by Walter Kirn
My mother was different. She believed in caution. I planned to stay over at her house when I reached Minnesota the next evening. She lived in the same little green Tom Sawyer river town where I’d grown up and gone to school, a retired ER nurse who liked to read the classics, play the piano, pay calls on housebound neighbors, listen to conservative talk radio, and write in her journal about her son’s accomplishments. It had been almost a year since I’d last seen her, which was a long stretch for us. I missed her when we were apart, but sometimes when we were together she unnerved me. Her stoicism. Her reserve. I couldn’t tell when she was angry at me, which allowed me to think she rarely was, but now and then I caught a twinge, a flicker.
This happened when I told her about Clark. My description of his quirks amused her, reminding her of Bertie Wooster from her beloved P. G. Wodehouse novels, but she grew quiet when I mentioned the trip, and even quieter when I brought up Shelby. She wasn’t an animal person to begin with—she had asthma and allergies, and fur was filthy—but what seemed to bother her in this case were the expenditures the dog had caused. How much had the wheelchair cost? The surgeries? Did I want to put all those miles on my truck? She didn’t ask these questions outright but they were implied in her silences and pauses. I also thought I detected a harsher charge, aimed at me alone, of genuflection.
In the motel in Forsyth, Shelby dreamed and whimpered on the floor. I lay in bed and listened to the trains making their heavy-breathing diesel noises and their shuddering, gigantic coupling sounds. I skimmed a book I’d tracked down a couple of days ago: Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley, the true account of a cross-country road trip taken in a pickup with a poodle. The book was published in 1962, the year that I was born, and I thought it could serve as a model, or a foil, for the book that might be forming inside me. Preserving a sense of literary purpose was crucial to my self-respect tonight. It might also prove crucial tomorrow with my mother, who would want a higher reason for my exertions than the servicing of a rich eccentric.
The Steinbeck book was not what I expected. My impression was that it consisted of folksy sketches of charming American characters and scenes, but it was gloomier than that. In a section set in Minnesota, Steinbeck drives an evacuation route intended to help people survive a nuclear war. He calls it “a road designed by fear.” He crosses the Canadian border and then reenters the United States, grumbling about the stern, impersonal guards and how modern governments diminish people. He frets that TV is flattening the culture and voices disgust at materialism and wastefulness. Pretty much the only state that pleases him, because it seems clean and honest and unspoiled, is Montana, the place that I’d just left.
The book depressed me. It brimmed with fears about the future that had mostly come true. I put it down. My phone was turned off, because those were still the days when turning a phone off wasn’t considered hiding. My silence would have to assure Clark I was coming. When I finally showed up with Shelby, if we made it—if the sounds she was making in her sleep weren’t symptoms of a failing nervous system—he’d witness a marvel that no one ever tires of: faith in a stranger rewarded in full measure. He trusted me, who trusted very few, and he was right to trust me, for here I was, heading his way through the hot Montana badlands where dinosaur fossils lay scattered across dry creek beds and pale, ribbed fingers of eroded stone offered moody perches to hawks and vultures. Still, I felt a rising qualm—not about Clark, about myself. Would it be wrong to write about him someday? If I masked his identity? If I changed his name? He knew I was a writer—we’d discussed it; he’d even done some “scribbling” himself. But did he know what a writer really is?
Probably not. Few people do. A writer is someone who tells you one thing so someday he can tell his readers another thing: what he was thinking but declined to say, or what he would have thought had he been wiser. A writer turns his life into material, and if you’re in his life, he uses yours, too.
SHELBY SOILED MY MOTHER’S kitchen rug the moment I helped her roll into the house. My mother’s place was a tribute to English cottages of the sort that Miss Marple might visit to solve a murder, all bookshelves and lamps and lace antimacassars, with so many welcoming nooks to sit and read in, so many helpful side tables and ottomans, that the question of how to best get comfortable there was a bit overwhelming—just too much choice. On me, the house’s effect was soporific, and happily so; the sleep I usually got there was soft, upholstered, deep, enveloping. It was the sleep of a prized and cared-for son, impossible to achieve in other settings. To benefit from this maternal service, though, required appreciative tidiness from me—no drinks without coasters, all throw pillows replaced—and Shelby’s disgusting act when we arrived ruined the atmosphere, setting it on edge.
“Out. That dog goes out,” my mother said.
She had me settle Shelby on the porch, under a bird feeder hectic with wrens and chickadees. I folded her wheelchair and leaned it against a wall. “It’s ugly, that thing. It upsets me,” my mother said. She was a small woman with olive skin and complexion-contrasting blue eyes whose power was their ability to narrow decisively yet minutely, also instantly, leaving a person to wonder what had shifted—my mother’s facial expression or the weather. Once she passed judgment on something, the issue was closed. There could be fighting about it but no winning.
When I came back inside after fussing with the chair she made me wash my hands with Ivory soap and gave me a fresh towel to dry them on. The towel went straight into the washing machine along with the clothes that I had on. My other clothes were in the truck, but I was forbidden to bring my bag inside. My mother gave me a robe and made me shower and waited for me in her leather reading chair, beside the stand where she displayed her dictionary and kept her curated kit of reading tools: her fringed leather bookmarks, her colored pencils, her ivory-handled magnifying glass.
“I’m going to say this,” she said when I sat down.
“I can’t. I’m sorry, Mom. It’s not my dog.”
“I want you to put it down,” she said.
“I know why you might think that but I just can’t.”
“This is absurd. It doesn’t have a life. It can’t even scratch itself, for heaven’s sake. Who is this man, anyway?”
“Clark?”
“There’s something wrong with him. Anyone who’d want that animal, there’s something wrong with him, I’m telling you. Which branch of the Rockefellers is he from?”
“That’s not the kind of thing we talk about.”
“How old is he?”
“My age. I don’t know exactly.”
“Who’s his grandfather? Nelson? David? Laurance?” My mother was a consumer of big biogaphies and knew her major lineages cold. Tudors, Plantagenets, Kennedys, Shrivers. The woman belonged on genealogical Jeopardy!
“Mom, I’m not up on that stuff,” I said. “I need to sleep.”
“I’m going to say something else to you.”
“Okay.”
I knew what was coming: nothing. She’d go quiet. She’d let me imagine something. A trick of hers. She’d look at me, I’d look at her, and then I would make some excuse to look away. I hated it. I’d hated it since childhood. Maybe the new way to play things would be to say so.
“I hate this, Mom,” I said. “I hate this one.”
She let the silence chill and thicken. In the window behind her the air was turning green, the color it gets in rural Minnesota when pelting hailstones are building inside black clouds and farmers are herding their animals indoors. Our small town was a strict, efficient moral universe where even the elements collaborated to help make the points that needed to be made.
“I need to bring her back inside,” I said.
“I’ll only allow it if you put her down.”
“This is out of my hands,” I said. “I made a promise.”
“Phooey, Walt,” my mother said.
I COULDN’T RESUME THE trip. With a nurse’s discernment, my mother saw my pallor, the trembly way I cut
and ate my pancakes, my too-tight grip on my glass of grapefruit juice, and wouldn’t permit me to get back on the road. She gave the order at the breakfast table, and for once I was happy to yield to common sense. I’d slept for ten hours, hard. I’d left the earth. When I woke up, I couldn’t move my body. My legs felt strapped to the mattress, my bowels were stone. Some deep, blocked channel had opened in my skull and freed a sludge of stagnant mucus that shifted and cracked behind my eyes and temples. The paralysis felt retributive and just and I lay there in bed for a while not fighting it, letting Shelby’s predicament be mine.
This sacrificial exercise succeeded: when I finally dragged myself downstairs, Shelby was drinking water and looked revived. My mother had laid a green garden hose in front of her, turned it on at minimal pressure, and she was lapping at the stream with a quickly curling, uncurling tongue.
Over breakfast my mother and I devised a plan. I called Northwest Airlines and booked a flight that left that night, a nonstop to LaGuardia. I had to pay full fare: four hundred dollars. I said I’d be taking a dog, but not what kind of dog. The agent reminded me that I’d need papers proving that she’d had her vaccinations. I didn’t possess such documents, but my mother knew how to get them: across the street from her lived a kindly bachelor veterinarian. We called his office, drove there, got the shots, obtained the papers, and paid his fee, which he freely admitted was twice his normal fee. “Emergency service,” he said. I didn’t buy it. My mother had told him the story and dropped Clark’s name—she couldn’t help herself. What the vet should have said was, “Rockefeller service.”
He also wrote out a prescription for tranquilizers—my mother’s idea and the key to the whole scheme. Stuff Shelby into a pet crate, knock her out, pack her wheelchair in a plain brown carton, lug it all up to the ticket counter, smile. The only snag was Clark: he had no answering machine. Unless he was home in the middle of a weekday to pick up his phone, he wouldn’t know to meet us.
But he was there. It was fine. He wasn’t at work. Come to think of it, all of our other conversations had also occurred during weekdays. He’d called me, though—called me from his office, I assumed. And yes, I remembered him saying he had an office. But maybe he didn’t go there much. Maybe he made his own hours. Or he was sick today.
“I apologize for the surprise, the change of schedule. But my truck’s running funny,” I said. “And Shelby’s tired.” I glanced at my mother across the kitchen table; she’d come over to my side, as she always did, though sometimes her principles slowed her down at first. “Actually, we’re both tired. It’s been a rough one.”
“I love surprises. I’m thrilled. Great news,” Clark said. He didn’t sound sick at all. He sounded tip-top. What mattered to me, however, was that he sounded grateful.
At the airport, drugged and crated, Shelby passed into the airline’s baggage system. A freight handler carried her through an unmarked door and she was no longer my responsibility. I boarded the plane and fell asleep immediately, progressing through some filmy mental membrane into a realm of private imagery. I’d like to say I remember what I dreamed of, but all I truly remember was that I did; the trip had brought on a psychedelic fever. I woke as the plane was passing over New Jersey, that brawny industrial landscape of tanks and docks, freight yards and pipelines, America’s loading area, and then we were crossing the lighted Manhattan skyline, as furrowed and labyrinthine as fate itself. I remembered the first time I saw it. I was ten. My parents had decided that my brother and I should see the great national landmarks of the East: the Liberty Bell, the Capitol, Boston Harbor, the USS Constitution. We drove. We stayed with people—friends and distant relatives—who’d made the mistake at some point in the past of idly inviting us to visit. The trip was punishing. New York came last. I’d grown jaded by then: the monuments we’d toured had all turned out to be smaller than I’d hoped or hedged in by unmagnificent surroundings. Not this one. As we approached the Lincoln Tunnel, I beheld a stupendous all-in-one new universe that instantly diminished the one I’d known. Here was the centerpiece, all else was backdrop. The place looked ancient, but in a modern way, and it had an ark-like self-assurance, as though it expected to ride out vast catastrophes that would devastate those who weren’t its passengers.
The plane met the runway with a squealing noise and all the alarming, thrilling bumps and shudders. Underneath me in the cargo hold Shelby was waking up, I hoped; I’d timed the administration of the tranquilizers so that Clark might meet a conscious animal, one capable of responding in some fond way when its new owner at last laid hands on it. The trip had been hard, and I wanted it to end well, in a way that was worthy of my stipend. I’d performed, in the old sense, the classic sense, a labor, the kind imposed on people by fickle gods. For once it had not been an intellectual labor but physical, emotional, and real. And I’d endured. I’d persisted. I’d come through.
THREE
HE SAID I would recognize him by his resemblance to the actor David Hyde Pierce who played the character of Niles, the brother, on the TV comedy series Frasier. It was one of my mother’s favorite programs, so I knew Niles well. He was slim, fey, balding, and he wore suits. The first time my mother made me watch the show with her, my impression was that Niles was gay because the script portrayed him as an opera buff, but later in the program he mentioned a girlfriend. Because I’d been called gay at Princeton for writing poetry, and at Oxford for writing plays, I abhorred any stirrings of bigotry in myself, but when Clark compared himself to Niles, his tone of voice conspicuously pleased, I’d wondered if he were testing me sexually as other gay men whom I’d known had when I met them. But Niles wasn’t gay, of course, he only seemed to be, and only to rubes like me, so probably not. What Clark was testing in me, if anything, were my feelings about prim and prissy upper-class types. I liked them just fine, was the answer. They had their place.
I looked around for Niles’s and Pierce’s double as I stepped off a crowded escalator into LaGuardia’s baggage claim area. Was that him? Too stout. Was that him there? Nah, too grim. I didn’t like this guessing game; I didn’t think it should have to be a game. He could have told me how he’d be dressed, as I’d done. Blue denim button-down shirt, black jeans, and sneakers. I didn’t care to impress him, this outfit meant. I was from Montana, my own man.
“There are you are, Walter! Welcome to New York.”
Clark, who seemed shorter than the TV actor and lacked his swan-like bearing, was wearing a pink billed cap and a pink polo shirt. His hair, what little I could see of it, was a tampered-with, unconvincing shade of blond. His glasses had thick, dark plastic frames and looked like they ought to come with a fake mustache attached. He had on khaki trousers and no socks. Beside him was a nervous-seeming woman who stood a step back and blurred into the background. It was Sandra, his wife. He briefly introduced us and then ignored her as he inquired, with an ornate, ambassadorial air, about my flight. I’m not sure how I answered him. All flights that land safely are much the same to me.
The luggage carousel creaked into motion and bags started sliding down out of a chute and battering one another at the bottom. A few minutes later all of them were gone and there was still no Shelby. Concern for her distracted me from Clark, who was buzzing on about something I hadn’t caught. I found him instantly annoying; a twee, diminutive hobbit of a fellow whose level of self-amusement seemed almost delusional. In his speech, as I’d noticed during our phone calls, he observed the outward forms of wit, as though speaking humorously came down to algebra (it’s not the X of Y that bothers me, it’s the Y of X) and how one filled in the variables didn’t matter. If he thought this way, he was working the wrong audience. I only laugh at truly funny remarks; it’s the one incorruptible, honest trait in me. Maybe he was nervous, though. His fake hair color spoke of a baseline insecurity, as did the cap, which I suspected concealed a bald spot.
While he prattled, an airline worker emerged from somewhere bearing the unwieldy plastic pet crate. It looked blessedly unda
maged. Clark knelt down and peered through its front grate, making dog-lover sounds—little clucks punctuating bursts of baby talk—that had an embarrassingly private quality. Over his shoulder he said, “Good work.” He then opened the grate and reached a hand inside. His arm made repetitive, gentle petting motions that filled me with relief.
“Excellent. Just excellent,” he said. “This calls for a celebration, don’t you think? Supper. Tomorrow. All of us. The Sky Club.”
“Great. That sounds great,” I said. “That sounds like fun.” In his invitation I’d heard a hint that I could expect my payment during the meal, a setting more fitting than this one for such a ceremony. “What time?” I asked him.
“I’ll ring you.”
“That sounds great.”
Clark grabbed hold of the handle on the pet crate. He tugged it to indicate that he wanted help but I was already on it, reaching over and taking upon myself the greater burden, because when I grasped the handle he eased off to the point of withdrawing his contribution. “I have the car waiting,” he said. Followed by the recessive, spectral Sandra, we carried the crate outside through sliding doors and to a curb lined by limousines and vans and men holding hand-lettered signs with names on them. “Right here,” he said. “This is perfect. This is splendid.” We set the crate down and he turned to face me. He stuck one hand out, a fleshless, wan appendage with all the vitality seemingly bred out of it and fingers that appeared never to have worked other than to sign checks and dial phones. It wasn’t clear to me which car was his, just that I’d not be riding in it with him to wherever he thought I might be going that night. I was staying at a friend’s apartment, but Clark didn’t know this because I hadn’t told him. Other than how my flight had gone, he hadn’t asked me a thing about myself. We said our goodbyes and I headed down the sidewalk to join a long line of people waiting for cabs. I didn’t look back to watch him get into his car. I had an odd feeling he didn’t want me to.
