In Partial Disgrace. Charles Newman
all and sundry, feeding them to surfeit, giving away oats to each passing stranger, keeping musicians, buffoons, and singers, in addition to Catspaw, our resident artiste and intellectual gent, and of course our hounds.
My father was attorney and village notary. His family had come to Cannonia as part of the great Huguenot migration, carrying with them nothing but a bust of Erasmus. Arriving after the latest wars of liberation had reduced every town to dust, the only inhabitants being a few Greeks and Jews, they found themselves more powerful in fact than in the law, unable to claim primacy or privilege, but triumphing over the lesser aristocracy by better management, making do on lesser sums, before they themselves were replaced by Schwabian, then Jewish bailiffs.
Our life revolved around the kennels. My parents possessed a brace of animals called “Chetvorah” in the local dialect, dogs revered for centuries for their hunting ability. The yard of my childhood was littered with the limbs and stuffings of the training puppets Mother fashioned from patch quilts and sockheads, little limp punchinellos which the dogs carried about until they disintegrated. Father used a bamboo pole and fishline tied to a grouse feather to get them on point, while Mother accustomed them to the gun. She weaned each litter, taking them their pans of steaming chicken stew four times a day, and as soon as their noses were buried in the gruel, tails propellers, she would circle them while discharging a revolver behind her back. The bullets shattered the terrace wall, ricocheted among the limestone outbuildings, and scarred the ancient oaks. There were those who misinterpreted the lady of the house always with a pistol in her apron pocket, but it is inarguable that growing up is the incremental conquering of fear. Today, you could set off a cannon in my room and I would only nod.
I do not know when my parents abandoned their common bedroom and moved into separate suites in the towers at each end of the house, though it seemed to coincide roughly with my appearance. From their respective suites they could see each other through me in the central tower, and at night I could see Mother’s candles glow in the smiling Orient, while to the West, Father’s greenish lampglass shone, an omen of the electrified cities to come.
As for our recent troubles, the cause is clearer than usually imagined, for our grain market, which once fed all of Europe, had been flooded by cheap surpluses from America, dropping the price of wheat by half. The farmers of Klavierland, lacking cash, deferred Father’s bills until all his litigatory energy was spent on fruitless efforts to collect his own fees in the clogged civil courts. Bad debt became the driving force of our reverse renaissance, a spiral in which everyone borrowed more to pay the interest on the debts on which they had already defaulted, credit pyramided upon credit, and the only way to survive was to live in perpetual bad faith. As his business dried up, Father would look out at the rotting fields beyond our property muttering “American cereal,” an expletive arioso which came to explain every problem we encountered and still retains a certain resonance throughout the local cosmos. Soon came the layoffs, first of the part-time help, then of the marginal servants who could least afford it, the first-fired who would resurface as our masters a generation later. The gardens, never prim, grew even more ragged, leaving it hard to tell a flower from a vegetable or fruit. The grass in the uncut meadows ran wild, reaching even the armpits of those on horseback, and in which the herds of grazing aurochs were barely visible. The best woodlots were sold off, copses along the roads cut down to deprive thieves of hiding places, and the horses, of course, reduced. A generation of geese and ducks passed on, their organs confitured and packed away in cellars. Even the tanneries, now well-launched into the miracles of modern chemistry, stopped buying our dog shit for their dyes.
Indeed, the last cash export from Semper Vero was the leeches found in abundance in the swamps, for apothecaries still thrived upon the margins of the Central Empires. The peasants would gather them in barrels and leave them in a shed, then Mother and I with a gaggle of peasant children would sort and bathe each wretched creature twice. Grading them by weight, we sewed them into linen bags forty centimeters long, to be picked up and taken to market by hawkers, usually the Fleischman brothers of later distillery fame. But the inexorable advance of medical science finally reached even our part of the world, and as bleeding went out of fashion, and plethoric, overfed gentlemen took to the waters, the value of our leeches necessarily became less, and our last source of hard currency flowed away.
Save a milk cow, the cattle were butchered, and most of the fields reverted to scrub, causing a new chain of wildlife to establish itself with startling rapidity. Hawks clotted the afternoon sky. Foxes became bold as leopards. Storks stalked adders. Pigs charged horses. Cranes and eagles strutted everywhere, and fat, sleek owls sat like avenging buddhas in the crotches of conifers. Meanwhile, in my father’s breast a great happiness arose, even as his business continued to fail, for just as the French have the mystique of their fields and the Germans of their forest, my father’s religion was the edge, that manmade, regenerative tangle of stumps, burn-offs, inexplicable wetnesses, and covers, which the animal kingdom in its colonial period prefers above all things, and which provides the final illusion to townspeople who need to believe they are descended from great hunters and perspicacious gatherers. It was the happiness of watching agriculture and all its bonds and shackles being erased.
Still, Semper Vero had to be rescued from its own mountain of debt, accumulated over centuries, and for a time my parents staved off the inevitable with tennis and French lessons for the gentry, whose heirlooms could still fetch cash. A walloping forehand and the languorous history of the future conditional allowed us a narrow margin for error in our decline. However, the day came when it was necessary to either sell off more fields or offer new services, and it was then that we began to take in others’ animals and pets. After realizing that none of the locals would pay good money to ameliorate a bad dog, Father ultimately took out a large ad for obedience training in the Sunday Therapeia Tagblatt:
TIRED OF YOUR DOG?
We are alone, absolutely alone on this chance planet, and of all forms of life which surround us, not one, save the dog, has chosen to make an alliance with us. It is not necessary to settle for just a pet.
Specializing in nervous peeing, uncontrollable boors, and promiscuous barkers.
Characterological reconstruction for the hardheaded, highly strung, and stupidly dependent.
Serving the owner willing to admit his own errors.
You may reply in confidence.
FELIX A. PSALMANAZAR, L.L.D.
SEMPER VERO
MUDDY ST. HUBERTUS
CANNONIA INFERIORE
SCHARF
(Iulus)
The only reply was from the Professor, who cabled immediately from Therapeia and made an appointment for the following week.
He arrived en famille, driving the coach heavy-handedly. In the boot of the closed black calèche, tied with a rope from his neck to the axle, sat a rude and mixed-up breed. They called him “Scharf.”
My father ambled out to meet his first client, dressed in his smoking jacket, a freshly killed woodcock hanging on a thong from his belt, and stared up with his glacial blue eyes at the city boy and his sad-faced, black-frocked entourage. The Professor stared back, perhaps taken aback to see what appeared to be a calm English gentleman in the touchy heart of Europe.
Scharf had leapt from the boot of the carriage to greet Father, but the rope to the axle brought him up short. The Professor moved quickly to disentangle him, and then, like a giant, mottled frog in harness, the animal dragged his black-suited master to Father’s patient hands. Felix quickly found the pressure points behind the strangely cut ears, and Scharf swooned as he massaged his bumpy skull. It was love at first sight—not of course, with Scharf, whose main problem was that he knew himself to be a pretext—but between the men, who now exchanged a considered handshake.
As the calèche emptied its contents, it became evident that the Professor was encosseted with a company of women: his daughter, with piercing black eyes, hair plaited in a manner suitable for a grandmother, though she was five or six at the most; his mother, who had similar eyes and a firm peasant jaw beneath an outrageous red velvet