The House Guests Read online

  With his learning process accelerated by being bowled over without serious injury by a passing car, Prince took over that porky-wise manner of the city dog, the broadchested little trot, the obvious preoccupation with destination, interrupted by the routine examinations of light poles and tree trunks.

  A friend phoned us once and told us of Prince’s solution to the traffic-light problem. We followed him and saw how he managed it. At the foot of the Beverly Place hill, a block away, Beverly Place crossed Genesee Street, US Route 5, a four-lane street, heavily traveled, with a traffic light at the corner. Prince would stop at the corner and begin to bark. Sharp, peremptory barks, widely spaced. The light would turn. Traffic would stop. He would thereupon trot across the wide street staying within the pedestrian stripes, quite obviously convinced that he had demanded a favor and that, as always, it had been granted.

  I am convinced that after I went off to the University of Pennsylvania my subsequent relationship with Prince was a disappointment to my parents. After all, this was A Boy and His Dog, reunited during school vacations. But I had to force more enthusiasm than I felt, and his response also seemed somewhat stylized. I used to wonder if I was lacking in capacity for this sort of affection. I realize now that the world had broadened for both of us. We had gone separate ways and had other things on our minds. I was learning to bark at another kind of traffic light. Our relationship was mildly affable and slightly nostalgic.

  When I met my wife-to-be at Syracuse University in 1936, Dorothy owned a cowardly black cocker spaniel whose registered name was Shadowfall Chloe. Chloe was utterly convinced of imminent disaster from almost any direction. On leash, when the horrors got too much for her, she would scrunch onto her belly and have to be either picked up and carried or dragged along with an ugly grating of toenails. If I reached slowly to pat her during our early acquaintanceship, she would run, screaming, and hide in the most remote corner she could find. Her eyes rolled white amid that black hair and she would pant with terror. Asleep she whined constantly, legs twitching as she fled the demons.

  After Dorothy and I were married, Chloe gave me a dubious acceptance.

  In our innocence of the wiles of dogdom, we had her bred at a kennel other than the one of her origin, with a pick-of-the-litter arrangement for the sire. When her time came, we took her to the kennel and left her there for the birthing. When we returned an attendant showed us one very tiny dead blond cocker in a tin can and said that she had given birth to just one, and that was it. Sorry. It was dead because she had gotten out somehow and had it in the cold. Sorry.

  We now know that a litter of one is so improbable as to be a fair indication of hankypanky. Perhaps Chloe’s conviction the world is a deadly place was justified. After all, they did steal her children.

  In 1938 Dorothy and I and Chloe were living in a fourth-floor walk-up apartment in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in what had once been a Harvard dormitory. Its doubtless apocryphal claim to notoriety was that during its dormitory days one Lucius Beebe, with the assistance of some interested companions, had dropped a piano down the stair well onto the tiled ground-level floor to see what the impact would sound like.

  I was attending the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration. Dorothy was pregnant with our only child, now twenty-five. She was working for the Kelling Nut Company with an assigned route which included an eerie number of urban and suburban drugstores. We were trying to either break our lease or get permission to sublet from the brothers who then owned the building. The obstetrician had advised us strongly to move out of a fourth-floor walk-up. In presenting this problem to one of the brothers at his office I had been somewhat disheartened to have him say to me, “Listen, you, if you’re both dead we collect from your estate. You gotta lease.”

  It was a weekday evening. Dorothy was napping. I was working on a case assignment for a class. Dorothy woke up and said, “John, this building is shaking. It must be a hurricane.”

  It was a chunky brick building. This was obviously some imaginative nonsense associated with pregnancy. They never have hurricanes in New England. I told her it was nonsense. She told me to turn the radio on.

  The radio said, “… and martial law has just been declared in Worcester. Winds are now upward of eighty miles an hour and the storm center moves …”

  We had a little black tudor Ford sedan parked down in front, and as it was not permitted to leave it there all night, I always took it over and put it in the lot across the river behind the Business School and usually combined this errand with the one of walking Chloe. So I snapped Chloe’s leash onto her harness ring and left at once. The winds seemed very strong, but not alarmingly so until I got onto the Charles River Bridge. Then I was broadsided with such violence I nearly lost control.

  I put the car behind the Business School. I got out As soon as I got a few feet away from the car, the wind got a good purchase on me, and before I could brace myself or grab anything, I was off and running, clutching the leash, Chloe bounding and sliding and screeching along with me. I came up against the woven-wire backstop of the tennis courts. Over the impressive and constant scream of the wind I heard an ungoldly banshee howl that went rowwarowwerrooee and soon identified it as a sound made by huge sheets of metal being ripped off the roof of one of the Business School buildings and flying by, spinning in flight, about fifty feet over my head. I think that it was at this moment Chloe’s defeat became total. All her life she had known of pending horror.

  I could not pick her up. I needed both hands to hold onto things. Later we learned that was the absolute peak of wind velocity, unmeasured because everything it could have been measured by was blown away. The velocity was measured by the damage done in that hour I was gone from the apartment. With the loop of the dog’s leash over my right wrist, I struggled homeward, crouching and crawling, seeking shelter, zigzagging from one precarious hand hold to the next. When we got to the bridge the wind was picking up solid water and dumping it on the bridge. It ran ankle-deep at both ends. I stayed below the shelter of the rail. I had to drag that damned dog. She was flattened, legs tucked under, eyes shut. When I reached the corner at the Harvard College side, every last one of those huge elms had come down since I had driven under them not long before. They lay blocking the road, three and four feet in diameter, with big slabs of sidewalk uptilted by the towering root structure. They did provide a windbreak. I had to lift Chloe over three of them. When we got to the sidewalk the wind was behind me. Chloe was rigid, inert.

  About fifty yards from the apartment building, she had a chance to express that final edge of terror. Dragging her along, I heard a curious clanging behind us, coming closer, over the wind sound. I looked back and saw an empty garbage can coming end over end, right up the sidewalk. It was hitting about every twenty feet, and at the apex of each leap it was perhaps four feet off the sidewalk. As I dodged and gave Chloe a yank to pull her out of the way, she turned and looked at the horrible thing clanging down upon her. I have never heard a scream like that from a dog. She sounded like a veteran Hitchcock actress. Galvanized, she ran to the end of the leash with such spirit that when she came to the end of it, it snapped her over onto her back. She lay right there, paws curled, belly exposed, waiting for the huge, noisy thing to come eat her. It clanged on by.

  After I got her home, after she had been dried and brushed, she still shook. She tried some of that strange little talking sound dogs attempt at times. But she gave it up. She just did not have the vocabulary for it. After that, curiously enough, her timidity was not as evident. But I cannot believe it was valor. It seemed more like resignation, as though she had decided that flight itself was futile. Later, when we had to move to a dogless environment, we gave her to friends in Poland, New York. I cannot believe they found her very responsive. No one did. But it was fun calling her.

  I spent two and a half years overseas. Dorothy and Johnny moved into an upstairs apartment in a two-story frame house in Utica, New York, at 1109 State Street. She wrote me abo
ut the acquisition of a dog. They had heard of a litter of pups at the pound which sounded interesting, and they went to look at them, but they both became captivated by a whiskery little female with a most persuasive personality, who, from the pictures I have seen, apparently had some Skye terrier in her bloodline. They took her home and named her Toppy.

  From all reports, she was a splendid dog, extremely bright, affectionate, responsive. She soon learned the pleasant duty of going and fetching her leash when told she was about to go for a walk.

  Dorothy found land for a victory garden atop Deer-field Hill overlooking North Utica and a broad reach of the placid valley of the Mohawk. It belonged to a farmer who lived a little further north along Route 8. In that spring of 1944 they went up there often, the woman, the child, and the lively dog. The farmer plowed the land for them, and Dorothy raised great hampers of vegetables.

  One day they started back toward the car and, as they reached the road, Toppy ran on ahead. Traffic was light, gas was rationed, and the speed limit in all of New York State was forty miles an hour. A woman alone in a car heading north struck and killed the dog. She saw the dog. She made a halfhearted attempt to avoid it, knew she struck it, and kept on going.

  (Lady, if you have survived these twenty years, do you still remember? Do you remember the summer day, the blond, tall girl and the little blond boy and the panic in their voices as they called their lively little dog? You may not remember them, but believe me, they will never forget you—nor forgive you the ugliness of not bothering to stop.)

  Awash with tears they went to the farmer and borrowed a spade and buried the dog under a tree near where she had been killed. We go up that road often, because we take Route 8 to go from Utica to Piseco Lake where we have a summer cottage. During a hundred trips either Dorothy or Johnny would say, “There’s Toppy’s tree.”

  The tree is gone now. A year or so ago the State Highway Department “improved” Route 8 between Utica and Poland. They did not widen the road itself. They widened the shoulders and bulldozed away those few thousand trees which gave that drive beauty and a character all its own. Now it looks like any other road through pleasant, rolling country.

  It is unfortunate for all of the rest of us that the trade of highway engineering should inevitably attract just the kind of dreary, narrow, empty little fellow whose only feeling about a tree is a vague uneasiness that someday someone might drive forty feet off the road and run into it. He prefers to clear away all such unplanned nastiness and leave us an unimpeded view of huge paper people showing their gigantic tombstone teeth as they smoke, drink, nibble, drive, and rub on consumer products which apparently create for them unimaginable ecstasies and social conquests.

  I do not know the sterling trade qualifications of the man who planned the present sterility of Route 8 between Poland and Utica, but aesthetically he is a fink. He took Toppy’s tree—and several thousand others which offended his sense of ugliness. It is astonishing how many hundred years of charm can be negated in one afternoon by some power-smitten snert at a drawing board.

  My mother tried to fill the teary gap by giving Johnny a little pedigree blanket cocker pup. It was too far gone with worms to survive the harsh remedy. But another dog did seem a good idea, and Dorothy acquired a young male cocker spaniel, black, which Johnny named Jive.

  After I was liberated at Dix, we holidayed in New York and then, in that September of 1945, headed up the prethruway highways toward Utica. Dorothy, in a very tentative manner, told me about the Problem with Jive. At first she made him sound merely unreliable. He seemed quite willing to bite people. She had to tie him outside stores. She had taken out special insurance, just in case.

  The dog had been playing with Johnny and had suddenly snarled and bitten him on the lip. Johnny had required medical attention. The dog had been eating a bone under the kitchen table. Dorothy had walked by. As she did so he had snarled, snapped, and somehow yanked the whole foot of her stocking out through the open toe of her sandal.

  The people who had bred him had taken him back for a little while for retraining, and he had seemed better, and then he had gotten worse. By then I was quite willing to agree with her tentative diagnosis. Jive was nuts. Not just unpredictably, but dangerously demented.

  She suggested I go to the kennel and get him by myself and bring him home so I would have an objective chance to observe him. She would leave it up to me as to whether I thought he should be destroyed. He was at Dr. Sellman’s kennel on North Genesee Street. The day after we got home, I went and got Jive. It was my first meeting with Dr. Sellman. Staying within the bounds of ethical comment, he told me a few things about the dog’s heritage. The breeding kennel had been having trouble with bad-tempered cockers, and in this instance there seemed to be considerable malevolence on the part of both the sire and the bitch. Also, their quaint training program seemed to consist of flailing away at the naughty dog with a stick, “to show him who was boss.”

  He said the dog could probably be sold, and many people would think that a logical answer. But if I decided the dog was too dangerous to live with, a better ethical posture would be to have it destroyed. Better for the breed too. He would do it.

  Jive seemed intent on proving I had nothing to worry about. He was a little wary of me, but no more than one would expect from any dog. He knew the car, and he quickly became quite friendly.

  I stopped in town at the Ford garage to have some wiring checked under the dash. I took Jive out of the car and around to the rear bumper and tied his leash to it, so he could not take a taste of the mechanic working on the wiring.

  I roamed restlessly around the way one does in garages. I went to Jive. He bounced and whined his greeting and was happy to be scratched behind the ears. I left him. I went around the hood of the car and approached him idly from the other direction. He lunged at me and his teeth clicked very convincingly about three inches short of my shin. I sprang back a goodly distance and he showed me a demon-face, head tilted, eyes slitted, ears laid back, lips lifted to display very white and businesslike fangs. He snarled a continuous and convincing threat. Experimentally, I went around the front of the car again, and from that side, got the warmest of greetings. I repeated it experimentally at least eight times, canceling out any possibility of mistake. The little group of service employees who had gathered to watch the show shook their heads and clucked and said the dog was crazy. One of them tried it, but Jive was willing to savage him no matter what direction he came from and indeed began to get so agitated that I had to put a halt to the game. Had he broken that leash, I think he would have emptied that garage in microseconds.

  I took him home and told Dorothy it was foolishness to try to live with an animal so erratic. She was saddened by the decision. She hates to have to give up where any living thing is involved. We took him back to Dr. Sellman, who gave him a massive injection of Nembutal, one that took him into a deep sleep and, in ten minutes or so, into death.

  Dr. Sellman brought us out the leash and harness and asked if we cared to take a look at the mad dead dog. We declined. No charge, he said, for the execution.

  Johnny seemed subdued about it, but quite reasonable, and willing to accept the necessity for it. I suspect that the vivid memory of having been bitten in the mouth tempered his sense of loss. And all other losses had to be measured against the loss of Toppy, she of the eager whiskers, and then the sudden gathering of the flies at the summer roadside. It was easier to say good-by to Jive.

  • • TWO • •

  It was an old and shabby neighborhood, those few blocks along State Street between Oneida Square and the knitting mills. But our windows looked out at the leaves of the old elms, and Dorothy had redecorated that upstairs apartment into a cheerful brightness.

  It had one overwhelming advantage. I had decided to try to make our living by writing fiction. We had a few dollars saved, plus my terminal-leave income—four months’ pay as a lieutenant colonel. We expected it to be precarious. And that two-bedroom ap
artment was under rent control, frozen at a monthly rate of $23.50.

  State Street sloped downhill toward the mills. The next street down was Mandeville Street, and just around the corner on Mandeville was the Mandeville Market, owned and operated by Howard Ehrenspeck, a good friend then and now. He and Jenny are now over on the east coast of Florida, where Howard is in the insurance business. Once upon a time, when food was half today’s cost, he let a very nervous and insecure writer run up a grocery bill of three hundred dollars. People came from all the best parts of the city to trade there. Howard and his employees had been most kind to Dorothy and Johnny. And so it got to be a pleasant habit to take a break and walk over to the market to get a pack of cigarettes and have a soft drink.

  That was the way I happened to meet George. At the time I met her, George was one very busy female cat, providing for some six kittens in the basement of the market. George had huge paws. She had six toes on one front foot and seven on the other.

  George had her litter in early September in the cellar under the Mandeville Market, in an old grocery carton of her choosing. I met her in October when she was in the process of weaning them. The market was renowned for the quality of the meat. There was a huge chopping block, scrubbed pale, curved to a shallow concavity by long use. There was sawdust on the floor behind the meat counter. On the floor against the back wall near the doorway to the walk-in cooler was the scrap basket, a bushel basket lined with butcher paper into which the meat cutters tossed the trimmings.

  The cellar door was propped ajar a few inches, enough room for George to come though. A cellar window was fixed the same way to give George access to the outdoor world, for night ventures and the pursuit of status.

  The first time I saw George, she came from the direction of the cellar with a air of purpose, went directly to the scrap basket, hoisted her front feet up onto the rim, and stared down into it, studying the contents. Next, braced by her left front paw, she used the hooks on her right paw to sort down through the scraps of meat. She was very intent and much like a housewife at a melon bin. When at last she found the piece suitable for her children, she leaned in delicately, picked it up in her jaws, reared around and walked back to the cellar stairs with it. Howard told me that sometimes she would come up, sort through the basket, find nothing suitable, give them all a brief, icy glance, and go on back down. And then some very tasty scraps would be tossed into the basket to await her next shopping mission.