I felt there was little to fear, so I stopped in front of them and asked if they or anyone they knew had lost a white-and-black puppy with simple markings in the last day, because I’d found one. The one boy who seemed to be the oldest and was large and unshaven with brightly dyed purple and green hair cut into a flattop—he was the one who had the dog leashed to his boot—this boy looked up at me without obvious expression. He turned then to one of the immensely dirty-looking, fleshy, pale-skinned girls crouched farther back in the grimy door stoop, smoking (this girl had a crude cross tattooed into her forehead like Charles Manson is supposed to have) and asked, “Have you lost a little white-and-black puppy with simple markings, Samantha. I don’t think so. Have you? I don’t remember you having one today.” The boy had an unexpectedly youthful-sounding, nasally midwestern accent, the kind I’d been hearing in St. Louis that week, although it had been high-priced attorneys who were speaking it. I know little enough about young people, but it occurred to me that this boy was possibly one of these lawyers’ children, someone whose likeness you’d see on a milk carton or a website devoted to runaways.
“Ah, no,” the girl said, then suddenly spewed out laughter.
The big, purple-haired boy looked up at me and produced a disdainful smile. His eyes were the darkest, steeliest blue, impenetrable and intelligent.
“What are you doing sitting here?” I wanted to say to him. “I know you left your dog at my house. You should take it back. You should all go home now.”
“I’m sorry, sir,” the boy said, mocking me, “but I don’t believe we’ll be able to help you in your important search.” He smirked around at his three friends.
I started to go. Then I stopped and handed him a paper sign and said, “Well, if you hear about a puppy missing anywhere.”
He said something as he took it. I don’t know what it was, or what he did with the sign when I was gone, because I didn’t look back.
That evening Sallie came home exhausted. We sat at the dining room table and drank a glass of wine. I told her I’d put up my signs all around, and she said she’d seen one and it looked fine. Then for a while she cried quietly because of disturbing things she’d seen and heard at the AIDS hospice that afternoon, and because of various attitudes—typical New Orleans attitudes, she thought—voiced by some of the marathon organizers, which seemed callous and constituted right things done for wrong reasons, all of which made the world seem—to her, at least—an evil place. I have sometimes thought she might’ve been happier if we had chosen to have children or, failing that, if we’d settled someplace other than New Orleans, someplace less parochial and exclusive, a city like St. Louis, in the wide Middlewest—where you can be less personally involved in things but still be useful. New Orleans is a small town in so many ways. And we are not from here.
I didn’t mention what the puppy had done to the ligustrums, or the kids I’d confronted at the French Market, or her description of them having been absolutely correct. Instead I talked about my work on the Brownlow-Maisonette appeal, and about what good colleagues all the St. Louis attorneys had turned out to be, how much they’d made me feel at home in their understated, low-key offices and how this relationship would bear important fruit in our presentation before the Eighth Circuit. I talked some about the definition of negligence as it is applied to common carriers, and about the unexpected, latter-day reshapings of general tort law paradigms in the years since the Nixon appointments. And then Sallie said she wanted to take a nap before dinner, and went upstairs obviously discouraged from her day and from crying.
Sallie suffers, and has as long as I’ve known her, from what she calls her war dreams—violent, careering, antic, destructive Technicolor nightmares without plots or coherent scenarios, just sudden drop-offs into deepest sleep accompanied by images of dismembered bodies flying around and explosions and brilliant flashes and soldiers of unknown armies being hurtled through trap doors and hanged or thrust out through bomb bays into empty screaming space. These are terrible things I don’t even like to hear about and that would scare the wits out of anyone. She usually awakes from these dreams slightly worn down, but not especially spiritually disturbed. And for this reason I believe her to be constitutionally very strong. Once I convinced her to go lie down on Dr. Merle Mackey’s well-known couch for a few weeks, and let him try to get to the bottom of all the mayhem. Which she willingly did. Though after a month and a half Merle told her—and told me privately at the tennis club—that Sallie was as mentally and morally sturdy as a race horse, and that some things occurred for no demonstrable reason, no matter how Dr. Freud had viewed it. And in Sallie’s case, her dreams (which have always been intermittent) were just the baroque background music of how she resides on the earth and didn’t represent, as far as he could observe, repressed memories of parental abuse or some kind of private disaster she didn’t want to confront in daylight. “Weirdness is part of the human condition, Bob,” Merle said. “It’s thriving all around us. You’ve probably got some taint of it. Aren’t you from up in Mississippi?” “I am,” I said. “Then I wouldn’t want to get you on my couch. We might be there forever.” Merle smirked like somebody’s presumptuous butler. “No, we don’t need to go into that,” I said. “No, sir,” Merle said, “we really don’t.” Then he pulled a big smile, and that was the end of it.
After Sallie was asleep I stood at the French doors again. It was nearly dark, and the tiny white lights she had strung up like holiday decorations in the cherry laurel had come on by their timer and delivered the garden into an almost Christmas-y lumination and loveliness. Dusk can be a magical time in the French Quarter—the sky so bright blue, the streets lush and shadowy. The puppy had come back to the middle of the garden and lain with his sharp little snout settled on his spotted front paws. I couldn’t see his little feral eyes, but I knew they were trained on me, where I stood watching him, with the yellow chandelier light behind me. He still wore my woven leather belt looped around his neck like a leash. He seemed as peaceful and as heedless as he was likely ever to be. I had set out some Vienna sausages in a plastic saucer, and beside it a red plastic mixing bowl full of water—both where I knew he’d find them. I assumed he had eaten and drifted off to sleep before emerging, now that it was evening, to remind me he was still here, and possibly to express a growing sense of ease with his new surroundings. I was tempted to think what a strange, unpredictable experience it was to be him, so new to life and without essential defenses, and in command of little. But I stopped this thought for obvious reasons. And I realized, as I stood there, that my feelings about the puppy had already become slightly altered. Perhaps it was Sallie’s Swedish tough-mindedness influencing me; or perhaps it was the puppy’s seemingly untamable nature; or possibly it was all those other signs on all the other message boards and stapled to telephone poles which seemed to state in a cheerful but hopeless way that fate was ineluctable, and character, personality, will, even untamable nature were only its accidental by-products. I looked out at the little low, diminishing white shadow motionless against the darkening bricks, and I thought: all right, yes, this is where you are now, and this is what I’m doing to help you. In all likelihood it doesn’t really matter if someone calls, or if someone comes and takes you home and you live a long and happy life. What matters is simply a choice we make, a choice governed by time and opportunity and how well we persuade ourselves to go on until some other powerful force overtakes us. (We always hope it will be a positive and wholesome force, though it may not be.) No doubt this is another view one comes to accept as a lawyer—particularly one who enters events late in the process, as I do. I was, however, glad Sallie wasn’t there to know about these thoughts, since it would only have made her think the world was a heartless place, which it really is not.
The next morning I was on the TWA flight back to St. Louis. Though later the evening before, someone had called to ask if the lost puppy I’d advertised had been inoculated for various dangerous diseases. I had to admit I h
ad no idea, since it wore no collar. It seemed healthy enough, I told the person. (The sudden barking spasms and the spontaneous peeing didn’t seem important.) The caller was clearly an elderly black woman—she spoke with a deep Creole accent and referred to me once or twice as “baby,” but otherwise she didn’t identify herself. She did say, however, that the puppy would be more likely to attract a family if it had its shots and had been certified healthy by a veterinarian. Then she told me about a private agency uptown that specialized in finding homes for dogs with elderly and shut-in persons, and I dutifully wrote down the agency’s name—“Pet Pals.” In our overly lengthy talk she went on to say that the gesture of having the puppy examined and inoculated with a rabies shot would testify to the good will required to care for the animal and increase its likelihood of being deemed suitable. After a while I came to think this old lady was probably completely loony and kept herself busy dialing numbers she saw on signs at the laundromat, and yakking for hours about lost kittens, macramé classes, and Suzuki piano lessons, things she wouldn’t remember the next day. Probably she was one of our neighbors, though there aren’t that many black ladies in the French Quarter anymore. Still, I told her I’d look into her suggestion and appreciated her thoughtfulness. When I innocently asked her her name, she uttered a surprising profanity and hung up.
“I’ll do it,” Sallie said the next morning as I was putting fresh shirts into my two-suiter, making ready for the airport and the flight back to St. Louis. “I have some time today. I can’t let all this marathon anxiety take over my life.” She was watching out the upstairs window down to the garden again. I’m not sure what I’d intended to happen to the puppy. I suppose I hoped he’d be claimed by someone. Yet he was still in the garden. We hadn’t discussed a plan of action, though I had mentioned the Pet Pal agency.
“Poor little pitiful,” Sallie said in a voice of dread. She took a seat on the bed beside my suitcase, let her hands droop between her knees, and stared at the floor. “I went out there and tried to play with it this morning, I want you to know this,” she said. “It was while you were in the shower. But it doesn’t know how to play. It just barked and peed and then snapped at me in a pretty hateful way. I guess it was probably funny to whoever had him that he acts that way. It’s a crime, really.” She seemed sad about it. I thought of the sinister blue-eyed, black-coated boy crouched in the fetid doorway across from the French Market with his new little dog and his three acolytes. They seemed like residents of one of Sallie’s war dreams.
“The Pet Pal people will probably fix things right up,” I said, tying my tie at the bathroom mirror. It was still unseasonably chilly in St. Louis, and I had on my wool suit, though in New Orleans it was already summery.
“If they don’t fix things up, and if no one calls,” Sallie said gravely, “then you have to take him to the shelter when you come back. Can we agree about that? I saw what he did to the plants. They can be replaced. But he’s really not our problem.” She turned and looked at me on the opposite side of our bed, whereon her long-departed Swedish grandmother had spent her first marriage night long ago. The expression on Sallie’s round face was somber but decidedly settled. She was willing to try to care about the puppy because it suited how she felt that particular day, and because I was going away and she knew it would make me feel better if she tried. It is an admirable human trait, and how undoubtedly most good deeds occur—because you have the occasion, and there’s no overpowering reason to do something else. But I was aware she didn’t really care what happened to the puppy.
“That’s exactly fine,” I said, and smiled at her. “I’m hoping for a good outcome. I’m grateful to you for taking him.”
“Do you remember when we went to Robert Frost’s cabin,” Sallie said.
“Yes, I do.” And surely I did.
“Well, when you come back from Missouri, I’d like us to go to Robert Frost’s cabin again.” She smiled at me shyly.
“I think I can do that,” I said, closing my suitcase. “Sounds great.”
Sallie bent sideways toward me and extended her smooth perfect face to be kissed as I went past the bed with my baggage. “We don’t want to abandon that,” she said.
“We never will,” I answered, leaning to kiss her on the mouth. And then I heard the honk of my cab at the front of the house.
Robert Frost’s cabin is a great story about Sallie and me. The spring of our first year in New Haven, we began reading Frost’s poems aloud to each other, as antidotes to the grueling hours of reading cases on replevin and the rule against perpetuities and theories of intent and negligence—the usual shackles law students wear at exam time. I remember only a little of the poems now, twenty-six years later. “Better to go down dignified / with boughten friendship at your side / than none at all. Provide, provide.” We thought we knew what Frost was getting at: that you make your way in the world and life—all the way to the end—as best you can. And so at the close of the school year, when it turned warm and our classes were over, we got in the old Chrysler Windsor my father had given me and drove up to where we’d read Frost had had his mountainside cabin in Vermont. The state had supposedly preserved it as a shrine, though you had to walk far back through the mosquito-y woods and off a winding loggers’ road to find it. We wanted to sit on Frost’s front porch in some rustic chair he’d sat in, and read more poems aloud to each other. Being young southerners educated in the North, we felt Frost represented a kind of old-fashioned but indisputably authentic Americanism, vital exposure we’d grown up exiled from because of race troubles, and because of absurd preoccupations about the South itself, practiced by people who should know better. Yet we’d always longed for that important exposure, and felt it represented rectitude-in-practice, self-evident wisdom, and a sense of fairness expressed by an unpretentious bent for the arts. (I’ve since heard Frost was nothing like that, but was mean and stingy and hated better than he loved.)
However, when Sallie and I arrived at the little log cabin in the spring woods, it was locked up tight, with no one around. In fact it seemed to us like no one ever came there, though the state’s signs seemed to indicate this was the right place. Sallie went around the cabin looking in the windows until she found one that wasn’t locked. And when she told me about it, I said we should crawl in and nose around and read the poem we wanted to read and let whoever came tell us to leave.
But once we got inside, it was much colder than outside, as if the winter and something of Frost’s true spirit had been captured and preserved by the log and mortar. And before long we had stopped our reading—after doing “Design” and “Mending Wall” and “Death of the Hired Man” in front of the cold fireplace. And partly for warmth we decided to make love in Frost’s old bed, which was made up as he might’ve left it years before. (Later it occurred to us that possibly nothing had ever happened in the cabin, and maybe we’d even broken into the wrong cabin and made love in someone else’s bed.)
But that’s the story. That was what Sallie meant by a visit to Robert Frost’s cabin—an invitation to me, upon my return, to make love to her, an act which the events of life and years sometimes can overpower and leave unattended. In a moment of panic, when we thought we heard voices out on the trail, we jumped into our clothes and by accident left our Frost book on the cold cabin floor. No one, of course, ever turned up.
That night I spoke to Sallie from St. Louis, at the end of a full day of vigorous preparations with the Missouri lawyers (whose clients were reasonably afraid of being put out of business by a 250-million-dollar class action judgment). She, however, had nothing but unhappy news to impart. Some homeowners were trying to enjoin the entire AIDS marathon because of a routing change that went too near their well-to-do Audubon Place neighborhood. Plus one of the original marathon organizers was now on the verge of death (not unexpected). She talked more about good-deeds-done-for-wrong-reasons among her hospice associates, and also about some plainly bad deeds committed by other rich people who didn’t like the
marathon and wanted AIDS to go away. Plus, nothing had gone right with our plans for placing the puppy into the Pet Pals uptown.
“We went to get its shots,” Sallie said sadly. “And it acted perfectly fine when the vet had it on the table. But when I drove it out to Pet Pals on Prytania, the woman—Mrs. Myers, her name was—opened the little wire gate on the cage I’d bought, just to see him. And he jumped at her and snapped at her and started barking. He just barked and barked. And this Mrs. Myers looked horrified and said, ‘Why, whatever in the world’s wrong with it?’ ‘It’s afraid,’ I said to her. ‘It’s just a puppy. Someone’s abandoned it. It doesn’t understand anything. Haven’t you ever had that happen to you?’ ‘Of course not,’ she said, ‘And we can’t take an abandoned puppy anyway.’ She was looking at me as though I was trying to steal something from her. ‘Isn’t that what you do here?’ I said. And I’m sure I raised my voice to her.”
“I don’t blame you a bit,” I said from strangely wintry St. Louis. “I’d have raised my voice.”
“I said to her, ‘What are you here for? If this puppy wasn’t abandoned, why would I be here? I wouldn’t, would I?’