Authors: Susan Conant
I told Althea about Geraldine R. Dodge. I gave the short version. “She’d had friends in Germany since the early twenties,” I finally said, “if not earlier. These were other dog people, breeders, important dog-show judges. I can’t believe that they were any more political than dog people are in this country right now.”
Althea corrected me. “Here, in this country, we enjoy the luxury of choosing whether to be political. Or perhaps the luxury of imagining that we are not. In Germany in the Nazi era, that choice did not exist.”
“Althea, I just cannot see Mrs. Dodge as someone who wanted to kill off the poor or sterilize people against their will, and I cannot see her as a Nazi sympathizer. But …”
“Yes?”
“She had German judges at her shows in the thirties, and not just in the early thirties.”
“And?”
“And I just found, on the Web—”
Althea came close to snorting. One of her Sherlockian friends, a man named Hugh, is a computer type from way back who is hooked on the World Wide Web and persists in futile efforts to introduce Althea to its wonders. But she does know what the Web is.
“Well, I did find it on the Web!” I insisted. “And I must have known this before, but maybe I’d forgotten. The point is that when the Nazis took over, they took over
everything
, including, believe it or not, dog clubs. They disbanded every breed club and every training club, every dog organization throughout Germany, and they nationalized all dog activities
and events under the control of one government-run organization. And Mrs. Dodge absolutely must have known that. So when Mrs. Dodge invited German judges to her shows in the mid-and late thirties, they didn’t just come here as individuals. These people arrived with
Nazi blessings.
Otherwise, they wouldn’t have been here.”
“You are shocked that the Nazis took over a part of
your
world? And sent it here?”
“Yes, I am.”
Althea’s expression was slightly cynical, but her tone was kind. “Holly, have you ever heard the word
totalitarian?”
“Of course,” I replied.
“Well, my dear, what did you think it meant?”
T
HE STAR OF DOG TRAINING
that Thursday evening was, for once, a human being, a woman named Sherry who’d joined the Cambridge Dog Training Club about six months earlier. Sherry’s dog, Bandit, was a bright, eager Aussie—Australian shepherd—who harbored a prejudice against Rowdy and Kimi, whom he apparently saw as a threat to sheep. I didn’t hold Bandit’s opinion against him. I thought he was right. To avoid arousing Bandit’s sheep-protective instincts, I usually kept my dogs away from him. Consequently, I hardly knew Sherry. Tonight I risked Bandit’s wrath by easing Rowdy into the little crowd that surrounded Sherry, who, it turned out, lived within a half mile of the Motherways. What’s more, Sherry’s best friend had gone to high school with Jocelyn.
The Motherways were already the main subject of talk in the advanced class when Rowdy and I arrived at the Cambridge Armory, which is on Concord Avenue within easy walking distance of my house. At the end of the hall close to the entrance, the big beginners’ class was laboring over such rudiments of civilization as sit and stay, but at the far end of the room, Roz, our advanced instructor, was working individually with a single dog-handler team at a time. At the moment, Ray Metcalf and one of his Clumber spaniels had all Roz’s attention. Everyone else was clustered around Sherry, a
plump woman with short, gray-blond curls. At a guess, she was fifty, about Jocelyn Motherway’s age. Age was the only thing the women had in common, I thought, age and, as I soon learned, the friend who’d gone to high school with Jocelyn. In particular, Sherry had the self-confidence and animation that Jocelyn sorely lacked.
“Ask anyone!” Sherry exclaimed. “The old man was always, always stinking mean to Peter, who was, believe me, no sweetheart, but you have to ask yourself, if you’d been raised like that, what would you be like?” Bandit, sitting squarely at Sherry’s left side, kept his eyes fastened on her face and listened with anticipatory interest, almost as if he expected her to order him to go fetch Mr. Motherway and shape him up. “When Jocelyn and Peter got married,” Sherry continued, “it was just awful. Peter’s father had a fit—and for the stupidest reason, which was that Jocelyn was adopted. Peter’s father figured she wasn’t good enough for his son because she didn’t know who her parents were, like it matters. And it wasn’t like Peter was some great catch, either. He flunked out of the academy, where his father taught, and then he got kicked out of another prep school, and he ended up in high school, and he barely graduated. And then he got sent to Vietnam, and when he got back, he moved in where they live now, in this little house, like a cottage, on his parents’ property, and he did odd jobs around town, but mainly he just did stuff there for his father. Sandra, my best friend, the one who went to school with Jocelyn, says the only reason Jocelyn ever got mixed up with him, Peter, to begin with was
low self-esteem”
Sherry made it sound as if the rest of us had never encountered the phrase before. After letting the idea sink in, she lowered her voice. “But about getting married, Jocelyn didn’t have a lot of choice. Things were different back then.”
To my annoyance, Roz interrupted. “Sherry? You and Bandit are next.” Really! What, after all, is the purpose of dog training? Gossip? Or just training dogs?
While Sherry and Bandit worked with Roz, I got Rowdy’s cheese cubes and roast beef from my little insulated bag, filled my pockets, and warmed him up with some heeling.
But as soon as Sherry’s turn was over, I felt compelled to rejoin the group.
“What was Mrs. Motherway like?” I asked. “Peter’s mother, Christina. The one who just died.”
“Oh, she tried to be nice to Jocelyn, but she’d spoiled Peter rotten, and it was too late to fix that. When Peter was a kid, his father’d make him do this awful stuff, and Peter’d go running to his mother, and she’d give him whatever he wanted. And then his father’d call him a sissy.”
“What awful stuff?” I asked.
Ron, who is my plumber as well as my dog-training buddy, said in my ear, “Holly, you don’t want to hear. She was telling us before you got here.”
“I
do
want to hear,” I told him.
“It’s gross. Take it from me. You don’t want to hear.”
I should have listened to Ron. A dog-training plumber is, by definition, a person who understands how things work. I persisted. “What awful stuff?” I asked Ron.
Unfortunately, he told me. “The old man used to make the son, Peter, kill the puppies there was something wrong with. He made him drown them. Sherry says he made the grandson do the same thing. When they were just little kids.”
Ray Metcalf was listening in. “The Nazis used to do that,” he commented. Ray is old enough to remember the era. He served in World War II. “Training for the Third Reich: They’d give a soldier a dog to raise, and then make him strangle it with his own hands.”
“Ron is
right,”
I said vehemently, “I really don’t want to hear this.” My stomach was turning. To settle myself, I stroked Rowdy’s soft ears, but when our time with Roz finally arrived, I still felt queasy. By concentrating on Rowdy and on the exercises, I managed to escape from myself, but as soon as our turn was over, the nasty feeling returned. For once, I was glad to leave the armory.
Walking home up Concord Avenue, I tried to blot out the ugly images by focusing on Rowdy’s pleasure in the cool of the evening, his wholesome happiness in trotting briskly over familiar pavement, and his earthy satisfaction in marking trees, shrubs, and utility poles he’d claimed as his own many
times before. Terrible, unspeakable things, I reminded myself, had happened and would happen to millions of people. The perversion of the human-canine bond that Ray had mentioned was simply a form of dehumanization I hadn’t happened to hear of before. If Mrs. Dodge had known of this or any of the other horrors perpetrated by the Third Reich, she’d have had nothing at all to do with anyone even remotely connected with the Nazis.
But what of B. Robert Motherway? In referring to his travels in Germany in the thirties, he’d said not a word about Hitler. Had he been a Nazi sympathizer? The notion seemed fantastic. Then I realized with a jolt that he’d had the perfect cover: He’d been an art history teacher who spent his summers leading American students on tours of Europe. If his German was good? His field was art history; of course his German was good. And he didn’t have a German name.
Robert
was innocently English.
Motherway
, I realized for the first time, must have been the name of B. Robert’s stepfather, the American who’d married a German bride, adopted her son, and cultivated the boy’s interest in art and in dogs.
With a second jolt, it hit me that Mr. Motherway hadn’t been the only character in this drama with the perfect cover. Those famous foreign judges? The experts Mrs. Dodge had imported to officiate at Morris and Essex? Mrs. Dodge’s German judges had visited Giralda with the blessing of the Third Reich. Those judges had returned to Nazi Germany. No one would have suspected a bunch of harmless dog nuts. How suspicious had the U.S. government been in the thirties, anyway? Not nearly suspicious enough, it seemed in retrospect.
Geraldine R. Dodge could
not
have sympathized with the Nazis, I reminded myself. Her support of the eugenics movement, I told myself, must represent a hideously naive lapse of judgment. But it was just possible that she had been used: It was remotely possible that my book about the Morris and Essex shows would require a chapter about German spies.
O
N FRIDAY MORNING
at ten-thirty when Rowdy and I arrived at the Gateway for our weekly therapy-dog visit, I found a note from the director of social services pinned next to my volunteer’s badge and sign-in sheet on the cork bulletin board in the nursing home’s office. “Maida Garabedian,” the note said. “Room 416. Likes dogs.”
The characterization proved to be an understatement. After moving upward through the nursing home to visit Rowdy’s regular customers, we took the elevator from the fifth and top floor to the fourth, and made our way to 416, which was a private room at the end of a corridor. A new-looking plastic plaque near the door frame read M.
GARABEDIAN.
Before I had a chance to poke my head through the open doorway to make sure we’d be welcome, the tiny, dark, and ancient woman in 416 caught sight of Rowdy and burst forth in a high-pitched peal of glee. Experience at the Gateway had taught me the wisdom of double-checking my reading of every initial response, no matter how enthusiastic it appeared. A few residents were so heavily medicated that they greeted everyone and everything with a calm, bland smile that could swiftly turn to a grimace of terror when a big dog suddenly loomed. Some of our regulars found Rowdy’s size and wolflike appearance so overwhelming that they preferred to admire him
from a distance. Others longed for the primary, primitive contact of touching the soft hair on his ears and digging fingers into the depths of his thick coat. Several real dog people wanted nothing more than to have their faces scoured by his clean pink tongue. The universal friendliness that made Rowdy a natural therapy dog sometimes led him to overestimate people’s eagerness for close contact. I always held Rowdy back until I’d asked, “Do you like dogs?”
In response to my question, Maida Garabedian clapped her tiny, gnarled hands together and then patted her lap invitingly with her open palms. When I let Rowdy take a few steps toward her, her face vanished in a mass of grinning wrinkles. “This is Rowdy,” I told her. “I’m Holly.” She had eyes only for him. As she stared at Rowdy and made smacking sounds with her lips, my task became clear: I was going to have to prevent Maida Garabedian from enticing Rowdy to leap into her lap. She’d have to settle for cradling his head; the weight of the whole dog would have crushed her frail bones to powder. “Easy does it,” I cautioned Rowdy.
We spent about ten minutes with Maida, who caught Rowdy’s name and addressed him by it again and again, but gave no sign of understanding anything else I said. At first, I tried out a few topics of conversation. “Maida is such a pretty name. Do you remember the children’s books about Maida?
Maida’s Little House? Maida’s Little Zoo?”
My childhood reading was heavily concentrated on dog books. What now struck me as the absurd premise of the Maida series had, however, taken my fancy. Maida was a little invalid whose widowed father, Jerome Westabrook, a Boston financier, cured his daughter’s loneliness and, eventually, her limp, by recruiting poor children to live on his fabulous estate. Each book was devoted to a new and yet more extravagant project that Mr. Westabrook arranged for his indulged daughter and the fortunate young objects of his beneficence: Maida’s little house, little shop, little houseboat, little island, little theater, and any other obscenely expensive little thing Maida craved, I guess.
Maida Garabedian, however, hadn’t read the series, had forgotten it, or had lost her capacity to chat about it. What
took her fancy was feeding treats to Rowdy one at a time from her open hand. “Like a horse!” I instructed, in what was probably an unnecessarily loud voice. Although Rowdy is gentle, it’s risky to offer him a tiny bit of food pinched between a finger and thumb, unless, of course, you happen to have taken a violent dislike to the tips of your digits. Maida had no trouble in mastering the correct technique. Every time Rowdy’s tongue swept a bit of dog cookie off her hand, she burst into laughter, then offered me her palm for a refill. Playing my limited role, I found myself thinking that, damn it all, locked somewhere in Maida’s brain cells were vivid sensory memories of the era just before World War II, the days of the great Morris and Essex shows, shows that this woman who was now feeding my dog had had the glorious opportunity to attend. Had she availed herself of it? I didn’t even know whether she’d ever owned a dog or gone to a dog show in her entire and exceedingly long life, never mind made the pilgrimage to Giralda. For a moment, I envied Rowdy’s animal capacity to link with her. Had I been able to do the same, I’d have tapped her recollections. And found … ?