The Kingdom of Dog (2 page)

“Just paper,” I said. “Nothing worth stealing.”

“Wasn't going to steal it.” The screwdriver slipped in his hand so he was holding it straight ahead of him in a menacing gesture.

I took in his posture, the way he gripped that screwdriver like a weapon, the empty look in his eyes. In a heartbeat, I was back in prison again, standing in the exercise yard. I had learned fast not to show any fear or vulnerability, because that would make me a target. Neither did I want to seem to aggressive, making promises with my mouth that my body couldn't follow through on.

Most important was that I had to learn how to act, rather than react. I couldn't stand there and wait to see if this guy became a threat to me or to Rochester.

“Away from the car. Now,” I said, in my most commanding voice, one I had begun using in prison and polished in the classroom. Rochester was still barking like mad, so I added, “Or I'll sic the dog on you.”

 

 

It was like I'd flipped some kind of switch in the homeless guy. He stuffed his screwdriver in his pocket and backed away. Though my heart was pounding, I stepped toward him, physically forcing him even farther back. I dropped the last box in the trunk and closed it.

The man walked around the front of the car, to stand on the curb looking at Rochester, who kept on barking. “Dog isn't very friendly, is he?”

“He's a good boy.” I forced myself not to hurry around the car, or to break eye contact with the homeless man until I slid into the driver's seat. As soon as I was beside him, Rochester stopped barking.

“It's OK,” I said, putting the car in drive and then stroking Rochester's head as we pulled out. “You're a good watchdog.”

He gave one last bark toward the man, then settled back on the seat, and my adrenaline level began to drop.

For a small town, Leighville had more than its share of homeless men and women. Some of the students were easy marks, and there were lots of college dumpsters around. I thought I might have seen that guy hanging around the campus sometimes, but I wasn't sure.

It was scary the way my prison training had popped up at the first sign of conflict. I wasn't sure if that was a good thing or not. I'd spent the last year trying to put everything behind me—Mary's miscarriages, the divorce, my unfortunate incarceration. But thinking I could forget about it all was a foolish idea.

Back up at campus, I parked once again behind Fields Hall and took Rochester to my office. Then I began ferrying the printer's boxes to the ballroom.

Though the old building had been renovated a few times, the ballroom was kept as it had been in the 1850s, with high ceilings and elaborate chandeliers, swagged curtains and a polished parquet floor. It was still used for faculty meetings, concerts and other events. In two days it would be the main venue for our campaign launch party. But for now it was a scene of organized chaos, with long folding tables laden with printed materials lining the walls. I joined the line and spent the next hour assembling packets. By the time I was done it was time to pick up Rochester and go home.

“Things are only going to get crazier over the next couple of days, Rochester,” I said, turning onto the River Road toward Stewart's Crossing. “I still have a million things to finish before the launch party.”

He didn't say anything. But it didn't matter; I just liked having him as a sounding board.

If I had to pinpoint the one thing I missed most from my married life, I'd say it was the chance to talk to somebody else about my day. Mary and I had eaten dinner together most nights, sharing complaints and inspirations. Toward the end of our marriage, when she was deep into depression over her miscarriages, I felt like I had lost more than just those two babies; I'd lost the person I was most connected to in the world.

Rochester had become my substitute. In exchange for a warm place to sleep, food, treats and care, he gave me unconditional love. He was always there when I worried about job prospects, meetings with my parole officer, or the general loneliness of single life. He sat curled on the seat next to me, listening, as we drove through the dark night back to our welcoming little townhouse.

He had a quick pee, and then we went inside. “I'm not complaining, you understand,” I said, as he sat on his haunches watching me prepare his dinner. “Despite everything, I'm grateful for my life. I met a lot of guys in prison who didn't have the opportunities I had—a pair of loving parents, a stable home environment, a reasonably high IQ and the ability to use it.”

I put down his bowl of chow, topped with a dollop of canned pumpkin to keep him regular, and started fixing my own dinner.

Rochester was a big part of my rehabilitation. When I came back to Bucks County, I was hiding behind emotional walls I thought I needed to protect me from further harm. He had showed me that I could enjoy myself again, that I could love another creature without fear.

After dinner I checked some emails, with Rochester curled around the back of my desk chair as if keeping me under control. Then we went into the bedroom and he jumped up on the bed next to me as we watched TV together.

The next two days zoomed past, filled with party planning and press relations details. I barely had time to take Rochester out for a couple of quick trips during the day. I had debated leaving him home the day of the party; despite his loving nature, he was something of a loose cannon, and I was afraid he'd sneak out of my office and terrorize the party guests with his big paws and lolling tongue.

But I couldn't leave him at home from early morning until late at night. So I settled for bringing in extra toys and a brand-new rawhide bone, which I gave him as the caterers began arriving. Then I warned him to be good, and locked my office door.

I walked down to the ballroom and spotted one of the laborers carrying a huge pile of tablecloths bundled with plastic cling wrap. “Those are the wrong color,” I said. “Eastern's blue is a light blue, like the summer sky. These are navy.”

The laborer continued walking in the room, dropping the pile on a round wooden table. “They told me blue. These are blue.”

“These are navy blue.”

He looked at me like I was nuts, and I pulled out my cell phone to call the caterer's office. Mike MacCormac came in as I was dialing, trailed by two football players who were often his shadows, both wearing Eastern football jerseys. Juan Tanamera and Jose Canusi were Puerto Rican kids from Jersey City, both fullbacks, and you never saw one without the other.

“Those are the wrong blue,” Mike said.

“I know. I'm on it.”

“You shouldn't have let it get this far,” he said. “Did you specify the right color to them? Did you check before they packed the cloths up for transport?”

“Calm down, Mike. I said I'm taking care of it.”

“Jesus Christ. It's going to kill us if we don't get Eastern's colors right. You know how many alumni will bitch and moan?”

“I know, Mike. I told you, I'm on it. ” Or I would be, as soon as he left me alone long enough to make the call.

Fortunately he saw a couple of guys setting up the bandstand in the wrong corner of the ballroom and took off, shouting, “Do I have to micromanage every single person around here?” Juan and Jose looked at me like they were his enforcers or something, but I glared at them and they followed him across the room.

I took a couple of deep breaths. I couldn't go off on Mike the way I had the homeless man the other day; Mike was my boss, and if I lost this job I'd be out in the cold. Just remember that guy, I thought. There but for the grace of God go I.

The grace of God, that is, and Rochester, who kept me sane and made me feel loved. Just before the guests started arriving, I took him out for a quick run around the back of Fields Hall. One great thing about my office, besides the gorgeous view of the campus, was the easy access to the outdoors. If I wanted to, I could avoid the labyrinthine corridors of the former mansion and just walk around the outside of the building. The ballroom was just around the corner.

Even in the middle of winter, the Eastern campus was a beautiful place, but the college hadn't always been in such verdant surroundings. It had been founded as a charity school for orphan boys in 1835 with a meager enrollment, scrabbling for donations from the public to keep its orphans in sackcloth and schoolbooks.

It attracted the attention of old man Fields, a shrewd operator and himself an orphan from Birmingham, England. The clayey soil of the Delaware Valley was perfect for the manufacture of porcelain and tile, and down the river in Trenton, artists like Walter Scott Lenox were making fancy china to rival the best Europeans, but Fields chose to concentrate on items like toilet fixtures and floor tiles, which flowed out of his factories, along the canals that paralleled the shallow Delaware all the way to Philadelphia.

Rather than create a foundation to do charitable works and revere his portrait, Fields left Eastern the bulk of his estate, several million dollars' worth of steel and coal stocks, and within a year, Eastern left its single red brick building and moved to this gray marble mansion.

The campus was unusually quiet, as we were in the middle of Eastern's winter break, when the students go home and the professors retire to their libraries. Rochester sniffed his way around a couple of pine trees and peed at the base of the marble sundial, and we walked back into my office through the French doors.

As soon as I'd unhooked him and sent him to his bed, my cell phone rang, and I struggled to hear a crackling call from Pascal Montrouge, a reporter from the Bucks County
Courier-Times
, who had gotten lost on the way to the college.

It wasn't like the place was hard to find. Eastern straddled a hill overlooking the Delaware, between Yardley and New Hope. Any reporter who covered the county had to know where the place was. But I reined in my impatience and gave Montrouge the directions. Then I walked out to the reception table, where each guest had to pass by Barbara and Jeremy, a pair of fresh-faced undergrads from the Booster Club, who helped out at campus events.

Barbara had dressed for the occasion, in a scooped-neck black taffeta dress and high heels, with her straight blonde hair piled up on her hair. But Jeremy looked like he was going to class, in a preppy button-down shirt and khakis.

“How's it going, guys?” I asked, scanning the ranks of name tags still to be picked up, and the empty spaces between. “Looks like about what, twenty percent are here so far?”

“Twenty-three point five,” Jeremy said.

Barbara beamed. “Jeremy is majoring in math. He's so smart.”

Jeremy blushed. “Do you remember me, Mr. Levitan? I was in your freshman comp class last year.”

“Of course,” I said, though that was a tough class, ending in multiple murders, and I'd tried to forget about it.

“Really wild what happened to Menno and Melissa, huh?”

“And sad,” I said.

“Yeah.” I was trying to figure out how to avoid talking more about that class when a tall, balding man in a camel-hair coat walked up, and I stepped aside.

Barbara jumped up. “Daddy! You came!”

“Told you I would, Princess,” he said.

“Richard Seville,” the girl said to Jeremy. “He's my father.”

“I guessed.” Jeremy handed the man a name tag. “There's a coat check right behind you, sir.”

“I need to stay here for a while and then I'll come find you,” Barbara said. She turned back to me. “Sorry, Mr. Levitan. Is there anything else we can do for you?”

“Just keep on being friendly and welcoming the guests. I'll come back and check in with you later.”

I walked past the tables groaning with paté, fried mozzarella squares, cheese, fruits, stuffed mushrooms, and other hors d'oeuvres, and made a pit stop at the bar. As I was turning away with a glass of white wine, Joe Dagorian came up to me.

“I can't believe this terrible waste of money,” he said, shaking his head. “Think of the scholarships we could have given for the cost of this event.”

“Haven't you and Mike been over this a hundred times, Joe? We need to spend a little money to make more money. I'm sure this party is going to bring in ten or twenty times what it costs in pledges to the campaign.”

“If the campaign works out,” Joe said. “You know my opinion on that. $500 million is too much money for us to expect to raise. We're only a small college. We're not Harvard or Yale, as much as John William Babson would like us to think.”

He pointed through the ballroom doors to where Eastern's president was spreading his considerable personal charm among a group of wealthy alumni. “Look at him. You'd think he was some sort of slick Wall Street executive instead of a dignified academic. We ought to forget all this silliness about fund-raising and public relations and get back to what we do best. Educating the young.”

As we watched Babson laugh and glad-hand, a tall woman, almost my height, came up to join us. She had masses of reddish-brown hair and red-framed glasses with circular lenses. Her exotic beauty was magnified by the 1940s style of her off-the-shoulder dress, in a tropical pattern of palm trees and parrots. She had a black silk shawl artfully draped over her unclothed arm.

“Good evening, Dr. Weinstock,” Joe said. “You look quite lovely tonight. But then, I'd expect a sense of style from the new chair of the Fine Arts department.” He introduced me to her, and I shook her slim hand, adorned with a series of wire-thin gold rings. She smiled, and I felt a frisson of attraction between us.

“Dr. Weinstock,” I said.

“Please, call me Lili. I get enough Dr. Weinstock from my students.” She smiled. “Joe was on the committee that hired me. They asked some tough questions.”

“Which you answered perfectly,” he said. “And your portfolio was quite impressive.”

“Are you a painter?” I looked down at her hand again, expecting to see bits of paint beneath her nails, but instead she had an elegant French manicure.

“A photographer. But I supervise faculty in painting, drawing and sculpture, so I've been plunged into all their controversies and concerns.”

“Ah, the life of an academic.” I wanted nothing more than to stand there for the rest of the evening, flirting with the lovely chair of the Fine Arts department, but duty called. As I walked away, I thought that if God truly was graceful, I would get a chance to get to know Lili Weinstock better. Soon, if at all possible.