Animal Appetite

had considerately placed me at a table where I’d feel at home. Although Claudia must have been close to sixty, her gray-streaked brown hair hung limply halfway down her back and was held away from her makeup-free face w ith the kind of handcrafted leather barrette that looks nailed to the crown of the head by a dowel driven through a hefty chunk of scalp. Her flowing multicolored hand woven garments were what peasant women would wear if they had tons of money and no desire to rise above their station, and her big gold earrings, necklace, and bracelet bore deliberate hammer marks. To a bat mitzvah in Massachusetts in November, Claudia wore open-toed Birkenstock sandals over bright green stockings. In Cambridge, comfort is everything.
    Her late husband, Jack Winter Andrews, she informed me, had been murdered eighteen years earlier by a business partner greedy for Jack’s insurance money.
    At a loss as to what to reply to Claudia’s announcement, I said simply that, as far as I knew, the victim and I hadn’t been relatives.
    “Jack was poisoned,” she proclaimed, as if she’d only seconds ago discovered how he’d died. “I was the one who found him!”
    “That must have been terrible for you,” I murmured.
    By now, we’d been served salads of radicchio, arugula, and avocado, and I was more interested in enjoying mine and in pumping Professor Foley about Hannah Duston than I was in listening to Claudia, especially if she moved on to unappetizing details, as she promptly did.
    “There were rats in the building,” she informed me.
    “Damned Yankee Press,” Professor Foley interjected.
    “Oh, the guides,” I said. The series was (and still is) popular: The Damned Yankee in Maine and so forth.
    Claudia ignored our efforts. “That’s what this partner of his used—rat poison slipped in Jack’s coffee. Jack was addicted to caffeine, always kept a thermos of coffee on his desk.”
    “Jack was a very fine man,” Professor Foley informed all of us. “Student of mine. We always stayed in touch. A dear friend.”
    “Fine man,” agreed a deeply tanned, bald, muscular fellow about Claudia’s age whose style was so entirely different from hers that I’d been surprised to hear him introduced as her husband, Oscar Fisch. He wore a conventional dark suit, a white shirt, a paisley tie, and no jewelry and nothing even vaguely reminiscent of Chinese rice growers, American factory workers, medieval serfs, or any other Cantabrigian icons. To judge from Claudia Andrews-Howe’s last name, though, it must have been Oscar Fisch who’d adapted to her world. Among Cambridge intellectuals, it is considered inexplicable, even somewhat bizarre, for a woman to assume the surname of her husband. Hyphens are still acceptable—Howe must have been Claudia’s maiden name— but I predict that they’re doomed, too. If the trend spreads throughout the country, the only creatures in the United States to share family appellations will be interrelated show dogs who bear the names of famous kennels. I wondered whether the pleasant-looking Oscar Fisch minded that his wife had retained Jack Andrews’s name and failed to add his. If so, he showed no sign of the resentment. On the contrary, he sat quite close to Claudia and eyed her proudly, as if she were an exotic bird that he hoped would perch on his arm.
    As servings of poached salmon arrived and were consumed, the conversation became general, and I learned that Claudia was an associate professor at what Cambridge calls “the” Ed School, as if there were none other—the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Her field was child care policy. Oscar taught at what is invariably called “the” Business School. Dick and Jane, of course, were in “the” history department; George Foley, as I’ve mentioned, was a Harvard professor emeritus of history; and except to insert vegetable sticks and heavily laden pieces of silverware, I for once kept my mouth shut and wished that my magazine subscriptions extended beyond approximately thirty thousand dog magazines. If that had been the case, maybe I could have contributed something more intelligent than the sound of my incisors ripping through carrots and celery.
    After a while, though, Claudia, in what may have been a peculiar effort to include me in the conversation, returned to the topic of her first husband’s murder. By then, she’d learned that I train dogs. “We were supposed to believe that Jack committed suicide,” she