Dog House (11 page)

(I confess, too, that I've saved two strips of tape and a piece of gauze that they left on Millard's arm. You know, just in case.)

And while science hasn't worked out all the bugs yet, they will surely get it right someday and oh, I'd love to be around to see it. Because then, ah joy, millions upon millions of beloved dogs and husbands will rise again to complain that it's too cold to go out for a walk and where's that leftover steak?

 

 

So we started to look around for another Jack Russell puppy. Or rather, I started to look around, since, as you know by now, I was ever the designated shopper. It was the sort of job I was born for, anyhow. All those years of antiquing the East Coast, picking out what I thought I could resell, had made me good at it.

I wish I could have done things right, though: called the august American Kennel Club, for instance, which is where one would ordinarily start the search for breeder recommendations. But it didn't like “us,” you remember. So I tried Texas again and discovered that, for some strange reason, Texas wasn't taking my calls. Closer to home, I heard about one Long Island breeder who didn't have a litter but was expecting one next spring. Spring? ! We wouldn't last till spring.

And then, finally, I talked to someone who talked to someone who knew a breeder in England.

Wow, I loved that idea from the get-go. Our very own new puppy arriving straight from the cradle of Jacks! An Imported Dog, so to speak. Made in England. Like our china.

 

 

But here's where I went wrong.

In my haste to fill the chasm where our love-dog used to be, I didn't follow the drill. I didn't ask for pictures of the puppy's parents, didn't see a decent photo of her or her littermates or her great uncle on her dam's side.

And here's an interesting sidebar, one you may not be aware of yet.

What I've described above is exactly how, before that mandatory “first year” is up, widows wind up marrying old family friends who seem to walk the walk and talk the talk. They're in such a grieving hurry to replace what they've lost that they forget to ask about the compulsive gambling, or the brother in Leavenworth or the wife who was “outgrown.” They take the undemanding route. As do widowers, who are possibly even less discriminating, and heedlessly (disappointingly) happy to wind up with the bringer of the seventh casserole.

Which must be why, in my own urgency to stopper the hole in our hearts, I mailed off a not unreasonable sum of money to an unknown breeder in one of those picturesque-sounding shires of the UK, trusting that I'd receive, in turn, a small crate at La Guardia's freight depot bearing your typical twelve-week-old, brown-spotted Jack Russell bitch.

I began to live for that day.

 

 

Freight depot parking at La Guardia is not for the fainthearted.

On an overcast, coolish October day, just as they laughably do in the movies, I left my car right in front at the curb because there was nowhere else to park, and in the dim freight office, after much exchanging of paper and photo IDs, took avid possession of a small green plastic case randomly slapped with scarlet LIVE ANIMAL stickers. Hurrying with my treasure to my—hey!—ticketless car, I realized that amidst the paperwork and stress, I'd barely found time to peek through the door's wire grill for more than a glimpse of three or four squares of smooth white fur. Only when I put the crate on the backseat did I notice that said white fur seemed unusually quiet. She was taking this well, I decided, while I, on the other hand, wasn't. I was dying see what she looked like, not to mention dying to hold her. So several times a minute on our ride home—seriously endangering scores of fellow drivers on the LIE—I rubber-necked in hopes of catching some key body part in the rearview mirror, a bright eye, a black nose, an ear, maybe.

But I saw little and heard less.

Could this pup, who had just flown from Heathrow in the freezing belly of BOAC, be thirsty or hungry or ... severely traumatized? Or—and here I flashed on my first days with my newborn son—was she even breathing in there? I needed to get home.

At the front door at last, I wrestled the travel crate out of the car and into the empty kitchen, closed the kitchen door ever so gently, hoping not to startle little Blue (don't ask), and breathlessly unlatched and dropped the wire door of the dog carrier. Out stepped—shaking herself and smelling really rank—a tiny, pure white terrier, the spit and image of a Chihuahua: bulging brown eyes, pointy upright ears, skinny white body on long, sticklike legs.

Yikes.

Which doesn't begin to express my misgivings.

I checked the label on the crate, but I had the right dog. And as I stared, unbelieving and unnerved, she confidently weed on the floor and explored a handy electrical socket. This non-Jack. This mutant. This pogo.

What's a pogo, you ask?

Think cat.

Though to be more precise, “pogo” is the dog aficionado's term for a pup that can—from a standing start—spring straight from the floor to the top of your dresser, say, to the top of your sofa, your kitchen countertop, to your guest's food-filled lap. Although Blue, as it soon became disappointingly apparent, wasn't having laps. She wasn't having people much at all, to be absolutely frank about it. And not to speak ill of the bitch, but if canines can have attention-deficit disorders, Blue was highly in need of meds.

Manifesting utter disinterest in Millard or me or any drop-by kids or birds or pink-tailed, be-whiskered vermin—which our new house had in spades—Blue came to us with the metabolism and attention span of a fruit fly. She was so un-Cosi, she might as well have been a Lab. And if we'd been thinking at all, she should have been. Although to be honest, Labs have always been much too popular for me. In common with certain nameless German cars you see everywhere in certain nameless suburbs, Labs are like fleas on a dog. Personally, I like the odd. The Georgian named Millard. The falling-down house. The Humber (I'd now worn out four). The suit-wearing child.

This Jack Russell/Chihuahua/fruit fly dog?

 

 

Well, one thing was certain: There'd be no sending her back. Even if we wanted to, we couldn't easily overlook what transatlantic horrors the poor little thing may have undergone that had turned her overnight from a Jack Russell terrier into—could dogs transmogrify?—a This. This sui generis Blue. She didn't want to be with us, or snuggle with us, and she didn't care when we got home or went out. Alone in our kitchen, she busied herself with creatively chewing the muntins around the glass in the kitchen door and when she tired of that, the cookbooks on the counter. (Most dogs like books, you know: It's their spines—all that animal glue. Though most dogs have natural good taste as well, and therefore like books.)

And in case you're wondering why she was loose in our kitchen munching books, all the foregoing took place before that lovely wire crate with the little fleece on the floor became the training method of choice. And by the way, Blue wasn't eating that door in hope of escape. She just had a mad passion for aged wood with lead paint sauce. Unfortunately for her (as I've come to appreciate lately) we had plenty to gnaw. But little by little, as I got used to Blue's appearance and disposition and tried very hard to accommodate those few of her peculiarities that were either likable or nondestructive, it hit me like a brick one day. Her English breeder had taken big-time advantage of our purported American naïveté as well as our distance from wherever she lived in Oddogshire to ship us—not merely the runt of the litter but her single unsalable pup.

Had we been had?

We missed our Cosi even more.

Though we tried to make the best of Blue. We'd always been inveterate glass-half-fools.

Time drifted by, maybe even another year, during which we made genuine and satisfying progress on the house. We patched and cleaned and waxed the wood floors, cut down dead trees, stopped that seepage in the basement (cleaned the gutters!) and hired a weirdly suited-up exterminator to take a beehive out of our attic; a beehive that was unquestionably, the fellow reported to us with some pride, the largest hive he'd ever seen in any inhabited living quarters. Some fifty pounds, as I recall (about the weight of a year-old bear). When he left, I spent the afternoon cleaning gob-bets of lovely sticky honeycomb off the attic floor, shoveling them into black trash bags and washing the old pine boards. I adore honey and would have eaten all those remnants on the spot had they not been studded with hundreds of dead, poisoned bees.

Now that the honeybee is in dire straits, of course I'm filled with retroactive remorse. Should we have smoked the hive and carried it outside? Should we have left it to flourish and sealed off that room? Should we have put on veiled hats and elasticized suits and become beekeepers? Should we have lived in a buzz of mutual amity? Will I ever do right by Mother Nature?

Although our house had been constructed in the early 1860s, we discovered photos taken in the 1880s, and poring over these, we were able to begin, slowly, to return bits of the structure to what each once looked like. Hand-chamfered wood railings replaced wrought iron on the porches. We'd already returned the decorative open spandrels to the upper corners of the porch roof supports when we belatedly discovered these were beloved of barn swallows, which may have been why they'd been boarded up to begin with. We even installed a reproduction of the old roof cresting. A kind of “icing” around the top of our house, this was basically an architectural fillip, but terrifying to install. Millard had cleverly re-created it by first making a casting of a segment we'd found at a flea market and then, at his plant, reproducing eighty or so feet in aluminum. We were starting to have fun.

One day, through the careful research and good offices of a neighboring preservation buff (which we were inadvertently becoming ourselves), we discovered that a rendering of our house had once appeared in the 1860s equivalent of a design magazine, and in the text accompanying its proud architect's own engraving of his vision, he'd set out his hopes for how the interior might be finished.

If his creation had
ever
looked that way, it utterly didn't now, but preservationists that we were and following his directions, we tried our best to finish his house for him. We painted the faux stone walls in the hall. Millard held the straight edge and I painted, though we quickly discovered that I lacked his steady hand. So I held the straightedge and Millard painted. (And that's why a good one-third of the front hall's “stones” looked hand-hewn while two-thirds looked machined.) I spent weeks on the faux-grained woodwork, making a point of continuing the whole onto the second floor, because I'd read somewhere that most graining was confined to main floors because the majority of nineteenth-century homeowners couldn't afford to have all of the house grained. I didn't want anyone to think we were only about show (and with DIY, after all, we could be big spenders).

In period-speak, we “gussied our house up.” And we did it all ourselves.

Except for the hall tile. We didn't lay tile.

 

 

And then we made a marvelous discovery.

I was still addicted to reading the antiques trade papers, and one dull winter evening, stretched out on the living room floor, leafing through page after page of gray text and grainy ads, I came across an arresting full-page photo; an advertisement for a cast-iron birdhouse that looked, gee, very much like our house. The porches were in strange places and there seemed to be a bay window where we didn't have a bay, but still ...

“Mill, take a look at this,” I said, sticking the paper under his pipe.

My spatial relations had always been a running joke between us, but Millard snapped to attention.