Ruffly Speaking

is always decently groomed. This boy had the vaguely neglected appearance you see in a lot of the children of Cambridge intellectuals—the uncut hair, the battered athletic shoes, the jeans with holes in the knees. The only fresh piece of clothing he wore was a white T-shirt with bright crimson letters that spelled out ‘Avon Hill Summer Program.”
    I half expected the boy to smash into Stephanie or me, or to trip over Ruffly, but at the last moment, he veered, zoomed away, and once again administered a series of passing blows to the fence. Then, after what looked like a brief conference with his buddies, he zipped back toward us, but suddenly turned, dashed up Alice Savery’s walk, and made for her front door, to which he delivered a single hard blow of the fist. Until then, the whole performance had been absolutely quiet, but the second his hand slammed against the door, the two boys lurking safely in the shrubbery burst into wild catcalls, and a shrill but not terribly loud alarm began to sound from Alice Savery’s house.
    By now, the boy who’d triggered it had sped out of the yard, and he and his eggers-on had switched from whoops and howls to raucous imitations of the alarm. To my mind, though, the star performer was Ruffly. At the first wail, the little dog danced across Morris’s yard, yapped at the shrub border demarcating the edge of Alice Savery’s property, then fled back to Stephanie, wheeled around, and reran the route, just in case Stephanie had missed the point, I guess. When Ruffly returned to Stephanie, he positioned himself to face the noise and, on the off-chance that Stephanie still hadn’t gotten the message, gave her a hard nudge. She did her part. “I’ll take over now,” Stephanie told Ruffly. Accompanied by the excited dog, whom she kept praising for his good work, she walked calmly down the sidewalk to the beginning of the eminent fence. She made a show of carefully observing Alice Savery’s big, shabby yellow house, the lovely garden, and the shouting boys. Ruffly’s work had been flawless; I wondered what could possibly be wrong with him.
    At last, the alarm quit. Stephanie briefly raised her hands to her hearing aids. “There. I’m back in business again. Sometimes it’s perfectly lovely to turn the world off.”
    “Does this happen often?” I asked, joining her.
    She smiled and shook her head. “The alarm’s new, I think, but those boys pull something or other on a fairly regular basis. This is their most spectacular effort to date. The poor woman who lives there has a real gift for keeping them going. If she’d ignore them, they’d leave her alone. She doesn’t seem to understand that the worst thing she can do is to make it interesting for them. The fence is their favorite target, not that they actually do it any harm, but poor Miss Savery is inordinately proud of it, for some reason.”
    “Longfellow admired it,” I said pompously. Stephanie smiled in recognition. “You know her?”
    “No. We had one little encounter. My dogs were with me. I got the fence lecture.”
    “Oh, dear. Miss Savery is very definitely not a dog lover. Doug warned me about that, but so far she hasn’t uttered a word of complaint. Doug marched me over and explained all about Ruffly, but all she did was treat us to a disquisition on the fence. It’s apparently standard fare. I gather that the children have it down almost word for word. They dare each other to brush their hands along the fence, and then they take off, or they hang around and wait for her to deliver the lecture about the fence. The thing that provokes her most is... She’s an avid gardener, as you can see, and it drives her wild to have them run through the yard. Matthew tells me that the ultimate dare is to pick her flowers.”
    “How does Matthew...?”
    “Because of Ivan,” said Stephanie, pronouncing the name as Leah did, EE-vahn. “Haven’t you heard about Ivan?”
    “Ivan the Terrible. Yes, of course. Leah talks about him all the time.”
    “Matthew and Leah,” Stephanie said rather pointedly, “are so cute talking about him. Leah keeps pretending to propound some dog training theory about how to settle Ivan down, and she’s joking, but Matthew is such a serious soul. Leah can’t resist teasing him, and the more she kids him, the more logical and sensible he becomes. Poor Matthew. Emotion always comes as such a surprise to him. He must be a little overwhelmed right now. He’s absolutely smitten