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 had 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.)