The Barker Street Regulars

by Susan Conant

  Feeling left out? If so, you know just how I felt on the Friday morning in mid-February when I led Rowdy into Althea’s room at the Gateway and overheard the animated conversation she was holding with Robert MacPherson and Hugh Searles. I caught English words and phrases, sometimes whole sentences, yet entirely failed to grasp either the gist or the particulars. I teeter-tottered on the non-Sherlockian side of the gaslit chasm. For the sake of anyone who might actually be able to understand what Althea, Hugh, and Robert were chuckling and exclaiming about, I wish I’d had a tape recorder along, but I didn’t. What I do remember made no sense to me. The word callosities stands out in my mind, as does a reference to a Crown Derby tea set, a mention of the supply of game for London, an evidently witty allusion to coals of fire, what sounded like an arch question from Althea about coins of Charles the First, and, from Robert, a riposte, I think, concerning, I swear, the extirpation of fish. At that point, everyone but me burst out laughing, and Hugh remarked that I must think they were discussing the fertility of oysters.

  “Fecundity!” snapped Robert. “Fecundity! Not fertility!”

  Callosities. Teapots. Oysters. I figured out what they were talking about only when the taller of the two men, Robert, I later learned, glanced over at Helen Musgrave’s bulletin board and in a pleasant, even affectionate, tone made a passing remark about a ritual.

  Feeling like the slow kid in the class who has for once got the right answer, I exclaimed, “‘The Musgrave Ritual’!” The Holmes story, which I’d just read, culminated in the discovery of a long-dead body and—oh, yes!—coins of Charles the First.

  Althea couldn’t see Rowdy unless he was right next to her, but she knew my voice. In a manner I now recognize as Watsonian, instead of telling Rowdy to go say hi, I said, “Althea, you have visitors. If we’re intruding—”

  “Intelligent company is never an intrusion,” Althea scolded.

  Naturally, I thought she meant my idea of intelligent company, namely, the unrivaled companionship of an Alaskan malamute. Rowdy knew better. He sank to the floor and peacefully rested his head on his big snow-shoe paws. With the lobby ladies, he was a performer. Gus needed a living link to the dogs he’d once loved; Rowdy was his animate time machine. Nancy’s need was raw and primitive: She suffered from the depletion of life itself. Rowdy was her donor, like a blood donor, really, but a transfuser of vitality that you could almost see and touch as it shot from him to her and restored, however briefly, her powers of speech and reason. Althea liked dogs. But what she really loved was intelligent human companionship, by which she meant, of course, a conversation with someone who would talk about Sherlock Holmes.

  “This is Rowdy,” I told Althea’s two guests. “I’m Holly. But meet Rowdy, and you’ve met me. A case of identity, so to speak.” That’s a title from the Canon: “A Case of Identity.” I can be a worse show-off than Rowdy.

  Althea apologized and went on to make amends. She claimed to have forgotten my last name. It seemed to me that she’d never heard it. When I supplied my full name, Holly Winter, Althea, Robert, and Hugh exchanged little smirks, and Althea offered what was to me the bewildering assurance that there was nothing vitriolic about me. Kitty Winter, I later found out, was a nasty character, a vitriol-thrower who appeared in “The Illustrious Client.” By the time I happened on Kitty, I was taking the Holmes stories personally and was far from pleased to find a violent Miss Winter with what had by then proved to be a weirdly prophetic first name. But I have leaped ahead. At the time, I was mystified. Robert MacPherson and Hugh Searles, Althea went on to say, were two of her oldest and dearest friends. Neither man, I thought, was as old as Althea. Both were certainly more than seventy, probably more than eighty, but I couldn’t guess their ages more precisely than that. Like active people I knew in dogs, Hugh and Robert looked vigorous and shared a liveliness that made age irrelevant. Robert, a thin, craggy, white-haired man at least as tall as Althea, looked so much like pictures I’d seen of Highland Scots that I wondered whether I hadn’t, in fact, seen him wearing a kilt and playing the bagpipes at one of those Celtic music conceits that are popular in Cambridge. It was even possible that I’d noticed him ambling through Harvard Square in traditional Scottish garb. Not that a six-foot, knobby-kneed man in a skirt really stands out in the Square, which always reminds me of an eccentric dog show with heavy competition for Weirdest of Breed: kids with topknots like the crests of exotic birds, blond-haired women in saris who’ve managed to pierce their noses, but haven’t mastered the Indian technique of applying makeup and consequently look as if they have oozing wounds on their foreheads. I later learned that I was right about Robert MacPherson, except that he didn’t parade around the Square in his kilt, but reserved it for the Robert Burns Festival, and didn’t play the bagpipes, but carried the haggis, which, I should mention, is not a musical instrument, but a sheep’s stomach stuffed with oatmeal and offal. It’s eaten only in Scotland, where people apparently like it, and in certain rarefied circles in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where everyone hates the taste of the stuff but eats up the image.

  As Robert was taking Althea to task for calling herself old and for referring to Hugh and to him as old friends, Hugh was staring at Rowdy, who had rolled onto his back on the linoleum and was waving his immense paws in the air. I translated: “He’s hoping someone will scratch his chest. There’s no obligation.”

  Hugh was a good six inches shorter than Althea or Robert, and attractively burly in the manner of people who look as if they’re savoring the pleasure of the previous meal while happily pondering the delights of the next. He had yellowish hair, bright blue eyes, and a dapper mustache, which I suspected he’d grown forty years earlier in an effort to add maturity to his round baby face. In contrast to Robert, who wore a dark three-piece suit, Hugh was dressed in khakis, a plaid flannel shirt, and a tan cardigan sweater. He struck me as a man who probably liked to tinker with mechanical objects. What accounted for his staring was, I suspected, curiosity about what made Rowdy work. When I later learned that Robert had gone to Harvard and Hugh to M.I.T., I was not surprised.

  “Now,” said Hugh, tentatively fingering the white hair on Rowdy’s tummy, “would this be an Alaskan malamute?”

  “He would be,” I said. “In fact, he is.”

  Robert lightly cleared his throat. Rising, he reached over the Sherlock Holmes figurines and removed one of the volumes that rested on the windowsill beside Althea. In making my way through the Gateway, I had noticed that almost no one was ever reading and that books were almost completely absent from windowsills, shelves, and other places where people displayed their belongings. Here in Cambridge! Book City, U.S.A.! Althea, in contrast, kept a miniature library that included several editions of the Sacred Writings. Her most prized possessions, which she stored in her nightstand, were what looked to me like nothing to brag about, just a pair of undersize paperbacks, although I’ll concede that the little books were bound in leather and bore Althea’s name stamped in gold. She also had a small collection of books about Holmes, Watson, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. In fact, she’d honored me by letting me borrow one; she’d wanted me to read a charming tongue-in-cheek essay by Rex Stout called “Watson Was a Woman.” Anyway, when Robert selected the same one-volume Doubleday edition of the complete works that I owned myself, I felt terrible. I had no excuse. Althea had tried to introduce me to the science of deduction. But only now, as Robert picked up the book, removed a bookmark, and resettled himself in his chair, did I realize that Althea, the one person at the Gateway who lived amid books, had such poor eyesight that she was completely unable to read. I should have read to her. I should have scurried around finding books on tape, books, of course, about Sherlock Holmes. When I later offered to do just that, Althea refused. Robert and Hugh read to her, she explained. She had no desire to hear the Canon from the lips of others.

  I got Rowdy to his feet and excused myself.

  As we left, Robert began to read. “Holmes laid his hand upon my arm,” he be
gan.

  Hugh interrupted in a cheerful effort to continue from memory. “If my companion would undertake it, there is no man—”

  “No!” Robert bellowed. “No, no, no! My friend, my friend, my friend!”

  “My apologies,” said Hugh.

  Althea’s eyes were closed. She wore a gentle smile of contentment. The exchange between Hugh and Robert, I realized, must be as familiar to her as the Canon itself.

  Mollified, Robert resumed where he had left off. “If my friend would undertake it, there is no man who is better worth having at your side when you are in a tight place. No one can say so more confidently than I.”

  Robert must simply have picked up where he’d left off. Even so, it now seems to me that the passage from The Hound of the Baskervilles was a fitting portion of scripture for my introduction to Robert and Hugh. Among Sherlockians, the relationship between Holmes and Watson is known as “The Friendship.”

  Chapter Three

  YOU LIVE IN CAMBRIDGE,” Robert informed me, “but you did not grow up here and did not go to Harvard. You have ties to Maine. You are a dog writer. You own two Alaskan malamutes. They are your only pets. When you acquired Rowdy, he was no longer a puppy.”

  Robert was not, I might mention, reading my palm, which was wrapped around a coffee mug. It was the Wednesday after I’d first met Hugh and Robert. In the morning I’d finished my column for Dog’s Life, and in the afternoon I’d gone to Harvard Square to celebrate in a typically Cantabrigian fashion, meaning that I had gone out to splurge on books. In other places, high living is French wine, marc de Bourgogne, cocaine. Here, it’s hardcovers. When I ran into Robert and Hugh, I was buying paperbacks. Cambridge low life. Anyway, Althea’s friends had invited me for coffee, and we were now sitting in a booth in one of those real-world coffee shops where you don’t have to specify the country the beans were grown in and how long they were roasted. “You are a linguist,” I told Robert. “Your real name is Henry Higgins. When you’ve finished with me, I’ll be able to hold my own in the senior common rooms, and no one will ever guess that I used to peddle flowers on the streets of Portland.”

  Hugh smiled. “Robert makes a study of vowels.”

  Robert nodded.

  “Are you actually a linguist?” I asked.

  “Robert retired from Widener a number of years ago,” Hugh replied, without saying whether Robert had been one of Harvard’s head librarians or had just checked books in and out. “The deduction of occupation is one of his pastimes.”

  Althea later told me that Robert had been a fairly senior librarian who’d overseen a number of special collections. Hugh, she insisted, had pursued an occupation so technical that she’d never understood what it was. The friendship between the men had begun as a family connection: Their wives had been sisters. Robert’s had died young and childless. Hugh, widowed ten years ago, had three children who worked in the Silicon Valley and took no interest in Sherlock Holmes, to whom Robert had originally introduced his brother-in-law.

  “You met Rowdy,” I told them, “and Althea has heard about my other malamute, Kimi. As a matter of fact, I don’t have any other animals, but I could. Plenty of people have cats and dogs, even cats and malamutes.”

  “As I deduced,” Robert responded, “you did not raise Rowdy yourself. He is a malamute. Therefore, despite his gentleness with people—”

  Hugh interrupted. “Including, of course, Althea.”

  “He is a predator,” Robert resumed. “Had he been brought up with cats—”

  “And just how did you deduce that I did not raise Rowdy myself?”

  With a smug little smile, Robert said, “Canine nomenclature merits a small monograph. The name ‘Rowdy’ is of an era that predates yours, my dear. Like ‘Rex,’ it bespeaks the twenties and thirties.”

  “Rowdy,” I said, “is a traditional malamute name. Rowdy of Nome was the first registered Alaskan malamute.” I refused to give Robert the satisfaction of admitting, first, that Rowdy of Nome had, indeed, been born in about 1928 and registered in 1935 and, second, that my Rowdy had been given his call name by a man of Robert and Hugh’s generation. “You’re right about the cats,” I admitted. “Rowdy wasn’t raised with them. Neither was my other dog, Kimi. It would be difficult for me to get a cat, but it could be done. And, okay, if I had a cat, you’d see cat hair on me, maybe, but for all you know, I could have a tank of fish. An iguana. A ferret! They’ve just become legal in Massachusetts and—”

  “Possibly,” conceded Robert with a smile. “As practiced by those such as ourselves, the science is not exact. Watson, for example, was notably unsuccessful in applying the Methods.” Really, you could hear the capital letter.

  I tried to remember whether I’d told Althea that Rowdy and Kimi were my only animals. Althea’s roommate, Helen Musgrave, preferred cats to dogs. If I’d told Helen that I didn’t have a cat, Althea would have overheard. “But I’ve been thinking a lot about a cat,” I said, as if proving to Hugh and Robert that my mind, at least, was unreadable. “And I don’t necessarily live in Cambridge. I could live on Beacon Hill or in Allston, Brighton, Somerville, Belmont, Brookline—”

  “Denim jeans,” Hugh countered. “Hiking boots. No trace of cosmetics on the face. Hair not recently trimmed. In combination with your choice of reading material? We couldn’t help noticing. Indeed, we make every effort to do so.”

  “Everyone reads Cynthia Heimel,” I said defensively. “She’s the funniest woman in America.”

  “Unmanicured nails,” Hugh responded. “Your Navajo ring.”

  “I didn’t buy the ring. It was a present.” From Steve Delaney. Steve is my vet. My lover. He lives in Cambridge, too. Come to think of it, he’d bought the turquoise ring in the Square.

  Hugh, undaunted, said, “When we lamented the demise of Elsie’s, you agreed.”

  Hugh looked so pleased with himself that I didn’t bother to argue. Elsie’s was a lunch place in the Square that made world-famous roast beef sandwiches. Anyone anywhere could have agreed that the closing of Elsie’s was a loss to the Square. “You looked me up in the phone book,” I charged. “And just because I live in Cambridge, it doesn’t necessarily mean that I’m a writer,” I said mendaciously. Hah! It’s true that not everyone in Cambridge is a published writer. My next-door neighbor Kevin Dennehy, for instance, is a Cambridge cop, and he’s never published anything. Being not just any cop, however, but a Cambridge cop, Kevin is convinced that there’s a book to be written about his experiences on the force. Kevin is probably right. He just hasn’t gotten around to putting the words on paper yet. “And not everyone who owns dogs writes about them,” I pointed out. “Am I covered with ink and hair?”

  With a languid Holmesian sigh, Robert pointed out that I was free in the daytime and walked around with a steno pad tucked in the outside pocket of my shoulder bag. “You are Holly, not Dr. Winter, not Professor Winter,” he said. “Cambridge being what it is, had you a title, you would use it. Therefore, you are not an academic. You own an exceptionally well-trained dog of a notoriously difficult breed.”

  “Malamutes are not difficult. They’re interesting.”

  “On Rowdy’s collar,” Robert continued, “Hugh observed an extraordinary number of tags. The average dog wears, perhaps, two: a dog license and a rabies tag.”

  “And an ID tag with the owner’s address,” I added, without admitting that Rowdy wore so many tags that I could hardly remember what they were: license, rabies, my name and address, his therapy dog tag, one proclaiming him a Canine Good Citizen, one from the National Dog Registry giving the location of his ID tattoo, and, oh, yes, a Saint Francis of Assisi medal I’d bought in desperation during one of the low points in our obedience career. “But I get the point.”

  “The collar, Hugh reports, is of fine workmanship. Yet your car, which we noticed in the parking lot on our way into that institution, before we encountered you, is old. It stood out. Bumper stickers. Cages.”

  I am the first to complain ab
out the battered state of my ancient Bronco. I prefer to be the first. And the only. Robert’s mother, I thought, should have taught him not to make personal remarks. Hugh’s mother, too. Never mind Sherlock Holmes’s.

  “Crates,” I corrected.

  “Crates?” Hugh inquired.

  “Dog people don’t say ‘cages.’ We say ‘crates.’ And Maine was easy. You saw the bumper sticker. MAINE: THE WAY LIFE SHOULD BE.”

  “Elementary,” said Robert, without a trace of self-consciousness.

  “Elementary,” I repeated. I might mention now, as I didn’t then, that as I’d been leaving the Gateway on Friday, I’d applied my own observational skills and deductive powers. Parked two cars away from mine had been an ancient Volvo sedan in that gray-matter color favored by intellectuals determined to pass off their vehicles as mobile human brains. Without even pulling out my Sherlock Holmes magnifying glass or taking samples of the dirt embedded in the tire treads, I’d brilliantly deduced that it belonged to Robert or Hugh. It bore a single, if rather telling, bumper sticker that read THE GAME IS AFOOT! Speaking of games, two can play. Or three. “You,” I said to Robert, “are intimately acquainted with libraries. Once you generated this hypothesis that I was a writer, you checked an index of periodicals. Maybe you even bought a copy of Dog’s Life.”

  With a jarring mixture of scorn and pride, Robert contradicted me by reporting that Hugh surfed the Web.