House of Heroes

by Mary LaChapelle

  That would make an impression. If only there were a way he could express to someone that he was special—a poodle, but more than a poodle. The truth was that he’d changed in the last few years, though he continued to behave in much the same way he always had—pouting, running in circles, and being manipulative. Like the time he had defecated in the pocket of their neighbor’s pool table. This had been his way of protesting being left there while the rest of the family went on vacation. That was years ago, but he’d do it again, given the same circumstances. Not because it was his nature, but because those were the means available to someone who had no hands and who couldn’t talk. And yet, if someone could get inside his head, they would see that he understood much more than it appeared. They would see all the many things he had learned from living with Gretta.

  Shortly, however, he was to be taken away from her, and a doubt had been growing in him about whether he really knew anything at all. He was afraid he might only know what Gretta knew, and once separated from her, the meanings he had come to recognize might just fade out, like radio music driving away in a car.

  It was a slow, sunny day on the screen porch. Gretta held him in her lap, picking through his fur with one old hand and clipping it with the other. She didn’t actually look at him as she did this, but felt out his long hairs, pulled them between the scissors and snipped them off, letting them float to the floor. There was comfort in her touch and in the quiet, and even in the snipping sound. Yet he was dismayed. He would be gone soon, perhaps even before the mailman arrived. He squirmed in Gretta’s lap. She turned him over and began to clip the hair under his chin. Since she was nearly blind, he recognized this as a critical task and lay motionless, looking up into her face.

  Gretta Ormson was 101 years old. She wore her hearing aid only a few hours during the day. The rest of the day she was stone deaf, and she sat with the stillness of a stone, like a Buddha, with her long, waxy earlobes, and her cataractous eyes. Her hands were particularly remarkable, hugely out of proportion as they curved over the ends of her chair arms. At rest there was still a kind of vibration under their loose skin, which, depending on the day or hour, changed in color from gray to a rough red to a purple cast. He loved Gretta’s hands.

  They shimmered with something a painter would ache to capture and never could. Except, perhaps, Rembrandt. Once there was a program about his paintings on public television; he couldn’t tell if Gretta was able to hear what it was about, but she had fallen asleep anyway, and the sound of the narrator’s voice mixed in with the sound of her breathing, which was the sound of old leaves blowing in the yard. “There is a light,” the narrator had said, “in each of his paintings, like a beacon, that draws one into them.” And when Binky had looked over at Gretta’s hands resting on the arms of her chair, he already knew how this could be true.

  Two weeks ago, the day he had first heard the news, had been the same warm kind of day on the sun porch. A flyswatter lay forgotten across Gretta’s lap. Her hearing aid remained in the box on the kitchen table, and she barely stirred at all. An airplane roared above. A fly was buzzing behind her head, then around it in a circle, landing, lost for a moment in her hair. It dropped down onto her hand, took a walk along the blue, cordlike vein. Binky perked up, protective, and watched it take a pinch of her skin in its little chopsticks. Then he stood up to make it fly away. These were the kind of daily activities they shared together.

  After the fly left and boredom had set in again, Binky had crawled over to the chair next to Gretta’s and found the spot under the springs that he had been digging at for the past few days. He’d finally reached the stuffing; it was coming away in clumps, making him giddy as it sprinkled down onto his chest and head.

  Whack! the flyswatter came down on his belly. Whack, whack, on each of his feet. “No! Binky!” she had scolded him. She prodded him from under the chair with her swatter, pushed him across the floorboards until he was lying at the toes of her shoes, his paws drooping in the air like the heads of remorseful ducks.

  Later, she had reached behind her chair and raised the window shade to put a patch of sun on the floor where he lay. And forgiven, he fell asleep, dreaming he was a young dog running after a scent, and the grass was bending around him, and he had no words or thoughts, just the scent and his running.

  He had been brought out of his nap by the rumble of Barb’s Oldsmobile pulling up to the house. Barb was Gretta’s youngest daughter. All of her other children were in their seventies or, some of them, dead, but Barb was a latecomer and only in her fifties. There was always something breathless and earnest about her, as if she would never get over being the baby of the family. On his hind legs, he leaned against the porch door while his breath created a little circle of fog on the window. Gretta’s chair was creaking a little, which meant she was watching her come, too. When Barb finally opened the door, he fell out through the crack, and she had to catch him with her knee.

  “Ouch! Binky!” she said, because she had arthritis in her knees. She pushed him back into the porch. He jumped around her and yelped once before he jumped onto the footstool by the door so she could pet him. Then he whined. Then he jumped down and ran around her legs. Then he jumped onto the stool again. This was how he was with Barb.

  She rubbed him all over with her long fingernails and said, “Oh, Binky! Goo’boy!” Finally, she had gathered him up and sat down in the chair across from Gretta. “Mom?”

  Gretta raised the lids of her eyes a fraction and looked at Barb as if deciding whether she wanted to see her or not. “Hi,” she said finally. “Are you already finished from work?” Barb worked part-time as a secretary. She visited Gretta every day.

  “No, Mother, it’s Friday.” (Friday, Binky knew, Barb never worked.)

  “Did you work hard today?”

  “No, Mother, it’s Friday. I’m always off on Friday.” Barb leaned over to look in Gretta’s ear.

  “No, I don’t have my hearing aid in. I can’t hear a word you’re saying. Is that a new blouse?”

  “I got it today.”

  “What?”

  “I got it… Mom, don’t ask me questions if you can’t hear me. I’ll go get your hearing aid. I brought you a shake from Burger King,” Barb shouted in Gretta’s ear. Binky dropped to the floor when Barb stood up. She pulled a paper cup with a plastic top and a straw out of a bag. Gretta took it in both hands and immediately put the straw in her mouth. When Gretta drank a shake she looked like a Buddha drinking a shake.

  “What happened to the chair?” Barb came back onto the porch pushing some of the stuffing into the corner with her foot. Binky had his paws tucked under and was avoiding her gaze. She handed Gretta the Indian bead box that always held her hearing aid. Gretta went through the ritual—opening the box, putting the battery in place, adjusting the dial, which caused a painful whistling. Eventually she placed it in the great hole in her ear and adjusted the dial until the whistling stopped.

  “What… happened… to…the…chair?” Barb said loudly, each word a separate enunciation.

  “He.” Gretta motioned listlessly toward him with her big hand.

  “Binky!” Barb leaned over and shook her finger at him. “Don’t do that!”

  Binky tried to look as dumb as he could.

  “He needs a trim,” Barb said. “Why don’t you let me call the Poodle Patrol?”

  The Poodle Patrol made house calls. Dogs were carried to someone waiting at the backdoor of their van. Inside they were clipped and shaved and powdered. Binky was usually given a number sixteen, which meant he got a hairpiece, resembling a shaving brush, molded on the top of his head. The rest of his body was shaved down to pink skin, except for his legs which were trimmed and left fluffy. Then he was returned with a ribbon around his shaving brush that said, “Poodle Perfect.”

  The whole tone of his day had changed when Barb mentioned the Poodle Patrol. He began to feel anxious and miserable. Just when he had achieved a plain comfortable scruffiness, he would be transformed i
nto a fluff.

  It was a great frustration. And he wondered as he did every time, if Gretta would bother with this, had her daughter Leslie not insisted upon it every month until the time of her death. In her lifetime, Leslie had succeeded in forming him into a parody of what one might find most ridiculous in people. Even now, when he was being finicky about his food, rigid in his routine, and generally snotty, he blamed Leslie.

  When Barb suggested Monday, Gretta had said, “No. Costs too much.”

  “Mom, it costs as much as anyone else, and I hate taking him in the car.”

  “I’ll trim him on my own,” she said. “Then I’m giving him away.”

  Barb had plopped down in her chair, as if a little dumbstruck. She looked at Binky, and then back again at Gretta. “Well, okay, I guess,” she said. “Okay then.”

  It seemed that Gretta had been trimming him for hours. He watched the little curls of his white fur make a larger and larger pile on the floor. He couldn’t say he hadn’t seen it coming. His bladder had lost its discipline over the years, and he couldn’t hold out much past three in the morning. Last winter she had told Barb that it would be his last. It was too much taking him out on dark, icy mornings. Now it was September, and he supposed she had no reason to change her mind.

  For days he had expected he’d get the news that they’d found him an owner. Barb left flyers with the Poodle Patrol, of all people, so they could circulate them to their customers. And though he’d heard no specific talk about it, he believed today would be the day. Perhaps Gretta would trim him badly enough that no one else would want him.

  Sometimes he’d tried to imagine an owner other than Gretta, but the task made his head reel as much as trying to picture a color never seen before, or eternity, or being dead. He had to find her then, curl beside her in her chair, and tuck his muzzle beneath her hip. If someone were to ask her, she’d say she didn’t own him at all. That it was always Leslie and Steiner that had owned him. And that he was just a living thing left behind.

  There were even owners before them. He wasn’t sure what he remembered: a lot of tumbling and disorder and then a stretch of being alone and hungry outside. Then he was inside again, which must have been this house. Leslie and her husband, Steiner, lived here then. They said that he was a stray—that Steiner brought him in to show Leslie and that she oohed and cooed. She was in love with him (or the idea of him) from that moment on. But Binky had never felt her love. He didn’t feel anything like that in the world until near the time of her death. By that time she was just a dim remainder of a person. And so it wasn’t her that had the love anymore but something persistent and steady in the air around her.

  No, Binky didn’t know what he could exactly remember of Leslie or what it was that he’d reconstructed from her artifacts. There were little coats she had made for him, crocheted in bright colors with matching hats. There was a raincoat, a rainhat, and a rayon sailor suit for formal occasions. There were her ashtrays and lamps, some rococo, the rest French Provincial. There were filigreed napkin holders, and goblets etched with palm trees, and, more than anything, there was a canopy bed. It was completely out of proportion to the small room that she and Steiner had shared in Gretta’s house. In fact, the ceiling pressed against the canopy so that it drooped instead of arched.

  The house filled up and overflowed with these things, and Gretta still kept many of them, as if maintaining her daughter’s desires. But every once in a while she’d find something like a pineapple platter from Hawaii and dump it without a flinch, as if it had suddenly come loose of Leslie’s pleasure, and without that turned instantly useless. And in his more anxious times, Binky wondered if he hadn’t grown useless in the same way.

  Gretta pushed Binky in her no-nonsense way off her lap. And he landed with a poof of dog curls around him. She began to rock forward in her chair, one, two, three, and four, until she had gained enough momentum to pull herself up on her feet. Binky waltzed backward, made little starts with his shoulders, as if he might jump into her arms. He wagged his tail incessantly—hoping—for what? To be let outside? To be fed? To be petted fondly? This he didn’t know. The sudden desire for her to do something with him just came over him at times, and it always took him a while to guess what it was.

  He circled around her legs as she hobbled away until she pushed him aside with her cane. He imagined suddenly that they could go on a vacation together before he had to leave. He had never gone along when the family went on vacation, and she hadn’t traveled for years. Maybe it would be a good thing for both of them. They could go to Florida for the winter, and she could find a room with a balcony. He imagined the sun she would like and the seagulls flying over the beach.

  He followed her with his small steps to the bathroom. But for the first time, he didn’t follow her in. He just waited in the hallway and felt forlorn. He knew, after all, that they wouldn’t ever go away together. And here he was in the hallway.

  When Leslie was sick, he had been left there too. And it was those last days of her cancer when things had begun to have names and meanings for him. He didn’t know what cancer was then, or even sickness, really. He only knew that he was no longer welcome in her bedroom and that he was treated roughly by Steiner, Barb, and Gretta, too, if he tried to enter. So he had slept on the rug that lay beween Gretta’s and Leslie’s rooms. A small light burned in the hallway and a small light near Leslie’s bed. There was an endless procession by the others night after night from one light to the other. Their weight as they passed him on the floorboards was heavy and kept him awake. But still he never wanted another place for himself to sleep. It was as close as he could be without being inside.

  Something happened. He began to distinguish between them better than he had before. He noticed that Barb would take her shoes off before entering the room, and the shoes had high spikes, and that sometimes, after she had left them, one of them would tip over and lie next to him. He noticed that Steiner would often stand in Leslie’s doorway without going in, his hand just dangling there. And later Binky would look at the others and see that Steiner’s hand didn’t move as much as theirs did, but hung at his side as if heavy.

  He began to know extraordinary things for a dog—not just the feeling of weight or the look of size, but how one thing could be like another, and how they could be different. Gretta’s step was the steadiest in those days. And it was for her mother that Leslie would call the latest into the night. Binky would hear the two of them talking in low tones. Their voices were the same as winter trees groaning together in the wind, and Binky, not knowing that it was a painful sound, was comforted by it and let the sound lull him to sleep.

  One afternoon the family all gathered in Leslie’s room. They went in and out. Barb came out with Leslie’s purse and set it on the dining room table. Steiner made trips to the car. Finally Gretta came out with Leslie. She was wrapped in blankets. She walked slowly past Binky. He couldn’t see her face, and it seemed that she couldn’t see him either. Gretta, who was a stout woman then, held her from behind and by the elbow as they left the house.

  They were gone for days, one of them returning only occasionally to put food in his dish and to let him out. And when they finally came home to stay, Leslie wasn’t with them. But he remembered Barb coming in, and how she had again set Leslie’s purse on the dining room table.

  This must have been late summer, because the air was thick like a blanket over him. Many people visited during the rest of the day and into the night, some of them leaving later than the first bird calls. And he was overwhelmed with the density of them in that little house, their smells, altogether, like an invasion upon a peace that by this time he had become comfortable with. Little children had grabbed him up in their boredom, handled his parts, as if identifying them to each other, his paws, his legs, his pink belly. One of them would blow into his ear to make him shudder, then they’d laugh when he finally broke away to hide under the sofa.

  When the house was finally quiet, Binky was the only
one left awake. Barb had gone home with her husband and children. He had found Steiner stretched on the parlor davenport dead asleep. He climbed onto Steiner’s chest, sniffed around his open mouth, and found the familiar sweet smell that Steiner had held in his glass all day.

  He had traveled along the living room furniture, finding cake crumbs and the remainders of casseroles on paper plates. There were filled ashtrays, sweating glasses, coffee cups with red lip marks on their rims.

  In the kitchen there was a drip from the faucet, a faint sound of something incomplete and not right in the house. The first light had only come up to the window, but not in—it stood there waiting like a stranger. And the whole house was gray with this strangeness. He was afraid of the quiet—the quiet left in Leslie’s room; the quiet in the bathroom. And when he went looking for Gretta, he had found her door closed for the first time in months. But he could hear the rumble of her old air conditioner. He pushed against the door, and when it finally clicked open, he fell in through the crack.

  It was cool and dry inside. Gretta was asleep on the single bed with her hand laid over her eyes. There were beads of water gathering on the underbody of the air conditioner, the dripping silenced by the drone of the fan. Light was slowly leaking into the room. An airplane vaguely roared overhead. He watched her sleeping. A bus shook the windows from two streets away. Light was creeping up the bottom of the bed, actually laying itself across her feet. The fingers of her hand fluttered, then slid away from her face. Her eyes were already open. There was nothing in them but the same languid feeling of the morning that had so far filled the room. And when she turned her eyes in his direction, he had stood up.

  She looked past him as though someone had entered the room at the same time. And she looked as if, in the next moment, she would be either very terrified or very calm. But she was calm. He saw something in her gaze that he’d never understood before. It was memory. It reminded him of a full bottle poised on the edge of a table. She turned her eyes up, and he looked up, and the bottle trembled between them, then tipped over, silently; Leslie’s black hair, how she looked while she laughed, and her perfume didn’t spill out, but slowly dripped into Gretta’s eyes and remained there.