Animal Appetite

by Susan Conant

  “I am serious now!” I countered. “And I do not appreciate your condescending hints to the effect that I need to grow up!”

  “What you are,” Rita informed me, “is afraid you can’t do it.”

  “Can’t do what?”

  “Write about people. Or, for that matter, anything else that has nothing whatsoever to do with dogs.”

  I dug my incisors into a juicy slice of pizza. When I’d finished ingesting it, I daubed my mouth with a paper napkin, drank more wine, and said defiantly, “That is not true! I write about dogs because, in case it isn’t overwhelmingly obvious, dogs are what I’m interested in. Furthermore, as you know, I happen to be a person with a mission, namely, animal welfare.”

  Rita sipped her wine, cocked her head, and sighed lightly. “Well, isn’t this just wonderful! Tell me, all of a sudden, are all of us free to earn our livings by pursuing our interests and following our missions? Do I, for example, get to cancel all tomorrow’s patients and spend the day researching whatever takes my fancy?”

  “You think”—I divided the remaining wine between Rita’s glass and mine—“that just because I love my work, I don’t really work at all.”

  “What I think,” said Rita, “is that you are failing to actualize your potential.”

  “My potential, Rita, is strictly canine.”

  “You’re scared,” she whispered. “You’re afraid you can’t do it.”

  “I can write about any damned thing I choose.” After emptying my glass, I added, “Even including, if need be, people!”

  “I bet you can’t!”

  “How much?” I demanded.

  “Five hundred dollars. Plus, of course, whatever you get paid for whatever it is you write. If, of course, you do.”

  I stretched my right hand across the table. Rita reached out with hers as if we were going to arm wrestle. If we had, the outcome would have been immediate and unambiguous. Rita has one Scottie, and I have two Alaskan malamutes. I’d have won hands down. Instead of arm wrestling, however, we shook on the deal.

  “Five hundred dollars,” Rita said, “for anything that has nothing to do with dogs.”

  “Nothing whatsoever,” I replied. “Five hundred dollars.” Then I rashly described the statue in the center of Haverhill.

  And that’s how I came to write about Hannah Duston.

  CHAPTER 2

  The next morning, ofi course, I tried to weasel out ofi the bet. I persisted for the rest of the week. I was letting Rita off the hook, I told her. We’d both had a lot of wine. I’d been exhausted. If I’d been thinking straight, I would never have agreed. She was my friend. It would be wrong for me to take her money.

  There was no reason to believe that the deal would cost her a dime, she stubbornly replied. Or had I already finished the piece of writing I had contracted to produce? As to my unwillingness to accept her cash, I was, after all, a professional writer, wasn’t I? I didn’t just create for art’s sake, did I? Besides, a bet was a bet. We’d shaken on the deal. She was not letting me out.

  The dispute, I might mention, took place not in the smooth, continuous way I’ve presented it, but in staccato bursts. Arriving home from work, Rita would rap her signature tune on my door and merrily inquire about the progress I was making with Hannah Duston. Returning from a walk with her Scottie, Willie, she’d start in again, and Willie, as usual, would fly at my ankles and yap out what sounded remarkably like a translation of Rita’s challenge into the scrappy language of terriers. By Wednesday, I felt sorry for Rita’s patients. By Friday, I heartily pitied them. On Saturday morning as I hurried out of the house on my way to a bat mitzvah, I ran into Rita and finally relented. “But when I win this bet,” I warned her, “I am donating the money. I am not becoming the object of your charity.”

  Rita’s eyes crackled remarkably like Willie’s. “Splendid! It will give me great pleasure to know I’m rescuing homeless malamutes.” She paused. “As well as to read about Hannah Duston.”

  “This hostility is completely unlike you,” I snapped. “And totally unnecessary. Writing about Hannah Duston will be entirely my pleasure.”

  As it turned out, Marsha Goldbaum’s bat mitzvah offered me not just one, but two, independent opportunities to begin my research. It was also at Marsha’s bat mitzvah that I learned of the murder of Jack Andrews. I have, however, leaped ahead of myself. Marsha, I should first inform you, was what in Cambridge would be called a mentee of mine, meaning that her parents had hired me as her mentor in the world of dog obedience competition. A few years earlier, the family had bought a bright, charming sheltie—Shetland sheepdog, and, no, appearances to the contrary, never, ever “miniature collie.” The dog, Nickie, was supposed to be a family pet. To train him to be a good one, the Goldbaums sensibly enrolled Nickie in puppy kindergarten, where he and Marsha emerged as the stars of the class. (What is puppy kindergarten? I feel like a dope saying so, but remarkably enough, it’s kindergarten for puppies: rudimentary manners, socialization with people and other dogs.) To continue Nickie’s résumé: After graduation at the top of the puppy kindergarten class, he and Marsha entered a basic pet obedience class, then advanced pet obedience, and continued to shine. In the meantime, Marsha started teaching Nickie an impressive repertoire of tricks. All on their own, Marsha and Nickie worked out a wonderful little routine that tickled Professor and Dr. Goldbaum, and turned Nickie into the perfect, nuisance-free canine companion.

  The nuisance part emerged when Marsha hit the dog-book section of the Newton Free Library and learned of the existence of American Kennel Club trials, titles, and ribbons, and of the various other rituals and honors of what I pursue as the religion of my own ecstatic choice. So Marsha started plaguing her parents, who had no idea what she was chattering about, but eventually located someone who did. Consequently, in addition to classes with a religious scholar, she got lessons from me. With her other teacher, she read the Torah. With me, she studied Barbara Handler’s Successful Obedience Handling: The New Best Foot Forward. Barbara Handler? Truly, she is a real person, an obedience judge as well as what her name proclaims. Here in dogs, we take for granted these little signs of meaning and harmony in an otherwise random and dissonant universe. I told Marsha so. In a rather different fashion, perhaps her temple conveyed the same message.

  To become a bat mitzvah, Marsha had to wait for an arbitrary date, her thirteenth birthday. Nickie, however, earned his C.D.—Companion Dog title—in three straight trials. Twice in the ribbons. Brag, brag. Although my principal contribution to Marsha’s success had been to drive her to and from the scenes of triumph while enjoying her company—she was a really cute, bright kid, and the dog was brilliant—she was irrationally grateful to me.

  So that’s why I got invited to Marsha’s bat mitzvah, which took place in a temple in Newton so Reform that its spacious interior was almost indistinguishable from a Congregational church, except, of course, for the absence of crosses and the presence of what to my New England WASP eye looked like an astonishingly large number of people for any day other than Christmas or Easter. But I’m no expert. I spent most of my childhood Sundays in the company of golden retrievers under the revival tents of dog shows, and except for switching to malamutes, I’ve stuck with the family faith.

  I’d attended only a couple of other bar and bat mitzvahs, so I’m unqualified to review Marsha’s and will limit myself to reporting that there was more English and less Hebrew read aloud at hers than at the others and that everyone, even the rabbi, refrained from referring to the deity by a gender-specific pronoun, but consistently talked about God and God’s whatever, instead of His, Hers, or (heaven forbid!) His or Hers, as if speaking about revered sets of monogrammed towels. The high point of the service arrived, I thought, when Marsha walked as confidently and briskly to the pulpit as I’d taught her to do in the ring and delivered the speech she’d written. Her topic was the gory story from the Book of Judges about Jael, the wife of Heber the Kenite, who slew her husband’s enemy, Sisera,
by driving a nail through his head. Indeed, just like Hannah Duston! As far as I knew, Hannah, however, was a heroine, plain and simple, who’d killed her captors to survive, whereas, according to Marsha, the ethics of Jael’s deed merited deep debate. Only later did I realize that I’d missed the essence of Marsha’s interpretation and thus perhaps the quintessence of Judaism—that the ethics of absolutely everything were always subject to endless reexamination. Debate and reexamination were, in fact, Marsha’s specialties. As she’d patiently explained to me, a certain portion of the Old Testament had to be read on schedule everywhere in the world on a given Saturday. The yearly cycle began in the fall, and the portion about Jael would be read in January or February. Consequently, Marsha had had to concoct a complicated explanation to justify a bat mitzvah topic that didn’t really correspond to the allotted portion for this Saturday in November. As I’d told Marsha, I understood perfectly: The American Kennel Club, too, had a yearly cycle of dog show weeks, and I had been comparably inconvenienced when, for example, the schedule made the Ladies’ Dog Club show fall annoyingly close to Memorial Day weekends that I’d otherwise have spent with my father in Maine.

  After the ceremony, the guests were invited to what turned out to be a sumptuous catered lunch in a big hall in the temple. The tables were elaborately set and had beautiful centerpieces of flowers, as well as carefully lettered place cards. I knew only three people in the big crowd, Marsha and her parents, who were making their way to what was obviously a family table, where I didn’t belong. Milling around, I eventually located my name card at a place to the right of a handsome elderly man with twinkling blue eyes. He rose, helped me to my seat, and graciously introduced himself as George Foley, a name so legendary in the world of dogs that I did a momentary and, I hope, imperceptible double take. The dog man—the real George Foley, as I at first thought of him—presided over the Foley Dog Show Organization, published Popular Dogs, and was a charter member of the Dog Writers Association of America. It didn’t surprise me at all to have the name crop up anomalously attached to someone else. As I’ve said: meaning and harmony. Or as the bumper sticker on Steve Delaney’s van reads: Dog Is My Copilot.

  Fortunately, I’m not shy, and neither was this George Foley, who turned out to be Marsha’s mother’s maternal great-uncle and lived on Fayerweather Street in Cambridge, not far from my own house. Within a minute or so, we’d established an area of common interest, and I heard all about his late bulldog, Winston. As I was sympathizing, an attractive-looking young couple appeared. They greeted my new friend as Professor Foley and took seats to his left. During the introductions, I learned that the newcomers, named, incredibly, Dick and Jane (was Spot at home?), were graduate students in the Harvard history department, from which Professor Foley had recently retired. Jane said that she was Marsha’s cousin. I said that I was Marsha’s dog trainer.

  As the four of us exchanged the usual remarks about how well Marsha had done, I felt so outclassed that I let fall what was meant to be an impressively casual comment about the subject of Marsha’s speech, Jael, who, I said, had made me think of Hannah Duston. Dick and Jane didn’t seem to recognize the name. Professor Foley, however, not only knew who Hannah Duston was but—in contrast to the ignoramus who’d raised the subject—actually knew something about her.

  “Taken captive six days after the birth of a baby. One presumed motive: The infant was killed almost immediately. Curious episode,” he told me with what appeared to be genuine, even childlike, interest.

  An admission of ignorance felt like my only defense: “Actually, I know practically nothing about Hannah Duston.”

  When George Foley smiled, happy lines radiated upward from his eyes and from the corners of his mouth. “The beginning of knowledge.”

  I asked, “Would you happen to know if there’s a book about her?”

  “Well,” he replied, “you’ll want to check Coleman, of course, New England Captives Carried to Canada—she’s in there somewhere—and then Thoreau discusses her, Whittier, Hawthorne, June Namias’s White Captives.” He mentioned a few other names. “But your best bet if you’re just getting started is Cotton Mather. Magnalia. Mather draws the same parallel you did: Jael, Hannah Duston. There’s a sermon, too, I believe. Mather’s about as close as you’ll get to a primary source: Hannah told her whole story to him. Oddly enough, though, I was discussing Indian captivity at a conference only a week or two ago, and someone told me about a privately printed book dating back to the thirties, if I recall correctly. I’ve been meaning to track it down. Probably something by one of her descendants or commissioned by the family, something of the—”

  As I was about to pull out a notebook to jot down authors and titles, the arrival of two new people cut Professor Foley off. Actually, only one of them did. A woman named Claudia Andrews-Howe dramatically seized upon my last name, Winter, to relate the circumstances surrounding the death of her first husband, Jack Winter Andrews.

  Claudia’s appearance so unambiguously proclaimed her place of residence that if I’d encountered her on a street in Bangkok, in a restaurant in Buenos Aires, or in a car on the Trans-Siberian Railroad, I’d have stepped right up to her and announced, “Hi! I’m from Cambridge, too!” Marsha and her parents, I now realized, had considerately placed me at a table where I’d feel at home. Although Claudia must have been close to sixty, her gray-streaked brown hair hung limply halfway down her back and was held away from her makeup-free face with the kind of handcrafted leather barrette that looks nailed to the crown of the head by a dowel driven through a hefty chunk of scalp. Her flowing multicolored handwoven garments were what peasant women would wear if they had tons of money and no desire to rise above their station, and her big gold earrings, necklace, and bracelet bore deliberate hammer marks. To a bat mitzvah in Massachusetts in November, Claudia wore open-toed Birkenstock sandals over bright green stockings. In Cambridge, comfort is everything.

  Her late husband, Jack Winter Andrews, she informed me, had been murdered eighteen years earlier by a business partner greedy for Jack’s insurance money.

  At a loss as to what to reply to Claudia’s announcement, I said simply that, as far as I knew, the victim and I hadn’t been relatives.

  “Jack was poisoned,” she proclaimed, as if she’d only seconds ago discovered how he’d died. “I was the one who found him!”

  “That must have been terrible for you,” I murmured.

  By now, we’d been served salads of radicchio, arugula, and avocado, and I was more interested in enjoying mine and in pumping Professor Foley about Hannah Duston than I was in listening to Claudia, especially if she moved on to unappetizing details, as she promptly did.

  “There were rats in the building,” she informed me.

  “Damned Yankee Press,” Professor Foley interjected.

  “Oh, the guides,” I said. The series was (and still is) popular: The Damned Yankee in Maine and so forth.

  Claudia ignored our efforts. “That’s what this partner of his used—rat poison slipped in Jack’s coffee. Jack was addicted to caffeine, always kept a thermos of coffee on his desk.”

  “Jack was a very fine man,” Professor Foley informed all of us. “Student of mine. We always stayed in touch. A dear friend.”

  “Fine man,” agreed a deeply tanned, bald, muscular fellow about Claudia’s age whose style was so entirely different from hers that I’d been surprised to hear him introduced as her husband, Oscar Fisch. He wore a conventional dark suit, a white shirt, a paisley tie, and no jewelry and nothing even vaguely reminiscent of Chinese rice growers, American factory workers, medieval serfs, or any other Cantabrigian icons. To judge from Claudia Andrews-Howe’s last name, though, it must have been Oscar Fisch who’d adapted to her world. Among Cambridge intellectuals, it is considered inexplicable, even somewhat bizarre, for a woman to assume the surname of her husband. Hyphens are still acceptable—Howe must have been Claudia’s maiden name—but I predict that they’re doomed, too. If the trend spreads through
out the country, the only creatures in the United States to share family appellations will be interrelated show dogs who bear the names of famous kennels. I wondered whether the pleasant-looking Oscar Fisch minded that his wife had retained Jack Andrews’s name and failed to add his. If so, he showed no sign of the resentment. On the contrary, he sat quite close to Claudia and eyed her proudly, as if she were an exotic bird that he hoped would perch on his arm.

  As servings of poached salmon arrived and were consumed, the conversation became general, and I learned that Claudia was an associate professor at what Cambridge calls “the” Ed School, as if there were none other—the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Her field was child care policy. Oscar taught at what is invariably called “the” Business School. Dick and Jane, of course, were in “the” history department; George Foley, as I’ve mentioned, was a Harvard professor emeritus of history; and except to insert vegetable sticks and heavily laden pieces of silverware, I for once kept my mouth shut and wished that my magazine subscriptions extended beyond approximately thirty thousand dog magazines. If that had been the case, maybe I could have contributed something more intelligent than the sound of my incisors ripping through carrots and celery.