The dog grunted and ran a pink tongue over its bristly lips before drifting back off to sleep. “Well then, maybe this is your lucky day.”
Mr. Chen gawked at the flabby woman with the designer jogging suit and Sony Walkman. “My son’s a veterinarian with very liberal payment plans for people in a financial bind.”
“I don’t take charity.”
“No, I wouldn’t think so,” Ida pointed at the dog, “but what about her… does she take charity?”
*****
Ida Goldfarb called her son, Robert, at the animal hospital. "I met an oriental man, Mr. Chen, in the park. He has a sick dog but can’t take the animal for treatment, because he’s living on a fixed income and hard up for cash."
"What breed?"
"A Shih Tzu - jet black with a wispy gray goatee. Very cute." There was a slight pause. "Aren't you going to ask the dog's name?"
"I was getting to that."
"Wei-shan, which means ‘great and benevolent’ in Mandarin. It's a male name but Mrs. Chen, who passed away a few years back, never confirmed gender before choosing."
"What’s wrong with the dog?"
Mrs. Goldfarb described what had happened. "Have your friend bring the dog by the office tomorrow in the late afternoon."
"He's not my friend. I hardly know the guy." She hung up the phone.
The following day, Mr. Chen arrived at the Brandenburg Animal Hospital in the late afternoon. Robert placed a stethoscope on Wei-shan’s narrow chest. "Dog's got a heart murmur... about a three."
"Three what?"
"Three out of six … a moderately-severe heart murmur." He handed the instrument to Mr. Chen, while continuing to hold the metal disc in place.
Kathunkish. Kathunkish. Kathunkish. Kathunkish. Yes, sure enough, tailing away from the diastole was an ominous, raspy sound that didn't belong. "Three out of six," Mr. Chen handed the stethoscope back.
"The condition’s manageable with medication." Robert placed the dog on a digital scale and waited until the numbers settle. "Dog's got to lose weight and I'm giving you some medication. Also, we will need to see Wei-shan back here in two weeks for blood tests to check chemistries and bilirubin." Robert scribbled notes in a manila folder and then brought medication from an adjoining room. "This pill," he held a pale yellow tablet not much bigger than the head of a pin in the palm of his hand, "is Salix, a diuretic to drain excess fluid. A half hour after you give her the pill, the dog will need to go outside to pee, so plan accordingly."
"And the other?" Mr. Chen took the plastic container from the doctor's hand and held it up to the light.
"Enacard – it's an ACE inhibitor to regulate pulse.” The older man seemed muddled by the technical jargon. “The medication lessens the workload on heart muscle and decreases fluid retention. Wei-shan gets a half tablet of both twice daily." Rummaging about in the supply cabinet, he located a surgical scalpel fitted with a rounded, number fifteen blade. Robert shook one of the pills out onto the counter. Placing the blade across the score line on the tiny pill, he pressed down gently and the chalky tablet spilt apart into equal portions. “There’s a month supply, sixty pills.”
Mr. Chen scooped Wei-shan up in his arms. “My social security check doesn’t come until the beginning of the month.”
“I’ll bill you,” Robert lied.
“And the pills?”
“The cost will be included in the statement.” He would forewarn the receptionist to ‘dead file’ Mr. Chen’s billing invoice and write the expense off as a tax loss. “For now, the dog can stroll about the yard as best she can. As her strength returned, Wei-shan might become more adventuresome but no more trips to the park.” He ran his fingertips over the dog’s abdomen and around the hips kneading the roll of excess flesh. “Two tablespoons of moist food twice a day - that's all she gets until the weight comes off.
“How much is she now?”
“Eight pounds four ounces,” Robert replied. “The dog needs to slim down to seven-two."
"Over a pound … that's almost a tenth of the dog's body weight."
Robert shrugged and glanced away. “Until the workload on the heart is reduced, there’s always the chance of another attack like the episode the other day.” Hypoxia - that was the textbook term for what happened to Wei-shan at the athletic field. The dog's stressed-out heart couldn't pump sufficient oxygen to vital body tissues and the pet collapsed, fell momentarily unconscious until the condition stabilized. “One more thing… every time you feed table scraps, you’re just killing her with kindness.”
“No. I won’t do that anymore,” Mr. Chen said remorsefully.
*****
Harry Chen, who for thirty-five years managed the Kowloon Oriental Restaurant, was a rabid history buff, a fact which Robert discovered on the Chinaman’s third visit. “The thirteen American colonies never intended to come together as a nation.” Every April Mr. Chen participated in a reenactment of the historic battle between the British Redcoats and local militia in the Minute Man National Forest just north of Boston in Lexington. Harry Chen assumed the role of a British soldier “When the first Continental Congress met on October 26th, 1774, none of the colonies intended to join together as a nation. Each region wanted to protect their economic interests... the New England colonies with their fish, timber and whaling, the southerners trading rum, cotton, tobacco and slaves.”
“Interesting.” Robert placed the dog on the scale. The animal was rather frail but stable. There had been several severe coughing fits, which was symptomatic of the condition, but no repeats of the grotesque incident at the park.
“By the time the Second Continental Congress met a half year later, the Battles of Lexington and Concord were already well underway, but even then, the colonists were still seeking reconciliation with England.”
Robert ran the stethoscope over Wei-Shan’s slender chest. The heart badly compromised, it was doubtful the pet would survive the year. “After the war everything changed,” Robert offered.
“No, not really.” Mr. Chen objected in his soft-spoken, understated manner. “The Congress of the Confederation met from 1781 straight through to 1789. Under the Articles of Confederation, they had little power to compel individual states to comply with any of their decisions.” Mr. Chen chuckled humorlessly. “More and more prospective delegates elected to the Confederation Congress declined to serve in it, the leading men in each state preferring to serve in their own state governments. The Continental Congress frequently couldn’t even establish a quorum. Only when the Articles of Confederation were superseded by the Constitution of the United States, did congress take the upper hand.”
Robert handed the dog back to his owner. “We never learned any of this in high school.”
Nodding somberly, the Chinaman nuzzled the frail dog with his chin. “What we have now two hundred years later,” the Oriental spoke in an offhand manner, as the facts were common knowledge, “is a plutocracy not a democracy.”
*****
A week later Robert's sister, Naomi, visited unannounced. He had just showered and was getting ready for bed. A stout, brown-haired woman with bowling pin calves, Naomi had been reasonably pretty once. Just barely. Sandblasted with a profusion of freckles, her middle-aged, fleshy face had lost its earthy appeal. In its place was a callow harshness that set Robert's nerves on edge. “I stopped by Mom’s apartment earlier.” Naomi’s tone was acidic. “She was in the living room when I arrived sipping that Bigelow English breakfast tea she favors.
“That’s nice.”
“A Chinaman, Mr. Chen, was sitting on the sofa also drinking tea with his ratty little dog curled up on the Persian carpet.”
“Wei-shan.”
“What’s that?”
“The dog’s name… it’s Chinese. He didn't offer the English translation.”
“Mother ran into Mr. Chen in the park and invited him back to her condo.” Naomi glanced distractedly about the apartment her hazel eyes never coming to rest on any particular object. “The Oriental didn’t feel comfortable leaving the decrepit beast cooped up alone in his muggy apartment with no air conditioning, so mother graciously suggested that he bring the pet.”
“The dog’s quite sick.”
Naomi scowled with her head tilted at a sharp incline. Robert noted that, over the years, his sister’s freckles had grown more pronounced, resembling an epidemic of chocolaty liver spots. In the kitchen the dishwasher shifted from wash to rinse cycle. Robert wanted desperately to go to bed, to be fresh for morning surgery. He had an operation - a beagle bitch riddled with mastitis - scheduled for eight o’clock. The biopsy came back benign, nothing more than a massive invasion of fatty lipomas. He would open her up from the pelvic area to the top of the sternum and clear away everything on the left side, wait a few months and repeat the process on the right. It was a gamble. Even though oncology proved negative, the root problem could be hormonal, since the dog had never been spayed, and that sticky issue would also need to be addressed.
The previous week he sliced a cauliflower-like papilloma from the left leg of an eighty pound mastiff. The tumor was situated just below the skin. The dog would be sore for a week or two. The pit bull with aggressive rhabdomyosarcoma on Monday wasn’t so lucky. A hopeless case, the animal had to be put down only hours after the exploratory surgery. "I just read a biography of the English writer, William Somerset Maugham," Robert deflected the conversation. “Are you familiar with Maugham's novels?”
Naomi, who taught ninth grade English, stared at her brother dully, trying to decipher his intent. "Of Human Bondage, The Razor's Edge… I don’t see what that’s got to do with the Don Juan Chinaman."
Robert sat down on the bottom riser of the stairs leading to the upper level. "Mother's morbidly shy. Even when we were children, she could never hold her own in social situations. Before Dad died she hadn’t any close friends outside his social circle." Robert spoke in a plodding, unhurried manner, such that it was unclear whether he was addressing his sister or carrying on a interior monologue. “W.S. Maugham was socially inept. He stuttered and felt inadequate in public. His homosexual lover, Frederick Haxton was an extrovert, a glib and witty conversationalist. Without Haxton's clever tongue, Maugham probably would have ended up a social recluse."
“I certainly hope you’re not suggesting...”
“When an agoraphobic, sixty-year-old woman invites a poor widower for tea, it’s a mitzvah, a worthy deed, not reason for sordid speculation.” Naomi winced violently. Her blotchy, bloated face morphed through a series of unflattering grimaces. He could have said more, but Robert's sister looked like she might deposit her supper on the living room rug.
“He’s after her money. You read about these things in the tabloids every day. Some emotionally vulnerable widow fritters her life savings away on some silver-tongued Romeo.”
“What do you intend to do?”
“Snuff the life out of this bathetic farce before it ends in tragedy.” Retreating to the front door, Naomi flashed her brother a dirty look. “And for the record, that W.S. Maugham remark was a cheap shot.”
*****
The following Tuesday Mr. Chen returned with Wei-shan. The dog had dropped a half pound and was stronger but only marginally so. “She gets out of breath easily." He held the pet against his chest protectively. "And every morning has the coughing fits, but other than that...”
Robert listened to the heart. The murmur hadn’t gotten much worse. “You’re giving her the pills twice daily?” The older man nodded. “I’ll be back in a moment.” He took the dog into an adjacent examining room and drew two vials of blood. “Are you familiar with acupuncture?” Robert asked when he returned.
Mr. Chen ran his fingers through a limp mass of thinning hair. “No more than most people.”
“I recently treated a Saint Bernard with epilepsy. The dog suffered crippling seizures on a daily basis. Anti-convulsive medicine didn’t worked.” He reached out and scratched Wei-shan behind the ear. “A colleague just down the road was using acupuncture in his holistic practice. I thought he was a crackpot, but out of desperation referred them there."
“And?”
Robert smiled sheepishly. “By the second acupuncture treatment, the grand mal seizures disappeared. The dog has been symptom free.”
“Can he cure heart murmurs?”
“Unfortunately it doesn’t work that way.”
Cracking the examining room door, Robert accompanied Mr. Chen back to the waiting room. The Oriental pointed at a twenty dollar bill with Andrew Jackson’s stern, chisel-chinned image staring out from a metallic framed hanging from the far wall. “Our seventh president… not the nicest human being that ever walked the planet.”
As Wei-Shan’s devoted master explained things ‘Old Hickory’ expanded the spoils system during his presidency to strengthen his political base. During the Nullification Crisis he declared that states did not have the right to challenge federal laws. He singlehandedly destroyed the national bank by vetoing the renewal of its charter, championed the Indian Removal Act, forcibly removing thousands of Native Americans to the Indian Territories of Oklahoma. “Because of his treachery and ruthlessness in battle, the Seminoles nicknamed him ‘Sharp Knife’”
The door opened and a brunette dragged an uncooperative bulldog into the foyer. Only eight weeks old, the cream-colored puppy with tan markings already weighed four times more than Wei-shan. The bulldog would ultimately top out at half a hundred pounds. She was lovable, lethargic, pigheaded, disagreeable and indiscriminately slobbered over anyone who extended a hand in friendship. “He kept slaves,” Robert noted.
“Over his lifetime, he owned upwards of three hundred.” The Chinaman lowered Wei-Shan to the floor and the two dogs began to sniff each other. “During Jackson’s time many slaves escaped bondage in Georgia and Alabama, running off to live with the Seminoles in Florida. Descendants of those original runaways established a peaceful farming community around an abandoned Spanish fort deep inside the territory. Jackson took an army of Southern whites illegally into the territory, attacked the free black community, murdered 270 men, women and children and then took the rest back to Georgia and Alabama and gave them to any whites claiming to be descendants of the owners of the original runaways!”
“High crimes and misdemeanors,” Robert muttered. Mr. Chen’s historical musings were always entertaining, but he had to get back to work. The bulldog nuzzling his left leg needed a distemper shot and then there was the Chihuahua in the adjacent room with loose bowels. “And for that we elect him to the highest office.”
“Twice!” Retrieving his pet, the older man who every Patriots’ Day dressed up in full Redcoat regalia with musket and powder horn – the only British soldier of questionable parentage - disappeared into the parking lot.
*****
Summer petered out in a final blast of bone-wearying humidity coupled with scorching heat. One Sunday in mid-September, Robert stopped by his mother's apartment. Mrs. Goldfarb was watching the evening news. "Did you get the invitation?"
The question caught him momentarily off guard. "Joel's bar mitzvah. The third week in October." Naomi's youngest son, decked out in prayer shawl and yarmulke, would be reciting the ceremonial Hebrew verses and reading from the torah.
"Hungry?"
Robert shook his head in the negative.
Mrs. Goldfarb lowered the volume on the TV several decibels, rose and went to the kitchen. A minute later she returned with a glass of black raspberry soda and plate of coconut macaroons. "Too bad you didn’t come a half hour earlier." She handed him a sticky cookie and napkin. "Mr. Chen and Wei-shan were visiting."
Strange! Robert had been to visit his mother on at least a dozen occasions since running Wei-shan's blood work, and she never mentioned either the Oriental or his hairy companion. "And how's the dog doing?"
Mrs. Goldfarb shrugged noncommittally. "No better or worse than the rest of us. The dog coughs her fool head off whenever she gets overly excited and still has to be carried up and down stairs."
"That's to be expected," Robert replied. The lapdog’s thorax was an anatomically claustrophobic space, no bigger than a one-bedroom, efficiency apartment for the animal's most precious organs. Wei-shan's swollen heart was pressing on the lungs. As she slept, fluid built up, leading to the coughing-retching episodes. Sometimes, in worse case scenarios, the delicate trachea collapsed from physical duress, the lungs hemorrhaged. But Robert had no intention sharing that morbid bit of incidental trivia with either his mother or Wei-shan's master.
"Harry is a history buff," Mrs. Goldfarb said.
“Yes, I know.” Robert couldn't linger. He had to get home. His daughter was taking skating lessons and he needed to shuttle her to the rink."The dog is doing reasonably well, then?"
"She hasn't had any more fainting fits, if that's what you mean." Mrs. Goldfarb fidgeted with her stubby hands, glanced at her son briefly and looked away. "Regarding Joel's bar mitzvah, Mr. Chen will be accompanying me."
"Okay." Robert was having trouble visualizing the scene. There would be the traditional ice sculptures, a chopped liver pâté, a sea of Semitic faces, the bearded, ultra-conservative Rabbi Jacob Goldstein decked out in an ornate robe and the widower, Harry Chen.
"What about Wei-shan… is she on the guest list?"
"I already told your sister," Mrs. Goldfarb ignored the silly banter, "and, needless-to-say she didn't take the news very well."
"When did you speak with her?"
"A half hour ago."
Robert did some mental calculations. Either there would be a shrill message waiting for him on the answering machine or, more likely, Naomi would show up unannounced as he was preparing for bed and harangue him for the better part of an hour with her paranoid conspiracy theories.
"Bringing Mr. Chen… it's non-negotiable," Mrs. Goldfarb picked up the thread of her previous remark. "At my delicate age, a woman does as she pleases."
"Naomi seems to think Mr. Chen has ulterior, pecuniary motives."
"Yes, she told me so in rather graphic terms."
Robert could picture his sister – a female version of Old Hickory - haranguing the mother with scandalous accusations. "And what do you think?"
"Mr. Chen is an old man with a sick dog."
An old man with a sick dog…
Wei-shan's' breathing was labored, too shallow, too rapid - the flailing heart too weak for the extravagant, insatiable demands of the flesh. Studying the animal's rheumy eyes over the past year, Robert witnessed physical distress, hopelessness and fear. He also sensed an abiding love for the frail Chinaman who carried her into the examining room.
When Robert finished the medical workup and the visit was over, the elderly widower lifted his dog in a scrupulously efficient manner. It was the sort of thing only a savvy animal breeder or vet would ever notice. Harry Chen grabbed the animal rather forcefully by the scruff of the neck, curled the free hand around the dog's hind quarters slipping the splayed fingers beneath the belly. Lifting with both hands in a deft, choreograph motion, he cradled the torso across the length of his left forearm. The other arm immediately engaged the rib cage forming a perfect cradle - a warm and comforting bed of flesh. The dog was an invalid; any awkward or jarring motion an affront to the infirmed. Only a man who had rehearsed that move a hundred - no, a thousand - times could pull it off with such effortless aplomb. The animal's suffering congealed in a solid lump of heartache that played itself out in the corners of Mr. Chen's thin lips along with lingering moistness in the corners of his eyes.
Robert's sister called Mr. Chen a conniving lothario, a gold-digging, slant-eyed charlatan. She never saw how he lifted his best friend, never witnessed the intimacy, the commonality, between the Chinaman and his damaged dog.
On the landing Robert waited for the elevator.
Ding! A bell sounded softly and the lift arrived just as the door to Mrs. Goldfarb’s apartment creaked open. “Mr. Chen will be accompanying me to Joel's bar mitzvah,” the older woman stated in a terse, no-nonsense tone.
“Yes, I heard you the first time.”
“If Naomi continues to make a hullabaloo, I simply won’t attend.”
Robert stepped into the elevator but leaned back out just as the door began to close. “Neither will I, Mother.”
The Moribund Moose
At 8 p.m., Ruth Ostrowski cracked the bathroom faucet and began filling the tub at a lazy dribble. Except for a slight limp, the aftermath of hip surgery, the pear-shaped, soft-bellied woman moved about the cramped bathroom with the somnolent ease of a tai chi master. Before the bath was half full, a rust-pocked Subaru with a blown muffler rumbled into the driveway. Her five-year-old grandson, Clyde, trudged up the brick walkway, a bulging pillowcase slung over his shoulder. The dark-haired boy wore a tattered, flannel jacket, too short at the wrists and flimsy for the frigid, late December weather. Noticeably underweight with knobby knees and ankles, the child exuded a feral wariness as he sidled, like an under-aged convict assigned a new cell block, toward the house. The boy’s mother watched from the car. A minute passed before the noisy engine fired up and she was gone.
Hustling Clyde into the bathroom, Ruth methodically stripped him naked. Straight black hair framed an economical mouth and walnut-colored eyes. The skin glowed pallid, almost ivory, below an unruly mop of dusky hair. “I’ll be just a moment.” She carried the soiled clothes and underwear to the front door and flung them outside on the frosty stoop. In the bathroom, she fished a container of Kwell from the medicine cabinet and began pulling a fine comb through the child’s black hair.
“Ain’t got no nits this time, Nanna.”
Putting the comb aside, she kissed the boy’s neck. “A precautionary gesture.” Ruth felt the words congeal in her throat along with a decade of unanswered prayers.
Clyde poked distractedly a scab on his leg. “Mommy’s sending me a postcard from Muscle Beach.”
Ruth’s husband, Fred, wandered into the bathroom and sat down on the toilet seat. An easygoing Taurus by temperament, he was a big-boned, slope-shouldered man. “Melba flying to L A?”
Ruth adjusted the chrome lever and increased the flow of warm water. “Smitten by wanderlust and an ex-con named Ralphy.” She ran the soap between Clyde’s toes and the clear water clotted over with a dingy film. Bending over the tub, she dowsed his fine hair with avocado shampoo. “Do me a favor,” she said without looking up. “There’s a pile of dirty clothes outside the front door. Put them in the washer along with the contents of the pillow case and run everything through the light-load cycle.”
“Detergent?”
“Arm and Hammer… on the counter by the light switch. Half a cup should suffice.”
Fred went off to see to the laundry but returned a minute later. “Found this at the bottom of the pillow case.” He held a tattered library book. Six months overdue, the slim volume chronicled a boy’s trip to an island off the coast of Indonesia to visit the Komodo dragons.
When he returned, Fred intercepted his wife just outside the bathroom door. He rubbed his stubbly chin. “You had that appointment yesterday. What’d the doctor say?”
Ruth Ostrowski’s midlife crisis - if that’s what it truly was - hadn’t come in the normally prescribed manner. Rather, it snuck up on her incrementally, one negligible tribulation after another; it bushwhacked her with night sweats and terrors, sent her caterwauling toward menopause and the outer rim of her twilight years. And now, compounding her inner blight, the first frost, like a silver-haired, uninvited guest, blanketed the New England landscape. “Psychiatrist,” Ruth corrected. “It’s okay to use the ‘P’ word.”
She waved a pair of slightly dingy underwear in the air. “Clyde’s waiting.”
“He can wait a minute longer,” Fred said gently. “What’d the shrink say?”
“Dr. Shulman says I’m suffering an involutional depression, a sadness that simply wells up from inside. I fall to pieces for no apparent reason. Which is to say, I am a fraud, phony, dissembler, emotional charlatan, impostor - a woman who hasn’t even earned the right to her foolish misery.”
“What else?”
“The depression’s just a symptom, not the root cause. He gave me some pills and billed my insurance for a hundred-fifty bucks.”
Fred shrugged. “Take the medication; we’ll worry about ‘root causes’ later.”
“I flushed the pills down the toilet before breakfast. The entire bottle.”
Fred groaned. “Cripes!” Even when upset, an evenhanded sympathy undercut his sarcasm. He eyed his watch. “We’re low on milk. I’m going to the market. Might as well pick up some extra fruit and cereal.”
Ruth nodded, her lips stretched thin with impatience. “We'll be just fine.” He bussed his wife on the cheek and disappeared out the back door.
*****
Clyde cupped his hands together, a familiar ritual. From under the sink, R