Katie Up and Down the Hall: The True Story of How One Dog Turned Five Neighbors Into a Family (22 page)

During the photo shoot for the article (Pearl’s first), we posed at her dining room table. One of Ryan’s arms was around my
neck, his other around Pearl’s shoulder, with Katie wedged between us. You couldn’t take a bad picture of Ryan, who was now
a lanky and very handsome eleven-year-old, happy-go-lucky and intrigued by all the attention being paid to him.

Although Pearl, Ryan, and John were a little shy about having a magazine photograph taken, Katie sure wasn’t. Now nearly twelve,
she was just about as energetic as always. An experienced model, she pushed herself into the center of every frame and stared
at the camera, never blinking at the flashes. Betty had groomed her to within an inch of her life, and her blond hair was
shining that day, her ears never fluffier. She was an old pro and a big ham.

Even when the photographer wanted to snap just Pearl and Ryan cooking together at the stove, Katie objected. She pushed against
the photographer’s legs repeatedly until he boosted her
up on the kitchen counter and submitted to her desire to stay front and center. In the shot, her nose poked down into the
frying pan as Pearl stirred the eggs.

When the article was published, something about it seemed to really touch readers because it turned out to be one of the most
popular pieces I’d ever written.

Despite Pearl’s innate modesty and her initial disinterest in being in the limelight, she was nonetheless excited about
this
! After I gave her copies of the article with the full-color photos, she started handing them out to all her friends in our
building.

For most of her life, Pearl had lived in the background—modestly leading what some might call a fairly ordinary existence,
certainly never seeking the limelight in any public way. With her huge heart and able hands, she’d always been helping
others
, most notably her husband and her family, and, of course, us.

But now—she was the STAR!

It was on the crest of this success, with our family at its closest, that some profound events occurred that would soon change
it all.

John had been actively looking for a mate and finally met someone whom he was becoming quite serious about. While Granny had
given the thumbs-down on many of John’s dates (typically saying, “Oh, my goodness, that guy, forget him”), John’s new beau,
Peter, was a warmhearted person who appealed to Pearl. A successful corporate headhunter, Peter was a nurturing kind of person
with a gift for turning a house into a home.

While down-to-earth, practical John was possibly the most nonmaterialistic person I knew—paying little attention to clothing,
furniture, or anything remotely connected to what
he considered “luxury”—Peter was just the opposite. He was an avid collector of furniture, art, and jewelry. And his large
apartment near Carnegie Hall was filled with stylish accents and effects completely foreign to Midwestern John.

They were such opposites. Peter was compulsively neat, driven, and superorganized, while John was more relaxed and casual,
but it was a good balance. Each had what the other needed. John wanted a stable partner and a comfortable home, while Peter,
with such a beautiful home and nobody in it, wanted a family.

Watching them together, I could see how much John enjoyed Peter’s take-charge attitude and easy affection; and Peter was touched
by John’s devotion to Ryan and by the way John had succeeded in balancing his responsibilities.

I admit that having Peter on the scene made me uncomfortable and, at times, resentful, because his presence shifted the balance
of attention—leaving Granny and me somewhat left behind.

It wasn’t long before Peter was spending more and more time on our floor. He upgraded John’s sparsely appointed apartment
into a homier nest, bringing in curtains, rugs, lamps, and plants while also filling out both John’s and Ryan’s wardrobe.
John was happy and excited with the turn of events, while Pearl welcomed Peter into her dining room, making him a part of
our group.

The downside for us was that, in May 2000, exactly seven years after John and Ryan had moved in, John announced that he was
moving uptown, into Peter’s more spacious apartment. Happy as I was for him, I was disappointed too, not wanting to lose them.

“It’s time for us to leave,” John told me quietly. “We’re going to miss you and Granny a lot! But this is a big step forward
for
me, and I’m moving for a happy reason,” though it wasn’t happy for everyone.

“I’m so sad,” I confided to Pearl one day. “I’m going to miss them so much. Do you think John’s doing the right thing?”

“You never know until you try—but he’s wanted this for a long time, so we have to let him go,” she wisely answered.

“But Ryan—what are we going to do without him?” I asked. She had no answer to that one. The hallway was going to be empty
without him, and Katie wasn’t going to like it either.

I loved that kid—having him over as he did his homework, watching TV with him, laughing about anything and everything, taking
him places with Katie, going out for holidays—all the things we’d done together for years. I couldn’t imagine life without
either him or John. Neither could Granny—so we both dreaded the inevitable.

On the final moving day, Ryan came into Pearl’s apartment to say good-bye to us. “I’m going to visit you all the time,” he
told Granny, giving her a huge hug and kiss.

“You’d better!” said Granny, handing John a tinfoil-covered plate of cookies for the road.

Katie jumped on Ryan’s lap. As if somehow understanding what was happening, she put her paws around him and licked his face
over and over again.

“Good-bye, girlie,” Ryan whispered. “I’ll come back to see you.”

And then, Ryan handed Pearl two going-away presents. The first was a small pink rhododendron that Ryan had taken good care
of, watering it as Pearl had instructed him to. (Thereafter, it became Pearl’s favorite plant.)

Next, he handed her a small package wrapped in tissue paper, which would become one of her most treasured possessions.

She opened it up, and there was a framed photograph of Granny and Ryan, one of the pictures taken for the magazine article.

“And look,” said Ryan, turning the frame over for Granny. “The best part is that it’s a
talking
picture frame!”

“A what?” asked Granny, puzzled by this.

“Look here, when you press this button, you hear a recording that I made—just for you, Oldest.”

Pearl then pressed the button, and out came a message: “
Hi Granny, it’s Ryan. Love you. You too, Katie. Don’t ever forget me.
” Then there was the sound of a kiss. “Love, Ryan.”

“Grannsy,” John said in parting, hugging Pearl close, “we’re gonna come down next week for some of that chocolate pie!”

“That’s a date,” she answered.

She opened her front door and sadly watched Ryan and John walk down the long hallway to the elevator, waving good-bye.

And then… they were gone.

How could things ever be the same again?

A
fter John and Ryan moved out, our red-carpeted hallway became eerily quiet. After seven happy years, all the action and excitement
ground to a halt.

Pearl’s daily trips to the school bus and the babysitting were over. Gone were the card games and hours spent laughing at
her dining table. Ryan now had an “official” nanny of his own, a second dad too, and even two dogs, a surly Lhasa apso named
Virgil and a hyperkinetic papillon named Chance. All of them displaced the family he’d known, including my lonesome dog.

At first, poor Katie scouted down the hallway every day. She scratched at Ryan’s door and lay next to it, sadly waiting for
her young friend to return. She was despondent without him.

“Oh, Katie girl,” I whispered, picking her up in my arms and taking her back down to Pearl’s. “Ryan isn’t here anymore, but
he still loves you.”

“
But Dad
,” she seemed to say, pulling against me and returning to his door, “
I gotta wait for him. I miss him
.”

“I know you do, sweetheart. I do too. But he’s gone.”

But the very next day, Katie would run right back down the
hall to Ryan’s door and poke her nose into it, desperately trying to find him.

Pearl wasn’t any happier than Katie. Although my dog and I showed up at her door just as much as ever, things seemed very
different. After all, Ryan wasn’t racing in and out with Katie at his heel; John was no longer asking Pearl for advice about
his dates or planning outings. And our family dinners were no more.

Sure, John and Ryan periodically phoned Oldest and me or came over to visit. We shared desserts at Pearl’s dining table, but
it just wasn’t the same as their living down the hall. I missed taking care of “the kid,” and hearing him tell me all about
school. I also felt sadly numb without John—I had lost my favorite confidante and on-site friend. But John was busy adjusting
to his new relationship and environs while Ryan was getting used to a different school and new friends; they were both understandably
busy with their new lives. And so I worried for Granny.

Everybody in life needs a support system—whether it’s family or friends or a surrogate family like the one we had created.
Pearl had definitely lost a big part of the support she had grown to depend on, especially after Arthur’s death.

As John later reflected, “It was sad because Ryan didn’t get as much time to spend with Grannsy—though we did visit as much
as we could—but I think she took it [the separation] harder than we did.”

Indeed, although Pearl typically kept her feelings private, around this time she began pouring her heart out to her longtime
friend Rose, a vivacious, glamorous woman who had worked in the fashion industry with the French designer Givenchy. (Rose’s
husband, Alvin, and Arthur had been business associates.) She was also a highly skilled astrologer,
extraordinarily sensitive about people, and sought after by a number of celebrity clients.

Rose, who lived across the river from us in Fort Lee, New Jersey, could easily see the dramatic transformation in Pearl’s
spirits as our family had evolved.

“Having Ryan in her life gave her purpose, something to look forward to every day,” recalled Rose. “But when Ryan moved away,
she was heartbroken. She was calling me every day, crying on the phone. She felt terribly lonesome.”

“Listen, Pearl,” Rose told her. “Nothing in life lasts forever. People come into our lives for a reason when we need them—and
everybody moves on.”

“I know it. I know.”

“I’ll mention something to Glenn. Maybe he can do something about it.”

“No,” Pearl answered quickly.

“Don’t take it so personally,” Rose continued. “Even if you were his real grandmother, you probably wouldn’t see him as much
as you were used to. After all, Ryan is growing up and kids his age want to be with their friends. That’s just the way it
is.”

But as Rose later reflected, “It was hard for Pearl to accept. She felt she was no longer needed. She told me it was like
losing Arthur all over again.”

At the grand age of eighty-eight, with her “boy” gone, it was as if someone had put a pin in the balloon of Pearl’s spirits.
She was still relatively robust, far ahead of most of her contemporaries, and continued to do all her own shopping and cooking.
But as I watched her do it all, I could tell she was just going through the motions. Her desire to cook and bake had slowed
way down, just as her pleasure in life was flagging. She was definitely depressed.

Some days, as I passed her door, I heard music coming through it, and more often than not she was playing one of her favorite
Billie Holiday LPs featuring “Lady Sings the Blues,” one of the signature songs written by the jazz singer. The mournful music
was somehow in tune with the mood of our hallway without Ryan.

Things were now falling through the cracks. Although Pearl had never been a fastidious housekeeper, her apartment was more
disheveled than usual. Half the time, she didn’t make her bed, while Arthur’s single bed was always perfectly made and empty,
a reminder of her loss. More and more, she looked through a huge, messy drawer of old photos, lost in the memories of her
past life. All this made me terribly sad. I tried to keep up her spirits by inviting her
out
to dinner, though she often declined.