as set foot in a church. ‘We'll go tomorrow.' I had intended to devote Saturday to scraping the flaking paint off our house, but this was an emergency. Vanessa's immortal soul was in danger! There was no time to be lost.

‘Lovely!' she said. ‘What fun!'

TEN

‘
I
s there anyone here you
don't
know?' Vanessa demanded with a laugh. ‘Or I should say, is there anyone here who doesn't know you?'

‘More people know Tom Fool than Tom Fool knows,' I said, remembering only a second too late that her father's name was Tom. Happily, she showed no sign of noticing my faux pas.

A big outdoor show with splendid tents and sunny skies would've offered the ideal setting in which to introduce Vanessa to the pageantry of dog shows. I'd never much liked the site of Saturday's show, a trade center with all the festive allure of a failing carpet factory, but if you're hell-bent on baptizing someone by immersion, it doesn't make sense to whine about the inadequacies of the local creek or to delay the rite until the water rises. We'd been wandering from ring to ring and now, at about one o'clock, had just finished watching the judging of Italian greyhounds. In the course of our meandering, I'd stopped to chat with a few people. By my standards, there hadn't been all that many. Malamutes had been judged early, before we'd arrived. Besides, the judge had been as unpopular with others as he'd been with me, so the total malamute entry had been a pitiful three. The show was just that, a conformation show – a beauty contest, but don't tell anyone I said that – with no obedience, agility, or other performance events, so we'd run into only a few people I knew from those little subkingdoms of Greater Dogdom. Still, the crucial, defining elements of a show were there in rich abundance: the sights and the sounds, the beauty of the breeds both great and small, the woofing and yipping, and the thick, complex, delicious scent of grooming spray, liver bait, freshly bathed dog, stale sandwiches, and all the rest, in my case, mother's milk. No exaggeration! It's a miracle that I was born in a hospital instead of being whelped at a show in a dog crate or on a grooming table, and it's entirely likely that at some point in my infancy, one of my parents mistook a bottle of coat conditioner for a baby bottle and pacified me with some sort of lanolin concoction in place of formula.

Have I digressed? Sorry.

‘Besides,' I said to Vanessa, ‘I've been showing dogs my whole life. So, I do know—'

‘Holly! Hey, I didn't know you'd be here. I need to talk to you.' The speaker was Katrina, the rescue volunteer Betty had mentioned, the one who'd been upset by a strange phone call. A soft-spoken, unassuming young woman, Katrina had a round face, fair skin, and white-blonde hair styled in a Dutch clip. When Katrina and her husband had applied to adopt a dog, I'd wondered whether she had the force of character needed to manage a malamute. As it turned out, she was as persistent as she was gentle, and she'd worked wonders with the shy Kaya, who'd spent the first two years of her life alone in a chain-link kennel. So far as we could tell, the first time Kaya left her owner's property was the day I picked her up and drove her to Steve's clinic, which was apparently the first building she'd ever entered. She'd had no socialization, no training, and no vet care. The sound of her own name meant nothing to her, and she had no idea what to do with dog toys. Now, three years later, because of Katrina and her husband, John, Kaya was happy and astonishingly self-confident.

So, when I introduced Vanessa and Katrina, I naturally had to tell Vanessa about Kaya, and Katrina about Ulla. Dog people being dog people, both of the women sped through the business of being happy to meet each other, and each dwelt at great length and with marked enthusiasm on how absolutely thrilled she'd be to make the acquaintance of the other's dog.

‘Kaya isn't here, of course,' Katrina said. ‘I'm helping a friend who shows Dobies. All I'm doing is lugging gear and keeping an eye on her dogs. She doesn't like to leave them unattended.'

‘Good for her,' I said.

Speaking even more softly than usual, Katrina then asked me whether I'd heard the details of her phone call.

‘Betty told me,' I said. ‘You must've seen on the list that I had one, too. Horrible laughing. Something about the dog I had before Rowdy, a golden. My Vinnie. And then obscenities. It was ugly.'

‘What a horrible thing!' Vanessa exclaimed.

‘Same man,' Katrina said. ‘At first, I was very upset, but I'm OK now. Misery loves company!'

‘I'm not exactly miserable,' I said, ‘but I know what you mean. It's less personal.'

‘John was furious,' Katrina said. ‘And when he heard that this joker called you, too, and then Betty, he decided that the guy had something against rescue. You know, somebody who got our names from the website and took it from there. The days of privacy are long gone.'

‘Not everyone realizes that,' I said.

‘It's true,' Vanessa agreed.

‘Yes, it is,' I said. ‘Speaking of which, did you try to trace the call?'

‘All I got was the area code, seven eight one, and that's hundreds of places. It's like a circle, well, a three-quarters circle outside Boston. But, Holly, the worst is that John is threatening that if anything else happens, we're going to quit doing rescue.'

I nearly wept. The greatest need of every breed-rescue group in the country was foster care, and foster care was just what Katrina and John had been providing.

‘But if I get another call,' Katrina continued, ‘I'm just not going to tell him about it.'

‘Well, if he's the one who answers—'

What drowned me out and cut me off was the sound of Pippy Neff's off-key voice speaking my name. Possibly in response to the irritating tone, Katrina excused herself and took off, but if I'd sprinted away, Pippy'd have been on my tail. I did, however, make an effort to divert her from the topic of Rowdy.

‘Pippy,' I said, ‘this is Vanessa Jones. Vanessa, Pippy Neff. Vanessa has a bitch of your breeding. Ulla.'
Bitch:
the dog fancy's good, clean word for female. By defining the term in the context of introducing Pippy, I don't mean to suggest . . . well, Pippy was, admittedly, female, in fact, decidedly so. She was a short, wide woman of maybe fifty-five with curly hair colored a vivid shade of coppery flamingo, but her most distinctive physical feature was her bosom, a tremendous outcropping of flesh that simply had to have been encased in wide bands of industrial-strength elastic. It's entirely possible that the constriction caused by this massive support affected her voice and that when she was naked, she no longer spoke in sour notes.

To Vanessa, Pippy said, ‘It was a shame about Olympia. A tragedy.'

‘Ulla's first owner,' Vanessa explained to me. ‘A neighbor of mine. And a friend.'

‘Such a nice girl,' Pippy said. ‘I was sick about what happened. In the midst of life, we are in . . . Holly, about Rowdy. I—'

‘Has your puppy buyer reached you?' I asked. ‘He talked to my father and to Betty Burley. He was—'

‘Good news!' Pippy said. ‘He's going to be able to keep his beautiful puppy. That's the best outcome, isn't it? He loves his puppy, and he's going to be able to keep him.'

I slowly inhaled and exhaled. ‘As I understand it, the owner is away fourteen hours a day.'

‘Oh, it's all going to work out,' Pippy said. ‘He's looking into a dog walker. Or doggy day care.'

I held my tongue.

‘So,' Pippy continued, ‘you tell Betty that it's all taken care of.'

Vanessa and I exchanged glances, and as if acting on an unspoken plan, Vanessa looked at her watch and said, ‘We'd better get going!'

‘Yes, we should,' I agreed.

When we'd made our escape and were wandering from vendor to vendor, Vanessa said, ‘I feel sorry for her dogs. Dogs have such sensitive ears! How do they stand her?'

‘I've wondered.'

‘And she never asked a thing about Ulla. She never even asked whether Ulla was all right.'

‘Yes, I noticed.'

‘Olympia didn't think much of Pippy.'

I shrugged.

‘Does anyone?'

‘Oh, yes,' I said. ‘Pippy has a very high opinion of herself.'

ELEVEN

W
hen I got home at three or so, our yard presented the kind of scene that always compels my father to bellow about the lilies of the field: ‘They toil not, neither do they spin: And yet I say unto you, that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.' Buck wouldn't have meant Steve, who was on the high ladder scraping paint while the gloriously arrayed Rita and Willie were keeping him company. As to their array, Rita, who was seated at the picnic table with the
Times
spread out in front of her, wore a cream-colored sweater, cropped black linen pants, and black leather shoes with wedge heels. Her hair was a neat brown cap of lightly streaked waves. Willie was, as always, groomed like a show dog – not by Rita, who'd be as likely to clip a dog's coat as she would be to cut her own hair, and who, in any case, had found a skilled terrier groomer to whom she paid a fortune to have Willie's coat hand-stripped. Pulling out the dead hair instead of cutting it produces great results, but pet owners almost never want to spend the money that hand-stripping costs, and few of them know how to do it themselves. As was also typical, Willie wore yet another brand-new collar, this one black and red, and he and Rita together could've been posing for a photo for the style section of a voguish publication, maybe even the
Times
itself. When I said hello to everyone, Willie's dark eyes flashed, and he cocked his head, but he remained at Rita's side and didn't bark or fly at me.

So, let me say now what I couldn't say to Rita. Let me shout it! What the hell was wrong with Quinn Youngman? Here was Rita, sensitive, perceptive, intelligent, witty, a loyal friend, a brilliant psychotherapist, looking not simply as pretty as a picture but actually looking like a picture, indeed, a picture of perfection; and complementing her was her equally stylish Scottie, Willie, groomed to match her and behaving flawlessly. And special credit to Willie, who worked so hard to control his naughty impulses. Here he was, the very model of the handsome canine gentleman! Separately and together, they deserved the best, as Quinn Youngman certainly was not, at least in my opinion. Steve, for God's sake, who liked almost everyone, had to struggle to get beyond Quinn's affectations and pretensions! Out of gratitude to Rita, who had been a wise counselor to both of us, Steve and I had knocked ourselves out to put aside our own feelings about Quinn and to think only of Rita's. And what were Rita's feelings about Quinn? God help her! As the saying goes, if love lights on a manure pile, there it will stay.