Paws before dying (3 page)

As I lounged on the bed and the dogs nosed around, she pulled out footless dancers’ tights, leotards, sweatshirts, football jerseys, running shorts, more bicycling gear, and shoes designed exclusively for marathons, walks, tennis, and aerobic workouts. I asked whether she danced, ran, walked, played tennis, or did aerobics, but she thought my questions were funny and admitted that she was not very athletic. She’d also brought a combination radio and tape player that was three times the size of my television (and, as it turned out, ten times as loud), three or four hundred cassette tapes, the complete works of Jane Austen in hard cover, a stack of raise-your-SATs workbooks, and more cosmetics than I have cumulatively bought in my life.

“You’re not really my niece, you know,” I told her. “We’re actually cousins.”

She smiled, dashed over to me, and gave me a hug. “I’d rather have you for my aunt,” she said.

Soon afterward, she asked a disconcerting question about a framed color photograph that hangs in my kitchen: “Is that your boyfriend?”

I thought she was kidding. “Of course not.”

She looked blank.

“Come on,” I said. “Do you really not know who that is?”

“No. Really, I don’t. Is it some kind of secret?”

“Leah, that is Larry Bird.”

Her forehead wrinkled a little, and she started to open her mouth.

“Larry Bird,” I repeated. “The greatest basketball player in the history of the world.” You usually have to discuss Bill Russell when you say something like that, but I didn’t want to talk over her head.

That evening, as Leah was in the guest room simultaneously painting her nails and reading
Pride and Prejudice,
I called Rose Engleman, who was on the board of the Nonantum Dog Training Club, to double-check the schedule of summer classes. While I was getting the information, Leah made the mistake of patting the dogs. When she saw the fur embedded in the tacky lacquer, she yelled at them, booted them out of her room, and slammed the door. Twenty minutes later, she apologized to me and taught Rowdy and Kimi to lap her face when she smacked her lips and said, “Kiss!” It was the stupidest dog trick I’d ever seen, worse than “Say Your Prayers.” Kimi and Rowdy thought it was grand.

Chapter 3

FAME was what sold Leah on Cambridge. The morning after she arrived, we did a tour of the Square and ended up at the sidewalk café that sprawls out from under celebrated Harvard’s Holyoke Center toward the famous Out of Town News-Stand, across from the Yard and in walking distance of the Fogg Museum, the Longfellow House, and the Blacksmith House, but Leah was impervious to historical renown. She caught on to the propinquity of contemporary celebrity thanks to the dogs, whose presence in an eating establishment was illegal, but who’d been easy to smuggle into the outskirts and stash under one of the tables that are more on the sidewalk than actually in the café. Practically all my father remembers of his one trip to France is that dogs were allowed in restaurants, and according to an article in a recent issue of
Dog Fancy,
they’re still welcome. To sneak a dog into an American café called Au Bon Pain is simply to add authenticity, as the proprietors must realize, even though the Cambridge (so-called) Health Department doesn’t. Most dog diseases are species-specific, and there isn’t a single one that a person can catch just by sitting in a café with a dog, whose mere proximity, of course, builds the human immune system so it can fight off the colds, flus, and strep throats spread by the legal customers. Have I digressed?

Because of our need to protect the francophile café management from knowingly violating the Cambridge restaurant code, We were perfectly positioned to person-watch and were doing Just that when Leah spotted among the passersby a cigar-smoking man whom she recognized as the greatest playwright since Shakespeare, then five minutes later, a tall woman best known as the Barbara Woodhouse of French cooking.

“She’s really famous!” Leah said in awe. “Everyone knows who she is! Do you think we could ask her to say something?”

“We’d have to follow her,” 1 pointed out. “And what would we ask her to say?”

“Preferably,” Leah said, “we could have her wish us
Bon appétit.
But anything would do. I could bump into her by accident. You know, just jostle her a little, not knock her over or anything.”

“Good.”

“And I’d say I was sorry, and then she’d have to say that it was perfectly all right or something. Or maybe Kimi would do something to her, and we’d have to apologize.”

“Sure,” I said. “All I do is sic my dog on Julia Child. Then we get to hear how she sounds in person. Leah, for one thing, for all I know, she is afraid of dogs.”

“I’ll bet she isn’t, and if she is, we could at least hear her shriek,” Leah said happily. “It would be better than nothing, wouldn’t it?”

The same reverence for public renown that sold Leah on Cambridge soon blended with her sense of fairness to sell her on my dog-training plans as well. As soon as she heard that Rowdy had an obedience title, she started making a game of kowtowing to him and calling him Sir Wowee.

“His name is Rowdy,” I said in defense of his dignity, “not Wowee. And his obedience title is C.D., Companion Dog. It’s the first title. It’s nothing special.” Except for a malamute. In the preceding year, for instance, golden retrievers had earned 814 American Kennel Club C.D.’s, 370 C.D.X.’s, and 127 U.D.’s, and 20 goldens had become O.T.Ch.’s, Obedience Trial Champions. There were 26 Companion Dog malamutes, one Companion Dog Excellent, and not a single Utility Dog that year. Of course, there are more goldens than malamutes, but just ask yourself: Why are there more goldens?

“And what’s Kimi’s title? She’s probably some kind of world champion.”

“Rowdy is a champion in breed, too, but Kimi doesn’t have a title in anything.” Then I hammered in the point. “He does, but she doesn’t.”

What Leah persisted in calling dog school began a couple of days after my preventive rescue of Julia Child. “We’ll eat a little early so we’ll have time to exercise the dogs before we leave,” I said.

Leah objected: “They had a long walk this morning, and it’s hot out. They don’t need any more exercise.”

I had to explain that although I usually avoid jargon, I do use “exercise,” a highly technical canine obedience term, because I refuse to say that a dog has to go to the bathroom. Rowdy finished his technical exercise before Kimi, who was somewhere down the block with Leah, and as I was crating him in the back of the Bronco, my next-door neighbor, Kevin Den-nehy, ended his daily run by trotting up and dripping sweat that hit the blacktop in loud splats. Even though Kevin holds a relatively elevated rank—he’s a homicide detective—he still looks like a Cambridge cop. Six months earlier, when enough Nautilus establishments had folded to convince Kevin that lifting was unfashionable again, he took up free weights at the Y. The program he was following must have been designed to reshape his body so it was too broad to fit through ordinary doorways unless he turned sideways.

He asked how I was doing. When I said that I was doing fine and heard that he was, too, he asked how my niece was doing with the dogs.

“She isn’t my niece,” I said. “She’s my cousin.”

“So why’s she call you aunt?”

“Because she feels like it,” I said. “And she’s doing fine with the dogs. She isn’t allergic, and they’re crazy about her. They’re totally infatuated. I mean, the standard says that they’re not supposed to be one-man dogs, but this is ridiculous.”

I expected some kind of response from Kevin, partly because he’s a friendly guy, but mostly because I knew he’d always had a slight crush on me. He didn’t reply at all. At opposite ends of the lead, Kimi and Leah were bouncing up Appleton Street. I’m not sure that Kevin even heard me. His glazed eyes were fixed on Leah, who was wearing what looked like a heavily elasticized black two-piece bathing suit over a yellow tank top and a pair of shiny knee-length electric-blue shorts. Freed from the topknot, her hair stood out from her head and curled down her back like the coat of an undipped apricot poodle.

“Hi, Kevin!” she said. “How’s your mom?” She also asked about three of his relatives who’d been visiting. In the couple of days she’d been with me, I might add, she’d learned the names of a few dozen neighbors who were only faces to me, and she’d ingratiated herself with Mrs. Dennehy, a strict vegetarian and teetotaler, who does smell hamburger and beer on Kevin’s breath when he returns from my house, but only imagines that she smells perfume on his clothes.

“Hey, Leah, come on,” I said. “We’re late.”

To make it to Newton by seven, I’d planned to leave at six-fifteen, and it was now close to six-thirty. Newton is Shaker Heights. Scarsdale. Maybe Shawnee Mission? The suburb of suburbs, it has big trees, bigger houses, good schools, and practically no crime. Stroll down a Newton street on any weekday, and you’ll assume that it has no people except babies, their nannies, and the hundreds of work crews mowing the lawns and painting the houses of the invisible population. A national survey of places in which nothing ever happens once rated Newton the most boring community in America. Although it’s only fifteen or twenty minutes by car from Cambridge, I always allow extra time: The boundary between the city and the suburbs is so steep that even my four-wheel-drive Bronco might not make the grade. Even so, Newton has lots of people who used to live here, because it’s where politically minded pro-public-school Cambridge intellectual parents move when their kids are ready for first grade. The prospect of moving to Newton is the most powerful birth-control device in Cambridge.

But Newton does have parks, dogs, and the Nonantum Dog Training Club.

“I want you to know that this is not my regular club,” I told Leah as we drove west along the river. “This one is much more competitive. Some of these people are obsessed with high scores—they really compete, even at fun matches, even in class—and I don’t want it to get to you. First of all, they’ve got poodles and shelties and goldens, real obedience dogs, and you can’t expect to compete with that. But more important, that’s a sort of sick attitude. All you want to work for is getting Kimi in shape so she’ll qualify sometime, right? Not necessarily this summer. Sometime. And the class you’re in isn’t for beginners. It’s Novice for Show.”

“Do you get grades every time?”

“At class? No. Never. Just at matches and trials. Hey, don’t worry about it. Just have fun with her. That’s what it’s about.” Remember, Holly? Scores don’t matter. What matters is your dog, not your score. Say it often enough, and you’ll shake that high-score sickness. Scores don’t matter. “Scores don’t matter, anyway,” I said.

As I’ve mentioned, dog training is one sport that requires no special costume, but as Leah and I walked the dogs through the wide opening in the stone and concrete wall, past a tennis court, and into Eliot Park, she drew a few stares. I guess Pre-Raphaelite aerobic bicycling hadn’t yet reached the suburbs.

Leah and Kimi and Rowdy and I were not, of course, in the same class. Leah and Kimi’s Novice instructor was Bess Stein, who sometimes admitted to seventy-five, was rumored to be well over eighty, looked about twenty years younger than she was, and moved with the agility of a preteen. She was tall and angular, with salt-and-pepper hair swept into a loose bun plunk on the top of her head, and she had the one absolute requirement of an obedience instructor: a clear voice that carried well, even outdoors. Tony Doucette, who was teaching my advanced class, was a tidy little man with a pencil-thin moustache and hair-oiled waves who looked like what you’d expect if one of Al Capone’s accountants had been deep-frozen in the thirties and then periodically defrosted to teach people to train dogs. I was always surprised that he didn’t wear spats.

Our advanced class met near the tennis courts, which, I might add, had a crumbling, choppy red clay surface and lacked nets, probably because of a tax-cutting measure called Proposition 2 1/2. Bess’s class gathered on the opposite side of the long, wide playing field granted to us by Newton Parks and Recreation. Beyond it stretched what looked to me, a country girl, like honest-to-God woods.

Novice obedience can get boring, but it has one giant advantage over advanced work: All you need is a dog and lead. While three or four of us were still hauling the high jump, the bar jump, and the broad-jump hurdles out of the van someone had driven into the park, Bess’s group of about fifteen handler-dog teams was already heeling around. Leah wasn’t hard to pick out, and I noticed two young guys heeling their dogs, a border collie and a German shepherd, very close to her. Steve Delaney would work his shepherd bitch, India, close to Kimi when India was almost perfect and he wanted to proof the exercise. All dogs deserve perfect scores in their own backyards, but to perform well at a trial, a dog has to ignore distractions: a kid with an ice-cream cone, the sudden blare of a loudspeaker, a burst of applause, or—the ultimate proof—an Alaskan malamute. But other handlers usually scrambled to avoid us. Even so, there they were, a burly blond kid with the sides of his head shaved clean, heeling a young male shepherd way too slowly just ahead of Kimi, and a younger kid, about Leah’s age, with curly dark blond hair, whose black and white border collie was within inches of Kimi’s tail.

When we finished setting up the jumps, sweaty work on that steamy night, Tony started running a handler and her black Lab through the Open routine, and Rowdy and I sat on the grass near Rose Engleman and her miniature poodle and a bunch of other people and dogs I knew from shows. The dog of Rose’s I’d known best was Vera, a fantastic O.T.Ch. standard poodle— at least twice the size of Caprice, her new one—and always shaved, trimmed, and pom-pommed. Caprice was also black, but she was a miniature poodle with a close-to-natural Puppy clip and an impish expression to match it. That Puppy clip told me that Caprice was being shown exclusively in obedience. For the breed ring—conformation, looks, gait, not behavior—she’d have needed an elaborate, sculpted English Saddle or Continental clip. Smart, perceptive obedience poodles must realize that that shaved-hindquarters Continental clip leaves them half naked in public, and I always feel embarrassed on their behalf, but don’t tell the poodle people that I said so.