I was glad to hear it. And that was how I came to tell Abelardo of a canine mortality obsession that had ended with my being home with Dandy while Waldo and Henry and Ezra explored dark, moist, and slimy caves.
"Basically, it is because I have already let two dogs die—I won't go so far as to say I killed them. But I could not leave Dandy. And yes, I know that no one would blame me if he died, but I would blame myself."
"Why would you do that?"
Why indeed? I thought. Guilt was generally considered a Catholic thing; certainly Waldo identified it that way, both my having it and his lacking it. But he also said that my clinging to it was all self-indulgence and drama. He had a point. He often did.
Before Waldo, I'd never had dogs or even known dogs. I compared my newfound canine devotion to the fervor of converted Catholics. No one who'd grown up with dogs or as a Catholic would ever behave so extravagantly. There was something tasteless about such excess.
I said to Abelardo, "I just would. I always believe that someone around here has to feel guilty, and since I'm the only one who feels that way, it is generally me. Did you have classes in guilt at the seminary?" Flirt and Dandy lay between us on the rug. Flirt was closest to the warmth of the fire. Dandy curled up on the chilly perimeter. It was always thus with these two.
"No. But we do study sin—or I would have studied sin, had I stayed longer. Las estudias hamartologisticas," he said, and grinned. I had no idea what he was talking about and no idea why it might be grin-worthy.
He said, "But in the intervening years I have come to think differently on guilt."
"You probably think I am self-indulgent," I said.
"Is that what my friend Waldito thinks?"
Aha, I thought. He must have studied with the Jesuits. Aren't they the ones who answer questions with questions? Or is that the Buddhists? I had no intention of answering him. "You have to understand about the bulldogs," I said. "You know the Pinchbecks always had bulldogs?"
If you credited the family lore, the first Pinchbeck in the Americas stepped off the Mayflower accompanied by a bulldog. The fact that there has never been a bulldog who didn't get violently ill on a boat never bothered the storytellers. When I first fell in love with Waldo, they had a bulldog named Stinkerbelle. She'd inhaled way too much pot hanging around with Waldo and Dick.
Abelardo looked pained. "Yes, I remember La Smellista."
"Stinkerbelle," I said.
"Exactly. She attacked me the first time I went to Maine with Waldo. Dogs have always loved me—it is a family trait—so I petted her, expecting a friend, and she bit my hand. You can still see the scar, very faintly." He held his right hand up closer to the fire. The scar was impossibly faint. What struck me were his perfect fingernails. I coveted them. I sat on my hands. "Posey bandaged it quite nicely, but she considered it my own fault."
"Not unlikely," I said. "Posey has never held the dogs responsible for their bad behavior. It is entirely the owners' fault. Except in your case, when it was the visitor's fault."
"In my country, if my dog were to bite you, he would be shot. We are not so sentimental. That is because we are tropical, and we are a poor country. Also perhaps because we understand the hierarchy in nature."
"It's too bad you didn't meet Bubbles. Posey and Three got her after Stinkers, and she was a major improvement. She was the ring bearer at our wedding. Which was sort of wonderful, and sort of a disaster. Posey was in a state because Bubbles had almost died on the flight to California. Bulldogs don't do well in the baggage compartment. My family thought I'd taken affection for Waldo to unseemly lengths."
"Can affection ever be too great?" he asked.
"Let's not go there," I said. "But I really am sorry you didn't come to our wedding. Getting all those Fairweathers out to California felt like an accomplishment, something along the lines of the Treaty of Versailles. Or do I mean the Peace of Worms?"
"I too am sorry. I am sure I would have learned much, and understood more. But alas, I had dengue fever at the time. Lástima."
Abelardo's face was mutable, and deepening by the firelight. His eyes were terribly dark, either brown or black, but it was too dark to tell which. So I went on. "The thing about bulldogs is that, well, to the untrained eye, they were so ugly."
"Yes, that was remarkable about them."
But eventually I'd changed my mind. It was my religious conversion, or as Audrey said, the brain transplant. It was naturally due to Ezra and Henry, who loved their grandparents' bulldogs: Bubbles, Peewee, and the late, lamented Gwendolyn. It was inevitable that sooner or later they would want a bulldog of their own. And one day I relented.
"And then our first dog, Gertrude, was killed by a motorcycle. Because I trained her so badly," I said.
We'd named her for Gertrude Stein, who I think in real life had pugs, but they could have been French bulldogs. Posey was delighted that I was no longer depriving my children of the advantages of growing up with a bulldog, but she didn't think much of the name. She'd told me Gertrude Stein had had a Boston marriage. I'd told her that Gertrude and her Alice had always lived in France.
Abelardo tugged at his earlobe, something he did again and again and which may have accounted for their size.
Waldo claimed I did not dominate Gertrude, which was true. Which was the problem. She always rode shotgun in the car, and if we were stopped at a stoplight and there was a motorcycle next to us, she'd go bonkers. She'd bark maniacally and lunge at the biker. I'd learned to keep the front windows shut, but I feared for the strength of the glass. After my car pulled away, its passenger-side window would be opaque with saliva. It had become a scrim of doggy drool.
"You know we were at his brother Dick's when she was killed?" I said. "Do you know Dick?"
"He used to come and visit Waldito at our rooms in Quincy House. A charming young man. We spoke about agriculture. He was interested in avocados and mangoes. As you know, my family has always farmed, and I applauded his interest. But it seemed unusual. Since he wanted to stay in Maine, where I believe nothing grows but blueberries and pine trees."
"It's not quite that bad," I said. "Potatoes grow too. Maine potatoes are famous."
"I shall remember that."
There were no potatoes, though, at Dick's farm. There was nothing native to the state of Maine.
"Gertrude was killed by a motorcycle," I said. "She was trying to take him down. She hated motorbikes. That's how fierce she was. I could never be that fierce."
We'd been out front at Dick's house when a motorcycle came along, its roar piercing the low hum of grass growing and flies napping. Gertrude had lifted her head and, almost simultaneously, had run out to the road.
"Do you think a dog is capable of hating?" Abelardo asked. "Saint Francis thought not."
"Whether she hated bikers or not, she got herself killed. It was Henry's first trauma."
Abelardo tugged on his ears, and I felt an irresistible urge to massage my own lobes.
"It's just that he was only two, but he claims to remember everything."
"I remember something that happened when I was almost three. It was Tía Tata's first miracle."
"She committed a miracle?" I said.
"She cured me."
"What did she cure you of?"
"The hiccups."
Of course I smiled. It seemed an odd joke, but who was I to judge?
"You think I am kidding. But these were terrible hiccups. I'd had them for days, seven days, in fact. I was unable to sleep. I was pale and weak. My mother was in despair, and then Tía Tata rubbed the small of my back and said a prayer, and they went away."
"You think that was a miracle?" I said.
"We know it was. I don't expect others to understand. It is our task, that they may understand."
"I don't want you to think I'm not sympathetic, because I am. I really am. I get terrible hiccups and I hate them. And Ezra got hiccups in utero, which, by the way, is not unusual. But ... don't hiccups usually go away on their own?"
&
nbsp; "That is a perfectly rational point to make. But that is not what happened." He paused, breathed so deeply a hiccup eruption seemed likely. He exhaled slowly. "Hiccups do normally go away on their own, of course. They can also be fatal. Pope Pius the Twelfth died of hiccups. May he rest in peace."
"Are you serious?"
"Serious as the pope."
"Did Waldo know about this? Not the pope, but your aunt's miracle."
"I'm sure I told him. It falls into the category of life-altering experiences. After all, we were roommates."
"He never told me."
"Of course, not being Catholic, he never really understood," Abelardo said.
"That is one thing you and I have in common," I said. "But I'm not a good Catholic. You probably wouldn't call me a Catholic at all."
"No. I would never say that. I would say that is for you to determine."
My stomach was growling. It would be very odd indeed if I started hiccupping just then.
"Now you have told me how one bulldog died," Abelardo said. "But you say you have killed two. Or not killed them. My apologies."
He poked the fire and threw on a log that hadn't been properly aged. The wood crackled. Sparks jumped and danced inside the fireplace like the damned in the last days of the plague.
"Are you sure this isn't boring?"
Abelardo leaned farther back into his chair, farther back than I thought possible, and pressed the fingertips of his right hand to the fingertips of his left hand and created the skeleton of a perfect dome.
"About ten months after Gertrude's untimely death we got Priscilla, but the boys called her Pilly. She was much more docile." I was prevaricating a little. I knew that. There was a way in which I was massaging this story in order to make myself seem both better and worse than I really was. Pilly wasn't really docile, she was narcoleptic. Sleeping was her strongest suit. Her second strongest was pretending to be dead. I was always calling her name, hoping for a raised eyelid or a sigh, just to reassure myself she was still alive.
Abelardo flexed his extended fingers back and forth.
"You'd think Waldo would have called by now," I said. Flirt got up, circled the room, and then lay beside my feet. I loved her warmth. Dandy wasn't moving, again. In another life, I thought, I will have pet turtles. It doesn't matter if they never move. True, I killed pet turtles back in California, but I hadn't noticed. Not until they began to smell. Guilt had not ensued. Waldo told me that turtles lack the aging gene, which is why scientists are always studying them. Even that had not made me feel guilty about the dead turtles. "I tried his cell but he must have turned it off. He has a thing about telephones. You probably knew that."
"In college he would never answer the phone. He said he couldn't hear the ringing."
"Did he tell you about his Great-Great-Uncle Henry? The one who really invented the telephone?"
"He explained how Alexander Graham Bell was a fraud and that he'd stolen all his ideas from a distant relative. Are you saying this is true? Our other roommates—you know Jaimee Bolt and Ogden?—they began to attribute every famous invention or discovery to a relative of Waldo's. They found this extremely amusing." It must have been, because Abelardo chuckled audibly. "Didn't he tell you?"
"Not a word," I said. "Silent as the grave."
"Oh, yes. Isaac Newton did not discover gravity; that was discovered by Waldo's Cousin Daisy, who had a coconut fall on her head while vacationing in the Caribbean. And the steam engine was invented by his Uncle Freddy Fairweather, who lived in some river in Maine. The best one was Einstein. Or not Einstein. They liked to say that Einstein stole the theory of relativity from Waldo's Grandmother Frances, who wrote it down on the back of a grocery list. He also had relatives who invented the radio, the ballpoint pen, aspirin, and, of all things, the sash window."
"He never told me," I said. "It must have been very funny. He should have told me. It would explain so much."
"About why he hates the telephone?"
"About why he is the way he is. Now, I just wish he would call. I can't believe I lost the name of the hotel. That is very unlike me."
"I'm sure he'll call soon. I too would like to speak with him," Abelardo said. "Is it still snowing?"
I went and opened the front door. Sometimes you couldn't tell just by looking out the window, because it was dark, or because the wind blew the snow around long after it had stopped falling.
"It looks like it. It's a beautiful night."
"I prefer the scent of gardenias."
"You could like both snow and gardenias," I said. It sounded like something I would have said to the boys: Just because Max doesn't like yogurt doesn't mean you have to not like it. You can like both Max and yogurt.
"But I don't. Alas."
The fire blazed on, soporifically.
"And so what about the other dog? She is also dead, I presume?"
"It was her eyes. Bulldogs are prone to all sorts of eye diseases. All those wrinkles make their eyelids turn inside out and then they get infected and full of pus." Abelardo shifted slightly in the armchair. "I'm sorry," I said. "I didn't mean to mention pus."
"Not at all," Abelardo said. His own eyelids were looking heavy.
"So one of her eyelids got infected, and even though I slathered it with antibiotic cream, the infection got into her system and one night she ran a terribly high fever, I don't know exactly how high because she died on the way to the vet."
I stopped and waited. What was I waiting for? Exoneration? Absolution? Forgiveness? All of the above.
Abelardo was so still I feared I had put him to sleep. So much for my tragic canine tales, I thought.
Finally he said, "I am sorry you didn't pray to Santa Lucia."
"Who?"
"She suffered terribly under the Romans, and her eyes were torn out. Surely you've seen the famous painting by Tiepolo of Lucia and her eyeballs on a platter. Before she died, they were miraculously replaced and she could see again. Better than before."
"You're kidding."
"She might have helped your Pilly. I wish I had known. I would have prayed for you."
"Next time."
Flirt and Dandy were giving me their signals, so I got up and let them out the front door. The snow was falling from the huge dark sky. Several inches gleamed white in the night, softening all the landscape's contours. I loved waking up to a snow-covered world. I loved knowing that everything had changed overnight, and that we, mere mortals, had had nothing to do with it. But I loved most of all to be with Ezra and Henry when they saw the snow out their windows, and felt safe.
"Do you know the poet Rubén Darío?" Abelardo said.
Where did this come from? Was this his long-lost brother, or a hero of the revolution? "No, I'm afraid not."
"He is the great Nicaraguan poet. He wrote a poem about Saint Francis and the wolf. 'Los motivos del lobo.' It's one of his most famous, rightly so. Most people think that it speaks of the wickedness of humanity as compared with the innocence of animals. But I think otherwise. I think Darío is writing that animals must be animals, and follow their instincts, and that we cannot attribute to them the motives that drive us."
I stood for a minute longer wrapped in the lacy chill that swooped past the open door, and then shut it very quietly.
"But I am not a literary scholar," Abelardo said. "I am just a coffee farmer."
"I'd like to see this poem," I said.
"You will."
"You must be very tired," I said. I knew that I wanted nothing more than to pull off my clothes and crawl into bed, and there, in solitude, wonder what Waldo and the boys were doing.
"I am. But tell me one thing: why are these dogs not bulldogs?" Abelardo gestured toward the front door, and by extension the outdoors, without turning his face from the fire.
It seemed painfully obvious, so much so that I couldn't believe there didn't exist—somewhere out there—a better answer than the one I was about to give him. "Because they kept dying on me."
; "You don't really think it had anything to do with you, do you?"
"I didn't want them to die. I was devoted to them. We all were. But still—"
"I had a very good friend, a Jesuit, and he told me that it was egotism to blame myself for sins I had not committed. That I was a glutton for guilt. It didn't sound quite that way in Spanish."
If I'd been eager to go to bed before, it was worse now. My toes twitched for the sheets. Abelardo's fingers on both hands were still meeting at the tips, rising and falling like a dying fish cast upon the beach. He added, "Of course I do not think you are an egotist. Not that at all. But the monsignor was good teacher, and a good friend of mine. So I often quote him."
"Okay. I really don't blame myself," I said. "I just feel responsible. There's a difference."
"I'm glad to hear it." Abelardo nodded and gave every impression that he took me seriously.
I could hear Flirt and Dandy running back and forth on the front porch. "You must be exhausted," I said. Again.
I let the dogs in. Normally they were brown and white, but now they were completely white, and for all that they were burdened with a layer of snow, they seemed lighter than air. The snow was falling steadily. Across the driveway was the barn that was such a sorry structure it barely deserved the name. The roof wore a thick white cap. It pained me to see the snow when Ezra and Henry were not sleeping upstairs, were not dreaming of a snow day, of a brand-new day stolen from the clutches of the legislated, regulated days of public education.
"When will it stop?" Abelardo asked.
"Soon, I'm sure. I never listened to the weather report, but it seems to be tapering off."
"Then I will thank you for a most delightful evening," he said.
He went upstairs, and I heard the high-pitched squeaking of Ezra's door, so different from the low breathy groaning of Henry's floorboards.
The wet dogs smelled powerfully, and they were uncharacteristically still, as if it took all their strength to keep from barking out some secret knowledge with which they had just been entrusted. For a few silent minutes I sat downstairs. Had I just unloaded on this unsuspecting—but very well-dressed—foreigner the stories of my late, lamented dogs and my currently sick dog? Obviously he'd been being polite. Normal people (my friends and relatives, for instance) stopped me ages earlier. When Dandy had first gotten sick and was diagnosed, his looming death seemed to me a tragedy of Greek proportions. Waldo told me I was more upset about Dandy than I had ever been over one of the boys' illnesses. "But they've been so healthy!" I whined. I justified myself by saying that Dandy's illness was fatal (so we'd thought then) while the boys only fell out of trees or put foreign objects in their noses. But Waldo was right. Even Ezra had to whisper in my ear, "He's a dog, Mom. He's only a dog."
Absent a Miracle Page 5
