Animal Appetite

otherwise have spent with my father in Maine.
    After the ceremony, the guests were invited to what turned out to be a sumptuous catered lunch in a big hall in the temple. The tables were elaborately set and had beautiful centerpieces of flowers, as well as carefully lettered place cards. I knew only three people in the big crowd, Marsha and her parents, who were making their way to what was obviously a family table, where I didn’t belong. Milling around, I eventually located my name card at a place to the right of a handsome elderly man with twinkling blue eyes. He rose, helped me to my seat, and graciously introduced himself as George Foley, a name so legendary in the world of dogs that I did a momentary and, I hope, imperceptible double take. The dog man—the real George Foley, as I at first thought of him—presided over the Foley Dog Show Organization, Published Popular Dogs, and was a charter member of the Dog Writers Association of America. It didn’t surprise me at all to have the name crop up anomalously attached to someone else. As I’ve said: meaning and harmony. Or as the bumper sticker on Steve Delaney’s van r eads: Dog Is My Copilot.
    Fortunately, I’m not shy, and neither was this George Foley, who turned out to be Marsha’s mother’s maternal great-uncle and lived on Fayerweather Street in Cam-1 bridge, not far from my own house. Within a minute or so, we’d established an area of common interest, and I heard all about his late bulldog, Winston. As I was sympathizing, an attracdve-looking young couple appeared. They greeted my new friend as Professor Foley and took * seats to his left. During the introductions, I learned that the newcomers, named, incredibly, Dick and Jane (was Spot at home?), were graduate students in the Harvard I history department, from which Professor Foley had recently retired. Jane said that she was Marsha’s cousin. I said that I was Marsha’s dog trainer.
    As the four of us exchanged the usual remarks about how well Marsha had done, I felt so outclassed that I let fall what was meant to be an impressively casual comment about the subject of Marsha’s speech, Jael, who, I said, had made me think of Hannah Duston. Dick and Jane didn’t seem to recognize the name. Professor Foley, I however, not only knew who Hannah Duston was but—in contrast to the ignoramus who’d raised the subject— actually knew something about her.
    “Taken captive six days after the birth of a baby. One j presumed motive: The infant was killed almost immediately. Curious episode,” he told me with what appeared j to be genuine, even childlike, interest.
    An admission of ignorance felt like my only defense: “Actually, I know practically nothing about Hannah Duston.”
    When George Foley smiled, happy lines radiated upward from his eyes and from the corners of his mouth. “The beginning of knowledge.”
    I asked, “Would you happen to know if there’s a book about her?”
    “Well,” he replied, “you’ll want to check Coleman, of course, New England Captives Carried to Canada —she’s in there somewhere—and then Thoreau discusses her, Whittier, Hawthorne, June Namias’s White Captives." He mentioned a few other names. “But your best bet if you’re just getting started is Cotton Mather. Magnolia. Mather draws the same parallel you did: Jael, Hannah Duston. There’s a sermon, too, I believe. Mather's about as close as you’ll get to a primary source: Hannah told her whole story to him. Oddly enough, though, I was discussing Indian captivity at a conference only a week or two ago, and someone told me about a privately printed book dating back to the thirties, if I recall correctly. I’ve been meaning to track it down. Probably something by one of her descendants or commissioned by the family, something of the—”
    As I was about to pull out a notebook to jot down authors and titles, the arrival of two new people cut Professor Foley off. Actually, only one of them did. A woman named Claudia Andrews-Howe dramatically seized upon my last name, Winter, to relate the circumstances surrounding the death of her first husband, Jack Winter Andrews.
    Claudia’s appearance so unambiguously proclaimed her place of residence that if I’d encountered her on a street in Bangkok, in a restaurant in Buenos Aires, or in a car on the Trans-Siberian Railroad, I’d have stepped right up to her and announced, “Hi! I’m from Cambridge, too!” Marsha and her parents, I now realized,