Ruffly Speaking

by Conant, Susan

  “It’s the old rule. If you can hear them on the floor, they need cutting.”

  Rita’s eyebrows rose. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Willie’s nails.On your kitchen floor. His nails need cutting.”

  “They can’t be that bad. I don’t hear them.” Rita sipped her^ coffee, licked her lips, and then closed her mouth more firmly than usual.

  Time for a change of subject. “So tell me how you ended up...”

  Her smile reappeared. “My nine o’clock canceled. So I had a free hour, and it was a beautiful day and all that, so I went to the Square and bought the Times, and then I went over to Au Bon Pain and got some coffee and sat at one of the tables outside.”

  Which square? Porter, Central, Kendall? Here in Cambridge, if it goes without saying, it’s like the letters that spell the name of God, best not pronounced aloud.

  “And it was so nice out that you decided to go to a funeral,” I said.

  “At the table in back of me, there were these two men, and I couldn’t help overhearing, and so one of them said something I didn’t catch. And then the other one said something like, ‘No, I can’t. I have to go to Norris Lang’s funeral.’ Or, anyway, that’s what I heard."

  “He died?” Norris Lang, I should tell you, was—still is and ever shall be—Rita’s analyst.

  “No. Would you let me finish?”

  “Of course.”

  “So I could hardly believe my ears!” Rita held out her hands, fingers splayed, palms up. “My analyst is dead, and no one’s even bothered to let me know! And then, instead of looking in the Times to see if Lang’s obituary was there, I turned around and said something like, ‘Pardon me, but I couldn’t help overhearing,’ and then I said what a shock it was, and they said it was to them, too. So I asked when the funeral was, and it turned out to be today, and after all the work Lang and I have done on grieving, not to mention the unbelievable termination issues and simply this overwhelming sense of loss and betrayal, I had to be there. So I got all the details, and it was at eleven-thirty, and if I’d been thinking straight—”

  “But, Rita, naturally, you weren’t. I mean, if somebody mentioned Roz’s funeral and I hadn’t even heard she was dead—”

  “Holly, Lang is my analyst. Roz is your dog trainer. It isn’t—”

  “It certainly is,” I said. “So Norris Lang isn’t d—”

  “No! And I should’ve known, because, really, if nothing else, someone would’ve called to cancel our next hour, but I was so thrown that I... Why I was so ready to believe that Lang was dead is another matter. That one’s going to take years. But what I did was go tearing back to my office, and I managed to reach my patients and cancel, and then I went flying over to this church on Brattle Street, which was jammed with people, and I should’ve...” Rita stopped to catch her breath. “But it never crossed my mind to ask if it was the right funeral. And there I was, sitting in this pew, and then, finally, I started looking around, and maybe a few faces looked a little familiar, but other than that, I didn’t recognize a single person, which seemed kind of peculiar, because I should’ve known half the people there. So finally, finally, I looked at that little program they hand you, and there it was. I’d cancelled five patients to go to the funeral of this guy I’ve never even heard of. I felt like such a jerk. And what was I going to do? Get up and walk out?”

  “Well, I hope it was at least a nice funeral,” I said. “Actually, it would’ve been right up your alley.”

  “I can’t handle funerals,” I reminded her. “You know that.”

  “Well, you could’ve handled this one. The priest brought her dog.”

  Gets me every time. “Oh. What kind of dog was it?”

  “Cute.” Rita is a person who refers to Shelties as “miniature collies.” She recognizes dachshunds because she used to have one. She probably knew what a Scottie was even before she got Willie. She can tell a Dalmatian from a German shepherd, but probably not from a pointer or any other medium-size spotted dog. She’s learned not to call my dogs “huskies,” which malamutes aren’t, and as I’ve informed her, even if they were, they’d be “Siberians” or Siberian huskies, but all she says when I tell her that is, “Then why aren’t yours Alaskans?” Unbelievable. This woman has a Ph.D.

  I refilled our mugs. “Rita, maybe I missed something, but I still don’t understand. How did you end up...?”

  “Because of the name. The guy at Au Bon Pain was mumbling, plus, of course, my unconscious contribution. The guy who died was named Morris Lamb. Norris Lang? So it was—”

  And that’s how I heard about Morris.

  3

  At the risk of excommunication from the Dog Writers’ Association of America, I spouted the inevitable my-God-I-wonder-what-happened-the-last-time-I-saw-him-he-looked clichés. As a matter of fact, Morris had looked fine. His young bitch, Jennie, had just gone Best of Breed out of Open, and Morris... Have I lost you? Well, if you don’t speak dog, let’s just say that Jennie had done well, and, if you’re fluent, let me add that two no-show exhibitors had enraged all the other Bedlington people except Morris Lamb by breaking the major, but that Morris hadn’t been more than slightly miffed. Morris was as competitive as any other terrier person, but he liked winning so much that, as long as he won something, he didn’t particularly care what it was. If his bitch had taken first place in the Silly Dog Trick contest at a K-9 fun fest, he’d probably have been delighted.

  Dog world relationships like mine with Morris are a little hard to explain to someone like Rita. For instance, any real dog person understands that since Janet Switzer is Rowdy’s breeder, she is thereby my own blood relative, but Rita misses the critical point: If it weren’t for Janet, Rowdy wouldn’t exist, and if Rowdy didn’t exist, I would be a person altogether different from who I am. Rita also fails to grasp why the act of entering even one dog in one show or obedience trial is tantamount to slicing open your palm and clasping the identically incised hands of every other person who has ever shown a dog. But it’s a fact. We’re blood brothers and sisters, like it or not; sometimes we do, and sometimes we don’t.

  “Morris wasn’t a close friend of mine,” I explained, “but everyone knew him.” When I say everyone, I mean everyone-everyone, which is to say, those of us with the; scarred palms. “Rita, you knew who Morris Lamb was. Winer and Lamb. In the Square?”

  Cambridge must have one bookstore for every ten or twelve pairs of human eyes: The Harvard Coop, The MIT Coop, WordsWorth, Mandrake, Reading International, the Starr, the Book Case, McIntyre and Moore, specialty stores, Grolier, Kate’s, Schoenhof’s, Pandemonium, the; Globe for travel books, and zillions of other bookstores,; including Winer &. Lamb—new and used cookbooks and a café, too.

  Rita switched to her professional mode; her face and voice went dead neutral. “You’re a, uh, valued customer? You bought cookbooks?” (And how long is it that you’ve been Napoleon, Miss Winter?)

  My cooking consists mainly of picking up pizza from Emma’s, which is on Huron Avenue, only about a ten-minute walk from where I live—Appleton and Concord —and has what must be the thinnest, crispiest crust and most compulsively delicious sauce this side of Sicily. Except in the North End, Boston’s Little Italy, practically all the pizza around here is that thick-crust Greek stuff,

  not that I have anything against Greeks, but, look, do Italians go around selling moussaka?

  I said, “I go to Winer and Lamb because of the dogs,” thus in four simple words explaining—well, everything. “In good weather, when they have the little tables out on the sidewalk, you can sit there with your dogs, and they bring out your coffee, so you don’t have to worry about what to do with the dogs while you go in to get it. Speaking of which, more?”

  Rita threw me a glance of suspicion. “Is this decaf?”

  “Of course not. I’m a writer.”

  “Do you have any Perrier?”

  “Poland Spring?” I’m from Maine, not France. Rita isn’t from Fra
nce, either. Maybe she assumes that Perrier is the name of a side street off Madison Avenue where water bubbles out of the concrete.

  “Sure,” she said.

  When I’d poured and handed her the glass of water, I went on about Winer & Lamb. “So dogs are sort of allowed. Morris Lamb was a dog person.” I made a connection. “Rita, that’s why the dog was at his funeral. It didn’t belong to the priest. It was one of Morris’s Bedlingtons. Cute, right? Like a little lamb.”

  “What?”

  “Like a little lamb,” I repeated.

  Rita still looked mystified.

  “A lamb. A baby sheep,” I persisted.

  “No, it didn’t look like a lamb. It looked like a dog.”

  “Well, then, it wasn’t a Bedlington.” True. Morris, in fact, used to refer to Jennie and Nelson as “my little flock.” The deliberate similarity results from painstaking grooming. Morris’s dogs always looked fabulous. He didn’t groom them himself, either, so his grooming bills must have been astronomical, not to mention what he must’ve Paid his handler, plus entry fees, and all the rest. Except for Doug Winer, who was Morris’s partner in both senses of the word, Morris didn’t have anyone but Nelson and Jennie, and he’d inherited the proceeds from some family cutlery business in New Jersey, so he had tons of money. “That’s too bad,” I added. “Morris would’ve wanted—”

  Rita held up a traffic-cop hand. “Don’t say it! Be-cause, being the real dog person he was, he cared more about dogs than he did about—”

  I felt offended. “No. Actually, he didn’t. As a matter of— Maybe you even remember this. It was a couple of years ago. Some woman threw herself in the Charles, and once she started drowning, I guess, she changed her mind, and Morris jumped in and rescued her. This was in the early spring, so the water must’ve been freezing. And Morris was a big man, but he wasn’t any great athlete or anything, and he must’ve been at least fifty. It sounds sort of corny, but it was a genuine act of heroism. Shit. I wonder what he died of.”

  Rita took a small sip of water. “If it had been something like that, the priest would’ve... But maybe she did. I was sitting way at the back, so I didn’t hear very much.” She rested an elbow on the table, leaned her head forward, and covered the lower half of her face with her hand. It was an odd, uncharacteristic gesture. She removed her hand. “Nobody could’ve heard from where I was.”

  “Rita, no one is accusing you of anything.” I could have been. The soundproofing between her apartment and the one on the third floor is pretty good because I renovated the two rental units when I bought the building. Willie’s owner-absent nuisance barking traveled throughout the building, but the noise produced by Rita herself was really bad only in my kitchen. Whenever she talked on the wall phone by her stove, her voice plummeted straight down. Also, although I don’t have anything against public radio, I like to be able to choose my own station instead of having advanced adult higher education forced down my ear canals every morning. After all, this is Cambridge. If you want to start the day by listening to an intelligent discussion of world events, you open the window, and a couple of passersby will be setting the events in Bosnia in global perspective, and when they’ve gone, others appear, and you overhear a vicious argument about the economics of sub-Sahara Africa. Cambridge is a city in which you see graffiti in what I’m assured is grammatically correct Latin. I like it here, but I can wait until after breakfast.

  When Rita and I had sat in silence for a minute, I said, “Weren’t you thinking about having your hearing tested?”

  She jerked herself upright. The little curls on top of her head shook. She said nothing.

  “Rita, can you hear Willie? He’s walking across your kitchen floor. Can you hear him?”

  She closed her eyes and concentrated. Her features aren’t perfect, but she’s very pretty and perfectly groomed, sort of like Morris’s dogs, not that she resembles a lamb or even a Bedlington, and please don’t tell her that I even suggested the comparison. What really shows on Rita’s face, though, isn’t the careful application of cosmetics. It’s a promise that if you need to talk, she’ll pay attention and take you seriously. She opened her eyes. “If I listen hard, I can.” She rested her chin in her hands. “You know, Holly, a lot of people really do mumble.” The truth of the statement seemed to cheer her. “And they talk too softly. Male psychiatrists are the worst. They don’t bother speaking up because they expect everyone to hang on their every word.”

  I did not point out that Norris Lang, her analyst, was a male psychiatrist. I did not ask whether she ever had trouble hearing him. I eventually broke the silence. “Rita, I’m going to be blunt.”

  “Mirabile dictu.” Rita’s mouth formed a sour line of worry. “And please do me a favor, would you? Do not, I repeat do not start telling me about how tactful and conflict-avoiding you used to be before you had malamutes, because I am not in the mood for it right now.”

  “Damn it, Rita! Look, in the past six months, I don’t know how many times you’ve been upset because you couldn’t hear something that everybody else could, okay? You can’t hear cats meowing or doorbells ringing, and you can’t hear the turn signals on your car, so you keep leaving them on.” By now, I was pleading. “And I know, I just know, that what you’re going to do now is spend forever analyzing whatever psychological reason made you hear Norris Lang instead of Morris Lamb, and maybe you’re going to say that you’ll get your hearing checked, but you’re going to end up not doing it. Rita, if Willie had trouble hearing, you wouldn’t just complain about it. You’d find out what was going on.” That’s true. Rita knows nothing about dogs, but she’s an outstandingly responsible owner nonetheless. Maybe she’d buy the argument that Willie’s habitual yapping would impair his hearing. It would be worth a try sometime; so far, my other bids for silence had failed entirely.

  “Have I been complaining?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Forget it. Just get it checked, okay?”

  She promised. Then I changed the subject. If the dog at Morris’s funeral hadn’t been one of his Bedlingtons and really had accompanied the priest, a woman priest at that, I wanted the details. Dog’s Life runs my column in every issue, and I was about to start substituting for a writer on whelping leave, but my editor, Bonnie DeSousa, is always crazy about free-lance articles on what

  I she calls “interspecies bonding,” and she pays pretty well for them, too. A female cleric with a canine acolyte? If you write for Dog’s Life, that’s the kind of story that brings home the kibble.

  4

  After Rita left, I checked the Boston Globe that had arrived that morning. Morris’s long, newsy obituary must have appeared in the Sunday paper, which Rita or my third-floor tenants had removed from my doorstep to avoid advertising my absence. Monday’s Globe had only a stark paragraph midway through the list of death notices.

  LAMB—Of Cambridge, May 8, Morris Duncan, age 52.Devoted son of the late Harold and Mary (Duncan) Lamb. A memorial service will be conducted at St. Margaret’s Episcopal Church of Cambridge at 11 a.m. IntermentMt. Auburn Cemetery, Cambridge. Late graduate of Harvard College. In lieu of flowers, donations may be made to The Bedlington Terrier Club of America Rescue Committee, 113 Fillmore Drive, Sarasota, FL 34236.

  It seemed to me that Morris would have made something of that “late graduate” business, but I couldn’t think what. In groping for the right clever remark, I found nothing but Morris’s absence.

  Then I went to the guest room to start the work of filling in for Beryl Abrams, who edits the canine products section of Dog’s Life and ordinarily writes most of the evaluations herself. Beryl has Papillons (average height at the withers about nine inches), and some of the products I randomly pulled from the two big cartons left by UPS would have to wait until Beryl’s two bitches were safely delivered. A postpartum Papillon might enjoy recuperating on a tiny self-warming dog nest designed to retain body heat, but as soon as Rowdy and Kimi discovered wh
at the little pillow did, they’d decide that, being warmblooded and vulnerable, it was a fun form of dinner.

  Another product I’d have to return to Beryl or farm out to one of my dog-training friends was a leash with a snap at one end for the dog’s collar and, at the other end, a belt to strap around your own waist. The idea was Look-Ma-no-hands dog walking, but with Alaskan malamutes? My loyalty to Dog’s Life does not extend to kamikaze missions. Equally unsuitable in somewhat less terrifying ways were a tremendous number of sure cures for problems that Rowdy and Kimi failed to exhibit: chlorophyll drops to end bad breath, medicated pads to relieve itching, whiteners to eradicate tear stains around the eyes, enzyme tablets to reduce flatulence, a hot-oil kit to correct dry skin, foul-tasting furniture polish to discourage chewing, a package of Pee Wee housebreaking pads, and an ultrasound bark silencer and training device called the Yap Zapper. The Rowdy and Kimi Award for the canine product that a malamute needs least went to a flavor enhancer intended to tempt the appetites of finicky eaters. If I’d shined the Yap Zapper with the dog-repellent polish, seasoned it with chlorophyll drops and eye-stain eradicator, added a dressing of hot oil and enzyme tablets, and served the whole mess up to Rowdy on a bed of Pee Wee pads, he’d have wolfed it down, and Kimi would have fought him for her share, too.

  The more I pawed through the remedies arrayed on the guest room bed, the more Rowdy and Kimi seemed like paragons of personal hygiene and canine good citizenship. Even so, I’d managed to identify a fairly large selection of products we could reasonably test out, including pet hair gatherers, pooper-scoopers, a newfangled version of the silent dog whistle, and—pity the poor manufacturers—a variety of toys, balls, and flying disks foolishly advertised as chew-proof and puncture-resistant. Hah! I wouldn’t guarantee a steel girder safe in the jaws or claws of an Alaskan malamute.

  When I’d ended my preliminary survey, I packed a small box with paraphernalia to return to Beryl, and a few products to forget entirely: old gadgets with new names, dangerous toys, and, believe it or not, a square of indoor-outdoor carpeting patterned with the head of a rabid-looking Doberman and the words Goahead. Make his day. I stowed that box in the cellar, put everything else in the two big boxes, and dragged them to my study so they wouldn’t get splattered with paint when I freshened up the guest room for my cousin Leah, who was arriving in a month or so to spend the summer with me.