Buddy

by Brian McGrory

  What neither of us could have known in that winter of recovery was that the worst was yet to come—and soon. Harry, unbeknownst to me, had actually begun a downward spiral, the mast cell cancer being as much a harbinger as a disease. By March, he couldn’t keep food inside him, and his once proud frame began slowly melting away, almost imperceptibly at first but before too long at a much more rapid, noticeable clip. When I couldn’t ignore it any longer, we found ourselves in the exam room of his lifelong vet, Dr. Pam Bendock, where we were regulars because of Harry’s famously sensitive stomach and his chronic arthritis.

  A word about Pam: beautiful. Another: soothing. There are also charming and, breaking the bonds of free-standing adjectives, one of those rare people you like the absolute moment you meet them. Her clinic was situated on the second floor of an old town house on Newbury Street, the most fashionable shopping boulevard in Boston. Her clientele was high end and filled with questions and demands. The latter description included me. This was not some operation in the distant suburbs where the doctors ruled and obliging clients did whatever they were told. For those reasons and more, Pam was a master of diplomacy. She pushed open the far door and walked softly into the exam room, her blond hair pulled back in a ponytail and a white lab coat covering her long, lean frame. All that was exposed was the calves of her jeans and a pair of clogs. James Herriot she was not, and I mean that in the best of ways.

  “How are you guys doing?” she asked, looking from one of our faces to the other, smiling.

  Harry did nothing to mask his lifelong crush on her, and I’ll confess, I didn’t do much more. He sauntered up to her, and she crouched down and pressed the smooth skin of her cheek against his face and said, “You don’t feel well, Harry? Well, we’re going to make you better.” And in one fell swoop, she lifted Harry up onto the examination table before he or I even knew it was happening. That was just like her, a study in contrasts—thin but surprisingly strong, schooled in the unyielding realities of science yet always humane in presenting her diagnoses, a woman who would think nothing of expressing a patient’s anal sacs with the same bare hands that an expensive Newbury Street manicurist had touched up the day before.

  When she pressed her stethoscope against Harry’s chest, it was as if she wasn’t listening just to his heart but to the secrets of his soul. The room was still. Harry lifted his head to accommodate her.

  “Any good vacations lately?” she asked me.

  Huh? Me? I snapped myself back into the moment from, well, the moment.

  “Nah,” I said. “I’ve been in writing mode. Too much work.”

  Don’t get the wrong impression, by the way. Pam was married. She had kids. I was not interested, in terms of being really interested. What I was could be best described as enchanted, and in that I was anything but alone; to be in her presence was to fall within this soothing spell of hers, such that you really and truly believed, as she said to Harry, that she could and would make things better. Men felt it. Women felt it, too. Pam Bendock had that way about her.

  She had met Harry nearly a decade before, back when he had been a blocky fifteen- or sixteen-week-old puppy and she’d been a new, young veterinarian working in a frenetic pet shop on Newbury Street where she seemed markedly out of place. She was too good for it, all the cackling birds and the smells from the aquarium and the young, tattooed shoppers who came in to look at the lizards just for kicks. Over the years she got to know Harry well through bouts of arthritis so vicious that he would hobble along the city streets on three legs. She learned the ins and outs of his fragile constitution, which seemed to be always in need of care. She knew that his owner would never just, as the receptionist always recommended, “leave him for the day,” that I needed to be called the moment he came out of any procedure, and that I preferred to be—no, insisted on being—in the waiting room as soon as he came to from his anesthesia.

  As Harry grew to be a calm and confident dog, a fixture in the Back Bay where he always sat untethered on the top step of our stoop gazing at the world around him, Pam, too, became a fixture. She graduated from the pet store, which shut down, to her very own clinic on Newbury Street. She took it from a tiny practice with just her and a couple of technicians/receptionists to a staff of doctors tending to a sprawling roll of clients. She was also one of those people, those women, who got more attractive as they aged. Experience suited her well in just about every way.

  “The Caribbean with kids is a new one,” she said, smiling, her eyes widening to show that it wasn’t the tropical bliss she had grown accustomed to. As she spoke, she ran her hands calmly over, under, and across my contented dog, checking, feeling, softly probing in a way meant to relax rather than alarm. She peered into his ears. She drew blood without his even flinching. She could have amputated an eye, and he would have just given me a (one-eyed) look saying Sure, no problem, I trust her.

  She looked at his chart for a moment, then said to him, her face just a few inches from his, “You’ve lost some weight, Harry. I’m not sure I like that.”

  She asked us to come back the next day for an ultrasound. I told her I couldn’t be there because I was traveling, but I’d have Carole bring him in.

  “He’s going to be fine,” she told me, making long eye contact in the way she always did. “We’ll figure this out and take care of it.” She gave Harry a kiss on the snout—lucky dog—and bid us both farewell.

  By that night I was in Washington, visiting my ill cousin Mary McGrory. Mary was, to newspaper readers in Washington and around the country, to national politicians of a certain era, to people who bent left in the political breeze, a living legend. She’d broken into political reporting when her editor at the Washington Star had sent her to cover the Army-McCarthy hearings on Capitol Hill in the 1950s with the advice “Write it like a letter to your aunt.” She never looked back. She penned the famous line “The world will never laugh again,” after President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. She won a Pulitzer Prize for her columns about Watergate in 1974. She made Richard Nixon’s enemies list, perhaps her proudest accomplishment. She wrote an unapologetically liberal, widely syndicated political column for the Washington Post right up until the afternoon in 2003 when she couldn’t write anymore.

  I met Mary, my father’s first cousin, when I was a junior in college on a Washington semester working my first ever newspaper internship—maybe the most exciting couple of months of my young life.

  I’d heard a little bit about her from my parents, but they didn’t know her all that well. Both of my parents’ families lived in the Boston area, and Mary had left for Washington by the late 1950s and never looked back, except for holidays and weddings and the like.

  One day I plugged a quarter into the pay phone in the hallway of my dormitory at American University and called the Washington Post, which was basically like some high school baseball player calling Yankee Stadium and asking to speak to Derek Jeter. Her assistant answered and transferred me to her, and I said simply, “Hi, Mary. My name is Brian McGrory, and I think we’re related.”

  “Excellent,” she responded. “I’m having a party this Saturday. Can you come by the house around six?”

  It was less a question than an order. Before I could pull a response out of my throat, she gave me her address and said, “I’m looking forward to seeing you. I’ve got to run now. On deadline.” And that was it.

  I was about as nervous as I’d ever been. Mary’s Macomb Street apartment was a fixture on the society pages for the salon dinners she held, with Tip O’Neill and Ted Kennedy singing Irish ballads as other House members, senators, White House advisers, cabinet secretaries, and high-profile journalists hashed over the most critical issues of the day. And that Saturday there would also be me—me trying to hold my own in conversations about the double-digit unemployment rate at the time, about David Stockman and supply-side economics, about the impact of a missile defense shield in the Cold War. Good God, I was a wreck. At the appointed hour, I got buzzed into the outsi
de door of her condominium building, took the elevator down one flight as instructed, and walked slowly down the long, dark hallway, past the trash room and an emergency exit, to her corner apartment. I stood outside the door for a long moment, collecting myself, probably feeling a bit like the scarecrow the moment before he met Oz. I was about to walk into the home of the most famous journalist I’d ever met, who also happened to share my last name. I was also entering a world in which I was entirely unsuited to be. My mind was crammed with every possible fact from the day’s Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and New York Times, to the point that I could have passed a final exam at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy on the conflicts in the Middle East. But the minute the first guest asked how I was doing, my eyes would probably roll back inside of my head and I’d faint. You can see the Post gossip page headline: “Mystery Guest Arrives by Metro, Leaves by Ambulance.”

  I knocked. I heard nothing, then shuffling, then some clatter, and the door opened slowly. A very pleasant-looking sixty-something woman with a soft expression on her face eyed me up and down, from the brown plaid pants my mother had bought me for this kind of occasion to the corduroy sports jacket that didn’t fit. I broke the reverie by thrusting out my hand and saying “I’m Brian McGrory. It’s a real honor to meet you.”

  She took it softly, not to shake but to hold, and in that moment, I couldn’t possibly predict the hundreds of dinners we’d have together over the years, the thousands of telephone calls, the Sunday night meat loaf, the annual Christmas Eve lunches, the column critiques, presidential campaign trips, crazy voice mails in which she thought she was actually on hold (“Hello? Brian? Hello!”). What I did know, instantly, was that I was suddenly very happy to be there—and relieved.

  “Yes, yes,” she said, her voice melodic, a look of bemusement on her face. She led me into a sitting room, where she pulled an old, yellowed family photo off the wall and said, “Here. Look. Do you know this man? You look exactly like your grandfather.” She was right.

  She was dressed—how else to put this?—flamboyantly, though that shouldn’t be confused with revealingly. I mean, lots of satins and silks, and I specifically recall some feathers, all part of a palette of colors that may or may not have matched. Mary was not into earth tones. She had a wry way about everything she did and, clichéd as it sounds, a certain twinkle in her eye as she regarded the world around her. Nothing was too serious, but nothing was an overt joke.

  I asked, “Where is everyone?”

  “The guests,” she said, “arrive at seven.” Guests. “Come on,” she said and led me into another, bigger, brighter room, where she showed me to the bar, instructed me where I could find the ice, and advised me how to get drink orders as soon as the guests came through the door and to fill them quickly. I needn’t have been worried about fitting in. I was the help, and unhired at that. I should’ve been reading up on gimlets instead of the turmoil in Beirut.

  I came to learn that I was in good company. George Stephanopoulos later confided to me that he, too, had begun in the Washington social circuit as Mary McGrory’s bartender, as had many others. Some months later, I graduated to become her gardener. It wasn’t until I returned to Washington a couple of years after that as a young reporter for the New Haven Register that I became an actual guest, though even then my designation might have been in some dispute. By my third tour of Washington, as the Boston Globe’s White House reporter in the 1990s, Mary and I had become fast friends, dining with each other almost every Sunday night, taking long walks with Harry through Cleveland Park, talking during the week about her columns or my stories or the various goings-on on Capitol Hill.

  We had our rituals. She met my friends. She hosted book-publishing parties for me with A-listers from politics and journalism. She once delivered the single nicest compliment I’ve ever received; she had just been rushed to the hospital after suffering a minor heart attack. I was living in Boston at the time but happened to be in D.C. on a column. Mary’s assistant called me with the news, having no idea I was in town, and I raced to her room and found her sitting up in her hospital bed, all alone, snacking on a plastic container of fruit Jell-O while watching CNN. She looked at me, surprised, a big smile spreading over her pale face, and said, “You always have a knack for showing up at the exact right time.”

  About a year later, Mary, a proud neo-Luddite who used to write her columns longhand on a yellow legal pad from the road, watched as her computer seized up on deadline and devoured her words. Moments later, she fell to the floor with what would later be diagnosed as a stroke. It was devastating. When she gained cognizance many days later, she suffered from aphasia, meaning that words tumbled out of her mouth in a jumble of incomprehensible syllables. A woman who had made a career out of her incomparable ability to write elegant prose could no longer speak a simple declarative sentence. She couldn’t read or write. Her brain knew what she wanted to say, but her words came out garbled, frustrating nonsense that made her a prisoner of her own mind.

  Mary never married and never had children, and she expressed occasional regret about that, even as she rose to the pinnacle of her high-profile field. Maybe for that reason, she always took unabashed interest in who I might have been involved with, what they were like, would I bring them over. Happiness, she knew, extended far beyond the newsroom, and she wanted me to be well aware of that as well.

  When she fell ill, her colleagues at the Post were terrific with her, constantly paying visits, bringing her food, taking her on rides, guiding her back into the newsroom for occasional visits. I headed down every few weeks, alternating visits with Mary’s nephew and niece from Boston. A few hours after Harry’s appointment with Dr. Bendock, I flew to D.C. because Mary had had an emergency appendectomy a couple of days before and I wanted to pay a surprise call on her at the hospital. It was why I’d asked Carole to take Harry to Dr. Bendock’s clinic the following day.

  I arrived at the Madison Hotel in Washington around 9:30 P.M., figuring it was too late to see Mary that night and I’d catch her first thing in the morning. As I walked into my room, fumbling for the lights, my cell phone rang with a 202 number that didn’t look familiar. When I answered, it was Mary’s home nurse on the other end of the line. “Mr. Brian,” she used to call me, kind of half jokingly, even when I told her all the time to knock it off. This time there was no joking tone. “I’m sorry,” she said, “but your cousin died unexpectedly a few minutes ago.”

  There I was, ten minutes away, and Mary McGrory had died pretty much alone. Some knack, I thought to myself.

  I’d still be in Washington the following day when the call came in about Harry.

  I had been dealing with funeral home directors, lawyers, and priests the entire next morning and didn’t think it could get much worse, but when I picked up my ringing cell phone and heard the way Dr. Bendock said hello, I knew it was about to. Her voice actually cracked as she talked in uncharacteristically formal fashion. The ultrasound, she said, showed that Harry had lymphoma, a very deadly disease. Of the two kinds of lymphoma that a dog could have, his was the worst, difficult—though not completely impossible—to treat.

  My legs began to buckle, so I sat abruptly on the end of the bed in a hotel room that seemed to be getting smaller by the moment. It was as if a cold gush of air was coming through the phone. Dr. Bendock was talking, but I couldn’t really hear what she was saying. Stay calm, I kept telling myself. Listen to her. Take in the information.

  “How long do dogs generally live with this?” I finally asked.

  There was a long pause, as if she didn’t want to answer but knew she had to because I wouldn’t accept any sort of evasion. “It could be just a few months,” she said.

  Mary was gone. Harry was next. I’m by no means equating the terminal illness of a dog to the death of a wonderful human being—or any human being—but the combination was devastating—two of the most vivid and vital presences in my life taken away just a few months apart. On the phone, Dr. Bendock
continued talking, about chemotherapy that could possibly pound the disease into remission, about steroid treatments that could possibly halt the spread, about the fact that dogs can be resilient and Harry especially had a knack for not letting things get him down. If I’d believed it, any of it, that would have been nice, but as she spoke, Dr. Bendock was crying, and the tears said much more than the words.

  6

  We sat on the front stoop trying to hold on to the moment: me wishing for the world that I could push back time, Harry sprawled in his usual spot next to the faded pot of impatiens, his front paws dangling over the top step. I was leaning against him, absently rubbing his furry ears.

  When Dr. Bendock arrived, clutching a brown paper bag, Harry thumped his tail and struggled to rise, then remembered that his bones were too weak and his muscles too sore. She began to speak but realized there was nothing good to say. So she leaned down and kissed his forehead, and I said, “If you’d like to head in, we’ll be there in a moment.”

  In those few moments, Harry gazed forlornly at the world before him—the century-and-a-half-old side street where we lived, the brick town houses that lined it, the sidewalk from which his friends and admirers so often approached, schoolchildren and neighbors and workmen who always had time to talk. It was a nice world, a soft world, a generous world—Harry’s world.

  “Come on, pal,” I finally said, standing up, my voice starting to crack. He pulled himself obediently to his feet, heartbreakingly so, his gaze falling downward as I held open the heavy door and gently guided him inside.

  Harry was a month shy of his tenth birthday then, the most intuitive and wonderful creature that I have ever known. He was, to the end, as smart as ever, as kind as he had always been, as knowing as any living being I had ever met, my constant companion on foot, in the car, at home, in stores, in parks, never on a leash, always getting my jokes and playing more than a few himself. We had battled his lymphoma hard these last five months, battled it with steroids, chemotherapy, a new diet; any straw of hope, glimpse of a prayer that we could find, we tried. He hated it, every bit. He’d flop under my legs in the waiting room of the oncologist’s office in suburban Boston and force me to carry him into the treatment area when his name was called. There he would lie on the dog bed as the technicians poked and prodded his veins for yet another round of drugs, always staring straight ahead, more beleaguered than dejected. Finally, the stern oncologist named Kim who never seemed to like animals all that much, or at least Harry, told me there was nothing more she could do.