Gaits of Heaven

do, Rita makes me ask what the dogs mean, what they symbolize, what message the dream dogs are conveying to me, and what message I am sending to myself. I think that besides the manifest content of our meeting tonight, there’s also latent content. And the latent content is about who murdered Eumie Brainard-Green. I now know who murdered her. And I know why.”
    My heart was pounding exactly as it did when I was entering the ring. My palms were drenched. But in the back of my mind, I could hear echoes of Eumie’s gift to me. I took a strong, deep breath and went on.
    “The woman who has just left, Anita Fairley, was a disgruntled client of yours, Ted, as well as a more recent client of Dr. Foote’s. It was Dr. Foote who prescribed the antidepressants that are causing what I’ve heard Rita call a hypomanic reaction. Anita wasn’t making a lot of sense about quite a few things, but she did, in fact, hire a private investigator. The papers that Ted was so eager to get his hands on are the PI’s report.”
    It’s possible that if I ever somehow get stuck handling Rowdy or Sammy all the way to the competition for Best in Show, or if we’re ever in a runoff for High in Trial, I’ll overcome my ring nerves well enough to do a decent job. If it happens, though, I’ll have a calming presence at my side: a dog. As it was, I had my imagination, which I put to good use by conjuring the image of Rowdy at my left side, India to his left, Sammy at my right, Lady beyond him, and Kimi in front of me, her fearless eyes on my face. I smiled at Kimi and summarized: Arkansas, Brandeis, psychology.
    “Public knowledge,” Ted commented.
    “O’Flaherty,” I said. “Anita was raving, but she didn’t make that up.”
    “Epstein,” Ted insisted.
    “When you got to Brandeis, you got mistaken for a Jew. Why not? Green.”
    “Shortened from Greenberg.”
    “Is that what you said? Why not? There must’ve been other people there whose families had shortened their names. Or changed them. You probably never even lied outright, Ted. You just didn’t correct people’s assumptions. And you picked up the Yinglish. Yiddish phrases. That’s not hard. I mean, I’m a shikse, and I can understand your Yiddish expressions. I know what a mezuzah is. I can recognize a menorah. It couldn’t have taken you too long, and plenty of the Jewish students at Brandeis must’ve come from assimilated families. Why not you? You belonged! You fit in. And your parents weren’t around to set people straight. Your father died when you were in high school.
    Your mother died just before you graduated. Who was to know? So, no one did.”
    “My mother,” said Caprice.
    “Did Eumie tell you?” I asked.
    Caprice shook her head. “Mommy knew everything.” Awakening briefly from her stupor, Dr. Foote mumbled, “A Jewish profession.”
    “Not exclusively,” said Dr. Needleman. “Look at Dr. Zinn.“
    “My father is Jewish,” said Missy Zinn.
    “In Israel,” Wyeth said unexpectedly, “if your mother’s not Jewish, you’re not.”
    “Freud!” exclaimed Dr. Needleman.
    “Wasn’t his mother Jewish?” asked Dr. Tortorello.
    “Of course she was,” said Dr. Needleman. “No one knows anything anymore.”
    “But how did Eumie find out?” I asked rhetorically. “The sad part is, really, that Dolfo told on you, Ted. Or he might as well have. We just saw a demonstration. Dolfo steals things. He especially steals paper. As Caprice once told me, mail is his favorite food.”
    “Your passport, Ted,” said Caprice. “Dolfo ate it. You had to get a new one for the trip to Russia. And you had to send in your birth certificate. And Mommy saw it. Was your mother’s name really O’Flaherty?”
    “Have you ever heard of a Jew named O’Flaherty?” Ted’s voice, however, had lost its strength, and tears were running down his face.
    “Neither had Eumie,” I said. “So, she made a fatal mistake. She teased you.”
    “Like she did me,” Monty said. “She taunted you, didn’t she? She threatened to tell everyone. She threatened to tell Wyeth what a jerk his father was. Eumie did that. She did it to me.”
    “You’re not a jerk,” Caprice said.
    “I’m a liar,” Monty said.
    “You’re not lying now,” Rita told him. “And your daughter loves you.”
    “Dylan,” said Quinn Youngman. “The themes, the images, the raw sense of being where you belong!”
    “No one is going gentle into anything,” said Dr. Needleman.
    “He means