The Women and Dogs in My Life

I Have a Friend here in Mississippi, a flamboyant and intrepid soul in his early 30s, who was recently devastated because his girl and his dog ran away in the same week--separately and, we surmise, from different motives. Their names were Christie and Augie. "I loved them both!" he cried out in a grievous agony that began with the twin disappearances last spring and continued into the summer. "The same damned week--and the guilt I have to wrestle with over missing my dog more!" My friend has taken to his heart the words from Synge's Deirdre of the Sorrows: "It's lonesome you'll be this night and tomorrow night and long nights after." He wanders now barefooted in the perfumed and spectral Dixie dark. Soon, I am sure, he will move away. (And he did, last Saturday, as I knew he would, to the Upper West Side of New York City, with $300 and without a job in sight.)

I honor the women's revolution and count a number of its pre--eminent advocates as my friends. How I have argued and agreed with them in the Eastern salons, and loved them for their ardor! "You're really with us," one of them once whispered to me on the balcony of an apartment on Central Park West as the lights of the great city came on. So do I incite them now when I unabashedly confess that I, like my heartbroken friend, am a woman-and-dog man? That women and dogs have been--inseparably--at the core of my existence? That I comprehend perhaps more than any other American male those ineffable qualities that fine women and fine dogs share: warmth, kindness, friendship, intelligence, independence, courage, self-confidence, loyalty, fun, mischief, love? That a man without a woman and a dog is an incomplete being, slightly askew and off center? That in this vale of sadness, I have been at my happiest when I have had, at the same time, a distinguished woman and a distinguished dog? That the death of one's beloved dog is like the end of one's romantic love?

We may not like it, but in these times a man, in truth, lives several lives in the course of a lifetime. The way we move about the American earth, dwelling in one locale for a few years and then setting down our space modules somewhere else to try again, has something to do with this; but I also think this ambivalence of the fixed commitments relates to the transience of sexual love in our most catastrophic epoch. Loving a particular girl in our generation encompasses its own realities, moods, feelings, habitudes, people, landscapes, places; and then--overnight, it often seems--many of these things are vanished with her. Over the years, our anger and hurt give way to tenderness. Yet our lives become like the shattered fragments of an old and cherished figurine. One man I know in New England, a fellow writer who is sometimes too graphic for his own well-being, calls this peculiar dislocation of the spirit "the muff tax."

Some years ago, I asked a beautiful girl to marry me. I loved her very much, perhaps more than I ever loved a girl. Our tensions were real, but so, I thought, was our attachment. We were children of our day, but I was dizzy in her arms. I believed our affection would triumph over the grave. It was Christmas--an appropriate time, I thought, to try marriage again. "You can cure human beings of almost anything except marrying," Faulkner said. We were with fine friends and children. It was snowing on eastern Long Island, and the frozen branches crackled in the wind. Sinatra's The Second Time Around, as I recall, alternated on the stereo with The Nutcracker. The girl and I had been together a long while, too, but she left me the following month for a television fellow (not the repairman but a scriptwriter).

I did not think I would survive. Misery encompassed me. I could not bear to leave my house to go to the drugstore. I stopped reading The New York Times (and never reacquired the habit, I am proud to say). I stared, trancelike, out the window. I read The End of the Affair, by Graham Greene, and contemplated Catholicism. I could not drink bourbon--always an ominous sign--nor could I sleep at night. I would get out of bed two dozen times in the interminable dark to fetch a drink of water; I had to be doing something. I thought my suffering terminal. When I finally ventured outside, I saw her in feverish mirage wherever I went. I prayed for surcease. The lines from Léon Bloy taunted me: "Man has places in his heart which do not yet exist, and into them enters suffering in order that they may have existence."

It was Pete who saw me through.

That was nearly a decade ago, but those moments returned last year to stalk me in horrendous déjà vu when Pete, less my dog than my brother, 14 years old, died of old age. He was a splendid black Labrador, the dog of my middle years. A man and a dog will become inseparable; one will spend more time with his dog than with his wife, children, friends. Pete slept under my worktable, awakened me every morning with his cold wet nose, trekked the woods with me, loved our friends and suffered our fools, traveled with me times without number to New York and back. Just as she had been my life's love, he was my life's friend. As he lay in our front room, dying, I put his head in my lap and told him I loved him. He opened his eyes and weakly wagged his tail. Then he got up and struggled out the door, found a private place on the lawn and died. We buried him in a sullen rainstorm on a hill, not far from L. Q. C. Lamar and the Faulkners, and recited a few lines from the 1928 Episcopal Book of Common Prayer.

Once more, I could not leave the house, stared out the window, watched the drifting leaves, fetched water in the night. When I finally managed to go outdoors, to the courthouse square or the lovely groves of the Ole Miss campus or the woods behind the football stadium or the Sardis lakes he and I had once wandered, I saw him coming toward me, eyes bright and tender, wagging his tail in the old familiar circle. The death of Pete was like the end of the affair.

•

"I have often thought of the final cause of dogs' having such short lives," Sir Walter Scott wrote, "for if we suffer so much in losing a dog after an acquaintance often or 12 years, what would it be if they were to live double that time?"

Sir Walter must have known much about women, too, in the context of his day, despite his rhetorical flourishes (his old-lace chivalry as arcane, no doubt, to the Upper East Side or the summer Hamptons in 1984 as Woody Allen's Manhattan would have been to him and his set on the time-drenched moors). He must have had an excruciating regard for them-- their moods, felicities, securities. The question he poses is relevant, leading me to another, most saddening, confession: that the dogs in my life, taken one on one in their separate tenures and longevities, have more or less outlasted the women.

Much of this has surely been of my own doing, for I am a 20th Century American man, neither better nor worse than most men of my day, whether I write words or not. I have sometimes had a propensity to love extremely pretty girls who have loved me back but not for any inordinate length of time, a problem I have never had with dogs. Women, in other words, have loved me deeply, but dogs have loved me longer.

Still, has this not been a common hazard for many of the dog-loving American men among my contemporaries, those of us in our 30s and 40s who were caught in the very inception of the sexual revolution? The structures and inhibitions were swept away, and this involved not merely the radical deterioration of marriage (when was the last time anyone perused the statistics on divorce among this generation in America?) but something more subtle and basic. In other times, not so distant, people were locked in by all the social contracts of sexual affection, and although this did not make anything any better, incurring the most singular hypocrisies, before our eyes the rhythms and expectations of love entered a whole uncharted terrain. In middle age, obsessed with some sparse hope of continuity in our mortal adventure, I have pondered dogs and women with a more acute and reminiscent eye.

Perplexed, as always, by the writing man's own lonely admissions, circumlocutions, trepidations that his insights here may be less universal than frivolous--a paranoiac saddled to a mastodon?--in a spirit of casual inquiry, I took these considerations to the generation just behind mine. One recent evening, I gathered a cadre of bright young Mississippi males, scions of a complex and inward society not exactly beloved by some but one that--and we do not need W. J. Cash to remind us--has always placed women and dogs on pedestals. We convened at an all-night coffeehouse near the Ole Miss campus called The Hoka, after a resourceful Chickasaw princess, a boondocks avant-garde institution presided over by a Jewish intellectual named Ron Shapiro and his black dog King Boy. Disregard, if you will, the fact that the young Ole Miss men had just returned from hunting with their dogs in the Tallahatchie swamp bottoms. Here are some of their comments:

You can develop the same attachment to both, but most of the dogs I've known have been more loyal. Short of Dobermans, how many dogs have turned on you?

The dogs here are interested in loyalty and food. The girls are interested in loyalty and money.

It's really hard these days to combine the affection of a wonderful woman and a wonderful dog--one of them is bound to get jealous.

The best thing is to have a girl who cares for your dog. That way, when she gets mad and threatens to leave--they leave you quicker and quicker nowadays--she'll think twice because of your dog. If possible, it's also not all that bad an idea to get a little female puppy and name her after your girl. She may be suspicious of boys, but how can she be suspicious of a little dog who has her name? She'll lump the two of you together and stay longer. But just be damned sure you love the girl before you get the puppy.

I just saw Woody Allen on the cable out of Memphis. Crazy! I have the hots for the big Hemingway girl. She was a foot taller than Woody. Why did he let her go? Didn't he know he loved her? She was about 17 and he was 42--what's wrong with that? I'd watched Diane Keaton in The Godfather. She's a doll, but they all were messed up. All of them kept quoting their head shrinks. Everybody was afraid of bugs--mosquitoes, mostly. None of them liked to drive cars. Woody Allen is a funny little guy. I really like him a lot. But he probably never had a dog.

When I'm feeling down and out, Yellow Jane II makes me feel it's not so bad after all. She's sweet and considerate and knows I'm sad. Louise tells me I'm all screwed up and starts hanging out with the damned S.A.E.s.

I love Deborah Ann more than I (continued on page 250)Women and Dogs(continued from page 130) love Shadow--well, in different ways. They're a lot alike--both are great. But Shadow takes me for what I am. That may not be much, but it's enough for Shadow.

And this lyrical demurrer:

You can't make love to a dog. Women are softer and gentler and don't move around as much and don't have hair all over their bodies.

After considerable rhetoric and self-flagellation, my confreres provided me with little more than this pristine catechism. I turn back now to the repository of memory.

•

From infancy through puberty to young manhood and adulthood, I have seldom been without dogs. They have assuaged adolescence, softened grief, lightened ennui, shared the grown man's nights of despair. Most of them have been ineluctably associated at certain points in time, as the Nixon men would have said, with the women I have cared for, so that down the great misty concourse of memory, a beloved girl and an honored dog stand together for me there on the horizon of old time in brief, affectionate frieze, punctuating the mysterious odyssey with a remembrance of care and love.

The dogs were bird dogs at first--Tony, Sam and Jimbo--whose moist tonguelickings and warm silhouettes were as real to my childhood as the shapes of trees or the smells of the delta woods. Then a succession of brilliant English smooth-haired fox terriers, hunters and comrades--especially Old Skip--in my boyhood and teenage years. And a vagabond dog in Oxford, England, named Henry. And then the eminent black Labradors of manhood--Ichabod H. Crane and my noble, unforgettable Pete. As for the women, at first they were Southern, then English, then Northern WASP or Jewish, then Southern again (for one somehow returns full circle sooner or later).

[A] s I jotted down some of these thoughts on an index card not too long ago, a most curious recognition struck me, nearly mystical in its sweep. These words are in front of me now, leaping out at me in existential benediction:

Dogs I have truly loved:7

Girls I have truly loved:7

These affections were disparate, of course, and differed in their degree, but is the symmetry not impressive? It is that very symmetry, in fact, that compels me to recall several unaffected scenes of my girls and dogs together. They often filled me with rage and anguish in the years we spent together, my seven best girls--for what is sexual love if not a blend of the suffering and joy all of us must experience as we imperceptibly approach the grave?--but as they recede into the past, the sharpness, too, fades, and I am with them again in the youthful mind's eye; I remember their own special poignance and tenderness and passion, just as I do the individual nobilities of my seven best dogs.

•

The first girl I ever loved, if one will forgive me one's original momentary dream, was named Barbara, and she was a girl then; her last name was Stanwyck. I was 12 years old, and my loyal bird dogs must have noticed something stirring in me.

I fell deeply in love with Barbara Stanwyck in the old Paramount Theater on Capitol Street in Jackson, Mississippi, in Double Indemnity. Who was this magical girl? As I sat there alone in the cool darkness, waiting for life to envelop me, there was something in her lovely, chiseled face, the slouching incline of her body, the way she not so much walked as glided across her landscapes that choked my prepubescent heart and fueled my iridescent dreams. Long before I knew anything of the specific ecstasies or their remotest possibilities, her beauty suffused my waking hours, an apparition created for my small town fantasies.

No, not even fantasies. Rather, my poor boyish quiverings were connected in a kind of tender innocence to the tentative flesh of an evanescent presence; she was my crucible, icon and diadem. Just as I had once written to Gene Autry and Roy Rogers, I wrote a letter to her in Hollywood, and three weeks later, waiting for me in the mailbox, was a big envelope with a glossy black-and-white photograph of her sitting on some secret veranda of the Western littoral in an evening dress. (Neither Gene Autry nor Roy Rogers had previously replied, though someone out there had sent me a picture of Autry's horse.)

I took the photograph into the back yard and sat down in the shade of a pecan tree. Soon I was joined, as I had known I would be, by Tony, Sam and Jimbo. They nuzzled me with their noses and looked at the picture with me. I pretended Barbara was there with us, sipping a drink and smoking a cigarette as she often did in her movies. I wished very much for her to be under the pecan tree with my dogs and to tell me how much she liked them, and I would inform her there of their habits, eccentricities and predilections. Soon one of them began licking me on the cheek. In the forenoon's heat of that long-ago Mississippi summer, I closed my eyes. Miss Stanwyck sure could kiss.

•

I move in time. All the effervescent girls of our high school days adored Old Skip, and none more so than Katie Culpepper, my first beloved flesh-and-blood girl. Katie and Old Skip had much in common; I believe they sensed this. Every morning, Old Skip walked with me down the broad boulevard of the town toward school. Five blocks away, Katie would be waiting for us on the steps of her house. In honored ritual, she and Old Skip would embrace; then he would reluctantly turn away and return home as Katie and I strolled the last two blocks to school.

She baked him apple pies and fed him chocolate cookies. No other girl ever cared for a dog of mine as my Katie did for Old Skip. They would be together when I was away from them, at football or baseball practice, and they would be waiting for me, the emotions of us three so curiously intertwined, so that Katie and Old Skip were the most precious living creatures to me of those years. And who else could ever have a girl as beautiful as Katie and a dog like Old Skip? She admired the way he played football with us and how he could drive a car with his paws if you operated the accelerator for him. She never forgot the day he attacked a copperhead slithering ominously across the lawn toward us.

Old Skip was a fool, too, for Katie. She was a long-legged majorette, sweet and cheery and lush and, like Old Skip, a fount of the greatest loyalty and fun. Katie ... who would go anywhere and do anything: sit with Old Skip and me on her front porch and watch the cars go by, or drive the back roads with us on smoky afternoons, or dance close to the words of Jo Stafford with her ringers casually on the lobe of my ear when Old Skip was not around, or explain to me why she was a connoisseur of Dr Peppers in the scratched bottles with 10,2 & 4 on them, or study with me on school evenings as Old Skip slept with his head in her lap. Katie ... my straight-C scholar of deep embraces and warm kisses and the easiest, richest, most bittersweet pleasure of my whole life, touching me now in the middle-aged memory of it.

I recall that golden Indian summer and the fine throbs of love. Leaves of a dozen colors drifted down out of the trees in those sad, horny delta days. They were burying the Korean dead in Yazoo. We remember what we wish to remember: Katie and I are standing on the side lawn of her house under an ancient water chestnut. It is the afternoon before our ball game against Belzoni, and she has been showing me her baton-twirling tricks, acquired at the Ole Miss baton-twirling clinic. She is still tanned from the summer sun, her blonde hair is bobbed at the back and her green eyes twinkle in mirth. I lean across and kiss her gently on the lips, and she kisses me in return. We stand in a light, amiable embrace; her cheek brushes mine. Oh, sweet agony of the loins! I gaze down from the summit of a quarter of a century, all the accumulated losses and guilts and shames, the loves come and gone, and death, ravenous death, and Katie herself long dead, buried under a mimosa on a hill in our cemetery. I summon that instant standing in the shade of the water chestnut with her, for suddenly Old Skip has emerged from an evergreen shrub and bounds toward us in playful solicitude. Old Skip, I understand now, had been watching us and approved. What do you do after Katie and Old Skip?

•

In England, after the years, the girl was Chicken and the dog, Henry--Chicken, a statuesque egghead from one of the Cinque Ports who was studying philosophy, politics and economics and who lightened the Dickensian fogs; Henry, a rust-colored vagabond from the nearby pub who took up with me in my rooms in the college. These were frigid quarters near a copious Oxford quadrangle and only a few yards from the 11th Century city wall. A boys' choir sang madrigals each afternoon from the chapel across the way, with its memorials to the dead of the many wars, and Chicken and I commingled in affection in dark, cold indoor places with the door shut on Henry.

Her nickname derived from an eccentric great-aunt who had married an Australian game hunter; his, from either Henry VII or VIII. Chicken and Henry and I would sit close to the fire on the bleak wintry days, eating buttered crumpets and listening to the medieval echoes in the misty rain. And on an afternoon of my first and most incomparable English spring, there were Chicken and Henry poised forever in silhouette for me on the banks of the Isis as the chimes of the ancient fortress town rang out in the distance: she in a flowing white dress and a blue-and-white straw hat, he wading gingerly in the placid waters--the two of them turning in the same moment to look for me as I tarried in a secret, bosky glade to absorb them there together.

[A] nd then my wife, Celia, and the first of the black Labs, Ichabod H. Crane, in the best years of my marriage. We had found him in a kennel overlooking the Hudson River in Washington Irving country. We had an old farmhouse sitting on a hill 70 miles north of Manhattan, and I loved to watch him in his youthful peregrinations in the Yankee woodlands. There was a Christmas there: snow on the ground, and the sounds of the caroling, and the reflections of the holiday lights on the frosty-white terrain. I had just put up the Christmas tree, 12 feet high, in the den with its cathedral ceiling, and my young son and Ichabod H. Crane and I sat relaxing on a sofa. Suddenly, the tree fell over and landed on the three of us; we were trapped irrevocably in its prodigious branches, and Ichabod H. Crane emitted an ungodly howl. My wife came in from the kitchen as swiftly as possible and pulled us one by one, by hand or paw, to freedom, Ichabod the first to be so liberated. Celia, my lovely, brilliant, brave Texas girl: I loved you so much then!

[A] nd so my roster continues across the landmarks of the past, Ichabod H. Crane kidnaped by me and joining me on eastern Long Island in time for Muriel, my gracious and lithesome Jewish beauty. I called her the Sardine Princess for her inheritance, Lord forgive me, and cherished her for her extraordinary passion and care, adored her at times beyond measure and took her to the games at Madison Square Garden, gave her a color TV on her birthday, drove long U.S. distances with her, arbitrated among the violent emigres of Europe in her house in her behalf and whispered to her my deepest love. Ichabod and I were nothing if not children of American divorce, and how kind this inimitably lovely girl was to Ichabod and me! She had courage, also, and once went with us to the South in the civil rights years. Did Ichabod perceive the electricity of that time between Northern Jewish women and Southern men? This, too, is subject for substantial discourse. Or was he content to belong to an authentic intellectual salon? God bless Ichabod: He had an iced-over pond to slide on, an ocean to swim in, children to play with, quarrelsome Eastern Europeans and dyspeptic Parisians to growl at, penniless Irish poets to assuage, and he was the first and last of my honored dogs to take commands in fluent French.

•

The years passed, and I come again to Pete, the finest of them all. He and I had not been together always; rather, we sought each other out, two lonely bachelor hearts. I was drawn to him the moment I saw him, some four years after the death of Ichabod H. Crane--a wonderfully handsome black Lab, perhaps three years old, who spent much of his time with the fellows in the service station in our village on Long Island.

He had brown eyes, floppy ears and a shining ebony coat. As the semiofficial mayor of the town, known to all as "Your Honor," he patrolled its streets and its beaches and its schools and its whole back-yard world of gardens and orchards and barns. He pushed open the doors to the bars with his nose and sat with his friends the potato farmers as they drank their morning boilermakers. He belonged to no man. Since I was no stranger to dogs, I sensed he was looking me over. Whenever I drove into the station for gas, he would get into my car. As we rode across the lush fields and sand dunes, he would sit there quietly, looking as if he were reflecting on me. Soon he started visiting me at my house, each visit longer than the one before.

One day, however, he did not leave. "Go back, Pete," I said. "They expect you." He refused to go. It was a moment of rare consequence, for we were inseparable from that moment to the end.

He was a creature of endless kindness, imagination and good cheer. I was forever impressed by his profound intelligence, and to the most remarkable degree he comprehended words, unspoken fears, joys and desires. Between us we had our own private language. I never once doubted that he was protective of my--his brother's--interests. When I met Barbara, the dazzling celebrity beauty, in the most intense and reckless of the affairs, I could tell he was pondering her as intensely as he had once investigated me. At her best, this intrepid and sparkling girl was our friend and comrade, loyal and orgasmic, generous and dear, any moment touched for her with fellowship and pleasure, and her laughter rings out for me yet, as I suspect it did for Pete. I neglected to know then how much she chose to be on her own, but when she wished not to be, she was incomparable. Pete gave his heart to her, I see now, for her mischief and adventure, and for her expert biscuits, stews and lemon chickens.

He was especially partial to Annie, when that time came, and held her, I believe, in much the same regard that Old Skip had held Katie Culpepper in the faraway years. Annie was a lovely blonde from the South; just as Pete was the kindest and gentlest of my dogs, so was Annie of my girls. She was considerably younger than Pete and I (these words must not sound incongruous), but this gentle disparity was no problem for Pete, for his eyes lit up with joy whenever he saw her. Annie was tall and full-breasted, a Vanderbilt girl, a Phi Beta Kappa, no less, passionate, as an earlier generation might have said of her, and I knew that and so, I think, did Pete; I never told him this, but she was the easiest and warmest since Katie, and the most appreciative, and she unfailingly gave us her comradeship and love and did not expect too much in return, except maybe a little comradeship and love, too.

She was a reporter for the paper, and there she was, thrust suddenly into a Long Island winter. As in the song, we fell in love because it was cold outside. The three of us huddled together in her first wintertime there. On good days, she and Pete and I would get into my car and drive the roads of eastern Long Island, Montauk to Riverhead, Sag Harbor to Bridge-hampton--take the ferries to Shelter Island and the North Fork, tarrying in the antique stores, lunching on lobster (Pete liked the claws most of all) in the outdoor fish places, later stopping along the way by an inlet to watch the gulls and the play of the frosty sunlight on the water or to let Pete wander the deserted beach.

She would say, "You're not too old, and I'm not too young." But she was the marrying age, and she wanted babies. The affection we had was never destroyed; it was the dwindling of circumstance. How does one give up Annie? Only through loneliness and fear, fear of old loves lost and of love renewed--only those things, that's all. The last departure came on a windswept October noon of the kind we had known. We stood on the porch of my house in the village and embraced. "Oh-- you" she said. She lingered for the briefest moment, a Tennessee girl with snow in her hair. As she walked to her car, Pete followed her. I watched as she leaned down and hugged him. Then she, too, was gone. When Pete returned, he seemed to say, "Look what you've done now, you old fool."

•

Not too long ago, I decided to return to live in Mississippi. I felt guilty for taking Pete, a Yankee dog if ever there was one, from his home ground. But tell me: Had I a choice? Had he? The car was loaded and I was ready to depart, for I had made my own painful farewells. Pete ruminated for the briefest instant, then jumped inside. He adjusted to Dixie. He ate catfish and ham hocks, and I think I discerned a hint of "y'all" in his bark.

Once, Pete and I found ourselves in the Civil War battlefield of Shiloh, just across the Tennessee line, with our friend Shelby Foote, the writer. Shelby comprehended this ground better than any other living man, and he was touched by it anew on this day. It happened to be the 120th anniversary of that fierce and tragic confrontation, and on this matchless morning of April, the mementos of death and suffering lay all about us. We watched bemused as Pete waded in the Bloody Pond.

Shelby, who cared for dogs as much as I, had recently purchased another pair of custom-made boots from a Memphis man whom he had patronized over many years. Shelby pointed to his boots and said, "My bootmaker asked me, 'Mr. Foote, is this your last pair of boots?' " We gazed out at Pete again in the Bloody Pond. "Is Pete your last dog?" he asked.

Last dog? Last love?

Pete is now gone from me, but I remember how he wandered the serene and beautiful Ole Miss campus, its woods and cul-de-sacs and athletic fields, in his driftless and trusting random. Those illustrious white and black beauties, the Ole Miss coeds, grew to love him, too, and even began taking him to their classes.

One day, from afar, as I walked alone, I sighted him in the Grove with my favorite coed of all, a most secret and innocent love but, after all the years, love nonetheless--one of the slender, willowy lovelies for whom Mississippi had always been justly famous, a graceful, down-home girl of laughter and caring who could recite Keats, Baudelaire and the infield-fly rule. She and Pete were sitting alone together under an oak tree as if in earnest conversation; her arm was casually draped around his neck, and in the dappled sunlight he was looking up at her. The years, in a rush, dissolved for me. She could have been the daughter of Katie Culpepper.

"A beloved girl and an honored dog stand together for me in brief, affectionate frieze."