The Family Dog

Our choice of pets says a lot about who we are … and we are all very different. There are cat people; there are dog people; there are bird people; there are reptile people and on and on. The famlly pet can mark a child’s development for better or worse, but if a dog or cat lives out the full term of its life, it is a part of that family for 12 or 14 or 19 years. These days most marriages don’t last that long. 

Growing up in the relative innocence of the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, the Philipson family dog — a female basset named Hamlet — progressed through the same stages of life as we did — puppyhood, socialization, taking place in the family constellation, motherhood … death. She even accompanied us on our two-year Paris sojourn.

And since we find ourselves in France, let us heed the wisdom of Anatole France. “Until one has loved an animal, a part of one’s soul remains unawakened.” 

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Transcript

I. Childhood 

During our growing-up years, we gained and lost a large number of pets: dogs, birds, horses! (a small corral on a ¼-acre lot), and more cats than memory can hold. Some lasted longer than others; some lasted not at all. We had a penchant for all-black cats, but when in quick succession we ran through Charcoal 1 (run over), Charcoal 2 (mysterious ailment), Charcoal 3 (disappeared), and Charcoal 4 (run over), we acquired a Siamese whom we named Cheena, and she stuck around forever – which was too bad because she wasn’t particularly affectionate. Alice distilled the hard-won wisdom of our transient feline population into an aphorism that can only offer cold comfort: cats are fungible. 

But dogs, as all pet-owners know, are different. Your dog believes you are the center of the universe; your cat knows you are only here to serve. (Or, as the oft-repeated saw goes: dogs have masters; cats have staff.) Dogs are bonded to their human companions in ways that can range from the casual to the pathological. And, of course, different breeds have different personalities. The family dog can say a lot about the family. In our case, the family dog was a basset hound, a basset hound named Hamlet, a female basset hound named Hamlet. 

Even though my mother seemed to set the emotional tone for the family (loving, high strung, sensitive to the opinions of others), my father’s personality dictated the kind of dog we got: quality (Hamlet came with papers), a voracious appetite, a laid-back affect, goopiness, and a great bargain! Our neighbors had bred several litters, and when it was finally decided that we should have a dog, they promised us the runt of the next batch. This was not ungenerous: Lola was pedigreed, and her pups sold for 50 bucks a head. We were getting Hamlet for free. 

Where did the name come from? My father I would guess. He wasn’t a literary man, so how he landed on the great Dane (a missed species joke there) is anybody’s guess, but his penchant for odd names extended to our cars. The Mazda was Ah So, and our Citroen – a car with a license plate angled between the hood and the front bumper – he christened Bucktoothed Billy.  

Having chosen the name, he assumed the gender and ordered the dog tag. But though man proposes, God disposes, and the runt of the litter came out female. Keyn zargn! In a bit of rabbinical sophistry, my father announced our dog’s name was Lady Hamlet and that was that. But we never used the honorific: Hamlet she was throughout the fourteen years of her life. 

What arrived from our neighbors was a little ball of life inside great folds of skin with two outlandish ears sewn on. She eventually grew into her skin but never succeeded in filling it up, although it wasn’t for lack of trying. We used to pile the extra skin of her cranium into folds on her forehead and say that she was worrying about the stock market. She never worried about anything else. She was a joyous pup and bounced her way into our hearts. And a rubbery creature too. When Hamlet wagged, everything quivered: ears, collar and excess skin. My father used to sing, “It must be jelly ‘cause jam don’t shake like that.” 

Yet she knew how to play on your heartstrings when she wanted something: more dog food, physical attention, something off your dinner plate. She would aim for your pity with her great brown eyes, and your heart would silently wail with hers. Your head told you that she led the life of Riley, but you wanted to get on all fours and moan along with her. Oooooooooowoooooowoooo. It’s a sad life when your paws can’t operate the can opener and you’re way shorter than everybody around you.  

But Hamlet was able to find solace for her hard lot. She loved having her stomach scratched, the closer to her cunt the better. Depending on the side you scratched, one leg or the other pumped in convulsive ecstasy, and her tongue lolled lasciviously out of her mouth. And if you happened to hit the magic circle itself, both legs would go, and she’d be in dog heaven for as long as her victim held out. When it came to pleasure, modesty and temperance weren’t part of Hamlet’s conceptual vocabulary. As she got older and stiff joints lent a certain dignity to her movements, we told her that a grande dame didn’t roll on her back and offer her underside to strangers, but our efforts at inculcating decorum made no headway. It wasn’t the nature of the beast.  

One nickname Hamlet quickly earned was the Low-Flying Slug – she exhibited remarkable aeronautics where food was involved. We had to help her into the back seat of the car, but if we left a piece of cake unguarded on a four-foot countertop, it was gone in a bound. She got to a pound of chocolate creams that way – my father’s favorite candy—and ate as many of them as her stomach would allow. Those she couldn’t eat she hid in various nooks around the house so that for the next few days each newly opened door would reveal a dusty round ball of creamy goodness (now, alas, inedible). When my father came home that evening, my mother greeted him at the door with the terrible news. 

“What did you do?” he asked with darkening brow. 

“I called the vet,” my mother replied. 

“You should’ve called the pound.” 

II. A Basset in Paris 

In 1961 my family moved to Paris, an event from which we never recovered. My mother was unhappy and wanted a drastic change in our suburban lives; my father too was anxious that we should know something of life other than the cosseted world of our Pasadena mesa. I was eleven at the time; Paris meant nothing to me. My concern was: could we bring Hamlet with us? For the first time in my young life I began to wish seriously on falling stars and to throw coins into wishing wells with a purpose. “We’ll see,” was all my parents could say. They had no idea of how we would be living in France. So we embarked for Europe, leaving Hamlet with some neighbors. 

Eventually, one month into our adventure, we found an apartment that could accommodate not only our turbulent family but the dog as well. It was a big, ornately furnished place of faded elegance in a toney section of Paris (the 16th arrondissement). A proper dog would have harmonized with the high ceilings and chandeliers of our new home. Had we not been such raw Americans we would have realized the difference between Hamlet shedding in the playroom and Hamlet shedding in the salon, between Hamlet drooling on the vinyl couch from Sears and Hamlet drooling on the Empire chairs. Could one stroll down the Champs-Élysées, could one impress the sidewalk diners at Fouquet’s with proud disdain while a scruffy canine waddled at one’s feet? How would our visitors feel after climbing the wide, carpeted stairs of the foyer, ringing at our door of polished wood and brass (with the Panamanian embassy on the same landing) only to have it open on . . . a smiling basset? 

But we had been raised on corn flakes, not buttery croissants, so we never asked such questions. We wired our neighbors to send us our basset post haste, and she arrived at the Orly airport in a week’s time. For once we had no trouble with French customs. Hamlet had been shut up in her traveling box since taking off from California. When she arrived at the airport, she sensed the presence of the family and set up a baying which we had never heard before, sounding a chord in her ancestral past when bassets had been bred for hunting rabbits. It was an impressive note, like a police siren in your living room. Worse really because the airport was made of tile and steel, and Hamlet’s wails rebounded from one end to the other. The French much have thought we were importing a banshee. None of us spoke the language well or loudly enough to clear up the confusion, and in minutes we had our dog out of her box and bouncing around us in joy. 

But Hamlet had to change her lifestyle to accord with her new urban surroundings. It wasn’t easy for a dog used to the freedom of the San Gabriel Mountains to accommodate herself to the constraints of an apartment. She was taken out six times a day. The schedule was stable, and everybody had their allotted times. Mine was at 4:00 p.m., just after I had returned from school, and again at 8:00. My older sister took her out in the early morning; my mother went shopping with her at 10:00; my younger sister made her sortie at noon; and my older brother went for walks with her at night. But Hamlet could never resign herself to the regimen of the leash; her pace never quite matched that of her companion. She made a great hit on the sidewalks, though. A basset was not a common sight, and she looked so tortured in her collar that even the proverbially stony Parisian hearts would soften. “Does she bite?” they asked. “No, but I do,” I replied, for I was eleven and thought that the height of humor. 

It was during my four o’clock walks with Hamlet that I grew to know Paris in its inward life: the housewives shopping with their net-string bags, the men playing boules in the park; the white-grey colors of the squat, serried buildings. Hamlet, alas, was less appreciative. I had been given a pair of three-wheeled skates from Italy, and I would sometimes put these on, forcing Hamlet to trot miserably behind as I rolled down the Champs-Élysées in my schoolboy shorts. On Avenue Foch with its bordered lawns, tall chestnuts, and signs reading ne pas marcher sur la pelouse we could sometimes let her off the leash if there were no gendarmes about. But Paris is a city of stone and iron, pedestrians and pigeons. Its pocket parks and grated trees could not satisfy a California dog’s craving for dusty trails and the smell of sagebrush. Though she liked disbanding parliaments of pigeons, though the world’s most famous monuments offered themselves for her peeing pleasure, Hamlet was not enriched by her sojourn in Paris. 

Unfortunately she not only urinated on the Arc de Triomphe – a mere two blocks away – she left landmarks of her own in our apartment. She knew this was defendu but acted purely in the spirit of revenge. She did not like to be left alone. We when came back from an evening out, we could be sure of finding a sign of her displeasure. However much we beat her, she was a refractory hound. Because we lived in mortal terror of our concierge, who never did come into the apartment, we were always moving furniture around to hide the latest spot. The concierge and his wife also had a dog, a large standard poodle named Vulcan who threw himself against the window of their apartment at the appearance of anybody, whether a stranger or tenant of 10 years standing. Hamlet regarded Vulcan with disdain. When she was angry, as when some curious male would sniff her backside, she’d growl once, bare her teeth, and turn on her suitor in a flash – end of courtship. 

As for humans, they never disturbed Hamlet’s composure unless they bore food or had rattled her leash. Even though she had no talent for them, Hamlet was avid for walks. If she heard the clink of her leash, though you might have touched it by the merest accident, you were committed to taking her out. She could be dead asleep (or wide awaked – even connoisseurs of the breed have trouble distinguishing between the two states), the softest chink would bring her bounding and barking into the foyer. It got to the point where we had to spell the world “w-a-l-k.” 

But there were fabulous promenades in our part of Paris. Each street raying from the Étoile had its own ambience: cosmopolitan Kléber framing the Eiffel Tower, Victor Hugo with its elegant shops and window displays, park-lined Foch, quiet Carnot, and the white, glamorous sidewalks of the Champs-Élysées. My favorite walk was one we sometimes took at night on the quays of the Seine. The windows of Notre Dame might glow in the distance or we might see a lacework of light ring the Place de la Concorde, but on the quays of the river it was shadowed, fresh, and lonely. In that dark artery of Paris we walked in quiet, in leisure, and – the veils of nostalgia drop heavily here – in peace. For me it was in these dark moments, surrounded by the city, that the family found its perfect unity. And Hamlet, as unconscious as we, padded along the stone quays by the murmuring waters of the Seine. 

During our second Parisian winter, Hamlet fell sick: her spirits grew heavy, her stool turned green, and she looked absolutely miserable. Most alarmingly, she lost her appetite. This was truly a sign of crisis, and we took her to a veterinarian. Being French, he diagnosed Hamlet’s problem as liver trouble, and we – being a naïve, credulous, possibly thick family—we believed him. Poor Hamlet! We could have brought her in from a traffic accident, and the vet would have attributed the crushed bones and torn flesh to liver trouble. It is the great bête noir of the French medical world. We’d had warnings. When I had fallen sick with pneumonia, a French doctor had diagnosed my ailment as liver trouble. Stuffing me with pills and suppositories had delayed my recovery by several weeks, so we really should have known better. There’s only one course of study in France for veterinarians and doctors alike, with the veterinarian degree awarded as a consolation prize to those who flunk the exams. 

Sadly, we were no brighter than Hamlet’s physician. We left Anna, our Spanish maid, with both the dog and careful instructions on how to administer the prescribed medicine and embarked on a Christmas in Switzerland. Our animal quack had assured us that our bouncing basset would be back in form upon our return. What we found after a ten-day absence was Hamlet bloated, barely able to move, and Anna with her arm in a sling. She had slipped on ice during one of the dog’s walks. Anna was afraid that we would blame her for Hamlet’s condition. There was a mound of dog food in the kitchen and evidence of unsuccessful attempts at force feeding. Hamlet tottered up to us and wagged her tail in feeble joy. Normally she would have brought the apartment down in a frenzy of welcome. 

This time we didn’t fool around. Mom located a veterinarian who served the people at the American Embassy. He had to mke a house call. Hamlet was too weak to walk, and it was bitterly cold outside. The new man examined her on the dining room table with the family hovering in tears, and he announced that she had distemper! He wasn’t sure he could save her since she had gone two weeks without treatment. We had no choice but to begin where we could. Hamlet miserably suffered glucose injections, antibiotics, and an unending stream of orally induced torments. For weeks we ministered to her and watched anxiously for signs that would reveal her fate. When she had to go to the bathroom, we carried her up and down the stairs like a baby to take her outside. It was winter in Paris and miserable weather: wet blankets of rain slicked the streets and turned their lamps into misty aureoles of vigilance. Hamlet slept heavily in her corner by the stove. Above her a window opened onto the wet gray courtyard. I remember my mother stroking Hamlet’s white throat to help her swallow her pills. The rain fell in unbroken sheets, giving the noise of the traffic on the avenue a harsh, monotonous quality, like ripping in the distance. 

Slowly she recovered. The swelling subsided and life returned. Little by little the leadenness left; the sickness dribbled away. By March the sun made occasional forays from behind its cover of clouds, and Hamlet was walking the streets again. Her veterinarian fell in love with her and wanted to play marriage broker, introducing her to what was perhaps the only male basset in Paris. Amazingly enough, my parents considered the propositions (“puppies in an apartment,” my mother wrote to a friend, “my GOD!”), but by the time Hamlet came into heat again, my father had made a fateful decision. The aerospace industry was entering a slump, and it was clear that if he stayed in Europe much longer he would have difficulty establishing himself back home as a chemical consultant. He recommended that the European office of the company be closed, and it was back to California for us all. 

III. Motherhood and Death 

Hamlet was not a beautiful beast. Her brown-and-white coloration was unexceptional and ears too short when judged by the standards of beauty that had been established for the breed. But she did have papers with the American Kennel Association, which meant we could sell the pups if we mated her with a pedigreed male. It was bound to happen. When she was in heat, the male dogs came a-courtin’, and, as we had a low fence, we often found some oversized canine trying to mount our Lady Hamlet. She showed surprising athleticism during these periods and would jump over the gate, twice her height. We added pickets to raise the stakes (literally!) and filled all holes we could find in our ragged collection of fences, but our yard proved escape-proof only when the dog had no desire to escape. 

Since, it seemed, biology was going to be Hamlet’s destiny, we made arrangements for a desirable mate. There were enough mongrels in the family. So we found her a handsome young male, put the two in the same enclosure, and waited, as a more modest period would say, for nature to take its course. To our surprise, Hamlet turned out to be a coquette. It was only with much coaxing and repeated encounters that she could be persuaded to relinquish her virtue. 

The coupling had its desired result. Within a few months Hamlet swelled to gratifying proportions. She now rolled ungracefully to Position One (belly scratching), and her teats grew enormously large. It was my firsts experience with The Facts of Life, and I watched the changes curiously. As I felt her distended stomach I was sure there were fifteen pups in there. It was the only time Hamlet succeeded in filling her skin. 

It was a natural childbirth with no complications. Hamlet began her labor in the shoe compartment of my parents’ closet (psychologists, take note!), but we gently moved her to a large cardboard box next to the piano in the playroom. (This was a fallow period in my intermittent struggles with the instrument, removing one more ambient danger.) One by one, eight pups dropped from Hamlet’s body, and she patiently licked the sack from each so that it could come into the world, breathe, and live. 

Three pups died within as many days from her infected milk. We took the rest and fed them formula through a doll’s baby bottle. Hamlet didn’t seem to mind that we had taken over her nurturing duties. To my mother’s chagrin, she was once again rising at 2:00 a.m. to feed the babies. The rest of us attended to the daytime feedings, delighted to see our little furballs swell as they nosed and licked the nipple. When we put them down afterwards, their stomachs distended to the reach of their tiny legs, and they tottered about, filling the air with their whimpers. Somebody came up with the brilliant idea of securing their ears above their heads with a clothes pin to afford them less encumbered movement.  

One brown puppy sported a white question mark on its back. That was Socrates, but the rest, following venerable family tradition, received names from The Bard. There was, of course, Ophelia, who actually was a female. Othello wore black, as did Iago. The greediest we christened Falstaff, and the other female, Portia. Three were tricolor and promised to be real beauties. The pups were a source of delight – and we had worked to keep them alive! After a few weeks we weaned them to solid food; a short time later they were big enough to be sold. It was sad giving them up, but six bassets in one house? Not to be thought of. The biggest and most beautiful male we kept and my father – ever the Germanophile – renamed him Maximilian. 

Max grew into a beautiful hound: broad-chested, long-eared, with a magnificent silky coat of red, black and white. If we had wanted to present him as a show hound, he would have been competitive, but training a dog was beyond the family mentality. We would order him to sit down, he would come joyously wagging his tail, and the obedience class instantly degenerated into roughhouse or, sadly, stomach-scratching. 

In a year’s time, Max grew half again as big as his mother. When we took them on hikes in the San Gabriel Mountains, the two would bounce ahead of us, tails high and snouts nosing into anything interesting. If they were particularly taken with a rabbit hole or bit of excrement, we would get ahead of them, even out of sight. Then they would run to catch up, and everything would fly: ears, tongues, and rubbery rumps. Gloppy was the family word for it, a portmanteau of “floppy” and “galumphing.”  

It was a good life for a dog. We had returned to our mesa, so it was hikes on the weekends and a walk at night. Because our cul-de-sac was strictly residential, there was never much traffic, and the dogs went out themselves when nobody was available for their nightly outing. A nearby canyon led to the mountains. We left the gate open, and in the morning my mother would find them sleeping on the furniture of the mis-named living room where nobody lived. At first she made an effort to protect the “good” furniture, but that only insured that the burnt-orange upholstered couch and matching wing chairs became their nests of choice. And yet … it is impossible to get angry at a basset, much less a sleeping basset. A sleeping basset is the confirmation of a natural and benign order. Those vouchsafed the vision of a sleeping basset have received an intimation that, as Browning writes, “God’s in his Heaven/All’s right with the world.” A basset sleeping is as innocent as birdsong or a baby’s laughter. Hamlet was a particularly accomplished sleeper, moving fluidly from Position Three (side curl) to Position One (supine with limbs spread-eagled). And when she sometimes indulged in a gentle, mellifluent snore, it could only ease the aching heart. 

When Max slept it was the only time his ears left him in peace. They were monstrous—a mark of beauty in a basset—and they would have been a problem for a dog with a less devil-may-care attitude. My father would take Max’s ears in both hands, tie them over his head and sing: 

Do your ears hang low? 

Do they wobble to and fro? 

Can you tie them in a knot? 

Can you tie them in a bow? 

Can you throw them over your shoulder 

Like a Continental soldier? 

Do your ears hang low? 

Max would sit on the floor looking perplexed. The answer to these existential questions was a lamentable yes. Neither dog could drink water without the ears drooping into the liquid along with their snouts, but mealtime was the real debacle. The French say that one should not eat to live but live to eat, yet this ancestral wisdom (“basset” derives from the French basse) had not survived the Darwinian imperative. The two dogs attacked their dinners with alarming gusto; large mounds of dog food would disappear in seconds. Considering that mealtime was the summum bonum of their lives (and although we knew they loved us, we held no illusions about the basset’s scale of values), one would have thought they savor a bit this supreme moment. But the basset appetite should not be taxed with gluttony. They ate; they drank; they were merry – and they lived in the hope for more. It sometimes happened. 

So we had our two bassets, and they were happy and loving and sweet. And then one night, Alice and her boyfriend took the dogs on a walk in the canyon. They returned sans bassets, but this was not unusual. The following morning only Hamlet had returned to her spot on the living room couch. We scoured the neighborhood, fixed signs to telephone poles, put an ad in the newspaper. Silence. Every walk, each ring of the telephone was sharpened by an anxiety that only dulled slowly with time. We couldn’t believe had had been stolen, hoped irrationally that his disappearance was temporary. And I remember poking about the unbuilt fields of the mesa, calling out Max’s name with only the stars and dim noise of traffic for answer. The lights of the long, fairy-flecked city stretched out in the basin before me. Someone had seen him and taken him away. And this was the end of our beauty. They had seen and admired his pelt and form, recognized perhaps that he was a purebred, and they had taken him away. And it was bitter, although not in a way I could then understand, that the thieves had taken him for his “beauty” without knowing his real beauty: his sweet disposition, his calming affect, the unconditional love he had for us all. And now he was gone. For months afterwards we couldn’t hear the rustle of bushes without straining our ears, holding our breath, helplessly hoping for the jingle of his collar and the sight of his tongue hanging from his smiling mouth. 

*     *     *     *     * 

Hamlet seemed scarcely affected by the loss of her offspring. She lived four years longer, but the family was changing as she descended into the crotchets of old age. Through the same round of walks, dinners, and naps, she got stiffer and less sociable. We finally got another basset pup—this one from a Mexican restaurant where, we joked in Judeo-Gringo style, he had been slated for enchiladas—and the focus of family affection shifted to him. Hard to tell whether Hamlet accepted this new addition with magnanimity, resignation, or indifference. Reading her moods had become difficult, and, truth be told, we were less interested. Leo liked Hamlet, however—Leo liked everybody—and was occasionally able to coax her into play. 

America marginalizes the old; my family was no different. Hamlet became a burden. Her coat turned rough and greasy, and she drooled in her sleep. We joked that when she died, we’d have her stuffed, put a drool machine in her, and move her from chair to chair. She’d continue to shed, and it would be as if she’d never left. She was no longer very affectionate nor much involved in the doings of the household. She liked the fireplace in the winter, the shade of the backyard in the summer. The seasons passed, and Hamlet grew peaceably older as the family moved toward dissolution. 

She died during the summer of my junior year in college. We put her down after my mother discovered her bleeding from the mouth. The vet informed us that Hamlet had cancer, probably throughout her body. There was nothing he could do. She was fourteen years old, and there wasn’t much left to save. The next morning, I had the opportunity to say good-bye. I knew she was going down later that day. 

I had a job as a custodian that began at five a.m., so every weekday I was up before dawn to open the gate and pull the car out of the garage. I was always half asleep, but I liked being up before everyone else. At the sound of the gate scraping against the asphalt, Hamlet pushed her way heavily through the pet door and came towards me. This was not typical behavior, but how could she know? It was cool in the dry desert morning. Only the faintest predawn light glowed in the east; the neighborhood slumbered in darkness. The crickets still sang in the field next door, but they would be silenced soon. Hamlet lumbered up arthritically; a tumor on her backside making her limp. I felt through the greasy brown fur with my fingers, and she whined. 

This is the way the world ends. 

This is the way the world ends. 

This is the way the world ends. 

Not with a bang but a whimper. 

“Ah, poor baby,” I said and took her head in my hands. As I kissed the top of her skull, that smell, the smell of dissolution, entered my nostrils. The pity died within me, and I stayed bent, almost experimentally, to see what would come. A light breeze rustled the leaves of our backyard fruit trees. Nothing. The image of sprinklers watering our thirsty lawns in summer flashed before me. Again nothing. What connection did this aching smelly carcass have with my memories of our walks in Paris, our mountain hikes, the balls retrieved and the stomachs scratched, the pain and laughter of a family that had grown up, separated, left? And had to leave and would have, each one, to know separation, loneliness and death, the loss of love and certainly the loss of those one loved? Nothing. Sentimental rubbish. Nothing. 

The light in the east grew brighter. I would be late for work. “Good-bye, Old Paint,” I said, patting Hamlet for the last time. Then I climbed in my car, turned the ignition and drove, clear-eyed and empty, into the L.A. dawn.