Evil Breeding

case, contributed by Mrs. Dodge, of course, were sterling silver. And the cash prizes! More than $20,000 in all. These days, you’re lucky to get a ribbon and a piece of silver plate. Mrs. Dodge herself always presented the Best in Show trophy. In 1939, it went to a black cocker spaniel, Ch. My Own Brucie. A picture in the New York Times showed Mrs. Dodge as she handed it to the famous cocker’s owner-handier, Herman E. Mellenthin.
    She wore a hat. I wanted a new picture for my column in which I, too, wore a hat and smiled her gracious smile. Mrs. Dodge met Rin Tin Tin. She bred 150 AKC champions. With a coauthor, she wrote two books, one on the English cocker, one on the German shepherd dog. She used her four-story mansion at 800 Fifth Avenue mainly as a convenient place to stay with her dogs when she showed at Westminster. By the 1950s, the mansion had fallen into such a state of neglect that the neighbors complained. If one of Mrs. Dodge’s dogs bit an employee, it wasn’t the dog she fired. Most of the world saw her as eccentric. I had always thought she was wonderful.
     

Chapter Two
     
    ON AUGUST 29, 1930, Marcellus Hartley Dodge, Jr., was killed instantly when his car hit a tree just outside the tiny French village of Magescq, on the road between Bordeaux and Bayonne. His skull was fractured. The carotid artery was severed. His companion and college classmate, Ralph Applegate, was lucky to get off with a broken leg and severe bruises. If it hadn’t been for two French motorists who came on the scene and dragged the young men from the car, Applegate would have been burned alive. It was Mrs. Dodge who had sent her son on this and other automobile tours of Europe. Young Hartley Dodge had what the New York Times called a “predilection for aviation.” His mother hoped to divert him from the hazards of flying. He had graduated from Princeton in June.
    B. Robert Motherway was reputed to have known M. Hartley Dodge, Jr., as well as Mrs. Dodge. Motherway had shown at Morris and Essex in the thirties. He was my source of a firsthand account of the grand show in its heyday, my living link to Geraldine R. Dodge and her very own dog shows. What’s more, he lived about a half hour’s drive from my house. If he hadn’t been nearby, I’d have had to settle for a skimpy phone interview. Our publisher had been tightfisted about fvmding research for the book. I, at least, consider a budget of nothing to be rather ungenerous.
    Mr. Motherway had to be a thousand years old, or so I’d assumed when I’d called to request an interview. Young Hartley Dodge had, after all, died in 1930, and Mrs. Dodge’s gigantic and fabulous shows had taken place before World War II. Mr. Motherway’s voice surprised me. There was nothing frail about it. And after I made my request, it was clear that he wasn’t too old to want his name in a book. The names of his dogs, too. Their photographs. His own photograph. To say that he agreed to the interview is a bit of an understatement. I let him set the date and time. He picked the next day at ten A.M. The conversation left me with a glorious sense of authorial power that lasted until the next morning when I tried to set out for Mr. Motherway’s and my old Bronco refused to start, and without one of its usual excuses, either: subzero temperature, rain. This was a dry, sunny morning in early May. If the Bronco had been a dog, I’d have known how to rev it up. Cars, however, fail to respond to even the most enticing motivational approaches; neither dried liver nor rare roast beef does a thing for them. The man from Triple A recharged the battery. He suggested getting a new one. He mumbled something about wires and alternators. I knew his diagnosis was wrong. The engine simply had to be clogged with dog hair. When something breaks around here, that’s always why.
    I called Mr. Motherway to explain that an important editorial conference required me to postpone our appointment. Would tomorrow morning be convenient? It would. It was foolish of me to lie. When I drove up, he wouldn’t exactly mistake my battered four-by-four for a chauffeured Rolls. And I wasn’t going to park the Bronco down the road from his house and pretend to have walked from Cambridge. Besides, there’s nothing shameful about having your car refuse to start. It happens to rich people, too, especially rich people with big, hairy dogs. Mrs. Dodge’s limousines were probably as unreliable as my old Bronco. What made me