Animal Appetite

a husband between Jack and Oscar? “I’m very sorry,” I said, envisioning a toddler hospitalized with some cruel illness. “How old is the child?”
    “Hers is only four,” he reported. Brightening, he added, “Mine is about nine.”
    About? I wanted to ask. Your own child, and you don’t know?
    Before I said anything, Oscar went on. With a rueful little shake of his head and a knowing look, he said, “Conflict there! Happens in all couples when there’s an age discrepancy between one partner’s child and the other’s.”
    As I’d now worked it out, after Jack’s murder, Claudia had remarried, produced or adopted a third child, and then either been divorced and granted custody or again been widowed. When she’d married Oscar, he, too, must have been a parent.
    “Well,” I said, “with dogs, a big age difference can work either way. Sometimes the older ones simply can’t accept the little ones, but sometimes they’re really rejuvenated, or they get very maternal.”
    Oscar’s face took on a look of amazement. His whole muscular body seemed to surge with energy. “Why, that’s astonishing!” he exclaimed. “Dogs, too?”
    “In terms of their emotional lives,” I informed him, “they’re very much like people. They’re social animals. They have attachments, rivalries, love... everything.”
    “But children? How would one ever know?”
    As a professional dog writer, I am an expert on the general public’s boundless, staggering ignorance about dogs. Moreover, I’d often noticed that many people who knew absolutely nothing about dogs were highly educated types who knew a lot about everything else and consequently assumed that they knew a lot about dogs, too. But how on earth could Oscar fail to realize that dogs had puppies?
    “Well,” I said, “by observation, I suppose.”
    “I’ll have to tell our group about this,” Oscar said. Once again sharp and rather grim, he said, “The group brings me back to the point of this visit.” Responding to what must have been my baffled expression, he added, “Claudia and I are both recovering.”
    That’s when I finally caught on. The child of Claudia’s he’d said was in pain was not Bronwyn, not Gareth, not the third child I’d imagined. All along, Oscar had meant only the inner child.
    Claudia, Oscar informed me, had been the victim of what he called “financial abuse” at the hands of the late Jack Andrews. Jack wrote checks on the couple’s joint account, failed to record them, and blamed Claudia when the checks were returned. Claudia now understood, Oscar reported, that in struggling to make ends meet, she’d been an enabler. Bronwyn and Gareth, Oscar claimed, had been raised in an atmosphere of constant insecurity. “Never knew from one semester to the next whether they’d be pulled out of Avon Hill.”
    Heavens! If the trend continued, we’d soon have recovery groups for people who’d been traumatized by having to attend public school.
    “Jack Andrews enjoyed the good life,” Oscar went on. “Drained the family purse traveling to promote those guidebooks.” Oscar’s tone made Jack sound like a purveyor of pornography.
    And wherever Jack went, I thought, there just so happened to be a dog show.
    “The fact is,” Oscar continued, “nil nisi bonum aside, if Jack Andrews hadn’t died when he did, things would have been even worse than they already were. His insurance was the only thing that got that family through—his insurance and Claudia’s spunk.”
    “The picture you’re presenting,” I remarked, “is quite different from the impression I had.”
    The bald head and heavy shoulders gave Oscar a bullish appearance. In an accusatory tone, he said, “There is no need for anyone to turn that son of a bitch into some kind of local hero.”
    “I have no such intention.”
    “Destructive excuse for a human being! Look at what’s happened to Bronwyn! Christ, look at Gareth!”
    “I’ve met Bronwyn.” I felt guilty about using a name other than the one Brat preferred. “I liked her. I’ve never met Gareth. I don’t know anything about him.”
    “Go to the Square. That’s where he lives. Refuses to take his medication. Hangs around the rubbish bins foraging like a wild animal.”
    If I wanted to see Jack Andrews’s true legacy, Oscar declared, all I had to do was take a look at Gareth.
     

Fourteen

     
    My dog training club meets on Thursday nights in the Cambridge Armory, which is on Concord Avenue