Ruffly Speaking

Stephanie—” Leah began.
    Before Leah could blurt anything out, I said, “Oh, that’s right. She had something at her church. That’s too bad.”
    “Isn’t she a love?” Doug said. “And her little dog, too?” The phrase sounded familiar. I remembered it as a croaking threat. The Wizard, of Oz, that was it: “And your little dog, too.” Then the evil cackle of the Wicked Witch of the West. I used to have nightmares about that movie. I didn’t care all that much whether Dorothy got back to Kansas, but I was scared silly that something bad would happen to Toto. I glanced sharply at Doug, picked up a fork, and started on a little cube of multilayered cake filled with chocolate and fruit. While I worked my way through a watercress sandwich, a raspberry tartlet, and a bite-size butterscotch éclair, Doug chatted with Leah without making even the most oblique reference to her beautiful red hair. Leah, in turn, somehow succeeded in conversing for four or five minutes without once permitting Bernie Brown’s name to pass her lips. At the end of this near conversational triumph, however, Doug once again began to grumble about the waiters and then moved from the burden of running a business to the horrendous responsibility of being a landlord.
    “I had no idea!” he exclaimed. “But what choice did I have? What was I going to do with Morris’s things? As it is I had to rush half of them into storage, and I don’t have the slightest idea what’s where, and it’s all going to have to be sorted through, but Stephanie was desperate, and she is my cousin Sheila’s oldest friend, so what could I tell her? Stephanie moved here very precipitously, you know, and the apartment she was in, well, it was a perfect dump, if you want to know the truth, and the miserable landlord was giving her a dreadful time about Ruffly.”
    “That’s illegal,” I said. “That dog isn’t—”
    “I know! I know! But Stephanie is not a disputatious person, and the place was not suitable for her. The neighborhood was... Well, I won’t say what the neighborhood was like, but it was completely unsuitable, and I was far from satisfied that it was safe to leave Morris’s house sitting there empty. And talk about depressing! And Morris would just have hated that. So I had mountains of Morris’s things thrown into boxes and carted away or stashed out of sight, and in Stephanie went, and, in all fairness to myself, I did warn her that there was a neighbor with a perfect phobia about dogs—”
    “Alice Savery,” I said.
    “Morris adored her, of course.”
    I found that hard to believe. “He did?”
    “Because she was such a perfect type," Doug explained. “I never could stand Alice, but Morris would egg her on and get her to perform. Do you know that she used to address him in Latin? Morris adored it.”
    “Like Professor Finley,” Leah said.
    “What?” I asked.
    “My father told me. It’s a sort of famous Harvard story. Professor Finley... He was a professor of classics, and one morning he was taking a walk by the river, and there were some men fishing there, and he greeted them in Latin: 'Salvete piscatores’ —Hail, fishermen—and then supposedly one of the guys yelled out, ‘Hey, piss on you, to o, buddy!’ ” Leah had kept her voice low, and when she finished, she glanced around as if to assure herself that no Parental figure had overheard her uttering the word piss >n public.
    Doug certainly wasn’t offended. He laughed and said something about town and gown that reminded me of Kevin Dennehy.
    “Doug?” I began. “Uh, Morris may have thought Alice Savery was sort of the quintessential Cambridge eccentric, but, Doug, did you know that she’s actually gone to the police? About Ruffly? They don’t take her seriously or anything.”
    “Oh, she hasn’t! The harridan! She never... She calls me incessantly!” He switched to a wickedly accurate mockery of Alice Savery’s Brattle Street pseudo-British. “ ‘Mr. Winer, that dog has been in my trash again,’ and then she goes into the most revolting details about saliva and the rabies virus, and I don’t have the patience with her that Morris did. The last time she called me, I said to her, ‘Miss Savery, what’s tearing up your trash bags are the raccoons living in your carriage house’—it’s a fright, and it’s positively infested with animals—‘and,’ I told her, ‘if you’d have it tom down or repaired, you’d have no more problems with