Cherished (6 page)

There is no way to tell non-horsey people that the companionship of a horse is not like that of a dog, or a cat, or a person. Perhaps the closest two consciousnesses can ever come is the wordless simultaneity of horse and rider focusing together on a jump or a finish line or a canter pirouette, and then executing what they have intended together. What two bodies are in such continuous, prolonged closeness as those of a horse and rider completing a hundred-mile endurance ride or
a three-day event? I have a friend who characterizes riding as “one nervous system taking over another.” I often wonder — which is doing the taking over, and which is being taken over?

I never expected to be writing this essay. Rather, I intended, in twenty years, to write, “Oldest Known Equine Is Seventeen-Hand Ex-Racehorse.” But I see it is time to take my own advice, the advice I gave my daughter when she got her first real boyfriend. I told her that no matter what happened with this boyfriend, once she had experienced the joys of a happy and close relationship, she would always know how to have that again, and would always have that again. And the truth is, that works for horses, too.

Y
es, yes, I admit it, I didn't take care of him the way I promised I would.

When I was ten years old, I had a black cocker spaniel named Fluff. (His full name was Mr. Fluff, though he wasn't particularly fluffy: I don't know whether the Mr. was my mother's or my father's idea.) Exactly what I didn't do is lost in the mists of time, but I'm prepared to admit that I didn't walk him enough, didn't clean up after him, didn't feed him regularly, didn't wipe his bowl, didn't check to see that he had water, didn't do any of the things that ten-year-olds promise they will do if their parents will only let them have a dog. The one thing I did do was love him. I can see evidence of that love in the last remaining snapshot I have of him. There I am, standing in front of our suburban New Jersey house in a suit jacket, shirt and tie, and knickers — what was my mother thinking? — and gazing lovingly into Fluff 's eyes as he sits on his hind legs (which he could do, as the stupid pet joke has
it, for hours on end). But I don't need the photo to remember how it was between us. I may not have always been there for him, but Fluffy was always there for me, adoring me and, I choose to think, forgiving me for my endless lapses.

My dog is the main subject of this story, but it's also about my mother and father, who found a way to free themselves of having to walk Fluff, feed him, wipe his bowl, etc., etc. They appealed to my patriotism.

The year was 1943, during the darkest days of World War II, when American boys were going off to fight in far-off lands and islands — not just nameless boys, but older brothers of kids I knew. One day my father came home from work in Manhattan, sat down in his big leather chair to read the afternoon paper, and tore an article out from an inside page. The subject, I learned at dinner, was a program just announced by Dogs for Defense.

A civilian organization that provided dogs for military duty, Dogs for Defense had been training large breeds — German shepherds, Doberman pinschers, and the like — as sentry or attack dogs. Now, however, they were planning to train a limited number of small breeds for a very different purpose: going behind enemy lines to find wounded American troops, then leading rescue parties to them. “Wouldn't it be wonderful,” my father said, “if they were willing to take Fluff?”

As soon as he said that, I felt a panicky swirl of shock, anxiety, incipient grief, and, God help me, patriotism. I don't know what I said — probably nothing — but over the course of the next few weeks I came around, or was brought around, to the very real possibility that Mr. Fluff might go to war.

If this were a story in an anthology about manipulative
parents, I might be reaching right now for my well-worn volumes of Freud, Jung, or Alice Miller. What did my mother and father think they were doing? They were forty years old when I was born, a time when forty meant you were starting to get old. By the time they happened on Dogs for Defense, they may have felt old, and been so preoccupied with the inconvenience of Mr. Fluff that they dared not dwell on the greater inconvenience of my feelings. (I'm giving them a pass here, but this is not an anthology about manipulative parents.) They probably thought they'd discovered a brilliant solution to a nagging problem, and in a sense that was true.

They had me where they wanted me, torn between my love for Fluffy and — I can't believe I'm about to type this, but it's true — my love of country. This was wartime, after all. Kids my age followed the European and Pacific campaigns avidly on the radio, in the newspapers, and in the main source of our emotional information, the war movies. Sending my dog to war had a special cachet, so I buried whatever grief I was feeling when my father told me that arrangements had been made. The army was sending someone to test Mr. Fluff for gun shyness.

A few days later, on a Saturday morning in autumn, an army lieutenant came to our house with a clipboard in his hand and a pistol in his holster. It was only a starter's pistol, but the bespectacled young officer was all business. He took Mr. Fluff out on the front lawn and told him to sit. Fluff sat. The lieutenant fired a blank round into the air. Fluff continued to sit, awaiting developments. The lieutenant fired again. The
second round startled me, but Fluff remained impassive. My dog, the officer declared, had passed his gun-shyness test with flying colors.

A week or so later a sergeant came to take Fluff away in an olive-drab army sedan devoid of chrome. If I said that the moment of my dog's departure was anguishing, I might be telling the truth, but that's not how I remember it. To tell the truly terrible truth, I don't remember the moment very well, but now I'll give myself a pass and say that the boy I was could not have endured such a moment without putting the tightest of lids on his feelings. (At the time, my mother was doing her part for the war effort by cooking with a pressure cooker, which used less gas; the image of that appliance suddenly feels apt for me.) I do remember getting down on the carpet on my hands and knees, holding my dog's sweet warm face close to mine, and giving him a last scratch behind his floppy ears. Then he was gone, and I had nothing to show for him but his leash and collar and his empty bowls.

Nothing, that is, until the following January, when our mailman, Sam, brought a letter, addressed to me and marked
WAR DEPARTMENT OFFICIAL BUSINESS
. The return address was — or rather, is, since the envelope and its yellowed contents are sitting on my desk as I write this — Assistant K-9 Director, Cat Island RTC, Gulfport, Mississippi. The mimeographed letter, dated 19 January 1944, carries the letterhead
HEADQUARTERS, CAT ISLAND WAR DOG RECEPTION AND TRAINING CENTER
. Beneath it is a form message, with a few specifics typed in boldface:

Dear
Sir
:

We are pleased to inform you that your dog named
Fluff
, breed
Cocker Spaniel
, Dogs for Defense No.
New Jersey 501
, has arrived at this center in good condition and has joined other dog recruits in basic training.

You will be further cooperating in the war effort if you will refrain from writing to this Center or to the Quartermaster General requesting information as to the welfare of your dog and the program of its training. While the interest of each individual in his or her dog is a natural one, it is felt that you will readily appreciate the magnitude of the task of furnishing information to the many thousands of donors. You may be assured that your dog is receiving the best of care and attention.

Thanking you for your generosity and interest in furthering the war effort, I am,

I lived on that letter for weeks, all the while furthering the war effort by not writing to Cat Island. (Had there been a Cats for Defense, would the army have done the training on Dog Island?) I did appreciate the magnitude of the task, so I focused my imaginings not on how Fluff was doing as a raw
recruit but on how bravely he would behave once he got close to enemy lines and picked up the scent of a fallen soldier.

Early that spring, Sam the mailman brought a delivery slip from Railway Express, the precursor of such freight and package services as FedEx and UPS. The Contents box was blank, but the Sender box said, ominously, “Cat Island War Dog RTC.” Because my mother hadn't driven a car since she dented the fender of a Jordan sedan in 1929, I had to wait for my father to come home from work and take me down to the train station. When I presented the slip to the stationmaster, he rummaged around in a storeroom for a while, then emerged with a wooden crate. Inside sat Mr. Fluff, obviously intact and panting with excitement. He went berserk when he saw me, and the feeling was mutual. I was too excited to wonder why he'd come back home so soon, but an explanation eventually arrived in the form of another form letter, still vivid in my memory but no longer in my files. Fluff had failed basic training. No dishonorable behavior was implied, but no details were provided either. In any case, he was a civilian once again, and all mine, once again, to not take care of.

At least for a while. One day my father came home with a big bag of cocktail franks for an impending dinner party. He'd bought them at Ershowsky's — how fateful names stick in the mind! — a Kosher delicatessen on the Lower East Side. (Have I spelled it right? Yes. Through the secular miracle of Google I see that S. Ershowsky and Brothers were on East Houston Street.) My parents were Jewish, but not observant; Kosher delis were the closest they came to temple. With the franks, though, came a story. Mr. Ershowsky's son, or nephew, or who knows at this point, had contracted polio, and wanted more than anything else in the world to have a dog. The little boy represented half of a critical mass. The other half, I now see with the rueful wisdom of hindsight, was my father, who must have wanted more than anything else in the world to get rid of my dog. Why this was so I can't say, and why I succumbed to this second round of manipulation I cannot fathom, but I must have agreed, however reluctantly, because off my dog went once again, not to perform brave deeds on a battlefield, but to a deli, to succor a Jewish stand-in for Tiny Tim.

This began as a good-faith effort to tell a story about a cherished dog, and here I am, still trying to figure my parents out. One thing I can say about them with reasonable certainty is that they were not great dog lovers. One thing I can say about myself at that time is that I didn't fight them tooth and nail for the right to keep Mr. Fluff in our home. I don't recall weeping or screaming, or throwing a last-ditch fit. I do remember, though, the little channel between Fluffy's eyes and
how smooth it felt when I ran my thumb up it; how he strutted his stuff on his squat little legs, and how he could sit at the dinner table, begging for food for hours on end.

T
hey were born in June, the year a Chinese man stood before the tanks in Tiananmen Square and the Berlin Wall gave way to perestroika. The year I got married to a man I didn't love because I didn't know what else to do.

In the first picture I took of them together, they are carrying a stick. Maybe carrying isn't the right word: They are fighting. Seamus, a cairn terrier with ears still too big for his head, has a crazed look, the whites of his eyes exposed like an Appaloosa's; Spud, a muddy-brown blur of a toy-breed mutt, holds his end of the stick so fiercely next to the other dog's clamped jaws that the force of it lifts Seamus's puny body off the ground.

The ground is mottled with turned leaves and the dim amber sunlight of a Minnesota October. I remember the dogs growling, pulling, shaking, tearing, fiercely devoted to the first in a long series of battles that would last the rest of their lives. They are each four months old.