Evil Breeding

another prep school, and he ended up in high school, and he barely graduated. And then he got sent to Vietnam, and when he got back, he moved in where they live now, in this little house, like a cottage, on his parents’ property, and he did odd jobs around town, but mainly he just did stuff there for his father. Sandra, my best friend, the one who went to school with Jocelyn, says the only reason Jocelyn ever got mixed up with him, Peter, to begin with was low selfesteem." Sherry made it sound as if the rest of us had never encountered the phrase before. After letting the idea sink in, she lowered her voice. “But about getting married, Jocelyn didn’t have a lot of choice. Things were different back then.”
    To my annoyance, Roz interrupted. “Sherry? You and Bandit are next.” Really! What, after all, is the purpose of dog training? Gossip? Or just training dogs?
    While Sherry and Bandit worked with Roz, I got Rowdy’s cheese cubes and roast beef from my little insulated bag, filled my pockets, and warmed him up with some heeling.
    But as soon as Sherry’s turn was over, I felt compelled to rejoin the group.
    “What was Mrs. Motherway like?” I asked. “Peter’s mother, Christina. The one who just died.”
    “Oh, she tried to be nice to Jocelyn, but she’d spoiled Peter rotten, and it was too late to fix that. When Peter was a kid, his father’d make him do this awful stuff, and Peter’d go running to his mother, and she’d give him whatever he wanted. And then his father’d call him a sissy.”
    “What awful stuff?” I asked.
    Ron, who is my plumber as well as my dog-training buddy, said in my ear, “Holly, you don’t want to hear. She was telling us before you got here.”
    “I do want to hear,” I told him.
    “It’s gross. Take it from me. You don’t want to hear.”
    I should have listened to Ron. A dog-training plumber is, by definition, a person who understands how things work. I persisted. “What awful stuff?” I asked Ron.
    Unfortunately, he told me. “The old man used to make the son, Peter, kill the puppies there was something wrong with. He made him drown them. Sherry says he made the grandson do the same thing. When they were just little kids.”
    Ray Metcalf was listening in. “The Nazis used to do that,” he commented. Ray is old enough to remember the era. He served in World War II. “Training for the Third Reich: They’d give a soldier a dog to raise, and then make him strangle it with his own hands.”
    “Ron is right,” I said vehemently, “I really don’t want to hear this.” My stomach was turning. To settle myself, I stroked Rowdy’s soft ears, but when our time with Roz finally arrived, I still felt queasy. By concentrating on Rowdy and on the exercises, I managed to escape from myself, but as soon as our turn was over, the nasty feeling returned. For once, I was glad to leave the armory.
    Walking home up Concord Avenue, I tried to blot out the ugly images by focusing on Rowdy’s pleasure in the cool of the evening, his wholesome happiness in trotting briskly over familiar pavement, and his earthy satisfaction in marking trees, shrubs, and utility poles he’d claimed as his own many times before. Terrible, unspeakable things, I reminded myself, had happened and would happen to millions of people. The perversion of the human-canine bond that Ray had mentioned was simply a form of dehumanization I hadn’t happened to hear of before. If Mrs. Dodge had known of this or any of the other horrors perpetrated by the Third Reich, she’d have had nothing at all to do with anyone even remotely connected with the Nazis.
    But what of B. Robert Motherway? In referring to his travels in Germany in the thirties, he’d said not a word about Hitler. Had he been a Nazi sympathizer? The notion seemed fantastic. Then I realized with a jolt that he’d had the perfect cover: He’d been an art history teacher who spent his summers leading American students on tours of Europe. If his German was good? His field was art history; of course his German was good. And he didn’t have a German name. Robert was innocently English. Motherway, I realized for the first time, must have been the name of B. Robert’s stepfather, the American who’d married a German bride, adopted her son, and cultivated the boy’s interest in art and in dogs.
    With a second jolt, it hit me that Mr. Motherway hadn’t been the only character in this drama with the perfect cover. Those famous foreign