Evil Breeding

by Susan Conant

  But when I opened the door to my kitchen, Rowdy and Kimi came bounding toward me. Their lovely ears were flattened against their heads, their dark eyes smiled, their wolf-gray coats gleamed, their beautiful plumy white tails wagged across their powerful backs, and they sang in unison the universal malamute song of joy: Woo-woo! Woo-woo-woo!

  “I am richer with you,” I solemnly told the dogs, “than I would be with other people’s money. I wouldn’t trade with anyone.”

  If I’d been Geraldine R. Dodge, I wouldn’t have had to trade. I could have had my perfect dogs. And money, too.

  Chapter Three

  LIKE GERALDINE R. and Marcellus Hartley Dodge, Steve Delaney and I maintain separate residences. The Dodges had adjoining estates. Hers covered about two thousand acres. His? I don’t know. Those were just their country homes. They also shared a Fifth Avenue town house. Shared is probably the wrong word. Mrs. Dodge always had ten or twelve dogs with her. Consequently, I suspect that occupancy of the Dodge town house was more a matter of taking turns than of actual sharing. A dozen dogs wouldn’t drive Steve away. There are often more than that at his clinic, and his own dogs, India, the shepherd, and Lady, the pointer, live with him above the clinic, which is in Cambridge and, come to think of it, probably closer to my place than Mr. Dodge’s house was to Mrs. Dodge’s. Our Cambridge estates, alas, cover less than a quarter acre each and do not abut. Because the noise from Steve’s patients and boarders disturbs my sleep, he often stays with me. Rowdy and Kimi howl at sirens once in a while, but are otherwise remarkably quiet. My cat, Tracker, sleeps on the mouse pad by the computer in my study, so even if she purrs loudly, no one but the PC hears her, and so far it hasn’t complained.

  Alaskan malamutes being the pack-oriented creatures that they are, Rowdy and Kimi like to sleep in the bedroom. Rowdy’s favorite spot is under the air conditioner, which he regards as a totemic object to be worshiped year round because even when its motor is turned off, it still leaks cold air. Both dogs are supposedly allowed on the bed only by invitation, but Kimi gets away with assuming that the invitation is open, and I don’t object because she is an excellent bed dog, meaning that she cuddles without shoving you onto the floor. When Steve is there, we banish the dogs; caring nothing about privacy themselves, they fail to respect other people’s. Enough said.

  Anyway, the siren-induced howling of the exiled dogs was how Steve and I ended up at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. The whole episode was the fault of the latest craze in canine education, a technique called “clicker training.” A clicker is a little plastic device with a metal strip that emits a sharp click when pressed. The first step in clicker training is to pair the click with food: Click, treat, click, treat, click, treat, and presto! The sound comes to mean that food is on its way; it rapidly becomes a secondary positive reinforcer. Since malamutes are totally obsessed with food and go utterly bonkers at dinnertime, I speeded up the initial phase of clicker training by clicking just before the dogs’ dinner bowls hit the floor. The next step was to pick a behavior to reinforce with clicks and treats. What I chose was howling. I selected this target for the excellent reason that when it came to Northern-breed vocalizations, Rowdy had always distinguished himself as a Pavarotti among malamutes, a canine Caruso, if you will, and while Kimi was more given to what malamute people call “talking” than to actual singing, she was perfectly capable of joining Rowdy in gloriously melodious evocations of the Land of the Midnight Sun. The only problem was that the dogs seldom showed off this prodigious talent. Also, they wouldn’t sing on command. Suppose you’re the young Glenn Gould’s mother, okay? Except that he hardly ever sits at the piano, and when your friends drop by, he won’t so much as rattle off a little tune, never mind launch into a Goldberg Variation. Such was my frustrating position until along came clicker training. The only impediment was that since the dogs hardly ever howled, they gave me blessed few opportunities to reinforce the target behavior with clicks and treats.

  So at two o’clock in the morning on a Saturday in May a few days after my first visit to Mr. Motherway, as Steve and I lay asleep in my bed, a terrible fire or possibly a major false alarm—I never found out which—sent what must have been dozens of fire trucks, cruisers, and emergency medical vehicles speeding down Concord Avenue past my house with their sirens wailing and blaring so loudly and insistently that Rowdy and Kimi felt compelled to answer back. Their chorus was utterly beautiful: eerie, chilling, and heartwarming, all at the same time. Dedicated dog trainer that I am, I leaped out of bed, grabbed a clicker and dog treats from the pockets of my jeans, which lay on the floor by the bed, and dashed naked into the kitchen to reinforce like mad now that I finally had the opportunity. And let me tell you, clicker training really works. You know those dolphins at Sea World? That’s how they’re trained, not with clickers and dog treats, of course, but with whistles and fish. Still, the method is the same. And the results are just as spectacular as those I was getting right in my own kitchen at two o’clock in the morning—Ah-wooooooooo! Ah-wooooooooo! Click! Treat!—until Steve staggered in and, after a few efforts drowned out by the dogs, managed to convey his displeasure at having been awakened.

  I was surprised. “You can always sleep through anything,” I reminded him. Steve never looks better than when he’s just reaching consciousness. His brown hair was curling all over his head. His eyes were especially green, probably, it occurred to me, with envy. After all, my brilliant dogs were learning a trick that his dogs hadn’t mastered. He was unselfconsciously naked. My desire to clicker-train the dogs subsided, replaced by a new and more compelling longing.

  The green in his eyes was apparently not caused by envy after all. “You have neighbors,” he said sternly. His tone silenced the dogs, who eyed him with puzzled disappointment.

  “Rita takes out her hearing aids before she goes to bed,” I replied. “Otherwise, she gets ear infections.” Rita is my second-floor tenant. She is also a close friend. She is young to wear hearing aids, and she uses those tiny ones that don’t show, so people tend to forget that she has a hearing loss.

  “Holly, for Christ’s sake! Helen Keller couldn’t have slept through that racket.”

  “Steve, the sirens were not my fault. I didn’t call the fire department. And I didn’t tell the dogs to start howling. All that would’ve happened anyway, even if I’d stayed in bed.”

  Steve had wandered to the refrigerator and was swigging directly out of a milk bottle. “In this situation,” he said slowly and patiently, “a normal human being tells her dogs to shut up. She does not jump out of bed in the middle of the night to pretend she’s Karen Pryor and that her dogs are porpoises.” Karen Pryor is one of the principal proponents of clicker training. She was a founder of Sea Life Park and Oceanic Institute in Hawaii.

  “I was not pretending I was Karen Pryor,” I said huffily.

  “But you were pretending that the dogs were porpoises.”

  “Dolphins,” I admitted.

  “In the morning,” said Steve, returning the germy milk bottle to the refrigerator, “you owe this entire neighborhood an apology.”

  As it turned out, the sirens had awakened all my neighbors anyway, and everyone, with one exception, was wonderfully understanding and, in a few cases, complimentary about the dogs’ howling. The exception was Rita. She was also the one person to whom I admitted that I’d inconsiderately prolonged the howling by seizing an unparalleled opportunity to apply a new and fashionable method of dog training.

  This was over a late breakfast. To buy forgiveness, I’d arisen early and driven all the way to Brookline for Kupel’s bagels with cream cheese and nova lox. When I returned, Steve refused the bagels and fried himself two eggs. Then he left for his clinic. After that, I apologized to my third-floor tenants and to the people in the nearby houses, including Kevin Dennehy and his mother. Kevin is a Cambridge cop. He really can sleep through anything. He swore he had. Mrs. Dennehy said that the dogs had put her in mind of the voice of the turtle—she
’s very religious—and that she had gone right back to sleep. Rita said that I did indeed owe her an apology, but that in place of groveling she would accept Kupel’s bagels, provided that I had bought cream cheese and lox as well. Once Rita settled herself in my kitchen, however, she fell victim to one of the many occupational hazards of being a psychotherapist—that’s what she is—by trying to persuade me to examine the meaning of what I’d done.

  She spread a thin layer of cream cheese on what she refers to as a goyische bagel: plain, and especially not garlic or onion. Rita is a New Yorker. She gets her medium-length brown hair lightly streaked with blond and has the kind of expensive cut that would cause the average Cambridge woman to wrap her head in a scarf until her hair grew out. To hang around with my dogs and me on a Sunday morning, she wore a navy wool pullover she’d bought in Scotland, dry-cleaned jeans with sharp creases down the legs, and a pair of ankle-length Joan and David boots sturdy enough to withstand a one-block hike on Fifth Avenue. As I understand it, her concern with superficialities is a necessary counterbalance to her personal and professional preoccupation with such heavy psychological matters as life, death, and what to do with the time in between if it isn’t automatically filled by dogs, dogs, and more dogs. Rita has only one, a Scottie named Willie. Still, if she didn’t give a damn about things like having her eyebrows waxed, the weight of her concern about love, fear, depression, and madness would throw her completely off balance, and she’d topple over like an old-fashioned scale with nothing on one end and a ten-ton bar of lead on the other, not that she views her clients’ problems or anyone else’s as leaden, in the sense of dull or worthless. On the contrary, human suffering and conflict are Rita’s pleasure as well as her business, but only because she is always certain she can help.

  “The principal victim of this lunacy,” Rita now declared, “was Steve. He was asleep only a few yards away. And you chose to act as if the noise wouldn’t disturb him, or as if he wouldn’t care if it did. Or”—here Rita paused to place a slice of nova on her bagel—“as if by comparison with your dogs and with your desire to train your dogs, Steve’s needs did not count one whit with you.”

  Noise! I ask you! The music of the spheres. I said nothing.

  “And when I say noise” Rita continued, “I mean noise. I know that to your ears, when the dogs howl, it’s the music of the—”

  “Spheres,” I finished. “As the hymn says: ‘All nature rings.’”

  “Do you want my professional opinion on this matter?” Rita demanded.

  With what her clients pay, I’d have been a fool to say no. She told me to think of the most romantic place in Greater Boston. What sprang to mind was the Bayside Expo Center during the Bay Colony Cluster dog shows. Unfortunately, the Bay Colony Cluster takes place in December, this was May, and a May-to-December romance was not at issue. Steve and I are about the same age. Besides, according to Rita, if I didn’t make Steve feel loved, important, and central to my life within the next few hours, there wouldn’t be any romance left.

  Even if you rule out the Bayside Expo Center during the Bay Colony Cluster shows, Boston is rich in romantic places. The North End, Boston’s Little Italy, with its winding, narrow streets and pastry shops, is ideal for romantic wandering, but the sky had darkened and rain was predicted, so it seemed like a poor choice, as did the Public Garden, not that riding in a swan boat in the rain was outright unromantic, but it felt childish to visit the setting of Make Way for Ducklings. Also, Steve, being a vet, might take a more anatomical than romantic view of the boats and realize that we were nestled in the swan’s liver or in a section of its large intestine.

  So that’s how Steve and I happened to spend the afternoon at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Fenway Court, which is so outrageously romantic that the Boston papers are always reminding us that Mrs. Gardner did not, in fact, import and reassemble an Italian palace stone by stone. As myths do, this one contains a truth that overrides reality: Fenway Court feels exactly as if its pink marble had been imported stone by stone from Italy, especially if, as in my case, you’ve never actually been to Italy. The building is four stories high and constructed around a big central courtyard with a mosaic floor and, high above it, a gigantic skylight. The upper floors have galleries that let you peer down into the courtyard, and especially on a rainy day, the filtered light that pours through the immense glass roof feels and tastes like some tangible form of grace given by one of the ancient gods depicted in the museum’s statues and paintings. All year round, the courtyard displays plants and flowers, including what must be the longest and most luxuriant nasturtium vines in the world. Isabella Stewart Gardner built the house between 1899 and 1901 to display her art collection. She always intended it as a museum. But she didn’t just turn it over to the public. She lived on the top floor. You can see why.

  Mindful of Rita’s advice, I stood next to Steve just outside the courtyard and said, “There! Doesn’t this make you feel special?”

  Because of the soft light, we looked special. In some parts of Fenway Court, the light was better for looking at live people than for examining the works of art, many of which were hidden in dark corners. According to art experts, that’s where some belong. Some pieces in the eclectic collection are considered to be, ahem, not in the best taste, which is more or less what Brahmin Boston thought about Isabella Stewart Gardner, too. Anyway, the central courtyard was a big hit with Steve, especially when he discovered a promising-looking café a few steps from it on the ground floor. But I persuaded him that having come to the Gardner, we were obliged to do more than ooh and ah at the courtyard, eat, and go home. Didn’t he want to see the scenes of the famous robbery? He did. In fact, it crossed my mind that Steve’s idea of the perfect museum would be one from which all the art objects had been filched and nothing remained but the coffee shop. I more or less dragged him up one flight to the Dutch Room, which I remembered from childhood visits with my mother.

  As everyone in Boston knows, on the night of March 18, 1990, two robbers dressed as Boston police officers convinced the museum’s two guards to do exactly what they had been ordered never, ever to do: open the door. The guards promptly found themselves bound, gagged, and handcuffed. The robbers got away with art worth between two and three hundred million dollars. The most valuable piece was taken from the Dutch Room: Vermeer’s The Concert, one of only thirty-two Vermeers in the world. The Dutch Room also lost two Rembrandt oil paintings, A Lady and Gentleman in Black and The Storm on the Sea of Galilee, as well as a Rembrandt etching, a bronze beaker, and a painting by someone named Flinck once attributed to Rembrandt. Six additional works of lesser value were stolen from the second floor. One was the finial from a Napoleonic flag. The robbers also took a Manet painting that was in a room right by the entrance. The total was thirteen objects. All were uninsured. A one-million-dollar reward was offered for the safe return of the stolen art. By now, the reward had been increased to five million. Not a single piece had been recovered.

  Steve was gazing at the frame that had held Rembrandt’s lady and gentleman. “Is this your idea of an upbeat afternoon?” he asked.

  “Romantic,” I corrected. “Not necessarily upbeat.”

  “Can we eat now?”

  In spite of the Sunday-afternoon crowd, we lucked into a small table by the window. The view was of a section of the garden thick with ivy that sprawled over the ground and climbed heavily up the trees. It was raining hard now, so the trees and plants were dripping, and we were warm, dry, and hungry. The menu was a little too ladies’-lunch for Steve’s taste, heavy on light quiche, but he ordered homemade soup and spicy cold linguine and didn’t complain. And he wasn’t the only man there. In fact, there were a lot of other couples. At a table close to ours, a man sat alone. We decided that he had to be an art student. The Gardner is right near the Museum of Fine Arts and the Boston Museum School, so the area is full of art students. This one had thick, dark, curly hair. On his left forearm was a tattoo embellished with such elabor
ate curlicues that I couldn’t tell what it was supposed to represent.

  “He’s eating quiche,” I said quietly to Steve.

  “Artistic type,” Steve mumbled.

  Raising my voice, I said, “I’m sorry I dragged you here. Rita said I had to do penance for waking you up at two o’clock in the morning by taking you to the most romantic place in Boston. I thought this was it.”

  “The most romantic place in Boston is your bed,” Steve said. “With you in it.”

  “That’s not what the guidebooks say.”

  “Little do they know.”

  “Do you want to go home?”

  He just smiled. Then he asked how my book was coming along. I remember talking mainly about Geraldine R. Dodge and her husband. I also remember how noisy the café was.

  “Mr. Geraldine R. Dodge had money, too?” Steve asked.

  “Lots. Not as much as she did, but he was still loaded. His grandfather was the head of Remington Arms and some other companies. The grandfather was Marcellus Hartley. His daughter Emma married a man named Norman White Dodge, and for a wedding present her father gave them a house right next to his. He lived on Madison Avenue. Anyway, Emma died in childbirth, and the grandfather raised the baby, his only grandson. And then when Marcellus Hartley Dodge was a junior in college, at Columbia, when he was only twenty, his grandfather suddenly died, and he inherited everything. He became the head of the family and the head of the companies and everything.”