Ruffly Speaking

was what I suppose a decorator would have called the communication center. The mounting bracket for Morris’s phone now held a couple of little plastic jacks from which sprouted a tangle of wires that led to a gray answering machine and to Stephanie’s telephone on the counter, which also held a jar of tiny dog biscuits, a pad of bright pink While You Were Out message slips, and a tray of pens and pencils. The phone was one of those full-size, enhanced amplification, big-button AT&T white models with fire, police, and ambulance symbols on the top row of buttons, and immense numbers and slightly smaller letters on the buttons underneath, as if hearing loss put people in constant need of emergency aid and simultaneously impaired their vision and their manual dexterity.
    “This is the only one I ever answer,” Stephanie said. “It’s the only one I can hear on. I’m getting another one just like it, but, in the meantime, either I answer this one, or I let the machine pick up. So let’s try it!”
    Stephanie wore an Easter-egg lavender homespun cotton dress that flowed around her as she made her way quickly to the deck, where she asked Doug to take Ruffly around to the front of the house for a minute or two. After they’d passed by the kitchen windows, I waited briefly, then aimed the Yap Zapper at the big white phone. I pressed the button. The little red light flashed on and off. The phone didn’t ring. At Stephanie’s insistence, I held the gadget right next to the phone and pressed the button. But, once again, the experiment failed.
    “Oh, well,” Stephanie said cheerfully, “maybe I was being greedy. I was hoping there’d be some sort of sympathetic vibration or something. I don’t really understand these things. It’s all those years being married to a physicist, I suppose, and then Matthew, too. Live with people who understand everything about something, and one winds up understanding nothing oneself. In any case, this other business is more within my own discipline, and I’ll have to ponder the matter of precisely how to approach her about it. Loving one’s neighbor as oneself is always particularly challenging when neighbor must be taken literally, I always think.”
    Stephanie was right: She did not have a scientific mind. When I’d first tried to explain what ultrasound was, I’d mentioned the gadget designed for use on a neighbor’s dog. Unfortunately, Stephanie had latched on to the example, and I now had difficulty in convincing her that the sound reaching her house did not necessarily emanate from Alice Savery’s and might even come from some long-untouched device of Morris Lamb’s. Or maybe Stephanie simply didn’t like the idea of having her house searched. Who would? And when I finally persuaded Stephanie of the need to look, she promised that she and Matthew would go over the place, but scrupulously pointed out that the cellar was packed with cartons of Morris Lamb’s belongings, possessions and papers that no one but Doug had any right to examine. It seemed to me that my fondness for Morris Lamb was proof against whatever horrible secrets I might uncover while searching for some hidden version of the Yap Zapper, but I felt embarrassed to say so. Also, since Doug Winer was right outside, it made sense to question him first and, if necessary, to ask him to delve into Morris’s cartons.
    When Stephanie and I moved out to the deck, we found that Doug had returned from the front of the house. He was near the grill, bending over to fasten the latch on a small metal toolbox.
    “Doug, where’s Ruffly?” Stephanie asked. “Ruffly! Ruffly, come!”
    “He was here a second ago,” said Doug, rising to his feet. He wore an open-necked shirt, freshly pressed shorts, and athletic shoes so clean that they looked brand-new. The tennis whites highlighted the blackness of his hair, including the thick growth on his arms and legs, and the individual whiskers emerging on his face after what I suspected was a recent shave. “The naughty boy, did he run off? Ruffly!”
    Within seconds, however, Ruffly danced up the stairs to the deck, ran to Stephanie, stood on his hind legs, and balanced there. “Good boy,” she told him warmly, and added, to Doug and me, “Compromise. He knows not to jump on people, so he gets his front paws within a half inch, and he stops right there.”
    The little paragon’s contrast with my own dogs was beginning to grate on me. I almost wished that Ruffly had