Well, of course we didn’t know he was a father when we adopted him.
It was the fall of 2020, and my now-husband and I had spent months attempting to rescue a dog. He was taking the lead, as I had never had a pet more advanced than a goldfish nor had I much wanted one. There had been a moment as a child when I’d begged for a goldendoodle because a cool girl I met at camp had one. I abandoned that quest to focus on a more attainable aim—securing pierced ears.
But Jason had grown up with dogs. He is a dog person like some people are natural-born mothers; puppies bound up at the farmers market, lumbering old-timers nuzzle their head in his hand. When the pandemic forced us indoors, he made his pitch. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a four-legged creature around, since going on walks was one of our few actual, sanctioned activities? Didn’t I want a new friend, now that socializing was at an all-time low?
I had known this was in our future. Jason had after all once considered fostering a cattle dog named Carol who needed to be taken on two-hour walks. After his childhood dog Gus died, he received a photorealistic pillow of him as a gift. We still have it in our apartment. So, sure, fine. I was in. I just had a few stipulations: I wanted the dog to be house-trained, under 25 pounds, and laid-back. Jason found Marvin—house-trained, 19 pounds, and so anxious he would later need a Prozac prescription—like some people find deals on The RealReal.
After weeks of hunting and a few near-misses, he presented a photo of a bedraggled-looking mutt to me over dinner. The dog in question needed a haircut, but even I saw the potential. He was 18 months old and full-size, with a terrier-like build. I didn’t see stars or feel a rush of emotion. I didn’t fall in love. Still, I liked the look of him. He had a certain sweetness. I blessed the application. Jason reached out to the rescue that had taken him in and we learned he was in Texas, but could be trucked up to New York in a few weeks. Perhaps we should have asked a few more questions when the woman he spoke to told us Marvin was a “lover, not a fighter.” We did not.
Marvin arrived on December 5, delivered to us from the back of a white van with his vaccination record, a microchip, and almost nothing else. There’s a photo of me collecting him, and I look how I felt—nervous and a little stupid. Jason was elated.
The first few weeks passed in a blur. Marvin was so freaked out that we were at one point taking him out to pee in two-hour intervals. He slipped out of his collar in Riverside Park and a kind citizen had to help me coax him back into it. He was defensive around his food bowl. He didn’t know how to walk on a leash. It snowed and the salt aggravated his paws. We had to soak them in a shallow bath of antiseptic that we rigged out of a glass baking dish, a pseudo-pedicure that he did not find relaxing. He cried when we tried to leave the apartment. We tried to crate-train him. He hated his crate. We needed to feed him an unceasing number of treats to get him to take the elevator with our neighbors. He barked at children on skateboards. He also barked at women with backpacks, a phobia we could not diagnose. Jason took his side, insisting that some pedestrians do look suspicious.
And somehow, despite all that, I was transformed. It was inexplicable to friends and loved ones, some of whom had known me since I starved a Tamagotchi through sheer neglect, that I had become a person who hand-fed Marvin freeze-dried rabbit treats. I suffered all the amnesia of the converted. Had I ever not wanted a dog, I marveled. Could that have been possible?
When Marvin moved in, I had declared that I would love him and care for him, but I would never let him lick my face. That rule lasted 48 hours. Marvin could stand on his hind legs, which I found charming. Marvin pawed at his face when he got tired, like a little kid. When he slept with his face flush to the couch, he woke up with what looked like a handle-bar mustache.
Jason and I looked at each other and beamed. We had gotten the perfect dog, had we not? In fairness, with genes like his, no wonder he procreated.
It was Jason who found out. He’d been walking Marvin to one of his endless vet appointments (the paws remained antagonized) when Marvin stopped to sniff another dog on the curb. The two were about the same size, with similar ears and button noses. “Marv-like,” Jason and I had started to proclaim to each other when we encountered dogs similar to our own. Marv-like, indeed. On an otherwise unremarkable stretch of Amsterdam and 88th Street, their leashes intertwined, their tails wagged, and Jason—not one for small talk under normal circumstances—felt for some fated reason moved to make conversation.
The owner of the other dog—a white furball named Leo, we would soon learn—narrowed her gaze in focus.
Can I explain what happened next without reviving the spirit of Jerry Springer?
Let me give it a go: The woman with the white pup? Her name is Tara, and she recognized Marvin in an instant. Like Jason, she knew the PetFinder rigamarole. She’d seen Marvin just a few weeks earlier and had no choice but to inform Jason that her dog was in fact Marvin’s son. Jason did the math. We had rescued a . . . teen dad. Jason gaped, but Tara kept talking. She went on to explain that one of Marvin’s other children was in the care of her friend Anne. All three dogs had come from Texas. All three dogs now lived within a mile of each other on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.
While Marvin and Leo reunited—no tears or thrown chairs, but we do think the two recognized each other—Tara told Jason that she had herself tried to adopt Marvin, but we had beaten her to the application. When she lost out, the owner of the rescue offered an alternative: Marvin’s previous owners had maxed out on the number of pets allowed in their new home and had surrendered not just Mavin, but one of his sons too. Did Tara want him? She scooped up Leo, who had come to New York in the same transport as Marvin. A few weeks later, another son became available, and Tara match-made the rescue with Anne.
It took Jason a few minutes to recover from the shock. (Did this make us . . . Leo’s grandparents?) But when he did, he called me from the sidewalk to scream-recount all this, which is what a person does in response to discovering that his dog fathered children at 10 months old. Jason and Tara exchanged numbers; Anne and I were soon added to a text thread. We gathered dad and sons a month or two later at a dog run near the Museum of Natural History—a neutral space. Marvin did not demonstrate a ton of paternal instinct, but genetics don’t lie. All three dogs stand on their hind legs, bark at rollerbladers in Central Park, and bear a striking resemblance to the fictional canine character Benji, star of the 1974 film Benji with a cameo in the 1976 flick Hawmps!
The reunion attracted a bit of attention, with Marvin, Leo, and Murray passing through a dubious New York rite of passage: Having their photo in the New York Post. o. In the true spirit of dramatic day-time television, we did later confirm their relationship via a dog DNA test. Marvin is believed to have mated with a rather noble Bichon Frisé mix. He turns out to have no trace of terrier blood at all. He’s a chihuahua-poodle mix. So far, Marvin has been able to maintain a low profile and carries his modest internet fame with grace.
We have gotten the clan back together a few times, although it’s harder now that Leo (with Tara) has left New York. Father-son relationships—fraught! Jason sometimes wonders about their previous lives in Texas, but I know Marvin, like Nora Ephron, Philip Roth, and Isaac Bashevis Singer before him, was meant to end up on the Upper West Side. He knows how to drive a narrative.
Marvin is five now, and—as befits a dog who lives within walking distance of Zabar’s in a neighborhood overrun with AARP subscriptions—has developed a series of gastrointestinal issues in addition to his angst. Jason and I continue to find him enchanting. So do a lot of other people, except for women with backpacks.