Gaits of Heaven

we had to listen for the phone. Furthermore, although Steve was always happy to let all five of our own dogs run together, neither of us wanted to take our dogs to the yard while Willie was there lest Willie display his excess of what’s called real terrier character. His feistiness always terrified Lady, and Lady’s terror aroused India’s protectiveness. Under my tutelage, Rowdy had become more than decent with other dogs, but not to the extent of calmly tolerating a noisy terrier challenge. As to Sammy, like sire, like son? I didn’t want to find out. Weirdly enough, Kimi, my alpha malamute feminist, reacted to Willie only by regarding him with an expression of utter disdain; in Kimi’s view, he was an upstart pipsqueak incapable of constituting a serious threat to her supremacy.
    So, I opened the door to the yard and stood at the top of the steps in the hope that Rita would hurry up. She met my gaze and gestured that she’d be off the phone in a second. “Well, crisis over for the moment,” she said into the phone. “We’ll talk about this at our next meeting. Look, before managed care and all the insurance problems, there were family systems therapists who would’ve met with everyone involved. Everyone. Parents, children, relatives, neighbors, friends, all the therapists, the household help. Even the dog trainer! The whole network. No one does that these days. Frank Farmer is probably the only therapist around who’d know how to do it, and even he doesn’t want to do it anymore. No one does. It’s not just the question of how you bill the insurance companies. It’s exhausting.” She listened. “Well, I wouldn’t go so far as to say that individual psychotherapy is a complete waste of time with this boy, but I do agree, Peter. Now, does the father know that the boy is at his mother’s?” She nodded and, after a few concluding words, ended the conversation.
    “Wyeth is at Johanna’s?” I asked.
    “You know—”
    “You said ‘even the dog trainer.’ We’ve just come from Ted Green’s. As you apparently know, Wyeth threw his computer and monitor and printer out the window when Ted had Dolfo in the yard. They got hit. Ted probably has a broken ankle or foot. Steve went to check out Dolfo. Wyeth had taken off. When we left, just now, George McBane had taken Ted to the emergency room, and Barbara Leibowitz was staying at Ted’s in case Wyeth came back. George and Barbara live next door. You know them. They’re psychiatrists. I need to call her. She offered to let everyone know what was going on.”
    While I was updating Barbara and then telling Steve, Caprice, and Leah that Wyeth was at his mother’s, Rita took Willie to her apartment. Then she came back down and joined Steve and the dogs and me in the yard. She greeted me by saying, “These boundary violations make me very uncomfortable.”
    “Rita, Barbara needed to know that Wyeth was safe. So did the rest of us. And if you think that Caprice’s presence here is a boundary violation, you’re wrong. What are we supposed to do? Throw her out? Besides, you’re the one who said ‘dog trainer.’ ”
    “It was only a figure of speech.”
    "Dog trainer isn’t a figure of speech. You meant me, and you meant it in a disparaging way, as if my efforts to help Dolfo didn’t really count. He is a member of that crazy family, and I have to say that getting everyone together sounds like a wonderful idea. Like one of those... What do you call them? Confrontations? Interventions? To persuade people to go into drug treatment centers. That kind of thing.“
    “That’s not what I was talking about. The idea isn’t to confront any one person. It’s to treat the entire system instead of identifying any one person as the locus of pathology.“
    “In this case,” Steve said, “you could flip a coin about which one to choose. Rita, you want a drink?”
    Rita was concerned that the crisis might not actually be over, so she wanted to stay sober, and Steve and I were thirsty, so all of us ended up drinking lemonade.
    “I think that you should organize one of these systems interventions,” I told Rita.
    “Not me! I don’t even know how. The only person who could do it is a guy named Frank Farmer. He specializes in these complicated families. Why I am talking to you about this? I’m not!”
    “He specializes in basenjis,” I said.
    “What?”
    “If it’s the same Frank Farmer. Sixty or so? With a mane of white hair? Good-looking. Very