Ruffly Speaking (20 page)

“And Stephanie also keeps saying that there’s something wrong with her hearing aids,” Leah told Steve, “and when she moved here, from New York, she had to start going to this new audiologist, and the one here says there’s nothing wrong, not that she can find.”

Steve looked as if he wanted to say something, but he just drank Geary’s.

“Steve, you saw Ruffly, right?” I asked. “Weren’t you supposed to see him today?” All he did was nod. Veterinarians aren’t schooled to blab about their patients’ illnesses, but they aren’t required to take a vow of silence, either. “So did you see him or not?” I demanded.

“Yeah. She brought him in.” As usual, Steve spoke evenly and slowly.

Sometimes his calm exasperates me. Sometimes it scares me. I’ve repeatedly explained to Steve that it’s only bad news you have to break; good news you can just blurt out.

He still doesn’t get it. “A brain tumor,” I said. “Ruffly has a brain tumor. It’s an early neurological sign, isn’t it? Steve, would you
please
—” I broke off. He seemed to examine his thoughts. After that, I guess, he paused to organize them. The man is a human Casablanca—all that waiting and waiting and waiting.

Eventually, he cleared his throat. “I can’t find a thing. It’s probably some stimulus he’s picking up on. We’re going to pursue it, to be on the safe side. We’re going to be real cautious, real thorough.”

“Seizures?” I asked.

“It’s a remote possibility. Some unusual kind of petit mal seizures. But it’s real remote. Or maybe what’s going on is that this is a dog that’s zeroed in on the owner, hyperattuned, and, at the same time, he’s hyperattuned to the environment, and they’ve moved twice in a few months. So what’s impinging on him is her stress and his own stress. These assistance dogs are prone to stress. They’ve got a lot of responsibility. If that’s his problem, once she settles down and the new sounds start to get familiar to him, he’ll be back to normal.”

“But, Steve, what about these, uh, episodes?Attacks. That’s what Stephanie calls them. That’s not generalized stress.”

“A stimulus.Possibly a seizure. Or she jumps, the dog jumps,” Steve said. “We’ll look for other things, but that’s probably what we’re going to find. Stephanie adapts, Ruffly’ll adapt. End of problem.”

Before he’d finished speaking, Rita’s eyes were narrow with rage. “I have really had it with both of you,” she said coldly, “and with Leah and Matthew and this audiologist of Stephanie’s and everyone else who’s so busy trying to drive her crazy.”

Rita rose and stood behind her chair with her trembling hands resting on its back. “Here you have an intelligent, cogent, superbly self-possessed, highly-developed, and articulate woman who makes certain observations of two subjects with which she is intimately familiar
—her
hearing and
her
dog—subjects about which she understands infinitely more than you do, and when she reports these observations, how do you people respond? You tell her she’s wrong. You tell her that what she knows is happening is
not
happening. And you know what that does to people?” Rita slammed the chair forward against the table. “It drives them nuts, that’s what. I’m going upstairs, and I’m going to take out my hearing aids, because I’ve heard all I really want to hear from people today. For once, I’m going to really enjoy being deaf.” She stomped out. The door slammed shut behind her.

Steve looked stunned. “Did I say something?”

“Yes,” I told him. “The word
adapt.
Steve, when you said that to Rita, you said the wrong thing.”

In the silence that followed, I worried more about Ruffly than about Rita. Any veterinary problem that puzzled Steve terrified me.

20

 No matter how tropical the temperature in India, the faithful continue to make way for the cow, but here in Cambridge, the hellish summer climate turns our sanctuary into Bombay in August, and Thursday night dog worship at the Cambridge Armory takes a two-month summer recess. Thus at seven o’clock on the evening of Thursday, July 2, I stood dogless on Stephanie Benson’s doorstep. When I rang Morris’s chimes, Ruffly barked, but by the time Stephanie opened the door, he was playing canine good citizen at her side. As I followed them into the entrance hall—no falls this time—and through the living room and dining room, I kept a close eye on Ruffly for a sign of something amiss, but, as on my previous visit, he was lively, friendly, and alert. When we reached the kitchen, I bent down to pat him.

In contrast to the living and dining rooms, the kitchen still contained some of Morris’s belongings, including an entire wall of floor-to-ceiling shelves packed with cookbooks. The mail-order kennel-supply catalogs stacked on one of the shelves could have been Stephanie’s, but the pastel premium lists and entry blanks for AKC shows that lay on top of the R.C. Steele catalog had certainly belonged to Morris.

The rest of the house, or at least the rooms I’d seen, had oversize casement windows with those cranks that never work and the kinds of sliding glass doors that can be lifted right out of their tracks and safely rested against a wall while the burglar’s busy inside. In the kitchen, though, what looked to me like new Andersen windows gave a view of Alice Savery’s house. Better yet, the wall that faced the backyard consisted of natural-wood-and-glass panels alternating with hinged doors that opened onto a big redwood deck thick with patio furniture and equipped with a gas grill. The stove, refrigerator, and dishwasher were of some strange German-sounding brand, but everything else was standard expensive new American kitchen—polyurethaned wood floor, granite-topped island with built-in cutting boards, handsome cherry table with Windsor chairs, and those cabinets with glass-paned doors favored by people with the money to hire others to keep the interiors fit for public display.

The last time I’d been in this room, Morris had been in the midst of inventing some Mediterranean-inspired fish stew. Every surface had been covered with fresh plum tomatoes, bunches of parsley, fish heads, fish frames, salmon chunks, swordfish steaks, and lumps of what may have been monkfish. Bowls of bivalves were disgorging sand into water, and live lobsters were crawling around in the sink. The floor was thick with dog toys and Bedlingtons, the air with anise, wine, and basil. Morris was drinking amaretto and singing snatches of “Ave Maria.”

The cookbooks on the lower shelves still showed the same old dog-gnawed spines, and Nelson and Jennie had left permanent tooth marks on the legs of the table and chairs. But the counters were now almost bare, and there wasn’t a Nylabone or a ball in sight. No one was singing, and the smell was so unpromising of dinner that if I’d been blindfolded, I’d have been unable to guess which room I was in. On a counter under the bracket that had held Morris’s wall phone sat an answering machine and a big white phone with oversize buttons.

The light from the windows and doors and from recessed spots set everywhere in the ceiling was as bright as ever, and when I knelt down to say hello to Ruffly, I got a good look at him. I didn’t really expect to find some diagnostic clue that Steve had missed, but if Ruffly happened to be showing one, I wasn’t about to forgo the chance to observe it, either. My close-up inspection revealed only that Stephanie took beautiful care of her dog. Ruffly’s black-and-tan coat felt as smooth, clean, and healthy as it looked. His eyes were clear, his nails neatly clipped, his teeth free of tartar. His giant ears had been recently swabbed. I ran my hands Over the dog, talking softly to him as I did so.

“Doug’s out back planting things.” Stephanie was uncorking a bottle of wine. She paused to gesture toward the deck.

I smiled. “I saw his car out front.”

“I asked him to stay for dinner—I thought you wouldn’t mind?—but he says he can’t.”

“That’s too bad.”

“Wine
is
all right, isn’t it? White. But if you’d prefer something else...”

“It’s fine,” I assured her.

Stephanie wore a loose dress of some unbleached homespun material. When she raised her arm to pour the wine, the dress looked like the ceremonial costume of some ancient religion. To my surprise, she said, “Doug is still so guilt-ridden.”

 “He’s very conscientious. He fusses about details. But I wouldn’t say he’s—”

“It’s the garden.” She spoke very softly. “You
do
know about Morris?”

Answer yes to a question like that, and you already know as much as you’re ever going to. “Sort of,” I said.

“Well, it was Doug who... I’ll show you later.” Stephanie handed me a goblet of wine. “Now probably isn’t the best time. Doug... Well, the garden is... It’s a box, really, with the dirt inside. A raised bed. He built a whole elaborate little miniature garden. There are hoops that go over it, and there’s plastic that goes over the hoops, so you can turn it into a little greenhouse, and there’s some kind of underground heating and watering system. But the point is, Doug built this little garden as a gift for Morris. And they planted... I don’t know a thing about gardening—and not much more about cooking! But all sorts of edible flowers and exotic greens, salad greens, and that’s where Morris must have begun gathering— But what a thing to start talking about! We’re having a salad! I don’t...” She faltered.

“That’s fine,” I assured her. “I’m not—”

“I
bought
everything. After, uh, after what happened, Doug tore out everything in the raised bed. That’s what he’s out there doing now, planting it with lettuce and something or other. He bought little lettuce plants. It was just an empty box of dirt, rather depressing, not that there was any real danger, but, even so, he’s so guilt-ridden....”

Whatever the true cause of Morris’s death, Stephanie clearly accepted Doug’s account. I was about to say something about Mr. Winer, Doug’s father, when Doug tapped lightly on one of the open glass doors of the deck and walked in. The tapping set Ruffly to work, but as soon as Stephanie reminded him that Doug was a welcome visitor, Ruffly calmed down.

At Stephanie’s insistence, Doug accepted a small glass of wine, and the three of us moved outdoors to the deck, taking seats on the tan pipe-and-canvas lawn chairs that had been torn and scratched by Morris’s dogs. The raised garden, located a few yards beyond the deck, was clearly visible to all of us. As soon as Stephanie caught sight of the rows of lettuce and some orange marigolds that Doug had just planted, she said a polite and appropriately subdued thanks. Although the lettuce would immediately bolt and turn bitter in the July heat, I should probably have added a quiet word of admiration, but after a quick glance, I averted my eyes. Mounds of earth are what they are; one pine box looks pretty much like another; and Morris Lamb really was dead. What threw me into near tachycardia was that, at first glance, the elements suggested the grave site of a giant recently interred by a lazy undertaker who’d only half buried the coffin, but had piled the raw earth with flowers nonetheless.

When I recovered, Stephanie was inquiring about how things were going at Winer & Lamb, and Doug was telling her all about the expansion of the mail-order side of the business and the preparation of the new catalog. “Our
old
ones!” he exclaimed in disgust. “Did you ever...? No, of course not, why would you? You don’t really cook, do you? Either of you? Not to speak of? Or collect? Well, you wouldn’t have had any reason to see our old catalogs—it’s a very specialized clientele—and, frankly, the way I felt when I looked through our last catalog was, well... I wished they’d all been lost in the mail! That nasty, cheap paper and the typographical errors! No sense of design whatsoever—nothing but a horrid little list. It was so amateurish that it made me sick.”

Stephanie pointed out that knowledgeable collectors were probably satisfied with a simple list, and I added that the dealers who specialized in used and rare dog books relied on catalogs that were far from color glossy, but Doug said that we both sounded just like Morris, who hadn’t understood that to survive the threat posed by the megabookstores, they had to expand the mail-order business. Morris hadn’t wanted to be bothered with the tremendous work required to turn out a thoroughly professional product—speaking of which, he must fly! In taking leave, Doug thanked his hostess, told me what a pleasure it had been to see me again, and otherwise displayed an updated version of Mr. Winer’s gentlemanly manners.

After Doug left, Stephanie and I returned to the kitchen, where she overbroiled two salmon filets and prepared a big salad that we eventually ate at the big glass-topped table on the deck. Dessert was a pastry cream and fresh fruit tart from the combination bakery, cheese shop, and gourmet take-out on Huron near the corner of Appleton. Instead of blurting out something like, “Oh, I’ve bought this, too!” I tactfully limited myself to exclaiming about how wonderful the concoction looked and tasted, but, to her credit, Stephanie made no effort to pass it off as her own and immediately told me where it had come from. After dinner, she made the inevitable French decaf. As we sat on the deck drinking the coffee and talking, Stephanie amazed me by asking whether I’d mind if she smoked.