Born to Bark Read online

  With the benefit of hindsight, I can see that research had clearly become my passion. It was addictive, and I was spending the majority of what free time I had gathering data, writing, analyzing—lost in my own intellectual world. I had become that clichéd Hollywood version of a scientist, immersed in his work while forgetting or neglecting his family and other relationships. I finished my undergraduate studies with four published research articles, including a study in one of the most important research journals in the world, Science. That publication, as much as my grades and other qualifications, led to my being accepted by Stanford University for doctoral studies in psychology.

  I graduated from Penn in the beginning of June 1964, and less than two weeks later Mossy and I were married, making two sets of parents and my grandfather very happy, and convincing them that all was right with the world. Later that summer, Mossy and I loaded everything that we owned (which wasn’t all that much) into the almost-new blue station wagon that my grandfather had given me for our cross-country trek to California.

  The last thing I did before climbing into the car to begin the journey was to bend down to say good-bye to Penny. I held her big square head in my hands, looked into her deep brown eyes, and quietly told her, “I love you, girl.”

  Normally the Goofy voice would have answered me with some snarky comment, but there were people around and I didn’t want them to think that I had gone mad. So the Goofy voice was silent this time.

  “Wait for me, Glock. I’ll be back for you.”

  It would be two years before I could return to my parents’ home in Philadelphia, and Penny could not wait. I never saw those brown eyes again and never again heard that Goofy voice.

  Because I had served in the military, when Mossy and I arrived at Stanford University we were eligible for subsidized married student housing. These accommodations were in a place called Stanford Village, which made it sound like some idyllic, tree-lined setting. It actually was a set of narrow, one-story wooden army barracks located behind Stanford Research Institute. These buildings had been used as a military hospital during World War II, but now had been converted to apartment units by building thin walls to subdivide the area into apartments. Each housing unit was composed of a small bedroom, a living room, a tiny kitchen, and a walk-in-closet-sized bathroom with no bathtub and only a metal shower stall. The walls had been hastily and cheaply put up with no sound insulation between units, and in some places there were gaps of around a half inch between the top of the wall and the ceiling. This gave us little privacy but lots of information about our neighbors’ private lives, since even whispers freely drifted through the walls and gaps into our apartment. Nonetheless, it was a place to live and it was very inexpensive.

  At that time, Stanford had one of the most respected psychology departments in the world. It could boast more winners of the American Psychological Association’s Distinguished Psychologist Award (psychology’s equivalent of the Nobel Prize) than any other department in existence. I was going to work with one of their superstars, Leon Festinger, who is best known for his theory of cognitive dissonance, which explains the ways that people form and change their attitudes, but who also made significant contributions to social psychology, learning, perception, statistics, and even paleopsychology (which is the attempt to reconstruct social and other everyday behaviors from the kinds of things that archeologists and paleontologists turn up when exploring the caves and primitive settlements where primitive humans lived tens of thousands of years ago).

  One of the most brilliant people that I have ever met, Leon could shed new insights on any problem to which he turned his attention. His analytic abilities were astonishing. In his weekly research meetings with his students and a few colleagues, he was a delight to watch as his mind worked behind the ever-present cloud of cigarette smoke. He would tease apart theoretical notions and then reassemble them in new forms. He had a talent for extracting the essence of a theory and then creating a very simple experimental procedure to test it.

  In spite of my admiration of him, Leon and I clashed several times during my first year at Stanford because I did not want to be a technician simply carrying out a principal researcher’s instructions, no matter how much of a genius he was. I had my own research ideas and my own interests, and Leon admitted that some were very interesting. Ultimately, he offered me a compromise. He gave me a large room as a laboratory and told me that as long as I completed the various research projects that we were doing collaboratively, I could do any other research that I wanted to do on my own and he would support it financially. This worked for both of us, and I always had three or four experiments going at the same time, each set up in a different corner of my big lab space.

  I was yearning for a dog, but pets were not permitted in our housing complex. So although cats are really not my cup of fur, I allowed myself to get involved in a research project that involved a cat. Socializing with a cat is certainly better than having no animal companion. She was a purebred Siamese with the registered name of Shen Wa’s Just Fu Too, but I just called her Fu. She had been selected because she was extremely cross-eyed and because of the odd way that the visual system of Siamese cats is wired to their brains. If we could, in essence, get her to tell us what she was actually seeing by teaching her to respond to some special types of visual displays, it might shed light on a newly developed theory about how humans see their world.

  I designed the apparatus that Fu was to be tested in. She had only a very simple task to perform. All that she had to do was to look at a display that controlled the information that came into each eye separately, and then push a lever on the right if she saw one line and a lever on the left if she saw two. Pigeons can do this sort of task, so there was no reason to expect that a cat would have any difficulty. The actual testing was being done by a more junior graduate student named Charlie. Leon had asked me to keep an eye on Charlie’s progress, which I gladly did since it gave me the excuse to drop by the lab at various times and, if testing was not in progress, I got to play a bit with Fu. She was incredibly beautiful, with deep blue eyes, and was, at least for a cat, very loving.

  Unfortunately, Fu turned out to be too dumb to even learn the preliminary tasks needed for her to be tested. Charlie became rather despondent about how the experiment was going, and Leon was annoyed at the lack of progress. Since Charlie was following the procedures exactly as specified, Leon’s displeasure focused on the cat, and he decided to end the testing and have her put down.

  I felt sorry for Fu, since she had at least partly filled the need that I had for a pet over the past 8 or 9 months. So when I heard his plans to terminate her life, I offered to take her. Leon was sufficiently frustrated and angry that he openly expressed a strong desire to see the animal dead and had already arranged to have her euthanized later that afternoon. With the limited time left I made the best pitch that I could think of.

  “Look, Leon, you have some affection for your own cat, Max, don’t you?” Max was a tailless Manx cat.

  “What difference does that make?” he grumbled as he reached into his pocket to take out a cigarette. This was a good sign, since it meant that he was not so upset that he had forgotten to smoke.

  “Well, maybe you can understand how I feel about Fu. I know what we paid for her, and I am willing to buy her from you.”

  “Buy her? Where the hell are you going to get the money to buy her given your bountiful salary?” I was earning $235 a month and we would have starved if it was not for the fact that Mossy was working as an X-ray technician. Fu would cost nearly half a month’s wages if I paid her full price, an amount we really couldn’t afford. “Furthermore, I don’t give a damn about the money,” Leon grumbled. “I just want her destroyed today so I can put her out of my misery.”

  He took a deep puff on his cigarette, looked at the ceiling, and exhaled. After a moment, he looked back at me and asked, “Is she really that important to you?”

  I nodded.

  “All right, simpl
y on behalf of my feelings for Max, you can have her, and it won’t cost you anything. However, there are two conditions. First, you get that cat out of the lab immediately. I never want to see it again. Second, I want you to promise me that you will never tell me that the cat is happy in its new home. I don’t want to even know where its new home is, and I don’t want you to say another word about her in my presence. Her name should have been Phooey! Now get that cat out of my lab before I change my mind.”

  I dashed over to Charlie’s office and told him to cancel the euthanasia request, then raced down to the workshop and with the help of the shop technician, cobbled together an ugly but usable kennel crate, using a wooden packing box from some recently received equipment. With this in hand I went to Charlie’s lab and removed Fu.

  Since there was no place else to leave her, I smuggled the cat into our apartment. In two days Mossy and I would be driving back to Philadelphia for a visit, since classes had ended for the Christmas holiday. This meant that the likelihood that the cat would be discovered was low.

  As I sat with Fu in my lap later that evening, I found that I wanted to talk to her as I had talked to Penny. So I said, “You know that you are very lucky. If Leon had delayed his decision to kill you by just a day or two, I would have been on my way to Philadelphia and would have missed the opportunity to save your life. Instead, you are going to become our Christmas gift to my parents.”

  Fu did not answer, and I did not expect her to. Although I felt comfortable talking to her, I had no desire to give her a voice or engage in any real interactive conversation with her—after all, she was only a cat.

  By the time I had finished my doctoral research, a number of changes had occurred in my life. Surrounded by many brilliant minds in Stanford’s psychology department, and its intense focus on scientific investigation, I had become virtually addicted to my research and writing. Mossy was supportive in her quiet way, but she did not understand either the issues that I was dealing with in my research or my passion for doing it. Because I was so occupied with my research, our relationship had weakened and we became more distant and uninvolved. We both noticed that this was happening and both of us wanted the marriage to prosper and continue, but I did not want to stop my work to make things better and Mossy did not have the skills or inclination to be involved with my studies.

  I did not know how to remedy our personal situation or even how to begin to work my way through the various alternative options that I might have. Because pets were not allowed in these apartments, I had no dog to serve as a confidant and sounding board to allow me to have the kind of therapeutic and exploratory “conversations” that I had had with Penny. Apparently I had become more dependent on those “dialogues” than I realized. Thus the idea that a lot of my own behaviors and choices were weakening my bond with my wife never truly entered my consciousness. Like so many other married couples confronted with a cooling relationship, Mossy and I decided that the solution was to have a baby.

  Although this method of trying to heal our marriage was, as is usually the case, a failure, I never regretted bringing our daughter Rebecca into the world. A pretty child, she had her mother’s dark hair and my mother’s sparkling blue eyes. While my relationship with Mossy did not permanently improve, it did get a little better for a while, and perhaps the downhill slide slowed a bit. I gave up some of my time in the lab to spend more time at home with Rebecca.

  Ultimately, as my addiction to my research took over again, I spent less time at home and more time working. When I finally finished my thesis and got my doctorate, I had published an additional half dozen articles in scientific journals. This was considered to be a remarkable level of productivity at that time, and so several well-respected universities offered me jobs. At the same time Leon Festinger had decided to leave Stanford to take an endowed professorial chair at the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research in New York City. Originally from New York, Leon adored that city and, in addition, he had fallen in love with a woman who was on the faculty of New York University. He was offered the opportunity to start his own research program with a suite of laboratories in a new building. Leon asked me if I would accept a faculty position at the New School and become the director of the new Perception Laboratory that he was founding. He also guaranteed research funding for the first two years. My loyalty to Leon inclined me to accept, the availability of research funding was a great incentive, and furthermore, New York was easy driving distance from Philadelphia where my family still lived, now with their new dog, a schnauzer named Baron, and their well-loved, blue-eyed Siamese cat named Fu. So it was off to New York with my wife and daughter.

  CHAPTER 5

  THE DOG THAT WASN’T MINE

  It was time to complete my family with a dog, but once we reached New York, we had a lot of trouble finding a dog-friendly apartment building. I believed that a puppy would make us a true family unit.

  Besides longing for a dog, I may have been trying to model myself after my father and the loving home he had created for us with the dogs he had brought home. I had convinced myself that this dog would be for my daughter—it would not be my dog; it would have to bond with Rebecca more strongly than to me. Even though I wanted another canine companion, I nonetheless believed that this was the right thing to do. So we got a little gray prick-eared Cairn terrier and named him Feldspar. Almost from the beginning my daughter called him Felfy, so Mossy and I did too.

  Virtually from the first day that I arrived at the New School for Social Research, I began to organize my lab and start a series of research projects. In a replay of what had happened at Stanford, my hours got longer and longer and I was seldom at home, which meant that I was not there to care for Feldspar, to train him or to walk him.

  By default, caring for Felfy fell to Mossy, who had never had a dog. I tried to instruct her about the basics, explaining to her about housebreaking and the need for walks every day to keep the dog happy and the house clean. She looked at me in absolute horror.

  “You mean you want me to go out there on the street alone, with just Rebecca, to walk the dog?” she asked, with considerably more emotion than was usual for her. “We are in New York. This is Greenwich Village. There are drunks and drug users and muggers and people who will attack a woman and a child that they find alone on the street simply because they can. And even if they were not there, you are asking me to bundle up our daughter twice a day and drag ourselves out every day—twice a day—whether there is rain or cold or whatever, just to empty out a dog?

  “I expected that this would be like keeping a cat. Cats learn to use a litter box. You don’t have to walk a cat twice a day on dirty and dangerous streets to keep the house clean. I was told that you can do something like litter box training for dogs. They call it paper training. You throw some sheets of newspaper in an unused corner and teach the dog to use them. All you need to do is to pick up the papers when they are messed and put down new ones. Either you paper train the dog or you arrange your schedule to be home twice a day to walk the dog. I am not walking any dog.”

  With that, she got up, went to the kitchen, and put the teakettle on the stove, so I knew that this discussion was finished and I had lost.

  I sighed and asked, “Which corner would you like him to use?”

  Paper training Feldspar actually turned out to be easy. The use of papers as his toilet became so ingrained that on days when I would take him outside for a walk, he would refrain from eliminating until he found a piece of paper to do it over. The piece of paper could be the size of an envelope, but that was enough. He would sniff it, and then place his head over it before letting go, often completely missing his tiny target. Eventually I got into the habit of always carrying a sheet of newspaper folded in my pocket when he and I were walking to speed matters up.

  Training Mossy to clean up after the dog was not as easy. I don’t know whether it was a holdover from her anger at my expectation that she would take care of Felfy, or that she simply did
not like housework (things like dirty dishes and unwashed laundry often piled up to crisis levels), but whenever I came home, there were always soiled papers in the corner. Making an issue of this unsanitary problem would have only brought a further chill to our relationship, so I kept silent and replaced the soiled papers with clean ones when needed.

  Felfy did what he was supposed to do as Rebecca’s dog, she loved him dearly, and she often sat and babbled to him about everything and nothing at all. She invented games, like “touch noses,” which involved more time spent laughing than nose touching, and “airplane ears,” where she would bend his pricked ears down to make them look like airplane wings and then make airplane engine noises while turning his head this way and that as if she were flying him.

  He was a pleasant dog, and I wanted to bond with him, too, and to give him a voice, but because Feldspar belonged to Rebecca, I did not feel that I should compete for his attention, although I can now look back and recognize my stupidity. My deliberate holding back of the affection I wanted to share with him sometimes made it painful for me when I was around Felfy.

  I was channeling all of my ardor and enthusiasm into my research and writing, building a name for myself, and developing a good reputation among my colleagues. Yet I was still young and beginning to miss the passion to be found in a close relationship. The results were probably inevitable as I became quite fond of one of my graduate students who was incredibly bright, creative, and sociable. After she got her degree, she continued to do research and write articles with me and we made some significant scientific breakthroughs together. Clearly, I had chosen a personal relationship that would not interfere with my obsession with science.