No Relation (41 page)

“Small dogs?” He looked a little troubled by my question.

“Yeah. You remember when I was a kid, whenever we’d be at the park and there was a small dog within a hundred yards of us, I would crawl up your leg until you’d lift me up onto your shoulders? You must remember. It happened pretty well every time we ventured outside the house.”

“You’re not telling me that you’re still terrified of little mutts, after all these years?” he asked, leaning forward. “I thought you’d certainly have outgrown that by now.”

“The fear is as strong as it ever was. Why?”

Dad looked around the room and started to wring his hands a bit.

“You’ve been scared of small dogs your entire life?” he asked.

I nodded.

“Did you ever speak to your mother about this?”

“Well, not since I was a teenager. But back then, she said it was just the petless adolescent’s standard fear of dogs, and that it was perfectly normal,” I replied.

“Well, that was the agreed-upon line in such situations,” Dad said, a tad sheepishly.

“Dad, what do you mean? I’ve been trying to get to the bottom of this for years, and my psychiatrist is taking bushels of my money on this very question.”

Dad did not look well. He cast his eyes to the ceiling for a moment or two and then exhaled long and low.

“Dad?”

“Your mother never wanted you to know this. She felt so guilty about it. It haunted her for the rest of her days. But I’m sure if she were here and knew you were still affected by it, she’d tell you herself,” Dad said.

He looked over at Sarah.

“Carry on! Inquiring minds want to know,” she said, leaning in.

Dad turned back to me.

“Well, I wasn’t there when this happened, but when your mother told me about what would forever be known as ‘the incident,’ she described it in excruciating detail. I’m not sure she ever got over it. But she made me promise never to tell you.”

“But you’re going to, right?” I asked.

“Well, if she knew you’d been suffering and there would be a therapeutic benefit, I think she’d forgive me,” he replied. “Your first summer, when you were about seven months old, Mom had just
changed your diaper one morning. You were lying on your blue blanket on the living room floor enjoying yourself, playing with your set of little coloured plastic rings. They made a rattling noise I can still hear in my memory.”

“I get it, Dad,” I interrupted. “I was having happy plastic ring time on my blanket. Go on.”

“Right. Well, a neighbour came to the door to visit. You remember Mrs. Pollard from down the street?”

I nodded. I never liked Mrs. Pollard. She reminded me of the witch in
The Wizard of Oz
.

“Well, she had her little dog in her arms. My goodness, your mother loved that dog, at least until that morning. They went into the kitchen to make coffee or something, and to talk. You were happy as a clam gurgling away in the living room. Well, at one point, Mrs. Pollard put her dog on the floor so she could doctor her coffee or grab a cookie. The dog started sniffing around the kitchen. They paid no attention to it. Then, a moment of two later, you started screaming bloody murder from the living room. Mom rushed out to find you all the way out in the hall. That tiny little vicious dog had sunk his teeth into your right leg and dragged you across the living room and toward the front door. That mutt was absolutely possessed. There was quite a bit of blood. It took the two of them some time to pry open the pup’s jaws and liberate your leg. Your mother sent Mrs. Pollard packing and called me at the office. I rushed home and we took you down to the hospital. You needed six stitches to close the four puncture wounds in your calf.”

My hand shot to the spot. I pulled up my pant leg and looked at the four little symmetrical scars that I knew so well.

“You told me I’d had four small moles removed when I was baby!”

“Well, we fudged that a bit,” Dad explained. “Your mother was distraught. She thought the doctor might call in Child and Family Services because she’d been negligent. It was silly, but she was very scared and racked with guilt. We agreed on the mole story and we stuck to it. In her defence, she didn’t want you growing up terrified of little dogs.”

“I see. So instead, I’ve grown up terrified of little dogs,” I replied. “That worked out well.”

“I’m so sorry, Hem. Your mother would be mortified if she were alive. I honestly had no idea that your fear had persisted for so long.”

“It was a Chihuahua, wasn’t it?”

Dad just sighed and nodded.

“They called the little critter Chi Chi Rodriguez, as I recall. Sorry, son.”

“Well, no wonder the dog was psychotic. They screwed up his name,” I noted. “If I know my golfing legends, the real Chi Chi Rodriguez is Puerto Rican, not Mexican.”

“What happened to the little guy?” Sarah asked.

“He’s still alive and lives in Puerto Rico. I think he’s been inducted into the World Golf Hall of Fame, too,” I said, taking modest pride in my ability to retain useless information.

“Not the golfer, the Chihuahua.” Sarah sighed.

“Oh.”

“He bit another small child a few months later, so they returned him to the breeder,” Dad replied.

“Bye-bye, Chi Chi,” Sarah said.

They left half an hour later to catch the shuttle back to Chicago. Sarah hugged me. Dad shook my hand, but still, it felt like more than a handshake. I was exhausted. It was one thing to have my life returned to me, and my family history rewritten, in a single night. But it was quite another to hear the story that so clearly explained a phobia I’ve endured for forty years.

I was drained when I arrived back at Marie’s. I gave her the highlights of my evening. She held me for a while and then made me show her my scars. I slipped into bed beside her and turned out the light. Despite how tired I was, I just could not fall asleep. At 12:30, I padded out to the little kitchen in Marie’s apartment, in our apartment, and sat down at the counter. There was a pad of paper next to the phone and a cup filled with pens beside it. I turned to the first clean, pristine sheet of paper on the pad and started to write. I didn’t stop until sunlight angled into the room and I could just hear the faint sounds of the morning traffic below on Bleecker.

ONE YEAR LATER

My apologies for what I think they call in movie parlance the “jump cut” to twelve months later. I guess it is kind of a cheap writerly trick but it seemed to make sense in this case. Change in our lives can seem incremental, modest, inconsequential, when examined continuously. You sometimes don’t even notice it. But cut away for a year and then come back, and you’ll get a better sense of growth, of progress, of change. The passage of time offers perspective. And in the span of a lifetime, twelve short months flash by.

Marie and I made our way to our seats in the MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey. It was early August, and the New York Jets were about to tangle with the Buffalo Bills in their first pre-season game. They were great seats, midfield, just twenty rows up from the turf. We were right on the aisle. The seat next to us was empty, despite the sellout crowd. I leaned against Marie, just
to have contact. It was nice. She pointed down to the group clustered at the end of a red carpet that had been rolled out from the sidelines onto the field.

“There they are! Next to the guy with the clipboard and the bad green jacket.”

I followed her finger and found the New York Jets official. Next to him and his clipboard I could see Hat holding hands with Diana Ross, who had donned a New York Jets jersey. She was bobbing from foot to foot.

“She seems a little nervous,” Marie said.

“Well, it might have something to do with the 82,000 fans jammed into this place. You never know.”

Hat and Diana Ross had been seeing each other for three months by then. She had a remarkably calming effect on him. He still carried butterscotch candies with him at all times, but more often than not he ended up eating most of them himself. Somehow, Diana had lengthened his notoriously short fuse. I don’t know how she did it. She claimed not to know, either. All the good in Hat was still there, and even stronger. But the all-too-swift anger had ebbed. Some thought she was brave to take him on, but she needed Hat, too. He was good for her. Relentlessly supportive and kind, he gave her a daily boost of confidence. She had moved directly to the centre of his universe, and she thrived there.

I felt my cellphone vibrate. “James Moriarty” flashed across the screen. I leaned away from Marie and into the aisle to answer.

“Hi, James.”

“Hem, I just had to call you. You were the one I wanted to tell first,” James said in an excited tone I’d never heard in his voice.

“Tell me what, James? What’s happened?”

“You remember that paper I wrote that you kindly read on your trip to Paris, the one about Holmes’s deductive powers in ‘The Blue Carbuncle’?”

“What do you mean, do I remember it? Of course I do. How could I forget? It was well written and well reasoned. Without it, the flight would have seemed even longer and the seat even harder.”

“You’re very kind. Well, this morning, I received a telephone call from the editor-in-chief of
The Baker Street Journal
. Did you hear that, Hem,
The Baker Street Journal
?”

“And, and?”

“They’re going to publish the paper in the next quarterly edition with very few edits,” he nearly shouted. “They’re actually going to publish it! I am in a state of shock.”

“That’s just fantastic news, James. I’m very happy for you.”

“But, Hem, that’s not the best part, not by a long shot,” he continued, almost breathless. “Twenty minutes ago my phone rang again. It was a very senior executive of the Baker Street Irregulars, the society I’ve been trying to join for twenty years now.”

“Right, and?” I had an inkling of what was coming.

“Well, the
BSJ
editor-in-chief is putting my name forward in January at the next major gathering here in New York. It’s at the Yale Club. It’s lovely there, it really is. Anyway, I’m tickled to my toes. I don’t know how it happened. It’s totally out of the blue. But
it seems I’ll stand as what they call an investiture in January. I’ve been accepted! Oh, I must think of my official investiture name. It’s all a little hard to absorb right now, but it seems I’m in, villainous name and all!”

“Yes! James, that is such wonderful news. You’ve wanted this for a long time. Just savour it. You’ve earned it. I’m very happy for you. Have you told Jackie yet?”

“She’s my next call.”

Jackie Kennedy had been circling James since our very first NameFame group meeting. I don’t think they were dating per se, but they’d started hanging out with each other and even enrolled in swimming lessons together. It was good for them both. We spoke for a few more minutes. I’d never heard James in such an advanced state of euphoria. When I closed my phone, I was feeling good. The universe was unfolding as it should.

“What was that?” Marie asked.

“Oh, well, um, it seems our James just got some really good news, you know, just some Sherlockian stuff, and he’s very happy.”

Marie smiled and was about to say something more when the public address announcer drowned out her words.

“Ladies and gentlemen, would you please rise, remove your hats, and join Diana Ross … from the New York Police Department in the singing of our national anthem.”

The announcer paused after saying her name and before noting her connection to the
NYPD
. I’m sure he did it on purpose. You could almost see every fan in the stadium snap to attention at the
prospect of hearing the Motown legend sing, only to be laid low when they realized they’d been momentarily duped. The sighs of disappointment throughout the stands could not have been more, well, audible, had the home team just missed an easy game-winning chip-shot field goal, wide right.

For the last few years, the New York Jets had invited local fans to audition to sing the national anthem to open pre-season games. Hat had persuaded Diana to apply, but she had done the rest by nailing her audition. Marie and I stood and cheered until the opening bars of “The Star-Spangled Banner” settled over us. Diana stood there alone at the microphone on the fifty-yard line and belted it out. Hat stood a little out of the way but still directly in her line of sight. She had her eyes fixed on his from “Oh say can you see” all the way through to “the home of the brave.” He kept smiling and nodding his head in support. Her voice never wavered. Not once. She knocked it out of the park, even though I’m sure there’s some
NFL
edict forbidding the use of baseball metaphors at a football game. Throughout Diana’s performance, Marie squeezed my hand tighter and tighter as it became clear that Diana was not just going to get through it, but was delivering the performance of her life. The crowd roared their approval when her last note died away all too soon.

“That was amazing. She was amazing!” Marie said, beaming. “And she had not a drop of alcohol to get ready.”

“It’s one of the many benefits of dating a man who doesn’t drink,” I replied.