Ruffly Speaking Read online

  Border collie stare wander from his master’s eyes until Jeff had released him. And Leah was the one playing instructor.

  Jeff was going away for the summer, but what if Leah bored him senseless and drove him permanently off? Well, I just hated the thought. We’d lucked out once: a perfect Border collie. But twice? Two perfect Border collies? Forget it. If fortune favored us, though? An Airedale. Possibly a Norwegian elkhound. A Keeshond, wonderful breed, long life span, more energetic at age ten than most breeds are at three.

  And if heaven frowned? A skulker, a carpet soiler, a submissive urinator, or, worse, a fear-biter or even a fight-starter! I mean, you try to educate kids, teach them the difference between right and wrong, but when they’re caught in the throes of adolescence? When the hormones are raging and their judgment’s shot? Well, it’s not easy. In fact, it’s nerve-wracking. You can absolutely never tell what they might bring home next.

  9

  Rita’s old dachshund, Groucho, was a sweet, cooperative little guy who provided her with a myriad of seasonal excuses to avoid dog walking. Summer was too hot for Groucho. Winter was too cold. Spring was wet. Autumn was unpredictable. Toward the end of Groucho’s life, he actually became too feeble to enjoy an outing and thus offered Rita her first legitimate reason never to take him for more than a one-block bathroom trip.

  Her present dog, Willie, however, is an energetic young Scottie who needs vigorous daily exercise. More to the point, Willie is simply not the kind of individual who would passively and cooperatively submit to being used as an excuse. After all, he’s a Scottie. He’s also himself. Double whammy. If Rita showed any sign of enjoying their walks, he’d probably fall flat on the sidewalk and refuse to budge as soon as his paws hit concrete. As it is, the more ardently Rita tries to avoid dog walking, the more intensely Willie revels in it. In fact, what Willie loves isn’t so much walking as winning. Willie: short for Willful.

  What’s going to save Rita from ruining Willie’s walks by learning to love them is her irrational insistence on dressing up whenever she leaves the house. When you walk a beautiful dog, what you wear doesn’t matter be-cause anyone worth meeting is going to look at your dog, not at you. Rita disagrees and refuses to compromise even in the small matter of shoes. This is Cambridge, postfeminist now, not China a hundred years ago, but at siy-thirty or so on Monday evening when Rita and Willie rounded the corner from Concord and trotted down Appleton, she wore a white linen suit and a pair of what she tells me are called spectator pumps. To walk a dog. But Rita looked great, and so did the recently trimmed Willie.

  Grooming, though, is an entirely superficial process that has no impact on character, especially what’s called “real terrier character.” Willie’s bushy eyebrows, correctly combed forward, failed to hide the fire in his blackhearted eyes. Am I getting the message across? Let me warn you: Willie doesn’t just bark. Well, I’ll hedge. Willie ponders biting. He mulls it over. He imagines it. He savors the prospect. He plans. To the best of my knowledge, however, he has not translated his impulses into action since he’s lived with Rita. What he does is eye people’s ankles and, given the opportunity, fly at them, too. For some reason or another, perhaps the scent of Rowdy or maybe even the scent of my own nonspectating soul, Willie really goes for mine.

  When Rita and Willie reached our driveway, I’d finished tidying up the tiny bed of impatiens next to the fence and was thinking how much prettier delphiniums would look there instead and wondering when Leah would get home. At the sight of me, Willie began his inevitable growling and barking, and Rita made her usual futile attempts to restrain him and to get him to keep quiet while she also fished around trying to turn off her hearing aids.

  “I’ll take him,” I bellowed over the din. I reached for his leash, but Rita didn’t trust me.

  “I can cure him of that, you know,” I shouted to her. “He has the right to learn how to be a good dog.”

  Rita had finally located the dials on her aids and hence missed most of what I said. “Yes, he really is a good dog,” she replied happily.

  That horrible stereotype of the comical old deaf lady who keeps making a laughingstock of herself?And all because of Willie. Well, not because of Willie himself— key distinction—but because of his rotten but eminently eradicable behavior. Yes, eradicable. How? Lots of ways, of course, but I’ll confess that what danced through my head was a sharp vision of the Yap Zapper in my own skilled hands. Why? Because no one makes a fool of Rita, not if I can help it.

  As usual, it didn’t take Willie long to settle into a silent but eager contemplation of my high-top Reeboks. Then Leah appeared—and not alone, either—and, black eyes blazing, Willie started up again. So, in her own way, did Leah. Without a single glance at Rita, Leah swooped down on Willie, wrapped her hands around his muzzle, clamped his jaws shut, and thus reduced his ear-shattering racket to a bewildered whine and, within seconds, to stunned silence.

  “What a good dog!” Leah told him. “Good dog, Willie! Willie is a good, good boy.” The Bernie Brown method? Make the dog do exactly what you want, and then make him glad he did. But pouncing on other people’s Scotties? It’s like reaching out to knock someone else’s elbow off the table. Besides, if you try this kind of thing with the wrong dog, you’re likely to get bitten, by the irate owner if not by the dog.

  Leah’s unpardonable violation of the rules of polite society worked maddeningly well. She kept crooning softly, and before long, Willie was watching her face instead of her ankles, and his little tail was zipping back and forth. Leah has a wonderful voice for dogs, much better than mine, a voice identical to my mother’s: sweet, confident, and utterly genuine. The flame in Willie’s eyes softened to a glow.

  1 suddenly remembered my own manners. “Hi,” I said to Leah’s companion. “I’m Holly Winter. I’m Leah’s cousin.”

  He squared his shoulders, held out his hand, and stiffly shook mine. In a bland way, he was a good-looking kid, medium height, medium build, medium-length medium-brown hair, medium blue eyes... Well, you get the idea. He was a clean-cut guy about Leah’s age dressed in a blue oxford shirt and chino pants.

  Still crouched next to Willie, Leah apologized for failing to make introductions and went on to make amends. Her companion’s name was Matthew Benson, and he was what any normal summer camp would have called Leah’s cocounselor. Unlike Jeff, Matthew lacked the rare gift of treating adults as full-fledged human beings. He was so rigidly polite that I immediately began to wonder what he was like when grown-ups weren’t around. Oh, one other thing about Matthew. As I’ve mentioned, practically everything about him was medium. The exception was his expression, which, far from being medium, was supercilious in the extreme, at least when he managed to take his eyes off Leah. When he looked at her, though, I saw the same soft glow that now warmed Willie’s black eyes. Possibly, just possibly, Leah had already muzzled this guy, crooned to him, and told him what an infinitely good boy Matthew was. Or maybe he’d just plain fallen for her.

  If Rowdy and Kimi had picked up a bland, supercilious companion on one of our walks, I’d have immediately ordered the hanger-on out of my sight: “You go home right now!” With Matthew Benson? The temptation definitely presented itself.

  Before long, however, Matthew was installed at my kitchen table drinking in the sight of Leah pouring fruit-flavored water down her deep seventeen-year-old throat while I fished around in the refrigerator and meditated on a favorite subject of Rita’s, namely, the odd and unpredictable relationship between reality and fantasy. In particular? The reality of this stolid youth and my fantasy of the free-roving character who would trail Leah home if Jeff departed. Jeff and Lance, you see, were hiking the Appalachian Trail, and, in the meantime, here was Matthew, the object of a moist, refrigerated mediation that led me to conclude that reality is what never crossed your mind.

  So what’s your guess about Matthew’s breed? Another Border collie? Wrong. A Chinese crested dog? The Scottish deerhound that went Best of Breed at Westmins
ter? An Irish water spaniel with weirdly human eyes, a Staffordshire bull terrier, a Tibetan spaniel, a puli, a briard, an Ibizan hound, two basenjis, an OTCH flat coat? Wrong, wrong, wrong! Reality, as I’ve said, is what never crossed your mind.

  Consider Matthew, installed here in my cream-and-terra-cotta kitchen at seven o’clock on the evening of Monday, June 15. Has there ever been a blue-eyed calf? If so, its eyes are Matthew’s, and they are trained on Leah, whose red-gold curls spill down the back of the only nonblack garment she owns, a brand-new Avon Hill Summer Program T-shirt, white with red letters. Her glorious laugh ripples as she chatters to this godless bovine clod. A reality. Matthew is clean and wholesome, and, almost exactly three months hence, like Leah herself, will pass through the Gate into the Yard, which is to say that the kid is going to Harvard.... But draw your own conclusions.

  Enter my cream-and-terra-cotta kitchen two magnificent specimens of a flawless breed, bright-eyed, plumytailed living proof of universal love, ambassadors of divinity, heavenly perfection made flesh and blood and fur, radiantly celestial and all-forgiving incarnations of the Great God Malamute. Suck in your breath, sigh in awe, sing their praises, reach out your hands. What do they offer? Redemption, salvation, momentary union with the infinite, life’s one absolute assurance that God does not, after all, expect us to make it on our own. We have not been deserted; we are not bereft. Reach out your hands! Touch them! But Matthew does not. Rebuffed, they prostrate themselves at his feet. He does nothing at all. Yes, friends, the literally god-awful truth: Matthew is an atheist! He does not believe in dogs.

  10

  “There doesn’t seem to be much here,” I said from the depths of the refrigerator. Its principal contents were a gigantic red box of dog biscuits—stored safely out of reach of dogs and food moths alike—a twenty-one-ounce plastic bucket of Redi-Liver—the same—two plastic bags of Vermont cheddar cut into bite-size cubes, and a half pound of thick-sliced low-sodium roast beef that would have done for sandwiches if it hadn’t been a little squished from being shoved in my pockets. As you’ll have gathered, I train with food. The cheese might have done okay for Matthew and Leah—it looked all right—but I somehow suspected that the last time I’d used it, I’d been teaching Rowdy to watch my face by filling my cheeks with cheddar. If you’re a real dog person, you know the rest, and if not, by all means don’t miss my forthcoming article in Off-Lead, “Secrets of the Pros: Top Handlers Spit It Out.” I closed the refrigerator door. When I stood up, so did Matthew. “I could run down to Emma’s,” I offered.

  “My mother’s expecting me,” Matthew said, “but thank you.”

  Nonetheless, when I took a seat at the kitchen table, he sat down again. I was hungry. I wished that he’d eat with us or go home, one or the other. On the theory that there’s nothing most adolescents hate more than a determined interrogation by a parental adult, I asked him whether he lived nearby. His reply was more interesting than I’d expected.

  “Highland Street.” He glanced briefly at me and returned his eyes to Leah.

  “Oh,” I said enthusiastically, “I used to know someone who lived there. He died this spring. Morris Lamb. Did you know him?” Highland is only two blocks long. Besides, Morris was hard to overlook.

  “My mother’s renting his house.” Matthew’s voice registered nothing.

  To Leah, I said, “Morris had Bedlingtons.” For Matthew’s benefit, I added, “Bedlington terriers.” Matthew still looked so blank that I stupidly said, “Dogs,” Leah squirmed in her seat and examined her fingernails.

  I changed the subject. “Highland Street is beautiful.” Scintillating. “So you’re going to college right near home?”

  Matthew’s eyes shifted; he looked unaccountably uncomfortable. Before he could reply, Leah, ever voluble, said, “Not really. His mother just moved here. They used to live in New York, and Matthew thought his mother was staying there, but he isn’t living with her after the summer. He’s in Weld, too.”

  All Harvard freshmen live in halls in the Yard. When they’re sophomores, they move to houses. Halls and houses, mind you, not mere dormitories, because the word would obviously condone the possibility of permitting one’s intellectual powers now and then to lie dormant, whereas at Harvard, even in sleep, the mind never rests.

  “Oh,” I said, “with Leah.”

  Kimi, who had evidently decided to return snub for snub, had retired to my bedroom, but Rowdy never gives up. His latest offering to Matthew was a polyester lambskin ball that he happily retrieves or simply transports i from place to place. When Matthew showed no interest in the toy, Rowdy dropped it at his feet and left the room. I’m not sure that Matthew noticed him at all.

  Meanwhile, Leah was talking. “And, Holly, you won’t believe what his mother does! You know what she is? She’s a rector! Just like in Jane Austen. Isn’t that incredible? A rector!"

  Matthew finally cracked a smile. “My mother’s an Episcopal priest. Leah thinks—”

  She interrupted him. “And she has a hearing dog, and I’m going to get her to bring her dog to the program and do a demonstration. You want to come?”

  Matthew had tightened up again. “Leah, she hasn’t—”

  “But she will!”

  As I’ve explained, the Avon Hill Summer Program offered courses, and if you’re thinking gimp, think Cambridge. Poetry workshops. Black-and-White Photography. Beekeeping. The Art of the Blacksmith. The Suzuki Method, which, thank God, Leah was not teaching. You know what the Suzuki method does? Takes innocent little children and teaches them to torment adults by squealing out “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” on quarter-size violins. Spare me. Urban Flora and Fauna—weeds and cockroaches?—taught by Matthew, who was also doing something about computers (not, I assumed, a module on user-friendliness), and, like Leah and all the other mentors, assisting in the program’s showpiece, a play that the children were writing and producing themselves. Leah had been hired to teach, of all the damn things, Conversational Latin, and at her own initiative was also giving a course on guess-what that included a demonstration by an arson-detecting Labrador retriever, a field trip to Steve Delaney’s veterinary clinic, a guest speaker with a dog from the Seeing Eye, and a hands-on grooming session from which Rowdy’s coat would, I hoped, eventually recover. Matthew was not, of course, coteaching the unit with her.

  “I’ve heard of your mother,” I said to Matthew. From Rita, of course. Morris Lamb’s funeral. Now I finally understood the presence of the dog with the priest.

  Matthew nodded politely. Rowdy reappeared with a red rubber Kong toy. He opened his jaws and watched the toy bounce across the floor. Matthew stayed as focused on Leah as if he’d just done an eight-week attention course with Terri Arnold and graduated at the top of the class.

  “Well,” I went on, “it really would be great if your mother would visit Leah’s course. Those dogs are amazing, and they usually have such wonderful personalities.” As soon as the words left my mouth, I could feel color rush to my face. I remembered a book I’d noticed on one of Rita’s shelves. I hadn’t read it, but the title had hit me: The Betrayal of the Body. I wondered whether this kind of blush was what the book was about. I heartily wished that Matthew would leave. Before long, he did.

  “Nice kid,” I told Leah.

  She lounged in her chair and stroked Kimi’s head. “You didn’t like him.”

  “Of course I did,” I lied.

  “You did not! You thought he was boring.”

  “How can you say that? His mother is a priest with a hearing dog. That’s the last kind of person I’m going to find boring. Maybe he, uh, talks more when adults aren’t around.”

  “You shouldn’t have said anything about being near home.”

  “What was wrong with that?”

  “Matthew wanted to go to Stanford, and he got in, but when he got into Harvard, too, his mother made him turn down Stanford, and then she moved here, so...”

  “Leah, I didn’t know that.”

  “And Ma
tthew is shy,” said Leah, softening. “But isn’t he gorgeous? Didn’t you think he was gorgeous?”

  A more ordinary-looking human being has never crossed my gaze, I wanted to say. Fortunately, I was leaning over gathering up the collection of toys that Rowdy had vainly offered Matthew, so Leah couldn’t see my face. “Yes,” I said. “And I’d love to meet his mother.”

  “So you can write about her,” said Leah, obviously accusing me of something.

  “Yes,” I admitted. “Among other things.”

  “For Dog’s Life.”

  “Probably.”

  “With a pun in the title.”

  “Hey, let me tell you something,” I said, staring Leah in the eye. “I have a mortgage to pay, two big dogs to feed, and an old car to replace one of these years, and if my editors want cute, then cute is what they get, okay? This may come as a big surprise to you, but the fact is that we can’t all teach conversational Latin.”

  Leah looked genuinely abashed. “Holly, I’m sorry. I’m very sorry. I didn’t mean—”

  “Oh, yes, you did.” I waited a second. Sometimes I forget how young she is. “But it’s okay. Leah? I’m sorry, too.”

  She brightened up, smirked a little, and said, “Urn...”

  “Yes?”

  She mumbled.

  “What?”

  “I was thinking... But maybe you’ll, uh, be of-fended.”

  “No I won’t. What?”

  “It’s kind of corny.”

  “Say it!”

  The title she came up with was pretty sappy, I’ll admit, not to mention obvious, but she was, after all, an amateur. For an article about a priest with a canine acolyte? Not bad.