Gertrude glanced shyly at me and cleared her throat and read her composition. “Dear Alida, I’m so happy to have a second sister. My little brother can be quite a blister. Now with three of us in the Bram, we can gang up on the little lamb.” This received the reaction you might expect—laughter and enthusiastic approval from Isadora, playful booing from Harry. I clapped, grateful that, though my hands needed to be gloved, they were complete in their own way.
Nine-year-old Harry thrust to his feet and shook his fist at Gertrude and waved at me. He was dark-haired and dark-eyed like his father, but with an impish quality that suggested he might be less inclined to take seriously much of what other people considered to be important. Somewhat small for his age, he nevertheless had a presence bigger than his height and weight. He’d memorized his welcoming words. “Dear Alida, violets are blue, roses are red. Be careful of my sisters. They aren’t right in the head.” With that outrage, it became the girls’ turn to boo, and Harry replied to their disapproval with a long, wet raspberry.
“I will tolerate your rudeness to one another,” Miss Blackthorn said, “because it was mildly amusing, but none of you is close to being the next Will Rogers.” She pointed at Harry. “Don’t you dare direct a Bronx cheer at me, young man.”
With greetings completed, the children left their desks and gathered around me, unraveling questions at me far faster than I could answer them. “What do you think of the Bram?” “Do you like your rooms?” “Did you like my rhyme? I was going to call Harry a ‘little ham,’ because he hams it up all the time, but I thought ‘little lamb’ was nicely ironic. Don’t you think it’s nicely ironic? We just learned about irony last week.” “Did you see the fountain with the stone dolphins? I adore that fountain, the way the spouting dolphins seem to be frolicking with such delight.” “Did you know we have a dog?” “Do you like cats? Welike cats, but Mother is crazy allergic to them and would positively stop breathing and die if we had a cat in the house.”
“Wait, wait, wait!” I said with such excitement that they all looked wide-eyed at me. “Are you serious? Do you really? Do you have a dog?” I’d long yearned to have a dog, but there were none allowed in McKinsey Shows, as there were in other carnivals. Mr. Burnell McKinsey said dogs were “filthy beasts” and forbade people who were in any way associated with his operation from having such a pet. I had seen photographs of dogs, of course, many breeds, each beautiful in its way. When Captain and I were traveling the speakeasy circuit, I sometimes saw dogs, though nearly always at a distance. I had read Mr. Jack London’sThe Call of the Wild, the fine story of a noble dog named Buck, his journey from a life of abuse and suffering at the hands of men to the leader of a wolf pack, free and unbowed, as Nature intended him to be. I readWhite Fangby Mr. London andA Dog’s Taleby Mr. Mark Twain and what other dog stories Captain had from time to time come upon in his thievery, and I had enjoyed them. I’d long thought that dogs would prove to be more loving and loyal—even wiser—than the human beings I had known. Now that fortune had brought kinder and more generous people into my life, I hoped only that any dog I came to know would be their equal.
“His name’s Rafael,” Gertrude said. “He’s German. He worked as a shepherd before he came to us.”
“He is a shepherd,” Isadora clarified, “but he never worked as one. He was bred for motion pictures, and he’s as handsome as Rin Tin Tin, handsome and very smart, but he can’t act.”
“He could if he wanted to,” Gertrude elaborated. “He just can’t be a phony the way actors are. He can’t pretend to be afraid or vicious or dumb because he isn’t any of those things.”
“He’s a killer,” Harry declared.
Isadora had no patience for such talk. “Don’t be absurd.”
“Rafael is a pissafist,” Gertrude said.
“Pacifist,” said Isadora.
Harry grew insistent. “He could be a killer if he needed to be. If some bloodthirsty Huns came down from the hills with submachine guns to murder us all, you better believe Rafael would for sure kill them.”
“Harold,” Isadora said with a sigh, “the Huns were defeated twelve years ago. It was all over after the Battle of the Marne, before you were even born.”
“That’s how much you know,” Harry said with disdain. “The Marne was in June. The Battle of Belleau Wood was in July, and nothing was close to over until the end of September, after the Battle of the Bulge.”
“All right, but that was in Europe, not here.”
“The Huns never give up,” Harry warned. “Lots of them came to the States after the war. Some of them are up in the hills with submachine guns, just waiting.”
I interrupted this discussion of recent history. “Where is this would-be killer, failed actor, and never-was sheep herder? I can’t wait to meet him.”
“We put him in the school bathroom,” Isadora said, “until we had all met you.”
Miss Blackthorn said, “He really is gentle and well behaved, but he’s big and he looks a bit fierce. We didn’t want to scare you. Now that you’ve been prepared, I’ll get him.”
As the teacher approached the door to the bathroom, Franklin said, “Rafael is just two, so he can still behave somewhat like a puppy. But he’s becoming a responsible gentleman and patrols the perimeter on the ground floor each night before the children go to bed. He’s very serious about the job. It’s quite something to see.”
Miss Blackthorn opened the lavatory door, and Rafael came into the schoolroom tentatively. He was God’s dog, truly, too beautiful for this world, black across his neck and back and the top of his bushy tail, black around the muzzle, but otherwise a mélange of various shadesof gold and copper, with here and there a lighter accent of biscuit brown. His ears were set high and erect, and the expression in his almond-shaped dark-brown eyes left no doubt that he was intelligent and alert.
He met my eyes briefly and then pretended indifference, but I knew I was nonetheless the subject of greatest interest to him. He felt obliged to make the rounds of his family, starting with Loretta and ending with Harry, sniffing them one by one, wagging his tail, allowing himself to be patted and stroked and cooed at as he made his way toward me. He stopped short and gazed up at me, his tail having gone still, his body taut. I felt that I was not only being studied but also analyzed. A dog’s sense of smell is many thousands of times greater than that of a human being, and its nose brings it more information than do our five senses collectively. The children and their teacher could only speculate about the abnormalities that were concealed by my robe, but in that first inspection, Rafael came to know my physical nature perhaps more completely than did Loretta and Franklin even though they’d seen me bared upon a stage. I feared that the dog would find me too strange to trust or befriend me. Then he settled to the floor at my feet and rolled onto his back and offered me his tummy, his forepaws limp in a gesture of surrender.
Everyone laughed, and Franklin said, “Rafael, you are a very good judge of character.”
“Alida,” said Loretta, “your status as a member of the family is now official. You’ve been granted a four-paw rating.”
I knelt beside my new friend. If having his belly stroked was a pleasure to him, it was a greater pleasure for me to attend him. My concern about not belonging at the Bram faded. If I were to number the best moments of my life, that first encounter with Rafael would be one of them—and not toward the bottom of the list.
When I rose and the shepherd got to his feet, Isadora asked, “Will you be joining the class with us, Alida? Miss Blackthorn is a sterntaskmaster. She exhausts us. We suspect she was once a drill sergeant. But we learn so much, and we have a lot of fun.”
I understood the girl’s thinking. I was mere inches taller than she was and every bit as slight. Though I was seventeen, I appeared to be her contemporary. However, of all the places in the Bram where I might belong, this schoolroom was the least of them. Before I could think of a polite excuse for declining, Loretta said, “Alida isn’t just seventeen. She’s also quite well educated. She has other interests that she needs to pursue on her own.”
Only when I saw Miss Blackthorn relax did I realize she had tensed at Isadora’s suggestion that I might join the class. Her work was difficult enough, instructing three students of different ages in the same room at the same time. She might be stressed to add a fourth. I assumed the children were no longer sent to a public or a private school because sweet Gertrude had been ridiculed by those who found her hand a source of amusement. Children can be cruel. She would be safe here among her siblings, her self-esteem intact. I complimented Miss Blackthorn on her obvious talent for instruction. The children enjoyed being taught by her, and their comportment was impressive. The three were attentive and respectful toward her, but she had not repressed their youthful spirit. She seemed genuinely pleased by my words. Yet an aspect of her expression and a sharpness in her eyes suggested she was suspicious of me. Experience—and many novels—had taught me that if people regard you with suspicion when no credible reason exists to do so, they are keeping from you a secret that you need to know and that it is they who have earned suspicion.
Fourteen
