My late husband had no religious feeling whatsoever, although at times in his youth he tried sincerely to muster some. At boarding school, he sang Episcopal hymns and recited prayers, closing his eyes and doing his utmost to feel some divine presence. Nope. Nothing. By the time I met him, when he was in his fifties, he couldn’t have cared less. He was utterly non-spiritual, the most completely secular person I’ve known, so even to me it seems vaguely suspect that it’s because of him that I now believe there may be an afterlife, a place I guess I would call Heaven. I believe in this afterlife—his, at least—because of the smooth fox terriers.
Roger Angell had loved smooth fox terriers since the afternoon, five or six decades ago, when he and his second wife Carol, on vacation in France, saw one prancing along a gleaming Mediterranean beach behind a strikingly beautiful woman wearing nothing but a bikini bottom. The image stuck in his mind, but Roger insisted he had eyes only for the dog. Upon returning to the States, he found a breeder in Vermont and bought a puppy; years later, after that one died, he and Carol bought another. Andy was their third.
In 2012, when Andy and I met, he was only two, thrilled to make anyone’s acquaintance. Roger was ninety-two, grieving and undoubtedly frightened. He’d lost Carol to breast cancer, which had returned unexpectedly in her early seventies. His anguish was not hard to imagine, at least for me, a widow, but he also suffered from a lack of domestic skills. He was good at so many things—driving, sailing, finding just the right gift for a loved one—but I’m not sure he knew the washing machine from the dryer. He could feed Andy, but, except for pouring cornflakes into a bowl and slicing a banana, he could not feed himself. One especially thoughtful friend brought him a sheaf of menus from neighborhood restaurants that would deliver.
I was uncharacteristically petless that year. My daughter’s childhood dog, Pearl, and our last cat, Moe, had both recently passed away, and I was practicing positive thinking: I’ll travel, now that I’m free. But, when I went over to Roger’s apartment to bring him a roast chicken, Andy came to the door, wagging and welcoming. I unwrapped the chicken enough to tear off a chunk for him, and then I asked Roger to marry me. He said no, but not as firmly as he might have. He may have divined, in me, a solution to the daily challenges that plagued him, but he couldn’t help hoping that a younger candidate would turn up. After all, I was sixty-four, and his previous two brides had been in their early twenties.
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.
It was good only for an hour, so I said I’d just let them out and take the car back, but Roger said no. “Come up with us in the elevator, and don’t leave until after Andy and I are settled in the apartment,” he said. “If you get back in the car now and disappear, it’ll break his heart.”
When, a few years later, Roger’s own heart began to break, Andy and I lay in bed with him and listened to audiobooks, or I read headlines from the Times, a favorite poem, or an old, familiar short story—there were so many that Roger loved, it was easy. A couple of times, Roger took both my hands in his and looked me in the eye—an earnest, uncharacteristic gesture that startled me and brought me to attention—and said he was so, so, so sorry that Andy was old, too. He was consoling me, in advance, not for his own imminent death but for Andy’s eventual one.
I argued with him. Andy wasn’t old. He spent every morning racing around the Park after squirrels, or retrieving balls thrown by his best friend, Keeper, a great, handsome mutt whose hip problems made him unable to keep up on long walks. Keeper was a pretty good pitcher, though—he used his teeth and tossed his head. Andy would retrieve the slobbery ball and place it between Keeper’s front paws for the next throw. “Gives new meaning to the term ‘spitball,’ ” Roger said.
But Roger knew. He just looked at me pityingly, insisting again and again, as if I might not believe him, “I will love you forever.” I think he did; I think he does.
I know that losing someone who was four months from his hundred-and-second birthday shouldn’t have been a shock, but it was. Roger was still so much fun, still so avid—more alive than I was, really, after a couple of hard pandemic years. You read about people who live to a hundred and five, a hundred and seven, even longer. I expected him to be one of them, and I still don’t understand why he wasn’t.
He died in May, 2022, and afterward Andy and I were both constantly sick. In July, I developed pericarditis and pneumonia, and in the fall Andy was diagnosed with metastatic cancer. I caught COVID in late October and couldn’t shake it for nearly a month, and Andy died in November after a precipitous decline.
I was desolate, and my desolation showed. The pandemic had made loneliness epidemic, but mine must have looked especially desperate, because almost immediately a couple of people asked me if I’d thought of dating. Dating. Anyway, no. Also, what kind of man would I look for? Surprise me.
One time early in our marriage, when I had flown to Virginia to visit my sister, Sally, in her nursing home, I’d found a dog running along a rural highway. He had to have been lost. There were no houses for miles—nothing but woods. I happened to have mozzarella sticks with me, so it wasn’t hard to lure him into the rental car. He ate a few and then curled up and fell asleep on the seat next to me. He stank to high heaven. He was a basset-beagle mix, and he’d been on the loose long enough that his fleas no longer bothered to hide. I dropped him off at a no-kill shelter and told them that, if they couldn’t find his owner, I would drive back down and adopt him myself. Back in New York, I told Roger all this, and there was no mistaking my seriousness: if this dog needed a home, I was going to bring him to ours.
Roger raised his eyebrows and seemed to stare into space. I steeled myself for an argument, but when he finally spoke what he said was, “What should we name him?”
The dog did need a home, but, by the time he was made available for adoption, several families in Virginia were vying for him, so I told the shelter to choose one. But I never forgot Roger’s eager, exemplary, completely surprising question. I understand that every marriage has its flaws and longueurs, but this was the kind of nonpareil moment that lets you know you’ve chosen well.
After losing Roger and Andy, I couldn’t imagine any solace. That winter, I went to Sarasota, where Roger and I had spent months during the pandemic and, in other years, had alternated between Orioles and Pirates spring-training games. Roger and Andy were well liked in the neighborhood, and it was excruciating to be there without them, without my boys. I had been depressed at other times in my life, but I had no experience with this level of loneliness. One sleepless night I did consider suicide, but I hadn’t cleaned out the attic of a house I own in the Catskills, so that was out of the question. Instead, I went online and searched for a dog. I typed in my requirements: middle-aged, small enough for me to pick up, good with children.
The dog I found was Sacha: six years old, seventeen pounds, and much loved by the grandchildren of the couple who owned her, who bred smooth fox terriers in Apopka, Florida, near Orlando. I took Sacha sight unseen. In a long life of dogs and cats, my first perfect pet had been Andy, so I wasn’t expecting another, but ask me anything about Sacha: Housebroken? Good with other dogs? Respectful of cats? Patient with toddlers? Sweet and calm with large, uncontrollable puppies? Peaceful when left alone? Cheerful, curious, funny? Yes, to all of it. Tasha, as I came to call her, was my second perfect dog. She saved me, and I loved her completely.
Last November 16th, I posted a picture on Facebook of Tasha for her ninth birthday. On December 1st, without warning, she died of internal bleeding caused by an undiagnosed cancer. She’d been especially happy that day, because her dog friend Staar was back from Thanksgiving. She had leaped and played and raced around Riverside Park and eaten a big breakfast when we came back home. She was fine all day and ate a good dinner. In the middle of the night, though, I woke up and knew something was not right. By four in the morning, she had died at the animal hospital, despite their urgent efforts to save her.
I was alone again, in much the same shocking way I had been three years earlier. My daughter, Emma, and her spouse, Kim, brought their dog over every evening that week. We would talk and have dinner together, and the three of them did everything they could to comfort me, but my days were horribly empty. The Health app on my phone reported that I had stopped walking, but I was not about to go out. People on the street, neighbors in the building, and children on their way to school would all want to know where Tasha was, and I knew I would cry if I had to tell them, and some of them would cry, too. So, no.
I had kept in touch with the breeder in Apopka, Susan, and I forced myself to tell her about Tasha’s death, because I knew she would notice the sudden absence of texted photographs. Susan wrote back to say that one of Tasha’s puppies had been retired from breeding after turning five, and, if I wanted to, I could pick her up in Apopka after the holidays. On January 6th, I took the Auto Train to Orlando, and the next morning I picked up my third—and last—smooth fox terrier, Nova. Once again, the dog of my dreams is trotting along beside me, and nagging thoughts about the miraculous nature of unexpected blessings keep me up at night.
I have never told anyone—especially Roger—that I feel his presence in these extraordinary circumstances, but maybe I should, because it does make a weird kind of sense. He had an uncanny ability to adapt, and it would be just his style to find himself in some sort of unexpected paradise—Wow! Look at this place!—especially one where he has serious dog-granting powers.
There is only one minor problem. Emma and Kim’s dog, who stays with me from time to time, is also named Nova (for lox, not an exploding star). All December, I thought about how the name of this second Nova might evolve into some concordant, vowel-sensitive variation—Lola, Nora, Nonna, Dona, Donna? I would give anything to let Roger decide.
So I keep thinking, Can’t we just talk? We could discuss Nova’s name, or maybe speak about serious loss in some roundabout way—Pete Alonzo leaving the Mets, say. If Roger didn’t want to admit that he was wrong about the afterlife, I wouldn’t press him, of course, but if he is my benefactor, somehow sending Tasha and now Nova to me, each at the moment of my greatest need, I so want to thank him, from the bottom of my heart—not only for the smooth fox terriers but also for keeping me in mind. If he does, I mean. If he is. ♦