The Barker Street Regulars

W
HEN ALTHEA BATTLEFIELD FIRST
referred to the Sacred Writings, I naturally assumed that she meant the American Kennel Club
Obedience Regulations.
She didn’t. What Althea had in mind—what Althea held perpetually in the forefront of her considerable intellect—was
The Complete Sherlock Holmes.
Neither
had
nor
held
is quite right, however, except perhaps in the nuptial sense of
to have and to hold.
Althea loved and cherished Holmes’s adventures with a passion that admitted only the richer and the better, and entirely discounted the possibility of the poorer or the worse. As to the bit about
from this day forward,
if you count Althea’s six preliterate years of dependence on parental voices, she’d been reading Sherlock Holmes for ninety years.

This is to say that soon after Rowdy and I first entered Althea’s room at the Gateway Rehabilitation and Nursing Center, she and I recognized each other as kindred spirits, women with passions: in her case, Sherlock Holmes; in mine, dogs. Not that I disliked Holmes. On the contrary, the ill-used hound of the Baskervilles was
one of my favorite literary characters, as I was quick to tell Althea, who pretended to bristle at the suggestion that the beast had been other than real. And not that Althea disliked dogs. Indeed, Althea’s mild fondness for dogs was the reason Rowdy and I began to visit her in the first place. When she referred to my gorgeous Alaskan malamute as a “big husky,” however, I pretended to take umbrage. In other words, Althea knew about as much about dogs as I did about Sherlock Holmes.

Before I say anything else about Althea or about the subsequent murder of her grandnephew, Jonathan Hubbell, I want to state outright that in taking Rowdy on pet therapy visits to the Gateway, I wasn’t engaged in a mission of noble altruism. I’m ordinarily thrilled to have my self-serving motives mistaken for saintly wishes to help others, but this is a story about trickery—fakery, fraud, artifice, subterfuge, call it what you will—and I feel impelled to dissociate myself from the deliberate effort to deceive. In fact, Rowdy became a therapy dog only because I’d taken him to an obedience fun match that also offered therapy dog testing, and I’d had him tested because I knew he’d breeze through and because I thought I’d found an effortless way to get him a new title. Hah! Well, Rowdy aced the test, but as I discovered only when I registered him with Therapy Dogs International, that organization takes ferocious objection to having its initials, T.D.I., used as a title. Why? Because of an utterly irrational suspicion that certain despicably title-hungry dog owners might see T.D.I. only as an easy new title and, once having obtained it, might selfishly refuse to take their dogs on therapy visits. So there I was with a certified therapy dog and no new title when I heard about a local Boston-area group called Paws for Love, which did a thorough
job of screening dogs and training handlers for therapy work, and—not that I cared, of course—would bestow on Rowdy the title Rx.D. when he had visited his assigned facility fifteen times.

Continuing in the spirit of full disclosure, I should mention my realization if I were ever to end up in a nursing home, the only thing that would cheer me up would be a visit from a big, friendly dog. I nonetheless entered the Gateway with the prejudices characteristic of most human beings and entirely foreign to dogs. First fear: The place would smell of urine. It didn’t, but if it had, Rowdy would have considered the stench a fabulous bonus. Second fear: Everyone would have Alzheimer’s, and ten seconds after we’d left, no one would remember we’d been there. Some people did have Alzheimer’s. One was a woman named Nancy, whose body had reached a state of advanced shrinkage in which her weight in pounds equaled her age in years: ninety-three. As I learned only after our first visit to her, the Gateway staff had never before heard her utter more than a word or two. I had to be told that Nancy didn’t usually speak. The first time I led Rowdy toward her wheelchair and asked whether she liked dogs, she ignored me, but croaked to him, “Beautiful! Beautiful dog! Come! Come here, beautiful dog!” Her hands were like a bird’s feet. She perched one on top of Rowdy’s head. He licked her face. She giggled like a child. “I love him,” she said to me. “I love him.”

Nancy’s hearing was poor. I’d been warned to speak loudly. “I love him, too,” I bellowed awkwardly. “His name is Rowdy.”

On our second visit, with no prompting, Nancy called out Rowdy’s name and repeated it over and over: “Rowdy. Rowdy. I love him. I love him. Rowdy. Rowdy.” Licking her hands and face, Rowdy reminded
me of a burly wolf tending to an emaciated feral child. Nancy suddenly looked away from Rowdy and directly at me. Her eyes were a faded hazel. She had more wrinkles than she did actual face. “God’s creature,” she said.

“Yes,” I agreed.

Entering the Gateway for our regular Friday morning visit, Rowdy and I always found a group of five or six sociable women in the lobby, their wheelchairs arranged in a welcoming half circle across from the elevators and next to the big dining hall. As soon as I’d signed in, pinned on my volunteer’s badge, and hung my parka in a closet rather alarmingly marked
OXYGEN,
I’d take Rowdy to the lobby, where the women made a fuss over him and helped me to train him to offer his paw gently and never to bat at people. The elderly, I’d been advised, have thin, fragile skin. On our first few visits, Rowdy himself proved more thin-skinned than I’d expected. He whined a few times and stayed so close to my left side that an obedience judge would have faulted him for crowding. Rowdy had been around wheelchairs before, but never so many as he encountered at the Gateway. And although he was used to the chaos of dog shows, the newness of everything at the nursing home taxed him.

Leaving the first floor, we took the elevator to the third. Near the nursing station, we always found a beautifully groomed woman who owned an enviable wardrobe of handsome business suits, silk blouses, and flower-patterned scarves. She never spoke a word to me. It took me a couple of visits to realize that although she didn’t want a big dog anywhere near her, she enjoyed looking at Rowdy from a distance of two or three yards. There was a tidy brown-skinned man named Gus whose wheelchair was always stationed in the TV room
on the third floor. Gus liked to tell me about the German shepherd dogs he’d had. On every visit, he told me about his shepherds in the same words he’d used the last time I’d been there. Rowdy didn’t lick Gus’s face. Gus wouldn’t have liked it. “Shake!” Gus would demand. Rowdy would offer his paw, and he and Gus would exchange a dignified greeting. Then Gus would look back at the television screen, and Rowdy and I would move on, pausing in the hallways and stopping here and there in people’s rooms. In the corridors and elevators, the staff of the Gateway and people who lived there commented on Rowdy. Again and again, people reached out to touch him. There was an almost religious fervency about that need to lay a hand on him. I imagined the Gateway as a deviant yet orthodox temple and Rowdy as a canine Torah.

Big, vibrant, and boundlessly affectionate though Rowdy is, there was never enough of him to go round. To avoid overburdening Rowdy, I’d been ordered to limit my first visit to twenty-five minutes and to lengthen our stays gradually. In thirty minutes, we could have given one minute each to thirty people, five minutes each to six people, a rich fifteen minutes to two. No one got enough. No one except Althea Battlefield, who wasn’t even wild about dogs.