Evil Breeding

by Susan Conant

  He didn’t growl at me. He didn’t exactly leap to obey my every command, either. I asked about Gustav Alisch and about a man named Sickinger who’d come from Germany to judge shepherds at Morris and Essex in 1935.

  “Sickinger,” Mr. Motherway repeated. “Rings a bell. I knew quite a few German breeders back then. I used to escort groups of students. In the summer, you know.” Indeed, I did. He was repeating himself. I didn’t say so. “Expose them to the Continent and so forth,” he went on. “Museums, cities, the language. I’d take advantage of the opportunity to meet the breeders I’d corresponded with, take in a show or two when I could fit it in.” And then, damn it, he was off on an almost interminable tangent about the past and present differences between the judging and breeding of shepherds in the United States and in Germany. I’ll spare you the details, which, in the case of the German system, are very complicated. Among other things, the German championship system requires working titles, endurance testing, and hip and elbow X rays to evaluate soundness. It also involves the assessment of what shepherd people call “progeny groups,” that is, offspring. In contrast, to register a litter of GSD puppies with the American Kennel Club, you need do nothing but breed two AKC-registered GSD parents. Period.

  “Incomparably superior,” pronounced Mr. Motherway, referring to the German system.

  I nodded. Who could disagree? When it came to breeding dogs, most European countries practiced what I now thought of as canine eugenics. With good results, too. I was in no position to object; I wholeheartedly believed in that kind of planned reproduction. For dogs. But for people? Voluntary planning? Yes. Involuntary? Certainly not! There was, however, a point on which I wanted to challenge Mr. Motherway, one I’d ordinarily have raised. For decades, the man had served as an American Kennel Club judge. In that role, hadn’t he felt like a hypocrite? I held myself back.

  “Americans,” Mr. Motherway continued, “are finally starting to add German dogs to their breeding programs. Long overdue. I’ve done it myself for years. Mrs. Dodge did, of course. From the beginning.”

  And during the Nazi era? I longed to ask. Just what did Geraldine Rockefeller Dodge do and not do? Who were her friends in Germany in those days? I do not raise sensitive topics with the recently bereaved. Mr. Motherway had been born in Germany to German parents. He’d had a sister who’d died in Germany, a sister he never spoke of. For all I knew, she’d perished in the Holocaust, a victim of Nazi eugenics. For all I knew, Geraldine R. Dodge had been oblivious to the rise of German fascism. Her tremendous wealth had bought a protected life. She had been deeply absorbed in her dogs, her horses, her art collection, her peaceful passions. I struggled to rationalize her membership in the American Eugenics Society, a group with strong ties to the German eugenics movement that culminated in the death camps. All her life, Mrs. Dodge had taken in stray animals. In 1938, she’d founded St. Hubert’s Giralda, which to this day carries on her mission of sheltering homeless dogs and cats. She’d taken animals from that shelter into Giralda itself. The Lady of Giralda had been kindness personified. It was simply impossible that she’d been anything remotely like a Nazi sympathizer. But from the edge of consciousness, something gnawed at me, some jarring bit of information. I felt plagued by the sense that Mr. Motherway could not only supply the information, but clarify and explain it.

  He let me down. I let myself down: I asked nothing. Our meeting ended.

  He rose. We shook hands. “It has been a pleasure,” he told me. He sounded sincere.

  “I’m especially grateful to you for seeing me at this difficult time,” I said.

  “Distraction is the best medicine,” he replied graciously. “Shall we get together again? In a few weeks, let’s say?”

  I mumbled a promise to call him. Then he escorted me to the door of his study.

  “You don’t need to show me out,” I assured him. “Thank you again.”

  According to the controls on the dashboard, my old Bronco had air-conditioning. The controls lied. Because the weather had taken one of those ghastly New England leaps from mild spring to sweltering summer, I’d left the windows down and parked in the shade of the barn, closer to the kennel runs than the resident dogs had liked. As I approached the car, the dogs in the kennel runs began barking, and Peter Motherway came stomping toward me from around a corner of the barn.

  “That look like the driveway to you?” he demanded.

  The complaint was unfair. Yes, I’d pulled off the gravel, but the spot I’d chosen was on a roughly mown area, not on the lawn. To make myself heard over the din of the dogs, I had to shout. “I’m sorry. I didn’t think anyone would mind. My air-conditioning doesn’t work too well. I always try to park in the shade. I’m leaving right now.”

  With shamelessly bad manners, Peter shook a fist at me. “Good! And stay gone! In case you don’t know, this is a family in mourning.”

  Blood rose to my face. I certainly did know that it was a family in mourning. The knowledge helped me to keep my mouth shut. As I was about to take a step toward my car, Christopher Motherway, Peter’s son, B. Robert’s look-alike grandson, threw open the front door of the house and took long, commanding steps toward his father. The resemblance between grandson and grandfather, I instantly realized, had as much to do with attitude and demeanor as it did with physical attributes. Indeed, although Peter was shorter than his father and his son, he shared their fair coloring, their blue eyes, and their even features. But he dressed like kennel help. Did clothes unmake the man? Mr. Motherway had worn a dark summer suit. Christopher looked like a model in a magazine ad for some trendy chain of expensive sportswear shops. His blond hair was carefully tousled, and he had on tan pants, a white shirt, and leather shoes with no socks. Peter, in heavy canvas dark-blue work pants and a matching work shirt, could have been costumed to play the role of a garbage collector. In inexplicably skipping a generation, the glitter of moneyed aristocracy had excluded Peter from the elite to which his father and his son had been born.

  With the air of taking the hired help to task, Christopher glared at his father. As he shouted, the barking of the dogs seemed to echo him. “You are out of line. Grandfather was looking out the window. He saw what happened. He can guess the rest. He offers his apology to Miss Winter, who is his guest here. In case you’ve forgotten, guests park where it is convenient for them to park.”

  As if determined to top his son’s rudeness, Peter replied, “Mind your fucking business, you lazy little shit!”

  I wanted to disappear. If the battery didn’t let me down, I had the means at hand. Quietly edging my way around the quarreling father and son, I made it to the driver’s side door and slid in. Looking anywhere except at the ugly family scene, I found myself staring into the distance as I turned the ignition key. As the engine caught, the great size of the distant kennels registered on me. Just how many dogs did Mr. Motherway own? Outside the open passenger window, the shouting grew increasingly violent.

  “And keep that goddamned crazy Gerhard the hell away from me!” Peter bellowed. “Or I’ll break his fucking neck for him. And I know how!”

  I shifted into reverse and backed out. My car backfired. The sound didn’t embarrass me. Neither did the car’s dents and scratches. I took a deep breath and savored the lingering aroma of dogs. I could hardly wait to get home to Rowdy, Kimi, and Tracker. Rowdy and Kimi had an air of nobility that the cat and I lacked. Tracker hissed and scratched out of fear, but at least she didn’t scream obscenities in front of visitors, and the dogs literally fell to the floor at the feet of my guests. I made people feel welcome. I offered food and drink. Rowdy had the gracious habit of appearing before guests bearing toys he had carefully selected as tokens of friendship. Kimi occasionally pushed hospitality a bit far by merrily sailing into someone’s lap. In the privacy of our little family, I sometimes informed the dogs that they were out of line, but when they offered their paws, I said thank you. And when I needed Tracker to get off the mouse pad, I often added the word please. If th
e scene I’d just witnessed represented the graciousness of the moneyed aristocracy, I’d take genteel poverty any day.

  Chapter Nine

  REMEMBER THAT MOUNT AUBURN is a cemetery and not a public park and always act accordingly. Considering Mount Auburn’s popularity as a birding spot, I hesitate to call this injunction the cemetery’s cardinal rule, but that’s exactly what it is. A sign near the main entrance on Mount Auburn Street specifically stated that dogs were not allowed. I had no need to take Kimi to the cemetery. It was Rowdy who had to visit the grave of his previous owner, Dr. Frank Stanton.

  After returning from Mr. Motherway’s, I removed both dog crates from the back of the Bronco and placed a copy of Peterson’s field guide in a prominent position on the dashboard. Raising the backseat and settling Rowdy in a down-stay on the floor, I took pleasure in my ability to enrich the famous garden cemetery’s canine population, which, in Rowdy’s absence, consisted exclusively of marble and granite dogs. In memorializing Dr. Stanton’s birthday as he would have wished, I was making a creative contribution to Mount Auburn.

  The first time Rowdy visited Dr. Stanton’s grave, he and Steve and I went on foot. In refining my technique, I’d switched to the car and explored alternatives to the main entrance. For a city cemetery, Mount Auburn is big—174 acres. It extends beyond Cambridge into Watertown and has more than ten miles of roads and paths. It started as a rural cemetery for Boston’s elite dead. Just why do I have these facts at my nontouristic fingertips? Because in preparation for writing my article about the dog statues of Mount Auburn, I’d helped myself to free pamphlets available from a rack at the entrance gate. I’d also bought a map, a necessity for finding your way around as well as for plotting ways to sneak in a dog. As my map shows, the cemetery stretches from Mount Auburn Street all the way back to the intersection of Grove Street with Coolidge Avenue, which borders Mount Auburn on the east and southeast. To the west is a Roman Catholic cemetery. Now and then, the dogs and I walked along Coolidge Avenue on our way to the Charles River. Grove Street, which is semi-industrial, has what I had hoped would be a useful service entrance to Mount Auburn. I tried it a few times, but eventually settled on the main entrance, where my car was just one of many carrying birders, walkers, tourists, and, of course, mourners.

  As I turned in at the main gate, I spoke a warning to Rowdy. “Down!” I reminded him. “Good boy! Stay!” I could hear his tail thump. He is not immune to the delights of forbidden pleasure. After bearing right and then left, I followed Spruce Avenue—green line, no parking—through the heart of the cemetery and eventually turned onto the narrow road that led to Dr. Stanton’s grave.

  “Now, be a good boy while I reconnoiter!” I told Rowdy. “Stay!”

  Our adventure was not, admittedly, in a league with the Gardner heist. Even so, I didn’t want to get caught. If our secret forays became known, the guards might watch for my license plate and stop us before we even entered. Nothing worse would happen, I thought. I did, however, imagine worse outcomes, for example, wanted posters of a guilty-looking woman and her innocent accomplice, a handsome gray-and-white malamute, plastered on tree trunks throughout the cemetery. So far, we had pursued our life of minor misdemeanor with impunity.

  Leaving Rowdy in the car, I walked the few yards to Dr. Stanton’s grave, which was marked by a plain granite stone that bore only his name and the dates of his birth and death. Sometimes I brought flowers, but only as a prop. Dr. Stanton would have traded every blossom in the Garden of Eden for one glimpse of Rowdy. Today, empty-handed, I pretended to read his stone while concentrating my attention on the periphery of my vision. I listened. From the low branch of a shrub, a catbird imitated Tracker. Any species I could identify was too common to attract a flock of skilled birders. The catbird wouldn’t squeal on us. No one else was around.

  I stepped back to the car, opened the door, picked up Rowdy’s leash, and smacked my lips. “Here we go, pal!” I whispered. Rowdy knew the routine. He moved swiftly out of the car and toward Dr. Stanton’s grave. Wagging his tail and tossing me a conspiratorial glance, he almost danced on the ground in front of the stone monument.

  “Happy birthday,” I said. “Thank you for my perfect dog.”

  Then Rowdy and I bolted for the car. After meandering along roads and avenues with names that sounded more suburban than mortuary, we neared the main gate. It’s an area with a lot of foot traffic. People chain their bikes to the bike rack there, and there’s a bus stop nearby. I’d been driving at a respectfully slow speed, but now I slowed to a crawl and watched carefully for pedestrians. I saw one, too, one I recognized almost immediately as the art student from the Gardner museum. I’d last seen him on his knees in prayer before what the papers always called the “controversial” John Singer Sargent portrait of Isabella Stewart Gardner. The thought crossed my mind that today, the art student might have been making a pilgrimage to her grave.

  The incident would have remained just that, incidental, had it not been for the murder. I heard the story the next morning on WBUR, the National Public Radio station in Boston that broadcasts mainly news, commentaries, interviews, call-in shows, and many other features that have nothing to do with dogs, but are nonetheless generously and—in my dog-biased, Dodgian view—unjustly supported by grants from the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation. I was idly sipping coffee, glancing through the paper, and listening to NPR out of the corner of my ear when I heard the word Gardner and caught a note of suppressed excitement in the announcer’s voice. The body of an unidentified man had been found only minutes earlier in Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge. A local bird-watching group had made the discovery. According to one member of the group, the body had been propped up against the Gardner family vault, the final resting place of Isabella Stewart Gardner.

  During her lifetime, the flamboyant and eccentric Isabella Stewart Gardner was big news in Boston. She persuaded the zookeeper to let her walk a young lion on a leash. Her friends included Anna Pavlova and Nellie Melba. She wore a purple velvet robe copied after one owned by Marie Antoinette. The robbery had reawakened the legend. The Boston papers found frequent excuses for articles about Mrs. Gardner: the anniversary of the theft, the perpetration of a comparable crime anywhere, or the recovery of stolen art in some distant part of the world. The theme of these stories was always the same: We should remain hopeful! The stolen art might yet turn up, and the criminals might yet be identified. Federal and state statutes of limitations had expired, but the U.S. attorney could still charge the robbers if the art had crossed state lines within the past five years; the robbers might yet be punished.

  Although the murder’s only connection with the robbery was the finding of a body at the Gardner vault, a local NPR reporter launched into a mandatory recap of the facts of the heist: thieves disguised as Boston police officers, guards who’d disobeyed orders by opening the museum door, the loss of thirteen pieces, all uninsured, the probable value of the stolen Vermeer and the three Rembrandts, the five-million-dollar reward.

  When I switched from radio to television, a photo of Vermeer’s The Concert filled the screen. It vanished, to be replaced by the John Singer Sargent portrait of Mrs. Gardner. Then a live camera showed a slick-looking male reporter posed in front of a familiar scene: the main gate to Mount Auburn. “We have just been informed that the man whose body was found this morning here at Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge has been identified,” He spoke a name that startled me. “Authorities are working on the assumption that this was not, repeat not, a natural death.” After a pause, he added, with a smug note of happy finality, “James Mc-Dougall reporting. Live at Mount Auburn Cemetery!”

  A sudden flash of horror crossed the reporter’s face as his closing words registered. Indeed, live at the cemetery. As Peter Motherway, among others, was not.

  Chapter Ten

  BESIDES BEING MY next-door neighbor and an anomalously beefy long-distance runner, Kevin Dennehy is a Cambridge police lieutenant. With no success, I tried to reach him
at headquarters and at home. I toyed with the thought of searching for him at Mount Auburn, but decided that the area around the Gardner vault would be sealed off. The entire cemetery might be closed to the public. What about burials scheduled for today? Would they be postponed because of murder? Held anyway? If I costumed myself in black and attached myself to a funeral party, I might get stuck at a grave in the new part of the cemetery, far from the prestigious old neighborhood of family burial chambers. Is there class after death? There is at Mount Auburn. The Gardners rest eternally in an august private residence in a tiny, thus exclusive, valley on the shores of a miniature lake. Nearby dwell Mary Baker Eddy and Henry Cabot Lodge. New neighborhoods will age. Saplings will become old trees. But they haven’t yet.

  I phoned police headquarters again. This time, I left a message for Kevin, a gracious invitation to dinner that evening. I promised steak. Kevin lives with his mother, who is a Seventh-Day Adventist. A strict vegetarian, she allows no meat in her house. Kevin would turn up. I pay no attention to the old taboo on training with food.

  The noon news on TV showed a photo of the Gardner vault, which was as I remembered it: a quaint little flat-roofed bungalow that sat, together with other equally darling cottages, near the shore of a lake. If I hadn’t blown who already lived in the houses, I’d have been eager to move in. As I’d forgotten, though, the Gardner family vault had one feature I disliked, a decorative frieze that ran just below the roof and looked something like an exterior version of a wallpaper border. The repeating motif was angular and, I am positive, Greek. Still, the pattern reminded me of swastikas.