by Tom Ryan
Little did I know we were about to face a challenge that would dwarf anything we’d faced during our entire winter.
Part II
Light over Dark
It is by going down into the abyss
that we recover the treasures of life.
Where you stumble,
there lies your treasure.
—JOSEPH CAMPBELL
16
A Heartrending Turn of Events
The secret of my success with the Undertoad was that when I came to town, I was completely captivated by the charming characters. It was as if I had discovered a community composed entirely of bit players from old black-and-white John Ford or Frank Capra movies. You know the kind. They were so genuine and gritty with their less-than-perfect looks, not like the supporting actors of today’s films. I watched with delight and studied them and got to the point where I could often predict their next moves, even if they couldn’t. It was as if I were watching a favorite movie for the fourth or fifth time. It wasn’t a job; it was mostly a pleasure.
Of course I had my trusted sources, too, and they clued me in on stories and taught me the lay of the land. I was an eager student with two eyes, two ears, and one mouth, and learned to use them accordingly. However, it didn’t take long to discover that in a city with a wide cast of supporting characters the star of the show was Newburyport herself.
She was beautiful, especially in the soft light of daybreak and sunset. She was mysterious, especially at night when secrets were forged and broken. She was seductive, and she evoked passions in her lovers: jealousy, rage, ownership. There were some who wanted to lock her up and keep her a secret, and others who wanted to let her breathe, to share her with the outside world. The lines of demarcation formed on the battlefield of gentrification fascinated me. But so did the age-old feuds between the natives and, in Newburyport’s case, even entire sections of the city.
The city had been divided for a long time. Many old-timers held generations-long grudges because they lived in the once-bedraggled South End (“down-along” in local parlance) and were looked down on by those who lived in the North End (“up-along”), while both were looked down on by those who lived on stately High Street. Where they met was the downtown. If you lived up-along, you didn’t go down-along, and vice versa, unless you were looking for trouble.
John Battis, a popular member of the city’s Greek-American population because of his letters to the editor, his commonsense political opinions, and his ability to play a mean sax, often waxed poetic about the old days. “When I grew up,” he said, “I knew there were certain parts of town I did not belong in and places I was not welcome. But it didn’t matter. It was a simpler time, and I just understood that that’s the way it was. I kind of liked it. Life was easy.”
But John was different from most. He loved Newburyport more than anyone I met. And it wasn’t just lip service. He’d taken a section of abandoned railroad that had devolved into a dumping ground, cleaned it up, planted flowers, and turned it into a little neighborhood park. Against his protests it was eventually given the name Battis Grove. I almost believe he wouldn’t have gone to the effort if he’d known it would be named after him. Recognition was never his motivation.
John was always doing things people didn’t know about. My favorite was a simple act of reverence. Each Memorial Day, geraniums magically appeared at the grave of Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist John P. Marquand. No one ever knew how the flowers ended up there, but I did. And it’s not as if John had known Marquand. As a matter of fact, in old Newburyport, with its antiquated caste system, they probably wouldn’t have crossed paths very often, and if they had, Marquand probably wouldn’t have given him the time of day. For he was a gentleman, and John Battis was but a “lowly” Greek American.
Marquand was buried in Sawyer Hill Burial Ground. It was hidden and somewhat exclusive, and many townies didn’t even know that it existed.
And yet John admired Marquand’s writing, and as a fellow son of Newburyport he thought someone should remember the late writer.
But John’s attitude, and his actions, stood in stark contrast to those of many of the old-timers who perpetuated the feuds of old Newburyport, with roots that ran deep enough to permeate many contemporary issues. To this day the best way to predict the mayor’s race is to figure out which of the two candidates people dislike the least.
John once told me that Newburyport was the only place he knew of where they could have a parade to celebrate a local boy made good—perhaps an astronaut landing on the moon, or a great athlete, or a movie star—and on the day of the parade the route would be filled with people telling you that in fourth grade the honored hero once stole a candy bar. Cannibal City. At breakfast one morning, as he repeatedly tapped my arm with the back of his hand while leaning in closer than I would allow anyone else to get (which he had the habit of doing), he said, “You are the only one I know who could get away with writing the Undertoad. You don’t have kids in school. You don’t have a job in town. You don’t have a wife. They can’t get at you.”
“They,” it was understood, was how old Newburyport operated. It was the damning rumor mill, the backroom deal, the threat against the landlord who dared rent you an apartment. If you weren’t for ’em, you were agin ’em. And if you were agin ’em, they’d do what they could do to stop you—which mostly turned out to be making your life miserable in as many ways as possible.
I learned local history from John Battis and an army of other townies, but I also learned a lot from the newcomers, the so-called carpetbaggers. From where I sat, I could see over both sides of the fence.
What I saw from my vantage point on the third floor of the Grand Army Building was that both natives and newcomers loved Newburyport and that on any given week a war of passions could break out about what to do with two dirt parking lots on the central waterfront, whether or not to accept grant money from the state that would make improvements but cheapen historic High Street, or whether or not to put bike lanes on city streets. Things that might not be a big deal in other places were divisive issues in Cannibal City.
New skirmishes sprang to life weekly—battle lines drawn, sides chosen, arguments made, aspersions cast. If a certain person stood on one side of the issue, I just knew that a certain other person would be on the other side, no matter what it was, simply because they didn’t like each other. Tip O’Neill once said, “All politics is local.” In Newburyport, all politics was personal.
It was a curious and passionate place, and I loved every bit of it. For a writer needs good stories to tell, and good stories need tension. I believe that Newburyport herself, the star of the show, loved it just as much. For as beguiling and outwardly beautiful as she was, she was also dysfunctional. What she wanted more than anything was to be fought over, because that showed her she was loved. And she was—both fought over and loved.
What she couldn’t abide was an inattentive lover, and that’s what I’d become.
Atticus and I returned home three months to the day after we had left. We had come back on occasion in the interim, but it was always a hasty trip to get out the latest issue of the Undertoad or to seek refuge from a storm. But it was clear we’d moved on with our lives, in spirit if not body. So when spring came and I returned home, I returned numb.
I was like a marathoner who suffered symptoms similar to postpartum depression. I had nurtured a dream, protected it, devoted all my energy to its care, and when it was over . . . when it was over, I was spent and empty. There was nothing else to chase after, no intensity of purpose, nothing more to surrender to.
Atticus and I had endured an exhausting, soul-satisfying quest, and we were returning to the mundane. We were back where we’d started, but it just didn’t feel right any longer. I was depressed.
Newburyport did her best to win me back over. She was a jilted lover who would do anything to keep me around. She dangled the
customary assortment of rascals, strange and incestuous bedfellows, usual suspects, good old political buffoonery, and the occasional hero in front of me. She tempted me with a mayor who was both inept and arrogant, industrialists who suffered delusions of grandeur, and a big-fish Boston billionaire developer who bought up nearly the entire downtown, held its future in his hands, and didn’t care enough about Newburyport to actually come to town.
Oh, how Newburyport tried! She showed me all these characters, knowing I could never have resisted the temptation to harpoon and lampoon them in the past. She assured me a good living and plenty to write about, if only I’d stay.
But it was too late.
Mary Baker Eaton, the grande dame of Newburyport political bloggers, recognized it. In her Newburyport Blog, she wrote, “I remember watching Tom at a Newburyport City Council meeting after that experience was over, and thinking to myself, The mountains have captured him. And they had.”
But I wasn’t the only lost soul. Atticus was having a hard time returning as well. After that first day on the beach, he was no longer himself. He moped about, often letting his head hang down. I chalked it up to his own form of depression and did whatever I could to cheer him up. We’d go for numerous walks each day and drop in on friends, and I made sure he got his favorite treats. But nothing helped.
Atticus stayed closer to me than ever. He developed the curious habit of touching his cool, wet nose to my bare leg. He did it in our apartment but did it even more out in public. When we walked down the sidewalk, he stayed by my side. He had no desire to lead the way as he used to. When we crossed the street, he stuck as close to me as possible. In a crowd his nose would find my leg more often. When I sat at my desk, he’d often ask to come up and would lie next to my computer as I wrote. He was reaching out, looking for reassurance.
I worried about him but recognized the symptoms because I was feeling pretty much the same way. I had returned to a city I’d once had the pulse of, but now I felt like a stranger. All I had, it seemed, was what he and I shared in the mountains.
However, it turned out that Atticus was suffering from something much worse than mere depression. One morning I tossed a cookie to him. It landed on his blanket. I watched, stunned that he didn’t see it even though it was only three inches in front of him. I picked it up and tossed it again. He still didn’t see it.
Something was wrong with his eyes, his beautiful, beautiful eyes.
I called John Grillo’s office, and they saw us immediately.
John examined him and said, “Cataracts. He’s got cataracts.”
“But he’s only five years old,” I said. Immediately I thought of the hikes through the snow over the course of the past two winters. “Is it because of all the hiking through snow and the reflection of the sun?”
John Grillo had a sympathetic face—I knew it well from the last days of Max—and he assured me it wasn’t from the snow. I wasn’t sure I believed him. He pointed to sled dogs in the Iditarod race as an example and said there was no history of eye disease with them. He then referred us to Susan Hayward, a veterinary ophthalmologist.
Over the next twenty-four hours, Atticus’s eyesight deteriorated rapidly. He bumped into furniture, tripped over curbs on the street, and had a hard time following me through a crowd.
The next night the phone rang. It was John Grillo. He told me there was something wrong with Atticus’s blood and it took precedence over the cataracts. He had tested positive for hyperthyroidism.
“What does that mean?” By the tone of his voice, I knew it couldn’t be good.
There was a pause on the line before John spoke again. He said that canine hyperthyroidism was very rare and then said something else, but I couldn’t hear him. I mumbled a few things, regained some footing, and asked, “What causes it?”
Another pause. He sounded tired when he spoke again. “Hyperthyroidism in dogs is nearly always associated with thyroid cancer.”
I asked John if he could do another test, and he said he would. That’s all I remember before my world went black. More words were spoken, but they were a mere fog. Atticus was sitting on my lap with his head against my chest. I’m certain he heard my heart breaking.
A month before, he was leading me over mountains, and suddenly he was going blind, and it appeared that the little dog who raised thousands for the fight against cancer had it himself.
Word spread rapidly. The little dog who had mesmerized much of a city with his adventures in the mountains was sick.
One of Newburyport’s own was hurting. So was the man who lived with him.
People reached out, and the answering machine filled up quickly and frequently, because I didn’t want to talk with anyone. There were hundreds of e-mails to respond to. Everyone wanted to know what was wrong with their friend Atticus.
I was strong for Atticus but collapsed in every other area of my life. Instead of talking to people, I used the e-mail chain I’d started during the winter to give them updates.
Soon the hiking community heard the news, and they responded as well. More e-mails, more cards, more calls of assurance telling me they’d help however they could. Whatever the Little Giant needed, they’d be there for him.
As for Atticus, for the first time in his life he was lost. He wanted nothing but to be with me and to be held. We went to Moseley Pines and sat in our favorite grove two or three times a day, his nose constantly seeking out my leg. There were days I had to redirect him so that he wouldn’t walk into a tree or get tangled in the bushes. For the first time since he’d arrived in Newburyport, the squirrels of Moseley Pines didn’t have to worry about being chased.
The second blood test showed the same results.
Grillo’s assistant called and told me that an ultrasound specialist was making a special trip to their office and bringing a portable machine. They would use it to look for the tumor, or tumors, they expected to find in Atticus.
That afternoon Atticus and I stopped at Jabberwocky Bookshop to visit our friend Paul Abruzzi, the manager. He’d always treated Atticus well, as had Sue Little, the owner, and the entire staff, and he suggested we might get some help from an unlikely source.
Every two years or so, a group of Tibetan monks spent a few days at Jabberwocky building a sand mandala. They were coming that week, and Paul suggested I bring Atticus by to see them. “He should meet Geshe Gendun.”
I didn’t know anything about Geshe Gendun, but I was game for anything that might help.
I liked Geshe Gendun the moment I saw him. He had a kind, round face, and he liked to smile. There was a genuine and gentle spirit to the man. I was curious about his life and learned he was my age, born in Tibet in 1961, that he had escaped to India in 1963 and had become a Buddhist monk when he was only eight years old. His Holiness the Dalai Lama had ordained him in 1981. And so it came to be that a little floppy-eared dog from Louisiana and a Tibetan monk sat facing each other.
Geshe Gendun sat in a chair, wearing his colorful robes. Atticus lay naked like a sphinx at his feet. Both were very serene. Geshe Gendun smiled warmly, and Atticus met his gaze through his cloudy eyes.
The monk spoke so softly I couldn’t hear him. It was as if he were whispering a secret to Atticus, and the way Atticus looked up at him, it was as if he understood every word. Geshe Gendun slowly moved his hands in the air around Atticus’s throat and his shoulders, then touched him gently. This went on for a couple of minutes, and then, as quickly as the union between the two of them had begun, they went their separate ways—Atticus back to me and Geshe Gendun back to supervising the building of the sand mandala. Not a word was spoken. As the monk left, he gave me the slightest nod of his head with a knowing look in his eye.
I won’t pretend to have a clue what happened between Geshe Gendun and Atticus, or if anything happened at all. The reporter in me told me to be suspicious of such things, but the man who had rediscovere
d the wonders of nature and had grown so close with a special little dog wouldn’t discount anything. At worst I figured we could add one Tibetan monk to the number of people who were praying for Atticus—which seemed to be at least half the city by that time.
Twenty-four hours later, in a starkly different setting, my heart broke again to see a couple of John Grillo’s vet techs holding Atticus down on a cold steel table. John and the specialist came into the room.
“Thank you for getting here so quickly,” I said to the specialist. “I understand it’s usually a longer wait.”
“Yes,” he said excitedly, “it is. But this is rare, and I wanted to see it.”
As he spoke, he shaved strips of hair off Atticus’s throat, chest, and belly. Everyone else in the room was quiet, perhaps a bit tense.
When the specialist turned the machine on and slid the probe along the shaved areas, everyone leaned in to see the tumors. The specialist was in his glory, and the rest of us watched. I suppose I was the only one who was truly nervous about what they’d find, and John Grillo and his techs were probably more curious than anything else, but I told myself they were also rooting against what they expected to see.
First the probe slid along Atticus’s throat, then down to his chest, then his belly.
I was led to believe we’d see something pretty dramatic. But the specialist looked a bit confused, as if there were something wrong with the equipment. He adjusted some knobs. The excited smile faded slowly from his face. He tried a different angle, thought he saw something, then looked disappointed when it was nothing. He kept going over the shaved areas. He gave us a play-by-play. “Nothing there . . . No, nothing there either . . . Um, what do we have here? Oh, nothing. Nothing there either.”
He continued to search and continued to find nothing. He actually looked disappointed and while I was thankful he’d squeezed us in as quickly as he had and was happy that he wasn’t finding anything, the more disappointed he grew, the more I wanted to punch him. God, how I wanted to punch him.
