Terloper after all.

Then Jenny grabbed Marley by the front paws,

lifted him up on his hind legs and danced around

the room with him. “You’re going to be an uncle!”

she sang. Marley responded in his trademark

way—by lunging up and planting a big wet tongue

squarely on her mouth.

The next day Jenny called me at work. Her

voice was bubbling. She had just returned from

the doctor, who had officially confirmed the re-

sults of our home test. “He says all systems are

go,” she said.

The night before, we had counted back on the

calendar, trying to pinpoint the date of concep-

tion. She was worried that she had already been

pregnant when we went on our hysterical flea-

eradication spree a few weeks earlier. Exposing

herself to all those pesticides couldn’t be good,

could it? She raised her concerns with the doctor,

and he told her it was probably not an issue. Just

don’t use them anymore, he advised. He gave her a

prescription for prenatal vitamins and told her

he’d see her back in his office in three weeks for a

sonogram, an electronic-imaging process that

Marley & Me

would give us our first glimpse of the tiny fetus

growing inside Jenny’s belly.

“He wants us to make sure we bring a video-

tape,” she said, “so we can save our own copy for

posterity.”

On my desk calendar, I made a note of it.

C H A P T E R 6

Matters of the Heart

❉

The natives will tell you South Florida has four

seasons. Subtle ones, they admit, but four

distinct seasons nonetheless. Do not believe them.

There are only two—the warm, dry season and

the hot, wet one. It was about the time of this

overnight return to tropical swelter when we

awoke one day to realize our puppy was a puppy

no more. As rapidly as winter had morphed into

summer, it seemed, Marley had morphed into a

gangly adolescent. At five months old, his body

had filled out the baggy wrinkles in its oversized

yellow fur coat. His enormous paws no longer

looked so comically out of proportion. His

needle-sharp baby teeth had given way to impos-

ing fangs that could destroy a Frisbee—or a

brand-new leather shoe—in a few quick chomps.

The timbre of his bark had deepened to an intim-

John Grogan

idating boom. When he stood on his hind legs,

which he did often, tottering around like a dancing

Russian circus bear, he could rest his front paws on

my shoulders and look me straight in the eye.

The first time the veterinarian saw him, he let

out a soft whistle and said, “You’re going to have a

big boy on your hands.”

And that we did. He had grown into a hand-

some specimen, and I felt obliged to point out to

the doubting Miss Jenny that my formal name for

him was not so far off the mark. Grogan’s Majes-

tic Marley of Churchill, besides residing on

Churchill Road, was the very definition of majes-

tic. When he stopped chasing his tail, anyway.

Sometimes, after he ran every last ounce of ner-

vous energy out of himself, he would lie on the

Persian rug in the living room, basking in the sun

slanting through the blinds. His head up, nose

glistening, paws crossed before him, he reminded

us of an Egyptian sphinx.

We were not the only ones to notice the trans-

formation. We could tell from the wide berth

strangers gave him and the way they recoiled

when he bounded their way that they no longer

viewed him as a harmless puppy. To them he had

grown into something to be feared.

Our front door had a small oblong window at

eye level, four inches wide by eight inches long.

Marley & Me

Marley lived for company, and whenever someone

rang the bell, he would streak across the house,

going into a full skid as he approached the foyer,

careening across the wood floors, tossing up throw

rugs as he slid and not stopping until he crashed

into the door with a loud thud. He then would hop

up on his hind legs, yelping wildly, his big head

filling the tiny window to stare straight into the

face of whoever was on the other side. For Marley,

who considered himself the resident Welcome

Wagon, it was a joyous overture. For door-to-door

salespeople, postal carriers, and anyone else who

didn’t know him, though, it was as if Cujo had

just jumped out of the Stephen King novel and

the only thing that stood between them and a mer-

ciless mauling was our wooden door. More than

one stranger, after ringing the doorbell and seeing

Marley’s barking face peering out at them, beat a

quick retreat to the middle of the driveway, where

they stood waiting for one of us to answer.

This, we found, was not necessarily a bad thing.

Ours was what urban planners call a changing

neighborhood. Built in the 1940s and ’50s and ini-

tially populated by snowbirds and retirees, it be-

gan to take on a gritty edge as the original

homeowners died off and were replaced by a mot-

ley group of renters and working-class families.

By the time we moved in, the neighborhood was

John Grogan

again in transition, this time being gentrified by

gays, artists, and young professionals drawn to its

location near the water and its funky, Deco-style

architecture.

Our block served as a buffer between hard-

bitten South Dixie Highway and the posh estate

homes along the water. Dixie Highway was the

original U.S. 1 that ran along Florida’s eastern

coast and served as the main route to Miami be-

fore the arrival of the interstate. It was five lanes

of sun-baked pavement, two in each direction

with a shared left-turn lane, and it was lined with

a slightly decayed and unseemly assortment of

thrift stores, gas stations, fruit stands, consign-

ment shops, diners, and mom-and-pop motels

from a bygone era.

On the four corners of South Dixie Highway

and Churchill Road stood a liquor store, a twenty-

four-hour convenience mart, an import shop with

heavy bars on the window, and an open-air coin

laundry where people hung out all night, often

leaving bottles in brown bags behind. Our house

was in the middle of the block, eight doors down

from the action.

The neighborhood seemed safe to us, but there

were telltales of its rough edge. Tools left out in

the yard disappeared, and during a rare cold spell,

someone stole every stick of firewood I had

Marley & Me

stacked along the side of the house. One Sunday

we were eating breakfast at our favorite diner, sit-

ting at the table we always sat at, right in the front

window, when Jenny pointed to a bullet hole in the

plate glass just above our heads and noted dryly,

“That definitely wasn’t there last time we were

here.”

One morning as I was pulling out of our block

to drive to work, I spotted a man lying in the gut-

ter, his hands and face bloody. I parked and ran up

to him, thinking he had been hit by a car. But

when I squatted down beside him, a strong stench

of alcohol and urine hit me, and when he began to

talk, it was clear he was inebriated. I called an am-

bulance and waited with him, but when the crew

arrived he refused treatment. As the paramedics

and I stood watching, he staggered away in the di-

rection of the liquor store.

And there was the night a man with a slightly

desperate air about him came to my door and told

me he was visiting a house in the next block and

had run out of gas for his car. Could I lend him

five dollars? He’d pay me back first thing in the

morning. Sure you will, pal,I thought. When I

offered to call the police for him instead, he mum-

bled a lame excuse and disappeared.

Most unsettling of all was what we learned

about the small house kitty-corner from ours. A

John Grogan

murder had taken place there just a few months

before we moved in. And not just a run-of-the-

mill murder, but a horribly gruesome one involv-

ing an invalid widow and a chain saw. The case

had been all over the news, and before we moved

in we were well familiar with its details—

everything, that is, except the location. And now

here we were living across the street from the

crime scene.

The victim was a retired schoolteacher named

Ruth Ann Nedermier, who had lived in the house

alone and was one of the original settlers of the

neighborhood. After hip-replacement surgery, she

had hired a day nurse to help care for her, which

was a fatal decision. The nurse, police later ascer-

tained, had been stealing checks out of Mrs. Ned-

ermier’s checkbook and forging her signature.

The old woman had been frail but mentally

sharp, and she confronted the nurse about the

missing checks and the unexplained charges to her

bank account. The panicked nurse bludgeoned the

poor woman to death, then called her boyfriend,

who arrived with a chain saw and helped her dis-

member the body in the bathtub. Together they

packed the body parts in a large trunk, rinsed the

woman’s blood down the drain, and drove away.

For several days, Mrs. Nedermier’s disappear-

ance remained a mystery, our neighbors later told

Marley & Me

us. The mystery was solved when a man called the

police to report a horrible stench coming from his

garage. Officers discovered the trunk and its

ghastly contents. When they asked the home-

owner how it got there, he told them the truth: his

daughter had asked if she could store it there for

safekeeping.

Although the grisly murder of Mrs. Nedermier

was the most-talked-about event in the history of

our block, no one had mentioned a word about it

to us as we prepared to buy the house. Not the real

estate agent, not the owners, not the inspector, not

the surveyor. Our first week in the house, the

neighbors came over with cookies and a casserole

and broke the news to us. As we lay in our bed at

night, it was hard not to think that just a hundred

feet from our bedroom window a defenseless

widow had been sawn into pieces. It was an inside

job, we told ourselves, something that would

never happen to us. Yet we couldn’t walk by the

place or even look out our front window without

thinking about what had happened there.

Somehow, having Marley aboard with us, and

seeing how strangers eyed him so warily, gave us a

sense of peace we might not have had otherwise.

He was a big, loving dope of a dog whose defense

strategy against intruders would surely have been

to lick them to death. But the prowlers and preda-

John Grogan

tors out there didn’t need to know that. To them

he was big, he was powerful, and he was unpre-

dictably crazy. And that is how we liked it.

Pregnancy suited Jenny well. She began rising at

dawn to exercise and walk Marley. She prepared

wholesome, healthy meals, loaded with fresh veg-

etables and fruits. She swore off caffeine and diet

sodas and, of course, all alcohol, not even allow-

ing me to stir a tablespoon of cooking sherry into

the pot.

We had sworn to keep the pregnancy a secret

until we were confident the fetus was viable and

beyond the risk of miscarriage, but on this front

neither of us did well. We were so excited that we

dribbled out our news to one confidant after an-

other, swearing each to silence, until our secret

was no longer a secret at all. First we told our par-

ents, then our siblings, then our closest friends,

then our office mates, then our neighbors. Jenny’s

stomach, at ten weeks, was just starting to round

slightly. It was beginning to seem real. Why not

share our joy with the world? By the time the day

arrived for Jenny’s examination and sonogram, we

might as well have plastered it on a billboard: John

and Jenny are expecting.

I took off work the morning of the doctor’s ap-

Marley & Me

pointment and, as instructed, brought a blank

videotape so I could capture the first grainy im-

ages of our baby. The appointment was to be part

checkup, part informational meeting. We would

be assigned to a nurse-midwife who could answer

all our questions, measure Jenny’s stomach, listen

for the baby’s heartbeat, and, of course, show us

its tiny form inside of her.

We arrived at 9:00 A.M., brimming with antic-

ipation. The nurse-midwife, a gentle middle-

aged woman with a British accent, led us into a

small exam room and immediately asked:

“Would you like to hear your baby’s heartbeat?”

Would we ever, we told her. We listened intently

as she ran a sort of microphone hooked to a

speaker over Jenny’s abdomen. We sat in silence,

smiles frozen on our faces, straining to hear the

tiny heartbeat, but only static came through the

speaker.

The nurse said that was not unusual. “It de-

pends on how the baby is lying. Sometimes you

can’t hear anything. It might still be a little early.”

She offered to go right to the sonogram. “Let’s

have a look at your baby,” she said breezily.

“Our first glimpse of baby Grogie,” Jenny said,

beaming at me. The nurse-midwife led us into the

sonogram room and had Jenny lie back on a table

with a monitor screen beside it.

John Grogan

“I brought a tape,” I said, waving it in front

of her.

“Just hold on to it for now,” the nurse said as she

pulled up Jenny’s shirt and began running an in-

strument the size and shape of a hockey puck over

her stomach. We peered at the computer monitor

at a gray mass without definition. “Hmm, this one

doesn’t seem to be picking anything up,” she said

in a completely neutral voice. “We’ll try a vaginal

sonogram. You get much more detail that way.”

She left the room and returned moments later

with another nurse, a tall bleached blonde with a

monogram on her fingernail. Her name was Essie,

and she asked Jenny to remove her panties, then

inserted a latex-covered probe into her vagina.

The nurse was right: the resolution was far supe-

rior to that of the other sonogram. She zoomed in

on what looked like a tiny sac in the middle of the

sea of gray and, with the click of a mouse, magni-

fied it, then magnified it again. And again. But de-

spite the great detail, the sac just looked like an

empty, shapeless sock to us. Where were the little

arms and legs the pregnancy books said would be

formed by ten weeks? Where was the tiny head?

Where was the beating heart? Jenny, her neck

craned sideways to see the screen, was still brim-

ming with anticipation and asked the nurses with a

little nervous laugh, “Is there anything in there?”

Marley & Me

I looked up to catch Essie’s face, and I knew the

answer was the one we did not want to hear. Sud-

denly I realized why she hadn’t been saying any-

thing as she kept clicking up the magnification.

She answered Jenny in a controlled voice: “Not

what you’d expect to see at ten weeks.” I put my

hand on Jenny’s knee. We both continued staring

at the blob on the screen, as though we could will

it to life.

“Jenny, I think we have a problem here,” Essie

said. “Let me get Dr. Sherman.”

As we waited in silence, I learned what people

mean when they describe the swarm of locusts

that descends just before they faint. I felt the

blood rushing out of my head and heard buzzing

in my ears. If I don’t sit down,I thought, I’m go-

ing to collapse.How embarrassing would that be?

My strong wife bearing the news stoically as her

husband lay unconscious on the floor, the nurses

trying to revive him with smelling salts. I half sat

on the edge of the examining bench, holding

Jenny’s hand with one of mine and stroking her

neck with the other. Tears welled in her eyes, but

she didn’t cry.

Dr. Sherman, a tall, distinguished-looking man

with a gruff but affable demeanor, confirmed that

the fetus was dead. “We’d be able to see a heart-

beat, no question,” he said. He gently told us what

John Grogan

we already knew from the books we had been

reading. That one in six pregnancies ends in mis-

carriage. That this was nature’s way of sorting out

the weak, the retarded, the grossly deformed. Ap-

parently remembering Jenny’s worry about the

flea sprays, he told us it was nothing we did or did

not do. He placed his hand on Jenny’s cheek and

leaned in close as if to kiss her. “I’m sorry,” he

said. “You can try again in a couple of months.”

We both just sat there in silence. The blank

videotape sitting on the bench beside us suddenly

seemed like an incredible embarrassment, a sharp

reminder of our blind, naïve optimism. I wanted

to throw it away. I wanted to hide it. I asked the

doctor: “Where do we go from here?”

“We have to remove the placenta,” he said.

“Years ago, you wouldn’t have even known you

had miscarried yet, and you would have waited

until you started hemorrhaging.”

He gave us the option of waiting over the week-

end and returning on Monday for the procedure,

which was the same as an abortion, with the fetus

and placenta being vacuumed from the uterus.

But Jenny wanted to get it behind her, and so did

I. “The sooner the better,” she said.

“Okay then,” Dr. Sherman said. He gave her

something to force her to dilate and was gone.

Down the hall we could hear him enter another

Marley & Me

exam room and boisterously greet an expectant

mother with jolly banter.

Alone in the room, Jenny and I fell heavily into

each other’s arms and stayed that way until a light

knock came at the door. It was an older woman we

had never seen before. She carried a sheaf of pa-

pers. “I’m sorry, sweetie,” she said to Jenny. “I’m

so sorry.” And then she showed her where to sign

the waiver acknowledging the risks of uterine

suction.

When Dr. Sherman returned he was all business.

He injected Jenny first with Valium and then De-

merol, and the procedure was quick if not pain-

less. He was finished before the drugs seemed to

fully kick in. When it was over, she lay nearly un-

conscious as the sedatives took their full effect.

“Just make sure she doesn’t stop breathing,” the

doctor said, and he walked out of the room. I

couldn’t believe it. Wasn’t it his job to make sure

she didn’t stop breathing? The waiver she signed

never said “Patient could stop breathing at any

time due to overdose of barbiturates.” I did as I

was told, talking to her in a loud voice, rubbing

her arm, lightly slapping her cheek, saying things

like, “Hey, Jenny! What’s my name?” She was

dead to the world.

John Grogan

After several minutes Essie stuck her head in to

check on us. She caught one glimpse of Jenny’s

gray face and wheeled out of the room and back in

again a moment later with a wet washcloth and

smelling salts, which she held under Jenny’s nose

for what seemed forever before Jenny began to stir,

and then only briefly. I kept talking to her in a

loud voice, telling her to breathe deeply so I could

feel it on my hand. Her skin was ashen; I found

her pulse: sixty beats per minute. I nervously

dabbed the wet cloth across her forehead, cheeks,

and neck. Eventually, she came around, though

she was still extremely groggy. “You had me wor-

ried,” I said. She just looked blankly at me as if

trying to ascertain why I might be worried. Then

she drifted off again.

A half hour later the nurse helped dress her, and

I walked her out of the office with these orders:

for the next two weeks, no baths, no swimming,

no douches, no tampons, no sex.

In the car, Jenny maintained a detached silence,

pressing herself against the passenger door, gazing

out the window. Her eyes were red but she would

not cry. I searched for comforting words without

success. Really, what could be said? We had lost

our baby. Yes, I could tell her we could try again. I

could tell her that many couples go through the

same thing. But she didn’t want to hear it, and I

Marley & Me

didn’t want to say it. Someday we would be able to

see it all in perspective. But not today.

I took the scenic route home, winding along

Flagler Drive, which hugs West Palm Beach’s wa-

terfront from the north end of town, where the

doctor’s office was, to the south end, where we

lived. The sun glinted off the water; the palm

trees swayed gently beneath the cloudless blue sky.

It was a day meant for joy, not for us. We drove

home in silence.

When we arrived at the house, I helped Jenny

inside and onto the couch, then went into the

garage where Marley, as always, awaited our re-

turn with breathless anticipation. As soon as he

saw me, he dove for his oversized rawhide bone

and proudly paraded it around the room, his body

wagging, tail whacking the washing machine like a

mallet on a kettledrum. He begged me to try to

snatch it from him.

“Not today, pal,” I said, and let him out the

back door into the yard. He took a long pee

against the loquat tree and then came barreling

back inside, took a deep drink from his bowl, wa-

ter sloshing everywhere, and careened down the

hall, searching for Jenny. It took me just a few sec-

onds to lock the back door, mop up the water he

had spilled, and follow him into the living room.

When I turned the corner, I stopped short. I

John Grogan

would have bet a week’s pay that what I was look-

ing at couldn’t possibly happen. Our rambunc-

tious, wired dog stood with his shoulders between

Jenny’s knees, his big, blocky head resting quietly

in her lap. His tail hung flat between his legs, the

first time I could remember it not wagging when-

ever he was touching one of us. His eyes were

turned up at her, and he whimpered softly. She

stroked his head a few times and then, with no

warning, buried her face in the thick fur of his

neck and began sobbing. Hard, unrestrained,

from-the-gut sobbing.

They stayed like that for a long time, Marley

statue-still, Jenny clutching him to her like an

oversized doll. I stood off to the side feeling like a

voyeur intruding on this private moment, not

quite knowing what to do with myself. And then,

without lifting her face, she raised one arm up to-

ward me, and I joined her on the couch and

wrapped my arms around her. There the three of

us stayed, locked in our embrace of shared grief.

C H A P T E R 7

Master and Beast

❉

The next morning, a Saturday, I awoke at dawn

to find Jenny lying on her side with her back

to me, weeping softly. Marley was awake, too, his

chin resting on the mattress, once again commis-

erating with his mistress. I got up and made cof-

fee, squeezed fresh orange juice, brought in the

newspaper, made toast. When Jenny came out in

her robe several minutes later, her eyes were dry

and she gave me a brave smile as if to say she was

okay now.

After breakfast, we decided to get out of the

house and walk Marley down to the water for a

swim. A large concrete breakwater and mounds of

boulders lined the shore in our neighborhood,

making the water inaccessible. But if you walked

a half dozen blocks to the south, the breakwater

curved inland, exposing a small white sand beach

John Grogan

littered with driftwood—a perfect place for a dog

to frolic. When we reached the little beach, I

wagged a stick in front of Marley’s face and un-

leashed him. He stared at the stick as a starving

man would stare at a loaf of bread, his eyes never

leaving the prize. “Go get it!” I shouted, and

hurled the stick as far out into the water as I

could. He cleared the concrete wall in one spec-

tacular leap, galloped down the beach and out into

the shallow water, sending up plumes of spray

around him. This is what Labrador retrievers

were born to do. It was in their genes and in their

job description.

No one is certain where Labrador retrievers

originated, but this much is known for sure: it was

not in Labrador. These muscular, short-haired

water dogs first surfaced in the 1600s a few hun-

dred miles to the south of Labrador, in New-

foundland. There, early diarists observed, the

local fishermen took the dogs to sea with them in

their dories, putting them to good use hauling in

lines and nets and fetching fish that came off the

hooks. The dogs’ dense, oily coats made them im-

pervious to the icy waters, and their swimming

prowess, boundless energy, and ability to cradle

fish gently in their jaws without damaging the

flesh made them ideal work dogs for the tough

North Atlantic conditions.

Marley & Me

How the dogs came to be in Newfoundland is

anyone’s guess. They were not indigenous to the

island, and there is no evidence that early Eskimos

who first settled the area brought dogs with them.

The best theory is that early ancestors of the re-

trievers were brought to Newfoundland by fisher-

men from Europe and Britain, many of whom

jumped ship and settled on the coast, establishing

communities. From there, what is now known as

the Labrador retriever may have evolved through

unintentional, willy-nilly cross-breeding. It likely

shares common ancestry with the larger and shag-

gier Newfoundland breed.

However they came to be, the amazing retriev-

ers soon were pressed into duty by island hunters

to fetch game birds and waterfowl. In 1662, a na-

tive of St. John’s, Newfoundland, named W. E.

Cormack journeyed on foot across the island and

noted the abundance of the local water dogs,

which he found to be “admirably trained as re-

trievers in fowling and . . . otherwise useful.”

The British gentry eventually took notice and by

the early nineteenth century were importing the

dogs to England for use by sportsmen in pursuit of

pheasant, grouse, and partridges.

According to the Labrador Retriever Club, a

national hobbyist group formed in 1931 and dedi-

cated to preserving the integrity of the breed, the

John Grogan

name Labrador retriever came about quite inad-

vertently sometime in the 1830s when the appar-

ently geographically challenged third earl of

Malmesbury wrote to the sixth duke of Buccleuch

to gush about his fine line of sporting retrievers.

“We always call mine Labrador dogs,” he wrote.

From that point forward, the name stuck. The

good earl noted that he went to great lengths to

keep “the breed as pure as I could from the first.”

But others were less religious about genetics,

freely crossing Labradors with other retrievers in

hopes that their excellent qualities would transfer.

The Labrador genes proved indomitable, and the

Labrador retriever line remained distinct, winning

recognition by the Kennel Club of England as a

breed all its own on July 7, 1903.

B.

W. Ziessow, an enthusiast and longtime

breeder, wrote for the Labrador Retriever Club:

“The American sportsmen adopted the breed

from England and subsequently developed and

trained the dog to fulfill the hunting needs of this

country. Today, as in the past, the Labrador will

eagerly enter ice cold water in Minnesota to re-

trieve a shot bird; he’ll work all day hunting doves

in the heat of the Southwest—his only reward is a

pat for a job well done.”

This was Marley’s proud heritage, and it ap-

peared he had inherited at least half of the in-

Marley & Me

stinct. He was a master at pursuing his prey. It was

the concept of returning it that he did not seem to

quite grasp. His general attitude seemed to be, If

Date: 2015-12-17; view: 956