Roger and Carol had both worked and always hired dog walkers during the day, but Roger took Andy around the block for the last walk of the night. A smooth fox terrier is small, but vividly black-and-white, even after dark. The doormen on East Ninetieth Street looked out for Roger and Andy. Roger did not easily strike up conversations with strangers, but he and Joseph Chiffriller, a writer and a baseball fan who was often on night duty at a building on Park Avenue, became friends. The first time I took Andy out for his evening walk, I was stopped repeatedly and asked about Roger, and Joseph eyed me skeptically coming and going. The doormen were a tough crowd; I thought it might be a long while before they trusted me, not just with Andy but also with Roger.
I wasn’t worried—I knew my heart was in the right place—but it seemed to take forever to bring everyone else, including Roger, around to my point of view. We didn’t marry until the summer of 2014, by which time Andy and I were a bonded pair, as Petfinder describes animals that cannot be separated from each other.
Roger and I were both still working, and we had family hither and yon, but Andy was the center of our days. We often took him out together on weekends, meeting and greeting various dog friends in the neighborhood. One afternoon, we ran into a black-and-white Shih Tzu at Engineers’ Gate, on our way into Central Park, and Roger called out, “Look! He’s wearing the team colors!” He bent down to scratch the dog’s fluffy topknot, and then he introduced him to Andy: “Tumble Gently? Meet Dry Flat.”
Another time, we passed a toddler in a stroller who pointed at Andy and asked his mother, “Cow?” His mother, who realized immediately that it was just a question of scale, thought for only a second before explaining, “No—Harry.”
Roger was beside himself with delight. “Harry the Dirty Dog” was one of his favorite children’s books. “That was the most purely literary conversation I’ve ever heard!” he said. “In three words!” He became quiet, and I knew he was thinking of his and Carol’s second fox terrier, who was also named Harry—for President Truman, not the dog in the book.
We were not always in perfect harmony where Andy was concerned. One night, when I came in from taking Andy around the block, I told Roger about a hostile dog we’d run into on the corner. I threw the leash on the hall table and stomped into the living room. I was outraged: “Andy was being so nice to him, and then the dog just attacked him!”
Roger was reading, but he looked up for a second. Andy hopped onto a nearby settee and wagged his tail. If Andy was fine, Roger was fine. He shrugged and went back to his book. “Yeah,” he said. “That happened to Gandhi a lot.”
A week later, we were watching the Westminster Dog Show on television when I said the smooth fox terrier was so cute. Roger snapped, “The fox terrier is not cute! The fox terrier is dashing!” Westminster, where members of the breed had won Best in Show four years in a row in the early twentieth century, was always a disappointment in the twenty-first. Roger especially hated a line the announcers used year after year as the terrier class paraded into Madison Square Garden: “And here comes the smooth fox terrier, with its easy-care coat.”
“That’s the best you can do?” he’d shout at the TV. “Easy-care coat?” This happened annually, on cue. If Westminster was in town, I’d make Roger’s evening Scotch-and-water a little stronger than usual.
We would occasionally take Andy for a drive in Roger’s old but noble 1997 Volvo wagon, which I’d fetch from a garage in Harlem where we stored it. We’d go across the George Washington Bridge and then up the Palisades to Snedens Landing, where Roger had spent summers as a small child and later lived with his first wife, Evelyn. There was an ancient cemetery nearby, where a couple of forebears of his were buried, and we would wander around looking at inscriptions on the headstones while Andy sniffed them. One darkening fall afternoon, we returned to Manhattan to find a parking spot right in front of our apartment building. “Miracle on Madison Avenue,” he said.
