Cherished (13 page)

By now the very notion of Molly wanting to harm any living thing seemed far-fetched, about as likely as her taking up the saxophone. But one time I did see her become genuinely vicious for an instant. A drunk whose tats and attitude suggested some acquaintance with gang life stopped by our restaurant patio table to admire Molly. Quiet and stoic as usual, she endured his pets and praises until he lurched too close to me to make a point. With an ugly growl, she leapt at him — just close enough to scare the lights out of us both and to let me know that she would, in fact, rip someone's throat to protect her man.

Why was it, how was it, that this muscle-headed beast looked to me first, followed me from room to room, and whimpered until I returned to the herd? The dog heart wants what it wants, but what was it in me that Molly wanted?

Possible Qualities That Might Make Me Lovable to a Dog:

I've noticed that humans are often subliminally drawn to mates who resemble them in some way. The union of one couple I know announces: we're in love with this nose. Was
Molly of the aquiline snout attracted to mine?

It couldn't have been my sense of humor, or my being so well read. The famous people I knew? Irrelevant. She wasn't into me for my convertible alone, cool as it was.

The cynic in me thought: adaptive behavior — I was simply a secondary provider (next to Judith, I was a pushover in terms of treat indulgence) and thus required extra attention. Thing was, Molly had literally and figuratively gone over to my side, so there had to be some intuitive attraction to the me-ness of me operative here. She might've liked my smell. Judith argues that I have a calmer nature than hers, and so Molly took to me in relief. This kind of love is like an eye of God, though. I felt that what she cleaved to was the best of me, even if I didn't quite know what that was.

I did know how to stroke her, in a certain way, on the very softest hair of her brow. This was my method of love transmission, which I know she welcomed. One night as I sat talking to Judith, I was stroking Molly's chest with one hand. When I stopped the absent petting and started to rise, she put her paw on my chest, forbidding my exit. The message was clear as she gazed into my eyes: Don't stop.

For days afterward, “She's giving me the paw!” was my delighted cry. After a while, this became routine: whenever I petted or stroked her, her paw demanded more.

I
T STARTED ON A CAMPING TRIP
, with a cough from Molly late one night so loud it woke the couple in a neighboring tent. The cough took, and it led to increasingly prolonged fits. I brought
her to our vet, thinking we'd get her medicine or a minor procedure. I was summoned to an office with surprising urgency, where the doctor stood contemplating an X-ray as though she were the first on the scene of a car wreck. An insidiously clever tumor had wrapped itself around one of Molly's lungs and her aorta, classically inoperable. Really, what we were looking at was a matter of time.

Molly prided herself in her vigilant alertness, so she hated the canine Vicodin that suppressed her cough. Even when the medicine was embedded in her favorite foods, she'd outsmart us, getting the food down and spitting out the pill. The drugs gave her respite, but she'd fight the effects. Refusing to lie down, she'd sit up beside the couch and slowly, slowly, tilt, like a junkie on the nod, until she hung at a forty-five-degree angle over the floor. Then she'd finally let me guide her into a supine position.

One day Molly was out in the garden and, in a reprise of her old enthusiasm, began to dig furiously by the steps. After a moment of it, her cough kicked in and she stopped, gazing up at me with a mixture of bewilderment and pain that ripped right at my heart. “Why is this happening?” she was asking, and worse, “Why can't you make it stop?” I led her back inside and stroked the soft fur on her chest until she quieted down.

Judith was out of town one night when Molly got caught in a fit that would not quit. She was gasping for breath. I alerted the hospital, which was twenty minutes away even with no traffic, and drove at demon speed, Molly wheezing in the back seat while I prayed to no God I'd ever paged before. When we
got there, she was too weak to climb from the car, so I carried her to the elevator, stumbling, horrified to see her pee on the floor — a shocking breach of dignity that upped my alarm. As soon as the doors opened upstairs, I was yelling like a character in a bad TV movie, “This dog needs oxygen!”

The interns hurried over to take her from me. I paced for a few awful minutes until one emerged to tell me she was tented and breathing normally. It had been no false alarm: another few minutes, and Molly would've been gone.

I'
D BEEN UNUSUALLY FORTUNATE
for many years: since losing my grandparents decades earlier, death hadn't come this close.

We had planned a weekend trip to the mountains for Molly to enjoy. But it was bitter cold, the town was inordinately busy with tourists, and Molly's now-constant wheezing was frightening small children. “What's wrong with that dog?” a little girl asked her concerned mother as they passed us on the street. When we got back to the cabin we'd rented for the weekend, Molly lay on the bed with a baleful look on her face that was unmistakable. Judith had been saying for some time now that Molly would let us know. We made the necessary call and cut the trip short.

Back home, we invited Molly to lie in bed alongside us. I wrapped myself around her warm girth and nuzzled her like a fellow dog. We try to inhale the ones who are leaving. We're holding on to what's been revealed to be a transitory thing. Molly was by then deeply involved with the simple task of continuing to breathe, and her gaze had dulled. She no longer brightened when I sat down beside her.

Judith grilled her a steak for her last dinner. Molly ate it with care and concentration. The next morning, when the doctor came, we took her for a last short walk, and she made a rare show of animation. It was as if she sensed what the stranger's visit signified. She, too, was postponing the inevitable. She seemed to be greeting and saying good-bye to the sun, grass, and wind.

The doctor explained a series of injections. We stroked her as the first needle went in, kissed her brow as the sedative seeped through her bloodstream. This was the prep for the second injection's lethal chemical, but Molly had stopped breathing, her eyes closed. The doctor was surprised to confirm that she was already gone. Her heart had been doing hard, hard work. It must've been such relief to at last let go.

Judith and I cried then, supporting each other like a suddenly elderly couple. There was an emptiness in the house that had never been there before. We hurried to put away the things of hers that now were merely things.

A
ND LESS THAN A YEAR LATER
, when I had to cope with my father's passing, I realized there was something familiar in it, that I was deeper into the heart of a dark country whose territory was not entirely unknown. If a person who's trying to process a beloved parent's demise is so much raw human meat, you could say that I'd already been tenderized. Molly did this for
me. She left me this brute knowledge as a kind of parting gift.

Her bones and ashes sit in a wooden box atop the bookshelves by my bed, but this is only totem and fetish, a shaker flung by a shaman toward the relentless infinity of sky. The bones aren't Molly, just as what's in the box that arrived for my mother, some days after his cremation, is decidedly not my dad. Where we go is the one thing that we can't know, but I like to think spirit moves on. A new kind of conversation evokes it in each newly precious day. And memory…

T
HE SHRUB SHAKES
, as if there's an isolated earthquake in our garden. Little clods of earth shoot out from behind it, and I can see a blur of light brown fur beyond the green. Molly's digging. I step out onto the front stoop to get a better look. She's gotten down to the depths of this hole, her white chest hair flecked with the darker dirt, paws a rhythmic blur. She backs up to assess her work, panting, circles the hole amidst the weeds, and then settles herself into it with unmistakable satisfaction, hind legs tucked beneath her, front legs crossed. Body in the shade, head in the sun, she turns her face to me, teeth glinting, tongue dripping, dark eyes serene. She smiles at me, and rests her chin on her paws. Guarding the gates to heaven.

T
he sign said, “Kittens for sale,” and I thought, why not? I'd just had lunch with my Aunt Helen, complete with cocktails, so I was feeling awfully good and not overly practical as I swayed into the dingy pet shop — though the word
practical
wasn't really in my vocabulary. I was nineteen years old, had just dropped out of college to become an actress in New York, had very little money, and lived in a railroad apartment that had a front window held together by duct tape.

I picked up one of the kittens — flea-bitten, ribs showing, coal black, and much too young to have been taken from its mother. It needed to be rescued. After two daiquiris on a hot September afternoon this seemed like a terrific idea. Why not? I paid the five dollars, took the kitten home, gave her a bath to get rid of the fleas, and came up with a name for her.

“
Winesburg
?” said one of my roommates as the kitten climbed our curtains.

“As in Ohio,” I said. My current boyfriend was in a Broadway play based on Sherwood Anderson's book
Winesburg, Ohio
.

Besides curtain climbing, Winesburg loved to hide under the beds, then reach out for passing ankles and hang on with her claws. (I ended up buying my roommates a lot of new stockings.) Winesburg's favorite trick was to grab the end of the roll of toilet paper between her teeth and then race from the bathroom through the rooms of the long narrow apartment, unfurling toilet paper like a banner behind her.

“I don't find this cat TP-ing the apartment very funny,” said one of my roommates as she unwrapped the chairs and couch.

Granted, Winesburg was not a cozy, cuddly little kitten, and yes, she was kind of crazy and wild, but we were a good fit.

We traveled a lot — on the train up to Westchester to visit my family on weekends, and then, when I got acting jobs on Broadway, to Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., for out-of-town tryouts. Winesburg loved the excitement of escaping from hotel rooms, and then, hissing and spitting, she'd hold armies of housekeepers and bellmen at bay as they tried to capture her. When I played the ingénue in a cross-country tour of
Pleasure of His Company
, starring Joan Bennett, Winesburg attacked Miss Bennett's poodle, Tinker Bell, and my parents had to come take my cat back to Westchester for the remainder of the tour. “It's not like she's an
easy
cat,” said my mother as Winesburg's cat carrier was loaded into their car.

After the tour I found an apartment I could afford on my own, and while it was being painted, Winesburg and I camped out at my friend Nicki's place on the fourteenth floor at Park Avenue and Eighty-sixth Street — much more posh surroundings than we were used to. Late one night I couldn't find Winesburg. “How the hell can a cat disappear from the fourteenth floor?” I cried.

Nicki and I looked at each other, suddenly horrified. We knew exactly how — the windows had no screens and there was only a ten-inch ledge under them. We raced down to the street. The doorman assured us that no cats had fallen out of the building that evening. I calmed down and thought about how Winesburg was Houdini. She was a master of hiding in strange and unlikely places — and it was a big apartment. That's what had happened; I figured she'd come out when she was ready.

At dawn the next morning the doorbell rang. It was the couple across the hall. The woman was holding Winesburg. She apologized for waking us so early and asked if this was our cat.

“Yes, yes,” I said, grabbing my beloved. “Where was she?”

“She came through our window last night and got into bed with us,” said the man. “Let me tell you, it was quite a shock.”

That ledge was only ten inches wide. How brave she was!

W
HEN I MARRIED MY FIRST HUSBAND,
a lieutenant in the navy, I followed him to Vietnam on a tourist visa, and of course Winesburg came too.

“You brought the
cat
with you?” said my new husband, looking aghast when Winesburg's crate arrived with me at Tan Son Nhat International Airport. “
Winesburg
came too?”

“I wrote you about finding kitty litter in Saigon —”

“I thought it was a
joke
.”

“My beloved cat is not a joke,” I said, briefly wondering why I had married this man.

The three of us checked into the Continental Palace Hotel in Saigon, Winesburg none the worse for her twelve-thousand-mile trip. A week later we moved into a rented house at 64B Hung Tap Tu across the street from the French embassy. It was impossible to keep Winesburg inside, and she roamed the neighborhood — down the street to the Buddhist school and over to the embassy. “La chat noir est à la recherche d'un amant!” the guard would say when I'd come looking for my cat, the black cat who was looking for love.