Free Evil Breeding by Susan Conant Page A

fervor akin to my own, she was genuflecting before God and Rin Tin Tin.
    The second of my favorites must have been taken when Mrs. Dodge was very old. She sat outdoors. Tall trees and low shrubs rose in the background. To the right of her chair stood two of her beloved shepherds. Two more sat on her left, and, beyond them, another rested on the lawn. What drew me into the picture wasn’t just the obvious health and happiness of the beautiful and well-loved dogs. All five dogs were smiling, I admit. So was Mrs. Dodge. But what reached out and seized me were those six startlingly identical pairs of eyes. Mrs. Dodge had seen the world through the eyes of her joyful dogs. They, in turn, gazed with delight at the perfect world she had created for them. When Mrs. Dodge was in her early eighties, her court-appointed guardians applied for legal permission to reduce the amount of money allotted to feed her dogs. Why the guardians? She had been declared mentally incompetent. Her husband had died the previous December. Although she paid $90,000 a year in taxes on her Fifth Avenue mansion, the house was never used and had been boarded up. In terms of dog ownership, she had hit what must have been the low point of her adult life: She shared the five hundred acres of Giralda with a mere forty-nine dogs. Her guardians applied to have the dogs’ annual food allotment drastically reduced from $50,000 to $14,000. On June 24, 1964, in Newark, New Jersey, Superior Court, Judge Ward J. Herbert ruled against the guardians. Mrs. Dodge’s dogs, he decreed, were entitled “to live in the style to which she had allowed them to grow accustomed.” That’s what the New York Times said. Gee, no wonder her shepherds had happy eyes. I said that.
    The third picture was the one that inspired me to buy the hat. It was printed in 1973 with one of the stories about the legal battle over her will. It was a studio portrait taken about 1940, a close-up of her head and shoulders. Her features were large and heavy. To her dogs, she must have looked beautiful. I, however, felt no desire to change faces with her. No, all I wanted was her hat, which was a cloche, I guess, worn at a jaunty angle, with the brim turned up. Fastened to it was a tiny pin that represented a dog. The original hat probably came from a smart Fifth Avenue shop. In the newsprint, the hat looked black. It might actually have been a dark shade of blue, green, purple, or crimson. Its material was anyone’s guess. My guess was velvet. That’s what I bought in a shop in Harvard Square: a black velvet hat with a brim. I put it on at that memorably jaunty angle. I turned up the brim. Although I had no tiny pin of a dog, I added Mrs. Dodge’s strong smile and the bold expression of her dark eyes. The pin would come later. Hers had probably been gold or platinum. With unpaid bills sitting at home, I shouldn’t have bought the hat. I would wait for the pin. Maybe one of Mrs. Dodge’s dogs had won hers. Maybe Rowdy or Kimi would win one for me.
    Having illustrated the intensity of my wishful identification with Geraldine R. Dodge, I will move on to reveal the disenchanting discovery I made late that Monday afternoon while fiddling around on the World Wide Web. I was using what are called “search engines,” super-duper indexes that find things on the Web. Imagine that the Web is an old-fashioned library with thousands of books, newspapers, and periodicals. To find what you’re looking for, you don’t use a catalog that consists of file cards arranged alphabetically by author, title, and subject. Rather, you use a miraculous device that hunts through every word in every piece of printed matter in the library. Yes, you can search for authors, titles, and subjects by the trillion. You can also search for individual words and phrases, not just in titles, but anywhere in the text of anything in this astronomically gigantic library known as the World Wide Web.
    Like many other miracles—birth,