Black Ribbon

been seriously misinformed, the poor applicant doesn’t have to sit on some specially designated ceremonial seat in the middle of the temple and get pelted, pro or con, by member after member of the entire elected assembly. All secret societies play games of one kind or another, but the exclusion-inclusion game is inevitably more complicated than either Ping-Pong or flyball.
    As I look back, though, I realize that if we’d wanted to find a considerate way to deny Eva’s bid for admission, we might as well have placed her on a hard-backed chair in the center of the dining room and taken turns slinging scraps of rejected food in her bulldog face. Would I have participated? Certainly not. Neither would any of the rest of us. Or so I like to suppose. I want to think that we were and are civilized, and I persist in believing that what characterizes civilization is something other than the refinement of cruelty.
    As it was, I cast my vote quite discreetly. When Eva reached into the pocket of her mud-colored, grass-stained jacket, produced a brochure for her kennel-supply and dog-training enterprise, and thrust it at me, I did accept the thing. Before shoving it in my own pocket, I even gave it a cursory look. Perhaps I shouldn’t have. The name of her business infuriated me. “High In Tail,” she called it. If you’re active in obedience, you’ll understand why I thought then and still think that “High In Tail” was a shameless rip-off. If you’re not? Because High In Trial, T-r-i-a-l, is a well-established, well-known, reputable, and otherwise altogether estimable mail-order supplier of leather leads, dumbbells, scent articles, practice jumps, harnesses, and other goodies used in obedience, herding, tracking, Schutzhund, and plain old having fun with your dog. If I’d shown any sense, I’d have realized that the people at High In Trial were capable of looking after themselves; they didn’t need any help from me. It might also have occurred to me that even a language as rich, diverse, and wondrous as that of my own community offered only a limited number of word plays and catchy phrases that might suitably be dogtrotted out into the dog-eat-dog free-market economy of canine commercial enterprise. In brief, had I paws’d to reflect—see what I mean?—I’d have kept my mouth shut.
    But this is a story about how things were, not about how they should have been. In what was probably a nasty tone of voice, I said, “High in Tail? You’re not calling the catalog that, are you?”
    “It’s my name,” Eva said. “It’s what I use.”
    “Well, I don’t think that’s very fair to High In Trial.”
    “My catalog’s not like theirs. It’s nothing like theirs. They
    aren’t going to mind. You’ll see. I’ve got a lot of good stuff lined up. New. Not like what everyone else has.” After that, Eva tried to worm my address out of me. It seemed to me that she almost tried to buy it. Her exact words were: Ten percent off for my friends. So I told her that she could send me anything she wanted in care of Dog’s Life. As I didn’t tell her, I failed to understand why she’d want to bother, because there were scads of kennel supply and dog training businesses all over the country, and the existence of hers wasn’t going to merit so much as a sentence in my column. I want to admit, though, that my response was petty. Stupid, too. If you’re in dogs, your address is no secret. Whenever you enter your dog in a show, your name and address appear at the back of the show catalog. Furthermore, dog people are dedicated joiners. I, for example, belonged not only to a great many clubs in which I had an obvious personal interest—my obedience clubs, our national breed club, the Dog Writers’ Association of America, the Alaskan Malamute Protection League—but to numerous others, including two organizations for fanciers of breeds I’d never even owned... or not yet, anyway. Dog sources failing her, Eva could have looked me up in the Cambridge phone directory. But would I give her my home address? No. So you see? A forkful of pot roast or a lump of lobster in her face might have been a kinder blackball than the one I hurled.
    That was the choice, supposedly, anyway. Some choice, pot roast or lobster Newburg, except that whereas everything else was self-serve, the lobster, if you could call it that, was doled out onto toast triangles by an unfortunate and probably generous-hearted young fellow stationed behind an