Ruffly Speaking (24 page)

He shrugged. “More likely the sound. Those dogs are all ears.” He asked Matthew how the gas happened to have been left on, but Matthew said he didn’t know— maybe the valve was faulty. His mother had used the grill a couple of times. He’d had to turn it off and on for her; she didn’t understand how it worked, and it made her nervous.

It seemed to me that any woman capable of getting herself ordained should be able to overcome a sense of female helplessness about gas grills. If the Church gives you the power to look God more or less in the eye and yank souls from the flames of hell, why go all fluttery in the face of a backyard barbecue? But I didn’t say so; I didn’t know much about priests. Or gas grills. What Leah and I both said was the obvious: how fortunate that Ruffly had been there.

But Matthew wasn’t impressed; he didn’t give Ruffly much credit at all. If there’d been a serious accident? A fire? An explosion? If his mother had been injured? Well, rationally speaking, it would have been her own fault. After all, he said, Stephanie knew she shouldn’t smoke.

24

 What stands between me and a darling black-and-white malamute puppy named Bernadette is a biological impossibility that’s entirely the fault of a woman once secularly known as Susan Cloer who joined the Holy Order of Breed Rescue; started combing the streets and animal shelters of Houston, Texas; encountered temptation; resisted it; and thus earned the only half-facetious title of Mother Teresa of the Malamute. The Temptation? Bernard. Starved down to fifty-nine pounds, the black of his coat bleached auburn by the Texas sun, Bernard was nonetheless recognizable as a better-looking Alaskan malamute than many of those seen in the ring. Equally evident—temptation, temptation—was this beautiful dog’s potential to sire the would-have-been Bernadette, to whom Bernard would doubtless have passed along not just the white tip on the end of his tail, but the incredibly striking diamond-shaped black markings on his white face, too—if only it hadn’t been for that damned Susan Cloer, as she was then. Texas. Tough. Stood right up to Satan. “Satan,” Susan announced, “haven’t you heard? All rescue dogs get spayed or neutered.
All."

And there went Bernadette, which turned out, by chance or by cosmic design, depending on your faith, to be the name of Ivan’s mother. Bernadette Flynn-Isaacson lacked black diamonds on her cheeks, of course, but she had a highly distinctive feature nonetheless, namely, the * saucer-shaped blue-violet eyes she’d obviously bequeathed to her son, who was currently seated at the I Flynn-Isaacson kitchen table surrounded by library books about dog care and mail-order kennel-supply catalogs— Cherrybrook, R.C. Steele, and a couple of others—that  Leah must have given him. While studying
This Is the Alaskan Malamute,
Ivan was eating the kind of lunch that: educated Cambridge parents feed their offspring, a nutritionally balanced and ethnically diverse combination plate consisting of fried squid, a slice of leftover pizza, and three marinated artichoke hearts spread with peanut butter and decorated with little mounds of raisins, an inventive twist on ants on a log, I decided. But was I disgusted? No. Curious. Interested. See what dogs will do for you?

B.D., Before Dogs, you witness a little boy digging his oversize, still-ridged grown-up teeth into a marinated artichoke heart topped with peanut butter and raisins, and you’re gripped by nausea or repulsion, but A.D., After Dogs, postconversion, the negative made positive, your soul drool-scoured and restored to perfect acceptance of Nature in all her once loathsome guises, you greet life eagerly and harmoniously as a fascinating series of equally informative encounters with the Divine. I came close to asking Ivan for a sample to take home. Marinated artichoke hearts plus peanut butter and raisins? Discovered by Holly Winter in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on Saturday, July 4: the only food the Alaskan malamute has ever been known to refuse. Glory, hallelujah!

“Would you like something?” Bernadette asked. “Shall I fix you a plate, too?”

Is there one clean?
I wanted to reply. And,
if so, how could you possibly find it
? The mess was incredible—discarded pieces of clothing, half-empty jelly glasses, a bowl of rotting fruit, food-encrusted bowls, used tea bags, and, even by local standards, an extraordinary amount of printed material. On two long unfinished boards tenuously supported by wall brackets, I spotted two one-volume editions of the complete works of Shakespeare; a Danish-English dictionary;
The, Chicago Manual of Style;
Alice Childress’s
Like One of the Family;
a collection of Simenon mysteries not in translation, either (around here, escapism goes just so far); and, in what I suspected was a vestige of some abandoned cataloging scheme, a few dozen biographies of people who didn’t have much in common. Alice James, Joe DiMaggio, and Virginia Woolf rubbed spines with Roger Tory Peterson, George Sand, Wagner, and Billie Burke. Imagine the pillow talk. Kitchen or no kitchen, the battered copy of
The Joy of Cooking
looked out of place. The books were the least of it. Edging one wall in what looked like a primitive effort at insulation were high stacks of
The New York Times
(Sunday in one pile, daily in another) and what must have been a complete five-year collection of
The New York Review of
Books. Magazines? On the countertops. Nature, Science,
Harvard Magazine, Bird Watcher’s Digest,
and, inexplicably,
Gourmet.

“Sit down! Tea?” Bernadette withdrew her hands from a salad spinner full of water and greens, made a token swipe at a rust-stained dish towel, and began to clear a space at the table, which served mainly as a repository for Xeroxed articles with notes scrawled in the margins and a few dozen yellow pads that looked as if they’d been used in some foolish attempt to take the toe prints of a couple of million chickens.

I’m no stranger here; I knew the signs. Bernadette’s pale brown hair had been cut short about four months earlier, probably the last time she’d noticed it. She wore jeans, a red T-shirt, and old running shoes. I was willing to bet that if she’d been forced to close her eyes and guess what she had on, she’d have had no idea whatsoever. Although she probably told herself that the kitchen was untidy, I was positive that she didn’t care. Why do housework? She was happy already. It also occurred to me that since Bernadette was—what was it?—a socioecologist, maybe some of what struck me as junk was material saved for recycling. In Cambridge, you always have to remind yourself that absolutely anything—the height of the stacks of old newspapers in the kitchen, the length of the hair on any given body part—may well represent a carefully thought-out political decision.

I accepted the offer of tea and stated the Cantabrigian obvious: “You’re writing a book.”

“Two!” As if to remind herself of the reality, she repeated, “Two! But I’m on sabbatical this fall.”

Since moving to Cambridge, I’ve concluded that all professors are permanently on sabbatical or about to go on sabbatical, and I’d previously felt outraged that all those academics were getting paid to loll around recuperating from the rigors of teaching four hours a week, if that, while I was pursuing my no-work-no-check occupation. This time, however, I was delighted. On sabbatical? Writing
two
books? Here in this cheerful mess? Although Malamute Rescue doesn’t require applicants to develop instant agoraphobia, the presence of someone at home doesn’t exactly prejudice us against a prospective adopter, either.

Having failed to locate a teakettle, Bernadette managed to find a saucepan that she filled with bottled water. The gas stove was one of those practically antique white enamel models you still find in Cambridge apartments, the kind with a built-in space heater as well as burners and an oven. After she’d twiste a knob a few times and tried blowing on the pilot light, Ivan finally stopped reading, went to the stove, and somehow persuaded the burner to produce a thin blue circle of blame. His mother set the pan on to heat. Then she dragged a chair to the sink, climbed on it, and began to rummage in a cupboard.

Ivan returned to his seat and said, “Really, she is writing two books, but they’re about the same thing, only one of them is popular, and maybe she’s going to publish it under another name so her department doesn’t find out.” So young yet so jaded.

“Oh,” I said.

“Because if a lot of people buy the book, the other people in her department might get jealous and not give her tenure.”

Bernadette’s laugh was a beautiful, prolonged peal of glee. “Well spoken, Ivan! Straight to the point. Holly, would coffee do?”

“Fine.Anything.”

“Coffee appears to be what we have,” she said, “and I know we have milk.”

Ivan evidently felt the need to explain his mother’s unexpected knowledge of the contents of her own kitchen. “We have a milkman.”

“I do, too,” I said. “In fact, we have the same milkman, I think. Jim, right? I saw the box on your porch. Pleasant Valley Farms.”

“He’s your milkman?”

“You know, Ivan,” Bernadette said, “women can deliver milk, too.”

Ivan corrected himself. “
Milk person.”
He scowled. “That sounds stupid. It sounds like somebody nursing a baby.” Ivan licked some peanut butter off his fingers, wiped them on his Avon Hill shirt, and said, “Creamery... creamery... creamery representative!”

“Excellent,” his mother told him, climbing down from the chair.

Ivan lost interest in the word game. With a look of impatience, he demanded, “Could we talk about the dog now?”

Bernadette laughed and ran her hands through her shaggy hair.

“Of course,” I said.

Ivan was eager. “Do you want to see the yard? The fence is five feet, eleven and three-quarters inches high.”

“He measured it,” Bernadette told me.

“Uh, we need to slow down a little,” I said reluctantly. “You know, Ivan, it’s important to make sure that this is a good time for you to get a dog at all, a good time for both of you, you and your mother.”

“We had a dog before,” Ivan said.

“Oh, you did?” In case you’re not involved in rescue, I should explain that if a prospective adopter’s last dog lived to fifteen, I’m impressed. But if the last dog got hit by car? Or died of heartworm because the people were too stingy to pay for preventive medication? Sobbing means nothing, by the way. People will go out their way to guarantee that Rover gets run over or dies of parvo or lepto, and then, once he’s not going to cost them anything, they get choked up and teary-eyed while telling you how much they loved the dog they murdered.

“Oh,” I said. “What was your dog’s name?” Ivan was dry-eyed, but I wasn’t about to ask a kid who’d lost his father to talk about the death of his dog.

“Ivan—” Bernadette began.

But Ivan got in ahead of her. “American Canadian Bermudian Champion Inuit’s Wooly Bully.” He even managed to get it out with a straight face. I’ve mentioned the pretty boy before. International Ch. Inuit’s Wooly Bully, ROM—three countries. International; ROM, Register of Merit, sired five or more champions—was an Alaskan malamute bred and owned by Sheila Balch, not Ivan Flynn-Isaacson, who hadn’t even been born when Floyd died. Floyd. Call name. Pretty boy. Get it?

Bernadette had finished slopping the boiling water into a Melitta cone precariously balanced on a hand-painted pottery pitcher. When she poured the coffee, it spilled on her hand and all around the dime-store mugs. She didn’t seem to mind. She gave me mine and said gently, “Ivan, our dog was named Hector.” To me she said, “Hector died when Ivan was only two.”

“I remember him!” Ivan insisted belligerently. “Maybe you do,” Bernadette said. “And you’ve seen a lot of pictures of him.”

I drank some coffee. It was surprisingly good. “What kind of dog was Hector?” I asked.

“A mutt,” Bernadette said. “A little brown dog. He belonged to an old man we knew, and when the man had to go into a nursing home, we took Hector, and he was already seven by then, and he lived another ten years. To seventeen.”

“Hector did tricks,” Ivan added.

“He did,” Bernadette agreed, smiling. “That’s true. We didn’t teach him; he knew them when we got him. He was like a little circus dog. He could dance on his hind legs, and before he got old, he could walk on his front legs, too. He was a wonderful dog.”