Dog House (17 page)

Have I justified that sufficiently?

I started by contacting employment agencies and after two or three false starts, one of them sent out this small and wiry Irish angel, though I was dubious at her interview. She wasn't young. She was about my age, I guessed. (Though, what with Botox and highlights and various nips—no tucks—it had been getting increasingly difficult to know what “my age” looked like anymore.) And Norah McNelis, who arrived at my door with short blond hair and deep (untreated) smile lines, looked to be—well, maybe not young enough for this job? Sure, she was sinewy and thin, but she didn't look like she was strong enough to run up and down our many stairs; to go out for the mail in the snow; to help me look after three hairy dogs. Three is a
lot
of dogs. But after we'd finished with the obligatory walk-through and I realized that, remarkably, she hadn't said a word about the hair-covered chairs or the hair-covered stair carpet or all those flights of stairs, and hadn't even seemed to register the millions of dustables, I was encouraged. Though still unsure. We stepped outside to sit on the porch glider and chat a little more. She was polite and somewhat stiff, and I was at my most formal and adult. (I mean, it had taken me long enough to acquire a little gravitas; I needed to take it out and dust it off every now and then.) All this time, I'd been carrying baby Jimmy Cagney to keep him out from underfoot, and I plopped him on my lap as we talked.

“Do you think you can handle this job, Norah? ”

Norah had that divine Kerry accent, which I won't try to do phonetically. She might get mad.

“Well, I do think I can handle it, but,” she said, and here, she reached for my squishy Jimmy Cagney pup, lifted him out of my arms and held him up to look him in the eye, “the best thing about this job is the dogs.”

And that was that.

 

 

Millard and I were turning into semi—Dog People by default. We'd never assist at a whelping or dock a tail, and I can't say I ever quite got the hang of plucking out Emma's dead hair (“stripping”), but by my reckoning, Dog People is what you automatically become when you own three or more dogs. That un-looked-for achievement, plus my now almost-lifetime of experience, had led me to believe I knew a little about how dogs think. I could tell, for example, when they were anxious about something strange (one forefoot in the air), unless they were anxious about an approaching thunderstorm, in which case there'd be pacing, wandering from room to room, trembling, whining and trying to hide under a table. I could tell when the dogs were happy, because they'd blink their eyes slowly and pant slightly and stretch their lips into a gummy “smile.” I liked—and still like—to catch them dreaming. Their muffled yips alert me to their dreams, along with that faint running movement of their paws. Though I worry as I watch. Are they chasing or being chased? I hope they're chasing.

I'd gotten quite comfortable, too, with the fact that when they were licking my hand, it was either because I'd been sweating or because I'd recently handled something tasty—not because they loved me. (Juno, though, has always licked twice for a head scratch.) It's never failed to surprise me that all my dogs have understood the various names I've given them beyond their formal names; that I actually got a response to calls for Deeviedog, and Julioollio and Jujypuss, and way back there, Balooneyooney. And I like to watch them watching me. Is she getting ready to go out? (Time to start pacing.) She's finishing dinner now—maybe there's something left for me. (I'll just go sit subtly on her feet.) It impresses me, too, that my dogs can tell perfect time within fifteen minutes of dinner, walk time and my bedtime. Dogs are smart. (In fact, those I live with these days seem to be able to count the number of times my phone rings: steady, regularly spaced rings are normal, requiring no action; two quick rings are the signal that someone's coming up the elevator and it's time to go berserk; three stuttery rings are the fax machine, which every so often is fun to watch.) And I'm amused by every dog I see trotting purposefully down the street as if it knows exactly where it's going and what excellent thing it's going to do or find or eat when it gets there.

So Millard and I were pretty comfortable with our dogs. In the thirty or so years since I'd consigned Fluffy to one hairy floor, we'd come to believe that we'd experienced, and more or less successfully dealt with, every possible type of dog behavior and problem:

Emma had stopped eating.

We called the vet and the vet found a lump.

We started chemo, and after her first injection, Millard sat on the carpet in the living room with Emma cradled in his arms and said—to no one in particular—“We'll spend whatever it takes.”

We did. But nothing helped. There was no help for our gentle Emma, who spent her last days crouched in the niche between a table and a chair on the cool tiles of the hall. Norah tried to soothe her poor face with a damp washcloth, but Jimmy Cagney and Juno wouldn't go near her. And when she stopped eating, when the tumors became too numerous, when they were on top of her head and around her eyes, I called the vet who came to the house and took her away.

I can't forgive myself for not going with her.

Millard made it a point to not be at home.

 

 

Miscellaneous thinkers and writers have commented on the configuration of the Heaven to which our lost, loved animals go.

Pablo Neruda had this to say about a favorite dog:

And from the Koran:

My favorite is from Martin Luther:

Somewhere, Emma wags her golden tail.

But she's buried in our garden, just at that corner of the house where she used to break for glory.

 

 

Oh, my Millard was desperate for another Emma. Right away. He hadn't the heart for mourning or the patience to wait. He wouldn't even consider a breed other than a Norfolk, either—one that was easy to housebreak, say? He wanted his Emma back. And I did, too, but I also felt obliged to remind him ever so gently of what had happened post-Cosi.

I said, “You never get the same dog again.”

I said, “Mill, every dog is a different little being, just like us.”

I reached for Heraclitus: “You never step in the same river twice.” Which really wasn't applicable but sounded as if it might be.

I fell back in despair on poor old Thomas Wolfe's “You Can't Go Home Again.” (Ditto)

And then, having run out of inappropriate bromides, I reluctantly picked up the phone to call the celebrity Norfolk breeder. And this time, the litter was in Milwaukee and Millard—who wasn't a hugger or a kisser or even a dependable hand-holder—leaped on the first plane to bring back to hug and kiss and cradle in his arms the most beautiful puppy I'd ever seen. She was caramel-coated with exceptionally wide spaced brown eyes, soft droopy ears, and a squeaky, bossy bark. He was so besotted with his treasure that he'd barely let me hold her, and at dinner, the night he brought her home, he elatedly reported that while he was waiting in the Milwaukee airport for his return flight, he'd discovered that a man with a puppy was a chick magnet. He didn't put it that way of course, because that particular locution didn't become widespread till after he died. Nevertheless, he managed to make it a little too clear that he'd have been delighted to sit in airports with his Diva forever.

And we couldn't wait to show off the new baby, so we invited Carolan and Peter, dear old friends (cat people, but still, dear friends) to meet her.

Carolan and Peter arrived in a flurry of coats and scarves, and since we were going out to eat, they waited in the hall while Millard went to get our pup. Diva was so tiny that when he came out of the kitchen holding her lovingly in tenderly cupped hands pressed against his chest, only a paw and a tail peeped out. When he was close enough to Peter to pass her to him without having to risk holding her over the hall's tile floor, he made the hesitant, careful exchange. And Peter, pleased and awkward, gently stroked her little head and body and made the sounds we all make when holding something small and helpless. He held her that way for a minute or so, crooning a little.

Then he dropped her.

Millard stood open-mouthed, his face drained of color. And he got to Diva, lying so still on the floor, half a second before I did.

Peter looked from one to the other of us, bewildered.

“What's the matter?” he said. “Did I do something wrong?”

Carolan, horrified, stared at the ceiling, the walls, her hands.

“Kittens,” he looked around defensively, “land on their feet.”

Puppies don't.

Diva was struggling to get up, wobbling, staggering and shaking her head so hard her tiny ears were making snapping sounds.

Collapsed on a nearby step, Millard and I sat together, shaking. Shaking our heads as well.

“No, no, Peter. It looks like she's all right. Everything's all right. It was a mistake. Just a mistake.”

And she
was
all right. And down the road, I don't think her sky-dive affected Diva's brain in any significant way—unless that's the reason she grew up loving to chase airplanes.

And Carolan and Peter are still my dearest friends.

I don't let them near my dogs.

 

 

This newest fur family, like our others, just sort-of got along. Jimmy Cagney and Diva cold-shouldered Juno altogether and lorded it over her because she was just a mongrel, after all, and they were
terriers
—by far the better breed. They did seem to like each other the tiniest bit, however, and although I've just been rattling on about how knowledgeable we'd become about dogs, I could still be surprised. For example, even though Diva and Jimmy Cagney had both been neutered, I walked into the kitchen one day to find them mating—in a “tie,” I think it's called. Now I didn't know that de-sexed dogs could do that. Or would want to do that. Though on second thought, I could see that at their separate ends of the tie, they were looking fairly baffled about this arrangement themselves, rather as if—like humans—they were wondering how to get out of this extremely awkward situation as painlessly as possible and would it mean that now they'd have to worry about their relationship.

 

 

The magnificent little Diva was pure and simple born alpha dog. Pass by her bowl when she was having her dinner—Just glance her way while she was eating, in fact—and you'd be face-to-face with her ancestry, slavering jaws and all. Jimmy Cagney shared those vulpine genes and jaws, but his weren't restricted to quiescent food. There was the time, for example, that Norah saw him take down a little bird in the dog yard.

It was spring again, and as a fledgling swooped by, a sad foot or so too low, Jimmy leaped straight up and crushed it in his jaws. When five or six small birds alighted to gather around its poor remains, Norah came to get me to look and swore it was awake. They were holding a wake. And from that moment on, she referred to Jimmy as “that little rat.” (Which, given his name, was appropriate.) Jimmy Cagney sometimes stripped his teeth at Norah, too. And snarled. Though no one did that with Norah and got away with it. She was as tough as he was. Or tougher. She could make her two-year-old granddaughter sit through Mass.

 

 

Unaccountably, Millard and I had reached our sixties and, as promised—or at least implied—life had turned golden. I don't think I'd term it the sunset of our lives, exactly. It was more that buttery time between five and seven in the evening when you've put on the Chopin and drifted out the back door for a last whiff of the lilacs. We'd become profoundly comfortable in our at-long-last beautiful house, plus, we had two thriving careers, and Barden had married a girl we loved and was living a worthy, if eccentric, life in the East Village. You know, Millard and I had been sure we'd raised a yuppie (I know those suits are still fresh in your mind) and instead, we got an activist/community-involved /gardening/art appraiser. We must have done something right.

No children yet, but I hoped. And hoped.

As to our canine children, Millard and Jimmy Cagney and Juno and Diva and I were enjoying any number of three-dog nights. And to our surprise and delight, our garden had matured. Or should I say the few things that had survived those first ten years had matured because, having killed off scores of tender, unsuspecting perennials and shrubs, we'd found ourselves unexpectedly successful with roses. Climbers had become our specialty, and we were proud to count more than fifty varieties growing over the house, the porches, the garage, the boathouse, the dog run, and if it had only stood still long enough, the car. Come June, when we threw an annual fireworks bash, their scent was old rose and ambrosia.