Evil Breeding

instructed, in what was probably an unnecessarily loud voice. Although Rowdy is gentle, it’s risky to offer him a tiny bit of food pinched between a finger and thumb, unless, of course, you happen to have taken a violent dislike to the tips of your digits. Maida had no trouble in mastering the correct technique. Every time Rowdy’s tongue swept a bit of dog cookie off her hand, she burst into laughter, then offered me her palm for a refill. Playing my limited role, I found myself thinking that, damn it all, locked somewhere in Maida’s brain cells were vivid sensory memories of the era just before World War II, the days of the great Morris and Essex shows, shows that this woman who was now feeding my dog had had the glorious opportunity to attend. Had she availed herself of it? I didn’t even know whether she’d ever owned a dog or gone to a dog show in her entire and exceedingly long life, never mind made the pilgrimage to Giralda. For a moment, I envied Rowdy’s animal capacity to link with her. Had I been able to do the same, I’d have tapped her recollections. And found...?
    Unexpectedly, the question led to a sort of negative epiphany. Is there such a thing? Yes. I had one. For all I knew, this Maida’s experience of the thirties had less to do with the foreign judges, the top dogs, and the sterling silver trophies of a lavish dog show than with the breadlines of the Great Depression. What came to me as I longed for a direct line to Maida Garabedian’s memory was an image from my own recent memory, an image in a photograph I’d looked at only a few days earlier. There’d been a dog in the picture, a shepherd that had belonged to Mrs. Dodge. It wasn’t the dog that bothered me. It was the vehicle in which he rode. While people by the thousands, including some of the people I now visited at the Gateway, had stood in breadlines, voted for FDR, and labored for the WPA, the lucky dogs of Geraldine R. Dodge had traveled in comfort and style. These days, exhibitors either drive their dogs from show to show on superhighways or ship them rapidly by air. In the twenties and thirties, dogs and people alike poked along on slow roads or traveled by rail. Unwilling to subject her dogs to the discomforts endured by plebeian canines, Mrs. Dodge commissioned a Cadillac touring car, a maroon stretch limo that took three men more than three years to custom-build. It had eight doors and carried as many as a dozen dogs. Wide-eyed, I’d studied the photo of this wonder. Now, fed by the reality of people at the Gateway who’d survived the Depression, nurtured by the chance association of a name, Maida, the image assailed me. Belatedly, the photo spoke of decadence. Or maybe it sang the theme song of the Depression: “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?”
    As Rowdy and I drove home from the Gateway, I found myself taking pride and pleasure in everything that was wrong with my old car. Instead of cursing the windshield wipers for senselessly leaping to life whenever I signaled a turn, I interpreted the malfunction as proof that no matter how well my dogs lived, no one could accuse me of decadence when I was at the wheel of so blatantly proletarian a clunker. Arriving home, I reminded myself that in 1937, the Dodges’ country estate had covered seven thousand acres, making it larger than my lot at the comer of Appleton and Concord in Cambridge by more than 6,999 acres. Furthermore, in contrast to the Dodges, who had lived in separate mansions, I rented out my upstairs apartments. Rowdy, Kimi, Tracker, and I occupied only the first floor, I did most of the repairs and maintenance myself, and if I’d been fortunate enough to own another house, I wouldn’t have let it become an eyesore like Mrs. Dodge’s neglected town house at 800 Fifth Avenue. The premise of the Maida books wasn’t so ludicrous after all, I decided. What had Isabella Stewart Gardner really done with her inheritance from her stinking-rich father? What had Geraldine R. Dodge done with hers? Maida’s Little Museum, I thought. Maida’s Great Big Dog Show. And if Geraldine R. Dodge was me with money, just what did that make me?
    A lucky person, I decided. Yes, Mrs. Dodge and I shared a passion, but she had the means to carry that passion to excess. I didn’t. In pursuing the love without the money, I was doubly blessed.
    With the peculiar sense of having clarified and deepened my relationship with the long-dead Mrs. Dodge, I felt free to work on the book,