The Power of the Dog

by Thomas Savage

  He was on the platform to meet them, smiling came forward in the darkness in the buffalo coat that made him huge, leaning into the winter wind that swept dry snow across the platform. ‘Hello, mother,’ he said, leaning to kiss her. ‘Hello, father,’ and formally shook the Old Gent’s hand. ‘You see, it’s begun to snow.’

  ‘It’s good to see you,’ the Old Gent said.

  ‘Same here,’ George said. ‘The car’s around the side, don’t you know.’

  ‘Just as always?’ the old man asked.

  The Old Lady thought wildly of speech, some word about the trip, about the meal on the train, something seen from the windows, some anecdote. She could remember only a crying child and a cross mother and the smell of a peeled orange. ‘Is anyone with you?’ she asked.

  ‘My wife,’ George said.

  ‘Well, what did you think of her?’ The old Burbanks had been installed in their old room.

  ‘The clock is going again,’ the Old Gent said. ‘But the windows still rattle.’ He walked over and looked out the window.

  ‘Didn’t you hear me? I said, What did you think of her?’

  ‘Think of her? I think it’s mighty considerate of her to turn this room over to us while we’re here. But how much can you tell, driving twenty miles in the dark?’

  ‘It’s more than twenty miles. When you were in the office talking to George, she knocked on the door and I went and let her in. She said the oddest thing.’

  ‘What on earth did she say?’

  ‘She said, “Somehow knowing George, I knew I could count on your kindness.”’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘It pleased me. That she sees George’s kindness.’

  The Old Gent turned from the black window that reflected the lamp behind him. ‘Will you give her a little of the jewelry or such things?’

  The Old Lady coughed lightly and patted her chest and went to the window. On the sill was a dead geranium in a pot. ‘I see Miss Jones is dead. I think we’d better wait and see. Too bad there’s a child. Loyalties.’

  ‘It was dying before we left, remember? It’s not — the child. You know that.’ The Old Gent turned sharply, walked across the room, turned sharply and walked straight back. ‘I can tell you one thing. I feel sorry for her.’

  The Old Lady said, ‘I haven’t seen you pace like that since you left this house.’ They began unpacking. ‘Isn’t it awfully cold in this room? You forget what cold is.’

  He looked up from his suitcase. ‘I haven’t heard you mention the cold since you left this house.’

  Rose, too, had felt the cold, her first time in the house. They had married after Christmas in the rectory in Herndon. George wondered whether they should invite some people? She said she thought because of Peter, it should be private. Did he understand? He seemed to. He said, ‘Suit yourself,’ but he had smiled.

  ‘But of course your brother,’ she said.

  ‘He never goes to anything at a church. He hates to dress.’

  Peter did some understanding, too. ‘You know I will always love your father. If I thought you’d be hurt if I got married, if I thought you wouldn’t understand?’ Peter had smiled. ‘You do understand?’

  Peter gazed out the window over the scrubby sagebrush past the schoolhouse down to the river and to the clump of willows where he used to sit planning and watching the moon. ‘I understand.’

  The stilted cast of his speech had long perplexed her, his ‘of course,’ his ‘for instance’ — and so did his calling her Rose. She would not question his motive, maybe fearing his answer, that it might reveal some inferior sort of love for her. In fact, the name Rose more closely fitted his image of her, more the beloved than the mother, the sole object, after the death of his father, of his strange affection, the single remaining subject of the scrapbook that had served him as guide and Bible for five long years. He felt no jealousy of George Burbank, or, if he did, it was as controlled and as impersonal as his hatred of those who might attempt to destroy his private images. Marriage would simply make possible for her what she deserved long before he himself could ever make it possible, and her getting what she deserved was all that mattered to him. Marriage would remove her forever from the Red Mill where she served those he loathed and scorned, where she must parry the drunken remark and the insinuating smile because she must make a living, secure a future for him who longed only to make a future for her. Sooner than he had dreamed, she would travel dressed in fashions from Harper’s Bazaar, drive a Lincoln or a Pierce, take a stateroom on an ocean liner, and arrange fresh flowers.

  The hours before the wedding his mother remained in a room at the Herndon House and George took him to Green’s to buy a suit.

  ‘Fix this young fellow up with whatever he wants,’ George told the man, and Peter smiled when he saw George take a quick look at himself in his own new blue serge, and draw in his stomach and take in his new belt a notch. ‘Your mother wants us to have our dinner alone,’ George said. ‘Guess she wants to get all fixed up and surprise us. Goodness, but doesn’t she always look so pretty!’ They ate at the Sugar Bowl Cafe. ‘Now you go ahead and have anything you want. Me, I always have the fried halibut when I go out. It’s sort of a little change. But you hop to it and have anything you want.’ Never before in his life had Peter had all the chili con carne he wanted. ‘Fix the young fellow up with another bowl,’ George told the waitress. ‘This is a kind of celebration for us.’

  Peter was the only guest at the wedding and properly so, he thought, for he was the only other principal involved. He liked the array of roses George had bought and the fussy woman at the florist’s had arranged in the brass pots on the altar. He was honestly touched that George had made so sentimental a gesture and scarcely breathed through the marriage service and merely moistened his lips when George took his mother’s hand and slipped on the wedding band; but his heart leaped when his mother turned and smiled and touched and arranged and fixed the fold of her dark blue traveling suit, as easy and elegant a gesture as he’d ever seen — heartbreakingly beautiful — the gesture of the charming, the enchanting, the rich Mrs Burbank. She walks in beauty, he quoted from his father’s books. She walks in beauty, like the night.

  He must have one of those roses later on. A few pressed petals would make a good entry for the last page of the scrapbook.

  Rose found a Mrs Mueller in Herndon, a dietitian at the hospital, a clean, starched, ambitious woman who was glad to give Peter room and board for the remainder of the school year.

  ‘I’ll try to come to you every weekend,’ Rose promised Peter. ‘And maybe sometimes you might like to come to the ranch? Won’t that be fun?’

  He thought it wouldn’t, but didn’t say so. He smiled his faint smile and took her hand. Thus he was removed from Beech where he had been taunted and avoided as the spawn of suicide. At the school in Herndon there was a real library, courses in chemistry and physics. ‘This is a pleasant room,’ he said.

  ‘Peter,’ she said, ‘sometimes I think you don’t listen to me. Do you listen to me? I never can tell what you’re thinking.’

  ‘I’ll pay more attention,’ he said. He thought what a relief it was to have to think now only of his own future. ‘Say hello to — George.’

  ‘I know,’ she said. ‘It’s hard for you to know what to call him, isn’t it? But he wants so much for you.’

  Rose remembered the cold the first few moments in the ranch house. George’s brother stood in the middle of the room as she and George walked in from the winter afternoon; she had waited on the steps while George drove the old Reo into the garage; the sound of the exhaust of the electric light plant smacked against the hill out front. The ranch dogs, alerted by the mutter of the car and the flash of the headlights had barked and come running around the house and now whined and leaped at George as he trudged back from the garage carrying suitcases. These he set down, and opened the door. Rose went in first, and there was the brother standing in the middle of the room.

  ‘Hello
there, Phil,’ George said. ‘You remember Rose.’

  ‘Oh, hello there,’ Phil said.

  ‘Something wrong with the furnace?’ George asked.

  ‘Search me,’ said Phil.

  It was a huge room and sparsely furnished, for the Old Lady and the Old Gent had gone away with chairs that left yawning spaces; there had been no rearrangement of furniture since their departure some years before. They had left behind the Navajo scatter rugs they had introduced from time to time as fitting in a ranch house, but the Indian motif had never been able to clear the air of disappointed elegance. The fire was laid in the fireplace, but unlighted. Over it the portrait of the Old Lady stared down with her Boston look, the eyes level on Rose wherever she moved.

  ‘Well, I’ll go down and shake it up,’ said George.

  ‘We had such a nice trip,’ Rose said.

  Phil said, ‘George, the Old Gent wrote. Stage brought the letter this morning. There’s a deed he wants I can’t lay my hand to. Mind looking around for it?’

  ‘I reckon that could go till morning,’ said George.

  ‘I been waiting around here for you all day,’ said Phil.

  ‘Rose,’ George said, kneeling by the fireplace and touching a match to the kindling. ‘Come over here and get warm. I’ll go below and shake up the furnace.’

  ‘I’m perfectly all right, perfectly warm,’ Rose said, but moving over there. She was terrified at being left alone.

  ‘No, I’ll just go below,’ George said. ‘Be a minute.’ He watched a moment while the small fire of the kindling lapped weakly at the tough, resistant bark of the green logs, then he turned and walked out through the big dining room with all the heavy, crouching mahogany furniture. Rose heard a door open and close, and steps descending.

  She was to know that basement well, that basement that flooded every spring; the rising water, slick with oil that leaked from the water pump, found out the dwellings of mice who drowned and floated bloated and belly-up in the small light that seeped through the ground-level windows. She heard a frantic rumbling down there, then the excruciating scraping of shovel on concrete that made her flesh crawl, then the clank of an iron door. Smelled coal smoke.

  She could not control her trembling, nor forestall the beginnings of an unusual headache. Phil had seated himself close to the fringed lamp on the table in the middle of the room and held a magazine at a painful angle to catch the required light; when Phil read, his lips moved. She felt that the silence was bound to be worse than anything she might say, but her light voice caught in her throat. ‘Well, brother Phil,’ she began, ‘it’s good to be here.’

  His lips continued to move, reading. Then he looked up from the magazine directly at her and smiled. He smiled as already George’s heavy steps ascended the still-unknown stairs, and Phil continued to smile, and then said clearly, ‘I’m not your brother.’

  George entered. ‘I heard you two talking together,’ he remarked pleasantly. As he spoke, the kitchen door opened and Mrs Lewis, humming something mournful, lumbered in to set the table for three.

  After supper Phil read for a time close by the lamp; then he rose abruptly and marched down the hall to the bedroom, closed the door behind him and got out his banjo and tuned up. He had to smile, had to smile thinking of George coming into that house with this woman, trying to make things smooth. How had he said? You remember Rose? That was it. What kind of a name was Rose! The name of somebody’s cook. He had to smile, had to smile thinking of George down on one knee before the unlighted fire — a little disappointed that Phil had not lighted it before their arrival, that the room might be all comfortable and welcoming. Ha-ha-ha. George should have known Phil better than to think he would do something he didn’t feel. Phil had to smile thinking of the sidelong glance Rose gave him at the supper table. He knew how he looked, knew it would get her goat. It used to get the Old Lady’s goat, the rumpled shirt, the uncombed hair, the stubble of beard, the unwashed hands. She might just as well get smart to the fact that he didn’t do things like other people because he wasn’t like other people, that he left his napkin pointedly untouched, reached for food rather than asked for it, and if he had to snuffle his nose, he snuffled. If the fancy relatives back East could stomach it, God knew this woman could, and if she was unused to a man’s leaving the table without first bowing and scraping and saying ‘Excuse me,’ she might just as well catch on now. Oh yes (he had to smile) she was in for a few surprises.

  He had her figured, had her figured from the first time he sighted her, knowing her as one who doubted herself too much to dare put a wedge between him and George by repeating what he’d said about not being her brother. She’d be pretty careful not to test George, risk his anger, tamper with his feeling for family because George was her meal ticket. And suppose by some chance she did whine, what good would that do her? The house was his as much as George’s, the money as much as George’s, and the ranch so set up you couldn’t split it without causing financial troubles, water rights, grazing lands and so forth. If she looked for trouble, she’d really be in the soup. He could see her now, coming into that house for the first time that late winter evening in a new getup that George had doubtless bought her, scared to death.

  Phil made no bones about it that he often laughed and talked to himself — ‘keeping hisself company,’ as he put it. It amused him to repeat the speech of those who amused him, to savor it. And now in a chillingly accurate female falsetto he imitated Rose. How had she put it? We had such a nice trip. Phil could imagine about how nice the trip had been, the wind and snow finding spaces between the side curtains where the grommets had torn out. Feet half frozen, hands too stiff to move, aching with the cold, the weak lights of the old Reo playing out over the frozen ruts. Phil had, furthermore, absolutely no use for people who tried to make conversation, knowing it as a ploy people used to make themselves feel adequate and to ingratiate themselves. She knew she didn’t belong there among Burbanks. Question was, how long would it take George to get wise to the fact?

  And then George’s coming up from downstairs, poking up the furnace and then coming up and saying, ‘I heard you two talking,’ and being satisfied about it. Oh, George was easily satisfied, all right. And the woman and Phil had been talking, all right.

  Phil cleared his throat, smiled and began to pick out ‘Red Wing,’ looking across the room at the empty bed. Beyond, in the darkness, was the butcher pen. They’d have to butcher pretty soon. Not much more than a hindquarter left in the icehouse.

  Suddenly Phil’s fingers were still on the frets of the banjo, and the fingers of his right hand were still, arched like a spider over the strings. His eyes darted to the light under the crack of the bathroom door between that room and the Old Folks’ room. George or Rosey?

  When the Old Folks had the big room on the other side, they had always unlocked the door of Phil’s side when they got finished in there, had finished their ablutions, made their ablutions, so if he or George wanted to sashay in there, they were welcome as flowers in May. Of course, Phil never did go in there, somehow uncomfortable with the Old Lady’s things, her scents and colognes, her Pears’ soap and monogrammed towels; the place had the offensive odor of women, and the Old Gent’s shaving mug and set of straight razors couldn’t fumigate it; it gave Phil a turn to come upon some filmy garment hung up to dry on a folding rack. You’d have thought the Old Lady would have kept those things cached and out of sight, and to hear her speak her la-di-dah language and to see her walk her proper walk, you’d have thought she’d have kept such stuff to herself. No, Phil used the lavatory down the hall, the stark, functional little room that smelled of functional soap and the damp gray roller towel. It puzzled Phil that George could have bathed in that other place while the Old Lady lived in the house, and now George was going to expose his body before this woman. Would he first douse the lights?

  Phil picked up his ears. Someone was locking the door between.

  Was it George who turned the key, or the woman? Mu
st be the woman, for after a reasonable length of time the door was not unlocked, as in the old days. Must be her hand that, instead, cautiously tried the knob so the door, so to speak, was locked against him. And you can bet your life that even if it were George who did it, it was the woman who was at the bottom of it. Phil lay there, rigid in the dark, thinking how the woman would go lie down with George and let him work away over her, and maybe get her with child.

  6

  Phil was two years ahead of George in college, and as a freshman made some kind of college history: half a million was a lot of money then, and by the time Phil was registered and walking to the dormitory in the California sun, the value of the ranch, via the grapevine, had perhaps doubled in the minds of the young men in the fraternity houses. The hick clothes he’d brought with him — the same he’d worn in high school in Salt Lake City — only emphasized that here was a fellow rich enough to ignore fashion, and he was invited to house after house and urged to pledge. Blandishments were heaped upon him, beer urged, cigars offered and the Egyptian Deities that some of the young sports fancied.

  And he went everywhere, wondering how far they’d go, sat in their leather chairs, his long legs crossed, poised and taciturn, inwardly amused at their small talk of baseball, motorcars; and he ignored the young ladies they brought over from a women’s seminary and paraded before him. ‘Like prize beef,’ he remarked later. Each group looked on him as a prize and suspected the other of taking some unfair advantage, anxious to pledge this fellow who would make it possible in time to come to add a wing, build a new house, refurnish the living room and — above all — to attract other young bloods of similar wealth, for wealth attracts wealth.

  On the final night of what they called Rush Week, when the freshmen made up their minds and wrote their choice on a slip of paper and dropped the slip in a box, Phil made his little bit of history.

  Naturally the young men at whose house he dined this last night felt it was their company he chose — why else would he be with them this final night? — and thus he found the president of the fraternity at his left hand, and a professor at his right. Those young men who worked their way through college got on their white jackets and served up the fried chicken and hot biscuits.