Dead End Gene Pool (15 page)

Obadiah was the adorable puppy with Dumbo ears that my mother had snatched out of a pet shop window, only to have him grow up to be a basset hound. Animal lover though she was, every chance she got she packed him off with us to visit our grandparents. He was fat, engulfed in his own saliva, and endearingly bent on parasuicide.
En vacances
in Maine he was fond of casting himself into the ocean, typically between the boat and the dock so that he could be crushed between them as he drowned. You’d think this would be a safe bet; as each wave passed by, Obadiah would get sucked under and slammed against the struts of the float and the wooden hull. Slightly less dramatic were his attempts to run away from home. I’m pretty sure the idea was to either starve or get run over by at least one automobile along the way. As he set off at a snail’s plod, you could almost see the miniature hobo sack swaying on a pole over his shoulder.

The main reason Obadiah never succeeded in completing his mission was that he required an audience. He would lumber down and heave himself off the dock only when there was a crowd of people to watch. Invariably someone dragged him out by his collar, usually falling in as well from the sodden effort of the recovery. Likewise, when Obadiah decamped for parts unknown, he would alert everyone by standing at the top of the driveway for about an hour, staring at the house for a misty-eyed final look. Sighing heavily, he would eventually set off. The way out to the world at large was half a mile long. Whoever saw him during the two hours it took Obadiah to reach the main road would alert a rescue squad, who in turn had plenty of time to repot a dozen begonias, read
The New Yorker
cover to cover, or prepare a Baked Alaska before hopping in the car to go pick him up.

I’m convinced Obadiah was welcomed into my grandparents’ house not because they were particularly fond of him but because he looked remarkably chic licking his privates under the Milton Avery landscapes or snoring on his back on the Bertoia furniture. Obadiah was photographed frequently beneath the boomerang-shaped Noguchi dining table, a layered inverted pyramid of honey-colored maple that might have come from a scrapped NASA project. In many of the pictures he is caught gazing balefully into the camera lens with an empty Baccarat goblet next to his elephantine splayed feet. As clumsy as the dog was, he knew how to treat the stemware with respect.

Now Obadiah traveled slowly across the living room to pose beside my grandfather, who was conversing with a deeply tanned West Coast sort who leaned toward him attentively, popping macadamia nuts in his mouth every two seconds from the hors d’oeuvres tray. Obadiah fixed his runny eyes on the trajectory between the man’s mouth and the tray. Freed from my cross-examination, I was studying my grandfather as he talked, as he smiled his dry smile and emphasized his points with languid gestures. He recrossed his legs with the help of his hands and, draining his glass, signaled Adolphe for another. Telepathically I signaled to him that he had one last chance to apologize, and to fire Arturo so that we could get on with the rest of the summer. I gave him exactly seven minutes, while I sipped my Coke, pretending to leaf through
Paris Match.
During those seven minutes, my grandfather and Mr. Hollywood covered the topics of post-World War Two Brazilian aeronautics, the disappointing fledgling ’63 California vintage, and the shocking trend of Harvard’s anticipated diversification, but my grandfather did not apologize.

Adolphe whispered to my grandmother that dinner was served, and the grown-ups went up the low stairs beside the fir trees to the table. Will and I remained behind, lying across the huge cushions on the sofa, sucking on the sugary crushed ice at the bottom of our Coke glasses, he reading the funnies from the
Ellsworth Times
and I one of the vintage
Vault of Horror
comic books that I kept stashed behind the American Heritage series on the fifth shelf. I watched as the butler pulled out my grandmother’s chair for her, and she carefully set her drink down beside a trio of wineglasses before half falling onto the slippery, modern plywood seat. Gathered around the table, the grown-ups looked like crazed surgeons in a slasher film, their faces flushed above the silly bibs they’d tied around their necks, and sharp instruments for torturing crustaceans lying menacingly alongside their place mats.

An enormous bowl of steamed clams was borne in. Adolphe stood unflinchingly beside my grandmother as she tussled with them, then he continued round the table as if he had the entire summer left to serve just this course. He reappeared to pour Taittinger champagne into the oversized V-shaped Steuben glasses, each so heavy you needed two hands to lift it. A skinned white peach was wedged into the point at each base; as the meal progressed the fruit flavored the champagne and the wine macerated the fruit.

That left Selma with the lobster. She stumbled a little under the weight of the scarlet carapaces, her old-fashioned spectacles opaque from the steam. Anna trailed with a bowl of buttered peas from the garden. Next out the swinging door of the kitchen would come corn on the cob, and then the golden ballooning popovers, and then a refill of champagne. I knew the drill like I knew bedtime followed brushing your teeth, and maggots followed flies on the decomposing body of a seagull.

Obadiah had singled out a woman at the north corner of the table, though she was as yet unaware. At dinner parties, he liked to position himself exactly in the middle of the diners and, from this advantageous position, choose a patsy. Plonking himself down at the victim’s feet, under the table, in line with his or her crotch, he would gaze steadfastly up, the deep red pockets of his eyes sparkling with eye goo. If pressed, Obadiah might even moan a little. Should the victim need more encouragement, he’d give his or her ankle a lick. During summer, most of these ankles were tanned and unsheathed, and the startling effect of Obadiah’s long, hot, dripping wet tongue usually resulted in something being thrown at him. If it happened to be food, he scarfed it down with the speed of a raptor. Obadiah had flashes of real intelligence.

Back on the sofa, I’d moved on to a moldy issue of
Chamber of Chills
. A grisly pictorial of zombies ransacking a kitchen afforded me a sudden brainstorm.

“Hey, Will,” I said to Will, nudging him with the toe of my sneaker.

“Mmm.”

“I just got an idea and it’s a really good one.”

“Uh huh.” My dyslexic brother was laboring through
Mandrake the Magician
. I kicked him.

“What!”

“Listen—when everyone’s asleep after lunch—”

“Ayeeeee!” cried Obadiah’s quarry, upsetting her champagne glass and elbowing her popover to the floor. Obadiah snatched it up and waddled briskly off through the fir trees and out the screen door.

Will and I slunk out the other way; he was, after all, our dog.

A fog had crept in during dinner, rolling silently off the ocean to hang in droplets from the needles of the pine trees and the thorns and blossoms of the wild rosebushes that grew at the top of the seawall. It clung to my hair and stood out in tiny wet granules on the thick wool of my sweater as we walked up the gravel path from the main house to our cottage. Obadiah clambered to the top of the stairs ahead of us. As I let him in, light spilled out onto the red painted steps, and the welcoming bulk of Henrietta spilled out after it. Edward was on her hip, sucking on a block, and he glared at me. I told him I was sorry for wrecking his wall, and he broke into a smile. “Bedtime,” said Henrietta, hugging us with one arm, and exhaling the smoke from her Winston over our heads. That suited me fine. I had a night of planning to do.

The following day we waited until it was the quiet hour when the adults were sleeping off the effects of a morning in the sun and a boozy lunch, and the help watched soap operas behind their bedroom doors or dozed in green wicker rocking chairs on the porch overlooking the vegetable garden.

Will and I started with the walk-in refrigerator. Silently, we picked up a massive blue enamel pot of bouillabaisse, and last night’s tin-foiled lobster carcasses, destined for tomorrow’s stew. Then we filled a laundry hamper with brown paper bundles of beef tenderloin and stewing chickens, and the waxed packages of smoked salmon and sturgeon from Zabar’s in the City. We moved on to netted sacks of grapefruit and oranges, bundles of leeks and carrots, wooden crates of Bibb lettuce and spinach and corn, and newspaper-wrapped cones of arugula, and mâche and frisée picked in the garden that morning. I pricked my fingers grappling with the artichokes, and broke more than a few of the quail eggs when I threw them on top of everything in the hamper. Working as a team, Will and I emptied the room systematically, transporting everything with buckets and a pulley system to where we cached it behind the three massive chimneys on the dead-flat roof.

Nothing was spared. We loaded up packages of bacon, a bunch of bananas, the four mackerel my brother had caught off the dock yesterday, a bundle of Italian parsley, half a crème caramel, and all the stinky cheeses flown in from France. We took the basket of local chanterelle mushrooms, and the bags of mussels, the barnacles on them scratching us through the burlap as we hoisted them to the roof. Up went a white enamel tray of lavender-colored squab (neatly dressed and lined up like the dead of battle), matchstick bundles of haricots verts, wooden pints of raspberries from the garden and
fraises du bois
from the woods, and cartons of tiny blueberries handpicked by my brother and me at ten hard-earned cents an hour. We stacked the remains of our grandfather’s black-and-white striped birthday cake (inscribed “TO POP WITH OP”) on top of some crates of Coca-Cola and ginger ale, and lugged it all up, only breaking a few of the bottles in the process. We left Arturo’s ray.

When we’d cleaned out the walk-in, we emptied the kitchen and pantry refrigerators, taking all the milk and cream, the cottage cheese and ham and mustards and mayonnaise and jams and jellies, and the pitchers of iced Constant Comment tea and the orange juice squeezed that morning, plus about a hundred eggs, and fifteen pounds of Land O’Lakes butter (salted and unsalted), and every kind of Pepperidge Farm bread they made back then (whole wheat, sandwich, very thin, and toasting white), and the twelve packs of Thomas’ English muffins that my family went through in a week—with at least ten of the one-pound packets of the (salted) butter.

We took a short breather before clearing out all of the drawers, cupboards, and bins. Flour, sugar, chunks of Belgian baking chocolate, cornstarch, rolled oats, tins of anchovies and StarKist tuna, tomato paste and Campbell’s chicken noodle soup, baking soda and candied violets and vinegars and Tabasco, Grape-Nuts and Corn Flakes and Cap’n Crunch. We left nothing—with the exception of my grandmother’s essential All-Bran (out of respect). By the time we’d packed the hamper with Triscuits and Finn Crisps and Martinson coffee and Fauchon tea, dried prunes and Fizzies, and boxes and boxes of Pepperidge Farm cookies (Assorted, Bordeaux, Lido, Milano, Pirouettes, and shortbread), and macadamia nuts (twelve jars) and After Eight dinner mints and Lay’s potato chips, which I ate while I worked, we were dead tired. We tossed a couple cans of Alpo and a box of Milk-Bones on top and lugged the final load up to the roof. Back in the kitchen we sat panting on the cool gray linoleum floor, and realized that we’d overlooked the freezer, but it was perilously close to teatime. As a compromise, we wound it up with a roll of duct tape. After a quick check on the progress/decay of Number Four and Number Nine, Will and I hopped on our bikes and rode into town for ice cream.

Seated on the glittery stools at the soda fountain, we giggled a little at each other while we waited for the ice cream to be dipped and then packed into the sugar cones.

“Boy are they ever gonna get a surprise when they go to start making dinner,” I said, swinging my legs nervously. It
had
been a bold reprisal. “Maybe Granddaddy’ll have a heart attack when he finds out and I won’t have to do the rat poison thing.”

“Yeah,” said Will.

“I hope Arturo has to go back to stupid Italy. Maybe they’ll fire Gloria too—wouldn’t
that
be great.”

“I guess.”

Will was looking a little pale—and more than a little uncertain, the pansy.

I said, “You know I was never
really
going to poison Granddaddy.” And I wouldn’t have. It was just that I like to plot big.

The euphoria of our delinquent deed was beginning to sour. In our unfolding awareness, I found I’d lost my appetite, even for a double-scoop cone of fudge ripple. We were like a couple of terriers that had gutted a herd of goats in a blood orgy and, now that the adrenaline was subsiding, were thinking, Holy shit—why did we do that? Our master is going to
kill
us.

We charged the melting ice cream to our grandparents’ account and coasted silently home.