Gaits of Heaven

that had been opened to create a long, wide space that held folding chairs arranged in rows. At the front of the makeshift theater was a small table intended to serve as a podium. Or maybe the idea was a chapel with an altar. In any case, since the gathering had been described as a service, I expected family members to take seats in the first rows, with close friends occupying seats toward the front and with acquaintances and such toward the rear. Dog trainers presumably belonged in the last row. As I was settling myself there in the family room, Dolfo came galloping up to me with a piece of paper in his mouth.
    “Where have you been?” I whispered. “And what do you have? Give! Trade!”
    Like every other dog trainer in the world, I find that I automatically speak to all dogs as I do to my own and to other educated canines. There wasn’t a chance in a trillion that Dolfo had been taught give, our household’s formal obedience command for requesting a dumbbell, or trade, our everyday order to relinquish an object. The remarkable feature of foolish lapses like mine, however, is that evolution has bequeathed to the domestic dog an astonishing capacity to decode even the most seemingly incomprehensible messages of Homo sapiens. Dogs perform the miracle of penetrating the unfathomable by using all available cues: the direction of the human gaze, tone of voice, subtle movements of the body, slight changes in respiration, and, I suspect, minute variations in the scent we emit. So, in apparent response to words he didn’t know, Dolfo handed over his treasure, which proved to be a page torn from an L.L.Bean catalog.
    “Good boy,” I whispered to Dolfo. “Did you want one of these Bean dog beds? Is that why you brought me this?”
    “Talking to dogs,” a male voice said. “A sure sign of sanity. Holly, good to see you.” The speaker was George McBane, who was, in his own way, as Irish-looking as Kevin Dennehy. George had the same bright blue eyes and pale skin, but he had curly black hair shot with white, and he lacked Kevin’s freckles. According to Rita, George McBane was so handsome that in shrink circles, he was called Gorgeous George—never, of course, to his face. With a hint of condescension, Rita said that he had a reputation for doing rapid, effective work with difficult patients. As far as I could tell, a lot of the most prestigious shrinks did what struck me as slow, ineffective work—ten years of nothing but insight in patients suffering from nothing worse than existential malaise—but what do I know? I’m a dog trainer. Canine self-understanding is never my primary goal.
    “We’ll sit with you,” said Barbara. “And then George will behave himself.”
    Barbara was, if anything, more gorgeous than George. The phrase “person of color” actually fit her well. Her vividness made almost everyone else look washed-out and almost sickly.
    “Please do sit with me,” I said.
    “Where we can escape,” George muttered.
    “You and I,” Barbara told him quietly, “have agreed to say a few words about Eumie. Remember? Hi there, Dolfo. Are you being a good boy?” Barbara took the seat next to mine, and George sat beyond her. Dolfo did a silly, bouncy dance of welcome and would have ended up in their laps if Barbara and I hadn’t stopped him. “He’s a loveable idiot,” she commented.
    “I thought he was staying with you,” I said.
    “Just off and on.”
    “To the detriment of all our possessions,” George said. “It’s eight-thirty. Isn’t this ever going to get going?”
    As if in response, Ted stepped up to the little table at the front of the room, cleared his throat, and said, “I want to thank all of you for being here tonight. Each and every one of you was special to Eumie, who is here with us and is grateful for your presence.”
    Someone in back of me groaned softly. Turning my head, I saw Wyeth leaning against one of the glass doors. His groan had clearly not been one of agonized grief for his departed stepmother. He was making faces and shifting his weight from foot to foot. I was again struck by how extraordinarily flabby he was. In fact, he reminded me of a freshly opened oyster, pale and invertebrate.
    “Our beloved Eumie,” said Ted, “has, to quote the Bard, undergone a sea change into something rich and strange.’ ”
    George McBane peered past Barbara to catch my eye, and when he did, I had the uncanny and unmistakable sense that he and I were suffering from the