Evil Breeding

object of the shameful episode was not to lay claim to dog pictures.”
    “No. No, I see what you mean. Mrs. Dodge collected bronzes. Paintings. Gold coins. Jewelry. I get the point. She owned Houdon’s bust of Benjamin Franklin.”
    “A marble bust,” said Althea, “a bit over twenty inches high depicting, you will recall, Franklin and Franklin only, unaccompanied by a canine companion. The work now belongs to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which according to one of these, uh, Web pages you left with me, paid three million dollars for the work.”
    “Althea, I never said that dogs were the only thing she spent her money on. I mean, she had a lot of it to spend. The Dodge Gateway at Princeton, in memory of her son. She and her husband donated that. The Madison, New Jersey, town hall. In memory of her son. Sometime in the forties, she bought a house in the East Sixties, in Manhattan, from some woman named Pratt. The house was rented, I think, by the Soviet Consulate General. I don’t know why Mrs. Dodge bought it, but she did. She paid two hundred thousand dollars for it. I have wondered about the Russian connection there, of course.”
    “There is no hint in the material you have presented,” Althea said sternly, “that Mrs. Dodge had any interest whatever in politics, left, right, or center. There is overwhelming evidence, however, that she was an avid collector of extremely valuable art. And that is the point you have overlooked. Only connect! You observed an odd character at the Gardner Museum and subsequently at Peter Motherway’s funeral. Where was Peter Motherway’s body placed after the murder? At the Gardner vault. Just what did B. Robert Motherway teach? Art history. His stepfather, the presumed Mr. Motherway, collected, you tell me, in a small way. Your Mr. Motherway, too, collects art. He collects Early American furniture and paintings. On the income of a prep-school teacher? I was one! And I have no such collection. In the thirties, this man led student tours of Europe. Tours of dog kennels? Of course not! Museum tours. Art tours. Art, again. Everywhere. Art. Valuable art.”
     

Chapter Twenty-four
     
    I’VE NEVER BEEN much of a science-fiction fan, mainly because I see parallel universes all the time in the here-and-now. To take a randomly chosen example, consider the world of purebred dog fancy, a so-called subculture that mirrors the supposed mainstream in more ways than you would dream possible unless you happen to belong to it. Speaking from the inside, let me assure you that if a phenomenon exists, it exists in the world of dogs, a proposition that is true of everything from nail polish to politics to social class to madness to undying love.
    The principal difference between these parallel universes is that the dog equivalent costs ten times as much or is ten times as intense as the human version. You can get a hair dryer for yourself at any discount drugstore by plunking down just about exactly one tenth the price you have to pay for the sturdy forced-air blower you need for a show dog. To trim your own nails, you need a file or an emery board. For a dog, you need either manual nail clippers, costing maybe ten dollars, or an electric nail grinder, say, fifty dollars. On my own hair, I use a comb and brush. On Rowdy and Kimi, I use undercoat rakes, wire slicker brushes, natural boar-bristle brushes, finishing brushes with stainless-steel pins, and a variety of combs specially designed not to damage the dogs’ hair. The dogs absolutely require a grooming table. I stand on the bathroom floor. The same goes for everything else: ten times as expensive, ten times as intense. Dog politics? The jockeying for power within the American Kennel Club makes the Knesset look like a Buddhist monastery occupied by a lone monk who’s taken a vow of silence. Madness? You haven’t met a lunatic until you’ve met a real dog nut. As to social class, why breeding is what it’s all about, my dears.
    To demonstrate the omnipresence of parallel universes, let me add a couple of examples that have nothing to do with dogs, namely, head lice and human mortality. The proposition we’re considering is, I remind you, that if something exists in one universe, it exists in others. So, on to politics in the world of head lice. The National Pediculosis Association is now, as we speak (as we itch and scratch?), vying publicly with a rival head-lice organization that has obviously won the first round of the