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 hat of the newest style, looking thirty years younger than her age and unembarrassed by her aura of total self-absorption; and finally his wife, a plain, pale, humorless woman who could have been thirty or sixty, clearly ill at ease in the great out-of-doors—a woman, he surmised, who either suffered from sleeping sickness or had been traumatized by giving life. The Professor’s attitude toward them all was at once devoted, exacting, and absent, and for Father too they quickly disappeared from his mind forever.
“Welcome, welcome to the land of the three wishes.”
Mother had appeared on the veranda in all her golden glory, hair falling about her shoulders, a welcome tray of raspberry-colored spritzers in her hands. Entranced, the Professor dropped the rope and dreamily advanced up the curving stair, clearly disoriented but homing in on Mother’s golden bee. She said something sweetly inaudible, and his right hand came up to his heart as he bowed. Felix was gazing into Scharf ’s eyes, the Professor into Ainoha’s. The other women held onto one another. The air was full of incipient disaster. But as the Professor toasted his hostess and greedily drank his spritzer, walking downstairs backward to regrasp the rope which Felix had held for him, Ainoha realized at once, as so many times before, that she had rendered the other women invisible and must immediately deal with the consequences. She set down the tray, descended the stair and pried the dour child’s hand from her mother’s. Then she took the dazed wife’s arm as a man might at a cotillion, and matching the fierce stare of the red-helmeted mother, escorted them all to the grove, where Cherith’s Brook careened around its stony corners, exposing the gnarled roots of horse chestnut trees and providing sufficient grottos and ladders for the least inquisitive of animals.
No word had yet passed among the men; it was as if we were in a silent film running backward. The three of us stood alone with Scharf in the courtyard. The animal read my father immediately, rolled over and over, twining the rope about his neck so as to strangle himself, and in the process jerked the Professor to his knees. The men took each other’s measure, and the courting began. Father crouched to wind up the coils of rope and, laying one hand on the Professor’s knee while the other rested even more gently across the animal’s foam-flecked mouth, inquired with a dry laugh:
“And what seems to be the problem, Herr Doktor Professor?”
From his knees, the Professor twisted his huge head to one side and came right to the point:
“He won’t mind.”
Felix stepped across Scharf ’s tummy, his four legs were now rigid and pointing to the heavens. “Ah, yes,” he murmured, “there appears in his makeup a great distance from the lip to the cup.” Then he pointed out that Scharf was apparently a cross between the rare stickelhäar and the now extinct Polish sea-hound, a point of origin which seemed to hold no interest for his client.
“How did you come by this animal?” Felix inquired.
The Professor shrugged. “My daughter. She wanted an orphan. She picked him out at the doghaus.”
“And this is your first family pet?” A question to which he already knew the answer, so didn’t listen to the reply.
The Professor had raised himself up, and dusting off his knees, emitted a huge sigh. “He’s turned out to be . . . a kind of joke!” he blurted.
“A tragical joke, it seems,” Felix added, taking the coil of rope softly from his client’s hands.
“Exactly. Though I confess I’ve developed a sort of strange affection for the animal and his perversities.”
Scharf ’s paws were now milling in the air as he dug a furrow of gravel with his skull.
“Does he make you feel safer in your home?”
“On the contrary,” the Professor said candidly, “the entire house has been arranged in his defense.” Then, more softly, “If the truth be told, he spends most of the day in the children’s beds.”
Felix nodded gravely. He had seen many similar cases among those reared in the doghaus, he explained—a particular form of neurasthenia in which the animal took to bed in the prime of life, choosing a soft landing when he ought to be charging through the park and challenging everything that moves. Lacking human stimulation in his early youth, he went on wearily, the dog becomes equally unresponsive to love or fear.
“This
