Russell Banks: A Permanent Member of the Family

Scooter, on the other hand, was a loner and often out all night prowling the neighborhood for sex. We had neglected to castrate him until he was nearly three, and evidently he still thought he was obliged to endure mortal combat with other male cats for the sexual favors of females, even though he was no longer capable of enjoying those favors. He had long been regarded by Louise and the girls and by Scooter himself as my cat, probably because I was an early riser and fed him when he showed up at the back door at dawn looking like a boxer who needed a good cut man. And though neither of us overtly acknowledged it, he and I were the only males in the family. He ended up at my gatehouse down the lane not because I particularly wanted him there, but more or less by default.

In keeping with the principle of dividing custodial responsibilities equally between ex-husband and ex-wife, since the ex-husband had been claimed by the cat, it was decided that the dog would stay at the home of the ex-wife. She insisted on it. There was no discussion or negotiation. I balked at first, but then backed off. Keeping Sarge at her house was an important point of pride for Louise, the one small tilt in her favor in an otherwise equitable division of property, personal possessions and domestic responsibility. It was a small victory over me in a potentially much more destructive contest that we were both determined to avoid, and I didn’t mind handing it to her. Choose your battles, I reminded myself. Also, claiming Sarge as her own was a not-so-subtle, though probably unconscious way for Louise to claim our daughters as more hers than mine. I didn’t mind giving that to her, either, as long as I knew it was an illusion. It made me feel more magnanimous and wise than I really was.

Back then there were many differences between me and Louise as to reality and illusion, truth and falsity, and a frequent confusion of the causes of the breakdown of the marriage with the symptoms of an already broken marriage. But I’d rather not go into them here, because this story is not concerned with those differences and that confusion, which now these many years later have dwindled to irrelevance. Besides, both Louise and I have been happily remarried to new spouses for decades, and our children are practically middle-aged and have children of their own. One daughter is herself twice divorced. Like her dad.

At first the arrangement went as smoothly as Louise and I had hoped. The girls, bless their hearts, once the initial shock of the separation wore off, seemed to embrace the metronomic movement back and forth between their old familiar family home, now owned and operated solely by their mother, and the new, rough-hewn home operated by their father. With a swing set and slide from Sears, I turned the backyard into a suburban playground. It was a mild autumn with a long Indian summer, I recall, and I pitched a surplus army tent among the maples by the brook and let the girls grill hot dogs and toast marshmallows and sleep out there in sleeping bags on warm nights when there was no school the next day. Back in June, when I knew I’d soon be parenting and housekeeping on my own, I had scheduled my fall term classes and conferences for early in the day so that I could be home waiting for the girls when they stepped down from the bus. With Vickie living over the garage — although only sleeping there irregularly, as she now had a boyfriend at school who had his own apartment in town — my place that fall was like an after-school summer camp for girls.

The one unanticipated complication arose when Sarge trotted arthritically along behind the girls as best she could whenever they came from their mother’s house to mine. This in itself was not a problem, except that, when the girls returned to their mother’s at the end of their three or four scheduled nights with me, Sarge refused to follow. She stayed with me and Scooter. Her preference was clear, although her reasons were not. She even resisted being leashed and went limp like an antiwar demonstrator arrested for trespass and could not be made to stand and walk.

Within an hour of the girls’ departure, Louise would telephone and insist that I drive the dog “home,” as she put it. “Sarge lives with me,” she said. “Me and the girls.”

Custody of Sarge was a victory over Louise that I had not sought. I had never thought of her as “my” dog, but as the family dog, by which I meant belonging to the children. I tried explaining that it appeared to be Sarge’s decision to stay with me and assured her that I had done nothing to coerce the dog into staying and nothing to hinder her in any way from following the girls up the lane when they left. Quite the opposite.

But Louise would have none of it. “Just bring the damn dog back. Now,” she said and hung up. Her voice and her distinctive Virginia Tidewater accent echo in my ears these many years later.

I was driving a Ford station wagon then, and because of her arthritis poor old Sarge couldn’t get into the back on her own, so I had to lift her up carefully and lay her in, and when I arrived at Louise’s house, I had to open the tailgate and scoop the dog up in my arms and set her down on the driveway like an offering — a peace offering, I suppose, though it felt more like a propitiation.

This happened every week. Despite all Louise’s efforts to keep Sarge a permanent resident of her house, the dog always managed to slip out, arriving at my door just behind the girls, or else she came down the lane, increasingly, on her own, even when the girls were in their mother’s custody. So it wasn’t Andrea, Caitlin and Sasha that the dog was following, it was me. I began to see that in her canine mind I was her pack leader, and since I had moved to a new den, so had she. If she didn’t follow me there, she’d be without a leader and a proper den.

There was nothing that Louise and I could do to show Sarge how wrong she was. She wasn’t wrong, of course; she was a dog. Finally, after about a month, Louise gave up, although she never announced her capitulation. Simply, there came a time when my ex-wife no longer called me with orders to deliver our family dog to her doorstep.

Everyone — me, Sarge, the girls, I think even Louise — was relieved. We all knew on some level that a major battle, one with a likelihood of causing considerable collateral damage, had been narrowly avoided. Yet, despite my relief, I felt a buzzing, low-grade anxiety about having gained sole custody of Sarge. I wasn’t aware of it then, but looking back now I see that Sarge, as long as she was neither exclusively mine nor Louise’s, functioned in our newly disassembled family as the last remaining link to our preseparation, prelapsarian past, to a time of relative innocence, when all of us, but especially the girls, still believed in the permanence of our family unit, our pack.

If Sarge had only agreed to traipse up and down the lane behind the girls, if she had agreed to accept joint custody, then my having left my wife could have been seen by all of us as an eccentric, impulsive, possibly even temporary, sleeping arrangement, and for the girls it could have been a bit like going on a continuous series of neighborhood camping trips with Dad. I would not have felt quite so guilty, and Louise would not have been so hurt and angry. The whole abandonment issue would have been ameliorated somewhat. The children would not have been so traumatized; their lives, as they see them today, would not have been permanently disfigured, and neither Louise nor I might have gone looking so quickly for replacement spouses.

That’s a lot of weight to put on a family dog, I know. We all lose our innocence soon enough; it’s inescapable. Most of us aren’t emotionally or intellectually ready for it until our thirties or even later, however, so when one loses it prematurely, in childhood and adolescence, through divorce or the sudden early death of a parent, it can leave one fixated on that loss for a lifetime. Because it’s premature, it feels unnatural, violent and unnecessary, a permanent, gratuitous wounding, and it leaves one angry at the world, and to provide one’s unfocused anger with a proper target, one looks for someone to blame.