Dog House

by Carol Prisant

  And from the Koran:There is no beast on earth nor bird which flieth with its wings, but the same is a people like unto you, and to the Lord shall they return.

  My favorite is from Martin Luther:Be thou comforted, little dog. Thou too, in resurrection, shall have a little golden tail.

  Somewhere, Emma wags her golden tail.

  But she’s buried in our garden, just at that corner of the house where she used to break for glory.

  Oh, my Millard was desperate for another Emma. Right away. He hadn’t the heart for mourning or the patience to wait. He wouldn’t even consider a breed other than a Norfolk, either—one that was easy to housebreak, say? He wanted his Emma back. And I did, too, but I also felt obliged to remind him ever so gently of what had happened post-Cosi.

  I said, “You never get the same dog again.”

  I said, “Mill, every dog is a different little being, just like us.”

  I reached for Heraclitus: “You never step in the same river twice.” Which really wasn’t applicable but sounded as if it might be.

  I fell back in despair on poor old Thomas Wolfe’s “You Can’t Go Home Again.” (Ditto)

  And then, having run out of inappropriate bromides, I reluctantly picked up the phone to call the celebrity Norfolk breeder. And this time, the litter was in Milwaukee and Millard—who wasn’t a hugger or a kisser or even a dependable hand-holder—leaped on the first plane to bring back to hug and kiss and cradle in his arms the most beautiful puppy I’d ever seen. She was caramel-coated with exceptionally wide spaced brown eyes, soft droopy ears, and a squeaky, bossy bark. He was so besotted with his treasure that he’d barely let me hold her, and at dinner, the night he brought her home, he elatedly reported that while he was waiting in the Milwaukee airport for his return flight, he’d discovered that a man with a puppy was a chick magnet. He didn’t put it that way of course, because that particular locution didn’t become widespread till after he died. Nevertheless, he managed to make it a little too clear that he’d have been delighted to sit in airports with his Diva forever.

  And we couldn’t wait to show off the new baby, so we invited Carolan and Peter, dear old friends (cat people, but still, dear friends) to meet her.

  Carolan and Peter arrived in a flurry of coats and scarves, and since we were going out to eat, they waited in the hall while Millard went to get our pup. Diva was so tiny that when he came out of the kitchen holding her lovingly in tenderly cupped hands pressed against his chest, only a paw and a tail peeped out. When he was close enough to Peter to pass her to him without having to risk holding her over the hall’s tile floor, he made the hesitant, careful exchange. And Peter, pleased and awkward, gently stroked her little head and body and made the sounds we all make when holding something small and helpless. He held her that way for a minute or so, crooning a little.

  Then he dropped her.

  Millard stood open-mouthed, his face drained of color. And he got to Diva, lying so still on the floor, half a second before I did.

  Peter looked from one to the other of us, bewildered.

  “What’s the matter?” he said. “Did I do something wrong?”

  Carolan, horrified, stared at the ceiling, the walls, her hands.

  “Kittens,” he looked around defensively, “land on their feet.”

  Puppies don’t.

  Diva was struggling to get up, wobbling, staggering and shaking her head so hard her tiny ears were making snapping sounds.

  Collapsed on a nearby step, Millard and I sat together, shaking. Shaking our heads as well.

  “No, no, Peter. It looks like she’s all right. Everything’s all right. It was a mistake. Just a mistake.”

  And she was all right. And down the road, I don’t think her sky-dive affected Diva’s brain in any significant way—unless that’s the reason she grew up loving to chase airplanes.

  And Carolan and Peter are still my dearest friends.

  I don’t let them near my dogs.

  This newest fur family, like our others, just sort-of got along. Jimmy Cagney and Diva cold-shouldered Juno altogether and lorded it over her because she was just a mongrel, after all, and they were terriers—by far the better breed. They did seem to like each other the tiniest bit, however, and although I’ve just been rattling on about how knowledgeable we’d become about dogs, I could still be surprised. For example, even though Diva and Jimmy Cagney had both been neutered, I walked into the kitchen one day to find them mating—in a “tie,” I think it’s called. Now I didn’t know that de-sexed dogs could do that. Or would want to do that. Though on second thought, I could see that at their separate ends of the tie, they were looking fairly baffled about this arrangement themselves, rather as if—like humans—they were wondering how to get out of this extremely awkward situation as painlessly as possible and would it mean that now they’d have to worry about their relationship.

  The magnificent little Diva was pure and simple born alpha dog. Pass by her bowl when she was having her dinner—Just glance her way while she was eating, in fact—and you’d be face-to-face with her ancestry, slavering jaws and all. Jimmy Cagney shared those vulpine genes and jaws, but his weren’t restricted to quiescent food. There was the time, for example, that Norah saw him take down a little bird in the dog yard.

  It was spring again, and as a fledgling swooped by, a sad foot or so too low, Jimmy leaped straight up and crushed it in his jaws. When five or six small birds alighted to gather around its poor remains, Norah came to get me to look and swore it was awake. They were holding a wake. And from that moment on, she referred to Jimmy as “that little rat.” (Which, given his name, was appropriate.) Jimmy Cagney sometimes stripped his teeth at Norah, too. And snarled. Though no one did that with Norah and got away with it. She was as tough as he was. Or tougher. She could make her two-year-old granddaughter sit through Mass.

  Unaccountably, Millard and I had reached our sixties and, as promised—or at least implied—life had turned golden. I don’t think I’d term it the sunset of our lives, exactly. It was more that buttery time between five and seven in the evening when you’ve put on the Chopin and drifted out the back door for a last whiff of the lilacs. We’d become profoundly comfortable in our at-long-last beautiful house, plus, we had two thriving careers, and Barden had married a girl we loved and was living a worthy, if eccentric, life in the East Village. You know, Millard and I had been sure we’d raised a yuppie (I know those suits are still fresh in your mind) and instead, we got an activist/community-involved /gardening/art appraiser. We must have done something right.

  No children yet, but I hoped. And hoped.

  As to our canine children, Millard and Jimmy Cagney and Juno and Diva and I were enjoying any number of three-dog nights. And to our surprise and delight, our garden had matured. Or should I say the few things that had survived those first ten years had matured because, having killed off scores of tender, unsuspecting perennials and shrubs, we’d found ourselves unexpectedly successful with roses. Climbers had become our specialty, and we were proud to count more than fifty varieties growing over the house, the porches, the garage, the boathouse, the dog run, and if it had only stood still long enough, the car. Come June, when we threw an annual fireworks bash, their scent was old rose and ambrosia.

  Millard and I shared jointly in their care: I chose and bought them (naturally); I planted them, fed them, sprayed them (sorry), picked them and arranged them. He got the hard part: the painful and painstaking job of tying them in and pruning the canes. One Father’s Day, I presented him with the horticultural equivalent of a bulletproof vest—elbow-length leather rose-pruning gloves. But macho guy that he liked to think he was, he never put them on. Which is why, after a long day on the ladder in the sun, his green tool belt slung low on his oldest jeans and trailing stray ends of rose ties and kelly green string, he’d come banging through the screen door for a beer—happy, sunburned, sweaty and covered in war wounds—having once again done battle with Nature and emerged if not victoriou
s elated.

  Early in the summer of 2000, as I eased the car up the drive on my way to run an errand, I happened to glance across the lawn and saw Millard on his ladder. In the curve of his back as he leaned to catch a wayward stem, I glimpsed, with a stab of pain, incipient frailty.

  Was he smaller?

  Was his lovely soft, black hair glinting with gray in the sunshine?

  Or is this hindsight?

  I was getting older, too, after all. And along with its taking longer and longer each day to look the same, I was increasingly breakable. In fact, one afternoon about two weeks later, I reached to snip a choice pink rose at the top of a long flight of porch stairs, and because the tread I was standing on was narrower than the others (who knew?), I lost my footing and slid-tumbled-fell to the bottom.

  Broken ankle, for sure.

  And where was Millard?

  Just around the corner. Though of course he wouldn’t hear me call. Scrabbling painfully across the driveway and onto the lawn, I finally, with much waving and yelling, caught his eye. But after trying to pick me up a few times—Im not exactly featherlight—Millard scratched his head, wiped his palms on his jeans, and ever the engineer, went to find the wheelbarrow. We maneuvered me into it and feeling stupid and hurting like hell (me), laughing at the dumbness of it all (us) and cursing that stair tread (him), we trundled to the car and went to get it set.

  I wouldn’t mention this incident except that it put me on crutches for the rest of that summer, and I may have been so focused on getting myself up and down our various staircases and in and out of cars to sit in the bleakly furnished waiting rooms of therapists and orthopods that I wasn’t paying sufficient attention when Millard began to complain that the comfortable new easy chair I’d bought him for his birthday was, unaccountably, giving him a backache.

  Still, I did snap to attention on that balmy night in late July when, during our usual companionable dinner on the porch, he pushed himself back from his half-full plate and, smiling at me, remarked:

  “You know, I’m still hungry. I feel like eating more, but I’m full.”

  He tapped his stomach lightly and turned to watch a blue heron alight on the bulkhead.

  We were having a favorite dinnertime standby that night: my mother’s pasta with meat sauce, a dish that Millard loved. You’ve met it once before, back in the sixties, when we still called it spaghetti. But no, I’m not about to stop to give you the recipe here and wouldn’t, even if this were that sort of book. Because something dire had flashed through my mind: some old, barely remembered warning about being hungry but feeling full. The next day, pricked by unease, I made Millard an appointment with a gastroenterologist.

  Who called me the following evening wanting to be solicitous but having no talent whatsoever for such niceties.

  “I’m calling about the images we got from Millard’s MRI. The radiologist thinks he sees a lesion on his pancreas.”

  My brain stopped. In the skies above, galaxies stood still.

  “What does that mean—a lesion?”

  “It means there’s a mass of some sort.”

  I fell to my knees.

  “Do you want to tell him or should I?”

  “I’ll tell him.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Yes.”

  And then, not giving myself a chance to breathe or think or find some presence of mind, I reached for the phone and called Barden. “Hold on,” he told me. “I’ll drive right out.”

  And after that I sat. And sat. And waited for the sound of Millard’s car on the drive. And for a good five minutes after he banged through the back door, I listened to him rattling on about his day and the weather and the mail. From somewhere underwater, I heard him pocketing his keys and opening the fridge and I let him have long minutes as I watched old films unwind in my head; old films where secondary characters conspire not to tell the hero how very sick he is and he never knows.

  When had that changed? Not everyone has to know. Or wants to.

  And then, with all my heart, I yearned to be in some old movie. I yearned to have been born mute. I yearned for him to riffle through the mail forever.

  “Dr. Wells called,” I said. “He said that something turned up on the MRI.”

  He turned, interested.

  “It’s a mass.”

  He blinked.

  “He thinks it’s pancreatic cancer.”

  He asked.

  “Maybe a year.”

  This wasn’t real. We stood on our beautiful porch and smiled and squinted at each other in the hot late light off the water. Then we sat on the glider and slowly rocked and acted out a scene I didn’t know we knew.

  “Is there anything you’d like to do?” I asked.

  “Anywhere you’d like to go?”

  “Nowhere at all.”

  “I thought a fishing trip, maybe ...”

  “Nowhere. Really.”

  “What can I do for you, dear?”

  “Nothing, I guess.”

  And he smiled at me.

  Millard smiled through Barden’s hugs and tears. And two days later, he smiled as we drove to the cancer hospital to meet the oncologist, although I think he smiled mainly because I needed a wheelchair (goddamned ankle) and he had to push me in it through the hospital.

  “I’ll bet everyone who sees us thinks you’re the sick one.” He laughed. “How can I be so sick and not feel sick at all?”

  We didn’t know. He went to work and played tennis and pruned the roses and continued to smile all through the six weeks we waited for the “top pancreatic cancer surgeon” in New York to return from his vacation and operate. (I wonder how it happens that everyone always gets the “top” man? Who gets all those second-best men? Or god forbid, the third?)

  Millard even managed to smile after the surgery when, a mere forty minutes into what was to have been his three-hour operation, he woke up in the recovery room, looked at the clock and realized they had simply closed him up and sent him home to die.

  “We never thought of this one, did we?” he asked me, smiling.

  After that, there were the visits to the specialists and nutritionists, and the highly recommended “grief therapist,” whose advice for us was: “It’s all right to feel sad.”

  Sad? Sad??!!

  Ripped to flaming shreds, rather.

  Unspeakable, rather.

  Intolerable.

  “This will happen to you someday,” I wanted to say, right before I wanted to slap her fatuous face. “Talk to me then about ‘sad.’”

  And as Millard went faithfully to work—how he loved that busy, noisy plant—I, in my spare time—and I was somehow awash in spare time—was hungrily on the Web, tracking down the pitiably few survivor Web sites; poring through densely unreadable medical publications in search of heartening or possibly useful news; forcing myself to read badly written articles about bizarre holistic cures in fifth-world countries. And all those free-floating new drugs in the pipeline, all those miraculous chemo mixtures, all those extracts of iguana tail, those toes of frog and blind worm’s sting; not to mention the harrowing surgeries that, if you were a candidate for them, sometimes worked and sometimes killed; all those life stories and wrenching, far-more-common death stories. And Millard came home from work every night feeling, looking and seeming healthy. Sick? He hadn’t lost a pound. He had no symptoms save that barely-worth-mentioning unease in his easy chair and an inability to eat as much as he liked. Weeks turned into a couple of months while we tried convincing ourselves that this was indeed happening.

  He was well.

  “How can I feel so fine and be so sick?” he asked over and over, smiling, as we continued to do the usual things.

  One Friday night, we went to see Space Cowboys.

  I thought he’d love it: a quartet of senior astronauts with Clint Eastwood. Rockets, old guys, outer space. What could be bad? Three-quarters of the way through the picture, one of the heroes decides to sacrifice his life for his fellow astron
auts because, unknown to his friends, he has pancreatic cancer and won’t be alive much longer anyway. Stricken in the flickering dark, I looked sideways to see Millard grinning at me.

  “How’d you find this one? Thanks a lot!”

  Right after they’d closed him up and sent him home, I’d started serious lobbying to get him into a Phase I trial for a new pancreatic cancer drug that was then being studied by a well-known researcher at a major Manhattan medical center. New drugs require a three-stage protocol on their road to earning (or not) FDA approval. In Phase I of such testing, patients are given increasing doses of the new drug to determine if it’s safe and what the maximum tolerable dosage is. She was just beginning Phase I of a new protocol, and I was desperate to get us in. It was the proverbial grasping at straws, but there was the merest possibility that this could be The Drug. If that were the case, he might have months or years. Or life, perhaps. So on the October day when we met with god herself and learned we’d been accepted into the protocol, we were over the moon with hope. After leaving the hospital, we floated giddily into a dark bar across the street where we toasted our luck, our resolve to fight and unspoken, our love. How I longed then, not to own, not to care for, but to be Lassie: to crawl across this thinning ice and pull Millard by his sleeve to safety, with my fists or with my teeth or with my love.

  When I was seventeen and Millard twenty-one, we’d spent sweet summer evenings sitting in dark bars in Pittsburgh with “Jamaica Farewell” and “Day-O” floating on the smoke-and-promise air. We always sat together at the bar, drinking, sampling our maturity; drinking, falling artlessly in love.