Gaits of Heaven

by Susan Conant

  Fundamental principle of dog training: end on a note of success. If we kept practicing, we might wreck my recovery by getting good at the new sport. If that happened, we’d be forced to take up a canine activity so unsuitable for malamutes that we’d be kicked out and probably banned for life. Herding came to mind. Confronted with a flock, Rowdy would reduce the sheep to racks of lamb. At least he wouldn’t do it in any sort of sneaky, duplicitous fashion. He didn’t have secrets, and he didn’t ferret out other people’s. If he caught a whiff of a puzzling scent, he acted openly and directly by sticking his nose in its source. I felt overwhelming gratitude to him for restoring me to myself.

  Forty-five minutes later, after shopping for food, I returned home to find a note from Caprice, who was taking Lady for a walk. I was just putting a pound of sliced roast beef, my thank-you gift to all five dogs, in the refrigerator when the phone rang. The caller was Gabrielle, my stepmother, who wanted to talk about Anita.

  “She was here today,” I said. “I didn’t invite her in. We talked in the driveway. She’s still on that kick about undoing wrongs.”

  “Well, she called me.” Whenever Gabrielle began a conversation by saying Well,…in that particular tone of voice, she made me feel that she was about to confide an observation or insight that would give us both great satisfaction. “We were right,” she continued. “Anita has become involved in the recovery movement. She’s been to a place called CHIRP. It sounds like an Audubon sanctuary, doesn’t it? But it’s some kind of spa or luxury mental hospital. Or both. So, someone did put her up to making amends.”

  “There was a hollow ring to it. What she said to me sounded rehearsed. Or maybe memorized. But CHIRP isn’t a mental hospital. It’s…as I understand it, it’s more like a retreat. Or sometimes a detox place. And maybe a spa, too. Healing and recovery.”

  “She’s been in therapy,” Gabrielle announced.

  “Are you sure?”

  “With someone named Ted Green. I want you to ask Rita about him.”

  I sighed and poured out everything. When I’d finished, Gabrielle said, “He sounds worse than anyone deserves.”

  “No. Rita says that a lot of people find him helpful. And I honestly can imagine that he would be very sympathetic. Not that Anita deserves sympathy, if you ask me.”

  “She is a terribly unhappy person,” Gabrielle said.

  “She is a sadistic crook.”

  “If she’s trying to change, she deserves to be encouraged.”

  “When she starts writing you checks, maybe I’ll be convinced,” I said.

  Oddly enough, the call left me feeling unusually mellow, possibly because I’d had the chance to vent my spleen at and about Anita in a single day. I was, however, aware of somehow having contracted a case of contagious sympathy for her. Gabrielle, who always thought of every friend or acquaintance as the equivalent of a family member, persisted in speaking as if Anita were a difficult relative. In a way, Anita was a member of my network, if not of my family, and it suddenly occurred to me that when she spoke about making amends, she just might be serious and genuine.

  But I had my own amends to make. I owed an apology to Ted and Wyeth, and in storming out, I’d deprived Dolfo of help. The approach I’d taken with Ted and Eumie, and then with Ted alone, had done nothing for the poor dog. My major error, as I saw it, had been to impose my viewpoint on the Brainard-Greens instead of discovering theirs and working from within it; I’d accepted their desire to use positive methods, but I’d failed to adapt my positive methods to their framework. From every dog I’d ever trained, indeed, from every dog I’d ever watched, I’d learned the importance of tailoring training to fit the individual animal. Even so simple a matter as what constituted positive reinforcement differed from breed to breed and from individual to individual. For the typical Border collie, the glorious opportunity to retrieve a tennis ball was wildly reinforcing. In contrast, if I tossed a tennis ball for Rowdy, his superior and scornful expression would inform me that if I insisted on throwing my toys on the ground, I shouldn’t expect him to pick up after me. Sammy, however, flew after balls and brought them back with the enthusiasm of a golden retriever. Rowdy worked for treats; his attitude was that if it wasn’t edible, it wasn’t really reinforcement, was it? When I told Rowdy and Kimi what good dogs they were, they might as well have come out and said, Oh, is that what you think? How nice for you. Now where’s the liver? Sammy simply ate up Good boy. So, which breed was Ted? What motivated him? And what kind of reinforcement did he want?

  I went to the computer and read up on Ted’s book and on his theories about trauma. As I’d heard, he had a broad definition of trauma, and in his view, trauma led to addiction, by which he meant almost any kind of dependency. Trauma required healing, and addiction required recovery, mainly by means of twelve-step programs. In evaluating what Ted had to say, I searched for examples in my own life. Naturally, I started out and ended up thinking about dogs: alpha and omega. The death of every dog I’d ever owned had, in Ted’s view, been traumatic. My losses had certainly felt traumatic. How had I responded to each such “ordinary trauma,” as Ted phrased it? By getting another dog. Was I hooked on dog love? Oh, yes. Indeed, my interpretation of the Serenity Prayer was a measure of the strength of my addiction: the serenity to accept behaviors I couldn’t change, the courage to change those I could, and the wisdom to know the difference was just what every dog trainer needed.

  So, having prepared myself, I called Ted Green. “I want to apologize for losing my temper,” I said. “And I feel terrible about saying what I did in front of Wyeth. If you still want my help with Dolfo, I’d like to give it another try.”

  “Something was going on with you,” Ted said gently. “Your reaction felt overdetermined. Out of proportion to the situation, so to speak.”

  “Yes,” I agreed.

  “So, what’s with you?”

  “I guess you don’t know. I, uh, I had a head injury a couple of years ago…a little less than that.” I was using the truth to tell a lie, so to speak. Losing my temper had nothing to do with head trauma. “And just afterward, I had a major emotional shock.” True. To my horror, Steve had married Anita Fairley, whose name I certainly wasn’t going to mention to Ted, who was, as I’d just learned, her therapist. “Anyway, as I was mulling over the way I overreacted at your house, I was thinking about grounding. And containment. In other words, grounding myself in present realities and containing my reactions to triggers. Setting boundaries. And I knew I’d let myself get sucked into the past. And so on. So, I had to call you.”

  “I understand,” he said.

  “I thought you would.”

  Ted said that he had a cancellation at five o’clock, and we agreed that I’d visit then.

  In my defense, I have to point out that my mendacity and, worse, my trivialization of life-shattering trauma was in a good cause, namely, Dolfo. What’s more, sustaining a whopping whack on the head and then finding out about Steve and Anita hadn’t exactly been fun, and in struggling to recover, I honestly had found it useful to ground myself in the here and now and so on. That is, beneath my palaver about true events, there actually lay some truth.

  CHAPTER 30

  At quarter of five, equipped with baby gates, leashes, and treats, I was ready to set off for Ted Green’s when Caprice decided to accompany me. “I left my winter clothes,” she said. “They’re in a cedar closet. I forgot about them when Leah and I were there. I want all my possessions out of that house, and I don’t want to have to go back alone. But if I’ll be in the way, I can go another time.”

  “No, it’s fine.”

  As I was backing out of the driveway, I was again delayed, this time by Kevin Dennehy, who greeted us and made what sounded like an offhand inquiry about where we were going.

  “To Ted Green’s,” I said. “I’m having another go at helping with the dog, and Caprice is picking up the last of her belongings. We’ll be—”

  “Hey, Caprice,” he said. “I gotta
have a word with Holly. Personal matter.”

  Kevin opened the driver’s side door of my car, and we walked back toward the house.

  “Personal matter?” I asked.

  “Personal safety,” he said. “I didn’t know you were still going over there.”

  “I haven’t been. Except for the memorial service. And Sunday morning, but not for long. Leah and Caprice went to get Caprice’s things. Otherwise—”

  “This is homicide we’re talking about.”

  “Kevin, I know that, but it’s not my homicide. I’m alive, obviously. It had nothing to do with me. Eumie wasn’t killed because I was training her dog.”

  “Her daughter’s living with you.”

  “Visiting us,” I corrected.

  “Get him to bring the dog here.”

  “It won’t work. For one thing, I said I’d be there. And for another, I need to work on restructuring the dog’s environment. I can’t do that here.”

  “Get Steve to go with you.”

  “No. Absolutely not. Kevin, you know how hard Steve works. I’m not asking him to put in time as my bodyguard. I don’t need one. If I did, I’d take a dog.”

  “Look, do me a favor. Don’t eat or drink anything. You or the kid. As a personal favor.”

  “I’m going there to train a dog. If I swallow anything, it’ll be liver out of my own pockets, and that’ll be by accident. Okay? And I’ll tell Caprice. Am I excused now?”

  Kevin nodded. He waved to Caprice and walked off looking glum.

  On the short drive to Ted Green’s, I passed along Kevin’s order, which I explained to Caprice by saying that Kevin was given to fits of paranoia and that the malady was an occupational hazard of being a cop.

  “He’s not being paranoid,” she said. “I hate walking into that house. If I could go in there and not breathe the air, I’d do it.”

  When we’d parked in Ted’s driveway and were heading for the steps to the front door, I caught sight of George McBane, who was emerging from his driveway on an expensive-looking racing bike. I expected him to stop and say hello, but he whizzed past and sped away without even nodding to us. He looked horrible. His face was pale, and his expression was sad and almost dazed.

  “George looks ghastly,” I said to Caprice. “I wonder if he’s sick.” We’d reached the porch and were dutifully removing our shoes.

  “He was probably the one who poisoned the squirrels,” Caprice said. “I saw him in one of those trees between their house and ours. He had a ladder. He probably got caught.”

  I was stunned. Only a few days earlier, I’d been looking through a large glossy mailing that Steve and I had received from the MSPCA-Angell when I’d spotted a photo of George McBane and Barbara Leibowitz, who were spotlighted because of a gift to the Boston Capital Campaign. The official slogan of the MSPCA-Angell was Kindness and Care of Animals. And George had been poisoning squirrels? Did Kevin know? Had Barbara found out and confronted him?

  Before I’d composed myself, the door opened, and Ted tried to give Caprice a welcoming hug. “Home at last,” he said.

  “I’ve come to get my winter clothes.” Caprice held up a box of trash bags she’d brought with her. “Holly, I’ll meet you in the car.”

  I handed her the keys. “You’ll need these. And you might want to listen to the radio.”

  “That girl,” Ted said with a dramatic shrug.

  Eager to get to the point, I said, “I have some fresh thoughts about Dolfo. Ted, who really knows what happened before you got him? It’s occurred to me that he may not feel safely grounded and that what he needs is a clear sense of boundaries. I’m worried that in the absence of them, he’s experiencing anxiety. It’s even possible that he’s having flashbacks.” As I was wondering whether I’d gone too far, I glanced around in search of the dog. “Where is he?”

  “Dolfo, here! Dolfo!” To me, Ted said, “He was here a minute ago when I came up from my office. Maybe I forgot to close the door, and he’s downstairs.”

  Ted headed for the kitchen, but before reaching it, he vanished through an open door. I followed him down a flight of carpeted stairs to an attractive waiting room with a couch, two upholstered chairs, and end tables that held magazines and boxes of tissues. Everything was off-white and had remained so. In other words, the waiting room appeared to be a Dolfo-free zone. From an open door, however, there emerged a soft thump. Cursing in what I took to be Yiddish, Ted dashed into what proved to be a small, windowless business office rather than the spacious psychotherapy office I expected. Crammed into the room, which had an ugly fluorescent ceiling light, were a desk that held a computer and printer, an office chair, and three filing cabinets. The bottom drawer of one filing cabinet was wide open. The floor space was occupied mainly by Dolfo and the manila folders and papers with which he was playing.

  “Jesus Christ! Damn it all!” Ted yelled.

  Dolfo responded by dropping the single sheet of paper he’d been chewing and turning his attention to what at first registered on my writer’s eye as the manuscript of a book, a thick stack of paper bound with one large clasp.

  “Boundaries,” I said calmly. “You see? He’s begging for boundaries. It’s in the nature of dogs to search for them, to force us to set limits by a process of trial and error. Is this a violation? Is that?”

  “Goddamn it, Dolfo, give me that!” Ted shouted.

  Enough. I had to shove past Ted to squeeze all the way into the little office. As I did so, I filled my left hand with treats from one of my capacious pockets. Instead of trying to persuade Dolfo to trade the manuscript for liver goodies, I took the expeditious course of tossing the food on the floor a foot or two away from the dog’s head. Predictably, he released his grip on his booty and turned his attention from the merely interesting to the irresistibly delicious. Pushing past Ted, I swooped down and quickly grabbed what I was embarrassed to recognize not as a book manuscript but as a copy of a thick federal tax return. There’s nothing wrong with my sense of boundaries: books are intended for publication, but tax returns are private. Still, I’m a rapid reader. The same quick glance that had enabled me to identify the return had also shown me a gross adjusted income that was impossibly low for someone living as Ted did; at a guess, Ted was reporting less than half the amount of money he actually took in. The responsibilities of a dog trainer, I decided, did not include the obligation to inform the IRS that her client was cheating on his taxes. Furthermore, this was not the time to tell him that if he underpaid, I therefore ended up overpaying because of his dishonesty. Etiquette having triumphed over ethics, I put the thick return face-down on the desk. By then, Ted was on the floor gathering up loose papers and folders. Dolfo, having wolfed down the treats, helped him by licking his face. When Ted stood up, I realized that he was, for once, angry at something Dolfo had done. Instead of psychologizing, Ted said, “Point made, Holly. Enough is enough.”

  “It’s like the end of Portnoy’s Complaint,” I agreed. “Maybe now we can begin.”

  Five minutes later, Ted and I sat at the kitchen table. Dolfo, on leash, sat at my side. Ted took notes on a yellow legal pad.

  “Doors will be kept closed,” I dictated. “Dolfo will be loose in, at most, one room at a time. If you can’t watch him every second, he will be either outdoors in your fenced yard or in a crate. I will leave one of the crates I have in my car. Dolfo will be taken out once an hour. If he produces, he will be given praise and food. He will be fed twice a day. You will put the bowl down for ten minutes. At the end of that time, you will remove it. You will hire a trainer. Not me. I will give you her name.”

  “You sure you don’t want coffee?” Ted asked. “Something to eat?”

  “Nothing, thanks. I can’t stay, and we have work to do.” The remaining work actually took only a few minutes. Ted helped me to carry a big folding crate from the car to his kitchen. I dug in my purse and found the number I’d promised, and I added the name and number of a reliable dog walker. Then I apologized. “You don’t h
ave the time to train Dolfo by yourself. And so on. I should have known that from the beginning. I’m sorry.” I really should have. Ted and Eumie did things by hiring other people; it was a way of life, and I should have recognized and accepted it as such.

  To my astonishment, Ted began to cry. “I can’t do much of anything without Eumie.”

  “I’m sure you can learn. Ted, I’m really very sorry.”

  “Caprice hates me,” he said.

  As I was on the verge of mendaciously assuring him otherwise, Caprice walked into the kitchen carrying a big trash bag that presumably contained her winter clothes.

  “What we’ve got here,” he said to her, gesturing to me, “is a real mensch.”

  “Keep the Jewish shtick to yourself,” she said. “I just ran into your un-bar-mitzvahed son, who’s a prize piece of dreck, and all the Yiddish and all the knishes going aren’t going to get you the Jewish family warmth you’re after, Ted, so lay off.”

  “Wyeth’s mother isn’t Jewish. That’s the only reason—”

  “Don’t tell me! I know! There’s a Yiddish word for it: meshugass,” she said. You and your Yiddish. You are such a phony. You put a mezuzah by the door and a menorah in the dining room, and on the High Holidays, you don’t go near a temple. But the main thing, the important thing, is that you don’t know a mitzvah when you see one. Or when you benefit from one. Holly’s trying to save your awful dog. Steve and Holly took me in. Mitzvahs both. So shut up.” She stomped out.