Animal Appetite

piece of passive evidence. My readers would not object, I assured her. Did I have her permission to write the story? I did. We made an appointment for eleven o’clock the next morning at her office. She promised to bring a photograph of Jack and, if she could find one, a picture of his dog, too.
    Claudia’s office was on Appian Way, only a few blocks from Harvard Square, in Larsen Hall, a peculiar-looking mid-sixties fortress with high, blank walls of red brick and, except in a sunken courtyard, almost no windows. The architect’s message, as I read it, was that at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, one had definitively arrived and thus need look nowhere else. The design did, I suppose, minimize hard feelings about who got stuck with offices in the interior of the building. Claudia’s was an airless beige cube to which she’d added personal touches evidently selected to create the illusion that she worked in Santa Fe. Woven into the red-patterned ethnic rug was a faded yellow motif of what looked like interlocked swastikas. A Hopi pot on her desk held pens and pencils. On one wall hung a large framed poster of a desert landscape with prickly pears in bloom. There wasn’t a toy in sight. Go to any canine training center you like, any dog show, any small-animal veterinarian’s office, and take a wild guess at what the decorations depict, usually in bewildering number and variety. The objects in my own home-office are precisely what you’d expect: a gold-framed copy of Senator Vest’s Eulogy on the Dog; photographs of Rowdy, Kimi, and my late goldens; snapshots of dogs sent by people who read my column; ribbons and trophies; and, on top of a bookshelf, a wooden urn containing the ashes of my last golden retriever, Vinnie, with a leather collar fastened around it and a little brass plate that bears her name and the years of her birth and death. Nothing in Claudia’s office, however, even remotely suggested an interest in children. Not that I expected cremated remains.
    The door to her office had been open when I arrived. When I tapped lightly and entered, Claudia looked up from her computer, removed her glasses, and gestured to a hard plastic chair by her desk. “My office hours,” she said. “We may be interrupted.” She wore a one-piece khaki safari outfit, a sort of boilersuit, and a necklace strung with such heavy-looking chunks of polished rock that the giant-size bottle of ibuprofen next to her keyboard made sense. Her long gray-streaked hair was held back by the same barrette I’d noticed at the bat mitzvah. The style is popular among women handlers: The clump of hair above the barrette provides a convenient place to stash the comb needed for last-minute touch-ups on the dog. I didn’t say so to Claudia. Just as my mother taught me, I made no personal remarks. I’ll tell you, though, that the bright overhead lights were unkind to Claudia’s face. The skin under her eyes was bluish, and deep lines cut her mouth and chin off from the rest of her face, as if her lower jaw were hinged in the manner of a marionette’s.
    I sat. “Thank you for seeing me. I guess my request must have seemed a little strange.”
    She shrugged. Her left hand opened and closed as if she were kneading a fat lump of putty.
    The contrast with the driven volubility she’d shown at the bat mitzvah was so sharp that I felt ill at ease. I pulled a steno pad and pen out of my purse, settled into the chair as best I could, and smiled. “I wonder if you could tell me what happened.”
    She cleared her throat. “Jack was a publisher. He ran a small press. In Cambridge. Damned Yankee Press. They did travel guides. New England guides. Books on the Alcotts, Lexington and Concord, Paul Revere. Before personal computers were, uh, fashionable, before the computer revolution hit, when it was just beginning, Jack saw the potential, especially for small presses, not only for the actual publishing but for direct marketing, mail order, all that sort of thing.” Claudia looked not at me but at her keyboard. She cleared her throat. “So at that point, he got connected with this dreadful little moon-faced man, Shaun McGrath, who was billed as some kind of computer whiz.” She transferred her gaze to me. “But what Shaun McGrath was, was a mindless technocrat! A complete philistine. He’d gone to some little business college, and... Jack himself was an acquisitions editor, really. His grasp of the business side of things wasn’t