A friend phoned us once and told us of Prince’s solution to the traffic-light problem. We followed him and saw how he managed it. At the foot of the Beverly Place hill, a block away, Beverly Place crossed Genesee Street, US Route 5, a four-lane street, heavily traveled, with a traffic light at the corner. Prince would stop at the corner and begin to bark. Sharp, peremptory barks, widely spaced. The light would turn. Traffic would stop. He would thereupon trot across the wide street staying within the pedestrian stripes, quite obviously convinced that he had demanded a favor and that, as always, it had been granted.
I am convinced that after I went off to the University of Pennsylvania my subsequent relationship with Prince was a disappointment to my parents. After all, this was A Boy and His Dog, reunited during school vacations. But I had to force more enthusiasm than I felt, and his response also seemed somewhat stylized. I used to wonder if I was lacking in capacity for this sort of affection. I realize now that the world had broadened for both of us. We had gone separate ways and had other things on our minds. I was learning to bark at another kind of traffic light. Our relationship was mildly affable and slightly nostalgic.
When I met my wife-to-be at Syracuse University in 1936, Dorothy owned a cowardly black cocker spaniel whose registered name was Shadowfall Chloe. Chloe was utterly convinced of imminent disaster from almost any direction. On leash, when the horrors got too much for her, she would scrunch onto her belly and have to be either picked up and carried or dragged along with an ugly grating of toenails. If I reached slowly to pat her during our early acquaintanceship, she would run, screaming, and hide in the most remote corner she could find. Her eyes rolled white amid that black hair and she would pant with terror. Asleep she whined constantly, legs twitching as she fled the demons.
After Dorothy and I were married, Chloe gave me a dubious acceptance.
In our innocence of the wiles of dogdom, we had her bred at a kennel other than the one of her origin, with a pick-of-the-litter arrangement for the sire. When her time came, we took her to the kennel and left her there for the birthing. When we returned an attendant showed us one very tiny dead blond cocker in a tin can and said that she had given birth to just one, and that was it. Sorry. It was dead because she had gotten out somehow and had it in the cold. Sorry.
We now know that a litter of one is so improbable as to be a fair indication of hankypanky. Perhaps Chloe’s conviction the world is a deadly place was justified. After all, they did steal her children.
In 1938 Dorothy and I and Chloe were living in a fourth-floor walk-up apartment in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in what had once been a Harvard dormitory. Its doubtless apocryphal claim to notoriety was that during its dormitory days one Lucius Beebe, with the assistance of some interested companions, had dropped a piano down the stair well onto the tiled ground-level floor to see what the impact would sound like.
I was attending the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration. Dorothy was pregnant with our only child, now twenty-five. She was working for the Kelling Nut Company with an assigned route which included an eerie number of urban and suburban drugstores. We were trying to either break our lease or get permission to sublet from the brothers who then owned the building. The obstetrician had advised us strongly to move out of a fourth-floor walk-up. In presenting this problem to one of the brothers at his office I had been somewhat disheartened to have him say to me, “Listen, you, if you’re both dead we collect from your estate. You gotta lease.”
It was a weekday evening. Dorothy was napping. I was working on a case assignment for a class. Dorothy woke up and said, “John, this building is shaking. It must be a hurricane.”
It was a chunky brick building. This was obviously some imaginative nonsense associated with pregnancy. They never have hurricanes in New England. I told her it was nonsense. She told me to turn the radio on.
The radio said, “...and martial law has just been declared in Worcester. Winds are now upward of eighty miles an hour and the storm center moves...”
We had a little black tudor Ford sedan parked down in front, and as it was not permitted to leave it there all night, I always took it over and put it in the lot across the river behind the Business School and usually combined this errand with the one of walking Chloe. So I snapped Chloe’s leash onto her harness ring and left at once. The winds seemed very strong, but not alarmingly so until I got onto the Charles River Bridge. Then I was broadsided with such violence I nearly lost control.
I put the car behind the Business School. I got out As soon as I got a few feet away from the car, the wind got a good purchase on me, and before I could brace myself or grab anything, I was off and running, clutching the leash, Chloe bounding and sliding and screeching along with me. I came up against the woven-wire backstop of the tennis courts. Over the impressive and constant scream of the wind I heard an ungoldly banshee howl that went rowwarowwerrooee and soon identified it as a sound made by huge sheets of metal being ripped off the roof of one of the Business School buildings and flying by, spinning in flight, about fifty feet over my head. I think that it was at this moment Chloe’s defeat became total. All her life she had known of pending horror.
I could not pick her up. I needed both hands to hold onto things. Later we learned that was the absolute peak of wind velocity, unmeasured because everything it could have been measured by was blown away. The velocity was measured by the damage done in that hour I was gone from the apartment. With the loop of the dog’s leash over my right wrist, I struggled homeward, crouching and crawling, seeking shelter, zigzagging from one precarious hand hold to the next. When we got to the bridge the wind was picking up solid water and dumping it on the bridge. It ran ankle-deep at both ends. I stayed below the shelter of the rail. I had to drag that damned dog. She was flattened, legs tucked under, eyes shut. When I reached the corner at the Harvard College side, every last one of those huge elms had come down since I had driven under them not long before. They lay blocking the road, three and four feet in diameter, with big slabs of sidewalk uptilted by the towering root structure. They did provide a windbreak. I had to lift Chloe over three of them. When we got to the sidewalk the wind was behind me. Chloe was rigid, inert.
About fifty yards from the apartment building, she had a chance to express that final edge of terror. Dragging her along, I heard a curious clanging behind us, coming closer, over the wind sound. I looked back and saw an empty garbage can coming end over end, right up the sidewalk. It was hitting about every twenty feet, and at the apex of each leap it was perhaps four feet off the sidewalk. As I dodged and gave Chloe a yank to pull her out of the way, she turned and looked at the horrible thing clanging down upon her. I have never heard a scream like that from a dog. She sounded like a veteran Hitchcock actress. Galvanized, she ran to the end of the leash with such spirit that when she came to the end of it, it snapped her over onto her back. She lay right there, paws curled, belly exposed, waiting for the huge, noisy thing to come eat her. It clanged on by.
After I got her home, after she had been dried and brushed, she still shook. She tried some of that strange little talking sound dogs attempt at times. But she gave it up. She just did not have the vocabulary for it. After that, curiously enough, her timidity was not as evident. But I cannot believe it was valor. It seemed more like resignation, as though she had decided that flight itself was futile. Later, when we had to move to a dogless environment, we gave her to friends in Poland, New York. I cannot believe they found her very responsive. No one did. But it was fun calling her.