Gaits of Heaven (7 page)

Although George McBane has never shared his wife’s
interest in animal welfare, he has always supported Barbara’s good works. Lists of donors to the Audubon Society and the MSPCA include both names, George McBane and Barbara Leibowitz, and George has dutifully attended many fundraisers, especially the ones that Barbara has organized. On a small and domestic scale, George has contributed by assembling and repairing the bird feeders in the backyard.

On the afternoon of Eumie’s death, as Barbara fills her bird feeders, she can’t help noticing the contrast between her squirrel-battered collection and the sparkling new avian dining establishments visible through and above the fence in the Brainard-Greens’ yard. Her own classic pole feeder retains its built-in green baffle but long ago lost its perches to the squirrels, and the best that can be said about the chop-sticks that George cleverly substituted is that they are effective. The green paint is chipped, and the pole shows rust. George has performed many repairs on the platform feeder, which is a shallow wooden box with a screen floor for drainage. The birdseed stays dry, and certain ground feeders, including juncos, sometimes land on the platform and peck away in apparent comfort. It occurs to Barbara that none of the squirrel damage she notices today is recent. What’s more, the thistle feeder is still half full of expensive thistle seed. In fact, as Barbara remarks aloud to Portia, who accompanies her, it’s been a while since she has even seen a squirrel in the yard. Portia, despite her terrier heritage, takes no interest in squirrels. It is characteristic of Barbara to have a thoroughly peaceful dog; a predator wouldn’t suit her at all.

Barbara doesn’t exactly miss the squirrels, or at least she doesn’t miss the gray squirrels. The distinctive black squirrels that inhabit Cambridge are another matter. They are somehow more attractive than their gray cousins. With a laugh, she says to Portia, “Black like me.”

Only when I was actually placing the serving dish on
the dining-room table that evening did it belatedly hit me that the vegetable I had chosen for Caprice’s first dinner at our house was none other than the traditional staple of canine weight-reduction diets, namely, green beans. Steve, seated at one end of the table, took a quick glance that darted from the green beans to Caprice and from Caprice to me. His face went blank. His handsome countenance was not, however, the family body part that worried me. No, what concerned me was Leah’s mouth, inside of which were pretty white teeth that she chronically failed to use in the service of biting her tongue. In this case, my specific fear was that Leah would make the obvious association between the green beans on the table and
No More Fat Dogs
, in which Steve and I repeatedly and enthusiastically urged our readers to substitute that low-calorie legume for large quantities of fattening dog food.

“Leah,” I said hastily as I took my seat, “would you pass the salmon to Caprice, please? Caprice, I hope that fish is all right. Not everyone likes it. If you don’t want it, don’t eat it.”

“It’s fine. Fish is fine,” Caprice said. “It looks delicious. This is so nice of you to have me here. I’m sorry to impose. I just don’t know where else…” Her voice broke off.

“You’re not imposing,” Steve told her, “and don’t think about going anywhere else. You’re welcome here.”

“We want you here,” Leah added. “And Holly and Steve have both had their mothers die, so—”

“We were older than Caprice is,” Steve said.

“Holly wasn’t all that much older, was she?”

“Leah,” I said, “could we not argue about it? The point is that we’re glad to have Caprice here.”

“For as long as she wants,” Steve said. “Speaking of which, we should go over the house rules about the dogs. If Holly hasn’t already?”

“Steve, could you pass the green beans, please?” Leah asked. “Thanks. The first rule about the dogs is that the malamutes steal food. Sammy isn’t too bad, but Rowdy and Kimi are awful, especially Kimi. And be careful about who’s loose together. Kimi and Rowdy are fine together, and India and Lady are fine, and Rowdy can be loose with them. So can Sammy. But Rowdy and Sammy supposedly can’t be left alone together.”

“There’s no supposedly about it,” I said. “They’re both intact male malamutes, and that’s that.”

“And,” Leah continued, “Kimi and India really, really can’t be alone together. Good salmon, Holly. Thank you.”

“You’re welcome. Then there’s Tracker.”

“The cat,” said Leah. “She scratches.”

“She doesn’t scratch me,” said Steve. “India, Lady, and Sammy are good with her individually, but not all three dogs together.”

“It’s Rowdy and Kimi you really have to watch out for,” I said. “They weren’t raised with cats, and they’re predatory. But I’m working on it.” Steve and Leah both laughed. “I am! My great strength as a dog trainer is persistence. We are making progress.”

“And then there’s Pink Piggy,” Leah said. “We forgot him.”

All color drained from Caprice’s face. “You—”

In unison, Steve, Leah, and I assured her that our menagerie did not extend to a Vietnamese potbellied pig.

“Pink Piggy is Sammy’s favorite toy,” Leah explained. “Pink Piggy has a squeaker, so Rowdy and Kimi can’t play with him because they’d tear him up and probably eat the squeaker. Sammy kills the squeakers, but they’re replaceable. The point is, though, that Sammy loves Pink Piggy, and we’re afraid that Sammy might defend him from the other dogs.
Any
of the other dogs. Except Lady. She’d never steal anything from anyone.”

For some reason, Caprice was smiling. “I can’t even tell all the dogs apart,” she admitted. “India is the German shepherd, and Lady is the pointer, and the other three are malamutes.”

“So,” said Steve, “you’re starting to be able to tell them apart.”

“You know Kimi,” Leah said. “You already knew her from school.”

And to my amazement, Caprice gave an impish smile and said, “Sure. That makes it easy. Kimi’s the one with the Harvard accent.”

We all laughed. If Caprice was joking about dogs, she was fitting in around here. Also, I have to admit I saw her in a new way. Before, she’d been an object of pity: a young woman whose face was distorted by obesity, a needy daughter whose mother had just died an unnatural death, the victim of her stepbrother’s verbal abuse, and so on. All of a sudden, she was someone with a sharp wit. Furthermore, the little remark she’d made hadn’t been about her obesity and hadn’t been at her own expense; she hadn’t played the role of fat clown. Anyway, the atmosphere abruptly loosened. Instead of issuing stilted, if genuine, assurances to Caprice that there was no need for her to return to Ted’s house, we talked about summer plans. Steve later told me that he’d made the same naive assumption I had, namely, that Caprice was going to attend Harvard Summer School, had a job lined up, or was volunteering somewhere. Her only plan, however, was to see her therapist.

“All of us were going to go to Wellfleet in August,” she said. “Everyone’s therapist is away then, anyway.”

“Rita says that they all go to Wellfleet,” I commented. “Rita has our third-floor apartment. She’s a psychologist. You’ll meet her. Anyway, she prides herself in not always going to Wellfleet. Every so often, she goes somewhere else.”

Caprice smiled. “Truro. It’s the next town. But I’m not going with Ted and Wyeth. I don’t know what they’ll do. They’re supposed to go to Russia in July. It’s sort of a school trip.”

I told myself that I’d seen Wyeth at his worst and that he must have redeeming qualities. Even so, it was difficult to imagine him reading Tolstoy and touring the Kremlin.

“That must be some school,” said Steve, who’d had paying jobs practically since he’d taken his first steps.

“Avon Hill likes parents to take students to the places they’re learning about. Eumie and I went to Greece the summer before last.” Caprice spoke offhandedly, as if she were mentioning an outing to Salem or Plymouth Rock. “It makes everything real when you’ve actually seen the Parthenon and Delphi and so forth instead of just reading about them. My father was supposed to take me, but he couldn’t. He had an important meeting.”

“Is your father a therapist, too?” Steve asked.

Her eyes lit up. “He’s a consultant. He’s mainly in New York, but he travels. He’s here pretty often.”

I have never been able to figure out precisely what consultants do. Obviously, they consult. But about what? And how do they do it? I always imagine them strolling authoritatively past Dilbert-style cubicles or rows of machinery while making grand pronouncements. The only thing I know for sure about consultants is that they get paid a lot. It sometimes occurs to me when I’m writing my hundredth article about pet-stain removal or flea control that instead of making grand pronouncements on those topics (
Use enzyme products!
Or, in the case of fleas,
Infestation is easier to prevent than it is to cure!
), I, too, could meander through high-tech businesses or low-tech factories while exclaiming,
What this organization needs is an incentive plan!
Or possibly,
Responsive leadership is the key to productivity!
I have only the vaguest idea of what an incentive plan is, and for all I know, leadership is totally unrelated to productivity, but I’ve never been convinced that consultants know more than I do. In fact, they almost certainly know nothing about pet-stain removal and flea control, topics on which I am an acknowledged expert.

I kept my thoughts about Monty Brainard’s profession to myself, of course.

Caprice went on. “He’ll help me think about what to do now. He might e-mail me tonight. Or call. He just got back to New York today, so he’s probably swamped.”

“You can use my computer,” Leah volunteered.

“Thanks, but I have my notebook.”

“There’s a phone jack in your room,” I told her. We don’t have phone jacks everywhere, but when Rita moved to the third floor, I hooked up my phone line to what had been her phone wiring.

The absence of dessert was normal enough; it wasn’t part of some sneaky scheme to take weight off Caprice, who had eaten average-size portions of dinner, including only one piece of French bread with a small amount of butter. Furthermore, when she helped Steve, Leah, and me to clear the table and put away the food, she didn’t dispose of small bits of leftovers by eating them as I often did myself. When the kitchen was clean, Leah invited Caprice to watch a video with her, but Caprice said that if we didn’t mind, she’d just check her e-mail, take a shower, and go to bed. I was only a little surprised. She’d had a draining day. And I was happy to realize that if Ted Green called, I’d be justified in telling him that Caprice was unavailable. Shortly after Caprice went upstairs, the phone did ring, but it was a friend of Leah’s. Ten minutes later, he turned up at the door, and the two of them took Kimi for a walk.

Steve and I opened a bottle of wine and took it, together with two glasses and the remaining four dogs, out to the yard. Even though Caprice’s room was on the opposite side of the house, we kept our voices low.

“I want to tell you,” I said, “how good I felt today when Caprice had nowhere to go, and I knew I could ask her here without checking with you. I knew you’d feel the same way I did.”

“The poor kid. What the hell is wrong with this father of hers? He just might e-mail her. If she’s lucky. And he’ll be swamped with work. What kind of bullshit is that?”

“Typical bullshit, I think. I ran into Barbara Leibowitz outside Ted and Eumie’s. After I found Eumie. She and George live next door to them. She said that Caprice will be lucky if her father shows up at all but that Caprice is better off not understanding what he’s really like.”

“How could she miss it?”

“I don’t know. At some level, she must get it. But with a family like hers…Steve, dysfunctionality would constitute a cure. The scene this morning was more horrible than I can possibly say. And then this afternoon, Ted Green just had to call here and badger Caprice because he was upset about the idea of an autopsy. He was trying to enlist poor Caprice to object to it. That’s nuts! Families can’t just go around saying that they don’t want autopsies. It’s not like requesting donations to charity in lieu of flowers. The law requires autopsies in cases of unexplained death. Period. Plus, trying to involve Caprice? That’s unpardonable.”

“What did Eumie die from, anyway?”

“Oh, an accidental overdose, I imagine. Ted kept saying that her trauma history, whatever it was, had caught up with her, and Caprice insists that her mother was murdered. What child wants to believe that her mother killed herself? Even semi-accidentally. It sounds to me as if Eumie had a habit of swallowing anything that was in the medicine cabinet. If she took who knows what at bedtime, her judgment would’ve been affected, and in the middle of the night, she could easily have taken the wrong thing. Or taken two doses when she meant to take one.”

“What kind of trauma was it?”

“I didn’t ask. When I was there on Friday, Eumie said something about
their
trauma histories, and then today, of course, Ted kept mentioning hers, but somehow I just couldn’t come right out and ask for details. I mean, trauma could be…well, except that Rita said that Ted’s book defines
trauma
very broadly. His book is called
Ordinary Trauma
. So in his terms, it wouldn’t necessarily mean sexual trauma, incest, something like that. It could be something less—”

“—traumatic,” Steve finished. As Rita is always pointing out, he is quite unpsychological. Miraculously, they are good friends anyway.

“But it really couldn’t be something trivial, either, could it?”

“It depends on what you mean by
trivial
. If the thesis of his book is that seemingly trivial events are actually traumatic, then it could be something that gets dismissed as trivial. I can’t think of what that would be.”

“Steve, when you’re talking about Ted and Eumie, who knows? Take the way Wyeth treated Caprice today. Now, I wouldn’t offhand consider his behavior to be traumatic. Abusive, yes. But maybe if she gets treated like that over and over, the result probably is traumatic or something close to it, anyway, especially if no one stops Wyeth from doing it. Here you and I are, taking the greatest possible care to make sure that our dogs can’t hurt one another, and meanwhile, Caprice doesn’t have the protection we routinely give our dogs. That’s horrible. Maybe it’s even traumatic. I don’t know. What I do know is that the whole situation is enough to drive anyone crazy. Here’s one more example. Ted and Eumie were going to Vee Foote for couples therapy.”

“Her,” he said.

“Her. Rita says that most of what Vee Foote does these days is diagnose everyone with depression and prescribe antidepressants. With therapy, of course. Many hours of expensive therapy. Maybe she’s redoing her bathrooms. It was her kitchen when I saw her. Anyway, seeing Vee Foote isn’t even what’s so weird, which is that they, Ted and Eumie, were seeing her for couples therapy, and now Ted says that he has to see her! And there is no doubt in my mind that she’ll continue to see him for couples therapy for as long as he’s willing to pay for it. When half of the couple is dead!”

“Holly, be fair.”

“I always am.”

He smiled. “Look, maybe the two of them, Ted and Eumie, were in the middle of something with her, and Ted needs to finish talking about it.” It was one of the most psychological statements I’d ever heard him make.

“Okay. Fair enough. For one or two sessions. And then? We’ll wait and see. But I’m telling you, Steve, it would be exactly like Vee Foote to build up a specialized practice in couples therapy that consists exclusively of treating widows and widowers. Couples bereavement therapy, let’s call it. Now, don’t you find that peculiar?”

“What’s that old saying? All the world’s crazy except me and thee.” He paused and kissed me. “And sometimes I wonder about thee.”