Authors: Susan Conant
She wore a hat. I wanted a new picture for my column in which I, too, wore a hat and smiled her gracious smile. Mrs. Dodge met Rin Tin Tin. She bred 150 AKC champions. With a coauthor, she wrote two books, one on the English cocker, one on the German shepherd dog. She used her four-story mansion at 800 Fifth Avenue mainly as a convenient place to stay with her dogs when she showed at Westminster. By the 1950s, the mansion had fallen into such a state of neglect that the neighbors complained. If one of Mrs. Dodge’s dogs bit an employee, it wasn’t the dog she fired. Most of the world saw her as eccentric. I had always thought she was wonderful.
O
N AUGUST 29, 1930
, Marcellus Hartley Dodge, Jr., was killed instantly when his car hit a tree just outside the tiny French village of Magescq, on the road between Bordeaux and Bayonne. His skull was fractured. The carotid artery was severed. His companion and college classmate, Ralph Applegate, was lucky to get off with a broken leg and severe bruises. If it hadn’t been for two French motorists who came on the scene and dragged the young men from the car, Applegate would have been burned alive. It was Mrs. Dodge who had sent her son on this and other automobile tours of Europe. Young Hartley Dodge had what the
New York Times
called a “predilection for aviation.” His mother hoped to divert him from the hazards of flying. He had graduated from Princeton in June.
B. Robert Motherway was reputed to have known M. Hartley Dodge, Jr., as well as Mrs. Dodge. Motherway had shown at Morris and Essex in the thirties. He was my source of a firsthand account of the grand show in its heyday, my living link to Geraldine R. Dodge and her very own dog shows. What’s more, he lived about a half hour’s drive from my house. If he hadn’t been nearby, I’d have had to settle for a skimpy phone interview. Our publisher had been tightfisted about funding research for the book. I, at least, consider a budget of nothing to be rather ungenerous.
Mr. Motherway had to be a thousand years old, or so I’d assumed when I’d called to request an interview. Young Hartley Dodge had, after all, died in 1930, and Mrs. Dodge’s gigantic and fabulous shows had taken place before World War II. Mr. Motherway’s voice surprised me. There was nothing frail about it. And after I made my request, it was clear that he wasn’t too old to want his name in a book. The names of his dogs, too. Their photographs. His own photograph. To say that he agreed to the interview is a bit of an understatement. I let him set the date and time. He picked the next day at ten
A.M.
The conversation left me with a glorious sense of authorial power that lasted until the next morning when I tried to set out for Mr. Motherway’s and my old Bronco refused to start, and without one of its usual excuses, either: subzero temperature, rain. This was a dry, sunny morning in early May. If the Bronco had been a dog, I’d have known how to rev it up. Cars, however, fail to respond to even the most enticing motivational approaches; neither dried liver nor rare roast beef does a thing for them. The man from Triple A recharged the battery. He suggested getting a new one. He mumbled something about wires and alternators. I knew his diagnosis was wrong. The engine simply had to be clogged with dog hair. When something breaks around here, that’s always why.
I called Mr. Motherway to explain that an important editorial conference required me to postpone our appointment. Would tomorrow morning be convenient? It would. It was foolish of me to lie. When I drove up, he wouldn’t exactly mistake my battered four-by-four for a chauffeured Rolls. And I wasn’t going to park the Bronco down the road from his house and pretend to have walked from Cambridge. Besides, there’s nothing shameful about having your car refuse to start. It happens to rich people, too, especially rich people with big, hairy dogs. Mrs. Dodge’s limousines were probably as unreliable as my old Bronco. What made me fib was Mr. Motherway’s address. He lived in what always emerged in Boston newspaper and magazine surveys as not only the wealthiest but the most prestigious and altogether splendiferous community in the Commonwealth. It had more millionaires,
more green space, better schools, and less pollution than anywhere else in Massachusetts. Higher taxes. No lottery ticket sales at all. If you lived there, you already had so much money that you didn’t throw it away trying to win more. Not that absolutely every person there was loaded.
Oh, but
he
was. I knew it even before I got to his house. Well, I didn’t exactly
know
it. But I can take a hint. Hints there were: the acres of pasture surrounded by neat white fences, the stables, the horses, and the colonial houses that, gee whiz, actually dated to the days of the Colonies. B. Robert Motherway’s was a white saltbox screened from the narrow road by a row of lilacs. More lilacs bloomed on either side of the front door. Beds of perennials took the place of foundation shrubs. Lupine and columbine were in bloom. The beds were weeded, but not too perfectly weeded, and certainly not mulched with wood chips or fir bark. There wasn’t a rhododendron in sight. The horticultural testimony was irrefutable: This wasn’t just ordinary money I was dealing with; it was serious Old Money. The newly moneyed in the Boston suburbs buy what are cruelly called “tract mansions”: four-story, twenty-room mock palaces pitifully set on quarter-acre lots. Mr. Motherway’s house didn’t have a tract mansion jammed next to it. It had woods on one side and, on the other, a vast stretch of roughly mown acreage that looked like a lawn from a distance, but was, up close, a field. Attached to the house by a substantial extension was an immense white barn with kennel runs along the side. From the closest run, a shepherd ordered me to go home. I should perhaps add that by “shepherd” I do not mean a biblical fellow with a flock and crook. In my world, as in Mrs. Dodge’s, a “shepherd” is a German shepherd dog. In writing, the breed is often the “GSD.” “Alsatian,” the British
nom de guerre
during and after both world wars, never really caught on in the United States and has almost vanished. What no one who’s anyone in dogs ever calls a shepherd is a “police dog.” Dahlings, it’s simply not done.
The front steps of Mr. Motherway’s house consisted of massive slabs of granite. Before I had a chance to ring the bell, fierce woofing from the opposite side of the door loudly
announced my arrival. I rang the bell anyway. The door opened to what looked like a museum of Early American decorative arts and furnishings. Without saying a word, a tall woman in her early fifties with broad, stooped shoulders and pale skin ushered me inside. She was not dressed in colonial attire. Furthermore, to my relief, she did not wear a black dress with a frilly white apron. Maids in mufti are less intimidating, I think, than maids in uniform. In any case, this woman’s appearance and manner were so unthreatening that even if she’d been in full regalia, with a frilly white cap on her head, she wouldn’t have scared me at all. As it was, she wore a plain white blouse, a blue denim skirt, clean white running shoes, and a pair of yellow rubber gloves. She should have been five foot ten or maybe even six feet tall, but her head dropped forward, and she had what in dogs, maybe in people, too, is called a “roach back.” In dogs, however, the problem does not stem from the postural efforts of tall teenage females to shrink themselves to the median height of their peers. Her odd shape could have resulted from untreated scoliosis or possibly osteoporosis, I suppose, but the cowed expression on her face suggested a sincere desire to squeeze herself into less space than nature had intended. Her pale blue eyes blinked rapidly, and she kept her rather full lips puckered, as if she were trying to suck them inside her mouth. Her long, straight brown hair was shot with gray. It parted itself down the middle, and was unflatteringly secured at the nape of her neck by a wide elastic band.
The dog who’d been barking now lay silently but vigilantly just inside the door on what I thought must be his rug. I had the impression that in dropping to this down-stay, he had obeyed no one but himself. He was a large black shepherd. To my eye, he looked oversized, but I am no expert on the breed. The shepherd I know best, India, belongs to my vet and my lover, Steve Delaney. India has her UD—Utility Dog obedience title—and is working on her UDX. The
X
stands for
excellent
, which is what India already is in all possible respects. She defines her work as taking care of Steve by doing whatever he wants. India is beautiful, intelligent, obedient, well trained, protective of Steve, friendly to almost everyone
else, and good with other dogs. Also, as does not go without saying in her breed, she is blessedly free of congenital joint disease. India is such a paragon that she’d be almost intolerable if it weren’t for her infectious interest in everything. If she could speak English, her characteristic utterance would be a buoyant, “I wonder what
this
is? And
this!
And
that!
Oh, and what’s
that
over
there!”
Like India, this big black male monitored his surroundings. India’s eyes and ears, however, are alert with curiosity. This fellow had a guarded, wary expression. He didn’t growl. His hackles weren’t up. Still, I reminded myself to do everything he expected and nothing he didn’t. My pockets were, as usual, full of dog treats. I didn’t offer him one.
“I’m Holly Winter,” I told the woman. “I have an appointment with Mr. Motherway.”
She still said nothing, but nodded pleasantly before picking up a plastic bucket and a spray bottle of all-purpose cleaner and heading up the staircase that rose opposite the door. In her absence, the black dog continued to observe me. Normally, if you were to set me in the middle of the Louvre and turn loose some scruffy, mangy little street dog, I’d be on my hands and knees making friends with the fascinating creature, and I’d be subsequently unable to remember a single art object in that particular gallery or maybe in the entire museum, because the living work would have stolen my rapt attention.
Now, reluctant to make eye contact with the black shepherd, I studied the hallway and admired the living room, visible through a doorway to my left. The house had the low ceilings and uneven floors of its era. The walls of the long, wide hallway, which stretched to the rear of the house, were covered with what looked like the original flower-patterned paper, miraculously preserved. The paper simply had to be a reproduction of an authentic pattern, didn’t it? Except to install electricity and radiators, no one had done any visible updating since about 1800. All the woodwork, including the banister, doors, door frames, baseboards, and window trim, must have been stripped to the raw wood and freshly painted in these bright and unusual shades of blue, green, yellow, and
a soft, rich red. The furnishings were American antiques. On the walls were American primitive paintings, including the kinds of oil portraits done by traveling artists who turned up at the doors of prosperous colonists with painted canvases missing only the particular faces of the family members to be immortalized. Displayed on tables and in cabinets were not the rustic, rusty kitchen implements it’s become fashionable to collect, but pieces of silver and pewter that had certainly been valuable in their own time. On the sparkling floors lay the kinds of Oriental carpets imported for wealthy colonists who wanted their establishments in the New World to look as much as possible like gentlemen’s residences in England. Everything looked scrubbed, dusted, vacuumed, shaken out, ironed, or polished, as needed. I don’t share the popular objection to a house that looks like a museum; the absence of a VCR and a mess of old newspapers in the living room didn’t bother me at all. I was wowed. By comparison with Mrs. Dodge’s Giralda Farms, I reminded myself, this place was practically a hovel. I was still wowed. And if the black male shepherd didn’t ooze charm, he at least refrained from oozing bodily fluids and leaving chew marks on his master’s show-place.
Footsteps sounded overhead. The feet and long legs of a man began to descend the stairs. Mr. Motherway was tall, lean, and fiercely upright. He had a bullet-shaped head and thick white hair cropped almost to his scalp. His eyes were a deep, bright cobalt blue. His unobtrusively well-tailored gray wool suit struck me as the perfect attire for an American Kennel Club judge on an important assignment. Reaching the bottom of the stairs, he stepped forward, extended his hand, and said, “Miss Winter, a pleasure. Jocelyn should have asked you to take a seat. You shouldn’t have been left standing here.”
As we shook hands, the dog rose and went to Mr. Motherway’s left side. Even in his master’s presence, this was not an ears-up, eyes-bright animal. The shepherd held his head low and moved as if completing a boring but necessary mission.
I said that I’d been enjoying myself admiring his house. I’d always liked American primitive paintings, I added. I
liked the sweetness and the naïveté. What I actually liked, although I didn’t say so to Mr. Motherway, was the depiction of dogs in American primitives. I loved the ones that showed a child or a group of children cuddling a stiff-looking, formal lapdog. Mr. Motherway didn’t have any of those, at least that I’d seen. I settled for saying that he had a wonderful collection.
“Family legacy,” he replied modestly as he led me into the living room. “My stepfather collected in a small way. He introduced me to dogs, too. He had shepherds. He was the one who first took me to Morris and Essex, as I may have mentioned on the phone.” The reference to his stepfather caught me off guard. Barbara Altman, the fellow dog writer who’d put me on to Mr. Motherway, had warned me that he’d had a sister who died in Germany in the thirties. He never discussed her; the topic was off limits. I’d somehow assumed that the taboo extended beyond the sister to the rest of Motherway’s family—obviously, I’d been wrong.
Mr. Motherway motioned me to a love seat that faced the immense fireplace. He took a wooden chair by the hearth. The dog lowered himself to rest at Mr. Motherway’s feet.
“Do you remember what year that was?” I asked.
“Well, it must have been 1928. I know it wasn’t the first year. Compared to what Mrs. Dodge did later, it was small. But even back then, it was an exhibitor’s show. She always went out of her way to make everything convenient. The trains that brought in the dogs had special baggage cars, and she arranged to have the dogs and the exhibitors transported from the trains. The estate, Giralda, was … Well, I wasn’t much more than a boy, and to me it looked like a castle out of a fairy tale. In later years, it got … Well, the word is
spectacular.
She kept enlarging the polo fields to make room for more rings and more tents, and the lawn would stretch as far as you could see. And there’d be trees all around, dogwoods blooming. It was extraordinary. Everything was tented. There was a luncheon tent. If you showed, Mrs. Dodge provided lunch for you. Don’t see much of that these days, do you?”