Paws before dying (4 page)

I said hello to Rose, who was sitting in a folding chair with Caprice perched on her lap, and I made Rowdy quit sticking his snout in the poodle’s face.

Rose had never been fat, but she’d lost weight since the days when she and Vera entered every trial within an eight-hour drive of Boston. I remembered seeing her once at a show when she’d had her feet propped up to reduce the swelling in her ankles. Kindergarten teachers have to stay on their feet all day, and I’d wondered how she managed to do that all week, then hit the road every weekend. She must have been in her midfifties then, maybe five years ago. The children probably loved her quiet, hypnotic voice as much as her dogs did. She’d probably never had to chase or yell.

“You aren’t teaching anymore, are you? Did you tell me you retired?” I said.

“Two years ago, but not from dogs, of course.” She stroked Caprice’s head. “I’ve used this place for years.” She nodded toward the tennis courts. Courts are a great place to train because they’re completely fenced in and at least somewhat suggestive of an obedience ring. The only problem with them is that they’re usually wasted on ridiculous people who insist on batting a ball around when there’s no dog to chase it. “I live around the corner. We’re here every night.”

“You look great,” I said. She did, too. People who show a lot in the summer have good color, because the typical ring is located in the full sun in the middle of a field, and if you want to be in the ribbons, you have to train a dog under show conditions. Unfortunately, that also means getting out there in the rain, making sure that the dog doesn’t break when thunder crashes, and downing him in puddles. (In case you don’t train dogs, I should mention that that’s
downing
him—making him lie down—not drowning him.) “Caprice looks terrific, too,” I added.

A certain type of top obedience handler would then have recounted every detail of her dog’s performance, complete with scores in all the trials in the past year. Not Rose. “This is a sweetie,” she said as she patted Rowdy’s big head. “And who’s your friend handling the bitch? Your sister? Glorious hair.” Her smile leapt at you suddenly, like a toy poodle finishing a recall by unexpectedly bounding into your arms.

“My cousin,” I said. “She’s easy to find in a crowd.”

“A knockout,” Rose said. “The boys must be beating her door down. Isn’t that the cutest thing going on over there?”

I followed her glance and heard Bess Stein’s voice ring out: “Let’s have better spacing here. If the handler in front of you is too slow, just pass him. That’s too slow for the shepherd, and if it happens again, get that malamute ahead of him. Halt.” Bess was fairly free of breedist prejudice, but she talked like all other obedience instructors: “The shepherd,” they say. “The Lab, the golden, the collie,” but always, always,
“that
malamute.”

As I watched the border collie almost sit on Kimi’s tail and saw the handler lean toward Leah and say something, I finally got the point. It was a familiar one. Leah had recently proposed the same strategy when she wanted to let Kimi bump into Julia Child to create the opportunity to apologize. I quit looking, not because I can’t deal with someone else getting attention when I’m not, but because the next handler Tony ran through the

Open routine was a rigidly upright silver-haired woman named Heather Ross with a silver Continental-clipped standard poodle called Panache who knew the exercises better than I did and was being drilled to score a perfect 200 instead of the measly 199 pluses he’d been getting for the past year. I’d watched him before, and every time, he’d wowed me.

“That’s one of the top obedience dogs around, you know,” a man said. “You know what...”

“We know,” I said, hoping to cut him off before he accused Heather of bending the rules or complained that the judges always let her get away with correcting her dog in the ring. I caught his eye and shifted my glance to a skinny woman huddled in a lawn chair. “This is Heather’s daughter,” I said. “Co-owner, right?”

She smiled yes. She knew why I’d interrupted. She probably overheard jealous rumors all the time. Rose’s turn came next, and I was glad to see her give Heather some competition. Although every nonbeatified obedience competitor envies the top handlers, some of the nasty rumors about Heather were well founded. Rose knew all the tricks, too, but she didn’t use them all- Heather, I’m sure, savored Caprice’s performance less than I did. She distracted me while I was trying to watch by telling everyone in mock-sympathetic tones that Rose had been in the hospital not all that long ago and had looked like hell for a while. I said that she looked wonderful and that I liked Caprice a lot. I did, but that’s not the only reason I said so.

Somewhat later, after the best malamute in the class mouthed his dumbbell and anticipated the high jump, everyone commented on what a happy worker he was. Even the top handlers will offer tremendous support to someone with what’s called a nontraditional obedience breed—and keep offering it until the second you become a threat.

Chapter 4

“OH,
she
did fine,” Leah said. “I’m all sweaty. I’ve never sweated so much in my life. So when does she get to go to a show? Hi, I’m Leah. I’m Holly’s niece.”

“Cousin. Rose, this is my cousin, Leah Whitcomb. Rose Engleman and Caprice.”

Leah said the usual things with unusual sincerity and prevented Kimi from pummeling Caprice.

“Lincoln’s having a match on Thursday, you know.” Rose’s bright blue eyes were on Leah. Training dogs doesn’t keep your hair from turning gray—Rose had a mass of short white curls— but it does stop your eyes from fading. If your soul stays vivid, your irises do, too. “It’s a fun match. Oh, you got the flier.”

“Bess gave them to us,” said Leah, holding out a piece of paper with one hand and reaching down to thump Kimi’s shoulders with the other.

“Rose, this was Leah’s first class. Ever. She belongs in a real beginners’ class. She wouldn’t—”

“Oh, yes, I would,” Leah interrupted.

“And I have the perfect book for you,” Rose told her. “You stop by my house on your way home, and I’ll give it to you. It’s called
Training Your Dog to Win Obedience Titles.
”

“Curt Morsell,” I added.

“She already has it?” Rose’s face was eager.

“No,” I said. “I’ve read it, but I don’t own it.”

“So you know it’s perfect for her.” “

“Rose,” I said, “the dog in the book is a German shepherd. “So?” Leah said. ,

“So it’s a good book,” I admitted. Without giving . Plot, I may reveal that the book follows Morsell's so trains a shepherd all the way through Novice, Open, and Utility. “But it might be kind of discouraging. With a malamute?” Rose dismissed the idea. “It’s the individual that counts.” My individuals who counted would have yelped at Caprice if I’d let her ride in their car. I drove, and Leah kept Rose company while she walked Caprice home along the edge of the wooded park to what turned out to be a prosperous-looking red brick house. The roof was gray slate, the casements had tiny diamond-shaped panes, and multicolored leaded-glass panels flanked the entry. A yellow bug light glowed in a wrought-iron cage over the front door, and a collection of artfully placed floods illuminated a lawn-serviced landscape of weed-free grass, pruned rhododendrons, and enough fir-bark mulch to smother all the vegetation in a square mile of tropical rain forest.

I parked in front and lowered the windows to make sure Kimi had enough air. Then I let Rowdy out of his crate, snapped on his lead, and was trailing after him toward a fire hydrant when a bunch of louts hanging around some cars in the driveway of the next house started that raucous, hackneyed meowing routine usually pulled by gangs of young men threatened by the sight of a slightly built woman with a big, macho dog. From somewhere in back of the house, a dog began barking.

“Don’t pay any attention to those awful things they’re saying,” I told Rowdy quietly. “They’re just jealous.”

A master of understated ritual display, he swaggered to the fire hydrant and cocked a hind leg. If the dog doesn’t react to the human pussycats, they usually quit right away, but when Leah and Rose appeared, this gang suddenly crossed species and shifted to mynah bird whistles and baboon shrieks. Except to quicken her pace, Leah ignored the show.

“I’m sorry. It’s like living next to a reform school.” Rose smiled, but her jaw tightened. “Come in.”

She kept apologizing as I put Rowdy back in his crate, locked the car, and followed her inside.

“Rose, really, it’s okay,” I said. “It isn’t the first time anyone’s ever given Leah a hard time. She can handle it. I think we were just surprised. You know, Newton?”

Rose corrected me. “Newton isn’t the way people think. It’s much more diverse. People have a stereotype, the way they think it’s all Jewish. It isn’t, you know. Thirty percent. And people think it’s a town, including people who live here, but the population is about ninety thousand. That’s a city.”

She led us into the kind of grown-up dining room you hardly ever see in Cambridge. The china cabinet was filled with Spode place settings and vegetable dishes instead of paperback books or Peruvian artifacts. An arrangement of yellow lilies and snapdragons replaced the usual stacks of academic journals and reprints on the long teak table. Arrayed on the sideboard were a couple of decanters topped with stoppers instead of transformed into makeshift Chianti-bottle candle holders, and neither Russian icons nor Zuni fetishes placed the menorah in a meaningful cultural context.

Rose’s husband, Jack, a burly guy with radiant health-club skin, walked in from the kitchen carrying a plate that held a mound of potato salad and a fat, lettuce-garnished sandwich on a bulkie roll. When he was introduced to Leah, he didn’t make her self-conscious by remarking on her beautiful red hair or, worse, asking where she’d got it. Although I don’t think he’d ever owned a dog, I’d met him at shows. Once years ago when my old car broke down at a show in Rhode Island, he’d located a mechanic to patch it up and insisted that he and Rose follow me back to Cambridge in case it conked out again. Two weeks later, when the same thing happened at a show in Portland, Maine, my cousin Sarah, who lives there, lectured me about joining Triple A and directed me to a Holiday Inn.

“Thanks,” I said when he offered us food, “but we’ve eaten.”

“Just a little something,” Rose said.

After Jack covered the table with plates of sandwiches and containers of potato salad, coleslaw, and pickled tomatoes that we had with iced tea, he joined Rose in apologizing for the louts next door, but also tried to temper her indignation.

“It was that Dale.” Rose’s pretty voice was angry. “I caught sight of him, all right. He’s the one with all the hoodlum friends. Mitch is outgrowing it, and Willie’s always just let himself get dragged in.” Her clenched fist rested on the table, and Jack covered it with his hand.

“Enough,” he told her, then, glancing at Leah, added, “The less said, the better.”

Rose ignored him. “Willie is not a bad boy. You know, he was at dog training tonight? I was so surprised to see him. With the new dog? Obviously he’s been reading a dog-training book and practicing on his own.”

Willie, it seemed, had been one of Leah’s two admirers in the Novice group, the one with the half-shaved head and the young, light-coated German shepherd.

“The dog is Righteous. I didn’t get the guy’s name.” Leah already spoke like a true dog person.

“Willie’s one of mine.” Rose sounded as if a poodle of hers had whelped his litter.

“Rose was his kindergarten teacher,” Jack translated for Leah. “Everyone here had Rose.”

“Not everyone,” Rose corrected him. “Newton has open enrollment. But quite a few. Case is a small school, only one kindergarten. You know where it is? Not far from the park. So I had most of the neighborhood children. Willie was mine. The other two started at Ward, but, if you ask me, the parents decided it was too Jewish, and they switched to Case, in spite of me.

“Then you’ve been neighbors for a while?” I said. “I mean, you’ve had to . .

Jack contemplated a forkful of coleslaw. “Fifteen years.”

“And,” Rose said, “they’ll never move because Edna won’t leave the house.”

“Edna Johnson, the wife. She suffers from agoraphobia,” Jack said sympathetically. “All the more reason to overlook what—”

Rose slapped an open palm on the table. “Overlook! Don’t—”

“Rose, enough,” he said firmly. “This is not—”

“You’re right. I’m making it worse.” She smiled at Leah. “And the truth is, they are not the only ones. The woods... You know that’s still Eliot Park, across the street. Eliot Woods, they call it. Well, it’s...”

“It’s a lovers’ lane,” Jack finished.

“Lovers’ lane!”

“It’s only in the summer,” Jack said. “They drink beer, they carouse. Who knows?”

“Who knows? I know. You know.”

“Every town in the world, there’s a lovers’ lane,” Jack said calmly and indulgently.

“The problem next door,” Rose said, “is who would bring friends home there? With his drinking and her…“

Jack nodded to her. “So you see? Who could blame them? They throw beer bottles, cans. It’s nothing,” he explained to me. Then he turned to Rose. “So now we pick them up and recycle them. So what?”