Evil Breeding

swiftly passes once it’s clear that I am human. If you meet the dogs and me, you’ll see that the photo hasn’t set you up for the kind of rude surprise I had recently when I went to a book signing in Harvard Square and discovered that the author didn’t look like a movie star at all. What I’d mistaken for the woman’s literary cultivation of a stylishly evocative out-of-date hairdo turned out to have another and simpler explanation: The photo had obviously been taken fifty years ago. I wouldn’t want to let my readers in for that kind of horrid shock. As shown in Dog’s Life, I’m in my mid-thirties and perfectly ordinary-looking. Rowdy and Kimi really are gorgeous.
    Once I started working on the book about the Morris and Essex dog shows, however, I became so overidentified with Mrs. Dodge that I longed to replace the accurate photo with a new one that would make me look rich or, failing that, one that showed me wearing a hat. This topic is not the non se-quitur it may seem. Mrs. M. Hartley Dodge was the president of the Morris and Essex Kennel Club, and the benefactor of the famous Morris and Essex dog shows, which, except for a hiatus during World War II, took place each May from 1927 through 1957 on the polo fields of Giralda. Polo: She raised horses, too. Also, pheasants.
    My coauthor, Elizabeth Kublansky, who, I might as well emphasize right now, is a photographer, not a writer, was restoring and arranging photographs for a book about the Morris and Essex shows. The project was Elizabeth’s idea. She invited me in on it when she discovered that to get a publisher for the book, she’d need to submit a proposal. In writing, of all things. Worse, the book itself would need words, sentences, maybe entire paragraphs. Horrors! Elizabeth wanted to do the book; she just didn’t want to write it. I did, and not only because I was already slightly obsessed with Geraldine R. Dodge. I saw the book as a belated opportunity to fit in with my fellow residents here in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where I had previously distinguished myself by being the only postpubescent person who neither was writing a book nor had already written one. I’d have been less embarrassed if my breasts had never developed and my periods hadn’t started yet.
    So I wrote the proposal, and Elizabeth got us a contract with a publishing house that specializes in lavishly illustrated and wildly expensive books about dogs, horses, and gardening, earthy subjects all, but groomed, trained, curried, weeded, or mulched, as the topic dictates, for coffee-table ostentation. Elizabeth and I were thrilled. We shot e-mail congratulations and self-congratulations back and forth—she lives in Seattle—and we posted our news on Dogwriters-L, the e-mail list of our profession, and I posted an announcement on Malamute-L and wandered around public places in Cambridge and dog shows all over New England creating occasions to refer to “my book.” We were worse than new parents. I hadn’t made myself so obnoxious since Rowdy finished his championship, but I didn’t have e-mail then, so there were limits to the number of people I could inflict myself on. Now I took advantage of boundless possibilities.
    Elizabeth and I decided to concentrate on the prewar Morris and Essex shows, especially the shows of the late thirties. After the war, the shows were limited to a comparatively small number of breeds. Before the war, they were all-breed shows that grew more lavish each year. The first show, in 1927, drew about 600 entries. By 1934, there were 2,827 dogs “benched,” as it’s said, meaning present and on exhibition. Since some competed in more than one class, the total entry was 3,590. In 1939, there were 4,456 dogs on the benches, with a total entry of 5,002 from forty states and Canada. The show drew people, too, of course, and in great numbers. On Saturday, May 27, 1939, a crowd of more than 50,000 watched the judging in sixty rings. All in a single day! And a beautiful day it was. The night before, rain threatened, and McClure Hailey, who managed the show for Mrs. Dodge, had to scurry around getting the rings set up under the grooming tents. But in the morning, the sun rose on tents and pennants in the Morris and Essex colors, purple and orange, and on the huge orange beach umbrellas Mrs. Dodge thoughtfully provided to offer shade to stewards and judges. Or was the color not orange after all, but gold? Maybe even real gold? The trophies, in any