Stud Rites

by Conant, Susan

  The Milestone chain being a microcosm of a balanced universe, here in New England the equally cavernous atrium, the Lagoon, was, as its name suggested, a sort of South Seas grotto, the focal point of which was a tropical lava-rock waterfall overhung by artificial coconut palms and set near a plastic-mahogany bar shaped like an outrigger canoe. The walls, papered in what I think was grass cloth, were festooned with exotic-looking paddles, feather headdresses, bunches of fake bananas, and so many ukeleles that if strummed in unison their strings could have drowned out the music being piped into the lobby: a Muzak version of ”As Time Goes By” with the synthesizer set to the sound of Hawaiian guitars.

  My room, however, was luxurious, and even if it hadn’t been, the Danville Milestone possessed the one advantage that offsets anything from outrigger bars and ukeleles to bathrooms with rusty baseboards and no hot water: It allowed dogs!

  Such was the gist of the violent complaint currently being lodged with the hotel manager by a red-faced man who brandished a clenched fist at the innocent-looking black announcement board built into the wall of the hotel lobby. The white plastic letters stuck into the grooves spelled out:

  Thursday, October 31

  The Danville Milestone Hotel

  and Conference Facility

  Aloha!

  Alaskan Malamute National Specialty

  —Oahu Room

  Luncheon and Meeting—Wahiawa Room

  Lofgren-Jenkinson Wedding Party

  Bachelor Dinner—Kailua

  Room Bride’s Dinner—Wahiawa Room

  ”Crystal plans her wedding,” boomed the man, ”a full goddamn year in advance! She checks out restaurants, she visits historical houses, she goes to hotels, museums—and she picks this place! And her mother comes and sees it, and then she drags Greg out here, and they drag me out here, and frankly, all this South Seas shit puts me off, but, hey, they’re going to Hawaii for their honeymoon, and Crystal’s crazy about the |dea... And this is the middle of last winter! Booked m advance! For three goddamn days! We got two dinners tonight, and we got the rehearsal tomorrow, and we got the rehearsal dinner, and then we got the wedding breakfast, and then we got the wedding and the reception, and NOW! Five minutes ago! Now, we pull in, and what do we find? This place booked ten months ahead of time, and you, you sneaky little son of a bitch, did not see fit to inform us that Crystal and Greg’s dream wedding was gonna happen in the middle of a fucking dog show!”

  I found the sentiment as shocking as the language. To have and to hold from this day forward, for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, till death us do part? You’ll never convince a real dog person that those words were written about a human relationship.

  ”Daddy, please! Mummy, make him stop!” The bride-to-be, Crystal, wore numerous layers of loose-waisted, flowing garments. Even so, it was obvious that at any moment, her father might have reason to regret his present loud display of temper: In terms of experience at whelping boxes, our national specialty was as good as a convention of midwives, and when it came to familiarity with multiple births, far, far, better.

  Daddy did not stop. And Mummy, a midforties, nonpregnant Crystal, with the same pert features and the same long blond hair, didn’t make him.

  The manager was heroic. ”Now, Mr. Jenkinson, let me assure you that there will be no conflict whatsoever. The two, er, events are scheduled for entirely separate and distinct facilities; and dogs are never under any circumstance permitted in the undesignated areas of this hotel.” As he spoke, he must have been employing some nonverbal technique he’d mastered in the Milestone’s management-trainee program, which, I became convinced, was staffed by Scottish shepherds, because, as effectively as a Border collie, the manager cut the bridal party out of the crowd in the lobby and herded together in a far corner the six members of the nuptial flock: Crystal, her parents, another couple about their age? and a young man who looked so frighteningly like a Ken doll that if Crystal’s condition had not suggested otherwise, I’d have wondered whether anatomy would permit him to consummate the marriage.

  As if preparing to flee the pen, Crystal lurked on the periphery of the group with her back toward the others. Catching sight of the only genuinely four-legged creature in the lobby, she stamped a foot and announced to everyone and no one that she, for one, didn’t mind at all, because she, for one, liked dogs.

  ”Greg? Greg! Greg, look!” She tapped life-size bridegroom Ken on the shoulder. ”That’s what I want!” Pointing to a malamute bitch so dirty that I’d have been ashamed to take her to the local park, the bride-and-mother-to-be announced, ”I want a husky! Greg? Greg, that’s what we should’ve asked for! We should’ve asked for a baby puppy!”

  Greg began to move his lips, but before sound emerged, his mother, as she obviously was (Ken in drag), intervened. ”Crystal, dear, you’re forgetting that Gregory is allergic to dogs.” As if pausing to permit a thought to travel across Crystal’s mind, she let five or ten seconds elapse before adding, ”And cats.”

  Folding his arms across his chest, Greg mumbled. I caught only one word. The syllables were distinct and prolonged: Mommmmmeeeee.

  Had the celebrants at my own rites been united not by a passion for dogs but by a mania for vipers, for instance, or stamps, coins, antiques, first editions, the French language, or the topic of alien abduction, the crowd in the lobby might have thinned. As it was, what held me held the other dog people. Crystal’s adamant I want! Mr. Jenkinson’s raised hackles? The challenge to another male, the dominant individual’s swift restoration of order, the maternal protectiveness, the whine of the young male... Oh, and the unplanned breeding, too. Dog people all, we’d seen and heard it before.

  Some of those in the lobby, of course, had business there: People waited in line to check in. The man with the dirty malamute wasn’t in line and didn’t have a suitcase. His name came to me: Tim Oliver. And his reputation: sleazy. I couldn’t remember whether we’d met or whether he’d just been pointed out to me. Perhaps in the hope of being mistaken for an American Kennel Club judge, Tim Oliver wore a navy blazer, but judges are usually tidy, and they don’t go around shedding dandruff flakes all over our nice clean dogs.

  As I was wondering whether to say hello to Oliver, the hotel door opened and in strode Duke Sylvia. He was a big, tall man who handled mostly Working Group breeds, a lot of Akitas and Danes, Siberians, Samoyeds, malamutes, boxers now and then; and mainly to show off, I’d always thought, also handled an unusually wide variety of other breeds when he got the chance—ridgebacks, bulldogs, and once in a while a toy, a Maltese, or a papillon. Duke was an ungodly gifted handler, one of the best I’d ever seen. Put Mario Andretti behind the wheel of an old VW bug, and maybe it becomes a Maseratti. Hand Duke a dog’s lead, you got a whole new animal. People swore that one time, on a bet, Duke Sylvia not only walked into the Pomeranian ring with a long-haired ginger cat, but won, too. The story must have been apocryphal. Watching Duke handle, you could still believe it. That’s how good he was.

  Duke didn’t have a dog with him now, just a leather suitcase in one hand and a metal tack box in the other. Although he was what my father calls ”a regular guy,” he was also what my grandmother calls ”a dandy.” He wore starched shirts, flashy ties, jackets fresh from the dry cleaner’s, creased pants, polished shoes, and heavy male jewelry: big rings, tie tacks, lapel pins, an ID bracelet, and a wristwatch with a wide metal band. His age? Over forty. Under sixty? He had thick gold-yellow hair streaked with white, like the mane of an aging lion, but treated with some kind of grooming product, maybe one of those conditioners that promise to eliminate tangles, mats, snarls, and static electricity while simultaneously moisturizing dry skin and imparting a pleasant nondoggy odor. As advertised, the effect was more controlled than greasy, and Duke’s hair matched the rest of him. He had broad features. Like a lion’s, his head was too big for his body.

  There was, however, nothing growly about Duke’s personality. On
the contrary, he was an affable guy with an endearing ability, unusual in our cult, to remember the names not only of dogs but, remarkably enough, of people, too.

  ”Holly Winter!” he called out. ”Saw your dad a few weeks back. Good to see him out and about again. Hey, Timmy, how you doing? You heard about Elsa? Damned shame.” Duke didn’t look particularly upset. He could have been remarking on the peaceful and natural demise of an elderly pet.

  Tim Oliver echoed Duke: ”Damned shame.” Matching platitude with platitude, he added, ”No-where’s safe these days.” Tim—Timmy, as the old-timers called him—had soft, unformed features, as if a childhood illness or a genetic quirk had prematurely halted his facial development. His hair was lank, his face flat, his ears large. The diminutive, Timmy, I thought, flagged a folk diagnosis of what a doctor might have recognized as a subtle syndrome with trivial consequences.

  When Duke had finished greeting six or eight other people by name and exchanging remarks with all of them about Elsa Van Dine’s murder and the damned shame of random violence, I started to approach him with a request for a favor. The Showcase of Rescue Dogs was set for seven o’clock that night. I wanted to persuade Duke to handle one of the dogs.

  Before I could slip in the request, however, Timmy Oliver snagged Duke and launched into a monologue about the merits of his bitch, whose name, as I overheard it, was Xerox, but, as Timmy went on to say, was spelled Z-Rocks. According to Timmy, Z-Rocks had easily finished her championship at a young age, was the bitch he’d been waiting for all his life, and—in a stage whisper—exactly James Hunnewell’s type. Duke took Timmy’s bid for approval with his usual air of calm amiability. I followed Duke’s eyes as they played over Z-Rocks, who, viewed as a show dog, seemed to me perfectly decent, but not outstanding. Also, her coat was in disgraceful shape.

  ”And wait till you see her move!” Tim exclaimed. Wait was what we didn’t have to do. Abruptly tightening the lead in his hand, Timmy Oliver went charging across the lobby with the astonished Z-Rocks doing her best to maintain a proper show gait despite the obstacle-ridden conditions of the odd ring in which she suddenly found herself. Directly ahead lay the invisible pen into which the Border collie manager had herded his distressed nuptial flock. To avoid a collision, Timmy came to a startled halt, and Z-Rocks, displaying a show dog’s nose for where power lay, dutifully posed herself before Crystal, who cried, ”Oh, you beautiful husky! I just love you!”

  Faced with rebellion in the pen and the presence of a wolflike creature just outside it, the manager lost control in a fashion entirely uncharacteristic of his breed. Raising an arm, he pointed directly at the father of the bride. ”Your daughter,” he boomed, ”was fully informed of the other event that would take place this weekend. She and I discussed it at length and in detail, and she voiced no objection whatsoever.”

  Silence fell in the lobby.

  ”Crystal,” bellowed Mr. Jenkinson, ”is that true?”

  ”It does sort of ring a bell,” Crystal admitted.

  ”A wedding bell,” I whispered to Duke and to Freida Reilly, our show chair, who’d appeared at his side. ”It’s a bridal party,” I continued. ”They didn’t know about, uh, us.”

  To the extent that a national specialty is any one person’s show, it is the chair’s. Within seconds, Freida Reilly had assessed the situation and was taking action. Freida had been trained by experts: Alaskan malamutes and AA. Pointing at Z-Rocks, Freida addressed Timmy Oliver in tones that suggested the implementation of an intensive rehabilitation program in which the participant is kicked down a flight of twelve steps onto a concrete landing: ”Timmy Oliver, you get her out of this lobby, and from now on, you keep her out of the areas of this hotel where dogs aren’t allowed. Out!” An ornate enamel malamute pinned to Freida’s heaving bosom appeared ready to leap off and, if necessary, enforce her order.

  Having dealt with Oliver, Freida, who looked exhausted, turned to the manager and the bridal party, and spoke calm words of conciliation. Everyone was here to have a good time, Freida said; no one had any interest in spoiling the fun for anyone else. Freida was a tactful politician as well as a superb organizer. She left unspoken the countercharge that their noisy, smelly wedding was going to ruin our lovely dog show.

  AT QUARTER OF SEVEN that evening, Betty Burley and I waited nervously for the start of our Showcase of Rescue Dogs. I’d written the script that would be read as our ten dogs were paraded around the ring, spotlighted, and presented with the same awards— white sashes—that would later go to the stars of the breed. The script was supposed to be sappy enough to bring tears to people’s eyes but not mawkish enough to bring their dinners back up to their mouths—and let me admit that even for a professional writer, attaining that precise degree of melodrama is far from easy. The ring was festooned with tiny white lights, and in the center was a white trellis that looked as if it belonged in a rose garden, but was surrounded by pots of yellow chrysanthemums. The lights and flowers were for the show-dog event to follow, not for our little showcase.

  ”Elsa Van Dine, poor thing,” Betty informed me, ”sent Freida an extremely generous donation specifically for flowers. Little did Elsa ever imagine...!”

  ”That she’d be sending them to her own funeral,” I finished.

  ”That’s a bit of an overstatement, Holly,” Betty replied. ”This is hardly Elsa’s funeral.” As if reconsidering the entire matter of Elsa and her generosity, she added, ”And, of course, Elsa did not send us so much as a halfpenny or whatever it is they use over there now.” Fifteen or twenty years earlier, I’d learned, the late Elsa Van Dine had married an English marquis, moved to Great Britain, and dropped out of dogs. Betty, Duke, and her other old friends, however, hadn’t seen her since she moved abroad and continued to use the name they’d known her by.

  ”And Elsa was a very wealthy woman in her own right,” Betty said, adding rather spitefully, ”for all the good it did her. In fact, I can’t help wondering whether Elsa hadn’t gone and rented some sort of flashy convertible, or whether she might have been wearing a mink coat or something else that attracted this mugger.” She sighed. ” ’Massive head injuries.’ That’s what Freida told me. Elsa would have hated that. She was a pretty girl. Very vain. Oh, well, at least it must have been over quickly.”

  ”Betty,” I whispered, ”there’s Sherri Ann Printz over there. This would be a good time to go and say a quick thanks for the lamp.”

  Sherri Ann was near the gate to the ring. She stood in a group that included our chair, Freida Reilly, who was about to walk in and take her place in the center.

  ”With Freida right there!” Betty exclaimed. ”Never! That is exactly what Sherri Ann has in mind, setting me up to create bad feeling with Freida. Nothing would please Sherri Ann more than to listen to me rub it in Freida’s nose that Rescue got the lamp that Sherri Ann promised her. I will not give Sherri Ann the satisfaction!”

  According to rumor, what was called the ”bad blood” between Sherri Ann Printz and Freida Reilly had originated a year or two earlier in what would’ve struck anyone outside the world of dog breeding as a nothing incident. Freida had wanted to breed one of her bitches to Sherri Ann’s Bear, Ch. Pawprintz Honor Guard. When Sherri Ann said no, Freida took the refusal as a gross insult to her canine lines and to her own reputation as a responsible, ethical breeder. Suppose that you’re traditional Chinese parents, okay? And an arranged marriage is proposed between your wonderful daughter and the splendid son of another estimable family. And his parents quash the deal. The implication? You’re not good enough. Neither is your kid. This was like that. Only far worse.

  Betty eyed the lamp, which was still with the antique wolf prints and the other valuable donations. Lowering her voice to a level audible to a mere twenty or thirty people, she confided, ”Tacky thing! Lowers the whole tone of the booth!” Although I’d never heard Betty express any admiration for Bear, it occurred to me that she, too, might have wanted to use him at stud and, like Freida, been flatly turned
down.

  The overhead lights blinked and dimmed. The announcer’s amplified voice boomed: ”Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Showcase of Rescue Dogs.” To take advantage of the power of first impressions, we’d given the number-one spot to what’s called a ”quality dog,” an obvious blue blood. The ”ahs” and ”oohs” rose above the announcer’s voice. Second was a sweet little female who’d been rescued from the puppy mill; third, a red-and-white male who’d been found with a metal training collar deeply embedded in the festering flesh of his neck. Our fourth, Helen, and the boy who handled her drew cheers.

  When Duke Sylvia led in the fifth dog, I thought for a second that sly old Duke had decided all on his own to boost the image of rescue dogs by slipping in a substitute for the one he’d agreed to handle for a timid adopter. The dog, Cubby, was one I’d placed with a woman named Jeanine, who was too shy to handle him herself. Three months before Jeanine had adopted

  Cubby, a man had broken into her apartment. She’d tried and failed to fight off the attack. Although the rapist was caught, Jeanine had remained terrified of aggression. She’d asked me for a big, gentle dog. Cubby was immense, a rangy, gangly creature with long, thin legs, a gigantic barrel chest, light eyes, propeller ears, and so many other faults that he might as well have had puppy mill via pet shop tattooed across his forehead. But he was as gentle as he was homely. He didn’t look gentle, though, and he was really, really big. I’d omitted Jeanine’s story from my script, of course. I’d also had to leave out the other interesting feature of Cubby’s history. Turned in by a man who’d bought him at a pet shop, Cubby had come with AKC papers. I’d run his pedigree—in other words, traced his family tree. As Cubby’s appearance suggested, most of his ancestors had been owned and bred by operators of wholesale commercial kennels in Missouri and Arkansas, in other words, by the people we aren’t supposed to call puppy millers in case they take offense and sue us. Four generations back, though, I’d found a dog with the kennel name Pawprintz, a male bred by Sherri Ann Printz and, according to the Alaskan malamute stud book register, owned by a G. H. Thacker. G. H. Thacker was, I’d figured out while running other pet-shop pedigrees, a USDA-licensed puppy farmer in Missouri, a woman named Gladys H. Thacker.