Ruffly Speaking

intersect with Appleton, I added, and it happened to be where Morris Lamb had lived. Furthermore, I felt like walking down it, and we were damned well going to do so. Malamutes might worship monotony, I said; I did not. If I decided that this was the way we were going, then this was the way we were going, and that was that. The dogs continued to balk. Then I reached into my pocket, pulled out a fistful of freeze-dried liver, smacked my lips, and, having firmly reestablished myself as the alpha leader of the pack, made the turn onto Highland with Rowdy and Kimi bouncing and leaping along beside me. You think I’m kidding? Alpha means the one who gets her own way.
    After Rowdy and Kimi had swallowed the liver, they threw me a few more of those bipeds-are-so-stupid looks, but soon got distracted by the olfactory traces of a dog who’d left his mark so high up on the trees and fences that Rowdy and Kimi, who aren’t exactly minis, nearly toppled over trying to cover his scent with theirs. Irish wolfhound? Great Dane? My dogs lingered at shrubs and pressed their noses together at tree trunks as if to share information about the big fellow and decide what to do about him. Meanwhile, I looked around. Dog-walking makes the perfect excuse to linger in neighborhoods that are tonier than you are.
    Highland runs parallel to Brattle for two long blocks —Sparks to Appleton, Appleton to Reservoir. Like Brattle, it has houses that the inhabitants might justifiably refer to as mansions, but never do. Off Brattle is just what it sounds like, the neighborhood off Brattle Street, but it’s also a way of life and a way of language. Off Brattle, you don’t inhabit a mansion; one has a big house. You didn’t go to Harvard, either; one was an undergraduate. It must be a required course, for God’s sake. Cambridge 101, Advanced False Modesty: The Linguistic Pragmatics of Less Is More.
    So Highland Street is Brattle without the traffic: big houses painted in earth tones, soft mauve, or a warm, pale yellow like homemade mayonnaise, old brick and natural stucco, and none of the aqua vinyl siding and gray asbestos shingle that still survive in my neighborhood, Fresh
    Pond, which is only a few blocks down Appleton from Highland, but on the opposite side of Huron, where a big; house is just that and isn’t apt to be all that big, anyway. But don’t get me wrong. Despite the muted mauve voices —earth tones, old brick—and the educated hues of the paint, Off Brattle is an intense study in color, and that color is green. In early June, Highland Street is like the masterpiece of an artist who worked green to its verdant limits, Henri Rousseau without even the ladies or the lions. Vegetable opulence.
    But here and there amid the wisteria-trimmed piles of stucco, the Victorian arcs, and the vast, restrained colonials resides the evidence that sometime not all that long ago, someone ran desperately short of cash and had to sell land. Morris Lamb’s house was one of the tattletales. To judge from its architecture, the era of need must have been the mid or late nineteen fifties, when Morris’s flat-roofed cube with its heavily framed plate glass windows must have looked daringly modem. Morris or one of the previous owners had tried to force-fit this angular peg into the curves of the neighborhood by painting its harsh uprights and cross beams an ultra-toned-down pale tan with just a hint of lavender, and by planting a miniature forest of low-maintenance, fast-growing shrubs around the foundation and all over the front yard. The camouflage was about as successful as ripping the tail fins off an old Caddie, soldering an upside-down peace symbol on the hood, and expecting the result to pass unnoticed in the new car lot of a Mercedes dealer.
    Rowdy and Kimi applied their noses to the leathery leaves of a rhododendron at the edge of the sidewalk in front of Morris’s house. Pleated blinds covered the windows. The two-car parking area next to the house was vacant. The shrubs were trimmed, and fir bark the color of redwood had been spread under them so recently that the air smelled strong and woodsy. The house looked neither inhabited nor uninhabited. There was no For Sale sign in the yard. Having learned nothing, I called to the dogs and moved along.
    Just beyond Morris’s, separated from his modem misfit only by a weed-free path and a narrow shrub border, was a three-story house with peeling cream-yellow paint and stark, handsome lines. The