Bride & Groom

by Conant, Susan

  “If fidelity is her primary concern,” I said, “she should get—”

  “She already has one. In fact, I suspect that that’s an issue for the husband, that his wife loves the dog more than she loves him.”

  “Too bad she didn’t marry a veterinarian,” I said. “In that way, Steve and I are a perfect match. And when it comes to absolute devotion to him, no one could compete with India and Lady. If you set out to get a one-man dog, you couldn’t pick a better breed than the German shepherd dog to begin with, plus India as an individual is very loving and ultra self-confident. India is really a dog with a single mission in life- Her mission is Steve and, to a lesser extent, everyone connected with him. Including Lady. And Lady is completely devoted to Steve because the entire rest of the world scares the daylights out of her. Pointers aren’t supposed to ke like that, but Lady has her reasons, and she does remarkably well. The miracle is that India never actually bit Anita when Anita went after Lady. But India did growl at Anita. I heard her. Fortunately, India is intelligent enough not to generalize from one wife to another. She and I get along very well. The only serious conflict is between India and Kimi, and that’s mainly because of Kimi. Well, and then there’s Tracker and my dogs.”

  “That awful cat,” Rita said. “You deserve a medal for keeping that thing.”

  “Tracker is not a thing,” I said. “And I’ve stopped feeling guilty about not bonding more with her.”

  “Guilty? Holly, that is an ugly, nasty cat. No one else would keep her for two minutes.”

  “Steve would.”

  “You tried to foist her off on Steve, and he refused.”

  “Only because he knew she’d be safe with me.”

  As we finished dinner, Rita nagged me about the need to get going on wedding plans. Now that I saw the event in its proper context, as we Cambridge types say, I shared her concern about my formerly casual attitude. Indeed, I’d been to dog shows chaired by people who’d taken their responsibilities lightly. The shows had been disasters. It’s one thing to turn your wedding into a dog show, but quite another to turn it into a crummy, disorganized dog show. I wasn’t going to let that happen: I felt determined that Steve and I would have the Westminster of weddings.

  In fact, when I got home that evening, practically the first thing I said to Steve was just that: “the Westminster of weddings.”

  “Have you been drinking?” he asked.

  “Of course not. We took my car. I drove.”

  Steve was lying on the bed sipping a beer and watching a DVD of The Sopranos. Also on the bed were four of our five dogs: my Rowdy and his India, Lady, and the beautiful-to-die-for malamute puppy, Sammy. Kimi, normally the biggest bed hog in the pack, was holding a sphinxlike pose on the floor.

  “If Kimi breaks that down-stay and goes for India, it won’t be my fault,” I said.

  After getting myself a glass of red wine, I rejoined what I was learning to think of as my family. After dislodging a couple of dogs, I managed to squeeze in next to Steve. The Sopranos episode was one we’d both seen before, one of the ones about Tony’s Russian mistress, so I felt free to tell Steve about my wedding epiphany.

  He took the revelation calmly. When Paul told people about what happened on the road to Damascus, they probably stayed pretty cool, too: Gee, that’s nice. And how was the rest of your day?

  “We never intended to leave the dogs out,” Steve said. “They were always part of our plans.”

  “It’s the remainder of the plans that I’ve been neglecting.”

  “We agreed to keep it small,” he said. “Have you changed your mind about that?”

  “No. Not at all. Not in the least. But we do need a guest list.”

  Looking from Tony Soprano to me, he said, “You’re not inviting what’s his name, are you?”

  Enzio Guarini. Steve knew the name as well as I did. So did everyone else in Greater Boston.

  “We really have to,” I said. “And we’d better ask Carla to do the flowers, too. If we don’t, she’ll be hurt.”

  Guarini’s wife, Carla, ran a flower shop. Guarini ran… well, Guarini ran a lot of enterprises, some legitimate, some otherwise. The principal “otherwise” was the Mob. I’d worked for Guarini off and on, but only in the blameless role of dog trainer. Guarini’s own behavior was open to criticism, but thanks to me, his Norwegian elkhounds were model citizens.

  “He’s your client, too,” I pointed out. “And he’s very fond of me. We can’t leave him out.”

  “We can’t invite every client I have,” Steve said. “Just my staff.”

  “And their husbands. Wives. Significant others. We can’t invite half of a couple and leave out the other. Anyway, we need to make a list for Gabrielle. With addresses. She’s doing the invitations. Thank God my father married her. But she can’t do invitations until we know where we’re getting married.”

  “Anywheres fine with me,” Steve said. “Did you and Rita have a good time?”

  “Yes,” I said, without mentioning the one bad part of the shopping trip, namely, my having seen his evil ex-wife.

  “Did you have a chance to mention the third floor?”

  The third floor of my house was sunny, airy, and, if anything, more attractive than the second floor, where Rita now lived.

  “No. I couldn’t find a tactful way to work it in, except that we did talk a little about Artie. I think they should get married. Rita loves him. I think he loves her. They have a monogamous relationship. They’re very companionable and compatible. At a minimum, they could live togther. I don’t know why they don’t.”

  “Willie.”

  Willie was Rita’s Scottish terrier, a feisty character who had a passion for human ankles, including mine. To the best of my knowledge, Willie had never broken skin, but he did voice his desires. I didn’t mind—on the contrary, I liked Millie, whose ankle fetish struck me as a kink that he had the self-control never to act on and the honesty never to lie about. Artie felt otherwise.

  Steve continued. "We’d better give it some time. Rita’s not dumb. She’ll work it out for herself. She’s been a real good friend to both of us. The last thing we want to do is make her feel pushed out.”

  The Sopranos episode had ended. Steve switched to the local news on TV. The murder of Dr. Laura Skipcliff got a brief mention. The victim had not been sexually assaulted. Her purse, found at the scene, had contained credit cards and two hundred thirty-two dollars in cash. The report ended with a platitude: Authorities were pursuing the investigation.

  “You didn’t use the garage at the mall, did you?” asked Steve.

  I hadn’t. Still, after dinner, Rita and I had hurried across the parking lot as fast as her high heels had allowed. I’d pretended that Rowdy was on one side of me and Kimi on the other. Ahead of us paraded Sammy. For all I knew, Dr. Laura Skipcliff, too, had owned big, beautiful dogs. For all I knew, she’d drawn strength from their imaginary presence until the moment of her violent death.

  CHAPTER 8

  From: Gabrielle@beamonres.org

  To: HollyWinter@amrone.org

  Subj: Worries!!

  Dearest Holly,

  Your father insists that I convey to you his extreme apprehension about your safety in Cambridge. I have assured him that you are unlikely to frequent the parking garage beneath The Charles Hotel, or any other hotel for that matter, especially now, of course. It is my impression that your common sense passed to you through the maternal line. I trust you to use that heritage.

  On the subject of maternal lineage, I want to pose a delicate question concerning the wording of your wedding invitation. As you know, while I never had the privilege of meeting your late mother, I hear marvelous things about her from everyone and, especially now, am acutely aware that you cherish her memory. As your wedding day approaches, how fervently you must long for her presence! And more to the point, for her name, together with your father's, on the invitation. Well, enough beating about the bush! Please answer me in all honesty! Who is
to request the pleasure of the company of your guests? Your father?

  Or Mr. and Mrs.? The Mrs. being, of course, yours truly, as I truly am, and am truly determined not to force my way into a position that a kinder Fate would have permitted your mother to occupy. I must also mention that she, Marissa, would perhaps have had greater success than I have been able to achieve in convincing your father that a wedding invitation is a formal announcement and, as such, requires the utmost in formality and therefore should not be worded "Mr. Buck Winter" or "Mr. and Mrs. Buck Winter," "Buck" being inherently informal, don't you think? I regret to report that in that matter, Mr. Buck Winter has prevailed. Luckily, however, Buck has agreed to wear a suit—the one he bought for our own wedding, so we may rest assured that he will look proper and handsome.

  Now, on to yet one more delicate matter. In surfing the web, your father has discovered that the Commonwealth of Massachusetts issues one-day licenses whereby laypersons such as himself are authorized to solemnize marriages. Knowing your father as you do, you will immediately guess the particular layperson he has in mind. As I hope you understand, I fell deeply and permanently in love with Buck within seconds of meeting him at the previously ghastly show when I was an ignoramus about dogs and in need of the rescue he effected. That being said, I think him an unsuitable person to solemnize marriages—for the simple reason, dear Holly, that he would inevitably turn any wedding at all, including yours, into an event indistinguishable from a dog show.

  It would be a miracle if he even mentioned you and Steve! Plus, you can't possibly want your father running the show, can you? Oh, dear, maybe I am barging in after all. Maybe you love the idea? If not, I urge you to make an alternative plan with the greatest possible speed. What about that nice Episcopal priest with the hearing dog? We ran into her in the Square. That you and Steve are not Episcopalians can't matter in the least, can it? I am and would be more than willing to put in a word for you. If necessary, you might want to convert. ASAP.

  Your loving stepmother,

  Gabrielle

  From: HollyWinter@amrone.org

  To: Gabrielle@beamonres.org

  Subj: Re: Worries!!

  Dearest Gabrielle,

  Steve and I want your name on the invitation! As to the solemnization of our marriage, it seems dishonest suddenly to become Episcopalians for the sole purpose of snagging a dog-friendly priest. Anyway, our priest friend will be away at a retreat.

  We need to discuss this whole matter. I will call you soon.

  Love,

  Holly

  Gabrielle’s E-mail arrived on Saturday morning. I replied immediately and then phoned her the minute Steve left for work. The first thing I asked was whether my father was there. Happily, he wasn’t.

  “Wonderful,” I said. “Look, this whole idea of having him marry us is a nightmare. I don’t care what we have to do, but we’re going to put a stop to it. I haven’t told Steve about it, and I’m not going to tell him, and I need you to do everything you can to make sure that Steve never even begins to hear the slightest hint about it. Buck already has a role in the wedding. He’s the father of the bride. That’s his role. It’s his only role. And not just because he’d talk about dogs. The worst would be that he’d manage to say something mortifying about Steve’s previous marriage or... the worst would be that he’d say something I can’t begin to guess and definitely do not want to hear. Wait! Yes, I can guess. He’d preach for hours about the fidelity of dogs and the infidelity of human beings. I can hear it now. At my wedding. Probably with examples. Bill Clinton and Buddy. Gabrielle, over my dead—”

  “Your dead body is your father’s other worry, of course.” Gabrielle had a warm, rich, throaty voice. Her typical tone, which she used now, was confiding. “It’s always difficult for parents to realize that their children are grown up.” She added, and not as a question, “Isn’t it.”

  “Gabrielle, that murder had nothing to do with me. Nothing. Crime happens in Cambridge just the way it does in every other city. And in the country! The woman who was murdered, Laura Skipcliff, was an anesthesiologist. For all we know, a patient of hers died, and some lunatic relative blamed Dr. Skipcliff. I don’t know, and the police don’t know. I saw Kevin Dennehy for a second this morning. He doesn’t even know what the murder weapon was. Probably a sledge hammer or something like that, but it hasn’t been found. No one at the garage or the hotel saw anything useful. Dr. Skipcliff lived in New York. She was here for a conference. It’s over. If her murderer was here for the conference, he’s gone home by now.”

  “Why would an anesthesiologist use a sledge hammer? Wouldn’t you think...?"

  “I don’t know. What I know is that I live right next door to a cop, the house has good locks, Steve and I have five dogs, and one of them is India. Would you remind Buck about her? And remind him that for most people, presumably including most murderers, one look at Rowdy and Kimi and even Sammy is a big deterrent. Most people don’t realize that malamutes are the world’s worst guard dogs. Remind Buck that if anyone actually attacked me, Rowdy and Kimi wouldn’t just stand there doing nothing.”

  Gabrielle responded by saying how much my father loved me. After that, we discussed wedding plans, of which Steve and I had, of course, made all too few. Then I refused her invitation to spend the next weekend in Maine. I offered excuses about Labor Day traffic and the need to work on the wedding. In reality, I didn’t want to subject Steve to more time with Buck than was absolutely necessary. Also, Steve and I both had heavy work weeks ahead and wanted the three-day weekend to ourselves.

  At the end of the conversation, Gabrielle said that since she wasn’t my biological mother, she had no difficulty in seeing me as an adult, but she still couldn’t help sharing a little of my father’s worry that I was living in a city where a woman had just been mysteriously murdered. I thanked her for her concern, told her how much I loved her, and said that I felt perfectly safe. I really did appreciate her concern and really did love her. It was also true that at the time, I still felt perfectly safe.

  CHAPTER 9

  Six days later, on the evening- of Friday, August 30, a woman named Victoria Trotter was murdered as she lay in a hammock on the front porch of her house on Egremont Street in Cambridge. I knew Victoria Trotter, whom I’d interviewed for two articles I’d written, one about her famous mother, the late Mary Kidwell Trotter, a dog portrait artist, and the other about Victoria’s own canine version of the tarot. I owned a Victoria Trotter deck of the cards and consulted them every once in a while, strictly to get a reading on themes I might be overlooking in my life and the lives of my dogs, not to foresee what I trusted was the unforeseeable future. Still, because of Victoria’s tarot, it’s worth noting that I had no premonition of her violent death.

  In fact, between the Saturday when I talked with Gabrielle and the Friday when Victoria was bludgeoned to death I paid only routine attention to the security precautions that city dwellers take automatically. As always, I kept the doors to my car and house locked. As I’d always done everywhere and fully intend to do for the rest of my life on earth and for eternity in the beyond, I spent nearly every waking and sleeping moment, indoors and outside, surrounded by big dogs. But I did so solely for the pleasure of their company. Dr. Laura Skipcliff’s murder had had nothing to do with me; nothing about it had suggested a threat to my safety.

  Even if I’d been worried, I’d have had little time to dwell on my fear during the week before Victoria’s slaying. As I’d told Gabrielle, Steve and I both had full schedules. In addition to his practice and my column for Dog’s Life, we were working on our first cooperative venture, a diet book called No More Fat Dogs. On Monday, I had a long phone conversation with Judith Esterhazy, Mac’s wife, about wedding sites that she’d investigated when searching for a place for their daughter, Olivia, to get married. Equipped with a list of the names and phone numbers of historic houses, estates open to the public, and large country inns near Boston, I spent a lot of time on the phone learning
that most spots were already booked or didn’t allow dogs. The only promising site was the Wayside Wildlife Refuge. It had the advantage of being conveniently nearby, in Lexington, and its main building was large enough for us to hold the ceremony and reception indoors in case of rain. Steve and I agreed to visit it over the Labor Day weekend. We drafted the guest list, which was alarmingly long. To our supposedly small wedding, we initially planned to invite more than a hundred people, and Steve and I kept adding names of others who simply couldn’t be excluded. To my horror, I found the web site about the Commonwealth’s willingness to grant one-day solemnization powers to people, presumably including my father, who wanted to officiate at weddings. More times than I care to report, I checked the big online bookstores to see how 101 Ways to Cook Liver was faring. It consistently ranked lower than Ask Dr. Mac, but only a little lower, so I felt satisfied. Out of curiosity, I also checked on Judith Esterhazy’s new book, Boudicca. The combination of painfully low sales and splendid reviews was depressing. It's a sad day for literature when a dog-treat cookbook does a zillion times better than a highly acclaimed novel. It’s a sad day even for the author of the dog-treat cookbook. On the other paw, of course, it’s a perfectly delightful day for big, hungry dogs.

  I said just that to Steve on Friday evening as we sat outside after dinner, with country music playing softly from a boom box on the stairs to the house. The fenced yard was one reason I’d bought the place. By suburban standards, the yard would’ve been small, but for Cambridge, it was decent-sized. Running parallel to the house on the long side of the yard was the brick wall of the peculiar little building that occupied the corner of Appleton Street and Concord Avenue, the “spite building,” as it was called, presumably because it was the legacy of some forgotten dispute. Wooden fences at the front and back made the area secure for the dogs. Ivy grew all over the brick wall, and shrubs and perennials testified to my vision of horticultural possibility if not to my acceptance of the reality of Alaskan malamutes. I’d no sooner cured Rowdy of digging when Kimi the Excavator arrived in our lives. Now, just as I was starting to feel hopeful about persuading Kimi that by “horticultural possibility” I meant the hidden gardens of Beacon Hill rather than the battlefield of Verdun, here was Sammy, who had been sired by Rowdy out of Ch. Jazzland’s Embraceable You, but by miracle rather than biology had inherited Kimi’s self-destructive zeal for tunneling directly to China, where “dog love” refers strictly to an unholy food preference that I’m unable to see as culturally relative. It’s not for me to judge harshly if cultural relativism dictates that it’s dandy for brothers and sisters to marry each other or that nonagenarians should be set adrift on icebergs to meet life’s end, but wrong is wrong, damn it! Torture is wrong. Child abuse is wrong. So is dining on dogs.