Year of the Dog (7 page)

After we'd put our dogs back on their leashes, Betty said to the raiser with the pale dog who still stood frozen, “Maybe she and Naomi should switch. Why don't you two work it out, trade them for a night?” And, while my head was still buzzing, she called me over with Edgar's person, a woman named Sylvia, and said, “We'll let Beulah and Edgar wait a few weeks, and then we'll work out a playdate for them. Edgar's basically doing fine, but he needs to get out more. And you're doing well with outings for Beulah, but you don't want her being so solicitous of you. You don't want her getting too attached.”

We all went out to our cars, and everybody else drove off, leaving the two of us who remained to talk a minute by our cars. Sylvia, a dark-haired woman maybe in her forties, in a long woven skirt in eggplant and oatmeal colors, sounded discouraged. “I
try
to get out more with Edgar, but I've got kids, and my husband . . . These people think you've got nothing else to do.” I guess I sounded pretty down, too, when I protested, “But I thought you were
supposed
to get them attached to you. I thought that was the point.” Still, we shook hands, and traded phone numbers, and the dogs wagged goodbye.

Driving home in my Honda with the Carolina plates, I consoled myself with the thought that if Good Dog didn't get to end up a companion to some worthy and needful blind person, but got returned to me, she could ride up on the passenger's seat beside me as we trekked all the way back to Carolina (a warm and steamy world she had never known), and at night
she could sleep on the foot of my bed, and in the mornings lick the last of the scrambled eggs off my plate. Cheering myself up. Not wanting to deal with the knowledge that I needed to start learning to wean my puppy just when she'd stolen my heart.

Building Worry

11

AUNT MAY CALLED me on a Monday in August to actually invite me over. “I haven't been the most hospitable of kin,” she confessed. “I thought perhaps, Janey, if you were free some afternoon this week, we could have a proper tea.”

“Would today be all right?” I didn't want to seem too eager, but, as I explained to her, “This afternoon, Beulah, my dog, is visiting with a friend named Edgar. So I could come, you know, without her—.”

“That's thoughtful of you, dear.” Her voice picked up. “Do come this very afternoon, certainly. At four? I haven't been entertaining, to tell the truth, since I went part-time at the library. It seems the more time one has . . .”

“That's good,” I said, “and thanks. This is a real treat for me. I guess I've been getting a little homesick, probably it's this heat that reminds me of Peachland. I miss the pharmacy especially. You always miss your work, don't you?”

“Indeed,” Aunt May said.

I didn't intend to share with her that I'd been worrying about not doing a proper job socializing my lovable puppy, since I knew she had a blind spot about dogs. But Edgar's person, Sylvia, and I had been helping each other out. When it was your turn to be the puppy-sitter, you took them both, but let them play together and nap inside, since we didn't figure a
blind person would be walking two dogs. And, at the start, Sylvia and I would have a cup of coffee and a short people visit, which I looked forward to. She made watercolor greeting cards of Vermont scenes which she placed in local shops. It happened, she told me, that the more people used email and cells, the more art and craft went into the ways to make paper. I'd sent a box of her notecards to my mom—purple, red, green, blue washes of the lake and mountains. I'd even enclosed stamps, because a trek to the Post Office was something my mom thought you made once a year at Christmastime to mail packages, and not worth the trip just to send off news you could say over the phone.

This time, I resolved I was not going to screw things up with Aunt May, arriving, the way I did last time, in scruffy shorts, unannounced and empty-handed. This time, after I took Beulah to her playdate with her new friend Edgar, I stopped by the flower stall on Church Street and got eight fully-opened roses in yellow and reds, August colors. And then, freshened up and in my long white pants and a nice red tee with a little scalloping around the neckline, I left for her house in plenty of time.

Aunt May welcomed me at the front door and took the bouquet. She had on cropped tan trousers with a fresh white shirt with deep pockets, and tan cords on the glasses that hung around her neck. The last time I'd been here, the only time, we'd sat in her rug and book-filled front room,
the receiving room
as my grandmama, her sister, would have said. But this time she'd spread a real cloth in the dining room with one plate of what she said were cream scones and another of tiny pimento cheese sandwiches. A real tea. I felt my eyes fill at finally being invited over in a way that I'd expected the first time. I could even smell the tea leaves, steeped way stronger than I liked, but there was a pitcher of real cream as well as lemon slices to help me out. Seeing what she'd done, the
trouble she'd gone to, I did have to admit it was better I hadn't brought Beulah and had to keep her locked a long time in the hot airless car.

“We'll wait a moment or two,” Aunt May said, popping my eight bright roses in a mason jar and putting them in the center of the white cloth. “I've invited, I hope that's agreeable with you, Janey, a friend of mine who lives in the carriage house out back, to make it more of a party.”

I admit I felt a rush of anticipation. Could it be that I'd actually meet Bert Greenwood? Mom would have a duck! I wanted to ask, if that was proper to do, where his bad view of dogs came from, and if he'd ever once put a good dog in a story. I'd now read two of his books—the one about the retired lady whose brother had sicced a dog on her when she was young, leaving her with lifetime scars, and the one in which a woman whose wrongly convicted husband survives being mauled by a posse of prison dogs. Both times, the judge who solves the cases, Judge Caldwell, retires to his chambers for a jelly glass of bourbon to help him get his mind over the awful event. You had to like the judge. He had big feet which resisted wingtips, and, naturally, happened to be widowed, the way most private eyes were, so they could be thinking about some female and make it clear they were not living alone by inclination. Then the librarian lady he's seeing has to look up old cases for him to peruse so he can fit the pieces together and bring the guilty to justice.

Then we heard the back door open, and I followed Aunt May into the kitchen, though she might not have intended me to. A small woman with tight gray curls, glasses and a flowered violet dress came in and set down a basket of fresh peaches. “This must be Janey,” she said. “The niece. You're the niece, aren't you? What a resemblance, you two.” And she looked across to where Aunt May and I stood, each a head taller than she was. She gestured to the basket. “I thought you
might be missing peaches, being from Carolina, although I'm sorry to confess these are from New Jersey.”

“I know,” I said, reaching out to shake her hand. “They call them eastern peaches in the market and they're delicious—
Jersey peaches.
” I laughed because that sounded such a contradiction.

Aunt May introduced the woman, “Janey, this is Kitty Boisvert who lives in the back. Kitty is a local historian, rather, a historian of the local area.”

“Sooner or later,” the small woman said pleasantly, her teeth slightly crooked, “historians always end up beholden to librarians.”

“I'm glad to meet you,” I said, staring at her, trying to be friendly and not let my disappointment show.

“Come on, Kitty,” Aunt May said, “peel a few, then, while I ready the tea.”

“May,” Kitty talked as she slipped the fragrant fruit from their skins, “I got a call on my machine from a Mr. Levine—.”

“Levine?” Aunt May considered. “Offhand, I'm sure I don't—.”

“The things I can't remember.” Kitty wiped her hands. “I leave these messages for people and then when they call back I haven't the foggiest. I guess I could look him up in the phone book, see what he does, anyway, where he lives. But there've got to be at least sixty Levines in the phone book, I'm sure.”

“That's nice,” I murmured, thinking as I often did up here that I hadn't really got to know my temporary home yet.

Aunt May stopped, teapot in hand. “What's
nice
?”

Kitty threw back her gray curls and laughed. “She thinks they're Jewish.” She looked at me, still laughing.

Aunt May laughed, too, shaking her head while I turned red with embarrassment. Because of course that's exactly what I had thought. She explained, “It's L-a-v-i-g-n-e, Luh-veen, a common French Canadian name. It means vine, grows
everywhere. There's a—.”

“—funeral home,” Kitty interrupted. “That's it. Lavigne's Funeral Home. I'm doing a little research on mortuaries, those that began in the 19th century or earlier. Times have changed. That's history, how things were. That's it, I remembering calling him, Lavigne.”

I turned and studied the kitchen wall, to give myself a little time to cool off, feeling like a complete dunce. But in a town with four synagogues, well, I just thought—
Levine.
Breathing in and out, I read some of the clippings tacked to a corkboard.

Obadian Alwyn

b. Rumsey, England

d. 1878 @ 79

The children of killers are not killers, but children.
—Elie Wiesel

The third spear carrier on the left should believe that the play is all about

the third spear carrier on the left.

—Lawrence Olivier

Then we all sat in the dining room, at the table with the white cloth, under a cooling ceiling fan. On the wall in front of me, a print of Raoul Dufy's “Open Window, Nice,” hung, its window looking out at a lake by a small city such as this one. Listening to the women, I helped myself to a china plate of peach slices, pimento cheese sandwiches, and a warm cream scone. My steaming cup held dark steeped lemon-lightened tea.

Kitty fanned herself with her napkin, saying it must be global warming, that she'd seen an article saying soon it might even quit snowing in Vermont in the winters. Aunt May said
that was nonsense, that the last time it had been this hot in August had been 1947.

And all the while I sat there smiling, amazed to be having afternoon tea with my great aunt and her close friend Kitty Boisvert.

12

MOM NEARLY POPPED with pleasure at the news that her aunt had remembered her antecedents and invited a member of her family for a visit. Her daughter Janey, and about time.

I told her all the little details, her and Daddy, who naturally was on the other phone. What I'd worn and that I'd fixed my hair nice, and left my puppy with a friend, and taken a hostess gift of real florist roses, eight for the month of August. “Aunt May set a beautiful table, with a good white cloth, and we had tea with cream scones and little pimento-cheese sandwiches.”

“Did I ask you for the menu? The item you promised to relate about the
belated
visit to my
only living kin
was: Did you meet her beau? What did he look like? You can't tell squat from the book jackets. They always show him walking off into the trees, that's the trademark, you might say. Did he and May get cozy?”

Daddy interrupted, “Your Aunt May, cozy? You've must've got her mixed up with somebody else, Ida Jean. She's a librarian. I'm saying that's not just a job, it's a personality is what I'm saying.”

“No,” I told mom, “Bert Greenwood didn't join us. I believe he—isn't much for socializing. Writers are that way. She mentioned he'd got upset recently about an article in the
paper on attack dogs . . .”

“What did I tell you, hon, I read all his books.”

I cleared my throat and took a swallow of iced tea, wanting to give a little pause so they'd be listening—that is, if they wanted to hear what I was going to say. Beulah sat beside me on the living room floor, a fan blowing our hair. “A woman historian joined us, a friend of Aunt May who is doing research on funeral parlors.”

“A subject we do not want to hear one more remark about: funeral parlors.”

Mom lowered her voice. “What's this about you're seeing this James somebody that you just happened to mention you've been seeing?”

“He's from Vermont; he's a teacher. OK?” Of course they were going to ask a thousand questions, which I should have foreseen before ever mentioning him.

Daddy broke in, “How about his folks, where are they? What do they do?”

“I believe they're—in the dairy business,” I said. Cows, Vermont.

“Farmers? His family's got a spread with milk cows? You don't think of a cold place having grazing.”

Mom hushed him. “Give the girl a break, Talbot. She's got a boyfriend maybe who happens to be someone else from the someone here who she spent the last five years of her life married to. That's the number one and only thing we need to know.”

“You look after yourself,” Daddy said, “hear me? You understand?”

Mom had the last word. “The next time you go over there to see her, you could take along one of Mr. Greenwood's books, that's nothing but a compliment, which I'm sure he'd be glad to sign to be accommodating to someone that's in the family.”

13

Dear Mom,

I thought you and Daddy would like to see some different photos of Charlotte than the ones I sent before, and hope they will get your mind back on a matter of major interest to you and off the teacher named James, who I know only in a friendly way.

Here is the big clock on the outside wall of the old red brick store which has the Woman in the Moon on the face and different objects for the hours. So the Judge can remember that he heard the gunshot at half-past frying pan before the parade began. And here is his house, which I figured out by counting the ones he passes every morning on his way to enjoy a cup of coffee with his neighbors: the one with the gazebo, the one with the greenhouse, the one with the turrets on top. And the white frame building is the old meeting house where he has his office. Now you can see the locations as you read over the books.