Ruffly Speaking Read online

  I guess Stephanie was a good priest. Her big, wide face warmed immediately. “Would you like me to talk to her? I’d be glad to.”

  I was thanking Stephanie and starting to explain a little about Rita when I caught sight of three boys huddled together on Highland Street. They seemed to have appeared out of nowhere, but now formed a tight little group on the far side of Alice Savery’s property. They weren’t making any noise—they seemed to be whispering together—and they were almost motionless. What grabbed my attention, I suppose, was their unnatural silence and stillness. Ambush posture: Your dog is trotting along minding his own business, sniffing a utility pole, bouncing around, and then suddenly another dog appears, and instead of leaping ahead to greet it or behaving himself and ignoring it, your dog drops flat to the ground. His legs go right out from under him. He doesn’t make a sound. His hackles don’t rise. He freezes. Then WHAM! He springs. It isn’t called ambush for nothing.

  But only one of the three boys actually sprang—a scrawny kid of seven or eight, I guessed, with straight brown hair that stood out in tufts all over his head. His two companions sank almost to their knees and sheltered themselves from view in the branches of a flowering shrub, but peered out to follow the dash of their tufted friend, who bolted down the sidewalk in front of Alice Savery’s house with his arms outstretched like the wings of an airplane, and deliberately and repeatedly whacked the top of Alice Savery’s fence along its entire length.

  At the end of his first pass through what I suspected was enemy territory, the boy was heading straight for Stephanie, Ruffly, and me. His eyes were in most respects entirely different from Rowdy’s, which are, of course, almond shaped and very dark brown—the boy’s were violet-blue circles—but I’d seen that glint before. It’s the sparkle that appears in the eyes of a creature who’s right in the delicious midst of getting away with something good. Rowdy, though, is always decently groomed. This boy had the vaguely neglected appearance you see in a lot of the children of Cambridge intellectuals—the uncut hair, the battered athletic shoes, the jeans with holes in the knees. The only fresh piece of clothing he wore was a white T-shirt with bright crimson letters that spelled out ‘Avon Hill Summer Program.”

  I half expected the boy to smash into Stephanie or me, or to trip over Ruffly, but at the last moment, he veered, zoomed away, and once again administered a series of passing blows to the fence. Then, after what looked like a brief conference with his buddies, he zipped back toward us, but suddenly turned, dashed up Alice Savery’s walk, and made for her front door, to which he delivered a single hard blow of the fist. Until then, the whole performance had been absolutely quiet, but the second his hand slammed against the door, the two boys lurking safely in the shrubbery burst into wild catcalls, and a shrill but not terribly loud alarm began to sound from Alice Savery’s house.

  By now, the boy who’d triggered it had sped out of the yard, and he and his eggers-on had switched from whoops and howls to raucous imitations of the alarm. To my mind, though, the star performer was Ruffly. At the first wail, the little dog danced across Morris’s yard, yapped at the shrub border demarcating the edge of Alice Savery’s property, then fled back to Stephanie, wheeled around, and reran the route, just in case Stephanie had missed the point, I guess. When Ruffly returned to Stephanie, he positioned himself to face the noise and, on the off-chance that Stephanie still hadn’t gotten the message, gave her a hard nudge. She did her part. “I’ll take over now,” Stephanie told Ruffly. Accompanied by the excited dog, whom she kept praising for his good work, she walked calmly down the sidewalk to the beginning of the eminent fence. She made a show of carefully observing Alice Savery’s big, shabby yellow house, the lovely garden, and the shouting boys. Ruffly’s work had been flawless; I wondered what could possibly be wrong with him.

  At last, the alarm quit. Stephanie briefly raised her hands to her hearing aids. “There. I’m back in business again. Sometimes it’s perfectly lovely to turn the world off.”

  “Does this happen often?” I asked, joining her.

  She smiled and shook her head. “The alarm’s new, I think, but those boys pull something or other on a fairly regular basis. This is their most spectacular effort to date. The poor woman who lives there has a real gift for keeping them going. If she’d ignore them, they’d leave her alone. She doesn’t seem to understand that the worst thing she can do is to make it interesting for them. The fence is their favorite target, not that they actually do it any harm, but poor Miss Savery is inordinately proud of it, for some reason.”

  “Longfellow admired it,” I said pompously. Stephanie smiled in recognition. “You know her?”

  “No. We had one little encounter. My dogs were with me. I got the fence lecture.”

  “Oh, dear. Miss Savery is very definitely not a dog lover. Doug warned me about that, but so far she hasn’t uttered a word of complaint. Doug marched me over and explained all about Ruffly, but all she did was treat us to a disquisition on the fence. It’s apparently standard fare. I gather that the children have it down almost word for word. They dare each other to brush their hands along the fence, and then they take off, or they hang around and wait for her to deliver the lecture about the fence. The thing that provokes her most is... She’s an avid gardener, as you can see, and it drives her wild to have them run through the yard. Matthew tells me that the ultimate dare is to pick her flowers.”

  “How does Matthew...?”

  “Because of Ivan,” said Stephanie, pronouncing the name as Leah did, EE-vahn. “Haven’t you heard about Ivan?”

  “Ivan the Terrible. Yes, of course. Leah talks about him all the time.”

  “Matthew and Leah,” Stephanie said rather pointedly, “are so cute talking about him. Leah keeps pretending to propound some dog training theory about how to settle Ivan down, and she’s joking, but Matthew is such a serious soul. Leah can’t resist teasing him, and the more she kids him, the more logical and sensible he becomes. Poor Matthew. Emotion always comes as such a surprise to him. He must be a little overwhelmed right now. He’s absolutely smitten with her.”

  14

  “Stephanie Benson says that Matthew is absolutely smitten with you,” I told Leah. “Those were her exact words.”

  “Matthew is being sort of a jerk,” Leah said.

  It was Saturday morning, and we were heading south on Route 128 on our way to a show-and-go at the Canine Emporium in North Attleboro. I was driving. Leah, still half asleep, was drinking coffee. I’d been awake for hours. By eight o’clock, Steve and I had had breakfast and taken a shower. (Always, always shower with your vet. Clean profession.) When Steve left for work, I walked the dogs, tidied up the house, and made two unsuccessful attempts to rouse Leah, who was displaying that notorious sign of incipient moral dissipation, sleeping late when you ought to be out showing your dog. The salvation of youth requires radical measures. Rapping on the door and calling her name had done no good at all, and the dogs were pestering to get into her room, anyway. All I did was open the door. The credit for wresting Leah’s slothful soul from Satan belongs exclusively to Rowdy and Kimi. “How is Matthew being a jerk?” I asked.

  “He thinks that Stephanie should go back to New York.”

  “You can’t really blame him. How would you like it if your parents had just suddenly decided to move to Cambridge?”

  “He doesn’t mind that much that Stephanie’s here.” If so, it seemed to me that Matthew Benson was the first freshman in history to be perfectly happy that his mother had followed him to college. I didn’t say so.

  Leah continued. “What he doesn’t understand is why his parents don’t work it out. And also, Stephanie and Phillip—that’s his father—gave him this whole line about the family and not going too far away. So what he thinks is that since they weren’t going to stay together anyway, they might as well have let him go to Stanford.”

  “Maybe they didn’t know they were going to split up,” I pointed out.

  “That’s what I
said.”

  “So that’s what he’s being a jerk about?”

  “It’s more about the rector, because Stephanie only got to be a rector by moving here, and Matthew thinks that she should’ve just stayed in New York instead of advancing her career.”

  “So his parents just separated? Recently?”

  “When the rector left. Stephanie got offered this job, and she packed up and left. Really what Matthew thinks is that since Phillip is a physicist, and she’s a rector, Phillip’s work is important and hers isn’t. Matthew doesn’t say that, but you can tell that’s what he thinks.”

  “I wonder whether St. Margaret’s knew.”

  “Knew what?”

  “That if Stephanie took the job, she’d leave her husband.”

  “What does that...?”

  “Nothing. I just wondered. Anyway, it sounds as if Matthew really confides in you.”

  “Of course he does,” Leah said smugly. “He’s utterly smitten with me.” She drank some coffee and made a soft noise of discontent. “This car smells funny. It smells like… like orange rinds or something. Lemonade.”

  “Lime. It isn’t the car. It’s Kimi.”

  I’d spent the week writing the article about Stephanie Benson and working on the product evaluations. The previous day, Rowdy had been my guinea pig for yet one more new line of Australian miracle coat revitalizers, shampoos, conditioners, and grooming sprays—dog fancy is high in Down Under these days—and Kimi had been allotted the equally trendy citrus goos and glops. An obedience show-and-go is the lowliest link in the Great Chain of Being Shown, just above a run-through and below a fun match, so I didn’t have to groom the dogs at all, but they’re inevitably the only malamutes entered in any obedience event, and I like them to serve as good ambassadors of the breed. The Aussie shampoo I’d used on Rowdy had disconcerted me by failing to foam or bubble, but it had done a good job. Kimi’s citrus products had left her looking terrific, too, but she smelled like a gin gimlet.

  “Didn’t you notice it when Kimi and Rowdy woke you up?” I asked.

  “The dogs didn’t wake me up. Rita’s radio did.”

  “I’m sorry. I’d speak to her about it, except that I keep complaining about Willie’s barking and I hate to do anything to make things worse. Rita’s not doing very well these days. It’s the hearing aids—she hates them. That’s why the radio’s so loud in the morning. She doesn’t like to put her aids in until she’s been awake for a while.”

  “I don’t know why she’s making such a big thing of

  it. Stephanie wears hearing aids and it doesn’t bother her. Rita’s being a big baby.”

  No one asked your opinion, I longed to say. The task of explaining Rita’s distress to a seventeen-year-old was beyond me, especially because I didn’t fully understand it myself. Instead of trying, I changed the subject by asking what Ivan had been up to in the past few days. After observing his assault on Alice Savery’s door, I’d taken increased interest in what Leah called “The Amazing Adventures of Ivan the Terrible,” and Leah was always happy to relate new episodes. As I’d heard earlier in the week, although Alice Savery hadn’t appeared during the raid, she’d evidently been at home and had certainly seen enough to read the lettering on Ivan’s shirt. On Tuesday, she’d presented herself at the Avon Hill Summer Program and insisted on seeing the director. She hadn’t complained directly about the boys, but had stated that she wanted to make a gift to the program, a gift that turned out to be a stack of photocopies of a page from a walking guide to Cambridge architecture, the page that contained a capsule description of her fence with notes on its historical significance. The director was, of course, mystified by the visit until Matthew Benson made the connection.

  Ivan’s latest prank at the program, the one Leah told me about in the car, involved Matthew himself. As I’ve mentioned, Matthew was teaching a course—or maybe a seminar, workshop, or module—about urban flora and fauna, and one of the fauna had, indeed, turned out to be the cockroach, which, as Matthew had explained to me, was a zoologically fascinating insect of ancient and noble lineage. The topic put Matthew in an unusually talkative mood, and he became outright animated as he went on about it. I wasn’t very responsive, but Steve, who was there, too, caught Matthew’s contagious enthusiasm, and the two had a long, technical discussion about evolution and adaptation that almost sent me rushing to call the exterminator.

  Steve commented afterward on what a bright kid Matthew was. I had to agree, but couldn’t resist adding that as companion animals, Border collies were a few million evolutionary steps ahead of roaches, and how would Steve like it if his clients started showing up with little portable kennels crawling with vermin for him to spay and neuter? Steve said that he, like every other veterinarian, would be happy to find a new area into which he could expand his practice, and he claimed to welcome the challenge of mastering microsurgical techniques. Furthermore, Steve said, neutering roaches couldn’t be any worse than de-scenting skunks.

  But back to Matthew. The Avon Hill Summer Program followed a hands-on, learn-by-doing approach. Consequently, instead of just reading about roaches and listening to Matthew lecture about them, his students watched them in the flesh, if flesh is the right word for what insects have. In the shell. In the shell surrounding some revolting mess of squishy, roachy slime. Whatever. The point is that Matthew’s roaches lived in some sort of dry aquarium in the AHSP science lab, or they did until Ivan liberated them.

  “And then Matthew and the director asked Ivan why he did it,” Leah said, “which turned out to be a mistake, because Ivan can explain anything, anyway, and his mother—she’s a single parent—is a professor of socioecology at B.U., and—” B.U. Boston University.

  “Of what?” I asked.

  “People and the environment.Rain forests. Trash recycling. Lots of things. Ivan can tell you all about it. She’s a really good parent that way, and she reads Shakespeare with him, things like that. Otherwise, she’s pretty oblivious, but she tries. Where was I? Oh, so they asked Ivan why he did it, and he had this great explanation about how they’d been studying the cockroach’s beautiful adaptation to varied natural environments—they don’t have to keep evolving, basically, because they’re perfectly adapted now—but how were you supposed to observe it when the roaches were trapped in a glass box?”

  “The director bought that?”

  “Not really. Matthew made Ivan sit down and work out how fast roaches reproduce so Ivan would understand the quote significance of his act unquote, and the director kept wringing her hands and wondering about whether to spray now or wait and see what happened. It was Matthew’s fault, really.”

  “What was Matthew supposed to do? Put a training collar on Ivan and bind him to his left side until—”

  “Bernie Brown is not meant to be taken literally,” pronounced Leah. “The roaches should’ve been locked up.”

  “Listen,” I said, “could we get something straight? First of all, Bernie Brown would take one look at Ivan and find that kid a good home and get himself a better prospect. Second, the no-force method isn’t about how to correct behavior problems. It’s about how to score two hundred instead of a measly one ninety-nine, okay?”

  Two hundred?Perfection. Let’s start from the Beginning, 1933, when Mrs. Whitehouse Walker returned from England and, instead of issuing the usual complaints about the lousy British food and the warm beer, said, “Let there be light.”

  And there was light.

  There were, however, neither apples nor serpents, no original sin at all, and, really, it’s a religion of endless forgiveness, too. Every time you enter the ring, you start out with all two hundred points. Your only task is to stay perfect. I should warn you, though, that strait is the gate that leads in and out of the obedience ring. And narrow the way. What did you think canine cosmology was? Some quack religion?

  15

  Here’s proof that I am less dog-obsessed than is commonly supposed. Kevin Dennehy had been my friend and nex
t-door neighbor for quite a few years before I noticed his almost unbelievably precise conformation to the American Kennel Club standard for the Mastiff. Amazingly enough, I never made the connection at all until I was researching an article on the breed. Then, all of a sudden, the words hit me. “Forechest should be deep and well defined.” Kevin’s forechest. “Shoulder and Arm—Slightly sloping, heavy and muscular.” To say the least. “Legs straight, strong and set wide apart, heavy-boned.” Kevin’s own-But here’s the clincher: “General Character and Symmetry —Large, massive, symmetrical, and well-knit frame. A combination of grandeur and good nature, courage and docility.” Kevin’s hair is even an acceptable color, for God’s sake! Well, the standard says “apricot,” not the word Kevin would choose, but his hair is a light enough red so that no sensible judge would disqualify him, and, all in all, Kevin Dennehy really is the ultimate Mastiff.

  What impeded my recognition of Kevin’s essential Mastiffness, so to speak, is that in the flesh, my next-door neighbor looks nothing whatsoever like a dog, and if he did, the probable breed would be an Irish terrier, Irish wolfhound, or Irish anything else. As it is, Kevin looks like exactly what he is: a Cambridge cop, a lieutenant, in fact. The original purpose of the Mastiff? Watchdog. I can’t imagine how I missed it for so many years.

  “Accidental death,” I told Kevin. It was early on Sunday afternoon, one day after the show-and-go (Kimi, 185; Rowdy, don’t ask) and Kevin and I had both found excuses to hang around outside and enjoy the combination of warm sun and a cool breeze that occurs in Cambridge about once every thirty years. Kevin was massacring the barberry hedge that separates his mother’s property from my driveway. I was washing my Bronco. “Everyone has been assuming that Morris died of AIDS,” I continued, “or some AIDS-related illness, but then I heard someone call it a terrible accident. Morris died on the night of May eighth or maybe early on May ninth. I remember, because it was my grandmother’s birthday. Late Friday night or early Saturday morning. He was found on Saturday. You know anything about it?”