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This story was related by a woman sitting next to me at a dinner in New York six years ago. This couple out in New Jersey -- they were friends of a friend of hers, she said -- were straightening up their house at the end of another suburban Saturday-night party. It was late by the time the last guests had departed, and the host announced that he'd had too much Chardonnay and was too beat to pick up so much as another plate. He went off to bed, but his wife, thinking what the morning would look like, stayed on in the kitchen, rinsing and loading. There came a scratching noise at the back door, and she opened it to discover the family pet, Tartuffe, a standard poodle, dripping with rain and mud and frantic pride, with a large dead rabbit in his mouth. Horrified, she extracted the prize from Tartuffe's jaws, shoved him into the garage, and then tried to think of some way out of the disaster. Sinkingly, she had recognized not only the dog but the rabbit, which was the adored pet of the eight-year-old boy who lived next door.
Without a plan and without much hope, she began cleaning up the bunny delicti. A little work at the sink took care of the mud and blood. Encouraged, she fetched her hair dryer from the bathroom, and, with assiduous brushing and blowing, transformed the victim into a shining, almost breathing show animal: a rabbit right out of "The Loved One." She slipped on her raincoat, tucked the precious bundle inside, and tiptoed across her soaking lawn and around to the back of the house next door, where she slipped the body into its vacant hutch and, as best she could, arranged it on the straw in the posture of a sleeping pet that had suffered a coronary accident. Noiselessly, she latched the door of the pen, and moments later was safely home again in her kitchen, where she mixed herself a nightcap.
She was awakened the next morning by the not unexpected telephone call. "The most terrible thing has happened!" cried the mother of the rabbit-keeper. "Freddie just came in and told us that Snuff is dead in his pen. I simply don't know what to tell him."
Our resourceful heroine was shocked, then sympathetic, then sensible. "These things happen," she said calmly. "Pets die, and it's always tough on kids. But isn't this why we let them keep animals in the first place? Everything dies, after all -- it's part of life, you could say."
"Yes, yes -- right," said the mother next door in a strangled voice. "That's exactly what we told him when Snuff died on Thursday, and we buried him out behind the garage. Now what do we say?"
I passed this story on, too. One of the friends I told it to, a producer with NBC News, took the tale back to his office, with the usual results. "Tom Brokaw says he knows about the rabbit," he told me the next day. "Only it didn't happen in New Jersey, it happened to friends of people he knows out in Pasadena." Maybe not, said another NBC colleague to my producer friend not long ago. She had retold the twice-dead-rabbit story last year at a restaurant in the Masai Mara, in Kenya, and noticed an Australian at her table nodding his head in recognition as the account unfurled. "Know the family well," he announced when she was done. "The whole thing happened to blokes we know just across the road, back home in Queensland."
-- Roger Angell
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