Gone to the Dogs (3 page)

“And,” Steve continued, “the house is okay.” He’d rented a little white cape on Little Spy Pond in Belmont, just over the line from Cambridge, about ten minutes from my place, where I reserve my first floor exclusively for myself and my dogs, and rent the other two apartments. I like it that way.

“So did you ask him about Patterson?”

“Jesus, Holly. He’s probably sick of it.”

“Well, Bonnie isn’t sick of it,” I said. Bonnie’s my editor at
Dog’s Life
. Oscar Patterson, D.V.M., had vanished from his New Hampshire clinic about ten days ago. The news had taken three days to reach Bonnie, and, since then, she’d been pestering me to do a story about Oscar Patterson and his disappearance, but what can you write about a total mystery? The lack of facts had ignited a firestorm of speculation in both the dog and literary worlds. “She wants anything,” I said. “He breeds foxhounds. He believes in pyramids.”

“Does he?”

“How would I know? I only saw him once. I got dragged to a reading he did, maybe four years ago. It was incredibly boring.” Ever been to a poetry reading? In Cambridge, they’re hard to avoid. If you’re lucky, they’re held at cafés, where you can order coffee. Then you can drink it and fiddle with the silverware instead of having to sit still with nothing to do. “He did have a sort of dramatic manner,” I said. “His voice went up and down. Maybe he was too abstract for me.”

I didn’t say it to Steve, but the idea of a veterinarian-poet or vice versa had originally hit me as ludicrous. Ascariasis? Sarcoptic mange? Is this the stuff of sonnets? But romance isn’t fashionable now, anyway. Even so, Oscar Patterson’s poems weren’t about pets and diseases, and probably I set myself up for disappointment by looking forward to something like a free-verse update of the epitaph Lord Byron wrote for the monument to Boatswain, his Newfoundland, but with a medical explanation of why the dog died, of course. Everything Patterson read when I heard him was pastoral: How I moved to the country and found depth in a shallow pond.… Look, I grew up in Owls Head, Maine. Show me a shallow pond, and I see a few bony pickerel, a lot of weeds, and a muddy bottom.

But could I tell you something about Oscar Patterson? His poetry didn’t move me, and neither did his dramatic style of reading it, but one detail about Patterson’s life really got to me and left me with the sense that I knew the child he’d been. I didn’t learn this crucial fact from Oscar Patterson himself but from a thumbnail sketch of his life that appeared on the flyleaf of one his books. The guy who took me to
Patterson’s reading—this was before Steve—had brought the book along for Patterson to sign. I remember feeling embarrassed about that. To ask Patterson for his autograph hit me as gauche, very un-Cambridge. As I understood it, in Cambridge the point wasn’t to fawn over celebrities but to become one yourself or, failing that, to act as if you could be instantly famous if you so desired. In the paraphrased words of a great American poet—not Oscar Patterson—I was a veteran sophisticate in those days; I’m a no-finesse novice now.

Anyway, as I’d sat drinking bitter espresso in the café while waiting for Patterson to appear, I’d glanced at the flyleaf and read about Patterson’s life. What got to me was this: Patterson grew up in the Bronx, where he lived just down the street from a veterinarian. From the time Patterson was just a little kid, he worked for the vet as a kind of living incubator. When the vet had to perform a Caesarean on a bitch, he’d call Patterson, who’d stand by to assist. As the vet removed each tiny puppy from the mother’s womb, he’d place the newborn in Oscar Patterson’s outstretched hands, and Patterson would clean the puppy, warm it, cradle it, and feel it take its first breath right there in the palms of his hands. Although the bio didn’t say so, the little boy must have felt as if he’d given life to those puppies, as if he’d whelped them himself.

I could have written my editor an article about the young Patterson and puppies, of course. The episode was nothing he’d confided to me. Even so, my knowledge created what felt like a weirdly personal bond between Patterson and me. Have you ever seen color photographs or, yet worse, a video of the birth of a human baby? Well, if I ever have a baby, there’ll
be no cameras. That’s how I felt about Patterson, too: I didn’t want to see his surrogate canine motherhood spread out on the pages of
Dog’s Life
.

“Anyway, Steve,” I went on, “what Bonnie really wants is something about how Patterson’s dog is so heartbroken that he hasn’t moved from the door since his master disappeared. Or how the dog’s suddenly started baying weirdly, and you can tell that he’s hearing his master’s voice.”

“Does Patterson have a dog?” Steve asked.

“Don’t ask me,” I said.

“He has Burmese cats,” Steve said. “And an iguana.”

“Damn. Maybe he has a dog, too.”

“You know,” Steve said, “considering the circumstances, you sound kind of flip about all this.”

He was right, of course. “Do I?” I said. “Yeah, I guess I do.” Rita … Remember Rita? Let me make a Cambridge introduction. She’s a psychologist in private practice. Rita, my friend and tenant, claims that when I sound heartless, I’m actually defending against the “potentially ego-disintegrative affect that is the legacy of your childhood history of repeated unresolved loss.” As may or may not be obvious, she means that my parents raised golden retrievers. Loss? One day the pups were there, the next day they’d been sold to strangers. What’s more, the one flashy trick that the remaining goldens never mastered was the ultimate show-off stunt of living forever. So I don’t like to have anyone just disappear. But who does?

“What circumstances?” I asked Steve.

“For one thing, Geri’s pregnant,” Steve said.

“I don’t even know who she is,” I said.

“The woman Patterson lives with. Geri Driscoll.
She’s pregnant. Lee’s wife, Jackie, told me. But don’t pass it along, huh?”

“Of course not,” I said. “But isn’t Patterson a little old to, uh, have to get married? I mean, at his age? He must feel sort of ridiculous.”

Steve smiled. “He’s all of forty. But it’s not like that. I gather he seemed real happy about it.”

As Rita would say, may I share a fantasy with you? I imagined that Geri would need a Caesarean and that Oscar Patterson, scrubbed and gowned for surgery, would reach his latex-gloved hands into her uterus to deliver the infant himself.

“So why did he take off?” I asked.

“Don’t ask me. I don’t know that it was voluntary.”

“You probably didn’t ask,” I said. “You should’ve asked Lee Miner. Speaking of him, when do I get to meet him?”

Steve lifted Rowdy’s eighty-five pounds of what you’d swear is steel-laced concrete off the table and onto the floor. “Would you not do that?” I said.

All he did was laugh. Sometimes I think that Steve sees all dogs as wet and bloody all-but-unborn puppies he’s just delivered.

Anyway, when we got to the waiting room, Kimi and Rhonda weren’t there, but on one of the plastic-covered benches sat a young woman with short, wiry black hair exactly like the coat of a Scottish terrier. What’s more, and I am not making this up, her face was long, her head was large for her body, her legs were really quite short, she wore black tights, and—I swear it’s true—her dress was Royal Stewart tartan. Her terrier—you guessed?—promptly flashed a good scissors bite, then let out a prolonged menacing growl, and, head and tail up, black eyes snapping,
staunchly hurled himself, all twenty pounds, to the end of his red leash. Yes, this little dog, no more than ten inches at the withers, was joyfully picking a fight with an Alaskan malamute. Totally crazy, right? The little guy was waiting there for a dose of veterinary psychiatry. Wrong. This animal madness is known to Scottie fanciers as “real terrier character.”

Rowdy’s ears perked up, his hackles rose, and a gleam of delight sparkled in his eyes, but I could tell that he was more interested in enjoying the show than intent on getting into a real scrap. Even so, he jerked forward, but I spoiled the fun by calling him to heel. Probably because we weren’t in the obedience ring, he obeyed.

Meanwhile, the woman was hauling in her dog and scolding him in the elated tones that terrier owners use when they chastise displays of what they privately consider the ideal temperament. Her voice was low and throaty: “Willie, that will do! Quiet!
Hush!”
She eventually succeeded in silencing Willie by dragging and shoving him around the corner of the reception desk and thus blocking his view of Rowdy. To Steve and me, she said brightly: “He really means it! He’s not kidding!”

“Yes,” I said. “I believe you!”

“He’ll take on anything! He’s a perfect fiend.”

“Well, he’s awfully cute,” I said truthfully.

“Don’t let his looks fool you,” she corrected me. In case I doubted her word, she added: “I’ve taken him to everyone! We saw Dickie Brenner once, and then we saw Lila Goldstein!” In case I still wasn’t convinced, she pursed her lips and said in a deep, chilling tone: “Twice!” Gazing down happily at Willie and evidently speaking as one with him, she added: “We didn’t like Mr. Brenner, did we? We’re never
going back to him. And Mrs. Goldstein didn’t understand us. But that’s all right! Because now we’re going to the Monks of New Skete!”

I know when I’ve been effectively demolished. You know who the Monks are, don’t you? Besides breeding German shepherds and writing first-rate dog-rearing books, they train dogs and give workshops. Any dog dreadful enough to have outdone his fellow couch destroyers, ankle nippers, rug soilers, lawn excavators, garbage stealers, and leash lungers to the extent of requiring three local consultations
and
the Monks of New Skete? Well, that dog had singled himself out as a world-class monster. I eyed Willie with respect.

“Holly,” Steve said, “I’d like you to meet Jackie Miner. This is Holly Winter.” Steve’s an immigrant. He grew up in Minneapolis.

Before Jackie and I had had a chance to say that we were happy to meet each other, Lee Miner, her husband and Steve’s new assistant veterinarian, appeared from the back of the clinic, and I’ll have to admit that my first thought about Lee was that Jackie would never need to take
him
to the Monks. Lee Miner was a tidy, compact, pale man who held his elbows close to his sides and kept blinking his hazel eyes.

“Pleased to meet you,” Lee said when Steve had introduced us. Even his enunciation was precise. He immediately sealed his thin beige lips. Then all three Miners—Jackie, Lee, and Willie—performed what I took to be a family ritual: Jackie yanked on Willie’s leash. When she’d positioned Willie at her left side, she tightened the leash, leaned down, and rested her weight on his hindquarters until he sat. As soon as she was standing upright again, she gave Lee an almost
imperceptible nod. On signal, Lee took small, careful steps forward until he stood directly in front of Jackie and Willie. Bending from the waist, Lee then reached down and tenderly scratched the top of Willie’s head. As Lee straightened up, Jackie tilted her head toward him as if inviting him to scratch her head, too. At the last second, though, she puckered her lips and gave Lee’s proffered cheek a noisy kiss.

Except for having been raised in only slightly divergent sects of the same faith—Steve’s family had English setters, whereas mine believed in golden retrievers—he and I had very different childhoods, but we both loved Red Rover. Remember? In case you don’t, two teams of kids link arms and face each other. To make a solid link, you clamp your hands around the forearms of the kids next to you, who get the same hard grip on your forearms. It hurts already, right? Then the leader of one team calls out the name of a kid on the other team, who has to charge across and try to break through whatever pair of locked arms he wants. Get it? The leader says, “Red Rover, Red Rover, send Sally right over.” If Sally decides that you and Jim are little runts who make a weak link, she runs like hell at your locked arms, and while she’s trying to break through, you’re trying to stop her. A kid with dog-handler’s wrists has a big advantage at Red Rover, but what the game really requires is wild ferocity. That’s what compensates for the red, aching forearms.

The point is that although Steve is a really gentle guy, he’s the first person you’d pick for Red Rover. Lee Miner, though, looked as if his game hadn’t been Red Rover at all. I was willing to bet it had been Quaker Meeting.

If you’ve ever taken an untrained dog to a beginning obedience class, you probably remember the paradox: The dog acts so wild that it’s almost impossible to register him for the first lesson. You try to ask whether you’ve come to the right class at the right time, but your dog begins yelping so loudly that you can’t hear the answer. Somebody hands you a pen and a registration form, but you can’t fill in the form or write a check because your dog, who has already wrapped his leash around your ankles, suddenly lunges at a beast four times his size, thus jerking the pen from your hand and your feet from under you. As your head cracks the floor, you wish you’d see stars—beautiful and imaginary—but what glows before your eyes is a hideous vision of the future: week after week of this unremitting humiliation at the paws and jaws of man’s best friend.

But if you’re lucky enough to show up at the Cambridge Dog Training Club, a round, bright-eyed face suddenly looms over you. One small, rather pudgy hand reaches down to pull you up, while another, equally small and pudgy, grips your dog’s leash with surprising strength. “It’s happened to all of us,” a cheery voice assures you. This woman has to be
lying. You don’t care. You’re grateful someone has taken charge. She goes on: “You’re all right, aren’t you? Of course you are. Here, I’ll hold him for you.” You have met Hope Wilson.

According to the membership lists distributed yearly by the Cambridge Dog Training Club, Hope has wirehaired pointing griffons. It may well be that she does. For all I know, she may own and train five or ten of them, in other words, a high proportion of the United States population of the breed, which is recognized by the American Kennel Club, but very few individuals. It’s a terrific breed, but let’s face it: How much demand is there, really, for a dog specifically developed to hunt in Dutch and French swamps? And, membership lists or no membership lists, it’s hard to imagine plump, soft-skinned, gentle Hope with gum boots on her feet, mosquito netting on her head, and a rifle slung over her arm, plodding from tussock to tussock in fatal quest of harmless avian marsh-dwellers. Of course, it’s probably also hard to imagine some Inuit version of me, mukluk-shod and fur-swathed, vaulting over the leads from floe to floe, but everyone’s seen me with my malamutes, and no one’s ever seen Hope with any kind of dog at all.