Black Ribbon

prediction was merely that and not a calculated injunction after all: I do love camp. And Rowdy loves it even more than I do. We are happy. We miss what the camera saw. Toward the right of the photograph, in the background, a big-boned yellow Lab leaps for a ball.
    But the camera does not see all. Or does it? In the picture, Bingo seems to be off lead. He was not. But he might as well have been. A Labrador retriever, young and healthy, if rather beefy, went hard after the ball. And then? I am forced to reconstruct. Eager to let Bingo follow the ball, Eva let him pull out the cord of the retractable lead. Too unfit or too lazy to keep up with her athletic dog, she remained where she was as the cord fed out. By the time I looked, Bingo was twenty feet away from her. At that point, I think, Eva finally pressed the trigger on the plastic handle and hit the little gadget that locks the retracting mechanism in place. His lead suddenly tight, Bingo gave a jolt, then a lunge that tore the handle out of Eva’s hands. With its mechanism locked to prevent the cord from retracting, the whole device, handle and twenty feet of thin cord, dragged after Bingo as he began what he must have meant as a game of catch-me-if-you-can. Glancing back at Eva, the tennis ball still in his mouth, he sped headlong and unseeing toward the line of experienced flyball dogs. That he collided with another Lab, Wiz, and with his own breeder, Ginny Garabedian, was a simple accident. Bingo, I am convinced, never intended to knock Ginny to the ground. But mounting Wiz was no accident. Although a gentle, docile creature, the chocolate Lab was nonetheless a female not in season and thus a lady unconditionally unreceptdve to the amorous advances of any male. Besides, poor Wiz was terrified. Much smaller than Bingo, unexpectedly jumped, Wiz did her best to fight him off. Clambering to her feet, her face smeared with dirt, Ginny drew on the strength conferred by decades of training, handling, showing, breeding, and just plain bossing around Labrador retrievers. By then, I’d joined the crowd that surrounded the melee. Like almost everyone else who witnessed Ginny’s rescue of Wiz, I had the impression that her principal weapon was a tone of voice that brooked no argument. When the crowd around her cleared, Ginny had Bingo sitting really quite nicely at her left side. Having somehow caught hold of the plastic handle of his lead, she held it firmly, the cord now shortened to a few feet. On what looked like a reliable down-stay a yard or so away, Wiz eyed Ginny with well-earned trust.
    Making her way through the curious handlers and excited dogs, Eva Spitteler approached Ginny. She reached out for Bingo’s' lead.
    “Sorry about that,” Eva blithely told Ginny. “But Bingo just loves the girls.”
     

 
    ONE LEAN ELBOW cocked on the bar, Ginny Garabedian spoke firmly: “A Bombay martini straight up with a twist of peel.” The spinsterish braid coiled around her head suggested the occasional indulgence in a drop of sweet sherry as a daring alternative to tea. A real bartender wouldn’t have blinked. This fellow gaped. I hoped that he stayed away from high-stakes poker.
    Impatient, Ginny demanded, “You do have Bombay gin?”
    “I think so,” the bartender stammered. Recovering, he offered to check. I wanted to inform him that Ginny had outlived five husbands.
    “Please do that,” Ginny said. “If not, Beefeater’s will do. And that’s straight up with a twist. ”
    I ordered a drink I didn’t want, a Johnnie Walker Black on the rocks. I wondered why I’d done it. Rita, my therapist friend and tenant, owns so many books that I sometimes wonder how her floor and my ceiling support them. In Cambridge, though, owning a trillion pounds of books is so typical that the building code probably has some special provision designed to protect the citizenry from what would otherwise be daily episodes of lower-floor dwellers being buried like avalanche victims under the descending libraries of their upstairs neighbors. Anyway, I haven’t read many of Rita’s books, but sometimes their titles stick with me. The one I thought of was called The Group Mind. Maybe it dealt with this compulsion to order Scotch when all I wanted was a glass of red wane.
    When the drinks arrived, we carried them to a little table in a corner of what the resort billed as “The Pub,” a room off the big main hall furnished with rustic-looking Rangeley-style furniture, tables and