Dog House (14 page)

It's not at all hard to type with a dog in your lap, you know. If I owned a small dog now, I'd be doing it as I write this. And if this were a memoir - which it isn't—I'd probably wax poetic over that. Suffice it to say that there may be nothing in life so blissful as being paid to do something you love with a dog in your lap.

 

 

Monday—Sunday—Monday—Sunday. Weeks, months, years streamed past. In some two-and-a-half star forties film of our life, pages flew off the calendar on the wall. We were both over fifty now. Millard had become almost embarrassingly proud of my work (note the “almost”), bragging to strangers about me, asking random captive visitors at his plant to read my articles, even going so far as to say he wished his dragonet mother were still alive so he could show her how wrong she'd been about me.

Did I share that wish about the woman who, with relentless criticisms in letters to her son, had broken my heart while inadvertently teaching me to be kind to my own daughter-in-law? She was right about one thing, though. She'd told Millard not to marry me because I had bad teeth.

Really.

Which is why I always paid for them myself.

 

 

Not only was Millard proud of my work, but sometimes he'd even ask if he could come along when I did interviews. He'd want to come along especially when my interviews were somewhere picturesque, like Nantucket or Sag Harbor. Once, we drove out east together to a little house owned by a talented and eccentric single mother, and while all my interviewees tended to be talented and eccentric, they weren't often humble and self supporting.

I greeted the photographer, took out my pad of paper, asked my subject to sit down, and began. Millard looked around.

“Anything here you need to have fixed?” he asked.

That interviewee told me years later that she'd assumed we three would be arbiters of the most refined taste, and here was this lovely guy just offering to repair her home. So she got up and brought out her toaster, her fan, her portable radio, her table lamps, and if she'd been able to get it in the house, she would have brought him her car. Millard “tinkered,” as she put it, till my job was done. And she never forgot him. One of her few “Good Man” memories, she tells me.

 

 

I was proud of that and, in my turn, proud of his success as a manufacturer of—I know you remember the old conversation-stopper—aircraft indicator cases.

He loved to tell the story of how he came to have a business manufacturing such an arcane, not to say singular, product:

He had been running a job shop in the early years, designing and crafting aluminum “cans” for various industries. When a can was too tricky for any other metal shop to make, the big guys called Millard. Then one day he took a phone call from a sales rep at a large and important firm who asked him if his shop made “aircraft indicator cases.”

“Sure we do,” Millard responded instantly. “What are they?”

(Oh, all right. They're the metal containers that all those cockpit dials and beeping-light things fit into.)

I was proud then, too, of his having opened a second plant in Phoenix; of his having successfully done the single thing that, way back when he was twenty-one, he'd told me he'd always wanted to do. Make something.

He was making many complicated somethings now. Beautifully.

 

 

Meanwhile, at our increasingly magical house, on what had previously been the top of a pergola over the semicircular drive, we'd created a small platform for dining that allowed us to eat on the prow of a great ship every fme night between May and October. Metaphorically. The grass and the water and the sunset spread themselves before us, and at nine out of ten of our twilit dinners, as the swans (yes, the swans) sailed down the harbor to their nests, we'd linger over coffee and marvel at our great good luck. Though it wasn't just over the beauty of our immediate surroundings. The town had finally blown up the incinerator smokestack. The coast guard had dredged the scores of decaying hulks from World War II. And our once-mucky lawn had become a smooth purl of green right down to the water's edge, where pink and white roses trimmed a bulkhead that was manfully keeping the whole from being swept out to sea. Sometimes Millard would take his fishing rod down to the harbor at dusk, and sometimes catch a sunny or two. (He'd also indulged in a used, two-person dinghy with sails, and I'd occasionally receive a chagrined phone call from some isolated spot miles up the harbor where he'd run his boat aground. He never quite developed a “feel” for the wind.)

On those mellow summer evenings after dinner, with Emma in one or the other of our laps, we'd talk softly into the firefly-lit dark about what still needed to be done in the garden and to the house. We were impressed by what we'd built. We gloated.

And we agreed: No vacation in the wide world could ever offer a spot more beautiful, more serene—sweeter—than this.

Ah, but gentle Emma seemed to be aging faster than we were. She was slower on the stairs and happier just to lie among the flowers, butterflies be damned. And while she wasn't ill, I'd already begun to have foreshadowings of loss. We'd become such slaves to this dear dog—our router of sparrows, our Hoover of crumbs—that I lived in dread of some Cosi-like wound. How had we become so invested? I began to entertain thoughts of a second dog—a backup, so to speak. Again.

Waiting for the perfect opening—after
Clear and Present Danger,
say, followed by the diner for a beer, a bowl of minestrone, a small Greek salad, a plate of steak tidbits with well-done hash browns, one overcooked green and one soggy yellow vegetable and a tall swirl of white and chocolate frozen yogurt, all for $11.99—I broached it to Millard.

You'd be wrong if you think you know him well enough to predict his reaction. Even I didn't know him well enough.

Because he liked it!

He liked it!

Mainly because of my plan, I think.

Or the yogurt.

 

 

I have to back up now to explain that for years, I'd been longing for a greyhound. Some secret and hubristic “Diana the Huntress” complex, I suppose; something I'm sure I should apologize for. And yet ... could there be any dog more regal, more elegant, more noble, more ancient (i.e., “antique”) than the greyhound? And since I'd long ago come to accept the fact that for better or worse, for profound or shallow, an embarrassingly large part of my life was about gathering beauty to myself ... my house, my garden, my antiques, my art, my car, my costly and endlessly new teeth ... a greyhound would be icing on my pink-rose-covered, three-tier vanilla and black-raspberry-jam-filled canine cake.

It had been my original hope to rescue a track dog, because the unconscionable business of dog racing results in thousands of greyhounds—the losers, the raced-out, the ones with broken legs—being euthanized each year.

Yes.

That dream, however, had one major, major drawback: When smallish mammals inadvertently cross their paths, racing dogs—bred to chase a lure—are gone. They hit forty-five mph in three long strides, and there's no calling them back because nothing stops a coursing hound. No whistle, no clicker, no squeak toy, no treat. Even dogs that were losers can run like the wind. And you remember, we were still living in an antique house. And antique houses are right on the road.

I didn't think I could deal with that anxiety.

 

 

But then I learned about an exceptional breed. Well, it wasn't a “breed” exactly. Like our JRs, it was a type, a mutt. And while it
looked
like a greyhound, it wasn't. This marvel, only to be found in Great Britain, is the Lurcher. Go ahead. Laugh. Everyone does. But the name has nothing to do with staggering drunks or Boris Karloff and
Frankenstein,
but everything to do with Ireland in the Middle Ages, where the gypsies, I learned, bred the dog for stealth poaching; their Romani word for “thief” was
lur.
This legendary creature was crossbred to be as fast and quiet as a grey or other sight hound—but to be as smart, tenacious and trainable as its other parent, a collie or terrier more frequently. With always this single stipulation: The Lurcher couldn't look like a greyhound, because only the nobility could own greyhounds, and the penalties were harsh. Like death. Or both hands.

So the gypsies learned to breed dogs that were swift, silent and smart; that looked much like the dog on the side of the bus—but not.

I LOVED the idea. Except for the fact that I couldn't save a grey, it seemed best of all second-dog worlds: a greyhound-ish dog that was smart like a collie.

And why did Millard like it?

I'd sweetened the deal by telling him that I hoped to get a magazine commission to write about the Lurcher quest, which meant that my trip would be free.

And so it was.

But first, I had to track down Dale, the president of the British National Lurcher Club: a helpful, cheerful, dog-mad fellow whom I phoned in South Yorkshire to ask how I might go about fmding a collie-mix pup. And I learned from Dale—but why was I surprised?—tkat the nearest litter would be a four-hour drive from London. That basically, if we wanted to see absolutely the only Lurcher puppies in England in that particular week in June, we'd have to take a train first to Doncaster, where we'd pick him up, our more-than-obliging guide, and be driven to the source for truly superior Lurchers in Fell View, Low Moor, Kirkby Thore, Penrith, Cumbria. Translated into East Coast-ese—though imagine translating that into East Coast-ese—we'd be traveling all the way from Long Island to almost-Maine and back ... to pick up a mongrel.

After crossing the Atlantic.

In Great Britain, though? Big-time Romantic! The Lake District. Wordsworth. All that.

 

 

It's unimaginable, I know, but Millard and I rarely traveled at all. In addition to our having such a good time with our own house (and okay, to my panic attacks on planes), we were neither sightseers nor gourmet eaters nor hotel buffs. When we did go beyond our usual Pittsburgh or Georgia, it was inevitably for a purpose: visiting gardens, attending air shows, seeing editors. Buying a dog abroad had to be about the most purposeful thing we'd ever tried.