The Wicked Flea

comment: Had I but known!
     
Winter, Holly
P. referred for emotional aspects of recent head trauma w/ amnesia lasting ca. I week. Now neur. ok except for reported early A.M. awakening, minor difficulty in concentrating, and reported problems in sequencing. Denies headaches. Injury concomitant with marriage of p’s former lover (Steve) to “consummate bitch.” Claims new wife indicted for embezzlement! Also concomitant w/ marriage of widowed father. Denies rivalry, resentment of new wife. Note marked idealization of late mother. Describes occupation as “dog writer”! Can this be?? Reports owns two, idealized—See late mother note. Perseveration on topic of dogs, deflects own conflicts to the animals, consequent to trauma?
 
COUNTERTRANSFERENCE!!!
     

Chapter 7
     
    Instead of going home after my session with Dr. Foote, I set out to pay a purely social call on a pair of elderly sisters, Althea Battlefield and Ceci Love, who were friends of mine and lived in Newton. Rowdy and I had met Althea on our therapy dog visits to a nursing home, and after she’d moved out of the facility and in with Ceci, I’d stayed in touch with both sisters. After my head trauma, they’d insisted on my staying with them for a few days. Incredibly, Ceci had welcomed my big, hairy, demanding dogs as well. She knew the medicine I needed most. Both sisters were now my adopted aunts. Althea looked about a thousand years old, but was only in her nineties. Ceci, the baby of the family, would object to a bald statement of her true age. Althea was tremendously tall and bony, with big hands, big feet, and a large brain capacity that she had put to use throughout her long life by devoting herself to the study of Sherlock Holmes. Although Ceci took advantage of Althea’s immenseness and scholar-liness as foils for her own petite frivolity, she had been trained in investment strategies by her late husband, a stockbroker, and was far less featherbrained than she took pains to appear.
    My appointment with Dr. Foote had been at 2:10. It was after three when I pulled up at Ceci’s house, a beautifully tended white colonial in a charming gas-lighted neighborhood of big houses with big yards. Real gaslights. But the yard was what I envied, a half acre or so that ran downhill behind the house and was fully enclosed by a high, sturdy fence, originally erected for the Newfoundlands Ceci had owned. When I’d met her, she’d been mourning the death of the last of her beloved giants, Simon, whose oil portrait occupied the place of honor above the fireplace in Ceci’s living room.
    Soon after I rang the bell, Ceci opened the door and launched into one of her usual nonstop and overwhelmingly hospitable greetings. “Holly, I’m so glad to see you, and Althea will be terribly sorry to have missed you, and I should have told you when you called, but I forgot, Hugh and Robert have whisked her off, so you’ll have to settle for me, if that’s all right, and Quest, of course, I’m dying for you to meet him!”
    Ceci liked to present herself as a vision in champagne. Her soft, pretty hair was tinted that shade, her face was always carefully made up in pinkish beige, and she favored flowing jersey garments in pale, pink-toned tans. Today she wore a light beige knit dress with a swath of black hairs across the skirt. The accidental ornamentation constituted my introduction to Quest, a Newfoundland she had just adopted from a breed rescue group. “Quest is shedding,” Ceci said, “not that I mind, I’m perfectly used to dog hair. Home isn’t home without it, is it? Althea begs to disagree, and she was determined to change his name to something from Sherlock Holmes—can you imagine a Newfoundland named Mycroft? And he is not fat!—but I said that being abandoned by his owners because he was supposedly defective was terrible enough, and it’s hard on any dog to adjust to new people, and I was not going to make things more difficult for him by changing his name, and there’s nothing wrong with Quest, is there? Especially when you consider that he’s been rehomed. ” Her smug expression suggested pride in the term, which was the new and fashionable way to refer to the rescue and placement of unwanted or abandoned animals. Ceci hated to feel outmoded. “In other words,” she explained, “he was on a quest, but his search ended right here.”
    As I trailed after Ceci, I tried to ask polite questions about Hugh and Robert, who are dear friends and