a certain cockiness, as well. During that first meeting, she seemed always to be either laughing or ready to laugh, and Judi said she had been the class clown of her graduating group.
Because the male Labrador remained in training, Trixie took advantage of her new status as an ordinary dog to tease him and to tempt him to break his sit-stay. While we listened to Judi and Julia instruct us in Trixie’s basic commands, we watched our girl take three different toys to the Lab and hold them inches from his face, jubilantly squeaking them to impress on him what fun he was missing.
Her favorite toy was what we called a dangle ball, a big fuzzy ball dangling on a loop of braided rope. She swung this in front of the Lab’s face, like a hypnotist swinging a pendant on a chain, and when he let his mouth sag open, tempted to make a grab for the toy, Trixie stepped back, insisting that he break his sit-stay.
In spite of our girl’s clownish tendency, we supposedly would rarely need to correct her behavior. Judi said that Trixie was so well trained and so smart that “if this dog does something wrong, the fault will be yours, not hers, because you will have gotten a command wrong or will have forgotten to do some part of her daily routine that she requires to stay on her schedule.”
Linda and Elaine left, not to return to work, as we might have hoped, but to make funeral arrangements for beloved aunts who had died that morning. What a sad world this is, with so much death.
When Judi and Julia left a few minutes later, Trixie set off to explore every corner of the house, bottom to top and down again. She would repeat this practice over the years in every friend’s house to which she was invited. With one exception, she never took liberties with anything in those homes, but her curiosity was matched only by her assumption that she was welcome to snoop everywhere.
Vito, Lynn, Gerda, and I took Trixie with us to dinner that evening at a restaurant that welcomed dogs on its patio. When given the command “under,” she settled under the table, facing out, and watched the other diners. She showed no interest in our food, was never restless, and made no sound.
Later in the evening, we brought her for the first time to our house on the hill, and she at once explored it as she had explored the beach house. We put her bed in a corner of the master bedroom, and she settled into it. Although we invited her to sleep at the bottom of our bed, and although she’d had some furniture privileges in her previous homes, she preferred the familiarity of her dog bed.
As we were lying in the dark, waiting for sleep, Gerda said, “A little scary, huh?”
I knew what she meant: The responsibility for this beautiful creature was now ours alone. Her health, her happiness, and the maintenance of the training that made her not only an ideal canine but also contributed to her confidence and to her sense of her place in the world—those things we must attend to no less dutifully than we would have tended to the needs of a child.
Sometime during the night, I woke with the feeling that I was being watched. Gerda and I sleep in a pitch-black room, where the windows are covered by wooden panels at night. I didn’t want to switch on the flashlight that I keep on my nightstand, so still lying on my side, I squinted in search of animal eyeshine, but could see none. Tentatively, I reached out past the side of the bed with my right hand, and at once found Trixie’s head. For a couple of minutes, in the dark, I rubbed the sensitive part of one of her ears between my thumb and index finger, and she leaned into this caress. Then she sighed and returned to her bed in the corner, and soon slept.
I imagined she had stood there, breathing in my complex scent, analyzing me with her talented nose, asking herself if I would be kind to her and love her and be worth loving in return. I intended never to give her reason to answer no to any of those questions.
V if she could talk, she’d do stand-up comedy
NOT LONG AFTER Trixie came to live with us, Judi sent a photograph of our girl with the rest of the dogs in her CCI class. “I don’t need to identify Trixie for you,” she said. “You’ll have no trouble recognizing her.”
In the photo, a dozen dogs face the camera in a semicircle. Most are goldens and hard to tell apart in a photograph, but a few are Labradors. Eleven of the dogs sit erect, in stately poses, chests out, heads raised, each holding the end of its leash in its mouth as proof of its high degree of learning.
The twelfth dog sits with legs akimbo, grinning, head cocked, a comic portrait of a clownish canine, ready for fun. This obvious free spirit is Trixie.
A trainer told us that when Trixie and her classmates were being taught the stay command, Trixie learned it quicker than the rest. At that point, further lessons on the same subject became a chance for her to have fun.
After the dogs seemed to learn to stay, all the trainers went into the adjacent room, closing the door behind them, leaving not one human in sight. Between rooms, a view window on the trainers’ side was a mirror from the dogs’ perspective. The teachers could watch the students and learn how long each maintained the stay.
For a minute, all the dogs did well. Then Trixie surveyed the room to make doubly sure no human had returned, and she broke her stay. She went to each of her classmates, one by one, and tried to tease him or her into joining the rebellion.
One of the trainers rattled the doorknob. Trixie sprang back to her original position, as if she had never disobeyed the command.
Until all the dogs in the class had learned to hold the stay, Trixie played the temptress. Frequently she induced a few classmates to break their positions, but at the rattle of the doorknob, she sprinted to her place and sat with her chest out and head raised, letting her pals take the fall.
Many incidents confirmed that Trixie had a sense of humor and suggested an uncanny level of intelligence, but my favorite occurred one night when we went to our friend—and assistant—Elaine’s house for dinner. By this time, we had moved into our new home and closed our offices in Newport Center. Elaine now worked in our house with Linda, and Trixie spent hours every day in their office.
I’m reluctant to compliment Elaine in this account because she’ll take it as a sign of weakness. Around here, giving anyone too many compliments brings out in that person the same predatory instinct that energizes a hungry lion when it glimpses a limping gazelle. My kind words will earn me much mockery not only from all our friends who know Elaine but also from Elaine herself. I must admit, however, that being a target can be as much fun as dishing it out.
Anyway, here goes: She is an attractive lady with lovely blue eyes, much older than anyone would believe, very much older, beyond my powers of calculation, but it is her personality that wins her so many friends and makes them so loyal to her. Elaine genuinely likes people, and she is sincerely interested in the lives of everyone she meets.
When Elaine worked for us, she went to the post office every day, to Federal Express and the office-supply store, and numerous other places, in part because we wanted her out of the house as much as possible, but also in part because we never had to worry that Elaine would be unkind to anyone or impatient with anyone. When you are even to a small degree a public figure, it is especially important that the people interacting with the world on your behalf should be liked and respected by everyone with whom they deal. Long after Elaine retired from her position with us and even after we finally were able to expunge the peculiar stains from the limestone floor around her desk, people everywhere that she went on our behalf were still asking about her, still under the spell of her inexplicable charm.
One thing that particularly fascinates
