Highlawn had no programs for Red Cross life-saving instruction, or speed racing, or even perfecting a jackknife, just the enjoyment that came from washing the day’s thick layer of dust off our burgeoning young bodies in the soft, lukewarm water, which we let dry on our arms and legs as a way of cooling down in the summer night. And then it was time to go home. The smell of sodden dog fur filled the air in the truck, and as we went to bed and threw off our flannel sleeping bags, our hair wet our pillows, silky and cold against the napes of our necks.
It was not hard to fall asleep by nine, considering that we had to be up by five thirty the following morning. If you weren’t on barn duty, then you had kitchen or bathroom duty, either of which I found considerably easier than smelling manure at such an early hour. Breakfast was huge, with pancakes and bacon, platters of scrambled eggs and toast, and plastic pitchers of Tang. The cook, Sandy, large-bosomed and big-bottomed in her tight T-shirt and shorts, called us to chow with a metal triangle, hung from a back tree under which there were two rickety wooden chairs for Liz and Ted, whom we called by their first names in an era when all children addressed adults as Mr. and Mrs.
The place was casual and dirty. Sherlock, the only dog allowed in the house, skulked around under the long trestle tables, hoping for the tidbits that always fell haphazardly and also were offered from the hands of the girls who fed him surreptitiously, despite the rules. He could have grown fat on such treats but instead frisked around the stalls and the riding rings, chasing the barn swallows, the cats, and the heels of the horses.
When my parents came for visiting days that first year, my mother always made a point of searching out Sherlock and, despite his size, held him on her lap to cuddle, his back legs dangling. I once had a photo, now lost to time and disorganization, of her with him up against her cheek. Both she and Joy talked incessantly about adopting him and taking him home. This was not to be, as he was well loved by the farm’s owners, who would not consider placing him elsewhere because he was so sweet. I, too, was disappointed that Sherlock couldn’t come with us.
Those visiting days were nevertheless reassuring to me: I could see my mother was all right. Sometimes there were shadows clinging to her, but other times she seemed cheerful enough to laugh at all our antics. Once she even perched atop Maxine’s horse Xantippe, with her safari hat on her head. She and my dad inevitably came on the Saturdays when the farm hosted “shows” and there were classes galore: riders came from all around to compete in equitation on the flat, equitation over fences, hunter classes, and conformation. Every class had its ribbons, and no one won based on a judge’s good humor or a desire to pass the ribbons around to each camper or to the numerous guests from the other camps. When you won, you won, and my parents applauded hard.
I decided I wanted to be involved with horses for the rest of my life and become a serious rider, and eventually a breeder, running a farm the way Liz and Ted did. When I failed geometry in the tenth grade, my mother lugged me over to her psychiatrist’s office, where I explained that I intended to go into the horse business and would never need an ounce of mathematics. He smiled and advised me to keep my options open.
My mother continued to talk wistfully about adopting Sherlock and his funny, patched face. Sherlock was the runt of the litter and my mother loved runts, having considered herself one for the many years she believed she was the less favored child in her family. Even at Christmas, she voted for the smallest, most crooked tree in the lot. She was sure that Sherlock needed a home and that that home was ours.
four
IN 1966, WE TRADED in our old house in Newton for a new place in Weston, another Boston suburb. It came complete with a big kitchen and a mudroom specifically designed for dogs with wet feet. It was an upper-middle-class suburb, so it was a move into a better school system and what my parents saw as a “better neighborhood.”
It was to this house that Penny soon arrived—toted in by Me-Me through an uncertain route. My sister, my father, and I were ecstatic, even though Penny was someone else’s reject and had probably been abused. She was already a year old, and she ran away from the initial enthusiasm of Joy and me on her first day with us to vomit behind the shrubs lining the foundations of our spacious new home. Shy, tentative, and vulnerable, she initially trembled when we held her, as if waiting for the next kick in the ribs, and she was always afraid of men and brooms, leading us to speculate that perhaps a man with a long-handled object had abused her. Nevertheless, over time she became my father’s special dog, and eventually she settled in to the idiosyncratic nature of the Sexton household.
I don’t know how pleased my mother actually was at this new dog’s arrival. At close to a year old, Penny was not as cute as a puppy. My mother was partial to puppies, even though she was the one supervising the house training. Penny wasn’t a particularly pretty girl, either, with her eye trim an incomplete ring around the pink skin of her eye, instead of a proper thick black line. Her coat was sparsely spotted, and those spots that were there were not evenly distributed.
Penny had an annoying habit of whining endlessly, and it was often difficult not to spank her to shut her up. I remember feeling scandalized that I could even want to do such a thing, could feel such a way. But she was not the easy dog Clover had been. One day, with Penny left alone in the house for hours because my mother was once again in the hospital and my father was at work, I came home from school to find she had chewed off a corner of my father’s prized zebra rug. He had shot the creature on an African safari in the late sixties and taken the pelt home with him to be displayed on the living room floor, something I would later come to feel was repulsive. I had not yet come to my bewilderment at how my father could kill some animals and love others. Back then, I could only imagine his wrath, and so I spanked her until my hand throbbed, until she growled at me with a glint in her eye and I drew back, afraid and astonished at both her and myself. I didn’t know that I had that kind of anger in me—the kind that would allow me to beat (that’s truly what it was), even if only with my hand. I left the room ashamed, and I never did it again. I was horrified at myself, at what in that instant I had become—perhaps, temporarily, a person not so unlike my father, with his love of dispatching beautiful animals with his gun.
Every evening, let out for her last potty of the night, Penny would often refuse to come back in, not even to the lure of a dog treat. She stood, just beyond reach, and taunted my tired father, who wanted only to go to bed. First Daddy would whistle, two beats. She would come within twenty feet and sit, tantalizingly, and wait. He’d whistle again and again. No movement. “Penny,” he’d croon, “want a cookie?” Even that lure, the all-time bribe between human and canine, failed. Then she would shift just two feet forward, enough to make your heart rise with hope and then plummet when she stopped short.
“Cookie?”
And ten more feet.
“Good dog, good dog,” didn’t work either.
Eventually he would slam and lock the door against her, and she would sit whining under the porch light until I—my bedroom situated above the back door—would come down to let her in. And then the routine would begin again, with her just out of reach and me, now, begging her to come. At last, I would lock up again and go back to bed, this time with my head under the pillow.
It was up to Joy and me, young adolescents now, to teach Penny a few basic commands, like sit and down and stay. Though Clover had died on the road, once again the back door was always open—but Penny, fortunately, did not wander. We all relaxed, and the household melded together once again.
By this time, I had a firmly entrenched affection for dogs, for the way they set me free in love. There were no strings attached when dogs were the objects of your adoration. There was only loving aplenty coming back at you, even with the sometimes-frustrating Penny.
•••
Raising Penny’s litter was almost like being at Highlawn, and my mother’s good mood persisted, perhaps urged on by the mewling from the baseme
nt that gradually grew into small barks. The puppies eventually graduated from nursing to eating a mush made of cream of wheat and milk from a baking pan, climbing in headfirst and emerging coated in sticky sludge on those first few days of experimentation—but ferociously licked clean by the other pups, if Penny didn’t get there first. One by one, the pups were brought upstairs to the kitchen so that we could play with them, not knowing that we were actually doing something important: socializing them to loud noises and the busy activity of a family. My parents knew nothing at all about raising a litter and neglected to have their dewclaws removed early after birth—a small operation performed even more frequently these days, which saves a dog tearing off his useless vestigial fifth toe, up high on the front leg, later in life.
Although the opening of the puppies’ eyes was followed closely by the opening of their ear canals at about three weeks, my parents also didn’t know to test them for deafness—but Me-Me did, following them around with a pot and spoon and banging loudly to see which ones turned to the noise. Happily, all of them did. My parents and Me-Me knew nothing about what to do with deaf pups except to send them to farms, but they did get them their first shots before placing them in homes, charging $200 for each, an amount to which they now felt entitled, because though the pups had no papers, they were still purebreds.
We kept one from the litter, and Joy and I called her Gidget after our heroine Sally Field. We were still caught up in a whirl of canned television programs and frozen Saturday-night pizzas—not yet ready, as was so typical of the age back then, for boys and dates.
Gidget was one of the sweetest pups we would ever own. She was a beauty to look at, with evenly spaced spots and lovely, full ears. All her eye and nose trim were finished in the darkest black, and her eyes were a deep, deep brown. Her loving disposition led us all to adore her, though she bonded with Joy and me particularly. She seemed blessed with a halo of light, a lively dog, defying her mother’s aloof temperament, and she followed us from room to room, stretching out at our feet with a satisfied groan. She was our first Dalmatian to smile since Clover, a trait common within the breed, by lifting her lips in a grin of happiness.
At the time she turned a year old, her fur began to turn patchy and fall out. We nicknamed her “the pink panther,” for the pink-and-white patches that were invading her black-and-white spots.
However, after a while, it became a joke tinged with worry. Soon her skin became raw and oozing where she scratched at the itch relentlessly, but the vet was stymied about what to do. Eventually my father took her into the Angell Animal Medical Center in Boston for a consultation. We were given a variety of medications, none of which seemed to help for more than a month or two.
In June of that year, after we left for camp and while my parents were on their safari in Africa, Gidget and Penny both went into a boarding facility for a month. Why my grandmother didn’t care for them I don’t remember, but when she went to pick them up just before my parents’ return, Gidget had no coat left at all. She was a walking bleeding sore. Nana marched off without paying the bill. My parents came home to find the house in an uproar.
Back to Angell Gidget went. Now my father was told she had a variety of mange that was heritable and incurable, passed along by Penny, who never should have been bred for this reason. Tiny mites got into the hair shafts of the coat and under the skin, causing an unbearable itch and the fur to fall out in handfuls. Dad was given a viscous brown solution to pour over her daily, so caustic he had to use rubber gloves.
In the tub Gidget sat immobile as a statue, stoically bearing the terrible scald of the medicated liquid. Where other dogs would have shaken, or tried to escape, she waited, taking on the pain gracefully. My father, the hunter, handled her extremely gently. I will never forget the sight of her there, poised under the spout, desperate for the relief of the cool water, but holding fast until my father turned on the faucets. She was a brave little pup. Dalmatians are nothing if not stubborn—but they are equally courageous—and little Gidget taught me a lot about bravery.
The treatments didn’t work and the mange grew worse and worse, until she was a sorry mess of scabs. Eventually my father took her back to Angell, where he was told that there was nothing more to be done for her. On his own, he decided it was time. He held her in his arms as they gave her the needle, and only when she relaxed into death did he put her down on the table. He cried the whole way home in the car.
In this way I learned that you never leave an animal to die alone. It was one of the greatest lessons my father ever taught me.
It came as a terrible shock to Joy and me. Gidget had been there one minute, and the next—like a puff of smoke—gone. We all mourned. Penny remained. Though never as affectionate and lovely as her daughter, she was still a dog long in wisdom. She always let you know her limits, and she curled up most days in the same chair in my mother’s writing room that had been Clover’s so many years before. Though she didn’t pad from room to room with you in companionable silence the way Gidget had, I nevertheless felt empathetic toward her because she came to us from a life that involved unhappiness, perhaps even some kind of trauma.
I believe that for my mother, all our dogs were “therapy dogs”—even though that concept did not yet exist in the general lexicon. She loved to stroke their soft coats; the motion mesmerized her and perhaps helped her bear her depression a bit. And so they were to us all: when my parents argued verbally, or fought physically, or when my mother danced with death, Joy and I could always retreat to a dog and hold on tight.
•••
The loss of Gidget overshadowed our lives, and it was not long before we were ready to venture forth with another puppy. My mother’s condition had also deteriorated. Her depression settled in again and attached itself like a cloak under which we were all suffocating. It was a dark time, marked with a loss of hope.
But another miracle was to come, specifically to my mother, but in turn, also to us. It was 1969, and the miracle’s name was Daisy. Though my mother hadn’t wanted the work of another dog, one evening my father simply came in the back door from the garage after work and called out to my mother, where she sat typing, “Anne, I’ve done something terrible.”
“Did you crash the car?” She came running.
And just like that, he set down on the floor a small puppy with floppy spotted ears that felt like velvet and eyes that looked as if they had been rimmed with kohl. He told us how she had climbed out of her box on the passenger seat of the car and snuggled up into his lap, something like a cat, seeking his warmth. That action was to define her nature: Daisy always wanted to curl up around you. As affectionate as they come, perhaps even more so than Gidget.
Dad claimed that she was an anniversary gift for my mother. That night, as she became a part of our family, she left the kitchen to explore, waddled into my mother’s writing room, and squatted in front of the fireplace to pee, as if claiming her territory. My mother’s exasperated reaction was predictable.
Returning one night from dinner, my mother was struck with an idea in the dark of the car. In her play, Mercy Street, produced off Broadway in 1969, she had named her heroine Daisy, taken from a song called “Daisy Bell.”
The name Daisy stuck, and ultimately my mother loved her as intensely as she loved her character. The puppy and the play had ushered in another era of a manic, upward swing into delight with life. Our family relaxed once again, undoubtedly because of my mother’s improved outlook. And from then on, until the very day she died, each postcard and letter she wrote in response to a piece of fan mail was signed with a hand-drawn daisy.
With the advent of Daisy came the advent of joy.
She was shortly nicknamed Daisy-Do, and Daisy Doodle Bug, and proved to be what my father lovingly referred to as a goof bucket. Quick beyond anyone’s expectations, she chased the cats from chair to chair and played hide-and-seek with whomever would pay attention to her. Often she could be seen perched atop the massive set of rocks in the fron
t yard, where she stood guard over the house and barked at passersby. She seemed to have a downright sense of humor, pleasing and sometimes surprising everyone who lived at 14 Black Oak Road, and those who visited as well.
Daisy loved to chase squirrels, mice, and any small animal that moved. Just like a cat, she would bring her trophies to the kitchen, dropping them at my father’s feet with a mischievous expression on her face. One morning, she strutted in proudly, crossed to the stove where my father was frying up the bacon, and hawked up a whole squirrel, minus the tail, in one entire piece. Joy and I screamed and Dad was stuck with cleaning up the bloody mess. From then on, we all called her “The Trojan Dog.”
But Daisy did have one fatal flaw that gave us deep anxiety: she loved to chase cars. My parents seemed oblivious to the fact that we now had a fully fenced backyard that easily could have solved the problem and instead kept letting her out the kitchen door that bordered on the road, where the cars moved past at a steady and regular clip.
One day, there was a shriek of brakes from the road, and Daisy came limping back home with one leg dangling, held uselessly off the ground. After a trip to the vet, her broken leg was set in a plaster cast from paw to elbow. My parents didn’t seem particularly upset, though Joy and I were, and it was indicative of their distracted attitude that when the leg twisted in the cast, thus healing as crooked as a gnarly old tree limb, they did not take her back to the animal hospital to have the bone reset, but allowed her to hobble, however expertly, on the crippled leg. It was the kind of deformity that caused people to catch their breath when she limped up to them, tail wagging hard enough to bang into chairs and tables and knock over any drink within reach. It did seem to stop her from chasing cars, however, and perhaps that was my parents’ collective unconscious speaking: they believed her deformity protected her. Her leg did keep her safe from the vehicles she only barked at now—but she was not safe forever.
Bespotted: My Family's Love Affair With Thirty-Eight Dalmatians Page 4
