Gaits of Heaven

by Susan Conant

  Anyway, filling their plates were two people, one of whom I was surprised to recognize as Rita’s psychopharmacologist date, Quinn Youngman. The other was a young woman with long, straight dark hair, Asian features, and a rather tall, athletic build. When I approached, Quinn was telling her that his choice of psychopharmacology had been a natural extension of his previous interest in drugs of all sorts, if she knew what he meant. After I’d interrupted, he introduced us, and that’s how I met Missy Zinn, Caprice’s therapist, whose plate held a bagel with cream cheese and lox, a chicken breast, and roasted eggplant. As I ate blintzes with sour cream and blueberry jam, we were joined by a lanky, sandy-haired guy who turned out to be an adult rather than the teenage boy I’d taken him for. In fact, he was Peter York, Wyeth’s therapist. Fortunately, I didn’t have to mention Wyeth. Instead, I said, “You’re in supervision with Rita. She’s a good friend of mine.”

  “And mine,” said Quinn Youngman.

  As we ate, we said flattering things about Rita. A pleasant-looking fortyish woman I’d never seen before overheard and misunderstood us. “Eumie was a dear friend to a lot of people,” she said. “Eumie changed my life.”

  I didn’t know what to say. That’s nice would’ve felt hopelessly inadequate. Luckily, Ted spoke up to ask everyone to move into the living room and the family room. Brushing past me, he murmured, “Damn Johanna. I invited her, and I expected her to have the decency to turn up.”

  Following the crowd, I found that the wall between the two big rooms was actually a pair of sliding doors that had been opened to create a long, wide space that held folding chairs arranged in rows. At the front of the makeshift theater was a small table intended to serve as a podium. Or maybe the idea was a chapel with an altar. In any case, since the gathering had been described as a service, I expected family members to take seats in the first rows, with close friends occupying seats toward the front and with acquaintances and such toward the rear. Dog trainers presumably belonged in the last row. As I was settling myself there in the family room, Dolfo came galloping up to me with a piece of paper in his mouth.

  “Where have you been?” I whispered. “And what do you have? Give! Trade!”

  Like every other dog trainer in the world, I find that I automatically speak to all dogs as I do to my own and to other educated canines. There wasn’t a chance in a trillion that Dolfo had been taught give, our household’s formal obedience command for requesting a dumbbell, or trade, our everyday order to relinquish an object. The remarkable feature of foolish lapses like mine, however, is that evolution has bequeathed to the domestic dog an astonishing capacity to decode even the most seemingly incomprehensible messages of Homo sapiens. Dogs perform the miracle of penetrating the unfathomable by using all available cues: the direction of the human gaze, tone of voice, subtle movements of the body, slight changes in respiration, and, I suspect, minute variations in the scent we emit. So, in apparent response to words he didn’t know, Dolfo handed over his treasure, which proved to be a page torn from an L.L.Bean catalog.

  “Good boy,” I whispered to Dolfo. “Did you want one of these Bean dog beds? Is that why you brought me this?”

  “Talking to dogs,” a male voice said. “A sure sign of sanity. Holly, good to see you.” The speaker was George McBane, who was, in his own way, as Irish-looking as Kevin Dennehy. George had the same bright blue eyes and pale skin, but he had curly black hair shot with white, and he lacked Kevin’s freckles. According to Rita, George McBane was so handsome that in shrink circles, he was called Gorgeous George—never, of course, to his face. With a hint of condescension, Rita said that he had a reputation for doing rapid, effective work with difficult patients. As far as I could tell, a lot of the most prestigious shrinks did what struck me as slow, ineffective work—ten years of nothing but insight in patients suffering from nothing worse than existential malaise—but what do I know? I’m a dog trainer. Canine self-understanding is never my primary goal.

  “We’ll sit with you,” said Barbara. “And then George will behave himself.”

  Barbara was, if anything, more gorgeous than George. The phrase “person of color” actually fit her well. Her vividness made almost everyone else look washed-out and almost sickly.

  “Please do sit with me,” I said.

  “Where we can escape,” George muttered.

  “You and I,” Barbara told him quietly, “have agreed to say a few words about Eumie. Remember? Hi there, Dolfo. Are you being a good boy?” Barbara took the seat next to mine, and George sat beyond her. Dolfo did a silly, bouncy dance of welcome and would have ended up in their laps if Barbara and I hadn’t stopped him. “He’s a loveable idiot,” she commented.

  “I thought he was staying with you,” I said.

  “Just off and on.”

  “To the detriment of all our possessions,” George said. “It’s eight-thirty. Isn’t this ever going to get going?”

  As if in response, Ted stepped up to the little table at the front of the room, cleared his throat, and said, “I want to thank all of you for being here tonight. Each and every one of you was special to Eumie, who is here with us and is grateful for your presence.”

  Someone in back of me groaned softly. Turning my head, I saw Wyeth leaning against one of the glass doors. His groan had clearly not been one of agonized grief for his departed stepmother. He was making faces and shifting his weight from foot to foot. I was again struck by how extraordinarily flabby he was. In fact, he reminded me of a freshly opened oyster, pale and invertebrate.

  “Our beloved Eumie,” said Ted, “has, to quote the Bard, ‘undergone a sea change into something rich and strange.’”

  George McBane peered past Barbara to catch my eye, and when he did, I had the uncanny and unmistakable sense that he and I were suffering from the same dreadful thought, namely that Eumie had been rich before her death, although probably not so rich as she’d have liked, and, by most people’s standards, more than a little strange. I could feel nervous laughter rising in my chest and was terrified of making a spectacle of myself. Fortunately, as so often happens, I was saved by a dog. Dolfo, who’d stationed himself in front of Barbara and me, squeezed past my knees and began to sniff and circle. I was all action. With Ted presiding over his wife’s memorial service, there was no one to object to my restraining the dog, so, having stashed a few essential tools of my trade in the pockets of my dress, I leashed Dolfo, helped myself to a pair of sandals from a supply by the door, and unobtrusively led the dog out onto the deck and down the steps to the yard. The trip outdoors was justified. I had wanted somehow to express my gratitude to Eumie for the CD and for her desire to help me. No one’s memorial service should be interrupted by canine bodily functions. My thanks were heartfelt, if peculiar and even grotesque. Still, I had offered posthumous dignity.

  CHAPTER 19

  In the manner of a public park, the Brainard-Greens’ yard was equipped with a small covered trash can and a weatherproof metal box that dispensed doggie clean-up bags. Having availed myself of one of the bags, used it, and deposited it in the trash can, I walked Dolfo around for a few minutes. Probably because he’d been spending time next door with Barbara and George, his demeanor was calmer than usual, which is to say that he wasn’t acting like a yo-yo at the end of the leash or trying to jump on me. Since Dolfo was for once in a highly trainable state, I couldn’t resist taking him to the far end of the yard and working with him for a few minutes. I started by “charging the clicker,” as it’s called, clicking and immediately treating him to a tiny snack of liver as a reminder that the click meant that food was on the way. Then I used a bit of food to lure him into a sit, and I reinforced the behavior with a click and treat. We practiced for a few minutes. He didn’t hold a sit for more than about five seconds, but I felt proud of him anyway.

  When Dolfo and I got back inside, Ted was talking about Sylvia Plath. Like Plath, he said, Eumie was beautiful, sensitive, and gifted. Within my hearing, at least, he didn’t refer explicitly
to suicide, but he didn’t need to; it was sufficient to mention Sylvia Plath at all. I half expected Caprice to stand up and protest, but she didn’t, and Ted moved immediately to a new topic, which was the special role that each of us had played in Eumie’s life. “Let’s get started by going around the room and introducing ourselves and saying a few brief words about who we are in Eumie’s life,” he said. A few brief words. I hate that phrase. At best, it’s redundant. But what irritates me is that it’s misleading. What are brief words? Words that take less than a second to speak? Words under three syllables? But there’s another phrase I hate even more. “In your own words,” Ted said, “tell us about your role.” I mean, whose words would we be likely to use? Wouldn’t our own be the likely choice? Or was there some weird warning embedded in the phrase? Don’t quote T. S. Eliot or else! Anyway, Ted assured us that we’d have time to speak at length after the introductions, and he got us started by saying, as everyone already knew, that he was Ted Green, Eumie’s husband.

  As a person who has attended hundreds or maybe thousands of classes, workshops, seminars, and other gatherings, I’m used to the initial ritual of having participants introduce themselves by saying their names and a few words—of any length—about themselves: I’m Holly, this is Rowdy, and we’re just getting started in rally obedience. Those are my words, obviously. Rowdy’s principal spoken word is the syllable woo, often melodiously repeated—woo-woo-woo—and thus, now that I think of it, laudably brief and his own, unless he filches it from other malamutes, many of whom do, I concede, say exactly the same thing. I am, however, used to relatively small groups, even when you count the dogs, as I certainly do, whereas there must have been eighty or a hundred people in this one. Fortunately, the introductions moved speedily along. Here in the People’s Psychotherapeutic Republic of Cambridge, therapists had no hesitation about presenting themselves as such: I’m Vee Foote, Ted and Eumie’s couples therapist. Nixie Needleman, Eumie’s therapist. Alex Tortorello, Ted’s therapist. Missy Zinn used the phrase “part of the team.” Quinn Youngman said that he was “one of the helpers.” Not everyone was a therapist. Patients of Eumie’s presented themselves as such, as did some patients of Ted’s. Some used the word client. Some were “seeing” Eumie or Ted. We heard from Eumie’s personal shopper, her personal trainer, and her Reiki healer. Quite a few people were, as Caprice had told me, parents from the Avon Hill School. George McBane and Barbara Leibowitz described themselves as friends and neighbors. I just said that I helped with Dolfo. With the exception of Caprice, not a single person there was a blood relative of Eumie’s, and the only relative of Ted’s was his son, Wyeth, who was, in effect, excused from participation in the introductory ritual. When the boy’s turn came, Ted spoke for him: “And Wyeth, of course. Eumie’s beloved stepson, right, boychick?”

  Now that the introductions were complete—it was twenty minutes after nine—Ted invited all of us to share our memories of Eumie. “My Eumie,” he said, “mayn basherter, my soul mate, is what we call a yenta, a busybody, in the best sense of the word. She meets somebody, anybody, she cares. She’s got to know the person, got to know everything, understand everything. That’s who she is. Bubee, we love you for it and…” When he’d finished going on at considerable length, he finally invited people to speak to and about Eumie.

  The first person to accept the invitation was a frail young woman with a beatific smile who’d been Eumie’s muscular therapist and who described the tension locked in Eumie’s body and the progress she’d made in releasing herself from the bonds of her armor. But, she concluded, trauma had triumphed. A parent from the Avon Hill School talked about Eumie’s love of children and her commitment to excellence. Another parent praised her generosity. George, who’d been grumbling almost inaudibly about having an eight o’clock patient the next morning and wanting to get to bed, took Barbara’s hand and walked with her to the front of the room. Far from addressing Eumie, they spoke of her in the past tense, but their remarks were fond and, by my standards, appropriate to the occasion. They took turns talking about her love of life, her enthusiasm, and her curiosity. “Barbara and Eumie,” George said, “shared a love of birds and the great gift of being able to see them through the eyes of a child. What Eumie saw weren’t so much birds as magical creatures, delightful visions with feathers. She had the great good fortune not to take the magic for granted.” Barbara spoke of Eumie’s pleasure in giving presents. As it turned out, my experience was typical. She’d had a habit of sending flowers, food, books, music, and films only because she’d sensed what her friends would like and had wanted to offer happiness.

  When Barbara and George had finished, they made their way to the back of the room and slipped out through one of the glass doors to the deck. Although someone else had stepped forward and had begun to eulogize Eumie, I followed Barbara and George outside and caught up with them as they were about to go through a gate in the fence that separated their yard and the Brainard-Greens’. Dolfo was, of course, with me. When we reached Barbara and George, he wiggled all over and then cuddled up to Barbara, who stroked his side.

  “I just wanted to tell both of you that that was lovely,” I said. “This gift giving was a part of Eumie that I didn’t know at all. Until today. She’d ordered something for me that was delivered this afternoon.”

  “Eumie had many good qualities,” Barbara said.

  After Barbara and George had wished me good night, I took a few minutes to do a little more work with Dolfo on his sit. This time, I began to cue the behavior (“Dolfo, sit!” plus a signal with my left hand), and Dolfo succeeded in staying for eight seconds. When we got back inside, a woman was testifying to Eumie’s commitment to helping her patients overcome the effects of trauma. As the woman spoke, she began to choke up and then to sob. In horrible pain, she eventually cried, “How could she have abandoned me? How could she?”

  Three people hurried to the heartbroken woman and, with their arms around her, led her away. I fervently wished that Kevin Dennehy were there and that he’d stand up and assure Eumie’s patients that she had not committed suicide.

  The person who actually moved to the podium was Caprice. “My mother did not kill herself. Not deliberately and not accidentally. She placed a high value on herself and her own life. She was not self-destructive.” And that was all she said.

  Before Caprice had even taken a seat, she was replaced at the podium by the woman who had introduced herself as Nixie Needleman, Eumie’s psychiatrist. I remembered who she was because of her distinctive appearance: mountains of platinum hair, heavy makeup, and a black dress with a neckline that plunged almost to her navel. By distinctive, I mean that she looked radically different from everyone else at the service. On certain street corners, her appearance wouldn’t have been distinctive at all; if the police had been present, they’d probably have kept an eye on her in case she started soliciting. When she spoke, however, it wasn’t to offer the wares she was displaying but to repeat what others had said, namely, that Eumie placed a high value on life. “Furthermore,” Dr. Needleman said, “she had no history of suicide attempts or gestures and no suicidal ideation. Any loss touches off fantasies of primitive abandonment and betrayal, with concomitant grief and rage. In some cases, it arouses powerful feelings of guilt. All of those emotions can be traced to sources far back in our own lives. They have no basis in present reality. We need to remind ourselves that no one, including Eumie, could have foreseen her death.”

  Dr. Needleman’s definitive tone had a simple, obvious effect on Dolfo, who spontaneously sat. I did not, of course, interrupt the proceedings by pulling out the clicker and startling everyone with its sharp metallic sound. Rather, I just slipped Dolfo a treat and rubbed his chest.

  As I was doing so, Vee Foote stepped forward to second everything that Dr. Needleman had said. “Eumie made no preparations,” she declared. “There was no note. There were no warnings. There was, in fact, nothing to hint at self-destruction.”

  Behind me, someone so
ftly exhaled. Turning around, I saw that Quinn Youngman was now standing at the back of the room. Out of nowhere came the realization that he was not just exhaling; rather, what I’d heard was a sigh of relief. As Eumie’s psychopharmacologist, he had prescribed for her. Dr. Needleman, an M.D., might well have written prescriptions, too. Vee Foote was also a psychiatrist, an M.D. The picture I had been given by Kevin and by Caprice was of a family with a pharmacopeia of psychoactive drugs, presumably including the prescription medications that had caused Eumie’s death. The cynical thought came to me that Eumie’s doctors were not “sharing memories,” as Ted’s e-mail had phrased the purpose of the memorial service, but were using the occasion to make self-serving, self-protective claims that had nothing to do with Eumie and everything to do with themselves. Were they afraid of lawsuits? Were they simply protecting their reputations? I had no idea.

  The service continued. Other patients of Eumie’s spoke of their attachment to her. I took Dolfo out. And brought him back in. More than once. Eventually, I returned to find that Ted was concluding the service by reading Tennyson’s In Memoriam, which I’d read in a college English course. It consisted, if I remembered correctly, of 133 incredibly long poems in memory of a dear friend of the poet’s, Arthur Hallam, who, I’d thought at the time, was lucky to have been the subject of the lamentations instead of what I felt myself to be, namely, their bored-to-death victim.