Black Ribbon

by Susan Conant

  “Nowhere,” I said. “I just got here.”

  “There’s room at our table.” Jiggling her plate a little, Cam said, “This is seconds. Hardly worth it, but I’m hungry, and it’s what there is. Come and sit with us. You don’t want to …” She turned her head meaningfully in Eva’s direction.

  “No, I don’t,” I agreed. Heeling at Cam’s left side, I asked, “What did you mean?”

  “By what?”

  “Wasting her time.”

  “Oh, it’s just sort of a joke about Eric. He loves to judge, and he likes to swim, and he doesn’t mind working on his tan, either. He likes California, Florida, and he isn’t exactly above putting up the worst-looking dog in the world if it just so happens that he puts up the dog, and lo and behold, whoever would have guessed, certainly not Eric, the owners turn out to be Mr. and Mrs. President and Show Chairman of the Surf and Sand Kennel Club, which just so happens to need a Sporting Group judge for the middle of January. I don’t know what Eva thinks she’s doing, but she doesn’t even belong to a club, and she’s never going to be in a position to get him any kind of assignment, never mind the kind he likes. So like I said, she’s wasting her time.”

  Newcomer to the fancy? The obvious question: Why didn’t Judge Eric Grimaldi just write to offer his services to every kennel club in Florida and California? Easy. Masons are forbidden to recruit members; AKC judges, to solicit assignments. And while we’re on the subject, let me report that as Cam and I passed by the table where Don and Phyllis Abbott were seated, Phyllis Abbott caught sight of me and exclaimed, “I just have to tell you that I am so impressed by the work you’ve done with that dog! He really has excellent attention.” Touching her husband’s arm, she said, “You really must see this dog. It takes a very special person to train a malamute. You deserve a lot of credit, Holly.”

  “Thank you,” said a prominent member of the Cambridge Dog Training Club, just the kind of person who might help the club to select judges for its trials or, at a minimum, to put in a good word—or possibly a bad word—for a proposed judge, for example, Phyllis Abbott. But then, Rowdy and I had worked hard, and as for the bit about being a very special person who deserved a lot of credit, the words made me think of Anna Morelli, a very special person in her own right, but also the breeder, owner, trainer, and handler of Vanderval’s Tundra Eagle, CDX, a creature of stunning brilliance and commanding presence, and also, as it happens, not that I want to make a big deal of it or anything, not that I’m laying claim to a share of Tundra’s achievements, or Anna Morelli’s, either, but.… Well, let me just mention in passing, simply as a matter of potential minor interest to canine genealogists, that Tundra and Kimi happen to be first cousins. Make of it what you will. Preferably two UDX’s, of course, but if you felt like tossing in a couple of OTCH’s, too, I wouldn’t exactly object, and neither, I’m sure, would Anna Morelli.

  When we reached Cam and Ginny’s table, I was a little surprised to find Joy and her G-man look-alike husband, Craig, there, too. “They,” Ginny said, apparently referring to Joy and Craig, “have a Cairn, and he’s been through basic obedience, and he has a nice temperament, and I’m telling them to go ahead and try the CGC test this afternoon.”

  Cam carefully set her plate on the table. “Sure,” she agreed. “You’ve got nothing to lose, except whatever it is, eight dollars or something. If he doesn’t pass this time, you find out what you have to work on, and you go home and work on it, and then one of these days you give it another try.”

  “Yes, go ahead,” I advised. “Nothing bad’s going to happen. It should be fun.” I finished layering a lot of cheap cold cuts and a great many paper-thin slices of cheese on the bottom half of a roll that looked soft and felt stale. I piled on tomatoes and near-white lettuce, and, on the theory that if you add enough grease, almost anything tastes good, I spooned on a big glob of mayonnaise. I put on the top half of the roll, pressed it down, lifted the sandwich to my mouth, and bit in. So much for the grease theory. I left the sandwich on my plate.

  I watched Craig swallow. In spite of the muscles, he had a prominent Adam’s apple. He wiped his lips. “Twenty,” he said. “Twenty dollars.”

  Ginny and I exclaimed in unison, “Twenty dollars?”

  “For a CGC test?” Ginny demanded.

  “That’s out of line,” I informed Craig. “In fact, I wonder if … Cam, does AKC set guidelines for that? For how much you can charge?”

  Too orderly a person to consume a messy salad-on-a-roll, Cam had avoided bread altogether and had arranged her food in as appetizing a fashion as the ingredients allowed. She applied her knife and fork to a slice of olive loaf, paused, shook her head, and said, “No, they don’t want to. What they say is, whatever you think is fair.”

  “Well, twenty dollars isn’t very fair,” I said.

  Cam nodded. “Charging a lot violates the spirit of it.”

  Joy looked bewildered. “So should we not, uh, put Lucky in?”

  Cam, Ginny, and I held a wordless consultation. Cam voiced our conclusion. “Go ahead, if you feel like it.”

  In apparent search of information about her own feelings, Joy looked timidly at Craig, who told her, “What the heck. It’s vacation.”

  I tried to remember the last time I’d heard a man Craig’s age use the word heck. It occurred to me that Craig and Joy might be churchgoers and that either he or Joy might find a casually spoken hell offensive or blasphemous.

  “Are you sure?” Joy’s manner induced in me what I believe is called a “clang” association: Joy, coy.

  Craig nodded. Joy beamed. “I’d better go get Lucky ready,” she said.

  “Will you excuse us?” Craig asked.

  Cam nodded. When Joy and Craig had left, she said, “Nice people. They deserved a decent dog.”

  “They didn’t know any better.” I thought for a second. “I hope nobody tells them how awful-looking the dog is.”

  “Oh,” Ginny said, “Eva Spitteler probably has, you know. That’s how she goes through life: saying awful things to people. And about people, too. What do you want to bet that’s what she’s doing right now? I’ll bet you anything she’s over there with Eric Grimaldi telling him terrible things about me. I’m getting coffee. You want some?”

  “Is there dessert?” Cam asked.

  “Rice pudding,” Ginny said.

  Cam had as little interest in rice pudding as I did, but we both accepted Ginny’s offer to bring coffee. When Ginny had departed, I said, “You know, Eva really does go around saying awful things about her.”

  “Eva says awful things about everyone. It’s a miracle that no one’s taken that woman to court.”

  “Ginny could probably sue her for slander,” I said. “This morning, after agility? I could not get away from Eva, and she went on and on about Bingo and Ginny. What she says—and I had the feeling that she tells this to everyone—is all about how Ginny has too many dogs, and how no one sees her kennels, she doesn’t socialize her puppies, that kind of thing.”

  “Ginny does have too many dogs,” Cam said.

  “She does?”

  “I think so, but then probably she thinks so, too. She keeps her old dogs, and she takes her dogs back, and she ends up keeping an awful lot of them. What is true is that—Look, her third husband was a vet, okay? George. Everyone says he was a lovely man, a prince.”

  “What did he die of?” I asked.

  “Heart attack, I think. Anyway, I guess Ginny got used to not paying vet bills.”

  “A lot of breeders do their own shots,” I said.

  “Ginny does a little more than that. And she waits a little longer than I’d wait to have a vet take a look at things. She has, uh, a tendency to cut corners. But Ginny believes in OFA. She OFA’s all her dogs. I know she does.”

  OFA: (noun) Orthopedic Foundation for Animals; (verb) to screen breeding stock for hip dysplasia. Buying a puppy? Oh, no you’re not! Not until you’ve seen the original certificates attesting that both parents have
cleared either OFA or the University of Pennsylvania’s PennHIP. Approximate cost of full hip-replacement surgery: two thousand dollars. Enough said?

  “How many litters does Ginny breed a year?”

  “One or two. Two maximum. Really, she’s a very responsible breeder. For all I know, she’s as good as most vets. And there’s nothing wrong with her dogs.”

  “Except maybe Bingo,” I couldn’t help saying.

  Cam eyed me. “Holly,” she said, “imagine yourself if you’d been raised by Eva Spitteler.”

  AT TWO O’CLOCK that afternoon, I was sitting alone at a table in the front window of Doc Grant’s restaurant (“Halfway between the Equator and the North Pole”) looking across Route 4 at the State Liquor Store and the Pine Tree Frosty, and eating two deep-fried fish fillets, a plateful of fries, and a platter of potato skins topped with melted cheese. The fish had come with tartar sauce, the potato skins with sour cream. To make sure I wasn’t left starved for carbohydrates or vulnerable to collapse from a deficiency of dietary fat, the waiter brought a little plate on which sat a roll and two pats of butter. I felt happy. The State of Maine abounds in tourist bistros with names evidently inspired by the quasi-artistic productions of children who’ve learned their colors and their vegetables, but haven’t integrated the two spheres of knowledge: The Purple Carrot, The Red Zucchini. Worse, the portions at those places are tiny, and all the food’s steamed over no-salt water by anorectic dietitians from out of state. But Doc Grant’s? Maine, the way life should be.

  At a table not far from mine sat Everett Dow, the camp handyman, and a blue-uniformed guy with a silver badge pinned to his left breast. On the chair next to him rested a Stetson hat. A patch on his shoulder read: Police, Rangeley. Everett was halfway through an order of fried clams with french fries accompanied by a roll and butter, a bag of chips, and a side of mashed. The cop wasn’t eating anything; he was just drinking coffee. In rural Maine, two o’clock in the afternoon is way too late for lunch, practically suppertime. I wondered whether Everett Dow hated olive loaf as much as I did.

  Dissatisfaction with the stewards’ lunch was not, however, my excuse for driving into Rangeley; and as for my presence at Doc Grant’s, if I’d been forced to justify it, I’d have given the George Leigh Mallory explanation except that mine wouldn’t have sounded quite so silly as his, Mount Everest having been far away and extremely inconvenient to reach, whereas Doc Grant’s was a fifteen-minute drive from camp—and on street level, too. In fact, I’d always suspected that when Mallory said, “Because it’s there,” what he really meant was, “Because it isn’t here.” What impelled him to flee his here I don’t know. Social entropy, perhaps, order turning to chaos. Maybe he couldn’t face learning yet one more thing he preferred not to know. Maybe he was starting to hate his own ugly perceptions of people he wanted to like.

  Take Max McGuire, to whom I’d been favorably predisposed for a variety of disparate and perhaps senseless reasons, the most imposing of which, literally and figuratively, was her splendid and pacific mastiff pup, Cash. Halo effect: shining Cash illuminates Maxine; radiant Elsa glorifies Eric. Were Chesapeake Bay retrievers granted judging privileges, Elsa, who loved swimming even more than Eric did, would never have compromised the position to which the AKC had elevated her, but would have picked her winners strictly on the basis of their merits. An honest dog deserves an honest owner. Cash. Max hadn’t even chosen the mastiff’s name. Even so, it now made me squirm.

  “Maxine,” Cam had said as we were leaving the dining room, “has an unfortunate tendency to get herself in trouble over money.”

  “With puppy buyers?” I’d asked. It’s easy to do, and I’d been eager to overlook misunderstandings about refundable deposits, stud rights, or complex co-ownership agreements. After all, my editor, Bonnie, vouched for Maxine; the two were old friends. Besides, Max was a real dog person, and if you can’t trust your own, you can’t trust anyone.

  “With everyone,” Cam had said. “This CGC thing is typical, charging twenty dollars because the pet people are a captive audience, and they don’t know better. But what she doesn’t take into account is that they’re going to find out because we’re going to tell them, and they’re not going to like it, and the whole thing’s going to backfire. And then this stingy lunch after all the hype about gourmet food. Plus the agility people—”

  “What—?”

  “The CGC testing’s in the agility area, so they have to move all the obstacles out of the way. They have to shift them around all the time, anyway, so the dogs don’t just run through the same pattern all the time, but they don’t normally have to drag everything out of the way. And those things are heavy! The A-frame weighs a ton, and the dogwalk isn’t all that easy to move. But the main thing is that Max has drafted the agility people to serve as evaluators.”

  Canine Good Citizen test evaluators decide whether the dog passes or fails an exercise. Any reasonable person who knows anything about dogs is allowed to be an evaluator, but the task ordinarily belongs to members of the organization sponsoring the test, people who want to make the event a success. It does not usually fall on employees who would otherwise have had time off.

  “Why?” I’d asked. “Why the agility people?”

  “That’s what they want to know. Apparently, it wasn’t part of their agreement. Maxine just sort of sprang it on them: ‘And guess what else you get to do!’ That kind of thing.”

  “Surprise! Extra work.”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s stupid, at least if Maxine wants them back again next year.”

  “Oh, they won’t be back, anyway,” Cam had said. “They’re opening their own agility camp. Don’t mention it. Maxine doesn’t know. Anyway, what’s sad is that it’s all so unnecessary, and as usual, Maxine doesn’t have any idea that she’s doing anything wrong. About anything. The twenty dollars, any of it. Probably she thinks it’s a favor to offer the CGC thing, and I’ll bet anything she has some rationale for why it costs so much. It’s just like that old business with the club funds.”

  By persuading Cam that I’d never heard anything about any club funds, I learned another thing I’d have preferred not to know. Years ago, it seemed, when Maxine McGuire had been the treasurer of what I’ll call the Unnamed Kennel Club, she’d been in charge of a certain Special Fund established for a certain Good Purpose that I shall not specify except to say that said Good Purpose was clearly not to offer an alarming number of no-interest loans to the club treasurer, loans that she was eventually discovered to have taken out and had somehow neglected to repay. And then? Should you have the misfortune to dwell outside the world of purebred dogs, perhaps you will be astonished to learn that instead of venting their collective outrage by promptly dragging Max into court and kicking her out of the club, the members of the Unnamed K.C. viewed Max’s behavior as an unfortunate accident, like a puddle left by a puppy that should never have been allowed full run of the house. Incredible? Not at all. Maxine hadn’t harmed a dog or broken an AKC rule. Since she’d done nothing unforgivable, the fancy forgave her. She resigned as treasurer, but she was still one of us. Freemasonry, I suspect, handles such incidents in the same way.

  As I was working my way through the first of the fish fillets, Everett Dow and the cop were talking about the Celtics and the Bruins, and also those inevitable Rangeley topics, fishing and hunting. Neither Everett nor his companion said anything about Maxine McGuire or Waggin’ Tail. I wondered what Everett made of dog camp. I wished he’d say. About the time I finished the fillet, the men stood up to leave. Everett nodded to me. I smiled and nodded back.

  For once, I did not clean my plate. I didn’t even come close. My stomach pressed up against my rib cage. I felt disgusted with myself for ordering a lumberjack’s lunch and equally disgusted with myself for leaving most of it. I paid my bill. I left a big tip. I think I must have been trying to persuade the waiter that despite my wastefulness, I was a decent human being.

  When I left Doc Grant’s,
the sky was the deep slate of an old New England gravestone, the kind that’s carved with a death’s head and a no-nonsense message about earth and bones, and the recurrent warning, as if the buried dead forever spoke:

  Stranger stop as you pass by

  As you are now, so once was I,

  As I am now, so you shall be

  Prepare for death, and follow me.

  I scanned the cloud cover for the shape of a skull or an hourglass or maybe the figure of a scythe-wielding Father Time. I wondered whether I might be getting my period. It occurred to me that some of those unknown Colonial tombstone carvers might have been women with PMS or men with an extraordinary capacity for empathy.

  I’d left Rowdy in the Bronco, which was illegally parked in the deep shade under the pine trees by the State Liquor Store. The windows were rolled down enough to give him air, the temperature had dropped about fifteen degrees since the heat of the morning, and he had a bowl of water. Even so, I crossed Route 4 to check on him. Universal dilemma of the real dog person: You leave the dog home, you worry that something will happen to him while you’re out. You take the dog with you, you worry that something will happen to him while he’s alone in the car. You roll the windows down a little, you worry that he won’t get enough air. You roll the windows down a lot, you worry that he’ll somehow get out or that someone will steal him out of his crate. The solution, of course, is to keep the dog at your side twenty-four hours a day every day, but then you worry that your constant presence is making the dog neurotically dependent, and besides, you can’t go anyplace that doesn’t allow dogs, so you can’t go to work or get your hair cut or go to the dentist. And then, of course, you feel guilty because, after all, doesn’t your wonderful dog deserve a better owner than this poverty-stricken, shaggy-headed slob with decayed teeth? Meanwhile, the dog doesn’t worry about anything. Why should he? That’s what he has you for, and for obvious reasons, he trusts you completely.