A Three Dog Life by Abigail Thomas Page A

"...a version of the past, Eddie may not have experienced anything like it but he realized with the turn of a page that he could do storytelling ... the first abundance of retelling fairy tales and fables and legends would come from their mouths—Eddie's and your father's."
    I scrounged around in my pocketbook and found my pen and notebook.
    "Once one goes to the trouble of becoming a storyteller," Rich continued, "they want the whole magilla—not only to be the first but the only—I'm not saying that occurred. I'm always glad when it does as long as feelings aren't hurt." I scribbled as fast as I could. "Eddie's fables include multiple storytellers but none of them feels at any loss if they're not the first or second out of the dugout. The art of storytelling is too various to have any one person have complete control."
    He was speaking slowly, pausing as if giving dictation. I was amazed at what I was hearing. Not only did Rich know nothing of the argument, he wouldn't have been capable of understanding it. On top of that, he had never before stuck to any subject for more than a sentence or two. And here he was holding forth so eloquently on just what had been obsessing me. "...that method of storytelling is forgotten, that time of Eddie's in which everyone seemed to add memory on memory deep in the forest, layers of dirt and leaves and branches get covered up—in a sense the past is underfoot."
    I was present at a miracle.

    So now when Rich mentions Eddie Butterman in the hospital I call his brother. "He was a cousin on our father's side," says Gil. "We never called him Edward. He was always Eddie. He did something in the stock market, married a shoe heiress, ran around a lot, everyone knew him at the racetrack. He even wore a checkered jacket like in
Guys and Dolls.
He disappeared out west years ago. Nobody knows what happened to him."

    Rich is in the hospital because last Friday he didn't know who I was. At first I thought he was kidding, I thought I could see him laughing behind his eyes. First I shouted, then I begged—talk to me right now, this minute, talk to me. He didn't respond to anything, not me, not the nurses, not his arm being jostled, or even his shoulder shaken—usually a surefire way to raise his ire. Nothing. They took his blood pressure, fine; no temp, fine. But he wasn't there. And when he began to come back from wherever he'd been, he couldn't walk. He couldn't even stand. The word
seizure
got thrown around, the word
stroke.

    A couple of years ago, Denise and I were in Mexico, both of us counting the days until we would be back with our dogs. We were pathetic. San Miguel was great, roosters and flowerpots on rooftops; our house was up a steep cobblestone street, the food was delicious, and all we wanted to do was get on a plane and go home to our dogs. One morning I was trying to get through to Rich on the telephone. He was at the Northeast Center for Special Care in Lake Katrine, New York, and I was in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, hollering into the receiver, intent on making him hear me, willing him not to let the phone slide away from his ear. I was staring at a tile on the counter as I shouted, "Rich? Rich? Can you hear me?"
    "Hello," he said, somewhat cautiously.
    "How are you?" I shouted, my eyes still drilling into the terra-cotta square.
    "Fine," he answered.
    " What have you been doing?" I shouted. There was a pause.
    " We made some tiles today," he said.
    When I got home I checked. I even talked to the person in charge of art and recreation. Nobody had made tiles, not that week, not ever.

    I have always believed (if rather uneasily) in the invisible world. I know people who have had messages from the dead. My sister has premonitions. Once in a while somebody sits down at the foot of my bed and I feel the mattress give and wake to no one, just an air of friendliness in the room. Sober citizens I know have seen ghosts. But Rich had no truck with any of it. He was a