Animal Appetite

right by the Fresh Pond traffic circle, not far from my house. One subzero Thursday last winter, we’d arrived to find the far end of the hall, where the advanced class meets, cordoned off and occupied by homeless mothers and children taking shelter from the cold. The floor space where we usually spread our mats and set up our jumps was lined with rows of folding cots. As we trained our dogs in the front half of the hall, the women and children sat on these flimsy beds, which weren’t even their own, to wait until we’d left so that they could go to sleep.
    The true contrast between the haves and have-nots would have been far greater at a fancy tennis club, a new-car dealership, or an expensive restaurant than it was at the shabby armory. What made it poignant was the simultaneous presence of the dogs and the children. The next day, my dog-training friend Hope Wilson started to volunteer at a soup kitchen located in the basement of a church in Harvard Square.
    On Wednesday morning, I called Hope to ask whether she knew anything about a man named Gareth Andrews. Before I’d even said that he was Caucasian and must be in his mid-thirties, Hope interrupted me. “Oh, Lord, Gareth! Yes, everyone knows Gareth. You’ve probably seen him in the Square. He always wears an aqua backpack. You see him at the corner of Mass. Ave. and Bow Street.”
    “What does he look like?” I asked.
    “Tallish. These days, he’s wearing a purple parka. On his good days, he has on earmuffs. On his bad days, he doesn’t, because he thinks that’s where the voices come from. On his really bad days, he doesn’t even need the earmuffs: The voices come from the fillings in his teeth.”
    I wanted to consult Rita, but she was at her office seeing patients. To me, Gareth’s evidently severe disturbance sounded far worse than what you’d expect from a childhood trauma that consisted of the fear of having to leave private school. Maybe it was the result of growing up in what sounded like a miserable family. Claudia and Jack, I believed, really had fought about money and about the dog, Chip. Rita would undoubtedly say that those topics were stand-ins for underlying issues of love and control. Brat had memorialized her father by becoming, in one person, both Daddy and Daddy’s little girl. Gareth had been Claudia’s son. In the family photo, he’d looked as if he were trying to bolt. When Jack was murdered, Brat had been eleven, she’d told me, and Gareth sixteen. A father’s murder would obviously have a powerful impact on any child. I wondered whether Gareth’s evident madness could have anything to do with knowledge, spoken or unspoken, of his father’s death.
    Although a few homeless people share Harvard Square with their dogs, most street people back away from Rowdy and Kimi. The alarm in those people’s eyes doesn’t look irrational; it looks like the kind of fear that’s based on reality. The genuine need to be wary of big dogs always saddens me. The partnership between people and dogs goes back tens of thousands of years. Homo sapiens and Canis familiaris evolved together. To sever the bond with dogs is, I think, to lose humanity. All this is to explain that when I went searching for Gareth Andrews, I left Rowdy and Kimi at home.
    Empty parking spaces in Harvard Square being almost nonexistent, I took a chance in driving, but the wind was ferocious, and the sky was spitting rain. I lucked into a spot on Mass. Ave., as it’s called—Massachusetts Avenue—-just around the corner from Quincy Street and opposite Bow Street. One high brick wall of Harvard Yard runs between Quincy and the Square itself. On the opposite side of Mass. Ave. are dozens of businesses that cater to students: clothing shops, a bookstore, an ice cream place, and restaurants, including one that’s reputed to house a brothel upstairs. Maybe the rumor is just one of those urban legends, like the story about giant albino alligators in the sewers of New York. (There really aren’t any, are there?) Anyway, at eleven o’clock in the morning, the only streetwalkers were jaywalking students bearing armloads of books and notebooks both ways across Mass. Ave. After nearly getting hit by a car, I made it across, checked out the area where Gareth Andrews was supposed to hang out, and saw no one with a purple parka and an aqua backpack. To escape the cold, I went into the Harvard Book Store. There I hunted around downstairs among the used history books for