Brute Strength (7 page)

Naturally, I didn't respond by asking, ‘And does someone sleep
in
the bed with you?' When we screen homes for rescue dogs, we feel entitled to grill people. Because many rescue dogs have been repeatedly passed along from owner to owner, booted out, neglected, or worse, we try to make sure that our adopters will offer permanent, loving, responsible homes. Still, there are limits to the kinds of questions you can get away with asking. For example, after one young couple complained about having been interrogated about what kind of birth control they used, Betty banned the topic.

‘The cat,' I said. ‘That's the only potential problem with your application. We just don't get a lot of dogs we can trust with cats. Also, you need a female, and the dogs coming into rescue tend to be males. Mukluk might be fine with another male, but it's the other one I'd worry about. So, you need a female who'd be good with Mukluk and your cat. We don't have one right now.'

‘I can wait,' he said. ‘That'll give me time to do something about the fence.'

‘Think of me as your matchmaker,' I said. ‘Or your adoption social worker. Your advocate. I will do my best to find you the right dog. We're getting a young female from Maine, but I don't know much about her yet. She'll need to be evaluated and vetted. I have no idea how she is with other dogs. Or with cats. But I'll find out.'

Max offered me coffee. I accepted. As we sat at the granite island in his kitchen, he made the same French roast that Rita buys, and I learned that he was a professor of psychology. A psychologist! Just like Rita! So, of course, I immediately said that I had a dear friend and tenant who was also a psychologist, and when I mentioned Rita's name, Max sat up a little straighter and, if I may slip into the Boston vernacular, looked wicked impressed and said that Rita had an excellent reputation. He went on to explain that he was not a clinician but an academic psychologist, a researcher. Close enough for me! I didn't say so, nor did I mention that he and Rita were both from New York City, and instead of telling Max that Rita had a Scottie, the breed of his childhood, I decided to let him make that discovery for himself. Furthermore, on inspiration, I created the occasion for him to do it.

‘I don't know if you'd be interested,' I said, ‘but my dog-training club is having an event in a few weeks. On May eleventh. It's a Saturday. It's part of National Pet Week. The idea is to help educate the public about responsible dog ownership. There'll be what's called a Meet the Breed part, so people learn about different breeds, and we'll have booths run by rescue groups, including ours. I'd love to have Mukluk there. He'd be perfect. It's at the Cambridge Armory, which is on Concord Ave., right near the Fresh Pond traffic circle. It's no distance from here. You could walk.'

Max agreed to be there with Mukluk. All that remained was to persuade Rita to show up, too. Well, almost all. There was also the matter of Willie's less than ideal temperament. If I muzzled Willie, Rita would protest, and a muzzle would, in any case, create a poor and misleading impression of the breed. Could Steve be persuaded to drug Willie for the occasion? Probably not. Besides, a sedative might have the paradoxical effect of making Willie agitated instead of peaceful. There was also the matter of Willie and Max's cat, a gorgeous and gigantic male red tabby Maine coon cat who strolled in while we were having coffee. Anyway, the problem of Willie was one I'd solve later. If need be, I'd drag Rita there without her dog. The crucial thing was to get Max and Rita together. I felt absolutely confident that they were made for each other.

EIGHT

S
weeping her eyes over the dogs and handlers, Avery said softly, ‘Hardly any men. I don't know why Mom bothered dragging me here. She should've brought Hatch instead.'

Although Steve was standing a good two feet away from me, I could feel every muscle in his body stiffen. The remark jolted me, too. Fiona had crashed her car and died on Sunday night. It was now Thursday evening, far too soon for Hatch or anyone else to be on the lookout for a replacement. At least for now, decency required everyone to think of Fiona as irreplaceable.

To backtrack. On Wednesday, when I'd called Vanessa to get the information I needed to write sympathy notes to Hatch and to Fiona's parents, she'd asked about dog training. ‘That must sound heartless, but I believe in getting back to normal life as quickly as possible,' she'd explained. ‘No matter how hard it is. When Jim, my husband, died, that's what I did, and that's what I made the children do. Life simply has to go on. Different people deal with loss in different ways, but that's ours. So, dog training?'

The armory where the Cambridge Dog Training Club holds its classes is less than a half mile down Concord Avenue from our house, so Steve and the dogs and I often go on foot. I'd invited Vanessa to walk with us, but she'd said that her father would be with her and that he might insist on going by car. ‘Or worse, once it was time to go home, he'd decide that it was too dark and dangerous in the big, bad city, and we'd be stuck begging a ride or trying to find a cab that would take Ulla. No, we'll see you there.'

So, when Steve and I were checking in at the desk in the front hallway, Vanessa appeared with Ulla and also with Tom and Avery; why, I couldn't imagine until Avery glanced into the big hall where we train and made the unfortunate remark about the shortage of men and, of course, about Hatch. I chose to ignore Avery's tactlessness. After all, I knew nothing about her relationship with Fiona. They'd seemed to be on good terms, but I couldn't remember having noticed any particular affection or closeness between the two. For all I knew, Avery had hated Fiona and was relieved to have her dead and thus out of Hatch's life.

‘I'm afraid you'll be very bored,' I told Avery. ‘We don't even have a spare dog for you to train.' We'd brought only two, Lady and Sammy. Neither Steve nor I had any great ambitions for Lady as a competition obedience dog. Rather, I was convinced that the structure and clarity of formal obedience work would help to build the timid little pointer's self-confidence. As it was, she trusted Steve completely. She also trusted his shepherd, India, and she'd made gratifying progress in trusting Rowdy, Kimi, Sammy, and me. She continued, however, always to look outside herself for strength. Corny though it may sound, I hoped that in mastering the exercises, she'd discover her inner resources and thus her own strength. In contrast, full-of-himself Sammy was convinced that the point of obedience training was the point of life itself: fun, fun, and more fun! At the moment, as we waited for our classes to begin, he was fooling around with Ulla, who was preening and
woo-woo
ing and otherwise flirting with him so outrageously that one of our instructors said as she passed by, ‘Oh-oh! Sammy's got a girlfriend!' And he did, too.

‘These two were made for each other,' Vanessa said.

The Cambridge Armory, however dear to me, is not one of those funky Richardsonian Romanesque fortresses. Rather, from the outside, it looks like an unprepossessing elementary school, and the big interior space we use for dog training is the kind of gymnasium you find in high schools and YMCAs everywhere. The bleachers that line one of the long sides can be folded up to create extra floor space, but we extend them for classes so we have seating for people who aren't working with their dogs and a place to leave our jackets, coats, and training gear. Seated at the near end of the bleachers was Elizabeth McNamara, who always accompanied her husband, Isaac, to dog training, but who never handled their young puli, Persimmon. A tall, lanky man of about seventy-five who dressed in khakis and plaid flannel shirts, Isaac liked to imagine that people mistook his wife for his daughter. The error probably did occur now and then. Elizabeth was ten or fifteen years his junior, and the two differed radically in size and style. Elizabeth was a tiny little woman with delicate bones and small feet and hands, and she carried to the extreme the Cantabrigian preference for ethnic and artisanal clothing and accessories. Almost everything she wore had been spun, woven, embroidered, or crafted by hand in Third World countries or in economically disadvantaged regions of the United States: Peruvian vests, African paper beads, hand-knitted Appalachian shawls, and loose peasant shirts made of unbleached muslin. Their house was full of museum-quality quilts. Elizabeth's full, curly, shoulder-length white hair framed her pretty face. She made no perceptible effort to look younger than she was, but she had an appealing agelessness. I suspected that her diminutive build and her husband's affection for her made him see her as she had looked when they'd first met. She had a high-pitched voice, and her laughter was like tinkling bells.

Spotting Elizabeth, Tom headed straight for her and in no time was settled next to her on the bleachers. The sullen Avery sat with them. The classes that had been meeting when we'd arrived came to an end, and Vanessa and I, with Ulla and Lady, joined the big drop-in class that served a variety of functions. Some of the dogs and handlers in the group had just completed the basic beginners' class and were there to keep training and to have fun, and others were preparing for the Canine Good Citizen test. Lady and I were there to work on the nit-picking details of the obedience exercises in a relaxed, cheerful context; in other words, I expected the low-pressure atmosphere to counterbalance my insufferable perfectionism, as I'm glad to say that it did. When I tell a dog to sit, I'm not just telling him to put his rear end down. What I'm after is a fast, perfectly straight sit in which the dog is close to my left side but not leaning into me. Furthermore, in my estimation, a dog whose eyes are fixed on anything except my face is a dog whose mind is wandering and who is thus not sitting at all. In case I sound like a tyrant, I must mention that by way of compensation, I train with first-rate treats: bits of steak, roast beef, liver, and Cheddar cheese. Also, when I expect a dog's total attention, I give exactly the same complete concentration in return. Because the class had about twenty dog-handler teams, the instructor had two assistants, so Lady had lots of opportunity to practice letting people put their hands on her during the stand-for-examination exercise. The combination of hard work, high standards, great tidbits, and lavish praise did wonders for Lady, who was too busy to be nervous, and before we knew it, the hour was up, and the class ended.

I'd left my gear on the bleachers near Tom, Elizabeth, and Avery, and when Lady and I approached them, I realized that Tom and Elizabeth had used their time together to discover and pursue the passionate interest they had in common: illnesses, diseases, ailments, and remedies of every possible kind. Instead of greeting me and saying something encouraging about Lady, Tom immediately conveyed the fascinating news that Elizabeth had celiac disease. ‘No gluten whatsoever!' he announced. ‘She can't tolerate even an iota of it. She tells me that she has been instructed to think of it as rat poison, can you imagine?'

‘Dogs can be gluten intolerant, too,' I said. ‘Actually, it's quite common in people of Irish ancestry and in Irish setters. It's pretty easy to manage in dogs. You buy food that contains rice or whatever instead of wheat.'

‘Just as easy to manage in people,' Elizabeth said, ‘once you educate yourself and adapt to it. If only arthritis were that easy!'

‘Elizabeth suffers terribly,' Tom said with satisfaction.

‘So do you!' she exclaimed, as if Tom had given her unfair credit.

‘And neither of us can tolerate anything but Tylenol,' he said. ‘Acetaminophen. We both buy the generic.'

Overdoses of acetaminophen occur fairly often in dogs, and the drug shouldn't be given to cats at all. Steve won't even let me keep it in the house. But I didn't say so. Far be it from me to spoil this cozily shared valetudinarianism. In any case, Isaac and Persimmon appeared, as did Vanessa and Ulla, and all of us began to gather our belongings together and get ready to go home.

‘How did it go?' I asked Vanessa.

‘Great!' she said. ‘The instructor – what's his name? – says that we should take the CGC test and then start getting ready for a show. A trial, I should say.'

‘Ron,' I said. ‘He's a terrific plumber, by the way, if you ever need one. There's a CGC test a week from Saturday. Gabrielle is coming down from Maine, and she'll be taking Molly. It's at a park in Newton. There'll an obedience match, too. Steve and I are judging. You could put Ulla in Prenovice obedience, too, if you want. Prenovice is all on leash, so nothing too embarrassing can happen. It's fun.'

‘But watch out for us,' Steve said. ‘We're what the old-timers call hard markers.'

‘We are not,' I said. ‘Don't listen to him! We're not even licensed obedience judges. We just do matches once in a while. This is a fun match. It's supposed to be fun.'

‘Is Leah going?' Vanessa asked.

‘I don't think so,' I said. ‘That's when Reading Period starts, and she needs to finish her term papers and study for finals.'

Harvard students, I should explain, have about ten days after classes end and before finals begin to do all the work they were supposed to have been doing from the beginning of the semester. Harvard being Harvard, this opportunity to cram and thus to pass courses in spite of never previously having cracked open a book is not called something appropriate such as Procrastinators' Interval or Sluggards' Last Chance. Rather, it is known as Reading Period and, Leah tells me, is officially billed as a time of reflection and contemplation. About what? The consequences of flunking out?

‘Reading Period,' Vanessa said with a nostalgic sigh. ‘When all the feeble-minded white male legacy admissions used to borrow my notes. Too bad about Leah. I hope we'll have a chance to see her again soon.'