The Wicked Flea (2 page)

“Disguising ourselves?” Gabrielle was offended. She sat at my kitchen table drinking a cup of strong coffee with tons of cream and sugar. In her lap was her bichon, Molly, who is spoiled rotten. Bichon is short for bichon frise, French for curly-haired lapdog, all-white, jaunty, cute, member of the American Kennel Club’s
Non-sporting
Group, an unfortunate term for certain nonhunting breeds that misleadingly connotes poor sportsmanship and a sort of joyless attitude never observed in the bichon frise. “We
are
dog walkers!” Gabrielle exclaimed. “We’ll just happen to walk our dogs into the Yard. What we do with Walter when we’re there is none of Harvard’s business. I won’t be bossed around by a lot of silly paperwork.”

You can see why Buck fell in love with Gabrielle. For one thing, they met at a show, a dog show—when it comes to my father,
ça va sans dire,
as he would never say—and for another, she has that low, seductive voice. The American Medical Association would probably describe Gabrielle as too heavy, and her skin makes it obvious that she has never bothered to use sunblock. Her hair is a mixture of blond and white, possibly natural—she’s in her late fifties—and cut in a feathery style that flatters a face that needs no flattery. She has incredible bone structure and blue eyes that most people would compare with such prosaic objects as oceans, skies, and cornflowers. From Buck’s viewpoint, his bride’s eyes are Siberian husky blue.

In declaring that she wouldn’t be bossed around by paperwork, Gabrielle was not just speaking figuratively. Spread out on my kitchen table were the printed web pages. “These have nothing to do with us,” she said dismissively.
“Body after dissection!
I ask you! I did not donate Walter’s body to science. And these people can’t even make up their minds what to call these laws. Annotated? General? But the point is, Holly, that they’re meant for grave robbers and shady morticians and sneaky murderers. They aren’t meant to apply to people like us. And these so-called creative scattering options are ridiculous. Turning Walter into a living coral reef? Or throwing him off a boat? Or rocketing him into outer space?”

“If we avoided archeological sites and Native American burial sites and that kind of thing, we’d be allowed to use a state park in California,” I pointed out, tapping a finger on one of the pages.

“Three thousand miles from home? Harvard Yard is right down the street.” Gabrielle picked at the sleeves of her long, loose white blouse, a cross between a smock and what I think is called a poet’s shirt. Molly’s eyes followed Gabrielle’s sun-spotted hands. Sighing, Gabrielle rose and put the little dog on the floor. With an involuntary, reflexive jerk, I looked around to make sure that Rowdy and Kimi hadn’t escaped from my bedroom. The AKC may classify the bichon as Nonsporting, but the Alaskan malamute disagrees: small furry things belong to the Fair Game Group. Although neither Rowdy nor Kimi has ever hurt or even threatened Molly, they still need careful watching when she’s around. As I always tell Rowdy and Kimi, the only reason I don’t trust them is that they’re not trustworthy. Molly wasn’t the only reason I’d incarcerated them. The other was a premonition that I’d capitulate to Gabrielle’s demands. On principle, malamutes don’t back down, and they don’t think highly of anyone who does. To the dogs, I’m supposed to be Holly Winter, She Who Must Be Obeyed, not Holly Winter, She Who Caves in to Her Stepmother.

I said softly, “Okay, Gabrielle, I give up. We’ll scatter the ashes anywhere you want.”

“Are you sure you’re well enough?” she asked.

“There is nothing physically wrong with me,” I assured her for at least the hundredth time. “A few little neurological blips. I’m supposed to avoid another head injury.” Honest to doG, that was the medical advice I’d been given, as if I’d have intentionally gone around searching for new and yet more skull-shattering ways to concuss myself.

The crack on the head was one of the twin traumas I’d suffered about two months earlier. While hiking with the dogs at Acadia National Park, I’d plummeted down a rocky little mountainside only to collide with a boulder. The damage suggests that I landed head first. When I regained consciousness, the fragmentary remains of my memory left me unable to retrieve an alarming number of ordinary words that would’ve come in handy.
Amnesia,
for instance, and
Holly Winter.
Forgetting my own name wasn’t necessarily all that big a deal, but as a real dog person, I’m still horrified at my initial failure to recognize Rowdy and Kimi as my own dogs. Their names were lost to me, too. But I did, of course, know that they were show-quality Alaskan malamutes.

The other trauma was a broken heart. My lover, also my vet, Steve Delaney had married someone else, and not just any old someone else, either, and not just a young, beautiful someone else, but a damned disbarred lawyer. Her name was Anita Fairley. I can’t bring myself to say more about Steve or Anita right now, except that I needed a new vet and that I hated Anita as ferociously as she hated dogs.

“Even so, I think I can probably manage to make it from here to Harvard Yard,” I told Gabrielle.

Consequently, on the following evening, a bleak and weirdly mild one for mid-November, Gabrielle and I set out on foot for what’s known as Tercentenary Theater, which, in Harvardian fashion
(“When I use a word, ” Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less”),
isn’t a
theater
by any normal definition of the term, lacking as it does such theater-defining essentials as a stage and seats, for instance. In fact, it’s the flat, grassy area of Harvard Yard between Memorial Church and Widener Library, which are, respectively, a church and a library, perhaps by mistake. It’s called a theater, I suppose, because it’s the venue for Harvard’s graduation ceremonies, which are known as
commencements,
another term that baffles me. For most alumni, going to Harvard is the apex, like reaching the summit of Everest, and leaving Harvard is the commencement of the descent into the dreary, litter-strewn base camp below.

Theater or no theater, the area between Memorial Church and Widener is, indeed, a spot fair to the eye, a quadrangle bounded on the other two sides by Sever and University halls and planted with numerous species of deciduous trees, all of which were indistinguishable from one another when Gabrielle and I arrived, because they had lost their leaves, and the lights shone on the paved walks and the entrances to the buildings, not on the treetops.

“Not that I can tell one tree from another,” I told Gabrielle. “Maybe you can. Did Walter have a favorite species? Kimi, not there!” I used to think that the leg-lifting frequently observed in female malamutes was a sign of dominance, but someone who works with wolves told me it had nothing to do with dominant or submissive rank within a pack and everything to do with self-confidence. Kimi would have made a great suffragist. Any male who’d tried to deny her the vote would’ve found himself pounced on, knocked to the ground, and pinned there until he not only conceded her right to cast a ballot, but promised to help elect her. Anyway, Kimi marks her turf all the time, but the prospect of having her drench a funeral marker struck me as unseemly. I’d left Rowdy at home. If you want to be dismissed as just one more dog walker, an Alaskan malamute is already a poor choice of breed to walk. And in a populous area like Harvard Yard, Rowdy is a shameless, hopeless, uncontrollable attention-grabber. Both dogs are wolf-gray, with plumy white tails, stand-off coats, and lovely little ears. But Rowdy is bigger than Kimi—about eighty-eight pounds to her seventy-five—and he’s a better show dog than she is, not because judges necessarily prefer his white face to her black facial markings, but because Rowdy radiates an animal magnetism that dares people to look elsewhere when he’s around. Also, Kimi can sometimes be persuaded to mind her own business, whereas Rowdy will not be stopped from singing loud peals of
woo-woo-woo.
We didn’t have the Yard to ourselves. Students passed by, alone, in couples, and in groups.

“Walter was partial to pines,” Gabrielle said, “but there aren’t any here.” For once, Molly was on the ground instead of in Gabrielle’s arms. Gabrielle held the little white dog’s leash in one hand. Her other hand supported one of those green and white L. L. Bean tote bags touted in the catalog as useful for everything, including, presumably, the transportation of human remains. “Not that it matters,” she added. “What I had in mind was Widener. There’s something religious about it, don’t you think? More than Mem. Church, really.”

Widener Library is a temple to academe, with tremendously long stone steps all across the front that lead up to the main entrance. The steps are reminiscent of those you see in pictures of pre-Columbian ruins, not that ascending them is any sort of prelude to human sacrifice, even in the case of undergraduates with failing grades, but Gabrielle was nonetheless right about Widener’s religious quality. “Yes,” I agreed, “there’s something wonderfully eternal about it. But there are people sitting on the steps.”

“There’s no wind,” Gabrielle observed, “so it’s not as if...” She broke off. “Did you know,” she asked, “that Harvard is the second-wealthiest nonprofit organization in the world? Second only to the Roman Catholic Church.”

“No, I didn’t know that,” I said.

“Well, it is,” Gabrielle said, as if Harvard’s endowment somehow entitled her to deposit her first husband’s remains on university property. “Even so,” she said, “the earth is probably better. Mother of us all, and so forth. Right over there would do nicely, I think.”

She pointed to a clump of young trees with Molly’s leash and then strode toward the chosen spot. Kimi and I followed. Reaching her destination, Gabrielle stopped, put the tote bag down, and bent over to remove its contents, which consisted of a flashlight, a sheet of paper, a pair of eyeglasses, and a square cardboard box. Before I could stop her, she turned on the flashlight.

“Gabrielle, that’s not a good idea,” I warned. “And we really don’t need any extra light.”

“We do,” she said. “Or I do, because I have a little something I want to read. You didn’t think we were just going to dump him on the ground and run off, did you?”

“People are going to wonder what’s up.”

“Let them!” she exclaimed. At the same time, however, having apparently thought the matter over, she turned off the light. “Oh, well, I know it by heart, I think.” Replacing the flashlight and eyeglasses in the tote bag, she opened the cardboard box. “Molly, sit!” Copying Gabrielle, I said, “Kimi, sit!” Onlookers, I hoped, might imagine that we were training our dogs.

“The plastic bag is already open,” Gabrielle informed me. “I haven’t come totally unprepared. Well, I suppose we’re ready.”

All on its own, my body adopted a prayerful posture; I could feel my shoulders straighten, my head bow, and my eyes close. Like Molly and Kimi, I waited silently.

Gabrielle lightly cleared her throat and, in that resonant voice of hers, said with great solemnity, “Goodbye, Walter. ‘Strength without insolence, courage without ferocity, and all the virtues of man without his vices.’ Good-bye, good-bye.”

The quoted words were familiar. No, more than merely familiar. I, too, knew them by heart. Had I chosen to do so, I could have continued where Gabrielle had left off:

This Praise, which would be unmeaning flattery

If inscribed over Human Ashes,

Is but a just tribute to the Memory

of Boatswain, a Dog

Boatswain had belonged to Lord Byron, who had written the inscription for the Newfoundland’s monument.

Gabrielle still maintains that it was my inexplicable coughing fit that alerted the Harvard University Police to our presence. In my defense, let me say that the fit was uncontrollable. But something certainly drew the attention of the young man in the Harvard University Police uniform, who came striding up to us and said in a what’s-this-all-about tone of voice, “Lovely evening, isn’t it?”

“Bracing,” Gabrielle replied.

“Something I can help you with here?” he asked. Under the circumstances, there was one right answer to that question:
no.
Even polite elaboration would have done nicely:
Thank you so much for asking, but we’re just out for a stroll with our dogs.

Gabrielle, however, always assumes that the entire world is on her side and that every stranger is about to become her best friend. She blabbed the entire story. The late Walter Beamon returned home with us.

Chapter 2

Subj: My Support—and a brag!

From:
[email protected]

To:
[email protected]

------------------

Dearest Holly!

I am fully supportive of your decision to see a psychiatrist. How lucky you are to have Rita as a trusted friend who can recommend the best possible person! Knowing your father as you do, you will understand that the wisest and most tactful course will be to say nothing to Buck about the psychiatrist, whom I have described to him as a neurologist. The departure from the precise truth is very slight. After all, both examine heads.