Ruffly Speaking

color was softer than the bright yellow of the Longfellow House on Brattle Street, and the Longfellow House wasn’t in desperate need of a gutter and roof job, but, properly renovated, this place would have had the same festive look of a three-tiered wedding cake. And, although there were stretches of lawn, the yard was mainly devoted to border after border of perennials. I stopped. My mother grew perennials. In fact, Marissa was a terrible snob about flowers. Not about people, I should add, or dogs, either, really, but flowers. She would have loved this place. Delphiniums were everywhere, along the front of the house and in profusion in the long, wide borders, where the heavily budded spires were beginning to stretch upward, but weren’t yet in bloom. Bleeding hearts and candytuft were on their way out, and the main sources of color were the blue forget-me-nots, columbine, and alpine asters, the pink coral bells, and the spreading clumps of magenta-flowered geranium sanguineum. Delicate white azaleas were in bloom, and the peony buds were about to open. Espaliered against a tumbledown carriage house visible at the rear of the deep lot was what I guessed might be a quince tree. Clematis vines climbed the twin trellises that flanked the front door of the house. Along the sidewalk ran a shabby but graceful white fence that came to an abrupt end at Morris’s property line.
    While I was admiring the garden, Rowdy and Kimi followed an invisible track across the damp concrete to one of the carved posts of the peeling white fence. Like most dominant malamute bitches, Kimi can lift her leg with the best of the boys—and did so on the shabby white fence. When she’d finished, the Best of Opposite sniffed the post, brushed past it, veered around, sniffed it again, turned around yet one more time, and at last began to cock his leg.
    At the exact moment that Rowdy’s hind foot rose from the concrete, a true Cambridge type suddenly emerged from the depths of a thick clump of peonies in the side yard and marched toward us like a tiny Caesar toward the Gauls, and, in case you think I’m being fanciful, let me add that her nose was distinctly Roman and that her short, straight steel-gray hair zoomed directly down from the crown of her head to her brow, just like you-know-who’s. She wore a pair of khaki canvas work pants and a short-sleeved white shirt that looked like the top of a coffee shop waitress’s uniform. On her feet were a pair of L.L. Bean Original Maine Hunting Shoes, which aren’t shoes at all, but the longest-lasting and most incredibly ugly boots on earth, guaranteed to keep your feet dry, comfortable, and one hundred percent hideous from the first wearing to the last resoling of your Bean boots or the final resouling of you, whichever comes first. If you’re looking for sin, I guess you can find it anywhere, even Off Brattle, and I was perfectly willing to believe that lust, avarice, and pride might thrive in private behind the delphinium spires and the colonial facades, but damned if I could imagine a real Cambridge type guilty of personal vanity.
    “What beautiful delphiniums you have!” I called out brightly. “I’ve never seen so many in one garden.”
    About ten feet behind the white fence, the woman came to an abrupt halt. She was small and rather bony, and the weathered skin on her face seemed stretched over oddly flexible iron. Brandishing a six-pack flat of delphinium seedlings in her trembling right hand, she delivered a lecture on the history and architectural significance of the fence that now separated us. She was an animated speaker who projected her voice with skill and vigor. Maybe she’d had training. In fact, as she went on, I began to suspect that this woman had been taught that the secret to conquering the fear of public speaking was to imagine something silly about the audience, that everyone was naked or that the listeners weren’t people at all, but heads of cabbage. At any rate, she certainly didn’t acknowledge that only three people had shown up and that two of the three were Alaskan malamutes. She looked neither at the dogs nor, I might add, at the fence post they’d just finished marking. I didn’t look at it either. Why look? I see dog urine every day. I don’t need a refresher course. And damned if I was going to apologize. True Cambridge types aside, reality is reality: Fences are fences, and dogs are dogs.
    The woman’s head turned back and forth on its axis. Her