Animal Appetite

Claudia’ll be embarrassed to have him seen in. Ergo, her presence here. Ergo, his dumping his parka. He wants attention, he ditches something she’s bought him, he hangs around where one of her friends’ll see him, the friend calls her, she shows up, she makes a fuss, he gets what he wants.”
    “He really could freeze.”
    “That’s his leverage. Claudia doesn’t actually give a shit whether he does, but she’s up for tenure, and if her son freezes to death in walking distance of her office, there goes her image as the maven of child care.” In a fashion characteristic of Cambridge children of important people, Brat assumed that I knew what her mother did. She was, of course, right.
    “As it is,” I said, “Gareth doesn’t exactly boost her image.”
    “Bullshit,” Brat growled. “He elicits sympathy. Poor Claudia, gallantly struggling with blah-blah-blah. This isn’t one of Gareth’s better scenes. He usually pulls them in the Square, where there’s a bigger audience.” On his feet again, Rowdy was fixing Brat with that big-brown-eyes look designed to convince her that he’d discerned in her a special and wonderful quality of character that every other creature she’d ever met had somehow missed. She was compliantly resting a hand on his head. “Good-looking dog,” she said. “You show him? In breed?”
    “Yes.”
    “Conformation’s a lot of bullshit,” she said.
    With unpardonable disloyalty to a sport I love, I said, “Sometimes.” Hey, if what you want is loyalty, get a dog.
    “What are doing here, anyway?”
    “I live here.” Claiming the neighborhood as my own,
    I felt like Rowdy with one of the orange barrels. “I live down the street. And you? What’s your role in—”
    The heretofore silent Gareth suddenly burst forth with the kind of ranting he’d directed at me days earlier in the Square. This time, his object was Oscar Fisch, his mother’s second husband. “Son of a bitch! Son of a fucking bitch! Poisoner! Poi—son—er!” Wildly addressing a startled couple who were passing by, Gareth, in the manner of the Hannah Duston statue, pointed a finger of accusation at Oscar and announced, “This man, Oscar Fisch, murdered my father and married my mother!”
    The couple twittered nervously. “And I suppose your name is Oedipus,” the man murmured before scurrying off.
    Brat was still leaning against the door of the panel truck and resting her hand on Rowdy. “The interesting feature of Gareth’s delusions,” she remarked, “is that, in one way or another, they’re always grounded in reality. Claudia was cheating on Daddy. She married Oscar less than a year after Daddy died.”
    “Why are you telling me this?” I started to say, then bit my tongue. The exchange we were having reminded me of an experience Rita once had after a vacation in the Bahamas. Returning to Cambridge, she’d gone to her office to see her first patient, a distressed woman who poured out sordid details of sexual adventures and fantasies to poor Rita, who hadn’t yet reoriented herself to what she did for a living and wanted to say, “I’m a total stranger to you! Don’t you realize that it’s inappropriate to tell me these intimate details of your personal life?” Rita, however, actually was a shrink. Why confide in a dog writer about your mother’s love affair? Because, I realized a bit belatedly, your brother is cracking up, you’re scared, you’re angry, and you don’t want your pain to show. “Your father had a lover, too,” I longed to say. “You have a teenage brother named Drew. He’s sane, friendly, and hardworking. He looks just like your precious Daddy.”
    Gareth, meanwhile, still raving at top volume, had switched from the blatantly Oedipal theme to the topic of Uncle George—George Foley—who, according to Gareth, kept drinking poison but still refused to die. When I’d encountered Gareth in the Square, hadn’t he said the same thing about his father? Claudia was cheating on Daddy, Brat had just informed me. She married Oscar less than a year after Daddy died. I’d assumed a connection: Claudia’s affair had been with Oscar, whom she’d married after Jack died. Had I misinterpreted Brat? Had Brat herself been wrong about the identity of Claudia’s lover? The elderly George Foley had been a handsome, charming mam Forty years his junior, I’d certainly felt the attraction. Eighteen years ago, he must have been even more boyish and vigorous than when I’d