Niobe the old black Labrador retriever is going to have a holiday from the city. She is going to Katonah, a distant suburb of New York, where she will have trees, grass, hedges, night-smells of earth, and, at a distance, a road to watch, and passing cars. She will have a house of her own, to guard. There is a field in Katonah where she can run as hard as she likes, and, not far away, a lake where she will swim, holding her head high, pouring herself through the water while her big, heavy old body feels light again and her legs stretch themselves. In the lake in Katonah, Niobe’s short, thick, powerful sea legs will stretch themselves until all the dull constriction of city sidewalks and city streets crumbles away from her webbed paws and from inside her muscles. Her legs will become sleek again and they will do what they like, sending her through the water at exquisite speed, so that the people watching her think, Why would anybody want to go faster than Niobe, and how can anybody bear to go more slowly than she goes when she swims?
Niobe is a changeling, anxious to please, but water is her element, and when she swims she becomes herself, a solitary reveller with a big, serious, courageous head and a store of indifference that make it seem sometimes that she might never come back to land. She always comes back, shaking herself so that the water springs off her and her fur stands up in spikes. And after shaking she stands for a minute, staring about her with the mad cousinly friendliness of her true cousin, the dolphin. She is ready for anything. At that moment, wet and rakish from her swim, Niobe seems to have travelled to earth from a far distance—from the bottom of the sea, twenty thousand fathoms down, where the Fish King has his court. The Fish King never speaks, not even to say “Now” or “At once.” His words are made of thunder and they reverberate at his will. Great sounds issue from him—sounds of wrath, sounds of mirth, and sounds of hunger. But he never speaks. He sits in oceanic silence under an immense floating canopy that is really an upturned lake of fresh clear water, and in its blue depths and shallows small green flowers and silver goldfish play games with the sunlight that was trapped in the water on the day the lake was stolen—a Monday in Norway, centuries ago. Niobe has seen the Fish King and his canopy, and she knows his palace guard of dignified young whales, and the thousand sequined mermaids who are his dancing girls. She was at home with them, and she is at home with us. She has seen everything. It is written in her face, in her sad, bright eyes. There is hardly anything she does not know, except when to stop eating. Her true memories are ancestral—they haunt her sleep. In daily life, the compromise she makes is wholehearted, but there is nothing in it of acquiescence. Housebound, she remains herself. She is a dog.
But today Niobe is going to the country. She is going to Katonah, where her big, hungry nose will find something to smell besides concrete and stone and lampposts, and gutters that seem interesting but that always prove unresponsive in the end. Niobe does not know that her leash is going to be put away for a month. To her, this is an ordinary day, and it starts as usual in her Greenwich Village apartment. She rouses from her sleep on the bedroom floor, on a dark, flowery carpet that is thin and worn to pale string in spots—a length salvaged from the acres of carpeting that once covered the lobbies and stairs of one of those majestic old New York hotels that disappeared last year, or the year before, or the year before that. The carpet smells of Niobe’s sleep and of the cats’ sleep and of the vacuum cleaner, but that is all. There are no memories in it, no echoes of country grass and leaves and earth, no bits of sand, no woodsmoke, no pine needles, nothing of the house by the ocean in East Hampton, where Niobe lived for most of her life. This is an apartment carpet, anonymous, warm, comfortable, and dull. No field mice ever ran across it, flying for their lives from the cats; no field mice, no moles, no chipmunks, no baby rabbits. Once a regiment of tiny black city ants marched across it and disappeared into the wall. And once an enormous black water bug hurried out of the bathroom and across the carpet in the direction of the kitchen. And a soft, pale-green caterpillar, a visitor from nowhere, crawled timidly about in the dark foliage of the old carpet for a little while before he curled up to die. But that is all. It is a poor, boring carpet, and Niobe yawns when she wakes up, ignoring it. She stands and stretches and looks about her, showing she is ready for her walk.
Niobe’s walk takes her around Washington Square, and as she passes the doorman of the big apartment house on the corner he grins and says, as he does every morning, “Hello, Old-Timer.” Niobe is nearly eleven years old, and her young, original, shining black face is disguised by a dusty mask of grey hairs, grey eyebrows, grey muzzle, and long grey jaws. The mask makes her comical, and people smile when they see her and say, “Oh, my, that’s an old dog.” People walking behind her smile, too, because, although her thick, heavy tail is still coal black, her behind is grey and it waggles importantly as she goes along. But however she goes, trotting, cantering, plodding, or simply dawdling, she always looks what she is—a dog out of water, not at ease in the city but putting up with it very well. She is amiable, although not particularly obedient, and she accepts her leash and makes her way, leading with her strong, wide-set shoulders and getting all she can out of this strange world where she has to behave like a clockwork dog who can go only in squares, circles, and straight lines. And she searches. She keeps looking for a black door in a little white house on West Tenth Street. Twice on her walks she happened on that door and refused to pass it, struggling to get into the house and even barking once, but for weeks now, for months, she has not seen it.
The house belongs to a man who took Niobe to Montauk for six weeks last summer, and when she sees the door on West Tenth Street she knows what lies behind it—a cliff dropping into the Atlantic Ocean. Niobe loves that cliff, which gave her a wild dash to her morning swim and, on her way back, countless difficult crannies to dig and burrow into. The house on West Tenth Street looks like a real house, and no one passing it would dream that all of Montauk lies behind it—the cliff, the sand, and the ocean. Everything worthwhile is there behind that door, which Niobe knows is closed only to hide the sea from dogs who are not going there. She has not seen that door for a long time now, but she has not lost hope. She watches for it. She looks for it everywhere, on all the streets east and west of Fifth Avenue, and along Fifth Avenue, and along University Place, and on Fourth Avenue, and on Seventh Avenue, and on little Gay Street and on Cornelia Street and even on Bleecker Street, behind the stalls of vegetables and fruit, but she is never confused into thinking that a strange door is the door she wants. There is only one door on West Tenth Street and she will know it when she sees it again.
Even in the city, Niobe had adventures. As she walked around Washington Square Park one morning, she came alongside a very, very old man sitting alone on one of the benches that line the paths around the grass. He was more than old, he was ancient, and although it was a glowing day, Indian summer, he was warmly dressed in an overcoat and a muffler and a crumpled grey hat, and he wore laced boots, and his hands were clasped together on his walking stick, and his eyes were closed. Niobe passed very close to him, and he may have heard her dramatic breathing as she pressed on in her pursuit of the Atlantic Ocean (hiding behind that door on West Tenth Street, so near, but where?), because he opened his eyes and saw her. He didn’t smile, but he looked at her. “Hello, Snowball,” he said, thoughtfully. “How are you doing, Snowball?” Then he closed his eyes again and went on sitting by himself in the warm sun.
Another time Niobe found a dead sparrow lying at a grass corner in the center of the Square, where the fountain is. (Where the fountain was. It has been dry for a long time.) The sparrow, no bigger than a withered leaf, lay on his side, with his wings folded and his legs close together. He was a very neat little dead body. A wild bird, his fate was strange anyway—to share a shabby city park with hungry, watchful pigeons, big fellows. How old had he been when he learned to dash in among them and grab his crumb? He must have been strong and clever to survive to his full size. His cleverness was finished now, and the story of his life was not even history—it was a big mystery that he had never known anything about, and that was wrapped about him now as he lay by the grass. He lay there, with the secret of his nature in open sight for anybody to look at; but only to look at, not to touch, not really to see, never to understand. He was a sparrow, whatever that is. Samuel Butler said life is more a matter of being frightened than of being hurt. And the sparrow might have replied, “But Mr. Butler, being frightened hurts.”
Niobe looked at the sparrow, and then she sat down and began to contemplate him. There was nothing to smell, but the light breeze blowing from the south, from Sullivan Street, touched a loose feather and it stood up and waved, a tiny flag the color of dust. That was all. It was quite otherwise with the mighty pheasant, an emperor pheasant, Niobe found dead on the beach in East Hampton one autumn morning, her third autumn by the ocean, years ago. That was an unearthly morning—one mislaid at the beginning of the world and recovered in East Hampton under a high and massive sky of Mediterranean blue. An Italian sky, a young and delighted ocean, a blazing sun; and far away on the white sand something crimson that caught the wind. The wind was so new that it blew cold, in its first rush across the world, but the air was soft. The pheasant’s head and body were almost buried in the powdery sand, but he had fallen with his wings wide open, and one of them slanted up to make a wedge of color in the air.
“All dogs go to Heaven, because we’re not the ones who screwed up.”
That autumn morning was early in November—the time of year when millions of small stones appeared in flattened wind formations at intervals along the lower part of the beach, where the sand is hard and flat near the water’s edge. Some of the stones are as big as walnuts and some are as small as grains of rice, and they lie tightly packed, a harsh sea fabric, while their faint colors—ivory, green, silver, coral—are always vague, almost vanishing, always about to dissolve into the stone. Niobe used to race along the beach until she was almost out of sight, and at that distance, far away, she became a big black insect with four waving legs and a waving tail and wings that were either transparent or folded. Because it was impossible that a creature who skimmed so confidently and at such speed across the sand and in and out of the water and along the top of the dunes should not also be able to fly up and away and out to sea, with the seagulls. The seagulls detested Niobe and flew off screeching with irritation whenever they saw her hurrying toward them. They stood in a long single line, staring at the water, and waited until she came close to them before they took flight. Their feet left a delicate tracery of pointed marks, a Chinese pattern, in the clean wet sand. Niobe’s big paws made untidy holes in the sand, and sometimes troughs, and even when she did make a recognizable paw mark it was indistinct and awkward, not to be compared with the delicate seagull imprint. She had attacks of wanting to dig in the sand, and then she dug as frantically as a dervish looking for a place to whirl. She loved to chase her ball into the ocean. She had a succession of balls—red, green, blue, and white, and sometimes striped, but one by one they drifted out to sea while Niobe stood at attention on the shore and watched them go. She knew the power of the big waves, and how they hurled themselves so far down into the sand that they were able to drag it out from around her legs.
“The cat’s away—what would you like to hear?”
After Christmas, when the storms began, the beach was whipped and beaten into bleak terraces—long ranges of sharp sand cliffs descending from the dunes to a struggling, lead-colored sea that foamed into mountains against the sad sky, while the seagulls screamed their warnings all day long. One day in January, Niobe received a present from the grocery shop of an enormous bone, a bone of prehistoric size and weight, a monumental thighbone with great bulging knobs at each end. She took hold of the bone at its narrowest place, in the middle, but even so she had to open her big jaws to their widest and her head was pulled forward by the bone’s weight. She straightened up and carried the bone from the kitchen to the lawn in front of the house, where she placed it on the frozen grass and looked it over tenderly before she started to attack it. Two seagulls appeared out of the fog and circled about not far above her, watching for a chance at the bone, and the day was so strange that the seagulls seemed to speak as natural claimants for the fog that was taking possession of the house. It was a dark-white day under a lightless sky and the view was ghostly. The small grove of trees at the end of the driveway had become a dim outpost, and to the left of the house, toward the ocean, there was nothing to be seen except shapes formed by the fog. Outside the house only the two seagulls and Niobe with her bone had substance. The fog reached the windows as the afternoon wore on, and night came to find the house shrouded, lost, hidden, invisible, abandoned except by the ocean, which filled each room with the sound of eternity, great waves gathering themselves for the clash with earth and darkness. Niobe had been in and out of the house all day. About seven in the evening she cried to be let in, but when the door was opened to her she backed away from the light and was immediately lost except for her face, a thin grey mask with imploring eyes looking out of the fog. Her eyes were pleading, not for permission to come in but for permission to bring her bone into the house. She vanished and reappeared a minute later, a transparent dog face that held in its ghostly jaws the great bone, which glowed phosphorescent, while beyond it four round diamonds flamed suddenly—two of the cats returning from their usual night-watch. There was no moon that night; no moon, no stars, no clouds, no sky, no real world—only the little house settling slowly into its place in safest memory, guarded by the silence that poured out of the voices of the waves.
The lawn in front of the house belonged to Niobe. In the summer she stretched herself out on it to bake, and in the winter when the snow was very deep she played boisterously in it, rocking and leaping and plunging, a dolphin again. The lawn was separated from the emerald acres of a famous golf course only by a thin line of trees, and from her place near the house Niobe could see the public road and the cars passing along there, going south to the beach or north to the village. Sometimes a car turned into her driveway and then she ran forward to welcome it. During her early days in the city she was surprised to find so many cars and all so close to her, parked along the sides of all the streets where she walked, and at first she thought they were all friends and she used to notice each car, and smell it, and look to see if there was a place in it for her. She soon discovered that in the city cars had no connection with her, and she stopped expecting anything from them, although it made her very restless to see a dog looking out of a car window, because she could not help hoping that somebody would offer her a ride, even a short ride, anywhere. Away from home, that is where Niobe dreamed of being, when she saw dogs in cars, and when she watched for the house on West Tenth Street. Away from home, that is where Niobe wanted to be.
One afternoon, just before the start of her holiday in Katonah, her walk took her a long way west, to Hudson Street and the walled garden of St. Luke’s Chapel. It was a cool afternoon, with thin sunlight, and a complicated country fragrance drifted across the walls of the old garden and through the bars of the garden gate. Niobe put her nose to the gate and smelled. She could see the big, old-fashioned garden, fading in autumn, and she smelled leaves, grass, and earth. Niobe smelled fresh earth. Somebody in the garden was digging.
In secret places in the neighborhood of her house in East Hampton Niobe used to bury her best bones. They were her treasures, and she knew they were still where she had left them, safely hidden, waiting for her. She smelled earth now, the same old earth, but she could not get into the garden because the gate was closed, and locked. There was a lady in the garden, walking near the gate, and Niobe wagged her tail, but the lady didn’t see her, or didn’t want to see her. Niobe stopped wagging, and two or three minutes later she turned from the gate and went around the corner onto Christopher Street. And there, as she walked west on Christopher Street, Niobe saw a vision. She saw the public road that cuts through the golf course in East Hampton, with the cars passing each other, going north and south, just as they always did. She was looking at the West Side Highway, which is cut out of the air around it just as the road in East Hampton is cut out of the green golf course. All she really saw was cars moving in the distance. It was months since Niobe had seen cars at a distance, and the distance between where she was on Christopher Street and the elevated highway was much the same as the distance between her old lawn in East Hampton and her old view of the golf course. Everything was happening at once. Her head was still full of the smell of new earth, and she was seeing her view again, and now she smelled, very close to her, the Hudson River. The river did not smell like the Atlantic Ocean, but Niobe knew she was walking toward water, big water. Perhaps she was going to have a swim. Her ears went up and she began to hurry, pulling on her leash. But then she turned another corner and found herself back in the same old concrete quadrangle, walking her geometrical city-dog walk, with only miserable lampposts to tease her starving nose. In her disappointment Niobe lost her temper and charged furiously across the sidewalk to threaten a five-pound nuisance, a miniature white poodle who yapped rudely at her, and who stood like a hero on his four tiny paws and glared up at her until she was dragged away, seventy pounds of raging disgrace.
Poor Niobe. She is being made foolish in her old age. She would like to go swimming, show them all what she can do. She would like to go swimming, show them all what she really is. She would like to dig up a bone. She would like to go for a ride in a car. She would like to find that door on West Tenth Street. Most of all, she would like to get away from Home. Yes, she would very much like to get away from Home, who now marches along behind her, holding her leash.
Home speaks: “Good Niobe. Good Dog. Nice Walk. Good Niobe.”
Home’s voice is consoling, but Niobe can’t be bothered to listen. Niobe is sick of Home, who holds her on a leash and won’t let her go anywhere or do any of the things she wants to do.
“Good Niobe,” Home says.
Niobe begins to go faster and now it is Home’s turn to be dragged along, hanging on to the leash. Home protests angrily.
“Stop it, Niobe,” Home says. “Bad Niobe. Bad Dog. Bad.”
Niobe doesn’t care. She begins to speed.
Home shouts, “Bad, bad!”
Niobe is pulling so hard that her chain collar hurts her throat but she only goes faster and faster. Disappointment and boredom have turned her into a fiend, and all she wants is to get as far as she can from Home.
But that was several days ago. Today, Niobe is going to Katonah for a holiday in the country. The car comes at twelve, as it promised to do. Niobe is led out of her apartment house on her leash, just as though she was going for her ordinary walk. But then the car door is opened and Niobe leaps into the back seat. She is mad with joy. She tumbles over herself and tries to tumble into the front seat, but as soon as the car starts off she quiets down and sits looking out through the window at the streets she is leaving. She is trembling with happiness. She makes no sound, but her eyes are shining with adoration for everything she sees—for the streets, and for the car she is in, and for the driver of the car, and for Home, who sits beside her in the back seat. Yes, Niobe is going away from Home, and Home is going with her. Niobe turns her head from the window and looks at Home, who is smoking a cigarette and smiling. “Good Niobe,” Home says, and Niobe stretches herself out on the seat and puts her head in Home’s lap. “Good Niobe,” Home says. Niobe sighs and half closes her eyes. Her tongue comes out and she licks her lips. She settles herself for a long ride. The wheels of the car go round and round and they sound as though they might keep going forever and ever.
| 1967 |
JOAN ACOCELLA
The other day, we accompanied our favorite dog, Louis, to his class at the Port Chester Obedience Training Club. Louis is a two-year-old German shepherd, and he is not what you would call a natural student. At the end of his first semester in obedience training, he got left back. But all that is forgotten now. He has passed Basic I and Basic II and is currently in Novice. In the car on the way to the class, Louis’s owner, Diane, told us she hopes that he will eventually get his C.D. (Companion Dog) title, or even a C.D.X. (Companion Dog Excellent). Louis looked skeptical.
We get to school early. Basic I, the occasion of Louis’s early humiliation, is going through its paces. There is a Siberian husky, a German shepherd, a huge, hairy brown poodle named Saki (after the writer), and a tiny, refined cocker spaniel named Zach. Presiding over the dogs is their teacher, Mary Ann O’Grady, who is wearing bluejeans and a shirt with a ceramic dog pin on the collar. Under Mary Ann’s direction, the owners are putting the dogs through their sits, stands, heels, pivots, and stops, for which they are rewarded with dog cookies. “Remember to randomize your treats!” Mary Ann urges the owners. If a dog gets a treat for every deed well done, he or she will soon get full or complacent, with predictable consequences for obedience motivation. The dogs do not get the point of this rule, and neither do some of the owners. We observe several treats being quietly distributed on an unrandomized basis.
Now Mary Ann is explaining to the owners another principle: they must start giving their dogs hand signals at the same time that they issue vocal commands. “Dogs get deaf as they get older,” she says. “If they only know vocal commands, they’ll stop obeying.”
To show what she wants, she brings out her own dog, Cora, a Border collie. Cora is so obedient that she gets to do television commercials. “Here, Cora,” Mary Ann says, and that is the last thing she says to Cora. From then on, Mary Ann performs a mime routine worthy of a Japanese temple dancer—hand up, hand down, hand scooping the air, hand sweeping the air, hand with fingers open, hand with fingers closed—all of which clearly means something, for Cora, in response, walks, heels, turns, jumps, stays, sits, puts up her paw, and, as her finale, lies down on the floor like an odalisque. The other dogs finish their lesson while Cora, still reclining, looks on, impassive.
Mary Ann dismisses Basic I. “Next week, we talk about grooming,” she says.
“Good. We could use it,” says the owner of Saki. If Tiny Tim were a dog, he would look like Saki.
Once Basic I has cleared out, the Novice class moves into the teaching area. There are two Welsh corgis, a Great Dane, a boxer, a golden retriever, a Portuguese water dog named Clyde, and two German shepherds, Lucas and Louis. Diane and the other owners have given us the lowdown on each of them. Lucas is being trained by one of the school’s senior instructors, Margie English. He is as large as she is, and when she pats him on the chest it makes a big, hollow thwonk, as if it were a wine barrel. Katie, the Great Dane, is going to be a show dog. Hope, the golden retriever, has a sort of saintly status in the class. She has been chosen to be a brood bitch for Guiding Eyes for the Blind, an organization that breeds and trains guide dogs. Her puppies will lead the blind. As for Louis, Diane confesses, he has a tendency to walk out of the class when he gets tired of it.
The Novice dogs are way beyond the simple sits and stops of Basic I. They don’t just do steps; they do combinations. They also undergo psychological trials, which test whether they can go on sitting and staying while faced with dire temptations to do otherwise. They all sit down in a row on one side of the room, their owners next to them, and Mary Ann, now wearing a Mephistophelian expression, weaves in and out among them, squeaking a squeak toy and bouncing a tennis ball. Necks become rigid, breathing becomes short, eyes gaze upon owners in an agony of indecision, but all the dogs stay put. Then Mary Ann throws the ball. This is too much for Ivory, the boxer. She races after the ball and has to be brought back into line. “We didn’t see that,” Mary Ann says. Then she ups the ante further, bringing out Cora and playing fetch with her. All the dogs hold their places. They saw what happened to Ivory. Now Mary Ann asks the owners to go to the other side of the room, so that the dogs can try the exercise without them. Diane is not even halfway across when Louis walks out of the class. Diane goes to retrieve him. “He did it perfectly on the first day,” she says. “I don’t know what’s the matter.”
Now the dogs get to do their jumps. Mary Ann erects an eight-inch hurdle in the middle of the room, and the dogs take turns charging over it. For the small dogs, this is an inspiriting challenge, and they go at it like Olympians. To observe Marvin the corgi, his stubby legs drawn up, his little tubelike frame quivering with joy as he sails through the air like a kielbasa shot from a bow, is to see a creature rising to what for him is one of life’s great occasions. For the large dogs, however, an eight-inch hurdle is nothing to write home about. Katie and Lucas step over it nonchalantly. Louis leaves the class.
Finally, the session is over, and Louis leaves for good, with Diane in tow, while we stay to put some questions to Mary Ann. In addition to teaching obedience class, Mary Ann operates a private service, Cara Na Madra Dog Training, out of Greenwich, Connecticut. “Cara na madra means ’friend of the dog’ in Irish—I’m Irish—and when I say ’friend of the dog’ I mean it,” she explains. “By the time I’m called in, it’s almost always a matter of saving the dog from euthanasia or from getting dumped in the pound. When people dispose of dogs, it’s usually for one of two reasons—barking or no housebreaking. Housebreaking isn’t really a problem. Mostly, you have to train the people, not the dog. They have to take the dog out more often.
“With barking, too, you have to train the owners. They stick the dog out in the yard for four hours, and he gets bored. Or he gets anxious. ’Hey, I’m out here. I don’t know what to do. I’m scared.’ So he barks. And they won’t let him inside because he barks. You have to get the owners to praise the dog when he’s quiet, not just scold him when he barks. That’s why I say, ‘Accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative.’ I have that on my business card.”
“Do dogs have humanlike feelings?” we ask. “Do they feel proud? Do they feel guilty?”
“They certainly feel proud,” Mary Ann says. “You can see it when they know they’ve done something good. They stick up their ears. Their whole body says ‘Look at me!’ As for guilty, I don’t know. If they do, it’s not for long.”
We go out to the parking lot to rejoin Louis and Diane. Louis is now happy as a clam. He scratches himself, he chews on his leash, he smells the grass tufts sticking through the sidewalk. Life stretches before him. Obedience class is behind him, at least for this week.
| 1992 |