Ruffly Speaking (13 page)

“It must be odd for you,” Stephanie said. “To see us here? In his house?”

“It’s a lot better than seeing it empty. That would be really strange.” We were in the front hall now. I imagined Stephanie buying a rug for the bare floor, closing the big windows in winter, arranging to have them washed, making the house her own. “And Morris would have been glad to have a dog here,” I went on. “I mean, I am, too....” I let it go at that. Without a dog, the house might not have felt like Morris’s, but it seemed unnecessary to say so.

“It’s an unlikely house for me,” Stephanie acknowledged. “It’s not really my style, and I’m used to an apartment, but the location is perfect—a ten-minute walk from St. Margaret’s—and the neighborhood was irresistible. After the city? I still can’t get over it.” Stephanie opened the front door, looked up, and smiled. “Trees. A real garden. We actually have a backyard. It seems like a miracle. It’s the most bucolic place I’ve ever lived.”

I looked up and down Highland Street. Even by my rural standards, it was remarkably verdant. Furthermore, unlike the country, it was all ivy, flowers, and well-pruned shrubs and trees, and it lacked the dented mailboxes, discarded beer cans, and tom-open plastic bags of rubbish that are the garden sculpture of the average back road in God’s country, the beautiful State of Maine.

“Highland is one of the prettiest streets in Cambridge,” I agreed. “And it’s so quiet.” As soon as I said it, I felt stupid. What did Stephanie care whether it was quiet or not? But maybe she did. I remembered the horrible roaring and buzzing that had assaulted me when I’d tried Rita’s hearing aids. I couldn’t reconcile that bombardment, which seemed to be defeating Rita, with Stephanie Benson’s poise and self-confidence, and especially with her obviously cheerful outlook. Although Stephanie was chatting and lingering, she was also ushering me out —we were at least halfway down her front walk. On impulse, I suddenly said, “Please tell me if this is an imposition or an intrusion, but I have a big favor to ask. One of my best friends has just started wearing hearing aids?” Why is it that women turn everything into questions? Rita had just started to wear the aids; there was nothing questionable about it. I rushed on. “And she’s having a rough time getting used to them. And I don’t know how to help her.” Confession. What are priests for?

I guess Stephanie was a good priest. Her big, wide face warmed immediately. “Would you like me to talk to her? I’d be glad to.”

I was thanking Stephanie and starting to explain a little about Rita when I caught sight of three boys huddled together on Highland Street. They seemed to have appeared out of nowhere, but now formed a tight little group on the far side of Alice Savery’s property. They weren’t making any noise—they seemed to be whispering together—and they were almost motionless. What grabbed my attention, I suppose, was their unnatural silence and stillness.
Ambush posture:
Your dog is trotting along minding his own business, sniffing a utility pole, bouncing around, and then suddenly another dog appears, and instead of leaping ahead to greet it or behaving himself and ignoring it, your dog drops flat to the ground. His legs go right out from under him. He doesn’t make a sound. His hackles don’t rise. He freezes. Then WHAM! He springs. It isn’t called ambush for nothing.

But only one of the three boys actually sprang—a scrawny kid of seven or eight, I guessed, with straight brown hair that stood out in tufts all over his head. His two companions sank almost to their knees and sheltered themselves from view in the branches of a flowering shrub, but peered out to follow the dash of their tufted friend, who bolted down the sidewalk in front of Alice Savery’s house with his arms outstretched like the wings of an airplane, and deliberately and repeatedly whacked the top of Alice Savery’s fence along its entire length.

At the end of his first pass through what I suspected was enemy territory, the boy was heading straight for Stephanie, Ruffly, and me. His eyes were in most respects entirely different from Rowdy’s, which are, of course, almond shaped and very dark brown—the boy’s were violet-blue circles—but I’d seen that glint before. It’s the sparkle that appears in the eyes of a creature who’s right in the delicious midst of getting away with something good. Rowdy, though, is always decently groomed. This boy had the vaguely neglected appearance you see in a lot of the children of Cambridge intellectuals—the uncut hair, the battered athletic shoes, the jeans with holes in the knees. The only fresh piece of clothing he wore was a white T-shirt with bright crimson letters that spelled out ‘Avon Hill Summer Program.”

I half expected the boy to smash into Stephanie or me, or to trip over Ruffly, but at the last moment, he veered, zoomed away, and once again administered a series of passing blows to the fence. Then, after what looked like a brief conference with his buddies, he zipped back toward us, but suddenly turned, dashed up Alice Savery’s walk, and made for her front door, to which he delivered a single hard blow of the fist. Until then, the whole performance had been absolutely quiet, but the second his hand slammed against the door, the two boys lurking safely in the shrubbery burst into wild catcalls, and a shrill but not terribly loud alarm began to sound from Alice Savery’s house.

By now, the boy who’d triggered it had sped out of the yard, and he and his eggers-on had switched from whoops and howls to raucous imitations of the alarm. To my mind, though, the star performer was Ruffly. At the first wail, the little dog danced across Morris’s yard, yapped at the shrub border demarcating the edge of Alice Savery’s property, then fled back to Stephanie, wheeled around, and reran the route, just in case Stephanie had missed the point, I guess. When Ruffly returned to Stephanie, he positioned himself to face the noise and, on the off-chance that Stephanie still hadn’t gotten the message, gave her a hard nudge. She did her part. “I’ll take over now,” Stephanie told Ruffly. Accompanied by the excited dog, whom she kept praising for his good work, she walked calmly down the sidewalk to the beginning of the eminent fence. She made a show of carefully observing Alice Savery’s big, shabby yellow house, the lovely garden, and the shouting boys. Ruffly’s work had been flawless; I wondered what could possibly be wrong with him.

At last, the alarm quit. Stephanie briefly raised her hands to her hearing aids. “There. I’m back in business again. Sometimes it’s perfectly lovely to turn the world off.”

“Does this happen often?” I asked, joining her.

She smiled and shook her head. “The alarm’s new, I think, but those boys pull something or other on a fairly regular basis. This is their most spectacular effort to date. The poor woman who lives there has a real gift for keeping them going. If she’d ignore them, they’d leave her alone. She doesn’t seem to understand that the worst thing she can do is to make it interesting for them. The fence is their favorite target, not that they actually do it any harm, but poor Miss Savery is inordinately proud of it, for some reason.”

“Longfellow admired it,” I said pompously. Stephanie smiled in recognition. “You know her?”

“No. We had one little encounter. My dogs were with me. I got the fence lecture.”

“Oh, dear. Miss Savery is very definitely not a dog lover. Doug warned me about that, but so far she hasn’t uttered a word of complaint. Doug marched me over and explained all about Ruffly, but all she did was treat us to a disquisition on the fence. It’s apparently standard fare. I gather that the children have it down almost word for word. They dare each other to brush their hands along the fence, and then they take off, or they hang around and wait for her to deliver the lecture about the fence. The thing that provokes her most is... She’s an avid gardener, as you can see, and it drives her wild to have them run through the yard. Matthew tells me that the ultimate dare is to pick her flowers.”

“How does Matthew...?”

“Because of Ivan,” said Stephanie, pronouncing the name as Leah did, EE-vahn. “Haven’t you heard about Ivan?”

“Ivan the Terrible. Yes, of course. Leah talks about him all the time.”

“Matthew and Leah,” Stephanie said rather pointedly, “are so cute talking about him. Leah keeps pretending to propound some dog training theory about how to settle Ivan down, and she’s joking, but Matthew is such a serious soul. Leah can’t resist teasing him, and the more she kids him, the more
logical
and
sensible
he becomes. Poor Matthew. Emotion always comes as such a surprise to him. He must be a little overwhelmed right now. He’s absolutely smitten with her.”

14

 “Stephanie Benson says that Matthew is absolutely smitten with you,” I told Leah. “Those were her exact words.”

“Matthew is being sort of a jerk,” Leah said.

It was Saturday morning, and we were heading south on Route 128 on our way to a show-and-go at the Canine Emporium in North Attleboro. I was driving. Leah, still half asleep, was drinking coffee. I’d been awake for hours. By eight o’clock, Steve and I had had breakfast and taken a shower. (Always, always shower with your vet. Clean profession.) When Steve left for work, I walked the dogs, tidied up the house, and made two unsuccessful attempts to rouse Leah, who was displaying that notorious sign of incipient moral dissipation, sleeping late when you ought to be out showing your dog. The salvation of youth requires radical measures. Rapping on the door and calling her name had done no good at all, and the dogs were pestering to get into her room, anyway. All I did was open the door. The credit for wresting Leah’s slothful soul from Satan belongs exclusively to Rowdy and Kimi. “How is Matthew being a jerk?” I asked.

“He thinks that Stephanie should go back to New York.”

“You can’t really blame him. How would you like it if your parents had just suddenly decided to move to Cambridge?”

“He doesn’t mind that much that Stephanie’s here.” If so, it seemed to me that Matthew Benson was the first freshman in history to be perfectly happy that his mother had followed him to college. I didn’t say so.

Leah continued. “What he doesn’t understand is why his parents don’t work it out. And also, Stephanie and Phillip—that’s his father—gave him this whole line about
the family
and not going too far away. So what he thinks is that since they weren’t going to stay together anyway, they might as well have let him go to Stanford.”

“Maybe they didn’t know they were going to split up,” I pointed out.

“That’s what I said.”

“So that’s what he’s being a jerk about?”

“It’s more about the rector, because Stephanie only got to be a rector by moving here, and Matthew thinks that she should’ve just stayed in New York instead of advancing her career.”

“So his parents just separated? Recently?”

“When the rector left. Stephanie got offered this job, and she packed up and left. Really what Matthew thinks is that since Phillip is a physicist, and she’s a rector, Phillip’s work is important and hers isn’t. Matthew doesn’t say that, but you can tell that’s what he thinks.”

“I wonder whether St. Margaret’s knew.”

“Knew what?”

“That if Stephanie took the job, she’d leave her husband.”

“What does that...?”

“Nothing. I just wondered. Anyway, it sounds as if Matthew really confides in you.”

“Of course he does,” Leah said smugly. “He’s utterly smitten with me.” She drank some coffee and made a soft noise of discontent. “This car smells funny. It smells like… like orange rinds or something. Lemonade.”

“Lime. It isn’t the car. It’s Kimi.”

I’d spent the week writing the article about Stephanie Benson and working on the product evaluations. The previous day, Rowdy had been my guinea pig for yet one more new line of Australian miracle coat revitalizers, shampoos, conditioners, and grooming sprays—dog fancy is high in Down Under these days—and Kimi had been allotted the equally trendy citrus goos and glops. An obedience show-and-go is the lowliest link in the Great Chain of Being Shown, just above a run-through and below a fun match, so I didn’t have to groom the dogs at all, but they’re inevitably the only malamutes entered in any obedience event, and I like them to serve as good ambassadors of the breed. The Aussie shampoo I’d used on Rowdy had disconcerted me by failing to foam or bubble, but it had done a good job. Kimi’s citrus products had left her looking terrific, too, but she smelled like a gin gimlet.

“Didn’t you notice it when Kimi and Rowdy woke you up?” I asked.

“The dogs didn’t wake me up. Rita’s radio did.”