The Dogs of Littlefield (21 page)

“Bill's home,” she said a moment later, though no one in the car had asked about Bill. “And Julia can always call if she needs me.” She thought of her bathrobe, the lamp by her bed. Her nightstand, on which waited a glass of water, her book, the vial of tablets.

She bent over the steering wheel as they reached the street. Clarice said that she was doing fine and that the road looked pretty clear.

“It's been a while since I've been out,” Margaret confessed. “And to be honest, I don't know how I'll face George again, after what happened at Christmas.”

“Don't be silly,” said Hedy, mummified by scarves in the front passenger seat. “It was a nice evening. Wasn't it, Dr. Watkins? We all had a very nice time.”

George, to his credit, had been a gentleman. E-mailed her the next day to say thank you for dinner and to say he hoped she was feeling better. For weeks she hadn't been able to think of that night without slight vertigo, and yet now it seemed hardly worth remembering.

They had left Rutherford Road and were heading toward the village. The streets looked so different at night, muffled by snow, bushes turned into small hills, dark houses into mountains. A white mailbox stood on four legs by the curb, watching her drive by.

— —

The three of them were
squeezed onto a couch, amid an assortment of kilim pillows, each holding a glass of wine. Margaret was playing with the silver ostrich charm hanging around the stem of her wineglass. Naomi had given everyone an animal charm, to protect against mixing wineglasses and spreading germs. Flu season.

Yes, Julia is doing much better, thank you. Back to normal. It was very scary but we think she's learned a lesson. You know kids: act first, think later.

She'd listened to herself repeat this short litany four or five times since their arrival as women she knew came up to inquire after Julia. Too much homework, everyone murmured. Too many reality shows on TV, making kids believe they can do anything. Look at the way they cross the street without looking. But clearly all of them thinking: screwed-up parents. Margaret stared at the plate of cheese and crackers on the coffee table.

When she looked up again Sharon Saltonstall was standing over her in a green cable-knit sweater, her wide face a cauliflower of concern. Margaret repeated that Julia was doing much better. Then she said she was sorry to hear about Sharon's dog.

Sharon said it had been hard, but Lucky went quickly and didn't suffer, and it turned out to have been an aneurysm, natural causes after all. In any case, compared to what Margaret was going through, she couldn't complain.

“Boy, you guys have had a tough time.” She was leaning down, hands braced on her thighs. “What a scare with Julia. I don't know how you let her out of your sight. I'd be home with her every minute. Really sorry to hear about your husband's firm, too. Boy, that's rough.”

Margaret agreed it had been a hard time.

“That story in the
Globe
was awful.”

“Yes, it was.”

“Gosh, hope he'll be able to find another job.”

“Excuse me,” said Margaret. “I think I'll get some more wine.”

When Margaret sat down again, Sharon had vanished.

“Odious woman.” Hedy leaned forward among the scratchy pillows. “Poof! I got rid of her. Piece of cheese?” she said, lifting a cracker toward Margaret.

Hedy was wearing a hairy brown cardigan that looked like coconut matting. In the living room's low light, her small dark face might have been a carven mask, cheeks sunken, nose beaky, heavy pouches under half-closed eyes.

“Julia will be fine. Isn't that right, Dr. Watkins?”

But Clarice was looking at something on her phone and did not answer. Hedy ate the cracker herself, then reached out to pat Margaret's arm. “Your Julia is very young. She will be okay. And Bill,” she added. “Him, too. You will see. In the end, it will all be okay.”

Margaret had gone to sit shiva with Hedy after Marv died. Hedy had worn the hairy brown cardigan then, too. The house had been airless and overheated, full of the odor of damp wool coats and the nutty, stale smell of rewarmed coffee. People sat in twos and threes in the darkened rooms, eating poppy seed cookies and talking in soft voices, while Hedy's little gray dog ran in circles, yip-yapping.

“It needs to be fed,” Margaret heard someone murmur.

“That thing always needs to be fed,” said someone else.

Margaret went into Hedy's pantry and found a bag of kibble in a cabinet; she poured a cupful into the dog's dish with a sound like hail on a tin roof. As soon as she put the dish on the floor the dog began gobbling, little black eyes bulging.

In the Melmans' living room women clustered in the soft lamplight, holding wineglasses, admiring Naomi's collection of Kokopelli figures playing panpipes on the mantelpiece, everyone dressed in silk and light wool, their animal charms winking. Naomi's children had been banished upstairs, along with Stan and Skittles the dog. Every now and then screeches of TV laughter came from above and the sound of Skittles's tail thumping the floor.

George arrived a few minutes late and was surrounded by a pack of women, led by Naomi. Hedy was in the middle of telling Margaret and Clarice a story about a Viennese uncle of Marv's, a medical student studying to be a psychiatrist who had known Freud and had once been allowed to photograph Freud lying on his famous couch. When Marv's uncle fled Vienna, he gave the photograph to his landlady. What that photograph would be worth now!

George turned around and caught Margaret's eye; he smiled at her. Hedy was still talking about Marv's uncle, who became a hat salesman in Newark because no American medical school would accept his Viennese degrees.

“And he could have been another Freud.” Hedy raised both palms.

“What a shame,” said Margaret, watching George turn back to Naomi. Naomi was wearing a brick-colored raw-silk blouse and a necklace of what looked to be bent nails.

“So this is a book group.” Hedy sounded unimpressed. “So what have you been reading?”

“Well, George's book, of course.” Margaret nodded at the copy Naomi had placed on the coffee table, next to the cheese plate. “Before that we read
Bleak House
.”

Hedy struggled to sit up again among the pillows, the beaded chain on her glasses swinging. “Do you know, I'm going to tell you something, Margaret. I want you to listen. Children do not think like adults. What makes no sense to you made sense to her. What do you say to that, Dr. Watkins?”

Clarice said it was an interesting observation.

Hedy gave a dissatisfied twitch to her hairy cardigan. “But I am sure you are worried.”

“All I do these days is worry.” Margaret lowered her voice. “About everything.”

“As Marv says, worry is part of the language of love. You worry about what you love.”

“You also worry,” said Margaret, “about things you're afraid of.”

Hedy seemed about to say something in reply when Naomi called out, “Find a seat, everyone!”

Naomi had pulled a straight-backed chair in from the kitchen and set it for herself in front of the fireplace. Installed next to her, in a throne-like bamboo papasan chair, was the author, smiling gamely above his blue denim shirt, unsnapped to reveal a few curls of graying chest hair, the stem of a wineglass in his fist.

“More chairs in the dining room if anyone needs one.” Beaming impatiently, Naomi sat gripping the seat of her own straight-backed chair. “Okay! As you all know, we have a special guest tonight, and we're going to begin by saying hello to George Wechsler, who has agreed to talk to us about his novel.”

“Hello, George!” chorused everyone.

Naomi began by asking George to give a brief history of how he got his start as a novelist. George revealed that his father, a high school math teacher in Brooklyn, had told him there were two ways to get ahead: the stock market or a trust fund.

“But since I wasn't interested in the first and wasn't getting the other, I focused on girls.”

Dutiful laughter.

“And pretty soon I noticed the best way to get girls' attention was by being a basketball star or playing football.” In his papasan chair, George leaned forward, smiling. “Unfortunately, I dribbled like a guy playing football and played football like a guy dribbling.”

More dutiful laughter.

“So I started writing poetry. Figured it worked for Lord Byron. Had some success with the editor of the school literary magazine. Went on to major in English in college, dooming myself to a future of low-paying jobs, a requirement for all serious writers.”

Several women were now looking at the floor. But George was launched into his story, familiar to anyone who, like Margaret, had read his website biography: years of rejections from publishers, mornings of waking at 5:00 to write at the kitchen table, the struggle over whether he should just “chuck it” and go to law school. Then the precious month alone in a friend's cabin in Maine when he took the 650-page manuscript on which he had labored for ten years “and turned it like an ocean liner,” pointing it in a new direction and throwing 300 pages overboard.

Expressions of astonishment.

“That's about it.” George sat back and drank half of the wine in his glass.

A sigh seemed to run through the room. Hedy had dozed off among the pillows. Clarice was staring at a Kokopelli figure. Margaret was thinking about George's harsh voice: tonight there was something almost tender in it—something eager and youthful, and also unwary. She winced and then wondered where George's wife had been while he was in that cabin in Maine.

“Any questions?” asked Naomi.

After a few long moments of silence, Naomi said, “Well,
I've
got a question, George, that I've been dying to ask. Is any of this book autobiographical?”

With a grateful smile, he began explaining that everything a writer writes is autobiographical, since it all comes from his own interests and observations, his own fears and obsessions. “We all sing the same note,” he concluded, scowling apologetically. “Me, me, me.”

The laughter was genuine this time. Then Naomi asked George if he would mind reading aloud a passage from his book. They waited patiently as he leafed through the copy that had been lying on the coffee table and finally announced that he'd like to read a scene toward the end.

He cleared his throat. In a slow, resonant voice he began reading one of Margaret's favorite passages, the moment when the young hero's rabbi father, sitting on the temple dais at his son's bar mitzvah, listens as the boy interrupts his haftorah reading, in Braille, Judges 13:10–14, to tell the congregation that in a world of confusion and false gods it's important to listen to yourself and believe in your dreams—and that if his father, Rabbi Pinchas, would only have faith in him, and send him to baseball camp in Fort Lauderdale, then he, Danny Pinchas, might someday be drafted by the Yankees.

After a stunned moment, Rabbi Pinchas rises slowly from his chair. In front of an aghast congregation, he falls to his knees. Shaking a fist at the empty ark, he cries out,
Isn't it enough? Haven't I suffered enough?
Repeating this question for nearly a quarter of a page until at last, from the very back of the temple, he is interrupted by the tired, old voice of Krasnick the janitor.

So, Rabbi, tell us. What is enough?

George stopped reading, allowing that final “enough” to linger in the air.

There was a lull, a sense of emotional percipience, followed by a smattered ovation that grew stronger.

“Thank you, George.” Naomi was grasping the armrest on George's papasan chair. “What a powerful moment.”

George thanked her and leaned down to pick up his wineglass.

Now women began raising their hands with questions for George. Do you write on a computer? How did you find your agent? Someone inquired into his literary influences.

Twain, Melville, Hemingway. “And Poe, of course.”

Margaret had been playing again with her ostrich charm, but she looked up as George began talking about Poe's haunted characters. He said the living dead were manifestations of “unappeasable longing” as well as fear and grief, and that the unseen were always with us, something Poe understood better than anyone, which was why he was a psychological genius.

She could feel everyone in the room listening to him differently now, attentive and thoughtful, until he began detailing the psychology of Moses Finkle, the zombie hero of his new novel—“because who's deader than a ballplayer who never hit above 180?”—when Naomi interrupted.

“Do you read any women writers?”

After thinking for a few moments, he mentioned George Eliot and a young Senegalese poet-activist whose name he had trouble pronouncing.

“There are others,” he added uncertainly, an elbow propped on the armrest of the papasan chair, one hand loosely cradling his empty wineglass.

But before he could list them, Emily Orlov, sitting across from Clarice in a bentwood rocker, announced that she thought his novel was about “the recognition of human isolation” and said Krasnick the janitor reminded her of a character in a short story who tells all his troubles to his horse because no one else will listen to him.

“It's hard to find real companionship in this world,” she said, rocking back and forth.

Murmurs of assent rippled around the room.

Someone asked about the novel George was working on now, while someone else refilled his wineglass. Margaret watched him lean back in the papasan chair, cowboy boots crossed at the ankles. Once more he began talking about Moses Finkle, when from the back of the room came a husky, imperious voice.

“I have a question.”

George's mother-in-law, Mrs. Beale, was standing in the doorway wearing a trench coat and a Liberty scarf, with a small elderly woman hunched in an old fur beside her. Margaret hadn't seen her come in; she must have arrived while George was reading.