Charles Newman - In Partial Disgrace

“One thing I may have not made sufficiently clear is the cost.” Felix paused, stroking his beard.

“I thought we had already agreed,” the Professor broke in agitatedly.

“Not money. What I’m saying is you cannot blame yourself for Wolf. If we take on such a bargain, we risk incessant failure. You can ruin by any gesture — too liberal or too conservative, too diffident or too délicatesse —but you cannot help one until you have ruined a few others. This truth, I believe, is the only place where the Christian doctrine and the rule of capital intersect.”

He had stood up and, letting his napkin drop to the floor, turned his back on the table and spoke to the ceiling.

“You simply have no idea the damage a self-confident man can unwittingly do,” he finished.

The Professor affixed his stern gaze upon my father’s brow.

“Perhaps,” Ainoha interjected in her usual half-mysterious, half-deadpan mode, “perhaps the Professor would care to see the gallery?”

“Ah, yes,” Father sighed, “I believe he is ready.” And already Öscar was wheeling a small cart with whiskey, soda, and cigars down the hallway.

In Grandfather’s time our home had real art: Chaudet’s Infant Sleeping in a Crib Under the Watch of a Courageous Dog Which Has Just Killed an Enormous Viper , and Desporte’s Dog Watching Over Game Beside A Rosebush . Not to mention Oudry’s glowing pointer bitches, Courbet’s awkward grayhounds, Landseer’s chunky Newfoundlands, and Géricault’s Bouledogues Vaginale . But these had long since been sold off, save for George Stubb’s White Poodle in a Punt , which still hung in Father’s lair along with his favorite quote from the painter, who, returning from the mandatory trip to Italy, confided to his diary, “Nature is better than art.”

Indeed, in our part of the world most galleries were like any others, full of wall-eyed ancestors, dull sporting scenes, gratuitous orders of merit, and if one were fortunate, a few recumbent odalisques, their curves resembling stringed instruments. But as you might expect, ours was no ordinary Galerie des glaces , for this was where my father chose to remember the many dogs he had ruined on his ascent to Hauptzuchtwart Supreme, as well as those who had simply failed him. He had had their loving cups beaten into metal feed dishes for the kennels, and their show medals defaced and soldered together to make a set of Celtic signet collars, so that the animals might also have a memento of their brief encounter. When failed dogs passed away, we did not cremate them and scatter their ashes on the island in the artificial lake with the kennel, as we did with the champs. We buried them in the church graveyard at Muddy St. Hubertus, in the vague bushy boundary between the Catholics and the Jews. But in the gallery they were memorialized, mate with mate, like ruined royals without heirs.

Father had an idealistic period during the early, monied part of his life when he collected bad art with a view toward not only keeping it off the market, but expunging it from future generations. These were largely portraits of barristers, merchants, admirals, petit barons, and baronesses in which the faces were honorific, stereotypical, and not well executed, the hands often hidden. But the clothes and other details were accomplished, whether a weskit, military uniform, silk ball dress, tweed suit, or lace sleeves. The torsos and their accouterments often revealed more of the personality than the visage — a cigar dangling loosely from a thumb and forefinger, a bow tie against an Adam’s apple, a chin resting upon a crook or a walking stick. In any case, Father had the faces whited out and the ruined dogs’ heads painted in, in such a way as to indicate how a character defect had gone undetected or an illness undiagnosed, which, intertwined with overreaching pressure or other ill-advised methods, had destroyed the animal’s usefulness. He wanted evidence of his many failures kept green, almost unavoidable, so that he would not repeat such harm.

First was the gaggle of gun-shy dogs rendered in various styles of foppery to conceal their secret hurts: Bello Bellini, a graceful grayhound in spats and top hat, who would come apart at the slightest rustle of wind; Satanella, a butch and vicious lapdog, all decked out in fur with protruding eyes; Malteo Falconi, a spinone galapatore, mindlessly playing his accordion with webbed paws; Gottlieb Von O., the essence of a German country gentleman, with exposed haws and curvature of the muzzle; Little James, a not-so-adorable pug in a sailor suit capable only of the most suffocating love; Dr. Becker, an enormously serious but bowlegged, loose-loined hound; and Henritte von Fitzewicz, a macabre terrier in a hunting dress, with a depressed saddle and seriously overshot jaw.

The Professor walked up and down the gallery, hands behind his back, taking in the grotesqueries while pausing now and then to examine a picture more closely, his head cocked in a way as to indicate serious interest, if not entire approval.

“There is no cure for gunshyness, then?” he inquired.

“Of course,” Father said, “but it is most drastic. I pray you will never see it. Obit anus, obit onus .”

The Professor attempted to pursue this line of questioning, but soon found himself guided among a more peculiar and recent class of portraits, all Chetvorah, those animals devoted to cynegetics and each other, exemplars of loyalty, probity, chaste ardor, and elevated thoughts, but who passed on hideous recessives, unfitted joints, cryptorchidism, and broken ears, or more commonly and mysteriously were simply unable to transmit their more desirable traits in any significant number, and thus, too, had to be discarded from the future if not the past. These were of course the saddest figures of all, arranged around a roaring fireplace: Chrysanor and Kallirhoe, dressed in an admiral’s uniform and a severe black ball gown, who proved, Mother said, that a good marriage might consist of nothing save that the two partners were united against reactionaries and philistines. (“But their children, oh Lord, their crazy, selfish, ugly children, you would not believe it!”) And there were Panfreddo and Pascheline, beautiful as they come, who would retrieve through an oak tree if necessary, but who produced only cleft palates and mental collapse. And Miriam and Monastatos, too cool for their species and over given to philosophizing and abject digging, even on concrete. And finally there were the braces of androgynous brothers and sisters which you wanted to breed so much it almost hurt, knowing they would produce a superior strain faster, but who would also introduce a timed explosive in the lineage, ruining all in the end. Among these were Parerga and Paralipomena, Leon and Lubmissa, Fawn and Dawn, Mars and Mustapha, Philemon and Bancis; the lost lovers, Helenia and Lysander, and Permea and Dimitrius; and the great and famous trick dogs, Didi and Dada.

“Ah, the complicity of flesh is one thing,” Mother murmured, “but the complicity of intelligence — oh, dear.”

The aristochiens no longer seemed amusing collages to the Professor; they had been transfigured into pure emotional states, all their fears and pretensions focusing out of their gilded frames, anticipating the blows of history that would subtract them from the race.

“This seems, if I may say so, somewhat bizarre,” he said without an edge.

Mother was doing some half-hearted port de bras in a corner before a large mirror, between death masks of comedy and tragedy.

“The dog has a better memory than we do,” Father spoke softly. “He never forgets the worst thing that happens to him. He does not store it away. He remembers it afresh each day. We must emulate his humility and allow it to stimulate our sense of gratitude.”