Gaits of Heaven (15 page)

“There’s a group,” I said hesitantly. “It’s called Overeaters Anonymous. OA. There are meetings in Cambridge. I know someone who goes. If you’re ever interested, I know she’d be glad to have you go with her.” The someone was a member of the Cambridge Dog Training Club, but I didn’t say so. Caprice wouldn’t necessarily have been flattered by the canine nature of our concern for her. To prevent any misunderstanding that might ever arise, let me say outright that if Steve and I treat you as we’d treat a stray mutt, if we phrase our advice in veterinary terms and refer you to dog trainers for help with your human problems, please don’t be insulted. You should, on the contrary, feel honored: if we treat you like a dog, it means that we’ve peered into the depths of your soul, recognized a familiar essence, and are fulfilling the religious obligation to worship the goD within.

Caprice groaned. “Twelve steps.”

“I’m afraid they’re unavoidable,” I conceded.

“This’d be more than twelve steps,” Steve said with a smile, “but you could try walking Lady. She could use the attention. And before we all get some sleep, let’s go over what you’re doing this summer. If you don’t have a job, you should get one.”

Vets rush in where shrinks fear to tread.

Caprice looked stunned. “A job?” She sounded as if he’d suggested that she drop out of Harvard and start panhandling in the Square.

“Paid employment. Or you could volunteer. Or take a course somewhere. What’s your, uh, field of concentration?” Harvard doesn’t have majors, and not because it’s a bastion of antimilitarist liberalism. The real reason is that
majors
would suggest the possibility of
minors
, whereas at Harvard, everything, simply by virtue of being at Harvard, is always preeminent.

“Physics,” Caprice said.

“You could tutor physics,” I said. “Or math. Paid or volunteer. But no one has to decide anything now. Your eyes are drooping.”

“Have you taken any medication tonight?” Steve asked.

Caprice was silent for a moment. Then, addressing Steve, she said, “No. I ate myself to sleep. But I’m okay now. I’m actually tired.”

“Hey, this isn’t going to be hard,” Steve told her. “We live real well. We eat well. We sleep well. We work hard. We have fun. We’re glad to have you here. Now, go to bed. You want Lady with you?”

“If you trust me with her,” Caprice said.

We did.

Tellers of entomological tales may long to be flies on
walls, but I dislike insects and have no desire for even the briefest metamorphosis into one. What I’d like the power to become is an invisible dog on the floor, preferably a golden retriever, a peaceful, ancient creature given to snoozing and eavesdropping. If Monty Brainard had owned a dog, visible or otherwise, I’d have mentioned it by now; he did not. Even so, if others may imagine themselves as flies on walls, I am entitled to listen in on Monty through the ears of that old golden, who is startled awake at 3
A.M.
on that same Friday night.

So, curled up on an area rug on Monty’s bedroom floor, I hear the ring of the phone. Monty utters a monosyllable that no self-respecting golden would repeat. He clears his throat, picks up the phone, and grumbles, “Yes.” The rug, as I see it—I, Holly, the fantasizer—is an ethnic one of some sort, perhaps Polish or Afghani. I, Holly the invisible dog, cannot see it; Monty does not bother to put on his bedside light.

After listening for what I, the golden retriever, find to be a frustratingly long time, he says, “I know the middle of the night’s your pattern, but it’s a pattern you’re going to have to start breaking.” And I, Holly, she who is conjuring up the dog, make a mental note to myself: like therapists and dog trainers, participants in twelve-step programs need to establish boundaries and set limits. And just how do I, Holly, know about the twelve-step program? The golden tells me. She is very intuitive.

“What you’re doing,” Monty continues, “is that you’re not going to meetings and calling me instead. The meetings are the heart of the program. If you show up at them and then you still need to call someone, okay. But you’re not doing that. There’s no substitute for the meetings. And I know we’re in the same dilemma. And not everyone else is. But close enough.”

Monty listens and resumes. “Look, it’s not just guilt. It’s shame. It’s both. And it’s easy to think that it’s people like us, parents, who really feel it. Take me. The idea is that I go to my daughter and say, ‘Well, honey, Daddy needs to tell you that he knows he’s been shortchanging you on time and attention and everything else, but he’s got a good reason. He’s hooked on Internet pornography, and he’s been protecting you from knowing that Daddy’s a pervert.’ And then I undo the harm I’ve done? Then I make amends? I’m not there, and I’m not going to get there. I’d do anything to protect my daughter. But it’s hard for everyone else, too. Show up at the meetings. You’ll see. We’ve all got the same problem.”

Well, okay. I have to confess that on that Friday night, the actual one, I had no idea about Monty’s secret and that I later learned it from a human being and not from an invisible dog. The admission is disappointing. Still, I did learn it in time to credit the elderly golden with intuiting it, and I’m always happy to do a favor for a dog.

“We had quite a scene here last night,” I told Leah at
nine o’clock on Saturday morning. She had the day off and had slept late. She was standing at the kitchen counter buttering an English muffin. Her red-gold curls were spilling from a knot on her head. She wore at least two black tank tops and had more earrings in both ears than I wanted to count. Sammy had plastered himself to her left thigh and was drooling so profusely that he was leaving a spot on her jeans.

“I know. Caprice told me. She heard me come in, and we talked for a while.”

“Steve was…he was quite blunt with her. He said things I wouldn’t have.”

Leah poured herself some coffee and took her mug and the muffin to the table. When she sat down, Sammy was her shadow. “Oh, she’s ready to drop out of therapy and see a vet instead.”

“I wouldn’t have mentioned her weight. But it’s strange. I think it bothers me more than it does Steve. It’s not that…what I really want…I do
not
think that everyone has to be thin and good-looking. I don’t. It’s the way her face is distorted. That bothers me because it’s just such a tremendous disadvantage.”

“You get used to it.”

“Easy for you to say! Leah, what I want is for her to have your advantages.”

“I sweat over chemistry. She takes physics courses for guts.” Harvard slang: easy courses.

“That’s not what I mean.”

“Maybe it should be.”

“Look, before Caprice gets back…that was one of the effects of Steve’s, uh, directness. She got up at eight, and she’s out walking Lady. And she had boiled eggs and cantaloupe for breakfast. But while she’s out, I want to tell you…Kevin says that the police found rat poison in the trees in Ted and Eumie’s yard. Someone put it there to kill the squirrels.”

Leah’s face fell. Her eyes filled with tears. “Who?”

“I have no idea. Someone who wanted to keep the squirrels out of the feeders, presumably.”

“That’s vicious! It’s monstrous!”

“Yes.”

“Ted? Or Eumie?” She paused. “Holly, Caprice would never do that. Never.”

“There’s also Wyeth, not that he’d care about bird feeders, but—”

The conversation ended abruptly when Caprice and Lady entered through the back door. Lady was wiggling all over and tossing happy looks to Caprice, who was flushed and damp. When Sammy ran up and greeted her with a deep
woo-woo-woo
, she said, “You’re still speaking to me, huh?”

“Sammy will love you forever,” I said. “He’ll remember the feast and forget everything else.”

“I wish I could.”

“Consider yourself redeemed,” I said.

As I was refilling the water bowl that Lady had emptied, Kevin Dennehy’s signature rap sounded on the back door, and Leah let him in.

“I heard voices in here,” he said.

“Maybe you should see someone about that,” Leah told him.

“Ha-ha. The three of you were chirping like birds. I thought maybe Rita was here. It’s a semiofficial visit.”

“What’s she done?” Leah asked.

“Nothing. A building up the street was entered last night. One of those places crawling with shrinks. It’s near where her new office is, and I thought she ought to know. If she’s got patient records there, she ought to get them out.”

“I’ll go get her.” In seconds, Leah’s feet were pounding up the back stairway.

“Coffee?” I asked. “Kevin? Caprice?”

They both accepted, and I went ahead and made Dunkin’ Donuts for Kevin, Bustelo for me, half caffeinated and half decaf Peet’s House Blend for Rita, and Trader Joe’s French roast for Leah and Caprice. Cambridge! On the one hand, we’re affected and precious, but on the other hand, we’re wildly considerate. Kevin took cream, and Leah and I liked milk foamed in a clever pitcher-cum-plunger gadget that Steve had given me. Caprice usually drank her coffee black, as did Rita when she was dieting. But there were limits. I hate the bitter aftertaste of artificial sweeteners, and I won’t serve them with coffee unless someone asks or unless a guest has diabetes. Also, I’d recovered from the all-things-French phase I’d gone through after our honeymoon in Paris and thus was no longer buying those rough lumps of brown and white sugar that look ever so continental but won’t dissolve in liquid.

As I look back at the five of us who were soon sitting around my kitchen table drinking coffee and talking about the neighborhood burglary, I realize that a stranger would have seen us as an ill-assorted group. Kevin and Caprice were about twice the size of anyone else. Kevin had the height and bone structure to carry to his bulk, but there was nonetheless a lot of him, as befitted his personality and, I suppose, his occupation. A frail cop? Dandy. On someone else’s block. Rita was the smallest of us, in weight and build, and although Kevin was wearing fresh chinos and a starched oxford cloth blue shirt, Rita was the only one who’d bothered to
dress
, in her sense of the word. By her standards, the black linen pants and top were informal, as were the flat-heeled black sandals she wore. Leah was an artist’s model from the Pre-Raphaelite era anachronistically costumed as a Parisian existentialist in hot weather, while Caprice wore a floor-length cotton dress that suggested membership in an agricultural commune of the 1970s. In my battered jeans, their pockets filled with clickers and treats, and my Alaskan Malamute Assistance League sweatshirt, with our motto,
We Pull for Them
, lettered across the back, I was unmistakable: a contemporary dog trainer and breed-rescue devotee. Sammy and Lady were timeless and, need I say, well-groomed.

“There are twelve of them in the building.” Kevin sounded as if he were describing an infestation of alligators, maybe, or some other unexpected and unwelcome species of animal. “It looks like the front door got left unlocked. They’re confused about who was supposed to lock up for the night. No alarm system. The door to this particular office was locked, but the guy kept the key on the door frame just above the door, so it didn’t take a genius to work out where it was.”

“Whose office was it?” Rita asked.

“Guy named Hershberg. Myron Hershberg. You know him?”

“I’ve heard of him. I don’t know him.”

“Anyways, there’s minor vandalism, stuff tossed around. All that’s missing are some old diskettes and CD-ROMs.”

“With patient records,” Rita said. “Oh, shit.”

“Most secrets are online, anyway,” said Leah.

Caprice nodded.

“The information that patients confide in their therapists is very definitely not online,” said Rita. “Kevin, thank you. I’ll have to take precautions I should’ve taken anyway.”

After Kevin left, the discussion continued.

“Maybe the aim was to find information to discredit someone for some other reason,” I said. “Something to use in a divorce, maybe.” I thought of Anita the Fiend. Hiring some thug to obtain personal information about Steve was exactly the kind of thing she’d have done during their divorce. Fortunately, he hadn’t been seeing a psychiatrist. Besides, marrying Anita was the only discreditable thing Steve had ever done, and it was public record.

“The aim might not have been practical,” said Rita. “The more I think about it, the more it feels symbolic. Penetrating a presumed repository of secret knowledge? It was probably more a plea for help than anything else.”

“Some people just like knowing other people’s secrets,” Caprice said. “My mother was like that. She teased Daddy. She’d tell him to remember that she knew all his secrets. She did that with other people, too. Maybe that’s what got her—” To my astonishment, Caprice broke into tears.

Ever so gently, Rita said, “Maybe this is a thought you need to finish, Caprice.”

Between sobs, Caprice said, “She used to get me to help. On the Web. I’m good at that. It was stupid stuff, really. If people were older than they said they were, how much they paid for their houses, whether they owed back taxes…nothing anyone would’ve murdered her for knowing.”

Leah took her hand. “But you still wish you hadn’t helped.”

“It made me feel…dirty.”

“You probably didn’t have much choice,” Leah said.

“I did. I just didn’t know it.”

Leah hugged Caprice, and then Rita and I did, too. Lady and Sammy crowded in. I like to think that the dogs were sympathetic. What I know is that if there’s one thing dogs hate, it’s being left out. Not that human beings like it. I, for example, had a disquieting thought that raised a question in my mind, and the question made me feel isolated. When Kevin had come here to question Caprice, she’d greeted him as Lieutenant Dennehy. Her use of his rank had struck me because I’d remembered that on the day of Eumie’s death, in the Brainard-Greens’ yard, I’d wanted to soften everything for her and consequently had introduced Kevin just as Kevin Dennehy. Furthermore, none of us ever called him Lieutenant Dennehy. So, how had Caprice known his rank? The answer was obvious: Google. She’d checked him out on the Web. Since she’d met Kevin only after Eumie’s death, she’d done the search for herself, not for her mother. Kevin’s rank was an entirely public matter; there was nothing even remotely secret about it. Furthermore, it was becoming common practice to use Internet search engines to find out who was who, hence the transitive verb
to Google
, as in
She Googled him
. The point wasn’t that she’d done it, though; the point was that she’d put the blame for using the Web in that fashion entirely on her mother. Eumie, Caprice claimed, had liked knowing things about people. Eumie, I thought, wasn’t the only one.