Evil Breeding

judges? The experts Mrs. Dodge had imported to officiate at Morris and Essex? Mrs. Dodge’s German judges had visited Giralda with the blessing of the Third Reich. Those judges had returned to Nazi Germany. No one would have suspected a bunch of harmless dog nuts. How suspicious had the U.S. government been in the thirties, anyway? Not nearly suspicious enough, it seemed in retrospect.
    Geraldine R. Dodge could not have sympathized with the Nazis, I reminded myself. Her support of the eugenics movement, I told myself, must represent a hideously naive lapse of judgment. But it was just possible that she had been used: It was remotely possible that my book about the Morris and Essex shows would require a chapter about German spies.
     

Chapter Fourteen
     
    ON FRIDAY MORNING at ten-thirty when Rowdy and I arrived at the Gateway for our weekly therapy-dog visit, I found a note from the director of social services pinned next to my volunteer’s badge and sign-in sheet on the cork bulletin board in the nursing home’s office. “Maida Garabedian,” the note said. “Room 416. Likes dogs.”
    The characterization proved to be an understatement. After moving upward through the nursing home to visit Rowdy’s regular customers, we took the elevator from the fifth and top floor to the fourth, and made our way to 416, which was a private room at the end of a corridor. A new-looking plastic plaque near the door frame read M. GARABEDIAN. Before I had a chance to poke my head through the open doorway to make sure we’d be welcome, the tiny, dark, and ancient woman in 416 caught sight of Rowdy and burst forth in a high-pitched peal of glee. Experience at the Gateway had taught me the wisdom of double-checking my reading of every initial response, no matter how enthusiastic it appeared. A few residents were so heavily medicated that they greeted everyone and everything with a calm, bland smile that could swiftly turn to a grimace of terror when a big dog suddenly loomed. Some of our regulars found Rowdy’s size and wolflike appearance so overwhelming that they preferred to admire him from a distance. Others longed for the primary, primitive contact of touching the soft hair on his ears and digging fingers into the depths of his thick coat. Several real dog people wanted nothing more than to have their faces scoured by his clean pink tongue. The universal friendliness that made Rowdy a natural therapy dog sometimes led him to overestimate people’s eagerness for close contact. I always held Rowdy back until I’d asked, “Do you like dogs?”
    In response to my question, Maida Garabedian clapped her tiny, gnarled hands together and then patted her lap invitingly with her open palms. When I let Rowdy take a few steps toward her, her face vanished in a mass of grinning wrinkles. “This is Rowdy,” I told her. “I’m Holly.” She had eyes only for him. As she stared at Rowdy and made smacking sounds with her lips, my task became clear: I was going to have to prevent Maida Garabedian from enticing Rowdy to leap into her lap. She’d have to settle for cradling his head; the weight of the whole dog would have crushed her frail bones to powder. “Easy does it,” I cautioned Rowdy.
    We spent about ten minutes with Maida, who caught Rowdy’s name and addressed him by it again and again, but gave no sign of understanding anything else I said. At first, I tried out a few topics of conversation. “Maida is such a pretty name. Do you remember the children’s books about Maida? Maida’s Little House ? Maida’s Little Zoo ?”
    My childhood reading was heavily concentrated on dog books. What now struck me as the absurd premise of the Maida series had, however, taken my fancy. Maida was a little invalid whose widowed father, Jerome Westabrook, a Boston financier, cured his daughter’s loneliness and, eventually, her limp, by recruiting poor children to live on his fabulous estate. Each book was devoted to a new and yet more extravagant project that Mr. Westabrook arranged for his indulged daughter and the fortunate young objects of his beneficence: Maida’s little house, little shop, little houseboat, little island, little theater, and any other obscenely expensive little thing Maida craved, I guess.
    Maida Garabedian, however, hadn’t read the series, had forgotten it, or had lost her capacity to chat about it. What took her fancy was feeding treats to Rowdy one at a time from her open hand. “Like a horse!” I