Authors: Jane Smiley
"On the way to Santa Barbara with Len. I have your screens."
"I thought you might." He peeked in the window, then said, "Andrew has been
warning me of their return." He didn't look disappointed.
"Show me a horse."
"My pleasure!" He was perfectly turned out, even in his horse-keeping clothes. He
waited as she parked the Franklin, and then two of the grooms took the artworks and
carried them away. He led her down the barn aisle. Grooms and trainers touched the bills
of their caps and dipped their heads to her in a friendly manner. There was no sign of the
crooked Australian. After she had appreciated how the horses arched their necks over the
tops of the stall doors and put their noses out for lumps of sugar, Pete had his own four
stripped of their blankets and led out for her appreciation. There were two bays, a
chestnut, and a gray.
"This one is by Fair Play, goes back to Bend Or on both sides. Dam's by
Tetratema, that's where he gets the gray color. This filly is by a nice French horse named
Rose Prince, dam's by Son-in-Law. That's a very prepotent sire. All ..."
She could make nothing of this patter, but it fell gloriously on the ear. When his
voice ceased, she said, "You sound very expert."
"That's the first step."
"How is it you acquired these horses but live in a stall?"
"Unpaid bills, darling. The owners' unpaid bills," said Pete. "Chestnut is my nicest
one, four wins already."
"Might I pet one of them?"
He pointed to the gray. "He's a friendly sort. I'm sure he would like it. Good
racehorses often bite, but he never does--more's the pity for my pocketbook."
She stepped up to the horse, and he pressed his nose into her outstretched palm
while she stroked along the roots of his mane. After a moment, she took off her glove.
His coat was dappled and fluffy, perfectly clean. She put her cheek against his neck and
took a deep breath.
Pete's stall quarters were neatly tricked out, with a cot and cases and trunks, and
prints hanging on the walls, and a curled-up whip with a long lash, and a mirror in a gilt
frame. She said, "You don't live here."
Pete
smiled.
She dared to say, "I am sure you live with some rich woman in Atherton. Maybe
she will like the screens."
Pete
laughed.
She was glad she had come. The fragrance of the horses and the neat piles of
horse clothing and equipment, the cold stables, the horses stamping and snorting--it was a
change. Then he took her elbow. "I need some breakfast. Would you care for a pot of tea,
madam? We can go to the canteen."
As they were making their way around puddles and piles of dirt, she said, "Pete,
you do seem at home."
"You're never old at a racetrack. There's always someone older than you, who's
been around since the Civil War and was actually there to see Kincsem run--or Eclipse,
for that matter."
"You seem young to me."
"I'm two years younger than that pig Lenin, and he's been dead for five years now.
So I'm old. In Russia, I would be dead. I'm older than you are."
"Then you must be old."
He said, "But see? Here you look especially elegant. I get on my pony named Ivan
Grozny, who is the sleepiest, sweetest thing in the world, and I ride out to watch the boys
train the horses and I feel very sprightly."
He didn't ask her about Andrew, and Margaret didn't say a word about him, either.
The canteen was a humble place, but it had eggs and toast and coffee and tea, and
it was another nice change to sit at a rickety table among all the men with their bits of
paper on which they were scribbling numbers or hotly comparing their bits with the bits
others were scribbling on. She saw that the men greeted Pete sociably, as if expecting a
witticism or a canny remark. After a bit, though, the canteen emptied out. She said, "Must
you leave, too?"
He shook his head. "Mine are finished for the day. If they would allow gambling
in California, you could see them run."
She nodded. Then, giddily emboldened by all these pleasures, she said, "Tell me
something about you that I can't imagine."
He smiled. "I wore dresses until I was three years old."
"That's what boys did in those days. Something else."
"How about this? When I first came to the States, I worked in vaudeville. As a
regurgitator."
"I don't believe that!"
"You see, there you go."
"What did you regurgitate?"
"I put out fires with sprays of regurgitated water." He was grinning. "Or I was
supposed to. I hadn't quite perfected my act when I first went on in Vacaville, and the
tube popped out from behind my ear. I got booed off the stage, and the theater manager
fired me. Then I tried to join a circus, doing some horse vaulting, but they said they had
Cossacks coming out of their ears, though most of the ones I saw were Mexicans or
Italians. Now you tell me something."
"Nothing I have to tell is interesting."
"If I don't know it, it's interesting."
"When I was eight, my older brother went down to the railyards with some
friends. They found a blasting cap and affixed it to a piece of iron they found, and then
one of the boys rubbed it against some bricks. It exploded and drove the length of iron
right into my brother's skull."
"That was a very unlucky thing."
"Yes, but unique. It seemed to me he couldn't possibly have died like that, so it
took me a very long time to believe that he had. I'd think of what happened and I would
start to laugh. I had two brothers and they both died as boys. But in Missouri after the
War Between the States, you didn't expect boys to live, somehow."
"I had an uncle gored by a bull. My mother's brother."
"I saw a hanging, they say. But I have never been able to recall it. I was five. I
recall earlier things, but of that I only remember fragments. Once I thought I remembered
the boy's name, Claghorne. Such an odd name. Now I have no idea if that was really his
name or not. He wore a red shirt. Maybe. My brother put me on his shoulders. Maybe!
You'd think I would remember such a thing."
"Have you heard of Sigmund Freud?"
She said, "No."
There was a pause while he went to the counter for more coffee. She closed her
eyes and made herself think of the hanging, but making herself think of it made it go
away. When he sat down again, he said, "What were you like as a girl?"
"Oh, I don't know. I was the third sister even though I'm the oldest. There's always
a beautiful sister and a smart sister, and then there's a sister that's not beautiful or smart."
"You kept out of trouble, then."
"Oh
yes."
"So few do."
Now it was her turn to laugh. "But that's why I loved Dora so from the first time I
saw her. She was always scouting for mischief, and she always dressed for it. When I
first met her, she had a bicycle and a very strange costume, with pantaloons, but it was
the newest thing."
"The first time I saw her, she had the shortest skirt in the restaurant, and you
could almost see the swell of her calf. That was very daring then."
"I miss Dora."
"But she is returning! She should be here in a month."
This was news to Margaret. She sipped her tea in confusion. Pete said, "I haven't
seen the painting."
"Mr. Kimura's painting?"
"I thought it would be good. He was very intent."
"It is good. But I put it away. I can't hang it."
His eyebrow lifted. "Andrew?"
"No, no. No! All the coots were slaughtered. Parents, chicks, all of them."
"Oh," said Pete.
"Did everyone expect that besides me? Is that why everyone was always saying
what common birds they were?"
He leaned forward and looked her intently in the face. He said, "Tell me
something about you that I don't know."
Tears sprang into her eyes. He said, "Tell me." He took her hand between his.
She said, "But you know it! Dora must have told you. Twenty years ago, my baby
died," and in a moment she was really weeping, in spite of all the years and all the layers
of "all for the best in the end." He did not grow restless in his chair. And he did not
speak. He had seen a lot worse; wasn't that the first thing you knew about him? But he
didn't mention any of those things, either. He waited for her to take her hands away from
her face, and then he handed her his pink handkerchief. He said, "It was Kiku who told
me."
Margaret steadied her breath, then said, "Oh yes. She came and held the baby. I
never knew why."
"Well, she did tell me that, too."
Margaret waited. It was surprising how even now she couldn't ask the question.
But Pete didn't need to be asked. He said, "She had some herbs with her, to offer you. But
when she held the baby, she saw--"
"That nothing would do any good." But she was no longer weeping--she was
again used to Alexander's fate.
Pete nodded. He looked like the soul of kindness. She blew her nose. She said,
"But the coots were also coots. I hated the way the last three babies staggered about
together, looking for bits to eat. I hated how doomed they were."
"Of course you did," said Pete. That was all, but it was enough, she thought.
They drank the last bit of tea. It was getting colder and windier outside, and she
began to think she should get home. He walked her to the Franklin. He held the door. She
got in and put down the window. Her gloved hand was on the door as he closed it, and he
took it in his and kissed it. Then he bowed slightly and turned away. She pressed the
starter with her foot, but she didn't drive off at once. She sat there until he disappeared
through the gate, and even after that.
When she got home, she took out the picture. What she saw this time were the
two curves--the steep rise of the hillside beyond the pond, and the answering flat line of
the far edge of the pond itself. Beneath these two large shapes, almost lost among the
waving grasses, were the cluster of coots in the right foreground, and the gay, foolhardy
chick, swimming quickly (as demonstrated by the rivulets around him) to the left. His
figure drew the eye, of course, and wasn't the eye that was drawn her eye, but also the eye
of the hawk, unseen, floating on an air current high above? She thought it was a
wonderful but terrible picture, like the picture of the snake, and she put it back in the
closet.
When Andrew inquired after Pete, she said that he seemed to be prospering.
Andrew was gratified at the success of his scheme for her welfare, and suggested,
"Perhaps, my dear, you need a biweekly outing, if not all the way to the racetrack, then to
some other place of recreation."
DORA finally came late in the winter, and what a winter it had been. The stock
market had crashed, and the Bells had lost a lot of money. Margaret heard about it in
every letter from Beatrice, who was in a panic, because Robert's partner had killed
himself, and the reasons why were still locked in the books ("the second set," wrote
Elizabeth, which could not be found). Andrew had lost some money, too, but not much.
He was still planning to pay cash for the large Italianate house they were buying as a
result of his retirement and his enforced move from the island to Vallejo. If he hadn't had
so much work to do with Len, he would have liked to deliver her to the Palace Hotel
himself, and welcome Dora back to the West Coast personally. As it was, he inspected
and approved her outfit before she left the house and said that he would meet the
dinnertime ferry just to hear all about Dora's recent adventures.
Dora maintained that the Crash would not affect her; her new paper (the
New York
Herald Tribune
, much more fashionable than the
Examiner)
was actually beginning to
turn a profit, and her editor was so intimidating that the publisher didn't dare defy him.
She was on a cross-country tour, interviewing victims of the Crash, high and low.
Talking about the Crash took precedence in their conversation, as in every conversation
Margaret had had in four months.
Dora said, "All the experts say this will be nothing truly fearsome."
"Do you believe them?"
"No."
"Why
not?"
"Because the ones with the money don't have it anymore. It's gone, and they know
it's gone. They don't believe the experts, even though they hired them."
"But Andrew says the stock market is going up again."
Dora
shrugged.
"What is it like in Europe?"
"Well"--she shook her head--"Italy, of course, is terrifying--more so every day.
England is okay, but you know they'll never recover from the Great War. I'm sure, if a
real depression hits, they will blame the Americans somehow."
"What about France?"
Dora smiled. "You know France. It's nice there. When things start to go bad, for at
least a while France freezes in place. You can go about your pleasures and say to yourself
that disaster is coming, but this is a lovely peach and there are beautiful cows out in the
field, and let's go find a two-room apartment in Biarritz and sit this out. Darling, I wonder
and I wonder where I want to be for the next few years, and I can't come up with an
answer. I just let the paper send me about, and count the places I don't want to be."