Gaits of Heaven (2 page)

“Ron,
vee geyts
? Ron does our plumbing.” Ted spoke with just a hint of a southern accent. “He’s one of the family. He and Dolfo are old friends.” Ron later told me that Ted and Eumie had waited six months to pay the last bill he’d sent them. Ron was a friend of Steve’s and mine, too, but he wasn’t one of the family. Consequently, we always paid him promptly.

“Well,” I said brightly, “tonight is going to be a new experience for Dolfo.” The dog, I should say, was perfectly happy on leash. In fact, he was always happy. Bizarre-looking, yes, and uncivilized, but wonderfully cheerful.

Ted and Eumie exchanged glances and then reluctant nods.
“Nisht gut,”
said Ted. “But we’ll try it for a few minutes.”

By then, handlers and dogs were arriving, so I hustled Dolfo into the entrance hall, where people were checking in and paying, but before Ron even had time to borrow a collar and leash from the club’s equipment box, the Dolfo experiment failed. To avoid getting graphic or disgusting, I’ll just report that right there in the middle of the entryway, Dolfo staged a large and smelly demonstration of what happens when owners fail to housebreak a dog. Instead of apologizing, cleaning up after their dog, or helping me to get him outside, Ted and Eumie decided that Dolfo was responding to stress.

“This whole situation is traumatic for him,” Ted announced.

Far from acting traumatized, Dolfo was merrily sniffing the evidence of his crime.

“Good boy,” Eumie told him. “We’ll take you home right now.”

“Eumie,” said Ted, “you’re forgetting the crisis.”

“We’ll find another housekeeper,” she replied. “We always do.”

“And she’ll quit, too.”

“We need to discuss this matter outside,” I said in my dog-trainer voice. As I led Dolfo out, he raised his leg on a doorjamb. Then he turned around and jumped on me. When I’d finally lured the Greens all the way to their brand-new silver Lexus SUV, which was parked in an illegal but nearby spot on Concord Avenue, I again apologized for what I called the “misunderstanding” about the auction item. “You probably paid a lot of money for dog training classes, and we can’t offer you anything until September. And Dolfo really can’t be loose. I know you don’t like to restrain him, but it’s a club rule. And it’s necessary. For the safety of all the dogs.” Ted opened the door to the backseat, and Dolfo jumped in. I reclaimed my spare leash and rubbed his ridiculous ears. “He’s really very cute,” I said.

“I’ll bet you don’t know what breed he is!” Eumie exclaimed.

“I can’t begin to guess,” I said truthfully.

“You probably thought he was a mongrel,” she said. “Or a Goldendoodle. We hear that a lot.”

There were so many Goldendoodles, Labradoodles, and cockapoos around these days that I’d learned to identify them, but my new skill hadn’t convinced me that they were anything other than costlypoos. Still, I said, “People always think that my malamutes are Siberian huskies.”

“Dolfo,” said Ted, “is a golden Aussie huskapoo. We found him on the Web.” With warm condescension, he added, “It’s a new breed.”

I refrained from asking how much Dolfo had cost. My bet was at least twice what Steve had paid for Sammy, who was a show-quality puppy out of a champion sire and dam, my Rowdy and American and Canadian Ch. Jazzland’s Embraceable You. I later learned that the Greens had actually paid four times Sammy’s cost, which goes to prove that I know less about dogs than I like to imagine. “Golden retriever, Siberian husky, poodle, and Australian cattle dog?” I asked. Because of my heritage, I can usually spot even a trace of golden retriever in a mixed-breed dog. I couldn’t see or sense any golden in Dolfo, but I wouldn’t have guessed the other parts of the mix, either.

Ted was delighted. “Australian shepherd,” he corrected. His face fell. “But the breeder told us that they practically house-train themselves.”

“The crisis,” I said.

“Our housekeeper quit,” he said.

“We’re well rid of that one,” Eumie said. “She really wasn’t very nice to Dolfo. Not that she was mean. We wouldn’t have allowed that. But she just didn’t give him the affection he needs. And she complained about him. She was not a self-reflective or self-actualizing person.”

Horrors!

“All she ever did was kvetch,” Ted agreed. “But we have to have someone.”

Job description:
Help wanted: self-reflective, self-actualizing housekeeper willing to give affection to unhousebroken dog.

“We lead very busy lives,” Eumie said. “We work a lot. We’re both therapists. We have patients to see.”

Rita, our tenant and friend, is a psychotherapist. Consequently, I was wary of raising a matter to which Cambridge psychotherapists pay what strikes me as pitifully little attention. The small matter was reality. “Housekeepers,” I said bravely, “aren’t going to keep cleaning up dog urine and dog feces. So, you’ve got a choice. Either you can get by without a housekeeper, or you can teach Dolfo to go outdoors. Which is it going to be?”

A word about my courage. The Alaskan malamute is universally considered to be a challenging breed. I not only lived with Alaskan malamutes but showed them in obedience. The dogs and I didn’t get the high scores that I used to get with my golden retrievers, but we did get titles. More to the point, as does not go without saying, after repeated experiences of entering American Kennel Club obedience rings with malamutes, I was still alive, a condition I attributed more to God’s mercy in forgiving my false promises than to the behavior of the dogs. Again and again as I’d waited outside the ring, I’d vowed that if God spared me the heart attack I was about to suffer, I’d never enter a malamute in an obedience trial again. I’d lied. And been forgiven, doubtless because even God had to admire a woman with my guts. In the past few months, my ring nerves had been acting up, and I hadn’t shown a dog in any competitive event, but when it came to speaking up, I was as bold as ever.

Ted, being a Cambridge therapist and therefore phobic about reality, evaded my question about housekeepers versus housebreaking. “I have to tell you that I am feeling disillusioned. Really, what I’m feeling is anger. When Eumie and I bid on dog training, we were told that the methods here were positive.”

“They are.”

“Leather straps are not positive.”

I quoted the bumper sticker. “‘Love is a leash.’ That’s another way to look at it.”

“The atmosphere did not feel positive,” Eumie complained.

“Look,” I said, “there are ways to train dogs totally off leash using completely positive methods, but a big dog-training club with group classes doesn’t lend itself to that kind of approach. Among other things, we’d have dog fights. We use lots of food and lots of praise, but we can’t take the chance of having untrained dogs or aggressive dogs starting trouble or getting themselves in trouble. We don’t want anyone to get hurt. Besides, we’d get sued.”

“I have to say that I feel that we were misled,” Ted told me.

As I’ve mentioned, the presence of Ted, Eumie, and Dolfo was my fault. And my responsibility. “I can’t train Dolfo for you,” I said. “But I can get you started. We can work on housebreaking. Is your yard fenced?”

They nodded.

“Then we can do it off leash.”

The real reason I offered was neither guilt nor responsibility. I didn’t do it out of loyalty to the club or a desire to protect the club’s reputation. The real reason was that I hate to see a dog do bad things only because no one has taught him to be good. In other words, I’m a total sucker for dogs.

In my mind’s eye, I see relief on Eumie’s face as Ted
steers her new SUV into the traffic on Concord Avenue. The source of the relief, which is to say, the relief I imagine Eumie to feel, is not Ted’s miraculous luck in escaping an accident: she is so used to his terrible driving that she barely notices it. If he had in fact sideswiped the little Saab he’d missed by an inch or two, her luxury truck would have kept her safe—it is only slightly smaller than a Hummer—and if he had totaled her car, she’d have bought a new one. Because Eumie died an unnatural death on the Monday night following her brief appearance at the armory on that Thursday evening, my imagination tempts me to attribute at least a little of the relief to a sort of emotional precognition, a fleeting feeling of happiness that she is not going to die right now, but I don’t believe that Eumie glimpsed the future. As a general principle, I reject the notion of fortune-telling and thus won’t allow it in what is, after all, fantasy, albeit fantasy that is as realistic as imagination can make it. No, the source of Eumie’s relief is the sense that her beloved dog, Dolfo, is going to be in capable hands, which is to say, my hands, and that she is thus going to be able to hire a housekeeper who won’t abandon her the way the last one did. Eumie would, I think, have agreed with this portrayal of her. She’d have acknowledged that safety and money were important to her.

“Dolfo developed an immediate bond with Holly, don’t you think?” she says to Ted in her squeaky but weirdly sweet voice. “A special bond. There was something so tender about the way he looked at her.”

In the backseat, Dolfo responds to the sound of his name by beating his bizarre tail on the leather upholstery. His face wears the smug look of a dog who understands that life has landed him in an altogether cushy situation.

“I know who she is,” says Ted. “Holly Winter. She’s married to the ex-husband of one of my patients. Anita Fairley. Anita’s that lawyer I told you about. Beautiful woman. Very traumatized. The ex-husband must be that guy with the huskies.”

“The hunk.”

“He’s a vet.”

“Gulf War?” Eumie asks.

Ted smiles. “Veterinarian.”

I had no opportunity to talk to Steve during our class,
which was the second in a series of four workshops on rally obedience. By comparison with the rigid formality of traditional obedience competition, rally-O was relaxed and easygoing. Obedience zealot that I am, I’d initially assumed that since rally failed to demand precision heeling, there was something morally suspect about it; and when I’d learned that rally handlers were supposed to talk to their dogs during the exercises, I’d decided that it was outright heretical. Imagine a Roman Catholic of fifty years ago who dutifully attends mass only to be told that there’s no need to go to confession and that it’s fine to eat meat on Fridays. The new sport turned out not to be sinful. For one thing, I’d found it surprisingly difficult. I was used to having a judge give orders, whereas in rally, the handler receives directions from a series of signs that mark a course. Some signs were readily interpretable: Halt. Others consisted of lines and arrows depicting, for instance, the route to follow around orange traffic cones or the manner in which the team should execute an about-turn. For another thing, rally classes turned out to be fun, and I’m convinced that the heavens smile on any sport that makes handlers laugh and dogs wag their tails. But would the lighthearted atmosphere of rally cure my ring nerves? I had no idea.

For the first rally workshop, which I’d attended a week earlier, I’d taken Rowdy, who was an experienced obedience dog and as such had left me free to concentrate on decoding the cryptic signs. Steve had been absent because of an emergency with one of his patients, a dog that had been hit by a car after running away from an off-leash playgroup. Tonight, Steve had intended to take India, his highly accomplished German shepherd bitch—a clean technical term here in the dog world—but she’d developed a limp at the last minute, so he’d ended up with Rowdy, and I’d boldly decided to take Sammy, whose only qualification for rally was that he and the sport were both about play. At the age of about sixteen months, Sammy was an adolescent puppy, and even for a young Alaskan malamute, he was wildly exuberant and thoroughly exhausting.

As Steve, Rowdy, Sammy, and I left the armory for home, I said, “Rally is perfect for Sammy. It’s high energy. Do one exercise, rush to the next one, zip through that, lots of bounce and chatter. The one thing that bothers me is that no one ever comments on how good Sammy is. All anyone ever says is, ‘Wow! What a beautiful dog!’”

“He is a beautiful dog,” Steve said.

Sammy had started out as Steve’s puppy. A few years earlier, Steve and I had split up, in part because I’d repeatedly refused to marry him. He’d soon married someone else, Anita Fairley, the human fiend who, in my opinion, had been incapable of loving Steve or anyone else but had wanted a husband as good-looking as she was. And for that matter, still is. The bitch. Nontechnical term. Not that I myself objected to Steve’s appearance. He’s tall and lean, with wavy brown hair and eyes that change from blue to green. So, it’s my view that Anita the Fiend had made what Rita, my psychotherapist friend and tenant, calls a “narcissistic choice,” meaning that Anita had wanted a husband who enhanced her already spectacular looks. But perhaps I’m in no position to criticize the Fiend on that account. After all, I believe in the old maxim that it’s just as easy to love a beautiful dog as it is to love a homely dog, and if Anita felt the way about husbands that I do about dogs, so what! So what? The difference between us is that Anita is incapable of loving anyone except herself. In other words, she is a person of bad character, by which I mean that she hates dogs and, worse, instead of simply avoiding them, goes out of her vile way to be outright nasty to them. During her brief marriage to Steve, she’d known better than to target Steve’s shepherd—GSD, German shepherd dog—India, but had directed her venom at his timid, vulnerable pointer, Lady, whom I had actually seen her kick. So, India and Lady had immediately caught on to Anita, but Steve hadn’t been all that far behind them. To his credit, having married in haste, instead of repenting at leisure, he’d separated and divorced in haste, too. It was during his separation from Anita, and from me as well, that my Rowdy had been bred to American and Canadian Ch. Jazzland’s Embraceable You, the beauteous Emma, who had produced a splendid litter of puppies, one of which Steve had bought. And that’s how Sammy—Jazzland’s As Time Goes By—had entered our lives: by bringing us back together. So now you know how
Casablanca
should really end: instead of packing Ilsa onto the plane with boring, noble, sexless Victor, Rick entices her to stay by buying a malamute puppy. Rick goes to veterinary school, Ilsa joins the Dog Writers Association of America, and they get married and set up housekeeping in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Ilsa becomes the dog’s co-owner and foolishly persuades the Cambridge Dog Training Club to donate lessons to the Avon Hill School’s auction, and…

“So, Steve,” said Steve pointedly, “how did you like rally?”

“You liked it,” I said. “I knew you would.”

“And you,” he said with a glint in his eye, “like a challenge. This time, you might’ve taken on more than you can manage.”

“Dolfo. Dolfo, I’ll have you know, isn’t a dog.”

“I know. I’m a vet. Remember?”

“He’s a fur person. Therefore, he doesn’t wear a collar, is never on leash, and, as you probably noticed, isn’t neutered, and, more to the point, isn’t house-trained, the point being that his owners, Ted and Eumie, are frantic because it’s impossible to keep good help these days if one of the requirements is cleaning up after the dog. Except that Ted and Eumie are not frantic. They are having a family crisis.”

“And you’re going to rescue them.”

“Steve, I couldn’t sic them on the club! They’re impossible. It was my fault they were there. They won us at the Avon Hill auction.”

“I kind of liked seeing them there. They reminded me of the birds at my feeders. One or two cardinals for every five hundred house sparrows. Colorful.”

“That’s one word for it.”

“I wonder if Rita knows them.”

She did. When we got home, Rita was in our little fenced yard with my cousin Leah and our third malamute, Kimi, one of my original two. Kimi was dark, intense, and tough. Although Rowdy and Sammy were also dark gray and white, Kimi had a “full mask,” as it’s called, with a black cap, a black bar down her muzzle, and goggles around her eyes. The boys, Rowdy and Sammy, had white faces with no dark markings, and both were far more lighthearted than my fundamentally serious Kimi. As to toughness, if (doG forbid) she’d gotten into a major fight with either of the males, she’d have inflicted more damage than she’d have sustained. Fortunately, she and Rowdy were old friends, and she adored Sammy, who was as close as she’d ever have to her own puppy. That’s not speculation. I left Kimi intact so that my cousin Leah could handle her to her breed championship. (Breed: conformation, the judging of the extent to which a dog or bitch, technical term, conforms to the breed standard, and, in that respect, more than just a beauty contest.) Last winter, Steve had spayed Kimi, who could still be shown in obedience and in other performance events, but was now ineligible for the breed ring. As a show dog, she’d been good, but not up there with Rowdy. As for Sammy, he lacked only one major (let’s just say one big win) to finish his championship. Was he better than Rowdy? Two judges had thought so. My own opinion? It depended on which of the two I happened to be admiring at the moment.

So, when we got home, Kimi was in the yard with Rita and Leah. If you know Cambridge, you’ve probably walked by the yard, which is on the Appleton Street side of my house.
Our
house. Marriage changes everything. Possessive pronouns. Possession itself. As I was saying, Steve and the dogs and I live in the barn-red house at the corner of Appleton and Concord. On the actual corner is what’s called the “spite building,” a long, narrow one-story structure presumably built as an act of revenge in some forgotten real-estate dispute. Far from resenting the spite building, I love it, mainly because its brick wall helps to fence my yard, as does my house itself. The other possible avenues of escape into traffic and death are blocked by ordinary wooden fencing that’s less attractive than the ivy-covered brick of the spite building. In contrast to the brick, the yard itself had disappointingly little vegetation. Having repeatedly failed in my efforts to grow plants, I was trying to cultivate a Zen-like attitude toward what an unspiritual person would have seen as the dogs’ warmongering determination to despoil this peaceful little spot of urban greenery. India and Lady were blameless. Rowdy would have abided by our Malamute Nonexcavation Proliferation Treaty were it not for his political alliances with excavating nations, namely, Kimi and Sammy, who were born to dig.

At the moment, Kimi was not digging, mainly because she was lying on her back with her white legs and feet tucked in and her white tummy exposed for the rubbing Leah was delivering to it. Leah was kneeling next to Kimi on my latest effort to pacify the war zone, which is to say, a thick layer of fir bark mulch that had been a mistake. Literally. The malamutes had mistaken it for dog food. (Deleted: graphic description of consequences of malamute mistake.) Happily, Leah may be described in attractive terms that will, I hope, divert attention from the nearly omnipresent topic of canine digestive malfunction. Leah had masses of red-gold curls that were spilling from a knot on top of her head. Although she is the daughter of my aunt Cassie, my late mother’s sister, I have no idea where she came from except with respect to the red hair that runs in the family and bypassed me. The family breed should be the Irish setter but is the golden retriever, which is what I resemble, and not a show-quality golden, either, but a decent-looking family pet. Leah, however, is showy: voluptuous and flamboyant. Even there on the dog-tilled fir bark, she looked romantic and otherworldly. Looks deceive. Having just finished her exams at the second most famous local institution of higher learning, the most famous being the Cambridge Dog Training Club, she was about to move in with us for the summer and to begin working for Steve in the unromantic and worldly position of veterinary assistant.

Rita was seated at the L.L.Bean picnic table we’d been given as a wedding present. Sammy had sculpted it in a few places, but my efforts to train the dogs to lift their legs elsewhere had been remarkably successful, and just to make sure that the table was fit for human use, I routinely washed it, as Rita knew. She is not the sort of person who places anything but the soles of her high-heeled shoes on the ground and is definitely the sort of person who cares whether or not her Ann Taylor and Eileen Fisher outfits come in contact with canine bodily fluids. She doesn’t actually get her hair streaked and trimmed every week, but you’d never guess it, and she uses makeup and hair spray and other foreign substances that the American Kennel Club wants removed before dogs enter the show ring. Dog makeup? Human mascara covers pink spots on dogs’ noses, not that Rita blackens her nose, of course. There is nothing outré about her. She is very New York and, if I may use an old-fashioned word, very smart.

In more ways than one. While Steve was inside checking on India’s limp, I poured out my story of Ted, Eumie, and Dolfo, and Rita said, “Them!”

“We wondered whether you knew them.” To Leah, I said, “They’re therapists.” In normal places,
therapist
might mean a physical therapist or some other kind of therapist. In Cambridge,
psycho
goes without saying.

“They’re crazy,” Leah said.

With Rita right there! “Leah, really!” I said. “Rita is a therapist, and she—”

“I know their daughter. Not their daughter. Hers. Caprice Brainard. She was in one of my classes this year. She’s a freshman. She used to come with us to Bartley’s, which is the last place she ought to go. Caprice has a major weight problem.”

Harvard College was founded in 1636. The Cambridge location was chosen because of its proximity to Bartley’s Burger Cottage, which was already producing the gigantic, greasy, delicious hamburgers and sandwiches for which it once received an official certificate of condemnation from no less a person than the late Dr. Atkins himself.

“Is that all you have to say about her?” I asked.

“No. Not at all. I like Caprice. It’s just that she’s very needy. What she is, is unhappy. And obsessed with her parents. That’s why I know about them.”

I was suspicious. “Was this a psychology course you were in together?”

Simultaneously, Leah said, “Yes,” and Rita said, “What’s wrong with psychology?”

“Nothing’s wrong with psychology,” I said. “What’s wrong with Ted and Eumie Green?”

“Brainard-Green,” Rita said. “He’s Green. Her previous husband was Brainard. Ted Green is a psychologist. Eumie is a social worker. She was his patient, and he left his wife to marry her. After she divorced her husband. That was in New York. They moved here maybe four years ago.”

Until I met Rita, my image of social workers was based on Jane Addams, Hull House, and genteel ladies who delivered baskets of food to the poor. Rita, however, explained to me that clinical social workers do therapy, sometimes with the poor, sometimes with the prosperous, the latter presumably on the grounds that the rich deserve help, too.

“With his awful son,” Leah said. “Wyeth. He goes to Avon Hill. I think he’s a junior. Caprice says he’s a spoiled brat. She can’t stand him. She’s living with them this summer.”

“Where’s her father in all this?” Rita asked.

“New York.”

I asked, “Why is she spending the summer with Ted and Eumie and this stepbrother if she can’t stand them?”

“It’s just Wyeth she can’t stand, really. With her parents and Ted, she’s overinvolved.”

“Enmeshed,” Rita said.

“Preoccupied. Just because Ted and Eumie live in Cambridge, it doesn’t mean that Caprice has to go there all the time, which she does. She should’ve gone away to school.” Leah paused. “She could’ve gone to Yale.” Then, with profound Harvardian doubt in her voice, she said, “Or Princeton, I guess.”