A Multitude of Sins (12 page)

Sallie bent sideways toward me and extended her smooth perfect face to be kissed as I went past the bed with my baggage. “We don’t want to abandon that,” she said.

“We never will,” I answered, leaning to kiss her on the mouth. And then I heard the honk of my cab at the front of the house.

Robert Frost’s cabin is a great story about Sallie and me. The spring of our first year in New Haven, we began reading Frost’s poems aloud to each other, as antidotes to the grueling hours of reading cases on replevin and the rule against perpetuities and theories of intent and negligence—the usual shackles law students wear at exam time. I remember only a little of the poems now, twenty-six years later. “Better to go down dignified / with boughten friendship at your side / than none at all. Provide, provide.” We thought we knew what Frost was getting at: that you make your way in the world and life—all the way to the end—as best you can. And so at the close of the school year, when it turned warm and our classes were over, we got in the old Chrysler Windsor my father had given me and drove up to where we’d read Frost had had his mountainside cabin in Vermont. The state had supposedly preserved it as a shrine, though you had to walk far back through the mosquito-y woods and off a winding loggers’ road to find it. We wanted to sit on Frost’s front porch in some rustic chair he’d sat in, and read more poems aloud to each other. Being young southerners educated in the North, we felt Frost represented a kind of old-fashioned but indisputably authentic Americanism, vital exposure we’d grown up exiled from because of race troubles, and because of absurd preoccupations about the South itself, practiced by people who should know better. Yet we’d always longed for that important exposure, and felt it represented rectitude-in-practice, self-evident wisdom, and a sense of fairness expressed by an unpretentious bent for the arts. (I’ve since heard Frost was nothing like that, but was mean and stingy and hated better than he loved.)

However, when Sallie and I arrived at the little log cabin in the spring woods, it was locked up tight, with no one around. In fact it seemed to us like no one ever came there, though the state’s signs seemed to indicate this was the right place. Sallie went around the cabin looking in the windows until she found one that wasn’t locked. And when she told me about it, I said we should crawl in and nose around and read the poem we wanted to read and let whoever came tell us to leave.

But once we got inside, it was much colder than outside, as if the winter and something of Frost’s true spirit had been captured and preserved by the log and mortar. And before long we had stopped our reading—after doing “Design” and “Mending Wall” and “Death of the Hired Man” in front of the cold fireplace. And partly for warmth we decided to make love in Frost’s old bed, which was made up as he might’ve left it years before. (Later it occurred to us that possibly nothing had ever happened in the cabin, and maybe we’d even broken into the wrong cabin and made love in someone else’s bed.)

But that’s the story. That was what Sallie meant by a visit to Robert Frost’s cabin—an invitation to me, upon my return, to make love to her, an act which the events of life and years sometimes can overpower and leave unattended. In a moment of panic, when we thought we heard voices out on the trail, we jumped into our clothes and by accident left our Frost book on the cold cabin floor. No one, of course, ever turned up.

That night I spoke to Sallie from St. Louis, at the end of a full day of vigorous preparations with the Missouri lawyers (whose clients were reasonably afraid of being put out of business by a 250-million-dollar class action judgment). She, however, had nothing but unhappy news to impart. Some homeowners were trying to enjoin the entire AIDS marathon because of a routing change that went too near their well-to-do Audubon Place neighborhood. Plus one of the original marathon organizers was now on the verge of
death (not unexpected). She talked more about good-deeds-done-for-wrong-reasons among her hospice associates, and also about some plainly bad deeds committed by other rich people who didn’t like the marathon and wanted AIDS to go away. Plus, nothing had gone right with our plans for placing the puppy into the Pet Pals uptown.

“We went to get its shots,” Sallie said sadly. “And it acted perfectly fine when the vet had it on the table. But when I drove it out to Pet Pals on Prytania, the woman—Mrs. Myers, her name was—opened the little wire gate on the cage I’d bought, just to see him. And he jumped at her and snapped at her and started barking. He just barked and barked. And this Mrs. Myers looked horrified and said, ‘Why, whatever in the world’s wrong with it?’ ‘It’s afraid,’ I said to her. ‘It’s just a puppy. Someone’s abandoned it. It doesn’t understand anything. Haven’t you ever had that happen to you?’ ‘Of course not,’ she said, ‘And we can’t take an
abandoned
puppy anyway.’ She was looking at me as though I was trying to steal something from her. ‘Isn’t that what you do here?’ I said. And I’m sure I raised my voice to her.”

“I don’t blame you a bit,” I said from strangely wintry St. Louis. “I’d have raised my voice.”

“I said to her, ‘What are you here for? If this puppy wasn’t abandoned, why would
I
be here? I wouldn’t, would I?’

“‘Well, you have to understand we really try to place the more mature dogs whose owners for some reason can’t keep them, or are being transferred.’ Oh God, I hated her, Bobby. She was one of these wide-ass, Junior League bitches who’d just gotten bored with flower arranging and playing canasta at the Boston Club. I wanted just to dump the dog right out in the shop and leave, or take a swing at her. I said, ‘Do you mean you won’t take him?’ The puppy was in its cage and was actually being completely quiet and nice. ‘No, I’m sorry, it’s untamed,’ this dowdy, stupid woman said. ‘Untamed!’ I said. ‘It’s an abandoned puppy, for fuck’s sake.’

“She just looked at me then as if I’d suddenly produced a bomb and was jumping all around. ‘Maybe you’d better leave now,’ she said. And I’d probably been in the shop all of two
minutes, and here she was ordering me out. I said, ‘What’s wrong with you?’ I
know
I shouted then. I was so frustrated. ‘You’re not a pet pal at all,’ I shouted. ‘You’re an enemy of pets.’”

“You just got mad,” I said, happy not to have been there.

“Of course I did,” Sallie said. “I let myself get mad because I wanted to scare this hideous woman. I wanted her to see how stupid she was and how much I hated her. She did look around at the phone as if she was thinking about calling 911. Someone I know came in then. Mrs. Hensley from the Art League. So I just left.”

“That’s all good,” I said. “I don’t blame you for any of it.”

“No. Neither do I.” Sallie took a breath and let it out forcefully into the receiver. “We have to get rid of it, though. Now.” She was silent a moment, then she began, “I tried to walk it around the neighborhood using the belt you gave it. But it doesn’t know how to be walked. It just struggles and cries, then barks at everyone. And if you try to pet it, it pees. I saw some of those kids in black sitting on the curb. They looked at me like I was a fool, and one of the girls made a little kissing noise with her lips, and said something sweet, and the puppy just sat down on the sidewalk and stared at her. I said, ‘Is this your dog?’ There were four of them, and they all looked at each other and smiled. I know it was theirs. They had another dog with them, a black one. We just have to take him to the pound, though, as soon as you come back tomorrow. I’m looking at him now, out in the garden. He just sits and stares like some Hitchcock movie.”

“We’ll take him,” I said. “I don’t suppose anybody’s called.”

“No. And I saw someone putting up new signs and taking yours down. I didn’t say anything. I’ve had enough with Jerry DeFranco about to die, and our injunction.”

“Too bad,” I said, because that was how I felt—that it was too bad no one would come along and out of the goodness of his heart take the puppy in.

“Do you think someone left it as a message,” Sallie said. Her voice sounded strange. I pictured her in the kitchen,
with a cup of tea just brewed in front of her on the Mexican tile counter. It’s good she set the law aside. She becomes involved in ways that are far too emotional. Distance is essential.

“What kind of message?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” she said. Oddly enough, it was starting to snow in St. Louis, small dry flakes backed—from my hotel window—by an empty, amber-lit cityscape and just the top curve of the great silver arch. It is a nice cordial city, though not distinguished in any way. “I can’t figure out if someone thought we were the right people to care for a puppy, or were making a statement showing their contempt.”

“Neither,” I said. “I’d say it was random. Our gate was available. That’s all.”

“Does that bother you?”

“Does what?”

“Randomness.”

“No,” I said. “I find it consoling. It frees the mind.”

“Nothing seems random to me,” Sallie said. “Everything seems to reveal some plan.”

“Tomorrow we’ll work this all out,” I said. “We’ll take the dog and then everything’ll be better.”

“For us, you mean? Is something wrong with us? I just have this bad feeling tonight.”

“No,” I said. “Nothing’s wrong with us. But it
is
us we’re interested in here. Good night, now, sweetheart.”

“Good night, Bobby,” Sallie said in a resigned voice, and we hung up.

That night in the Mayfair Hotel, with the window shades open to the peculiar spring snow and orange-lit darkness, I experienced my own strange dream. In my dream I’d gone on a duck hunting trip into the marsh that surrounds our city. It was winter and early morning, and someone had taken me out to a duck blind before it was light. These are things I still do, as a matter of fact. But when I was set out in the blind with my shotgun, I found that beside me on the wooden
bench was one of my law partners, seated with his shotgun between his knees, and wearing strangely red canvas hunting clothes—something you’d never wear in a duck blind. And he had the puppy with him, the same one that was then in our back garden awaiting whatever its fate would be. And my partner was with a woman, who either was or looked very much like the actress Liv Ullmann. The man was Paul Thompson, a man I (outside my dream) have good reason to believe once had an affair with Sallie, an affair that almost caused us to split apart without our even ever discussing it, except that Paul, who was older than I am and big and rugged, suddenly died—actually in a duck blind, of a terrible heart attack. It is a thing that can happen in the excitement of shooting.

In my dream Paul Thompson spoke to me and said, “How’s Sallie, Bobby?” I said, “Well, she’s fine, Paul, thanks,” because we were pretending he and Sallie didn’t have the affair I’d employed a private detective to authenticate— and almost did completely authenticate. The Liv Ullmann woman said nothing, just sat against the wooden sides of the blind seeming sad, with long straight blond hair. The little white-and-black puppy sat on the duckboard flooring and stared at me. “Life’s very fragile in the way we experience it, Bobby,” Paul Thompson, or his ghost, said to me. “Yes, it is,” I said. I assumed he was referring to what he’d been doing with Sallie. (There had been some suspicious photos, though to be honest, I don’t think Paul really cared about Sallie. Just did it because he could.) The puppy, meanwhile, kept staring at me. Then the Liv Ullmann woman herself smiled in an ironic way.

“Speaking about the truth tends to annihilate truth, doesn’t it?” Paul Thompson said to me.

“Yes,” I answered. “I’m certain you’re right.” And then for a sudden instant it seemed like it had been the puppy who’d spoken Paul’s words. I could see his little mouth moving after the words were already spoken. Then the dream faded and became a different dream, which involved the millennium fireworks display from New Year’s Eve, and didn’t
stay in my mind like the Paul Thompson dream did, and does even to this day.

I make no more of this dream than I make of Sallie’s dreams, though I’m sure Merle Mackey would have plenty to say about it.

When I arrived back in the city the next afternoon, Sallie met me at the airport, driving her red Wagoneer. “I’ve got it in the car,” she said as we walked to the parking structure. I realized she meant the puppy. “I want to take it to the shelter before we go home. It’ll be easier.” She seemed as though she’d been agitated but wasn’t agitated now. She had dressed herself in some aqua walking shorts and a loose, pink blouse that showed her pretty shoulders.

“Did anyone call,” I asked. She was walking faster than I was, since I was carrying my suitcase and a box of brief materials. I’d suffered a morning of tough legal work in a cold, unfamiliar city and was worn out and hot. I’d have liked a vodka martini instead of a trip to the animal shelter.

“I called Kirsten and asked her if she knew anyone who’d take the poor little thing,” Sallie said. Kirsten is her sister, and lives in Andalusia, Alabama, where she owns a flower shop with her husband, who’s a lawyer for a big cotton consortium. I’m not fond of either of them, mostly because of their simpleminded politics, which includes support for the Confederate flag, prayer in the public schools and the abolition of affirmative action—all causes I have been outspoken about. Sallie, however, can sometimes forget she went to Mount Holyoke and Yale, and step back into being a pretty, chatty southern girl when she gets together with her sister and her cousins. “She said she probably
did
know someone,” Sallie went on, “so I said I’d arrange to have the puppy driven right to her doorstep. Today. This afternoon. But then she said it seemed like too much trouble. I told her it
wouldn’t
be any trouble for
her
at all, that
I’d
do it or arrange it to be done. Then she said she’d call me back, and didn’t. Which is typical of my whole family’s sense of responsibility.”

“Maybe we should call her back?” I said as we reached her car. We had a phone in the Wagoneer. I wasn’t looking forward to visiting the SPCA.

“She’s forgotten about it already,” Sallie said. “She’d just get wound up.”