Stud Rites

by Conant, Susan

”I hope so,” Leah said, ”so you can play it tomorrow instead of all that gory—”

  I kicked her under the table. One of Betty’s tapes was about family pets stolen and sold to research laboratories. The video of puppy mills was so revolting that some of the people who’d caught sight of it on the monitor at the rescue booth had been unable to take in what they were seeing. Innocent and mystified, they’d peered at the screen and asked, ”What is that?” I’d found replies difficult to formulate. A chicken-wire cage crammed with the corpses of puppies, I could have said, or A broker who’s killing a dog while those two people wait to buy the meat.

  ”People need to see that,” Betty told Leah crisply. Although Betty was right, some of the other rescue people had lured me into a harmless conspiracy aimed at substituting tapes that would attract people to the rescue booth for the ones that they needed to see. Jim Kuehl was letting us borrow his tape of obedience bloopers, and we’d also lined up some films of long-ago shows. According to the plan, I was one of the people designated to eject Betty’s cassettes and slip in the appealing ones.

  Consequently, instead of minimizing my chances of success by focusing Betty on the subject of videos, I said brightly, ”Betty! Who’s that woman over there? The one at the corner table. She looks familiar.”

  So familiar that I even remembered her name—Michele Muldoon, Mikki as she was called—and had a good idea of why she’d chosen to eat alone. Her appearance, however, was so striking that I might well have chosen her in an uncalculated pick. She was a beautiful woman whose swept-back white hair was shot with fading red and whose face retained what I always assure Leah will be wrinkle-disguising freckles. I’d never met Mikki Muldoon, who came from the West. But I had frequently seen her picture in ads in the Malamute Quarterly, and had read and heard stories about her. She was a popular judge with what I’d been told was a flamboyant manner. As the judge, she appeared on the left in the show photos, usually with her feet hidden behind a large basket or pot of flowers, and maybe a pile of trophies—tote bags, tea sets, glass punch bowls, commemorative clocks—and always an announcement board with letters reading something like BEST OF WINNERS, PRAIRIE SCHOONER KENNEL CLUB. Truly, you’d assume from show photos that AKC judges share some grotesque podiatric disorder or a predilection for the kinds of ludicrous shoes that exhibitors wouldn’t want wrecking otherwise impressive pictures of big wins. Anyway, on the right, the smiling handler invariably stood behind the dog, who, being a show dog, usually looked suitably showy. ”Highly respected breeder/judge Mrs. Michele Muldoon,” as the ad copy often read, looked like every other judge in every other ad, except in one way: Instead of proffering the ribbon to the dog or the handler, she always looked ready to pin it on her own breast.

  ”That’s Mikki Muldoon,” said Betty as our food arrived. ”You know, she really should’ve had this assignment. She finished second in the poll. She deserves it. That’s what she’s doing eating all by herself. Just in case.”

  Judges, I might mention, do not fraternize with exhibitors before completing their assignments. They don’t have to imprison themselves in their hotel rooms, but they do maintain their distance.

  Leah, who must have been studying an out-of-date book, looked up from her steak. ”But that doesn’t mean she automatically gets—”

  Betty’s malamute eyes darted from Leah’s food to her face. ”Now it does. They changed the rule. Mikki finished second, so if she’s here, she gets the assignment.”

  ”Has anyone seen Hunnewell?” I asked. ”Do we even know he’s here? Maybe he isn’t, and that’s why—”

  ”Oh, he’s here,” Betty said grimly. ”Duke saw him checking in.”

  I said the same thing that everyone always said about Duke: ”What an incredible handler he is!”

  Equally unimpressed with Duke Sylvia and the salmon she’d ordered—creamed and, from the looks of it, canned, too—Betty edged toward my seafood casserole. ”Hah! Hunnewell’s not going to look twice at that dog of his. Duke told me so himself.”

  ”But I thought—” Leah began.

  Like Kimi anticipating the command to jump, Betty leaped to explain that Duke had not only been around long enough to remember James Hunnewell’s likes and dislikes, but was a genius at assessing judges’ preferences.

  As coolly as I could, I asked what Hunnewell liked. Duke Sylvia’s dog was a big gray male, Mal-O-Mine Ironman, that he co-owned with a breeder named Lillian Ingersoll, who was missing the national because she’d broken her shoulder so badly that she’d had to have surgery and was still wearing a clumsy, awkward cast, which, I might comment, couldn’t possibly have been any more clumsy and awkward than Lillian herself. Hence her injuries. And her reliance on Duke Sylvia. But back to Ironman, who, to judge from the photos I’d seen, needed Duke as much as Lillian did. Or let’s say that Ironman was totally different from Rowdy and that he was just not my type. And if Ironman wasn’t Hunnewell’s type? Maybe Rowdy was.

  ”SO WHAT is Hunnewell’s type?” I asked. Looking like a skeptical Buddha, Betty said, ”Well, ask Sherri Ann, and she’ll tell you it’s her Bear. The truth is, the dogs that were Hunnewell’s type all died a long time ago. Comet was probably the last dog that Hunnewell thought was decent, and Comet died... I don’t know. Fifteen years ago.” Perking up, she merrily remarked, ”Of course, that’s what’s got Freida worried sick.”

  Having picked out and eaten all the lobster, I was working on the shrimp, which were tough enough to justify the full name of the dish: Old Tyme Seafood Casserole. I swallowed. ”What is?”

  Shoving ahead of Betty in the conversational queue, Leah said, ”That Hunnewell’s going to withhold all the ribbons!” Unnecessarily, she added, ”For want of merit! Wouldn’t that be exciting!”

  Atlantic City: When the beauty queens have finished strutting and parading, the great moment arrives. The judges’ decision? That each contestant is more hideous and less talented than the last. No Miss America this year! Not even a runner-up.

  I glared at Leah. ”That would be humiliating to everyone here! It would be a nightmare for Freida and everyone else who’s worked so hard on this show.” Leah was, as usual, unchastened. ”Seriously, can a judge do that?”

  Betty said grimly, ”AKC wouldn’t like it, but when it comes to the merits of dogs, the judge’s decisions are final. Period.”

  Her hopes restored, Leah was bright-eyed. ”Does that ever really happen? That the judge withholds everything?”

  Neither Betty nor I could remember a single instance. If Leah had had a tail, she’d have wagged it. She could hardly wait to witness history.

  ”Leah,” I said severely, ”your attitude—”

  ”Is human,” Betty finished. ”Lay off her.”

  ”Fine,” I agreed. ”Let her find out for herself. But, Leah, I’m warning you: You walk into that ring with Kimi on Saturday morning, and you’re not going to think it’s so hilarious if—”

  ”I,” Betty interjected, ”hope that she does! Because nothing would please me more than to see someone having fun! Leah, thank you. And whatever happens on Saturday, you just remember that all it is, is one person’s opinion on one day, and not a darned thing more.”

  Timmy Oliver had snuck up on us while Betty was preaching. ”Well spoken, Betty!” he now applauded. Uninvited, he pulled out the fourth chair at our table and, evidently mistaking it for a horse, perhaps of the rocking variety, turned it around and straddled it-When he reached across the table to grab the basket of rolls, I half expected him to feed his pretend pony. Instead, after grubbing around with his dirty hands, he selected a cinnamon bun and, using a knife lifted from Betty’s plate, slathered it with butter, bit, and chewed. With his mouth open, too. I might mention that the restaurant was comfortably cool; it was a grill in name only and didn’t have a hot open kitchen or any other heat source to account for the flush and sweat on Tim Oliver’s face.

  ”It’s a lesson you might do well to remember,” Betty told him. ”One person’s opinion on one
day.”

  Tim Oliver smiled. His upper and lower incisors met in a viselike bite that had forced him to grind his front teeth until he’d worn the edges even. ”Exactly,” he told Betty. ”Good sport or none at all.”

  Tim’s subtle overemphasis of the phrase ”good sport,” in combination with his ingratiating manner and general air of sleaze, convinced me that he was going to hit Betty up for what I’d ordinarily call a favor. The word that actually came to mind was ”succor.” For the next five minutes, I listened to him go on with obnoxious enthusiasm about Z-Rock’s chances under Hunnewell and his own prospects in distributing a dietary supplement for dogs called Pro-Vita No-Blo Sho-Kote. I came close to asking Timmy whether the secret ingredient he kept mentioning actually was snake oil. Leah had inched her chair back from the table and was gazing silently at Mikki Muldoon. I kept waiting for Timmy to try to enlist Betty, and possibly me, in a Pro-Vita No-Blo Sho-Kote pyramid scheme, but what he finally got around to oozing was the request that Betty tell the hotel that his camper was hers so he could leave it in the parking lot all night. As we’d been repeatedly informed, motor homes were allowed in the parking lot only if they belonged to people registered at the hotel. They were absolutely not to be used for sleeping. A few People, I thought, broke the rule. That morning, I’d noticed four or five of the big, long campers parked unobtrusively at the far end of the lot, but so far as I knew, the management hadn’t staged any midnight raids.

  ”Oh, for heaven’s sake, Timmy,” Betty told him, ”go to the campground! It’s only ten minutes from here. If they catch you sleeping out there and your camper’s listed on my room card, they’ll come banging on my door in the middle of the night expecting me to let you in!”

  Tim Oliver wasted another few minutes wheedling and whining, but Betty held firm. His scheme having failed, he departed. Between bites of the scallops I’d rejected, Betty predicted that Timmy would find someone else to lie for him. I listened in silence. Although I had no reason to believe that Tim was one of the people whose words had caused Jeanine such pain, he struck me as exactly the kind of person who’d go around talking about ”Betty’s mongrels” and ”trash dogs.” If Betty had heard the phrases, however, she obviously had not identified either voice as Timmy’s. On the contrary, it seemed that Betty was his defender. Although I kept my opinion of him to myself, Betty tried to change it. ”You didn’t know Timmy when he was a kid,” she said. ”He needed a lot of help, and everyone watched out for him and gave him a hand. Elsa Van Dine, among others. Elsa really took him under her wing.” With the universal affection of the dog fancy for junior handlers, Betty added sadly, ”When Elsa took to someone, she could really be very generous, and Timmy wasn’t so full of himself then. He wasn’t a bad kid at all.”

  When the waiter offered coffee, Betty refused, but Leah and I accepted, and all three of us ordered the same dessert: chocolate mousse. Leah and I commiserated about Rowdy’s and Kimi’s rotten performances in obedience that morning. We comforted ourselves: Of the seventeen dogs in the trial, only four had qualified. If we’d washed out? Well, so had the bitch I’d considered Rowdy’s serious competition, Vanderval’s Tundra Eagle, C.D.X., whose score I will tactfully not report lest anyone ask, ”Oh, and what was Rowdy’s?”

  Betty stood up. ”I am beat,” she announced. She looked it. Furthermore, she hadn’t finished her own chocolate mousse, never mind anyone else’s. Like Kimi stealing a hunk of raw beef, however, she snatched the check, refused to give it back, and even said what Kimi virtually says, namely, ”This is my treat!”

  Leaving the grill, we followed a maze of corridors and stairwells, both up and down, and eventually dropped Betty outside her room and continued to our own, which was at the exact opposite end of the hotel from the exhibition hall and the outdoor grooming tent, but conveniently near the stairs to an exit to the back parking lot. Our room was much larger than I’d expected, with a couch, armchairs, side tables, a large-screen TV, a desk, two king-size beds, and lots of floor space left for Rowdy’s and Kimi’s crates. The Hawaiian theme so overwhelmingly prevalent in the public areas was mercifully absent. The room was clean, beige, and bland, with nontropical bedspreads and framed prints of distinctly non-Polynesian chickadees and cardinals. The windows overlooked the rear parking lot and a stretch of New England field with woods at its far end. Furthermore, until Leah cluttered up the bathroom with enough cosmetics to do the makeup for the entire cast of all three Star Wars movies, it was a model for what I’d love to have at home: big sink, long counter, unstained tub, white tile, and new grout.

  Except for their forays in the obedience ring and a couple of bathroom trips, Rowdy and Kimi, who are used to vigorous daily exercise, had had the kind of crated day that animal-rights extremists imagine as the show dog’s life sentence.

  ”Hey, buddies! Let’s go!” I opened the crates. ”Leah, they need to go out. Besides, uh, something ugly happened. I need to talk about it. Come on!”

  Leah was reluctant. Our room fascinated her. My cousin had a pop-culturally deprived childhood: no Public school, no white bread, no comic books, no Sitcoms, just year after year of Montessori, seven-grain loaves, and Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. Chauffeured horn eurythmics to Suzuki to conversational French, she barely knew she was American at all. Her parents’ idea of fun was to sit around the dining-room table correcting the proofs of her professor father’s latest book. Instead of traveling to Disney World, her family visited the birthplaces of obscure composers and made pilgrimages to the graves of minor poets. Leah got dragged on so many tours of Olde Sturbridge Village and Plimoth Plantation that the phrase You are now entering... sends her into a violent paroxysm of yawning even when there’s not a spinning wheel or a Hadley chest in sight. More to the point, she always got stuck on foldout cots at quaint country inns where the rooms were hot in the summer and cold in the winter, and where the bathroom was a converted closet with a metal shower stall and a prominent notice explaining that as part of the management’s commitment to saving the planet, the hot-water supply was rigged to give out in three minutes. After a childhood in the black-and-white world of academe, Leah had only recently been snatched up, whirled around, and precipitously deposited in the Technicolor Oz of middle-class comfort. Harvard she took for granted; it was just home, only with more books and worse food. This hotel wowed her.

  ”Leah,” I insisted, ”I do not enjoy walking them together when it’s dark out and there are so many other dogs around. And there is no reason why I should have to make two trips.” I take care of all of our dog expenses, including entry fees and travel costs. That’s fair. The dogs are mine alone. I don’t trust co-ownership, which, in the AKC legal system, permits either owner to do just about anything except actually sell the dog without the other owner’s knowledge or permission. Not that Leah would sneak around breeding Rowdy and raking in stud fees, of course. It’s not Leah I distrust. It’s the whole arrangement.

  As we descended the stairs and crossed the parking lot with the dogs, I gave Leah a full report of everything Jeanine and Arlette had told me. When I repeated the denigrating phrases, I kept my voice low, but I had to persuade Leah to subdue her exclamations of outrage.

  ”These bastards couldn’t have known Jeanine’s history, of course,” I commented. ”And I’m not even all that sure that it’s relevant, anyway. You don’t have to have been raped to be supersensitive to cruelty.”

  ”But, Holly, these people didn’t care one way or the other! People like that don’t give a shit whose feelings they hurt just as long as they hurt someone’s.”

  I agreed. ”And damn!” I added. ”The adopters were our guests. Great hospitality we offered!”

  ”But now that it’s happened, what are you going to do about it?”

  ”For the moment, nothing, really. Just not overreact. That’s why I don’t want Betty to know. I’m afraid she’ll fly off the handle, and I really think that creating a big hullabaloo about it would be counterproductive. The point here is to pr
omote a positive image, and a major fuss would be so negative. Also, this was just two rotten apples, and I don’t want the good people to feel as though they’re being blamed. The whole feeling was so warm; I hate to spoil that.”

  ”But you can’t just do nothing/”

  ”Oh, I’ll write about it, I guess. Not that it’ll do any good,” I added morosely.

  ”The pen and the sword and all that.”

  ”Right now, Leah, if I knew who those two people were, I’d greatly prefer the sword.” Then I switched to a happier subject by pointing to a row of five or six campers and trailers parked along the edge of the field like giant sled dogs hitched in single file. ”When we get rich,” I said, ”that’s what we’re going to have—a little house on wheels.”

  ”Bristling with luxuries,” Leah agreed. ”Kimi, leave it! Would you please refrain from consuming things that are not food! Or we won’t give you a ride in our lusciously decadent camper. You’ll be stuck home eating garbage and... Hey, isn’t it illegal for those to be here?”

  ”Only if you sleep in them.”

  Unexpectedly money-conscious, my cousin said, ”So people don’t sponge off the hotel.”

  On the grass at the edge of the blacktop, Rowdy squatted and produced. Ms. Responsible Dog Owner that I am, I pulled a plastic clean-up bag from my pocket and scooped up after him. As I deposited the waste in a nearby trash barrel, I said, ”Also so they don’t start their generators at six A.M. and wake up the paying guests.”

  Strolling past the enviable campers, Leah and I played at choosing ours. In the dim parking lot, all looked—and probably were—the usual dog-show-camper beige. A sort of stretch-camper the length of three limos was so intimidating that neither of us wanted to drive it. We rejected another: two people, two dogs, too small.

  ”I wonder if what’s-his-name’s is here.” Leah has beautiful enunciation. Highly educated people can be very embarrassing.

  ”Shh!” I hustled Rowdy away from the campers and onto the grass at the edge of the field. ”Tim Oliver. Probably. It’s possible that he’s talked Betty into telling the hotel that his camper is hers. She’s more softhearted than you might think. Oliver might’ve called her room or just showed up there and given her some story about how he doesn’t have the money to pay the campground because he spent it all on vet bills.”