Ruffly Speaking (11 page)

“Leah, really. It isn’t a rectory. It was Morris Lamb’s house, and take it from me, Morris was no rector.” j Undeterred, Leah picked up an imaginary book and held it dramatically at arm’s length. “Her delicate, sensitive heart pitter-pattering in her moist and ivory-skinned yet richly ample and curvaceous bosom, our heroine raps timidly yet boldly upon the massive oaken portal of the somber
rectory.”
She cleared her throat and continued. “The hollow ring of manly footsteps thuds from within the manse and reaches the tender and quivering drums of her shell-like pale pink ears. The ancient door creaks inward upon hinges unoiled for countless generations.”

“Morris’s house was probably built about 1955,” I said, “and—”

“And in the dim light of the single votive candle that casts mysterious yet oddly thrilling rays of flickering illumination in the vast cavern of the great hall, our heroine descries—”

“What?”

“You’re interrupting!” Leah resumed her narrative. “Descries that it is HE—Matthew! the noble rector’s noble son—who languidly intones, ‘Enter, my pretty! So you have not forgotten our assignation.’ ”

“Enough! I get—”

“Stop interrupting! You’re breaking the flow. We’re just getting to the good part.” Leah continued: “Languidly stretching forth all twelve highly inbred yet unmistakably aristocratic digits, he seizes...”

“
Twelve
?”

“Twelve,” she repeated. “Inbred.”

“Twelve.”

“With all twelve inbred digits, the better to bodice-rip, my dear, he seizes the lacy and demure yet—”

“Yet again?”

“Yet again tantalizing bodice of her pale green watered silk, puff-sleeved, shimmering gown and petrify' ingly but thrillingly rips it to passionate shreds.” With a gasp, Leah put a protective hand across the intact black jersey that stretched across her own ample and curvaceous bosom. “But wait! Hark!”

“Hark
isn’t romance, is it? It’s—”

“Hark! Out of the deep and looming blackness that hovers o’er the rectory, and up its steep and winding steps, thunder the massive paws of a gigantic hound of hell. Slavering at the mouth, the great beast springs and leaps. Within mere nanoseconds, the would-be rapacious Matthew lies pinned to the time-worn timbers he so recently trod, all thoughts of present and future bodice-ripping forever banished by the righteous fangs of canine justice. So the moral of the story is—”

“Romances don’t have morals,” I said. “The romance
is
the moral.”

“This one does.” Leah closed the imaginary book and set it firmly on the table. “When keeping assignations with sons of rectors, always remember your own bitch.”

12

 Late on Monday afternoon, I rang what still felt like Morris Lamb’s bell. To make sure that
Dog’s Life
hadn’t scheduled a competing story about some other dog-assisted member of the clergy, I’d phoned Bonnie, my editor, who called the idea “fresh and novel.” For obvious reasons, fastidious dog journalists avoid the word
scoop.

Where Morris Lamb had found the door chimes, I can’t imagine. There can’t be much call for the theme from
Canadian Love
Song anymore. You always knew when Morris was approaching the door. He sang along. So did his older Bedlington, Nelson. That last time I was there, his young bitch, Jennie, hadn’t yet learned to join in, but Morris felt optimistic about her progress. Terriers have little aptitude for singing tricks, but even if Jennie had spent years without producing so much as a little yowl, Morris would have maintained his faith in her. I once overheard someone—it must have been Doug Winer—accuse Morris of always thinking that the glass was half full. I remember Morris’s rejoinder. Yes, indeed, he replied, half full of Sapphire Bombay gin.

The high-pitched barking that now accompanied the chimes was loud and intent, if not melodic. The little dog who produced it proved to be what the vernacular styles a Heinz. At a guess, Ruffly had some Papillon, Chihuahua, foxhound, toy Manchester terrier, and beagle, possibly mixed with some basenji. But if you want a clear picture of him, imagine a Sheltie-size smooth fox terrier body; a black-and-tan coat; and the bright, intelligent dark brown eyes of a Pomeranian. Ruffly’s most striking features, though, were his rounded, stand-up Cardigan Welsh corgi ears, one perfectly upright, the other folded slightly at the tip, both utterly immense in proportion to his head and body, like two gigantic flexible satellite dish antennas on a tiny cottage, one mounted solidly on the roof, the other listing as if fixed in the act of clutching some invisible signal. Oddly enough, Ruffly’s serious expression and those mammoth, improbable puppy ears gave him the distinctive beauty of a dog perfectly suited to fulfill his purpose. Fifty-seven varieties and all, Ruffly was an unmistakable purebred, A.K.C.—All Kinds Combined—the perfect prototype of the all-American hearing dog.

When I’d rung the bell, Ruffly’s prancing and yapping had been audible, but by the time Stephanie Benson opened the door and welcomed me, the dog was frozen in a sit-stay with nothing moving except his bright eyes and those sound-grabbing ears. Leah had said that he was having problems. I saw no sign of them at all.

Like almost everyone else who lacks a major physical °r sensory disability, I practically don’t notice those of other people and am immediately relaxed and comfortable with anyone who has one. Furthermore, all my friends will testify that if, instead of being someone with hearing aids, the woman who greeted me had had no head or if she’d been a ringer for my deceased mother or even an obvious clone of me, I’d still have looked at the dog first. Having studied the dog, Ruffly, I did not then stare rudely at Stephanie Benson’s hearing aids, which were larger than Rita’s but had the same kinds of little switches and dials. Their color was the same, too, what Rita vilified as “prosthetic pink.” But, as I’ve said, nothing about disability makes me in the least bit ill at ease, apprehensive, or self-conscious. I’m never afraid that I’ll do or say the wrong thing. What happened as I followed Stephanie Benson across the foyer of Morris’s house was a meaningless accident. That I have executed thousands of about-turns in obedience rings covered with tom, taped, curly-edged rubber mats without once falling on my face is irrelevant. I just plain tripped.

I’ve liberated myself from stereotypes about priests, too. It’s thus unnecessary to point out that when Stephanie Benson kindly knelt down to make sure that I hadn’t broken anything, I did not imagine that she would chant prayers over my bruised and recumbent body. I was, however, a little surprised to hear her say, “These bare floors are just hell on rubber soles.” Rita would have made something of it, of course.
Hell
and
soles
in a single sentence? But, then, Rita makes something of anything. “I’ve got to put a rug down here,” Stephanie Benson added. “Are you sure you’re all right?”

I scrambled to my feet. “Fine,” I said.

Stephanie Benson smiled. She was a tall woman with a large frame and substantial muscles, bosomy, too, but not heavy. She had strong features and unusually square, widely spaced teeth that looked as if she’d just brushed them. Her face looked freshly washed, too. Her skin was thick and leathery, something like the insides of Ruffly’s ears. She wore no makeup, but, in its stead, a heavy coat of shiny moisturizer. Each of her hands was about the size of the dog’s head, and on the fingers of both, she wore silver and turquoise rings that were nothing, absolutely nothing, compared to the heavy Navajo squash blossom necklace that almost covered the top half of her white jersey dress. Her eyes were almost as turquoise as the stones. Her hair was black, with only a few strands of white, pulled straight back into a knot at the nape of her neck.

As I gaped at Stephanie Benson’s jewelry, struggled to regain my composure, and checked out my camera and tape recorder, she covered my awkwardness by telling me how happy she was to help with the article. “They tell us we’re pioneers,” she said. “Everyone knows about guide dogs, but hearing dogs are equally remarkable, and part of our job is to get the word out about them.”

Before long, Stephanie Benson had supplied coffee and settled me in Morris Lamb’s big living room, which still, of course, had its same old floor-to-ceiling windows and sliding glass doors, open today to let in leaf-filtered sunshine. The room now held a collection of formal furniture that honestly seemed better suited to a rectory than to Morris’s cube: maple tables, pale yellow wing chairs, an ottoman, two upholstered couches with no fireplace to flank, a museum-quality highboy with shiny hardware. Stephanie Benson’s Oriental rug was too small for the living room floor; and in the adjoining dining room, the ladder-back chairs jutted up discordantly, and the long, wide oval table created the impression of a dance floor so elevated that would-be waltzers would need
^a
step stool to reach it. Morris had furnished the place in stark wood and vivid colors, but he was such a hopelessly pndulgent dog owner that, in his day, every piece of furniture not actually occupied by a Bedlington at least bore the marks of one, puppy-chewed legs or telltale splotches
^w
here a stain remover had reneged on its manufacturer's

Promise.

Stephanie had seated me directly opposite her on one of the couches. The coffee table between us held, in addition to two delicate violet-patterned white cups and saucers, my little tape recorder, which Stephanie gave me permission to use before I even had the chance to ask. When I interview people who are self-conscious about their voices, I end up trying to scribble down what they’re saying instead of being free to listen. Stephanie said, “You want to tape this? Go ahead. Then you won’t have to bother writing, so we can talk." Ruffly stationed himself on the floor next to Stephanie. As she and I talked, his eyes darted back and forth between us as if following the ball in a conversational tennis match.

Before I could begin the interview by making warmup small talk about Matthew, Leah, and the Avon Hill Summer Program, Stephanie took the initiative. “First,” she said, “I’m going to tell you why I have a hearing dog. Everyone always wonders. Here I am, the rector of St. Margaret’s. We spoke on the telephone. When you talk to me, I hear you. And I may sound slightly ministerial, but I don’t sound
deaf.
Did I cheat?” Her turquoise eyes watched me. I wondered whether she could hear me catch my breath. Ruffly could: Those waving ears held momentarily still. His owner’s smile widened.

“I assume not,” I answered.

“Well, the answer is simple, Holly. Virtually no one can manage hearing aids twenty-four hours a day. It’s unendurable, and you end up with ear infections. So you take them out at night, and the dog is your smoke alarm-Your burglar alarm. Your alarm clock. That’s literally true. I set the clock for Ruffly; it’s no good to me. When it goes off, he wakes me up. That’s part one of the answer, the simple part. The other part is that if I’m walking down the street, I don’t necessarily hear a car even when it’s right next to me, but Ruffly does, and if someone calls my name from a block away, there’s not a chance I’ll hear it, but Ruffly knows my name, and he knows every name anyone’s likely to call me, so if someone hollers “Mrs. Benson” or “Stephanie” or whatever, he lets me know. Or if my back’s turned. It’s... I don’t know how to explain it—it’s nothing he was specifically trained for— but he can tell if someone’s talking to me. Before Ruffly, people must’ve thought I was a terrible snob! Because I’d muddle along listening and lip-reading, which is mostly guesswork, you know, and then someone would start a conversation, and I suppose I just wouldn’t answer, or they must’ve seen me on the street and tried to say hello, and I’d just go sailing off ignoring them.”

“Is that how you happened to get a hearing dog?” Stephanie laughed. “The precipitant actually was teakettles. I’d burned out something like twelve in a row, and then I really did it. One of them must’ve whistled itself dry, and then, well, it didn’t actually go up in flames, but the fumes set off the smoke detector, and, meanwhile, I was in my office merrily working away, and by the time Matthew got home, the teakettle had melted —well, melded, really—into the element on the stove. And also, before Ruffly, I was managing
talking
on the phone, but the problem was knowing when it was ringing. If I didn’t have my aids in, forget it, but the rest of the time, we had this bell rigged up that was so loud that it drove Matthew crazy. And the other thing was sirens.” I must have looked puzzled.