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The Indenture of the Dog Lovers

SEPTEMBER 1, 1985—Family Weekly

 

My father bred English setters, and there were around the house, at any typical moment, five or six, half of them kept at the farm where we used them in pheasant hunting, two or three around the house and, when I was twelve, one of these became my own, my first doggie. He was a tall, handsome black-and-white freckled beauty, whose pedigreed papers called him Sultan something or other followed by his patronymic, which I have long since forgotten, though I have not forgotten the pride I took in knowing that he had been bred of champions. At first I attempted with some formality to call him by his name, Sultan, but soon gave up, and for some reason found myself calling him Ducky.

In respect of my liking for dogs, as in other respects, I tended to be taken by enthusiasms. I shared, in those days, a bedroom with my youngest brother, from one window of which a porch began that led along the length of the huge colonial house to a staircase descending to the grounds below. I persuaded the care-taker to substitute for the fixed screen that shielded my brother and me from the mosquitoes and fireflies of New England summers a screen dislodgeable by the merest exertion of a dog’s nose. The screen, the dog having passed through it, would return to perform its conventional function through gravity. Ducky could now vault the radiator along the window stool and, knocking the screen out of his way, land on the porch whenever inclined, during the night, to leave my bedside or, more commonly, my bed. When he returned, he would bound up on my bed, and elect to sleep always with his head either over my rump or over my neck.

Oh how we loved each other, Ducky and I. I had nine brothers and sisters, and my oldest sister, who was sixteen and far gone in cultivated sarcasm, noting the guileful habits of Ducky, who knew instinctively how to endear himself to those who could do him favors—take him hunting, give him food, or simply sit and stroke him—decided one day to refer to him as “Unducky.” Some of my brothers and sisters thought this extremely funny. I did not. I managed to rise above it, however, and if anyone, in the course of the day, would say to me, “Bill, where’s Unducky?” I would simply continue doing what I was doing, as though I had not heard the effrontery directed at my affectionate, noble doggie, who died one cold night, many years later, when I was a freshman at college.

My first experience with True Grief came when an older sister’s cocker spaniel, who was called Peter, was killed by an oil delivery truck one summer afternoon. We rushed him to the vet’s, but he was DOA. The caterwauling in the household was not surpassed in any Spanish nunnery on Good Friday. It was years later that I heard the awful story, apparently a commonplace in German folklore, which communicates the seriousness of a child’s engrossment with his dog. Skipping home late in the afternoon from school, the story has it, seven-year-old Gretel asks her mother, “Where is Dada?” Her mother has spent the entire afternoon bracing herself for this encounter, because the awful truth of the matter is that Dada was tragically run over shortly after the little girl went off to school. Her mother, consulting friends and professionals, had decided to tell her daughter the plain truth, and take the consequences. Accordingly, she replied, in sober tones, “Darling, I must tell you something: Dada has been killed.” The little girl looked up, wrinkled her nose, and then said, “Where are my cookies and milk?” Vastly relieved at her daughter’s stoicism, the mother bounded to the kitchen to give her daughter her snack, after which Gretel said, “Mummy, where is Dada?”

“I told you dear, Dada had an accident and was killed.”

There followed a lachrymose pandemonium which the mother could not arrest. Finally she blurted out, “Darling, I told you when you came home from school that Dada had been killed.”

Little girl: “I thought you said Papa had been killed.”

I am not saying it was so when our cocker spaniel Peter was killed, that we’d have gratefully exchanged the news that our beloved Father had been run over. But I intend to suggest the intensity of a child’s grief, when something happens to the doggie.

My wife also grew up with dogs, and I don’t think there was ever a moment when, during our married life, we were without a dog. The highlight of our doggie life together was being introduced to a dog, a dog so special that he and his “heirs,” as I delicately call them (in fact, Rowley disdained female company), have brightened our lives consistently for fifteen years now.

The breed is called Cavalier King Charles Spaniel, and thereby hangs a tale.

Rowley came to us in Switzerland. He arrived in a lady’s purse: the British gentlewoman, who had bred her own bitch, brought her little puppy as a house present, and it was love at first sight. He was ten weeks old, and when he was twelve weeks old I flew him back to New York, receiving permission from Swissair to keep him on my lap during the flight. There was something about Rowley that absolutely never failed, at least not during the first two or three years of his lifetime. It was that he was irresistible, and all rules pertaining to dogs and their governance were simply waived when otherwise inflexible executors of the law came face to face with—Rowley.

It happened that the Swissair flight landed at Shannon on that trip, and I decided Rowley needed to be taken off the plane to give him an opportunity to relieve himself. But I was no sooner down the gangplank than four men zoomed up in a jeep with a machine gun mounted on it. I had committed a most awful transgression. Because Ireland, you see, is like England in only one respect: It has the same rules against dogs landing on native territory without first putting in six months in Coventry in order to discover whether the dog is rabid. When the four Sumo wrestlers skidded to a stop telling me brusquely to take the dog back up into the airplane I said to them, How could they treat a little dog in this way? They looked down at little Rowley, and—of course—it worked. They permitted me to mount the jeep, Rowley in my arms, and were driven to a compound. That was the compound where, apparently, immigrating dogs were segregated, before going off to the hygienic dungeons where they sit, forlorn, for six months, before being designated as safe to mingle with the pacific breed of human beings who govern Ireland.

Anyway, there we were, and the leader of the detachment, his eyes furtively looking down at Rowley, waiting for him to do his business, made talk with me. I tried to keep the conversational fires burning, and we talked about politics, communism, the pope, and eternal salvation. All Rowley would do was bound about and look endearing. Finally the crisis came: The plane was about to leave. With some embarrassment, I having pleaded the distress of Rowley to the Irish paramilitary, I said we would obviously need to return to the aircraft, never mind that Rowley’s little bladder, or come to think of it, immense bladder, was unrelieved. By the time we had got back to the airplane, each of the officials insisted on having a personal valedictory with Rowley, which affectionate embraces Rowley affectionately returned.

Rowley went everywhere with me, but as the years went by I had to acknowledge that there was just that slight estrangement that men with such keen perception as mine are bound to notice. He loved Someone Else more than he loved me. He loved Jerry Garvey, who drives for us, better. The seduction of Rowley began when first he rode in the car with Jerry. Sometimes in the front seat, sometimes burrowed in the cavity next to Jerry’s legs, sometimes on the magazine shelf behind the back seat, from which he would peer out the back window or, occasionally, down at us: but most often, longingly, toward the front, where Jerry dwelled. But every year, for thirteen years, he was with us in Switzerland, without Jerry, and there his enchantment became legendary.

We welcomed a new little Cavalier King Charles, about whom something very odd needs to be confessed. It is this, that for the first eighteen months, he was a lovely and refined dog, much like Rowley, but there grew a coarsening of body and spirit which my wife identified with the spiritual depression that came on when Beepee, as he was (is) called, was succeeded by Blenhie (after “Blenheim”), the breed colored white and brown. Failing to be the center of attention, and unreconciled to the senior citizenship status of Rowley, Beepee became rather bulbous, and his hair turned matty: and when a Spanish friend who always loved him told us that he would love to give Beepee to his freshly widowed mother to console her, we acquiesced, and as I write, Beepee lives a charmed life in Bilbao.

Blenhie inherited the charms of Rowley, but in due course he, too, faced competition. The circumstances of the new acquisition will amuse all couples, the male member of which is regularly accused of extravagance.

I had come upon a gentleman who lived in Greenwich, Connecticut, and was advised that his wife bred Cavalier King Charles Spaniels. I was informed that they had just bred a fresh litter of beautiful Blenheims. Since, living in Greenwich, they were our neighbors (we live in Stamford), I prevailed on my wife to drive over and have a look at the little six-week-old puppies. She agreed, but on the way to Greenwich cautioned me: She reminded me we were under no obligation to buy a dog and certainly did not need yet another dog.

All six were brought out—about the size of a man’s shoe—and began curling and playing on the carpet in the living room. At one point the breeders left the room, and my wife looked up at me from the other end of the room on the floor of which the puppies were playing, and raised her hand inquiringly ... ? She had two fingers raised, and I nodded, and we have been happy ever after, with Sam and Fred.

I have never understood why, when there are beautiful dogs one can acquire, people should go out of their way to acquire non-beautiful dogs. But I know better than to give an example, because nothing arouses owners more than the suggestion that their breed is less than the most desirable in the world. And, of course, it is true that a dog objectively ugly—a cur, a mongrel, a you-name-it —can capture the heart and mind of its owner. I don’t know why this shouldn’t be true of dogs, come to think of it, since it is certainly true of people: I would rather have spent my days with the Hunchback of Notre Dame, who was very ugly, than with Tallulah Bankhead, who was very beautiful.

But admit it, the Cavaliers are strikingly attractive. And just as one feels the impulse to stroke them, they feel the impulse to be stroked. Sam and Fred can spend hours being fondled, as you read your book or talk to your guest. But then they will exhibit their independence. It disappoints me only that they do not like my study. Rowley used to come to my study once every hour or so, to have an extended love-in, during which we would re-exchange our eternal vows. Sam and Fred will accompany me to my study and then leave, to play elsewhere: or simply to lie, hours and hours on