Stud Rites (5 page)

There was, however, nothing growly about Duke’s personality. On the contrary, he was an affable guy with an endearing ability, unusual in our cult, to remember the names not only of dogs but, remarkably enough, of people, too.

”Holly Winter!” he called out. ”Saw your dad a few weeks back. Good to see him out and about again. Hey, Timmy, how you doing? You heard about Elsa? Damned shame.” Duke didn’t look particularly upset. He could have been remarking on the peaceful and natural demise of an elderly pet.

Tim Oliver echoed Duke: ”Damned shame.” Matching platitude with platitude, he added, ”No-where’s safe these days.” Tim—Timmy, as the old-timers called him—had soft, unformed features, as if a childhood illness or a genetic quirk had prematurely halted his facial development. His hair was lank, his face flat, his ears large. The diminutive,
Timmy,
I thought, flagged a folk diagnosis of what a doctor might have recognized as a subtle syndrome with trivial consequences.

When Duke had finished greeting six or eight other people by name and exchanging remarks with all of them about Elsa Van Dine’s murder and the damned shame of random violence, I started to approach him with a request for a favor. The Showcase of Rescue Dogs was set for seven o’clock that night. I wanted to persuade Duke to handle one of the dogs.

Before I could slip in the request, however, Timmy Oliver snagged Duke and launched into a monologue about the merits of his bitch, whose name, as I overheard it, was Xerox, but, as Timmy went on to say, was spelled
Z-Rocks.
According to Timmy, Z-Rocks had easily finished her championship at a young age, was the bitch he’d been waiting for all his life, and—in a stage whisper—exactly James Hunnewell’s type. Duke took Timmy’s bid for approval with his usual air of calm amiability. I followed Duke’s eyes as they played over Z-Rocks, who, viewed as a show dog, seemed to me perfectly decent, but not outstanding. Also, her coat was in disgraceful shape.

”And wait till you see her move!” Tim exclaimed. Wait was what we didn’t have to do. Abruptly tightening the lead in his hand, Timmy Oliver went charging across the lobby with the astonished Z-Rocks doing her best to maintain a proper show gait despite the obstacle-ridden conditions of the odd ring in which she suddenly found herself. Directly ahead lay the invisible pen into which the Border collie manager had herded his distressed nuptial flock. To avoid a collision, Timmy came to a startled halt, and Z-Rocks, displaying a show dog’s nose for where power lay, dutifully posed herself before Crystal, who cried, ”Oh, you beautiful husky! I just love you!”

Faced with rebellion in the pen and the presence of a wolflike creature just outside it, the manager lost control in a fashion entirely uncharacteristic of his breed. Raising an arm, he pointed directly at the father of the bride.
”Your
daughter,” he boomed, ”was fully informed of the other event that would take place this weekend. She and I discussed it at length and in detail, and she voiced no objection whatsoever.”

Silence fell in the lobby.

”Crystal,” bellowed Mr. Jenkinson, ”is that true?”

”It does sort of ring a bell,” Crystal admitted.

”A wedding bell,” I whispered to Duke and to Freida Reilly, our show chair, who’d appeared at his side. ”It’s a bridal party,” I continued. ”They didn’t know about, uh, us.”

To the extent that a national specialty is any one person’s show, it is the chair’s. Within seconds, Freida Reilly had assessed the situation and was taking action. Freida had been trained by experts: Alaskan malamutes and AA. Pointing at Z-Rocks, Freida addressed Timmy Oliver in tones that suggested the implementation of an intensive rehabilitation program in which the participant is kicked down a flight of twelve steps onto a concrete landing: ”Timmy Oliver, you get her out of this lobby, and from now on, you keep her out of the areas of this hotel where dogs aren’t allowed.
Out!”
An ornate enamel malamute pinned to Freida’s heaving bosom appeared ready to leap off and, if necessary, enforce her order.

Having dealt with Oliver, Freida, who looked exhausted, turned to the manager and the bridal party, and spoke calm words of conciliation. Everyone was here to have a good time, Freida said; no one had any interest in spoiling the fun for anyone else. Freida was a tactful politician as well as a superb organizer. She left unspoken the countercharge that their noisy, smelly wedding was going to ruin our lovely dog show.

AT QUARTER OF SEVEN that evening, Betty Burley and I waited nervously for the start of our Showcase of Rescue Dogs. I’d written the script that would be read as our ten dogs were paraded around the ring, spotlighted, and presented with the same awards— white sashes—that would later go to the stars of the breed. The script was supposed to be sappy enough to bring tears to people’s eyes but not mawkish enough to bring their dinners back up to their mouths—and let me admit that even for a professional writer, attaining that precise degree of melodrama is far from easy. The ring was festooned with tiny white lights, and in the center was a white trellis that looked as if it belonged in a rose garden, but was surrounded by pots of yellow chrysanthemums. The lights and flowers were for the show-dog event to follow, not for our little showcase.

”Elsa Van Dine, poor thing,” Betty informed me, ”sent Freida an extremely generous donation specifically for flowers. Little did Elsa ever imagine...!”

”That she’d be sending them to her own funeral,” I finished.

”That’s a bit of an overstatement, Holly,” Betty replied. ”This is hardly Elsa’s funeral.” As if reconsidering the entire matter of Elsa and her generosity, she added, ”And, of course, Elsa did not send
us
so much as a halfpenny or whatever it is they use over there now.” Fifteen or twenty years earlier, I’d learned, the late Elsa Van Dine had married an English marquis, moved to Great Britain, and dropped out of dogs. Betty, Duke, and her other old friends, however, hadn’t seen her since she moved abroad and continued to use the name they’d known her by.

”And Elsa was a
very
wealthy woman in her own right,” Betty said, adding rather spitefully, ”for all the good it did her. In fact, I can’t help wondering whether Elsa hadn’t gone and rented some sort of flashy convertible, or whether she might have been wearing a
mink
coat or something else that attracted this mugger.” She sighed. ” ’Massive head injuries.’ That’s what Freida told me. Elsa would have hated that. She was a pretty girl. Very vain. Oh, well, at least it must have been over quickly.”

”Betty,” I whispered, ”there’s Sherri Ann Printz over there. This would be a good time to go and say a quick thanks for the lamp.”

Sherri Ann was near the gate to the ring. She stood in a group that included our chair, Freida Reilly, who was about to walk in and take her place in the center.

”With
Freida
right there!” Betty exclaimed. ”Never! That is exactly what Sherri Ann has in mind, setting me up to create bad feeling with Freida. Nothing would please Sherri Ann more than to listen to me rub it in Freida’s nose that Rescue got the lamp that Sherri Ann promised her. I will
not
give Sherri Ann the satisfaction!”

According to rumor, what was called the ”bad blood” between Sherri Ann Printz and Freida Reilly had originated a year or two earlier in what would’ve struck anyone outside the world of dog breeding as a
nothing
incident. Freida had wanted to breed one of her bitches to Sherri Ann’s Bear, Ch. Pawprintz Honor Guard. When Sherri Ann said no, Freida took the refusal as a gross insult to her canine lines and to her own reputation as a responsible, ethical breeder. Suppose that you’re traditional Chinese parents, okay? And an arranged marriage is proposed between your wonderful daughter and the splendid son of another estimable family. And his parents quash the deal. The implication? You’re not good enough. Neither is your kid. This was like that. Only far worse.

Betty eyed the lamp, which was still with the antique wolf prints and the other valuable donations. Lowering her voice to a level audible to a mere twenty or thirty people, she confided, ”Tacky thing! Lowers the whole tone of the booth!” Although I’d never heard Betty express any admiration for Bear, it occurred to me that she, too, might have wanted to use him at stud and, like Freida, been flatly turned down.

The overhead lights blinked and dimmed. The announcer’s amplified voice boomed: ”Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Showcase of Rescue Dogs.” To take advantage of the power of first impressions, we’d given the number-one spot to what’s called a ”quality dog,” an obvious blue blood. The ”ahs” and ”oohs” rose above the announcer’s voice. Second was a sweet little female who’d been rescued from the puppy mill; third, a red-and-white male who’d been found with a metal training collar deeply embedded in the festering flesh of his neck. Our fourth, Helen, and the boy who handled her drew cheers.

When Duke Sylvia led in the fifth dog, I thought for a second that sly old Duke had decided all on his own to boost the image of rescue dogs by slipping in a substitute for the one he’d agreed to handle for a timid adopter. The dog, Cubby, was one I’d placed with a woman named Jeanine, who was too shy to handle him herself. Three months before Jeanine had adopted

Cubby, a man had broken into her apartment. She’d tried and failed to fight off the attack. Although the rapist was caught, Jeanine had remained terrified of aggression. She’d asked me for a big, gentle dog. Cubby was immense, a rangy, gangly creature with long, thin legs, a gigantic barrel chest, light eyes, propeller ears, and so many other faults that he might as well have had
puppy mill via pet shop
tattooed across his forehead. But he was as gentle as he was homely. He didn’t look gentle, though, and he was really, really big. I’d omitted Jeanine’s story from my script, of course. I’d also had to leave out the other interesting feature of Cubby’s history. Turned in by a man who’d bought him at a pet shop, Cubby had come with AKC papers. I’d run his pedigree—in other words, traced his family tree. As Cubby’s appearance suggested, most of his ancestors had been owned and bred by operators of wholesale commercial kennels in Missouri and Arkansas, in other words, by the people we aren’t supposed to call puppy millers in case they take offense and sue us. Four generations back, though, I’d found a dog with the kennel name Pawprintz, a male bred by Sherri Ann Printz and, according to the Alaskan malamute stud book register, owned by a G. H. Thacker. G. H. Thacker was, I’d figured out while running other pet-shop pedigrees, a USDA-licensed puppy farmer in Missouri, a woman named Gladys H. Thacker.

In writing Cubby’s part of the script, I’d had to omit Cubby’s true role in Jeanine’s life, and I certainly wouldn’t have humiliated Sherri Ann Printz by informing the assembled membership of our national breed club that a Pawprintz dog had somehow ended up in a puppy mill. Sherri Ann would have been totally disgraced. Suppose you’re a pooh-bah in the Daughters of the American Revolution, and there you are at the national D.A.R. convention when over the loudspeaker booms the announcement that your eldest daughter is a white slave in a brothel in Thailand, and that you’re the one who sold her into bondage. No, no! Consequently,

I worried that my deletion of the unmentionable would focus attention on the dog’s unfortunate looks. At the end of the afternoon’s rehearsal for the showcase, however, Duke had taken possession of Cubby and vanished with him into the grooming tent. There, the Michelangelo of fur, he’d applied grooming mousses, sprays, gels, combs, brushes, and a powerful force dryer to sculpt a new animal out of Cubby’s hair. In so doing, he’d freed the dog from the coat. The transformation was superficial, of course; even Duke Sylvia couldn’t get great movement out of faulty anatomy. But Cubby moved as well as Cubby could move. To my left, Jeanine was clinging to Betty Burley and sobbing hard. In those few seconds, I fell in love with Duke Sylvia.

The sixth and seventh dogs had what are ordinary stories in Rescue: abandoned in shelters, saved from gas chambers. The eighth dog, Frosty, another obvious blue blood of unknown origin, drew silence, then noisy murmurs of speculation. Frosty’s looks maddeningly proclaimed an origin in a show kennel, any of dozens, without specifying which one. Ninth was Juneau, who’d been turned in after she’d repeatedly broken loose, located an astonishing number of henhouses and duck ponds, and done what malamutes do.