Innocence

Years later, after other experiences with dogs, I wondered if their species were shaped and charmed to serve as four-legged guides able to assist in leading humanity back to our first—and lost—home. By the example of their joy and humility, by wanting nothing more than food and play and love, by the deep satisfaction that they take from those humble things, they belie all creeds of power and fame. Although they have the teeth to tear, it is by swish of tail and yearning eyes that they most easily get what they want.

And as it happened, in a critical hour, dogs did prove to be all that I imagined and more.

48

THE CITY STEADILY SUCCUMBED TO THE BLIZZARD, but Gwyneth did not. The chain-wrapped winter tires churned through soft powder and spat it out in compacted wads. Snow fell at nearly two inches an hour, and already more than half a foot mantled the ground, but she still thought this was a perfect night for speed, pressing the Land Rover faster, faster, making it slalom around a few stalled vehicles that busy tow trucks had not yet snared, taking corners as if the danger of tipping and rolling were obviated by some ruling she had won in court against the laws of physics.

Even as young as I was, I remembered a time when the plows were quick into the streets and the cleanup began even as the storm was still rising toward its peak. These days, judging by the delay in response, you might have thought the city relied, as in an earlier century, on brigades of shovelers who needed time to bundle against the cold and fortify themselves with spirits before reporting, and on wagon sleds and dray horses to haul away the accumulation.

Simon, to whose rescue we were riding, turned out to be the homeless man who, in search of redeemable soda cans to cash in for whiskey money, found the badly beaten, naked little girl in the Dumpster. Decades before that discovery, he had been a young artist whose career was taking off. But something about success scared him so much that, with alcohol as his copilot and a tendency to burn business relationships as if they were slips of a magician’s flash paper, he managed to stall out and crash so spectacularly that in one year he went from sleeping in a penthouse to passing his nights in a bedroll under bridges.

After his breakdown in the doughnut shop, where he brought the battered child, and after he was released from the hospital, he gave up alcohol overnight, without the help of drugs or counseling, or a twelve-step program. Lifting a glass or a bottle of the old poison to his lips, he recoiled from the stench of it, and when he tried to sip it, invariably he vomited. The smell and taste were as foul to him as the malodor in the Dumpster. Each time that he tried to drink, he was forced to confront the realization, which he’d made in the hospital, that it was not merely weak but also evil to throw away your life when so many had their lives or the promise of their future taken from them by cruel people or by the brutal forces of nature.

He lived, sober and industrious, in an eccentric neighborhood, an enclave of picturesque 1920s-era bungalows on a loop of two-lane called John Ogilvie Way, in the southeast borough, near the river.

During the first half of the nineteenth century, the city rang with more harmonies than discords, and everywhere there were things to please the eye. But during decades when the government turned to expert planners, much of the past was considered déclassé, if not abhorrent. Architecture that raised in the mind an appreciation of history was deemed embarrassing because much of that history was considered unfortunate, if not shameful. No place could be made for what was quaint or charming or noble. Anything that might be seen as the work of sentimental primitives was torn down and replaced by massive buildings seemingly inspired by Soviet apartment blocks and by forests of steel-and-glass office towers that blazed in daylight as if they were more glorious than the sun that shed it.

The bungalows of John Ogilvie Way became popular with painters, sculptors, and ceramics artists who lived in them and used them also as their personal galleries. The neighborhood survived long enough to become a tourist attraction, a cultural asset about which the city boasted. Because contemporary art is said to be about the future and progress, about abstraction and the impossibility of knowing truth, it is embraced not just by genuine aficionados but also by those who despise the past. So Ogilvie Way remained, encircled by structures that, in their bold expressions of brute power and command, looked as if they were from a parallel world in which Hitler triumphed.