Authors: Susan Conant

Paws before dying (27 page)

BOOK: Paws before dying

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Speaking of Christmas, I never wrote that article about Marcia Brawley, but she finished the scarf for Buck, and I paid her for it. It’s still here, packed in mothballs. I’ll have to decide whether to give it to him. If I do, I won’t tell him what else she puts around people’s necks... or, more precisely, around dogs’ necks.

Dr. Charlotte Zager’s fluoride treatments have done wonders for my teeth, and contrary to Buck’s predictions, haven’t affected my politics at all. Her son moved into his new offices, and when Steve told Rita that there was nothing more he could do for Groucho, she started taking Groucho to Dr. Don Zager for acupuncture treatments. Groucho is as stiff and lame as ever, and his yellow-tinged eyes stare more and more deeply into nowhere, but Rita is convinced that his energy is improving, and she likes Dr. Zager a lot. In fact, she and Don Zager have had dinner together twice, but I am not optimistic about their future. Some interfaith relationships work fine, but theirs is a doomed combination: She is devout Cambridge, and he’s born-again California.

Jim O’Brian adopted Tina’s rescue dog, the malamute bitch. He named her Rose. It seemed a peculiar choice to me, but Jack didn’t mind. He told me that it’s a Jewish custom not to name your children after the living and that Rose would’ve been flattered.

In late August, Kimi completed her C.D. in three straight trials and with good scores, too. Leah handled her. Not long afterward, on the morning Leah left, the phone rang about two dozen times. Not one of the calls was for me. Leah went out to visit Kevin Dennehy’s mother and a lot of other neighbors. After that, Miriam, Ian, Seth, and some more people came over to say good-bye to her. They played a lot of loud music. Miriam somehow ended up wearing a sweatshirt that I recognized as mine, but I didn’t say anything about it. Jeff brought a single red rose, and I dragged the dogs away so he and Leah could have some time alone in the living room.

Rowdy and Kimi, of course, knew that she was leaving. Even the stupidest obedience-school flunk-out knows when someone’s going away, but the ancestral memory of Alaskan malamutes reminds them that no one hangs around on a fast-disintegrating ice floe to whistle for a stray pup. Eyes bright, muscles tense, ears pricked up, new fall coats gleaming, they sniffed Leah’s luggage, barricaded the door, pranced from room to room, and tried their best to look too cute to leave behind.

When Leah and Jeff finally emerged, they were both crying so contagiously that I started in, too, and hugged them both. The dogs, of course, barged in, and all of us clung to Leah as if we’d never hear from her again. Then I drove her to the airport, where we met Arthur and Cassie’s plane. I hated to turn her over to them. I tried to remember that it was for only one more year.

When I got home, the house was weirdly quiet. Miriam had left my sweatshirt, and no one had borrowed anything else. The phone didn’t ring. I vacuumed. I scrubbed the bathroom. No one undid my work. The dogs kept nosing around.

“Don’t look at me,” I told them. “I didn’t throw her out. She had to leave. She had to go home.”

Then the three of us went to Leah’s empty room. I sat on her bed and patted the mattress to tell Rowdy and Kimi that it was okay for them to join me. They did. I wasn’t really alone. No one with two Alaskan malamutes is ever alone. Or lonely. It’s just that we felt that way.

Cassie sent me a perfunctory thank-you letter, and over the next few months, Leah called now and then, mostly to ask about the dogs. I made Rowdy and Kimi woo-woo into the phone and kept her up-to-date on their training. She said she was busy studying, taking all those tests, and doing her college applications.

Then one day in November, the phone rang. At first, I didn’t recognize Arthur’s voice. I thought I’d got an obscene phone call.

“You have completely blown her chances! Do you realize that?” The voice was enraged.

“Arthur?” I asked incredulously.

“I knew it was all a terrible mistake. I knew it, I knew it. The plane fare would’ve been cheap at this price. Her whole life! It’s her whole life she’s ruining!”

“Arthur, slow down. Sit down. Take a deep breath, and then blow it out.”

“Blow it out! Blow it out!”

“Arthur, this is Holly Winter,” I said. “Cassie’s niece? Maybe you dialed my number by mistake.”

He may actually have taken my advice about the deep breath, but the ensuing exhalation was no act of wordless, mind-clearing stress reduction. If he gasped in a lungful of air, all he did was spend a few seconds oxygenating his fury before he propelled it out, over the phone wires, and into my innocent left ear. Three words were clear:
Leah, Harvard,
and
dogs.
Then he started to groan and cry. During Leah’s stay with me, I had, of course, begun to reconsider and reevaluate my parents’ view of Arthur. Could such a mental and moral weakling have sired Leah? But this pathetic ranting made me realize that my parents may have been right, after all. The maternal stock must have been prepotent; Arthur’s get showed the traits of her mother’s line, none of Arthur’s.

Cassie finally got on the phone. Her distress equaled Arthur’s, it seemed to me, but she held herself together enough to inform me of its cause. Until today, Leah had seemed to her parents to be submissively following the family plan of completing a successful application to that place down the street from my house. I should add that Leah was, in fact, complying with the application requirements. She had not only taken but had excelled on numerous acronymic tests of language and mathematical ability and other tests of achievement in English, math, chemistry, and, of all things, Latin. Her grades were high, her recommendations sensational, her extracurricular activities diverse. In other words, she was such a perfect specimen of the breed, virtually the standard incarnate, that the judges were sure to put her up. Or so it had seemed. Until now. And it was all my fault.

Gaining admission to Harvard, it seems, is not exactly like getting a place in the ribbons at a dog show. In the breed ring, the dog has to trot around, hold a pose, and look happy while a stranger stares and pokes; and in obedience, he has to demonstrate a mastery of the exercises and complete attention to the commands of the handler. But to win? In either ring, he also has to show off, strut his stuff, hold his head up, put some energy into his step, and announce to the judge that he’s the obvious, unmistakable number one. Leah, it seemed to me, had done all of that, but, as I’ve said, there is one surprising difference between the requirements of Harvard and those of the American Kennel Club: Dogs are never expected to speak for themselves. Leah, though, had to submit a series of essays, and, at least in her parents’ view, she’d stubbornly and deliberately NQ’d—not qualified—by failing that last exercise.

I knew precisely how they felt. It’s happened to me. In Novice and Open, of course, the last exercise is the long down. You get through everything else with a 200, step confidently toward the dog with five seconds to go until that perfect score, and then watch helplessly as he rises to a sit and your heart sinks. He might as well have lagged, forged, sat crooked, failed the recall, and dropped his dumbbell. You might as well never have trained at all. You might as well have stayed home. Or, in Leah’s case, she might as well have gone to public kindergarten instead of Montessori, read the complete works of Robert Ludlum instead of Jane Austen, and scored minus 800 on all the tests. Most of all, she should have stayed home. She should have stayed with her parents, not with me. Why is that?

Cassie read me the NQ’ing essay. Her voice sounded nothing like my mother’s. I felt sorry for Arthur and Cassie, but I knew that there was no cause for alarm. Leah’s statement was succinct and truthful. Why
did
she want to go to Harvard? Well, Harvard
is
located conveniently near the Nonantum and Cambridge dog training clubs. Harvard Square
is
an ideal place to train because, damn it, it really
is
a lot like a dog show.
Veritas,
you know. Truth. That’s Harvard’s motto.