Cherished by Barbara Abercrombie Read Free Book Online Page A

furnishing information to the many thousands of donors. You may be assured that your dog is receiving the best of care and attention.
    Thanking you for your generosity and interest in furthering the war effort, I am,
Very truly yours,
GEORGE s. PAYSON
1st Lt. Q.M.C.,
Asst. Dir. Of Tng.
    I lived on that letter for weeks, all the while furthering the war effort by not writing to Cat Island. (Had there been a Cats for Defense, would the army have done the training on Dog Island?) I did appreciate the magnitude of the task, so I focused my imaginings not on how Fluff was doing as a rawrecruit but on how bravely he would behave once he got close to enemy lines and picked up the scent of a fallen soldier.
    Early that spring, Sam the mailman brought a delivery slip from Railway Express, the precursor of such freight and package services as FedEx and UPS. The Contents box was blank, but the Sender box said, ominously, “Cat Island War Dog RTC.” Because my mother hadn’t driven a car since she dented the fender of a Jordan sedan in 1929, I had to wait for my father to come home from work and take me down to the train station. When I presented the slip to the stationmaster, he rummaged around in a storeroom for a while, then emerged with a wooden crate. Inside sat Mr. Fluff, obviously intact and panting with excitement. He went berserk when he saw me, and the feeling was mutual. I was too excited to wonder why he’d come back home so soon, but an explanation eventually arrived in the form of another form letter, still vivid in my memory but no longer in my files. Fluff had failed basic training. No dishonorable behavior was implied, but no details were provided either. In any case, he was a civilian once again, and all mine, once again, to not take care of.
    At least for a while. One day my father came home with a big bag of cocktail franks for an impending dinner party. He’d bought them at Ershowsky’s — how fateful names stick in the mind! — a Kosher delicatessen on the Lower East Side. (Have I spelled it right? Yes. Through the secular miracle of Google I see that S. Ershowsky and Brothers were on East Houston Street.) My parents were Jewish, but not observant; Kosher delis were the closest they came to temple. With the franks, though, came a story. Mr. Ershowsky’s son, or nephew, or who knows at this point, had contracted polio, and wanted more than anything else in the world to have a dog. The little boy represented half of a critical mass. The other half, I now see with the rueful wisdom of hindsight, was my father, who must have wanted more than anything else in the world to get rid of my dog. Why this was so I can’t say, and why I succumbed to this second round of manipulation I cannot fathom, but I must have agreed, however reluctantly, because off my dog went once again, not to perform brave deeds on a battlefield, but to a deli, to succor a Jewish stand-in for Tiny Tim.

    This began as a good-faith effort to tell a story about a cherished dog, and here I am, still trying to figure my parents out. One thing I can say about them with reasonable certainty is that they were not great dog lovers. One thing I can say about myself at that time is that I didn’t fight them tooth and nail for the right to keep Mr. Fluff in our home. I don’t recall weeping or screaming, or throwing a last-ditch fit. I do remember, though, the little channel between Fluffy’s eyes andhow smooth it felt when I ran my thumb up it; how he strutted his stuff on his squat little legs, and how he could sit at the dinner table, begging for food for hours on end.

6.
SEAMUS AND SPUD

Judith Lewis Mernit
    T hey were born in June, the year a Chinese man stood before the tanks in Tiananmen Square and the Berlin Wall gave way to perestroika. The year I got married to a man I didn’t love because I didn’t know what else to do.
    In the first picture I took of them together, they are carrying a stick.