The Barker Street Regulars (2 page)

The plastic plaque on the wall outside Althea’s room on the fifth and top floor of the Gateway displayed two names:
A. BATTLEFIELD
and
H. MUSGRAVE.
Althea’s roommate, Helen, was a sprightly little woman who took frequent advantage of the numerous events listed in the Gateway’s monthly calendar and posted on the little kiosk in the first-floor lobby. I never found Helen napping on her bed. Rather, when she wasn’t having her hair done or attending a sing-along, a coffee hour, or an arts and crafts class, she bustled around rearranging the
greeting cards, snapshots, and photocopied notices pinned to her cork bulletin board. I have never understood how Helen managed to keep track of the Gateway’s elaborate schedule of events. Her delight in the family photographs and cards on her bulletin board sprang in part from the perpetual novelty they held for her. The identities of the pleasant-looking people in the pictures were a mystery to her; she puzzled over the handwritten messages and signatures on the cards. The first time Rowdy and I entered Helen and Althea’s room, Helen, whose bed was the one near the door, sprang from her armchair, gave an enthusiastic cry, and darted around exclaiming, “A beauty! Isn’t he big! Isn’t he big!”

Rowdy preened. I smiled. “You like dogs?” Although the inquiry was clearly unnecessary, I’d been trained to ask.

Helen abruptly stopped dashing and chattering to concentrate on mulling over my question. She acted more or less the way I would if someone asked me whether I liked caducei. First, I’d have to remember what they were. Then I’d have to decide whether I had any feelings about them one way or the other.

From a wheelchair positioned to give a good view out the big plate-glass window, a high-pitched, authoritative voice decreed, “Yes, but she prefers cats.”

“I prefer …” Helen began unhappily.

“You like dogs, but you prefer cats,” the voice informed her.

Although the woman by the window was seated, it was immediately clear that she was the tallest person I’d seen at the Gateway, taller than any of the men, indeed one of the longest women I’d ever encountered anywhere. Her hands were so large that in the days when she’d needed outdoor clothing, before she’d entered
the Gateway, she must have had to buy men’s gloves. I wondered what she’d done about hats. Her arms were tremendously long, and instead of resting her feet on the wheelchair, she stretched her legs way out in front to plant the soles of her orthopedic shoes flat on the floor. Her hair was short, white, curly, and so thin that her entire scalp was visible, as was the bone structure of her face. The skin on her forehead and cheeks had passed beyond what must have been a phase of lines and crinkles to a state of smooth translucency. Fine creases, however, surrounded blue eyes so pale that they were almost white, and folds of loose skin drooped from her elongated neck.

Althea introduced herself. Early that morning, I’d tried to think of some way to avoid using only the first names of the people I’d meet. When, as part of a group of new volunteers, I’d trailed after an experienced therapy-dog handler and her Portuguese water dog on an orientation session at another nursing home, I’d felt uncomfortable with the practice. People in nursing homes were not schoolchildren; they had grown up in a long-gone era of formality; I wanted to follow the old rules. I couldn’t. For one thing, I didn’t always know what people’s last names or titles were. For another, I didn’t want to insult the staff of the Gateway by arrogantly diverging from the universal custom. And was I to be Ms. Winter instead of Holly? After only a few minutes, though, I felt okay about using first names, which were, after all, better than none. Furthermore, as I reminded myself, everyone in the world of dogs went by first names, and plenty of the people I trained and showed with were at least as old as the people at the Gateway.

“I’m Holly,” I said. “And this is Rowdy. Do you like dogs?”

Althea Battlefield thumped the padded arm of her wheelchair with an immense, bony hand. “Bring him right up here next to me, or I won’t be able to see him. Closer!” Her hand groped. I used a puppy-size dog cookie to lure Rowdy into position.

“He
is
a big dog, isn’t he?” Althea said. “The other one that visits here is pint size. It’s what’s called a bichon frise.” She didn’t anglicize the pronunciation, but produced a somewhat self-conscious nasal and a French
r
that would have left me with a sore throat.

I was tempted to ask Althea whether she’d ever owned a dog, but felt uneasy about raising the topic. Although I’d rapidly abandoned my resolution to shun first names, I was determined never to ask a question I’d heard from a new and well-meaning volunteer on my orientation visit:
Did you have a dog?
she’d inquired of someone. I’d cringed at the unspoken preface to the question. Indeed,
Back when you had a life, did you have a dog?

Then, turning her attention from Rowdy to me, Althea referred to the Sacred Writings. As I’ve mentioned, I misunderstood her. She corrected me by pointing to a long row of hardcover books that sat on the windowsill. Arrayed in front of the volumes was a collection of objects that reminded me of the knickknacks sold at dog shows. Instead of depicting terriers, pointers, or spaniels, however, Althea’s figurines showed a pipe-smoking man who wore an Inverness cape and a deerstalker hat.

“Oh,” I said stupidly, “do you like Sherlock Holmes?”

Every once in a while, of course, some dope asks
me
whether I like dogs.

D
URING JANUARY AND EARLY
February, as Rowdy and I continued to make our weekly visits to the Gateway, I began to read the Sherlock Holmes stories, some for the first time, others, like
The Hound of the Baskervilles
and “The Red-headed League,” for the second, third, or fourth. Let me make this plain, however: Just as a vast, woofy gulf separates the real dog person from the person who really and merely enjoys dogs, so, too, a great gaslit chasm stretches between the true Sherlockian and the person like me who truly and merely enjoys Sherlock Holmes. I, for example, not only own two Alaskan malamutes, Rowdy and Kimi, but am a card-carrying member of the Dog Writers Association of America. Literally! I have a card. I carry it. It identifies me as a member of the press, a bit of an exaggeration, I always think—Dog
’s Life
magazine isn’t exactly
The New York Times
—but then again I own a D.W.A.A. baseball cap that I’m supposed to wear when I cover dog shows, and how many
Times
correspondents can boast the equivalent? More to the point, when other dog people talk about
fiddle fronts, woollies, sunken croups, good crowns, three-point majors, and the leathers of P.B.G.V.’s, I know exactly what’s being said because everyone’s speaking my language.

Feeling left out? If so, you know just how I felt on the Friday morning in mid-February when I led Rowdy into Althea’s room at the Gateway and overheard the animated conversation she was holding with Robert MacPherson and Hugh Searles. I caught English words and phrases, sometimes whole sentences, yet entirely failed to grasp either the gist or the particulars. I teeter-tottered on the non-Sherlockian side of the gaslit chasm. For the sake of anyone who might actually be able to understand what Althea, Hugh, and Robert were chuckling and exclaiming about, I wish I’d had a tape recorder along, but I didn’t. What I do remember made no sense to me. The word
callosities
stands out in my mind, as does a reference to a Crown Derby tea set, a mention of the supply of game for London, an evidently witty allusion to coals of fire, what sounded like an arch question from Althea about coins of Charles the First, and, from Robert, a riposte, I think, concerning, I swear, the extirpation of fish. At that point, everyone but me burst out laughing, and Hugh remarked that I must think they were discussing the fertility of oysters.

“Fecundity!”
snapped Robert.
“Fecundity!
Not
fertility!”

Callosities. Teapots. Oysters. I figured out what they were talking about only when the taller of the two men, Robert, I later learned, glanced over at Helen Musgrave’s bulletin board and in a pleasant, even affectionate, tone made a passing remark about a ritual.

Feeling like the slow kid in the class who has for once got the right answer, I exclaimed, “‘The Musgrave Ritual’!” The Holmes story, which I’d just read,
culminated in the discovery of a long-dead body and—oh, yes!—coins of Charles the First.

Althea couldn’t see Rowdy unless he was right next to her, but she knew my voice. In a manner I now recognize as Watsonian, instead of telling Rowdy to go say hi, I said, “Althea, you have visitors. If we’re intruding—”

“Intelligent company is never an intrusion,” Althea scolded.

Naturally, I thought she meant my idea of intelligent company, namely, the unrivaled companionship of an Alaskan malamute. Rowdy knew better. He sank to the floor and peacefully rested his head on his big snow-shoe paws. With the lobby ladies, he was a performer. Gus needed a living link to the dogs he’d once loved; Rowdy was his animate time machine. Nancy’s need was raw and primitive: She suffered from the depletion of life itself. Rowdy was her donor, like a blood donor, really, but a transfuser of vitality that you could almost see and touch as it shot from him to her and restored, however briefly, her powers of speech and reason. Althea liked dogs. But what she really loved was intelligent human companionship, by which she meant, of course, a conversation with someone who would talk about Sherlock Holmes.

“This is Rowdy,” I told Althea’s two guests. “I’m Holly. But meet Rowdy, and you’ve met me. A case of identity, so to speak.” That’s a title from the Canon: “A Case of Identity.” I can be a worse show-off than Rowdy.

Althea apologized and went on to make amends. She claimed to have forgotten my last name. It seemed to me that she’d never heard it. When I supplied my full name, Holly Winter, Althea, Robert, and Hugh exchanged little smirks, and Althea offered what was to
me the bewildering assurance that there was nothing vitriolic about me. Kitty Winter, I later found out, was a nasty character, a vitriol-thrower who appeared in “The Illustrious Client.” By the time I happened on Kitty, I was taking the Holmes stories personally and was far from pleased to find a violent Miss Winter with what had by then proved to be a weirdly prophetic first name. But I have leaped ahead. At the time, I was mystified. Robert MacPherson and Hugh Searles, Althea went on to say, were two of her oldest and dearest friends. Neither man, I thought, was as old as Althea. Both were certainly more than seventy, probably more than eighty, but I couldn’t guess their ages more precisely than that. Like active people I knew in dogs, Hugh and Robert looked vigorous and shared a liveliness that made age irrelevant. Robert, a thin, craggy, white-haired man at least as tall as Althea, looked so much like pictures I’d seen of Highland Scots that I wondered whether I hadn’t, in fact, seen him wearing a kilt and playing the bagpipes at one of those Celtic music conceits that are popular in Cambridge. It was even possible that I’d noticed him ambling through Harvard Square in traditional Scottish garb. Not that a six-foot, knobby-kneed man in a skirt really stands out in the Square, which always reminds me of an eccentric dog show with heavy competition for Weirdest of Breed: kids with topknots like the crests of exotic birds, blond-haired women in saris who’ve managed to pierce their noses, but haven’t mastered the Indian technique of applying makeup and consequently look as if they have oozing wounds on their foreheads. I later learned that I was right about Robert MacPherson, except that he didn’t parade around the Square in his kilt, but reserved it for the Robert Burns Festival, and didn’t play the bagpipes, but carried the haggis, which, I should mention, is not a
musical instrument, but a sheep’s stomach stuffed with oatmeal and offal. It’s eaten only in Scotland, where people apparently like it, and in certain rarefied circles in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where everyone hates the taste of the stuff but eats up the image.

As Robert was taking Althea to task for calling herself old and for referring to Hugh and to him as old friends, Hugh was staring at Rowdy, who had rolled onto his back on the linoleum and was waving his immense paws in the air. I translated: “He’s hoping someone will scratch his chest. There’s no obligation.”

Hugh was a good six inches shorter than Althea or Robert, and attractively burly in the manner of people who look as if they’re savoring the pleasure of the previous meal while happily pondering the delights of the next. He had yellowish hair, bright blue eyes, and a dapper mustache, which I suspected he’d grown forty years earlier in an effort to add maturity to his round baby face. In contrast to Robert, who wore a dark three-piece suit, Hugh was dressed in khakis, a plaid flannel shirt, and a tan cardigan sweater. He struck me as a man who probably liked to tinker with mechanical objects. What accounted for his staring was, I suspected, curiosity about what made Rowdy work. When I later learned that Robert had gone to Harvard and Hugh to M.I.T., I was not surprised.

“Now,” said Hugh, tentatively fingering the white hair on Rowdy’s tummy, “would this be an Alaskan malamute?”

“He would be,” I said. “In fact, he is.”

Robert lightly cleared his throat. Rising, he reached over the Sherlock Holmes figurines and removed one of the volumes that rested on the windowsill beside Althea. In making my way through the Gateway, I had noticed that almost no one was ever reading and that
books were almost completely absent from windowsills, shelves, and other places where people displayed their belongings. Here in Cambridge! Book City, U.S.A.! Althea, in contrast, kept a miniature library that included several editions of the Sacred Writings. Her most prized possessions, which she stored in her nightstand, were what looked to me like nothing to brag about, just a pair of undersize paperbacks, although I’ll concede that the little books were bound in leather and bore Althea’s name stamped in gold. She also had a small collection of books about Holmes, Watson, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. In fact, she’d honored me by letting me borrow one; she’d wanted me to read a charming tongue-in-cheek essay by Rex Stout called “Watson Was a Woman.” Anyway, when Robert selected the same one-volume Doubleday edition of the complete works that I owned myself, I felt terrible. I had no excuse. Althea had tried to introduce me to the science of deduction. But only now, as Robert picked up the book, removed a bookmark, and resettled himself in his chair, did I realize that Althea, the one person at the Gateway who lived amid books, had such poor eyesight that she was completely unable to read. I should have read to her. I should have scurried around finding books on tape, books, of course, about Sherlock Holmes. When I later offered to do just that, Althea refused. Robert and Hugh read to her, she explained. She had no desire to hear the Canon from the lips of others.