Bespotted: My Family's Love Affair With Thirty-Eight Dalmatians

by Linda Gray Sexton

  My mother’s parents raised and showed Old English bulldogs—so perhaps for me, owning and raising beautiful show dogs was preordained. After my grandparents’ death, an enormous silver punch bowl, which was engraved with both the names of the kennel club who sponsored the show and the winner, graced the buffet in our dining room, holding the plethora of Christmas cards that came through the mailbox slot in the front door every year, rather than the more traditional eggnog for which it had surely been designed. When my mother died, I inherited this bowl and, initially, used it for the very same thing. Now I display it on the living room bookshelves along with all my other dog trophies: it was the first in a nice long line.

  My father, too, wanted a dog, one with whom he could play as he had played with his childhood dogs, a dog big enough to be a “dog” but not as big as a pony. And so, finally, in 1962, my parents gave in to our whining and brought home our first. Clover was a lively Dalmatian, just as warm and affectionate as I had hoped, though she wasn’t allowed to sleep on my bed, as I had fantasized. She came from a farm in New Hampshire close to Maxine Kumin, who spent her summers away from her own suburban neighborhood beside ours.

  Our town, Newton Lower Falls, had been named for the waterfall that separated it from Newton Upper Falls, and its river divided it from the upper-class town of Wellesley; the Fig Newton cookie was named for the town, which was near the biscuit factory that manufactured it. There was no supermarket, barbershop, or pizza place. Just a liquor store that my grandfather owned for a while and a drugstore where we went for Hershey bars and the chewing gum that came in slim packs of baseball cards, which we girls traded to the boys for pieces of the flat pink bubble gum.

  I remember Maxine as a big Dalmatian fan, but in any case, her Caesar was bumptious and fast with a thrown ball. Joy and I loved playing with him. When the breeder who had whelped Caesar had a girl up for sale, my father, a softie underneath all his violence toward the squirrels, listened to our entreaties and bought her for us as a surprise. In this way, Clover joined our band of six, my mother and father, Joy and me, and the cats.

  My sister and I loved Clover’s moderate number of black-and-white spots and her soft brown eyes that were so welcoming. She had a narrow head that made those eyes particularly luminous. Immediately, I fell in love with the beauty of the Dalmatian breed and did not want any other kind of dog, not even the “neater” ones owned by the families of some of my other friends. Belying the stereotype that all Dals were hyper with nasty temperaments, she was gentle and loving.

  Every morning, Clover cuddled up on the worn red chair in my mother’s writing room, pleasing her mistress with some friendly company as Anne clacked away furiously on her beige manual typewriter and endlessly revised the poems that were already making her famous. Clover was the first in our family’s long affectionate relationship with the breed—a dog with the “soulful” eyes my mother found so irresistible. Sparkling under our praise and love, she was the perfect pet for a home with two growing children and a stay-at-home, lonely mother-poet.

  Another of Clover’s favorite activities was to sit in the middle of our street, holding her paw up to cars that came to abrupt stops in front of her. The year I turned nine, and sometime close to when she turned two, she also developed a wanderlust that often took her far from home. It seemed my parents were always searching for Clover in my mother’s Volkswagen Bug (nicknamed the Blue Jewel) or my father’s black Buick Electra (a company car that he hated to use for transporting the dog even to the vet, as her white hairs penetrated the upholstery and clung to whomever had the misfortune to sit in the passenger seat).

  “Clo-Ver,” they called in loud, singsong voices as they drove slowly through the neighborhood, usually just as dusk was beginning to fall and they at last realized she had been missing since early afternoon.

  She loved to roam over the golf course that ran behind our house, just on the other side of the railroad tracks, and my father worried (when he could worry about someone other than my mother) about the dog being hit by a train. This planted a fear in my heart. My parents never took Clover out on a leash because no one walked their dogs in those days, at least not in our neighborhood. Never once did they confine our beauteous wanderer to our nicely sized backyard by building a fence. The denouement of her freedom was not a surprise.

  It was a sunny autumn afternoon, probably in 1962, when I was nine years old. It was getting late, and the sun was just lowering itself to a slanted angle in the clear blue sky as we returned from the community play in which I held the starring role. It was an afternoon tinged with the success I’d experienced in a performance that had been applauded for a long time; an afternoon tinged with the smell of leaves burning, in the days before it was politically incorrect to pile them high and wide along the gutter and throw in a match.

  Our next-door neighbor, Les, came running into the front yard to say that Clover had been spotted down on the highway that bisected Newton Lower Falls from Auburndale. Route 128 was one of the new interstate superhighways, built just a few years before. It was four lanes in each direction, with cars speeding by in busy, tightly packed lanes. My father and Les went running, but it was already too late.

  I imagined her body spinning high into the air and then landing with a sickening, bone-crunching thump. I don’t believe my father even brought her home because she was so mangled. The police took her straight to the vet, perhaps, some place from where she could be disposed.

  Overwhelmed with grief, my mother picked up Clover’s china water bowl and threw it into the sink, where it shattered. We all cried, long and hard. My performance in the play was forgotten. We had lost our first companion animal, the one with whom we cuddled, the one who never failed to prick her ears for a photo opportunity, the one who first showed us what a true Dalmatian smile was, with her lips wrinkled up in a friendly, silly grin that showed her front teeth. Our first animal comfort, full of life in a house where death so often threatened.

  My father did not wait long to bring home a replacement, in an era when people didn’t allow themselves to fully grieve a dog before seeking another in order to recapture the bliss they had experienced with the first. We called her Angel, but an angel she was not. At four months old, she was still a cute puppy with loving round eyes and floppy ears too big for her head. However, she steadfastly refused to be housebroken, thus contributing to my mother’s general sense of chaos and loss of control. In those days, housebreaking was undertaken by using a thick layer of newspapers on the floor until the dog was big enough to go outside. We did not understand that we were teaching them only to poop and piddle inside the house from the very first day. No wonder Angel was such a trial.

  Even with Me-Me giving advice, and using a rolled-up magazine to smack her on the bottom, or shoving her nose into her fragrant piles—nothing seemed to work. She kept right on piddling and pooping on the newspapers spread, more and more abundantly, all over the kitchen floor. Needless to say, she wasn’t allowed out into the rest of the house, and because of this, we had trouble bonding with her. My mother had long since been brought to tears by what was seen to be Angel’s intractability. No more dogs to comfort her, no more warm presence in the red chair of her writing room.

  Me-Me, banging a pot with a spoon behind the puppy’s head, declared that she must be deaf. Deafness runs in the breed, but only at birth, and becomes evident as soon as a puppy’s earflaps open, at three weeks old. At that time, most breeders relegated such pups to the “farm” soon afterward, but somehow Angel’s deafness had escaped notice. When my parents took her to the “farm,” I imagined this to be some bucolic spot where deaf dogs could run free and not worry about being housebroken, but now I suspect that this was just a euphemism for the end of a vet’s fatal needle. Little Angel disappeared out of our lives, and we never had a chance to know her. I can’t really remember what she looked like, and there isn’t a single picture of her in the family scrapbook.

  three

  I MET MY THIRD D
almatian in the summer of 1964, when I was allowed to go off for my first year at sleep-away camp, a place where I learned to be independent. For a while, I had been begging to spend a month at Highlawn Farm, a girls’ horseback riding camp near Maxine’s summerhouse in New Hampshire. Her daughters had gone there for several years, so it was a place my parents felt safe in sending me. For me it meant freedom from the demands of my mother, whose mental illness increasingly pressed down on the family. At camp I didn’t have to take care of her, and I didn’t have to worry about her either. And at camp, best of all, there were horses.

  Highlawn was in the mountains outside the tiny town of Warner, which was basically just a crossroads with a small IGA grocery store, a post office, and a Laundromat. It was a working farm with cows and chickens raised in order to be slaughtered for winter meat and “outside” dogs that ran in a pack around the pastures with the small herd of sheep and goats and cows. A full vegetable garden had bird nets and staked tomatoes, which were later on the table fresh in summer and in winter from glass jars, whose seals made a pop when you opened them. A baler picked up the hay we mowed in careful rows and compacted it into the squares with which we fed the livestock.

  The horses were carefully bred in the paddocks, both mare and stallion supervised by the owners of the farm, introduced to each other at the end of leather leads, then the mare’s tail carefully pulled to one side so that the stud could enter her. All of us girls perched on the wooden fence rails like attentive sparrows, fascinated by this primal scene. The animal life around me was a relief from the interior life of the mind and the psyche by which life back in Massachusetts was driven.

  Foals had just arrived every year I attended. The breeding of horses was another connection to life, and so horses were now included in the adoration I felt for dogs, in much the same way they are for so many teenage girls, who are not yet ready for romantic love with a boy.

  In the aftershock of Clover’s death and the banishment of Angel, my heart was empty, ready for a new infusion of dog love, someone to curl at my feet as I did my homework at the kitchen table, someone to playfully hide his head between his paws in a favorite game of hide-and-seek. His name was Sherlock, for no reason I can remember, but he made an indelible impression as I arrived from Newton, homesick for Clover, if not for my mother.

  Sherlock was a striking young Dalmatian pup, and he immediately caught my attention. Like the more misbegotten Angel, he was also deaf, and he had been dropped off at Highlawn because of this handicap. Here he could run free and perhaps survive. Like Clover and Angel, Sherlock was lively and loveable. Perhaps loving Sherlock was really just another chance to love Angel.

  While the dog pack circled the campers warily—their main contact was not with humans—Sherlock let himself be petted and his ears fondled. He had a large black patch running from his left ear down over his eye, and this gave his face a delightfully lopsided look. I loved his soft black-and-white coat, the way his spots grew from the size of dimes up to the size of rough-shaped quarters, the way some of those spots stood singly and others ran together in slightly crooked lines, and of course, his ears of bold black. Apart from the patch on his face, he could have been a show dog, but I knew nothing about show dogs at that time and so knew only that he looked beautiful to me.

  At Highlawn, the ten summer girls were really worker bees for the owners, Liz and Ted and their family, and for the farm from June to August, a span that provided nearly all of the main income for the farm throughout the year. Winters were downtime; everything and everyone at the farm bundled up for the freezing wind and snow, the summer girls long gone home. Sometimes I was allowed to come with Maxine and her daughters to Warner during these quiet months at the farm, and we rode from Highlawn’s barn in air so freezing it numbed fingers without gloves instantly, as well as feet clad only in thin leather riding boots. The horses’ hooves crunched through the snow, and there was no cantering, but how happy I was for this precious time. And how grateful we all were for Liz’s generosity in warming us up over her dinner table.

  But those two summer months were not forgotten by a single one of us, and we pined to get back to camp full-time. For $200 a month—a sum our parents gratefully paid—we were allowed to take care of the animals and give riding lessons to those more wealthy, privileged girls who went to camps modeled on Teela-Wooket, those “real” riding camps that catered to richer families, where programs included horses and swimming lessons, archery and riflery, arts and crafts and tennis.

  But the way we saw it, we were the lucky ones because we had constant physical contact with the animals and a summer-long riding lesson as well. Every morning before the “customers” arrived, we mounted up on the ponies and horses we had fed and curried and hoof picked and tacked. While we disliked mucking out the stalls—boot soles matted with clumps of manure and straw—we took a perverse pleasure in it as well and just hated those interlopers whose names and numbers filled the grimy, ink-smeared lines of the appointment book.

  Hot afternoons were spent cleaning tack: our fingernails rimmed with dirt and greasy saddle soap, one thin dime assuaged our thirst with an ice-cold orange soda or root beer pulled up from the old-fashioned red Coke machine that stood in a corner of the grain room. It was only a matter of time before Joy’s lobbying to come to camp forced my parents to relent; she followed me to Highlawn after a couple of summers, just shy of when she was old enough.

  The riding ring, nothing but a dirt track encircled by a split-rail fence, threw up constant clouds of dust that coated our arms and faces. The haze created, lit by the high summer sun, made it hard to see without shading your eyes with your hand. Sherlock liked to stand with his nose through the fence, watching the horses curve around in their circle on the track, or he ran in and out, threading his way through their legs as their riders awaited their turn. No one took mind of him; he had become a fixture from the day he arrived. He had no fear of the large iron-shod animals, Dalmatians having originally been bred to run in the traces behind horse-drawn carriages and then to guard the passenger’s luggage and boxes during overnight stops at the inns along the way, town to town. It was a long time before the breed became associated with riding on fire trucks.

  The first month we learned something as simple as posting to the trot, but by the second year, we had progressed to railroad ties laid on the flat, carefully spaced to serve as cavalletti, or a fence crisscrossed at only eighteen inches high. And by the following July, it would be a broad jump at three feet and riding the far-more-difficult sidesaddle. Both Joy and I made steady progress, becoming extremely proficient riders over the course of a few summers.

  By my third summer, I got to pick a mount for myself alone, a magical experience that cost $100 extra, money I made babysitting rambunctious kids for twenty-five cents an hour during the school year. Instead of my favorite mare being worn out with the constant riding of others, she was fresh and all mine for the two months I stayed at camp.

  For eight weeks, life revolved again around the horses, the chickens who needed to be fed their corn, the goats and sheep who needed their hay spread out in the pasture, the dogs who begged for kibble in their bowls. Day to day, we did it all, and kept the calendar for the incoming customers as well, aiming the feet of little girls into their stirrups, straightening the reins of those our own age, and showing them all how to post up and down in their English saddles by giving them a boost with our hands.

  Secretly, we laughed behind our hands at how terrible all the incoming riders were. We took groups of adults out for trail rides, shepherding them through the woods over paths barely discernable to the eye, through the ferns, through the mud and streams, and through branches that sometimes had to be held back from one rider to the next in order to allow the line to pass. We liked this better than teaching in the long afternoons, which were hot and dusty and full of dull stupid girls kicking our beloved animals around the ring. Besides, on a trail ride, you got to ride rather than just stand there, yelling instruc
tions. It was a treat that enriched the day’s early morning lesson.

  There was a tribe of cats—kittens and mothers alike, led by the males—who served as main mousers for the barn, and were not fed at all, left to forage on their own. The dogs sniffed along hungrily, Sherlock at our heels, all of them waiting to be fed but hoping anyway that some sweet corn and grain would fall when we hefted the buckets and poured them into the horses’ feed boxes.

  I loved the way Sherlock joyfully sped willy-nilly over the acres of the farm, barking at the cows, pestering the goats by nipping playfully at their heels and making them run round in circles, giving the chickens a scare and stirring them up in a great flap of squawking and dust.

  As a latecomer, he didn’t really hang out with the pack of other dogs, none of whom I remember, and that made him even more dependent on humans. He followed us girls from activity to activity, interested, it seemed, in everything we did. He had to be restrained from following us into the woods when we took out customers for trail rides, and he wanted to be in—but was banished from—our sleeping area. However, when he was successful at getting past the counselors, he made a warm nest at our feet in our sleeping bags, where we lay on top of our shaky army cots.

  On the hot summer evenings, when we were taken to a nearby lake to swim, he was allowed to join us, a special treat, and he was the only dog taken in the metal bed of the pickup truck, where my eight compatriots and I held on to our butts and shrieked with laughter as we swerved and bottomed out on the ruts of country roads. Sherlock swam like a retriever and loved to jump from the muddy bank into the cool water, not hesitating to chase sticks or to swim out in deep water to the raft that belonged to someone we didn’t know and who apparently didn’t care that a bevy of girls used it as a place from which to dive.