Authors: Susan Conant
On cue, I laughed. “These days, you’re lucky to be able to park in walking distance of the rings.”
Mr. Motherway smiled. He had good teeth, obviously his own. “One year, can’t remember just when, she had a special area reserved for toys.” Toy breeds, I should perhaps add. Little dogs. “Special parking area,” he continued, “right by a big tent reserved for toys, right next to the rings, so no one had to lug anything. And the whole area was at the edge of the field, in the shade, as I recall. The show was always in May, late May, and it can get good and hot and humid in New Jersey in May, so she had tents everywhere and these orange beach umbrellas. There was a tower for the photographers to go up to get panoramas of the whole scene. I talked my way up that tower one time, and it was a sight to see: the trees, the acres of lawn, thousands of cars, fifty or sixty rings, dozens of tents, umbrellas, dogs, exhibitors, gawkers. Even from the ground, it was a remarkable site, like a giant carnival.”
“I’d give anything to have been there,” I said truthfully. “What did she give the exhibitors for lunch?”
Mr. Motherway looked taken aback. “Well, don’t know that I recall. Chicken, I suppose. It must have been chicken.”
I’d always been curious about those lunches. These days, the club sponsoring a dog show provides a good lunch for the judges and either the same lunch or a less lavish one for the stewards, the volunteers who help the judges. Exhibitors pack their own picnics, or eat at cafeterias or concession stands. I couldn’t get over the idea that Mrs. Dodge had served a civilized lunch, presumably a delicious one, to
everyone
who entered her show. Before I could press Mr. Motherway for details about the menus, a loud, horrible scream rang through the house. If the black dog hadn’t still been motionless at Mr. Motherway’s feet, I’d have assumed, I hate to admit, that he’d dug his teeth into someone, probably the maid, Jocelyn. There was something elusively female about the scream.
Mr. Motherway rose from his chair by the fireplace. “My wife,” he explained. “Christina is dying at home,” he added with dignity. “Everything possible is done for her here. If you’ll excuse me, I’ll see that Jocelyn is with her. Jocelyn has orders to stay within close hearing distance of Christina, but
she does not always follow orders.” Glued to Mr. Motherway’s left side, the shepherd followed him from the room. The dog hadn’t shown any reaction to the startling cry. He must have been used to it. To some extent, I was, too. My Rowdy is a certified therapy dog. We visit a nursing home. A few of the very old and ailing people there cried out now and then in a way that had initially alarmed me; I thought I was hearing shrieks of pain. Some may have been. Others were not. One day I took Rowdy to the bedside of an ancient, frail woman named Betty whose mind wandered. On some days, she loved to see Rowdy. I’d guide her thin hand through the safety bars that surrounded her bed, and she’d rest her palm on top of his big head and finger his soft ears. Occasionally he’d gently lick her fingers in what I took to be a canine effort to heal a wound. One day when Betty’s mind was somewhere else, I tried to rouse her by following our usual routine. I guided her hand to Rowdy, who must have sensed that she was failing and decided to help. The second his damp tongue touched her skin, she broke into wails of terror. Someone should never have done something, she screamed. Never on earth! Never on earth! She cried out to God to save her. Hauling Rowdy with me, I ran for a nurse. What Betty suffered now was an attack of ancient psychic pain revived by her illness and dementia. I felt terrible about having unintentionally aroused some mental monster.
Having apparently restored his dying wife to comfort, Mr. Motherway returned. Over coffee supplied by the still-silent Jocelyn, we had a long talk about Morris and Essex. Mr. Motherway had actually been there in 1935 when Johnny Aarflot, the famous Norwegian breeder, judged Norwegian elkhounds. In 1935, Mrs. Dodge brought from England Mrs. Cecil Barber, who judged Scottish terriers, and Mme Jeanne Harper Trois-Fontaines, who judged Great Pyrenees. In 1937, Forstmeister Marquandt, president of the Dachshunde Club of Germany, drew a big entry: nearly three hundred dogs.
Mr. Motherway also wandered into tales of his youth. In the thirties, he’d led student tours of Europe. He’d been teaching art history at the prep school from which he was
now retired, and in the summers he and a band of students would wander in France, Italy, Spain, and Germany. It was hard to connect the freewheeling character he’d evidently been with the staid, upright gentleman I saw now. In the summer after his sophomore year in college, he informed me, he’d gone to Montana with a party of friends. “On a dare,” he confided, “I entered a rodeo. Had no idea what I was doing. I ended up on a wild steer, and darned if I didn’t ride it to the finish!”
“That’s amazing,” I said.
“Won my spurs in range fashion! Foolhardy. I was lucky to get off without breaking my neck.”
“But you’re glad now you did it?”
He beamed. “Shall we meet again? Somewhere, I’ve got a few pictures from the old days that might interest you. I’ll dig them up.”
“That would be great.” I also had some questions I hadn’t been able to fit into my allotted time. “How would next Friday be? At ten or so?”
“Ten,” he said firmly. I should have realized that he wasn’t an or-so type.
Before I left, he offered me a tour of his kennels. I accepted. I expected him to show me around himself, but he departed in search of someone called Peter, to whom he was evidently delegating the task. This time, the black shepherd stayed by the hearth when his master left. I hadn’t seen Mr. Motherway give any signal to the dog. He certainly hadn’t issued a spoken command. The dog apparently did what he felt like doing, and since he mostly just put himself on long down-stays, there was no reason for anyone to object.
Jocelyn appeared carrying an empty tray that she rested on a side table. I picked up my cup and saucer and started toward the tray, but she rapidly took the china from me. Mr. Motherway’s cup and saucer lay on what I think is called a piecrust table, a small side table with the top fluted around the edge. The black shepherd was still on his voluntary down by Mr. Motherway’s chair and directly in front of the table. When Jocelyn leaned over him to get the cup and saucer, he
stirred, eyed her, and growled. The cup and saucer rattled in her trembling hand.
I couldn’t keep my mouth shut. “He shouldn’t be allowed to get away with that,” I told her.
“It’s not my dog,” Jocelyn said meekly.
“So what? No one should have to tolerate being growled at.”
“If I stay away from his places, he doesn’t do it. It was my fault. I put my foot too close to—”
“You should be able to tell him to get up and move.
He
is a dog.
You
are a person. If you need him to move, he should move, and he shouldn’t growl at you. There’s no excuse for that kind of obnoxious behavior.”
Before I could ask Jocelyn whether she had ever discussed this situation with her employer, he reappeared with a sullen-looking man at his side. “Peter will do the honors,” Mr. Motherway said pleasantly. Before excusing himself to sit with his wife, he said how happy he was to have the opportunity to reminisce about the grand old shows and how glad he was that we’d be meeting again.
Peter glared at Mr. Motherway’s retreating form. He might as well have said outright that he resented being stuck with me. He was a wiry man in his fifties, I guessed, shorter than either Mr. Motherway or Jocelyn, with sun-reddened skin, blue eyes, and blond-gray, scraggly hair that fell to his shoulders. He wore work boots, dark-green work pants, and a matching work shirt too hot for the spring day. His expression suggested that since he had yet to meet a human being he liked, I shouldn’t waste any effort in trying to make myself the first. I trailed after Peter as he stomped by the row of sixteen or eighteen spacious, sturdy chain-link kennel runs attached to the freshly painted barn. The shepherds, being shepherds, ran to the ends of their runs to baric at me. Peter made no effort to silence them. Rather, he ignored them as diligently as he ignored me. The dogs made so much noise that even if I’d wanted to ask a question or make a comment, I wouldn’t have been able to make myself heard. The kennels had concrete floors and were as clean as any I’d ever seen. The dogs looked healthy and were as clean as their living
quarters. In the distance, I noticed two more outbuildings, also with kennel runs attached, but Peter didn’t offer me a tour of those, and I didn’t ask.
When I’d driven up, the doors to the big barn had been shut. I’d parked my car on the gravel by the side of the house. Now the barn doors stood open to reveal not only the interiors of the dog runs and a collection of farm and kennel equipment, but an old black Ford pickup, some sort of unpretentious little foreign car, a luxurious black sedan that stopped maybe a few inches and a few thousand dollars short of being a limo, and exactly the kind of shiny new van that would let the dogs and me travel to shows in safety, comfort, and style.
I thanked Peter, who was already too far away to hear me, climbed into my old Bronco, and hoped it would start. It did. On the way home, I kept seeing glimpses of my battered car, my modest house, and, indeed, myself through the unflattering eyes of the rich. Whenever I signaled a turn, the car’s wipers swept across the windshield. The upholstery had triangular rips on both front seats. The tape player would work for weeks and then unpredictably destroy a cassette that I couldn’t afford to replace. When I opened the windows, dog hair flew out, but the dog smell stayed. Pulling into my own driveway again, I wished that I had a garage and that I occupied all three floors of my house instead of just one. Brushing undercoat off my denim skirt, I wished I’d had something better to wear to Mr. Motherway’s than an outfit almost identical to his maid’s. The back stairs to my house needed painting. I’d have to do the job myself. As I put the key in the lock, I realized that I had the hands of what I often was: a manual laborer. And I wished for something I’d ordinarily have laughed at: a professional manicure.
But when I opened the door to my kitchen, Rowdy and Kimi came bounding toward me. Their lovely ears were flattened against their heads, their dark eyes smiled, their wolf-gray coats gleamed, their beautiful plumy white tails wagged across their powerful backs, and they sang in unison the universal malamute song of joy:
Woo-woo! Woo-woo-woo!
“I am richer with you,” I solemnly told the dogs, “than I would be with other people’s money. I wouldn’t trade with anyone.”
If I’d been Geraldine R. Dodge, I wouldn’t have had to trade. I could have had my perfect dogs. And money, too.
L
IKE GERALDINE R.
and Marcellus Hartley Dodge, Steve Delaney and I maintain separate residences. The Dodges had adjoining estates. Hers covered about two thousand acres. His? I don’t know. Those were just their country homes. They also shared a Fifth Avenue town house.
Shared
is probably the wrong word. Mrs. Dodge always had ten or twelve dogs with her. Consequently, I suspect that occupancy of the Dodge town house was more a matter of taking turns than of actual sharing. A dozen dogs wouldn’t drive Steve away. There are often more than that at his clinic, and his own dogs, India, the shepherd, and Lady, the pointer, live with him above the clinic, which is in Cambridge and, come to think of it, probably closer to my place than Mr. Dodge’s house was to Mrs. Dodge’s. Our Cambridge estates, alas, cover less than a quarter acre each and do not abut. Because the noise from Steve’s patients and boarders disturbs my sleep, he often stays with me. Rowdy and Kimi howl at sirens once in a while, but are otherwise remarkably quiet. My cat, Tracker, sleeps on the mouse pad by the computer in my study, so even if she purrs loudly, no one but the PC hears her, and so far it hasn’t complained.
Alaskan malamutes being the pack-oriented creatures that they are, Rowdy and Kimi like to sleep in the bedroom. Rowdy’s favorite spot is under the air conditioner, which he
regards as a totemic object to be worshiped year round because even when its motor is turned off, it still leaks cold air. Both dogs are supposedly allowed on the bed only by invitation, but Kimi gets away with assuming that the invitation is open, and I don’t object because she is an excellent bed dog, meaning that she cuddles without shoving you onto the floor. When Steve is there, we banish the dogs; caring nothing about privacy themselves, they fail to respect other people’s. Enough said.
Anyway, the siren-induced howling of the exiled dogs was how Steve and I ended up at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. The whole episode was the fault of the latest craze in canine education, a technique called “clicker training.” A clicker is a little plastic device with a metal strip that emits a sharp click when pressed. The first step in clicker training is to pair the
click
with food:
Click
, treat,
click
, treat,
click
, treat, and presto! The sound comes to mean that food is on its way; it rapidly becomes a secondary positive reinforcer. Since malamutes are totally obsessed with food and go utterly bonkers at dinnertime, I speeded up the initial phase of clicker training by clicking just before the dogs’ dinner bowls hit the floor. The next step was to pick a behavior to reinforce with clicks and treats. What I chose was howling. I selected this target for the excellent reason that when it came to Northern-breed vocalizations, Rowdy had always distinguished himself as a Pavarotti among malamutes, a canine Caruso, if you will, and while Kimi was more given to what malamute people call “talking” than to actual singing, she was perfectly capable of joining Rowdy in gloriously melodious evocations of the Land of the Midnight Sun. The only problem was that the dogs seldom showed off this prodigious talent. Also, they wouldn’t sing on command. Suppose you’re the young Glenn Gould’s mother, okay? Except that he hardly ever sits at the piano, and when your friends drop by, he won’t so much as rattle off a little tune, never mind launch into a Goldberg Variation. Such was my frustrating position until along came clicker training. The only impediment was that since the dogs hardly ever howled, they gave me blessed few opportunities to reinforce the target behavior with clicks and treats.