Gaits of Heaven (11 page)

At five-thirty on Thursday afternoon, Monty Brainard
called Caprice on her cell phone to say that he was flying in from New York for Eumie’s memorial service. Leah and I were with her in the kitchen when she got the call, which was brief.

“You don’t have to,” she said. “I mean—” After listening, she said, “It’s okay. Really. It’s fine. Don’t worry about it. I’ll see you there. I love you.” And then, “Bye.”

“My father’s coming,” she announced with a smile of relief. “Holly, you really don’t have to go. I won’t be there alone.”

“We’re both going,” Leah said.

“Please! Leah, it’ll be gross. Please don’t. Ted will pretend she’s there in spirit. He’ll speak to her.”

“I can handle that,” Leah said.

“It would be embarrassing to have you hear it.
Please
.”

Leah conceded. In case Caprice tried to discourage me, too, I shifted the conversation to another topic. “We need to get organized. Caprice, you have your appointment with Dr. Zinn at six, don’t you? Steve will be home any minute, and he’ll be going to dog training. Leah, are you going with him?”

“I’ll take Kimi. For rally.”

“I got takeout from Loaves and Fishes. Roast chicken, eggplant, asparagus, some other stuff.” I didn’t mention the green bean salad, which I’d chosen out of habit and should probably have fed to the dogs once its significance dawned on me. What stopped me, I suppose, was the knowledge that greens beans really were an excellent weight-loss food. “We’ll all have to forage. Rowdy, Kimi, and Lady have been fed, and Steve can feed Sammy and India when he gets home with them. I’ll need to get ready for the service.” I have an old-fashioned streak. In Cambridge, you can wear anything to anything, but when I go to anything even remotely like a funeral, what I wear is a dark dress.

An unsettling little event had made me suddenly eager to pay my respects. About forty-five minutes earlier, when I’d been checking my e-mail, I’d been interrupted by the delivery of a small package from a company I’d never heard of. My work for
Dog’s Life
sometimes included product evaluations, and now and then an enterprising company would send samples directly to me, usually with a note expressing the optimistic certainty that my dogs and I would be so enthusiastic about the items that I’d recommend them in my column. Shamelessly lacking in even the most rudimentary sense of journalistic integrity, the dogs would have had me write a rave review of every edible bribe I was offered, but I stuck to my ethics. My product reviews were fair, and when I recommended toys, equipment, and treats in my column, it was never because I’d been bought off. For example, I bought the Buster Cube myself; my fabulous Chris Christensen 27mm pin brush with the T handle was a present from my stepmother, Gabrielle; and as to the Bil-Jac treats, for which I regularly shopped, the dogs loved the liver, peanut butter, and pizza flavors, and I liked being able to break the soft morsels into little pieces when I trained. Anyway, this package was too small to contain anything for the dogs and, in fact, turned out to hold a CD titled
Guided Imagery for Performance Anxiety
. My dogs weren’t the ones with ring nerves; the CD was meant exclusively for me. The gift receipt in the package included this note:
I will help you to do your own personal version, but this will get you started. Gratefully, Eumie
. Although the notion of a message from beyond the grave was a bit gothic for me, I still found it unsettling to realize that Eumie had taken an active step to help cure me of ring nerves. When she’d said she could help, she had not been making a vague promise, on the contrary, as soon as she’d heard of my problem, she’d ordered the CD. If she’d lived, I now saw, she’d have followed through. I had no intention of thanking her aloud at the memorial service, but I did want to attend.

That was before we got there. Once we did, I realized that Caprice had been right: Ted Green was throwing a death party. What’s more, he must have invited everyone he and Eumie had ever known. The closest parking place I found was three blocks away, and by the time I snagged it, I was wishing we’d left the car at home and gone on foot. All the lights in the big house were on, and the front door stood open. The porch was so crowded with people taking off their shoes that we had to wait to get in.

“Your mother had so many friends,” I said softly to Caprice.

“Most of these people weren’t her friends, and they aren’t Ted’s. Some of them are people he wants referrals from. A lot of them are people they both wanted to impress, mostly parents from Avon Hill. They’re here out of curiosity.” A second later, her cynicism vanished. “There’s my father! Monty! Monty, I’m here!”

When I saw Monty Brainard, I realized that I’d been expecting him to have the human equivalent of the real Monty’s malamute splendor. In reality, the only obvious resemblance between the false Monty, Monty Brainard, and the real Monty, Ch. Benchmark Captain Montague, was that both were muscular. Monty Brainard was a short, balding man with straight, medium-brown hair and small brown eyes. His only outstanding physical characteristic was a deep tan, probably natural, possibly chemical. He wore a conservative gray suit. Forcing his way through the crowd, he wrapped Caprice in his arms and said, “Daddy’s here, baby girl.”

Baby girl
. Only when Monty Brainard spoke the phrase did I take a hard look at Caprice, who was swathed in a voluminous dress of pale lavender. Her pale blond curls were held back with little white barrettes. Baby girl, indeed. Daddy’s plump baby girl.

“Holly, this is my father, Monty,” Caprice said. “Daddy, this is Holly. She’s the one I’m staying with, Holly and her husband. Holly is my friend Leah’s cousin.”

“I’m very grateful,” Monty said as he shook my hand. His late ex-wife, I suspected, would’ve thrown her arms around me, gushed about her gratitude, and told me how special I was. By comparison, Monty’s ordinary civility felt…I am tempted to say that it felt special. After all, if everything is special, what’s left to be truly special? Ordinariness.

Caprice, her father, and I exchanged a few words. I said that Steve and I were happy to have Caprice stay with us. Monty said that he was going back to New York tomorrow after he’d taken Caprice out to lunch. Ted came rushing up to me, threw his arms around me, and told me how glad he was to see me. He wore a sage green linen suit with a shirt of what looked like unbleached, unironed muslin. “You were so special to Eumie,” he said. Diverted by the arrival of yet more people, he hurriedly pointed toward the dining room, told all three of us to help ourselves to food, and moved away to greet the new visitors.

If I were entirely human instead of half malamute, I’d have been driven toward the dining room by my sensitivity to Caprice’s desire to have time alone with her father. In fact, the driving force was my quest for food. The dining-room table and a long sideboard held an almost incredible spread that was being neglected by most of the other guests, who, I assumed, lived the kinds of unappetizing lives characteristic of people who fail to receive daily infusions of big, hungry dog DNA. The offerings were characteristic of Jewish rites of passages but combined the typical dishes of a big Jewish wedding with those of a big Jewish breakfast. Tremendous platters contained delectable arrangements of chicken, roast beef, and grilled vegetables. There were baskets of bagels, bialys, and black bread, bowls of cream cheese, plates of lox, tomatoes, and cukes, dishes of half-sour pickles, and two supersize green salads. My initial survey also identified noodle kugel, a gigantic poached salmon, and—oh, bliss!—blintzes, which are the Jewish version of crepes, thin pancakes filled with ambrosial cheese and served with sour cream and jam. To convey my appreciation of this display of gustatory generosity, I should mention that I come from a New England WASP background and have yet to shake the expectation that the so-called food offered to fifty or a hundred mourners will consist of one small plate of 1/2-by-1/2-inch brownies and another of 1/2-by-1/2-inch lemon squares accompanied by your choice of watery tea or see-through coffee.

Anyway, filling their plates were two people, one of whom I was surprised to recognize as Rita’s psychopharmacologist date, Quinn Youngman. The other was a young woman with long, straight dark hair, Asian features, and a rather tall, athletic build. When I approached, Quinn was telling her that his choice of psychopharmacology had been a natural extension of his previous interest in drugs of all sorts, if she knew what he meant. After I’d interrupted, he introduced us, and that’s how I met Missy Zinn, Caprice’s therapist, whose plate held a bagel with cream cheese and lox, a chicken breast, and roasted eggplant. As I ate blintzes with sour cream and blueberry jam, we were joined by a lanky, sandy-haired guy who turned out to be an adult rather than the teenage boy I’d taken him for. In fact, he was Peter York, Wyeth’s therapist. Fortunately, I didn’t have to mention Wyeth. Instead, I said, “You’re in supervision with Rita. She’s a good friend of mine.”

“And mine,” said Quinn Youngman.

As we ate, we said flattering things about Rita. A pleasant-looking fortyish woman I’d never seen before overheard and misunderstood us. “Eumie was a dear friend to a lot of people,” she said. “Eumie changed my life.”

I didn’t know what to say.
That’s nice
would’ve felt hopelessly inadequate. Luckily, Ted spoke up to ask everyone to move into the living room and the family room. Brushing past me, he murmured, “Damn Johanna. I invited her, and I expected her to have the decency to turn up.”

Following the crowd, I found that the wall between the two big rooms was actually a pair of sliding doors that had been opened to create a long, wide space that held folding chairs arranged in rows. At the front of the makeshift theater was a small table intended to serve as a podium. Or maybe the idea was a chapel with an altar. In any case, since the gathering had been described as a service, I expected family members to take seats in the first rows, with close friends occupying seats toward the front and with acquaintances and such toward the rear. Dog trainers presumably belonged in the last row. As I was settling myself there in the family room, Dolfo came galloping up to me with a piece of paper in his mouth.

“Where have you been?” I whispered. “And what do you have? Give! Trade!”

Like every other dog trainer in the world, I find that I automatically speak to all dogs as I do to my own and to other educated canines. There wasn’t a chance in a trillion that Dolfo had been taught
give,
our household’s formal obedience command for requesting a dumbbell, or
trade,
our everyday order to relinquish an object. The remarkable feature of foolish lapses like mine, however, is that evolution has bequeathed to the domestic dog an astonishing capacity to decode even the most seemingly incomprehensible messages of Homo sapiens. Dogs perform the miracle of penetrating the unfathomable by using all available cues: the direction of the human gaze, tone of voice, subtle movements of the body, slight changes in respiration, and, I suspect, minute variations in the scent we emit. So, in apparent response to words he didn’t know, Dolfo handed over his treasure, which proved to be a page torn from an L.L.Bean catalog.

“Good boy,” I whispered to Dolfo. “Did you want one of these Bean dog beds? Is that why you brought me this?”

“Talking to dogs,” a male voice said. “A sure sign of sanity. Holly, good to see you.” The speaker was George McBane, who was, in his own way, as Irish-looking as Kevin Dennehy. George had the same bright blue eyes and pale skin, but he had curly black hair shot with white, and he lacked Kevin’s freckles. According to Rita, George McBane was so handsome that in shrink circles, he was called Gorgeous George—never, of course, to his face. With a hint of condescension, Rita said that he had a reputation for doing rapid, effective work with difficult patients. As far as I could tell, a lot of the most prestigious shrinks did what struck me as slow, ineffective work—ten years of nothing but insight in patients suffering from nothing worse than existential malaise—but what do I know? I’m a dog trainer. Canine self-understanding is never my primary goal.

“We’ll sit with you,” said Barbara. “And then George will behave himself.”

Barbara was, if anything, more gorgeous than George. The phrase “person of color” actually fit her well. Her vividness made almost everyone else look washed-out and almost sickly.

“Please do sit with me,” I said.

“Where we can escape,” George muttered.

“You and I,” Barbara told him quietly, “have agreed to say a few words about Eumie. Remember? Hi there, Dolfo. Are you being a good boy?” Barbara took the seat next to mine, and George sat beyond her. Dolfo did a silly, bouncy dance of welcome and would have ended up in their laps if Barbara and I hadn’t stopped him. “He’s a loveable idiot,” she commented.

“I thought he was staying with you,” I said.

“Just off and on.”

“To the detriment of all our possessions,” George said. “It’s eight-thirty. Isn’t this ever going to get going?”

As if in response, Ted stepped up to the little table at the front of the room, cleared his throat, and said, “I want to thank all of you for being here tonight. Each and every one of you was special to Eumie, who is here with us and is grateful for your presence.”

Someone in back of me groaned softly. Turning my head, I saw Wyeth leaning against one of the glass doors. His groan had clearly not been one of agonized grief for his departed stepmother. He was making faces and shifting his weight from foot to foot. I was again struck by how extraordinarily flabby he was. In fact, he reminded me of a freshly opened oyster, pale and invertebrate.

“Our beloved Eumie,” said Ted, “has, to quote the Bard, ‘undergone a sea change into something rich and strange.’”

George McBane peered past Barbara to catch my eye, and when he did, I had the uncanny and unmistakable sense that he and I were suffering from the same dreadful thought, namely that Eumie had been rich before her death, although probably not so rich as she’d have liked, and, by most people’s standards, more than a little strange. I could feel nervous laughter rising in my chest and was terrified of making a spectacle of myself. Fortunately, as so often happens, I was saved by a dog. Dolfo, who’d stationed himself in front of Barbara and me, squeezed past my knees and began to sniff and circle. I was all action. With Ted presiding over his wife’s memorial service, there was no one to object to my restraining the dog, so, having stashed a few essential tools of my trade in the pockets of my dress, I leashed Dolfo, helped myself to a pair of sandals from a supply by the door, and unobtrusively led the dog out onto the deck and down the steps to the yard. The trip outdoors was justified. I had wanted somehow to express my gratitude to Eumie for the CD and for her desire to help me. No one’s memorial service should be interrupted by canine bodily functions. My thanks were heartfelt, if peculiar and even grotesque. Still, I had offered posthumous dignity.