In Partial Disgrace. Charles Newman
Professor seemed more downcast and disoriented than on his first visit, but nevertheless rushed over before Felix could say a word, vigorously pumping his hand while explaining that Scharf had suddenly sniffed freedom, broken away from his wife on the evening walk, and been cut in two by an electric tram. The Professor, driven wild by his sobbing women, had gotten a replacement the very next day from the doghaus, though in this admission Felix could discern no real grief or contrition. And it did not bode well, he noted, that the present dog, despite being in such evident pain, had not cried out.
Ainoha had prepared a hare fricassee for lunch, and Felix was happy enough to postpone investigation of the Alsatian, tying him to the axle on a short lead with a slipknot, hoping no doubt the dog might do away with himself. When asked why he had again chosen a companion for life who had been so obviously and cruelly abandoned, the Professor could only say that the doghaus officials had assured him that the animal was of the noblest, purest stock, the absolute favorite of a landed Russian family of the finest northern German origin, the sort of people who had kept their servants standing in the orangery with torches throughout the killing frosts of the recent troubles, and when rightly alarmed by the czar’s appointment of a parliament, had hastily emigrated by freighter from Odessa, and now lived in the most reduced condition in the Therapeia ghetto, where they had reluctantly turned over the Alsatian, their last proud possession, to the care of the state. The long sea voyage had no doubt unsettled the animal, the doghaus officials opined, but his superior breeding would undoubtedly resurface once the trauma of losing his fortune and his homeland, as well as his constipation, subsided.
Felix put on his gamest face throughout this exculpation, interjecting only that with this animal, at least the nature of the abuse was clear, as was often the case with tumbled aristocrats. However, after coffee on the terrace, the Alsatian bit him fiercely when untied.
“You see—the children call him Wolf!” the Professor fairly shouted.
Father bore pain as well as any man I ever saw, and with one hand still clamped in the brute’s jaws, staunched the flow of blood with his free hand, somehow making out of his pocket-handkerchief a tourniquet. If the Professor was embarrassed, he was also plainly intrigued by his host’s ambidextrous stoicism, which gave his apology—signaled by the arc of his eyebrows—a rather forced and detached air, his curiosity overcoming his identification with another’s misfortune, which any normal person would of course find quite unforgivable.
Felix decided to rescue a bad situation by making it didactic. He allowed his encaptured hand to go limp as a fish in Wolf ’s mouth, then gave it a friendly shake or two. Realizing that he had perhaps overreacted, the dog reconsidered the amputation, which, as Father was wont to demonstrate, could also be a kindness. The Alsatian’s ears arched as he released Felix’s hand with a small pop, a string of saliva tinged with blood still conjoining them.
The Professor, however, had apparently decided to inflict a public punishment on the cur, and took up Wolf ’s rope, coiling it about his arms and swinging the knotted end above his head a la gaucho. But before he could administer the chastisement, the animal lowered his head and began to pull like a mule, first in one direction and then in another, causing the Professor’s patent leather shoes to screech on the gravel like chalk on a blackboard. He glanced imploringly at Felix, throwing up his one free hand in a gesture of disbelief. And then, as if to certify the case, the shortened lead was snapped even more anarchically, until Wolf, wheezing against his collar with unbelievable persistence, lowered his shoulders, turned his toes in and elbows out, and with gravel flying from his paws, became a classic study in time and motion. The Professor managed to emit a deep sigh before he was again, as on his first visit, forced to his knees, but this time also flung forward on his face. Succeeding in making his point, Wolf immediately sat down and licked the considerable foam from the corners of his mouth, one yellow eye wandering like an expiring nova.
“You see,” the Professor groaned, lying on his stomach, “he wants to leave us! There is no master in this house.” The dog had yet to emit as much as a grunt.
Felix folded his arms and delivered his lay opinion that the dog had been pulled on so much that his natural impulse was now to pull himself, wanting like anyone to put a little loop into his future. And he could play this game only by exhausting his tenacious master. The good news was that the dog in question was not timid, not a layabout like dear departed Scharf. His illness was simply an inappropriate response to the stress of everyday life.
“He doesn’t want to run away, Herr Doktor. He just wants some slack.” The Professor took this in gravely and repeated it to himself as if he were translating from a foreign language.
“Then he’s not . . . a revolutionary?”
“If so, a very poor one.”
Closing one brown eye and rising to a knee, the Professor opined that perhaps the freedom and fresh air of Cannonia might ameliorate the situation. Felix shook his head slowly.
“When a bear is uncultured, you do not tie him in a forest.”
This brought forth from the Professor a huge shrug, as if from his very soul, signifying, “What is to be done, then?”
Felix looked the Professor in the eye and reached into an inside jacket pocket, where he always kept a delicate choke collar of the tiniest blueblack Dresden steel ringlets. He held the collar up for his client as a jeweler holds a necklace for the bride, making a shimmering circle of dark silver and iron.
“Training, Herr Doktor Professor, training,” he whispered, trilling the ns.
My father was a man of many pockets: one for tobacco, one for sweets, one for the Dresden collar, one for dry husks of bread, and one from which he now withdrew a crimson kerchief, which he knotted around his neck. He needed to work the dog without distraction, so he ushered the Professor into the house, where, not finding Mother at home, the visitor could be seen in the staircase window, faded and grave as in a daguerreotype. Through the leaded glass, he watched the two murky figures in the courtyard.
At first, Felix slowly circled the panting, spittleflecked Alsatian, moving with his back against a dark green privet hedge. Then he held up a husk of bread.
“Kominzeeheer, Wolfie.”
Trailing his rope, the dog approached tentatively, but then took the husk from Felix’s hand and walked about sniffing and scratching it like a chicken, while occasionally peering over his shoulder at the knotted rope, then back at his immaculate food source. Felix continued to pass out husks with one hand, while with the other he opened a large flapped pocket that had been lined with surgical rubber so that the blood of game might easily be removed. (He had one sewn in all his jackets, evening clothes included.) From this otherwise empty game pocket he now withdrew a strand of insulated electrical wire as long as he was tall. My grandfather Priam had refused to install electricity at Semper Vero, and the week after he died, his wife, age spots on her temples as large as silver dollars, had the entire house and every outbuilding wired, socketed, and telephoned. It was this original telephone wire—flexible yet holding a shadow of the shape your hands might give it—Felix now held, a line without hard edges which could be looped or straightened, and along which willed energy might run like no other conductor, alternating impulses of discipline and freedom.
Gently, he looped the steel ringlets about Wolf ’s neck, attached the telephone cord to one ring, and keeping plenty of slack, strolled along the privet hedge. Wolf grimaced and dug in, preparing to haul his newest interlocutor beyond the horizon. But just as the lead grew taut, Felix turned his wrist a quarter-turn, and keeping his elbow stationary, gave a delicate if abrupt jerk, as if he were scything through a single stalk of wheat. The Dresden collar slipped through itself and the ringlets popped tight on Wolf ’s larynx, emitting a click like a cartridge being chambered.
The dog’s eyes bulged, then he coughed politely, and rather than hauling stopped short. As he did so, the collar slipped back open and the cord went slack. Wolf was fleetingly aware of a parenthesis of liberation, the triumph of cessation, that moment when your lover allows you to take her by the throat while your own head is cradled in her hands like a melon.
Then