Gaits of Heaven (4 page)

If reinforcing desired behavior were sufficient to housebreak a dog, we’d have been all set. As it was, I had to harp on the need to prevent accidents indoors. When we were back in the family room, where I sat on a couch with Dolfo lying at my feet and studying my face, I said, “We have to remember that Dolfo can’t be given the chance to practice the behaviors that we don’t want.”

“Oy vey!”
said Ted. “Where to begin? You have to understand that we are a merged family. We have a daughter, Caprice, from Eumie’s previous marriage, and a son, Wyeth, from mine.”

“And Dolfo,” said Eumie, “is the child we have together. We are deeply committed to providing him with unconditional love.”

Oy vey!
Where to begin? Operant
conditioning
is about as
conditional
as you can get.

“You see,” said Ted, “communicating negative emotions can give the child the message that he is globally bad. So, he adapts by splitting off that part of himself. And what began as a whole, unified, healthy organism becomes divided.” He paused dramatically. “Divided against itself.”

“And what are possessions, after all?” Eumie demanded. “Things! Objects!”

“Maybe we can agree,” I ventured, “that soiling outdoors is preferable to soiling indoors.”

On that point, we did agree. Ted again mentioned the dog’s breeder, who claimed that golden Aussie huskapoos housebreak themselves. It said so on her Web site.

“The Web site lied,” I said. “Furthermore, Dolfo has had the chance to practice going in the house. He thinks it’s just fine. The behavior has become a habit, and unless we can break the habit, he’s going to keep on doing it.”

Their faces fell. “You want us to lock him in a cage,” Eumie charged. “That’s what the vet said to do. Dr. Cushing. We need to find someone else.”

“She has an excellent reputation. But there are alternatives to crate training.” I mentioned some: keeping the dog on leash every second, confining him to the little powder room near the kitchen, and so on.

Far from recognizing my advice as emanating from a Higher Power, they continued to regard me with suspicion and took turns explaining that my suggestions translated into making Dolfo feel cut off, rejected, frustrated, and unloved.

To borrow a word of Ted’s,
meshugass
! Madness! If it hadn’t been for Dolfo, I’d have walked out. But the foolish-looking dog got to me, in part because his background and experience predicted a disaster I just wasn’t seeing, namely, a horrible case of aggression. He’d been bred, I suspected, for nothing but money, sold to people who knew nothing about dogs, and taught nothing about the rules of canine conduct, yet far from becoming a danger, he was sweet, zany, weirdly loveable, and touchingly eager to learn to be a good boy.

“Let’s give ourselves some time to mull matters over,” I suggested. “You can use the clicker and treats when you take Dolfo out. But you have to
take
him out and not just let him out. And we’ll schedule another meeting. Monday is Memorial Day. How would Tuesday be?”

Ted gave a strange nod, but Eumie, as if translating from a foreign language I was too dense to understand, said, “Tuesdays are my special days just for myself.”

“If you love Dolfo,” I pointed out, “then he is part of yourself. I’ll be here at nine on Tuesday morning.”

Somewhat to my surprise, Ted and Eumie both thanked me. Armed with his clicker and treats, Ted took Dolfo outside to the backyard. It was Eumie alone who showed me to the door. When we got there, she spoke in a voice far softer and gentler than her usual squeal. “You’re anxious about something,” she said, “something that has nothing to do with us. I have the feeling that you’re panicking about something.”

To my amazement, I found myself telling her what it was. “Showing my dogs,” I said. “I’ve always had ring nerves. But it’s all much worse. I haven’t been showing in obedience at all.”

“I can help you with that,” Eumie said. “And I will.”

Oddly enough, I believed her.

On Saturday, while Steve and Leah were at the clinic, I
show-groomed Rowdy and Sammy, who were entered the next day, both with professional handlers. I’d almost always used a handler for Rowdy, who’d finished his championship easily and had thereafter been shown occasionally as a “special,” a champion competing for Best of Breed and, with luck, for a placement in the group to which the breed belongs. A
show
, as maybe I should mention, is a
conformation
event, as opposed to performance events like obedience and agility trials: in conformation, the judge evaluates the extent to which the dogs
conform
to the ideal image spelled out in the breed standard. The Best of Breed winners then compete within their respective groups, and the first-place winners in the groups compete for Best in Show. These days, when I entered Rowdy, I was interested in a group placement, that is, in having him take first, second, third, or fourth place in the Working Group, the one to which the Alaskan malamute belongs. Well, at Sunday’s show, Rowdy never made it to the group because the judge overlooked him in favor of Sammy, who went Winners Dog and Best of Winners, and then BOB over specials, including, of course, his own father. Naturally, Steve and I were thrilled about Sammy, and neither of us was surprised when he went nowhere in the group, mainly, we thought, because he was still a puppy and looked immature next to the competition.

On Monday morning, Memorial Day, Steve devoted an hour to taking down his bird feeders and remounting them on poles equipped with new squirrel baffles. When he finished, he came into the kitchen and looked out the window above the sink as if he already hoped to see cardinals and chickadees devouring sunflower seed and goldfinches scarfing up expensive thistle. The feeders, I might mention, were not in the fenced yard but on the opposite side of the house, where any birds they might attract would be safe from Rowdy, Sammy, and Kimi. It was Kimi who’d delivered the coup de grace to my previous bird-feeding efforts by interpreting the term
bird feeder
as a personal invitation to feed on birds. Feed on them she had. I’d given up and given the feeder away. The dogs, however, never entered the area on the opposite side of the house, and Steve was optimistically convinced that his magic touch with animals—he truly has one—would enable him to devise a system for foiling the squirrels.

“Maybe we should get a squirrel feeder,” I suggested. “People do that. They put out dried ears of corn. The idea is that the squirrels prefer the corn and leave the birdseed alone.”

“Unlikely,” he said.

“It isn’t as if we have ordinary squirrels. The black ones are special.”

Cambridge abounds in what Steve calls
melanistic individuals
or
black morphs
, which is to say, black squirrels. When I first lived here, I was convinced that some Harvard lunatic who’d spent a year in a place like Ceylon or Java had brought home a breeding pair of exotic squirrels that had filled Cambridge with pigmented progeny. As it turns out, our Cambridge black squirrels are probably descended from a colony in plain old ordinary Westfield, Massachusetts, a colony descended from black squirrels imported from plain old unexotic Michigan. Fantasy is often better than reality.

“An attractive color variant,” Steve agreed.

“Ted and Eumie don’t have any squirrels,” I reported.

“Then they don’t feed birds.”

“Oh, but they do! They must have a dozen feeders. Maybe more. Including right on the rails of their deck. There’s a company that comes to clean and fill the feeders.”

“What kinds of baffles are they using?”

“None. None that I saw. But the feeders weren’t damaged at all.”

“Impossible,” Steve said.

“Fact. Tons of feeders. No squirrels.”

“You just didn’t see any. Where there are feeders, there are squirrels. It’s a law of nature.”

“Not on Avon Hill.”

“Everywhere.” He paused. “Unless someone’s killing them.”

“Don’t say that,” I said. “Ted and Eumie are…they’re not monsters.”

That afternoon, we had a little Memorial Day barbeque that left me regretful that Steve and I hadn’t taken all five dogs for a hike instead. Everything was going well until Rita showed up with Quinn Youngman, who made himself mildly obnoxious by droning on to Leah’s friends from school with stories about his wild youth of sex, drugs, Bob Dylan, and radical politics. When Rita had started to date him, I’d tried to support her by concentrating on their shared professional interests and ignoring their age difference. My reaction after the barbeque was, so what if she was a psychologist and he was a psychopharmacologist? He was twenty years older than she was, and a bore to boot, albeit a tall, striking, and fairly good-looking one. On reflection, it seems to me that my annoyance at Quinn Youngman stemmed in part from knowing that Ted and Eumie were his patients and knowing equally well that professional ethics would prevent him from satisfying my idle curiosity about what he prescribed for them and why.

On Tuesday morning, I was tempted to cancel my appointment with the Greens and Dolfo. Steve and Leah had taken India, Lady, and Sammy to work with them. Steve’s old apartment over his clinic was still furnished, not that the dogs cared; and except for occasional canine tenants, it was vacant, so when he took dogs to work with him, they occupied the apartment and didn’t have to be kenneled at the clinic when he and Leah were busy with clients. At eight o’clock I was settled at the kitchen table with Rowdy and Kimi snoozing on the floor and a cup of good coffee, a yellow legal pad, and a pen in front of me. The traffic on Concord Avenue was low background noise that I tuned out. Thanks to the squirrels that had emptied the feeders outside the kitchen window, there wasn’t even any chirping to disturb me. I could’ve spent the morning dreaming up a topic for my
Dog’s Life
column, making notes, and starting the first draft. As it was, the prospect of breaking up my morning ruined my concentration. After wasting forty minutes, I gathered my Dolfo-training supplies and drove to Avon Hill. This time, there were no service agency vehicles and no service providers in sight. When I rang the bell, Ted opened the door, and before I could even remove my shoes and walk in, Dolfo jumped on his back and almost knocked him down. “Dolfo,
genug
! Enough already!” Ted exclaimed.

The immediate cause of Dolfo’s excitement was my arrival. His eyes—the hazel and the brown one—gleamed with happiness, and he quivered from funny-looking head to silly-looking tail. Possibly because of a certain authoritative gleam in my own eyes, however, he did not jump on me but loped out of the hallway toward the kitchen. Among his many oddities was a strange gait. I took comfort in the thought that if Dolfo suffered from a major structural flaw, at least his owners could afford orthopedic consultations and surgery.

After Ted and I had exchanged greetings, he informed me that he was expecting an important phone call from a patient at nine-fifteen and that he had patients scheduled after that. Because of the way he and Eumie had conspired to thwart my efforts during our previous meeting, I was actually glad that only one of them was available: divide and conquer. As it turned out, Eumie, however, was still in bed. “I moved to the guest room in the middle of the night,” Ted informed me. “I haven’t seen her this morning except when I let Dolfo out at seven. She was asleep then. But she’s probably getting up now. She has a pedicure appointment, and she won’t miss that. You can get started with Dolfo.”

Embodiment of positive training that I am, I said, “No. Our agreement is that I get
you
started, and I can’t do that if you’re working and Eumie’s in bed, so I’d suggest that you go and get her, or we’re going to have to forget about the whole thing. Dolfo can keep soiling in the house, and you can keep losing housekeepers, and, I might add, I don’t particularly like it that both of you apparently forgot about your appointment with me but that Eumie certainly wouldn’t miss her pedicure. So please go and get her and ask her which she loves more, her dog or her feet.”

After glancing at his watch, Ted complied to the extent of going halfway up the stairs and calling, “Eumie! Eumie, the dog maven’s here.” After waiting a moment he said to me, “Maybe she’s in the shower. Look, I can’t miss this phone call. Why don’t you go on up and find her. It’s the door straight ahead at the top of the stairs.”

Perhaps I should explain that I had occasionally taught people to train their dogs and had coached obedience handlers to show their first dogs. On rare occasions, I had even trained people’s dogs. Never once had my duties extended to dragging lazy owners out of bed or out of the shower, and I was not about to start redefining my obligations now. I was taking time from my own work out of loyalty to the club and sympathy for Dolfo. If the Greens had been paying me, instead of speaking my mind, I’d have quit the job. I settled for using a favorite word of Rita’s to justify my refusal to barge in on someone I hardly knew: “It really wouldn’t be
appropriate
,” I said, “so please just take a few seconds to go and get her.” I paused and added, “And I’m sorry I was so sharp. It’s just that Dolfo really needs help, and so do both of you.”

This time, Ted hustled all the way up the stairs. Dolfo chose to remain with me, either because he at least recognized my potential as a Higher Power or because he smelled the roast beef and cheese in my pockets, not that there’s all that much difference from a dog’s perspective. Having nothing better to do during Ted’s absence, I whiled away the time by pursuing my mission in life, which is to say that I used a tiny piece of the roast beef to lure Dolfo into a sit, and then sounded my clicker, fed him the treat, and told him what a good dog he was, as was certainly true. The experience of replacing barbarism with one small element of civilization was so satisfying to both of us that we repeated the exercise several times and might, in fact, have kept on training for quite a while if Ted hadn’t interrupted by running down the stairs in a panic and shouting, “She won’t wake up! I shook her, and she wouldn’t wake up! Help me!”

Ted’s show of alarm registered on me as nothing more than a manipulative ploy to get me to do exactly what I’d refused to do, namely, to act as Eumie’s maid by dragging her out of bed for the day. The thought crossed my mind that if Ted kept trying to force me into the role of lady’s maid, I’d empty a bucket of water on Eumie’s head and subsequently inform her that I’d merely been following Ted’s orders. “Should I call an ambulance?” I asked coolly.

Taken aback, he said, “Let’s keep it quiet. Eumie uses a lot of sleeping medication. I keep warning her to watch what she’s taking when she gets up at night. She loses count of what she’s already had. Maybe she’s just sleeping it off.”

“Ted, if she’s taken an overdose—” Breaking off, I dashed upstairs and through the open door of the room that lay straight ahead. The room was almost totally dark; the only light came from the hall. The stench was nauseating. Despite my sudden realization that something might actually be wrong, I now had the sense that my presence was genuinely inappropriate. Still, I ran my hand over the wall near the door frame, found a light switch, and flipped it. Two lamps with low-watt bulbs came on, one on a dresser and one on a small desk. Ahead of me was a king-size bed with a duvet so heavy and rumpled that it was at first hard to see that the bed was occupied at all. Fighting the awkward sense of being an intruder, I spoke Eumie’s name as I moved toward the left-hand side of the bed, where masses of streaked blond-brown hair were almost camouflaged by the multicolored duvet cover and matching pillows. “Eumie!” I said loudly. “Eumie, wake up!”

My first physical effort to rouse her was tentative: I lowered one hand to what I guessed was the vicinity of her shoulders and patted gently. Nothing whatever happened: there was not the slightest sign of movement, not the faintest sound of breath. After that, I was all action, ripping the comforter off, rolling Eumie onto her back, pushing up one sleeve of her pink silk pajamas to check for a pulse, feeling the cold of her skin, observing the rigidity of wrist and elbow, and yanking the cell phone out of my pocket, pushing the button that brought it to life, and punching the emergency number. Struggling to speak clearly, I gave the Greens’ address and had just finished saying that Eumie was dead when a young woman burst into the room and came to an abrupt halt.

I recognized Caprice Brainard immediately. My cousin Leah had said that Caprice had a major weight problem. The problem, as I now saw, consisted of distribution as well as of simple obesity. Bad genetic luck or some vicious force of nature had forced excess pounds upward to her face and neck. What looked like separate pockets of fat seemed to have been cruelly inserted on the upper and lower lids of her blue eyes, on either side of her mouth, on her cheeks, and even on her forehead; and distinct rolls encircled her neck. Her body was heavy, but her torso was mercifully rounded, and she wore a long denim skirt that hid her legs and feet. Her beautiful hair seemed to mock the disfigurement of her face. She had the blond ringlets of a cherub.

Still holding the cell phone to my ear, I used my other hand to gesture to Caprice to stop where she was. Simultaneously, I shook my head. “Wait outside,” I told her.

Unfortunately, I was too late. Caprice’s eyes were fixed on her mother’s body. Frozen in place, she began to scream. Having finished reporting the essentials of the emergency, I gave up on the 911 call, put the phone back in my pocket, and was moving toward Caprice when Ted appeared. Instead of checking on his wife or attending to his stepdaughter, he rushed past Caprice and through the open door of what proved to be a large and luxurious bathroom. When he put the lights on, I could see tile, marble, and mirrors. Noticing my gaze, Ted hastily shut the door.

The bang of the door silenced Caprice, but before I had the chance to lead her out of the room, a teenage boy staggered in and began shouting, “Caprice, for Christ’s sake, shut up! All I’m trying to do is get some sleep. Now shut your fat mouth!”