Authors: Rita Mae Brown
“Darling, this is a dinner party, not a stockholders’ meeting.” Taxi laughed. “Is it obvious how much my husband loves his job?”
As the guests agreed with Taxi and speculated on how people find the work that suits them, Fitz-Gilbert asked Blair, “Will you be attending opening hunt?”
Blair turned to Harry. “Will I be attending opening hunt?”
Stafford leaned toward Blair. “If she won’t take you, I will. You see, Harry will probably be riding tomorrow.”
“Why don’t you help me get ready in the morning and then you can meet everyone there?” Harry’s voice registered nothing but innocence.
This drew peals of laughter from the others, even Brenda Sanburne, who knew enough to realize that getting ready for a fox hunt can be a nerve-racking experience.
“Nice try, Harry.” Fitz-Gilbert toasted in her direction.
“Now my curiosity’s got the better of me. What time do I have to be at your barn?”
Harry twirled her fork. “Seven-thirty.”
“That’s not so bad,” Blair rejoined.
“If you drink enough tonight it will be,” Stafford promised.
“Don’t even mention it.” Fitz-Gilbert put his hand to his forehead.
“I’ll say. You’ve been getting snookered lately. This morning when I woke up, what a sorry face I saw.” Little Marilyn pursed her lips.
“Did you know, Blair, that Virginia is home to more fox-hunting clubs than any other state in the Union? Nineteen in all—two in Albemarle County,” Cabell informed him. “Keswick on the east side and Farmington on the west side.”
“No, I didn’t know that. I guess there are a lot of foxes. What’s the difference between the two clubs here? Why don’t they have just one large club?”
Harry answered, a wicked smile on her face, “Well, you see, Blair, Keswick Hunt Club is old, old, old Virginia money living in old, old, old Virginia homes. Farmington Hunt Club is old, old, old Virginia money that’s subdivided.”
This caused a whoop and a shout. Stafford nearly choked on his dessert.
Once recovered from this barb, the small group discussed New York, the demise of the theater, a topic creating lively debate, since Blair didn’t think theater was pooping out and Brenda did. Blair told some funny modeling stories which were enlivened by his talent for mimicry. Everyone decided the stock market was dismal so they’d wait out the bad times.
After dessert, the women moved over to the window seat in the living room. Brenda liked Harry. Many white people were likable but you couldn’t really trust them. Even though she knew her but slightly, Brenda felt she could trust Harry. In her odd way, the postmistress was color blind. What you saw with Harry was what you got and Brenda truly appreciated that. Whenever a white person said, “I’m not prejudiced myself . . . ,” you knew you were in trouble.
The men retired to the library for brandy and Cuban cigars. Fitz-Gilbert prided himself on the contraband and wouldn’t divulge his source. Once you smoked a Montecristo, well, there was no looking back.
“One day you’ll spill the beans.” Stafford passed the cigar under his nose, thrilling to the beguiling scent of the tobacco.
Cabell laughed. “When hell freezes over. Fitz can keep a secret.”
“The only reason you guys are nice to me is because of my cigars.”
“That and the fact that you were first oar for Andover.” Stafford puffed away.
“You look more like a wrestler than a first oar.” Blair, too, surrendered to the languor the cigar produced.
“I was skinny as a rail when I was a kid.” Fitz patted his small potbelly. “Not anymore.”
“Ever know Binky Colfax when you were at Andover? My class at Yale.”
“Binky Colfax. Valedictorian.” Fitz-Gilbert flipped through his yearbook and handed it to Blair.
“God, it’s a good thing Binky was an academic.” Blair laughed. “You know, he’s in the administration now. An undersecretary in the State Department. When you remember what a wuss the guy was, it makes me fear for our government. I mean, think of it, all those guys we knew at Yale and Harvard and Princeton and . . .”
“Stanford,” Stafford chipped in.
“Do I have to?” Blair asked.
“Uh-huh.” Stafford nodded.
“. . . Stanford. Well, the nerds went into government or research. In ten years’ time those guys will be the bureaucracy serving the guys that will be elected.” Blair shook his head.
“Do you think every generation goes through this? You pick up the paper one day or you watch the six o’clock news and there’s one of the wieners.” Fitz-Gilbert laughed.
“My father—he was Yale ’49—said it used to scare him to death. Then he got used to it,” Blair said.
Cabby chimed in: “Everyone muddles through. Think how I feel. The guys in my class at Dartmouth are starting to retire. Retire? I remember when all we thought about was getting . . .”
He stopped, as his hostess had stuck her head into the library, hand curled around the door frame. “Are you fellows finished yet? I mean, we’ve solved the problems of the world in the last forty-five minutes.”
“Lonesome, honey?” Fitz called to her.
“Oh, an eensie-weensie bit.”
“We’ll be out in a minute.”
“You know, Fitz, I think we must know a lot of people in common since so many of your schoolmates came to Yale. Someday we’ll have to compare notes,” Blair said.
“Yes, I’d like that.” Fitz, distracted by Little Marilyn, wasn’t paying much attention.
“Yale and Princeton. Yeck.” Stafford made a thumbs-down sign.
“And you went to Stanford?” Blair quizzed him.
“Yes. Finance.”
“Ah.” Blair nodded. No wonder Stafford was making so much money as an investment banker, and no wonder Cabell shone smiles upon him. No doubt these two would talk business over the weekend.
“You were smart not to become a lawyer.” Fitz twirled his cigar, the beautiful, understated band announcing
MONTECRISTO
. “A lawyer is a hired gun, even if it’s tax law. I’ll never know how I passed the bar, I was so bored.”
“There are worse jobs.” Cabell squinted his eyes from the smoke. “You could be a proctologist.”
The men laughed.
The phone rang. Tiffany called out from the kitchen, “Mr. Hamilton.”
“Excuse me.”
As Fitz picked up the phone, Stafford, Cabell, and Blair joined the ladies in the living room. In a few minutes Fitz-Gilbert joined them too.
“Has anyone seen or heard from Benjamin Seifert?”
“No. Why?” Little Marilyn asked.
“He didn’t go to work today. That was Cynthia Cooper. She’s spent the evening calling his business associates and family. Now she’s calling friends and acquaintances. I told them you were here, Cabby. They’d like to talk to you.”
Cabell left the room to pick up the phone.
“He’s out of the office as much as he’s in it,” Harry volunteered, now that Ben’s boss was out of earshot.
“I told him just last week to watch his step, but you know Ben.” Fitz pulled up a chair. “He’ll show up and I bet the story will be a doozie.”
Harry opened her mouth but closed it. She wanted to say “What if this has something to do with the vagrant’s murder?” What if Ben was the killer and skipped town? Realizing Little Marilyn’s sensitivity to the topic, she said nothing.
Harry had forgotten all about Ben Seifert when Blair dropped her at her door. He promised he’d be there at seven-thirty in the morning. She opened the door and turned on the lights. Only one came on. She walked over to the debris on the floor, the lamp cord yanked out of the wall.
“Tucker! Mrs. Murphy!”
The two animals giggled under the bed but they stayed put. Harry walked into the bedroom, knelt down and looked under the bed, and beheld two luminous pairs of eyes staring back at her.
“I know you two did this.”
“Prove it,”
was all Mrs. Murphy would say, her tail swaying back and forth.
“I had a wonderful time tonight and I’m not going to let you spoil it.”
It was good that Harry had that attitude. Events would spoil things soon enough.
33
The earth glittered silvery and beige under its cloak of frost. The sun, pale and low in the sky, turned the ground fog into champagne mist. Mrs. Murphy and Tucker curled up in a horse blanket in the tack room and watched Harry groom Tomahawk.
Blair arrived at seven forty-five. As Harry had already brushed and braided Tomahawk, painted his feet with hoof dressing, and brushed him again, she was ready for a clean-up.
“What time did you get up?” Blair admired her handiwork.
“Five-thirty. Same time I always get up. Wish I could sleep past it but I can’t, even if I go to bed at one in the morning.”
“What can I do?”
Harry shed her garage mechanic overalls to reveal her buff breeches. A heavy sweater covered her good white shirt. Her worn boots, polished, leaned against the tack room wall. Her derby, brushed, hung on a tack hook. Harry had earned her colors with the hunt while she was in high school and her ancient black melton coat with its Belgian-blue collar was carefully hung on the other side of the tack hook.
Harry placed a heavy wool cooler over Tomahawk and tied it at the front. Unhooking the crossties, she led him to his stall. “Don’t even think about rubbing your braids, Tommy, and don’t get tangled up in your cooler.” She gave her horse a pat on the neck. “Tommy’ll be good but I always remind him, just in case,” she said to Blair. “Come on, everything’s done. Let’s get some coffee.”
After a light breakfast, Blair watched Harry replace Tomahawk’s square cooler with a fitted wool dress sheet, put on his leather shipping halter, and load him into her two-horse gooseneck, which, like the truck, was showing its age but still serviceable. He hopped in the cab, camera in his coat pocket, ready for the meet.
He was beginning to appreciate Harry’s make-do attitude as he perceived how little money she really had. False pride about possessions wasn’t one of her faults but pride about making her own way was. She wouldn’t ask for help, and as the blue bomb chugged along he realized what a simple gift it would have been for him to offer the use of his dually to pull her rig. If he had asked politely she might even have let him. Harry was funny. She feared favors, maybe because she lacked the resources to return them, but by Blair’s reckoning she kept her accounts even in her own way.
Opening meet of the hunt brought out everyone who had ever thrown a leg over a horse. Blair couldn’t believe his eyes as Harry pulled into the flat pasture. Horse trailers littered the landscape. There were little tagalongs, two-horse goosenecks, four-horse goosenecks. There were a few semis pulling rigs a family could live in, Imperatore vans with the box built onto the back of the truck, and there was even one of the new Mitsubishi vans, its snub nose exciting both admiration and derision.
Horses, unloaded and tied to the sides of these conveyances, provided splashes of color. Each stable sported its own colors and these were displayed both in the paint jobs of the rigs and on the horses themselves, blanketed in their own special uniforms, the sheets or blankets indicating their allegiances. Harry’s colors were royal-blue and gold, so Tomahawk’s blue wool dress sheet was trimmed in gold and had a braided gold tail cord on the hindquarters. There were coolers and blankets in a myriad of color combinations: hunter-green and red, red and gold, black and red, blue and green, tan and blue, tan and hunter-green, silver and green, sky-blue and white, white and every color, and one cooler was even purple and pink. The purple and pink one belonged to Mrs. Annabelle Milliken, who had ordered a purple and white cooler years ago but the clerk wrote down the wrong colors and Mrs. Milliken was too polite to correct her. After a time everyone became accustomed to the purple and pink combination. Even Mrs. Milliken.
Big Marilyn’s colors were red and gold. Her horse, a shining seal-brown, could have galloped out of a Ben Marshall painting, just as Little Marilyn’s bold chestnut might have trotted out of a George Stubbs.
Harry put on her stock tie, her canary vest, her coat, derby, and deerskin gloves. Using the trailer fender as a mounting block, she swung into the saddle. Blair asked her if she wanted a leg up but she said that she and Tomahawk were used to the do-it-yourself method. Good old Tommy, in a D-ring snaffle, stood quietly, ears pricked. He loved hunting. Blair handed Harry her hunting crop with its long thong and lash just as Jock Fiery rode by and wished her “good hunting.”
As Harry trotted off to hear the words of wisdom from the Joint Masters, Jill Summers and Tim Bishop, Blair found Mrs. Hogendobber. Together they watched the tableau as the Huntsman, Jack Eicher, brought the hounds to the far side of the gathering. Horses, hounds, staff, and field glistened in the soft light. Susan joined the group. She was still struggling with her hairnet, which she dropped. Gloria Fennel, Master of the Hilltoppers, reached in her pocket and gave Susan another hairnet.
Blair turned to Mrs. Hogendobber. “Does everyone ride?”
“I don’t, obviously.” She nodded in the direction of Stafford and Brenda, both of them madly snapping photos. “He used to.”
“Guess I’d better take some lessons.”
“Lynne Beegle.” Mrs. Hogendobber pointed out a petite young lady on a gloriously built thoroughbred. “Whole family rides. She’s a wonderful teacher.”
Before Blair could ask more questions, the staff, which consisted of three Whippers-In, the Huntsman, and the Masters, moved the hounds down to where the pasture dropped off. The field followed.
“The Huntsman will cast the hounds.”
Blair heard a high-pitched “Whooe, whoop whoop, whooe.” The sounds made no sense to him but the hounds knew what to do. They fanned out, noses to the ground, sterns to heaven. Soon a deep-throated bitch named Streisand gave tongue. Another joined her and then another. The chorus sent a chill down Blair’s spine. The animal in him overrode his overdeveloped brain. He wanted to hunt too.
So did Mrs. Hogendobber, as she motioned for him to follow on foot. Mrs. H. knew every inch of the western part of the county. An avid beagler, she could divine where the hounds would go and could often find the best place to watch. Mrs. H. explained to Blair that beagling was much like fox hunting except that the quarry was rabbits and the field followed on foot. Blair gained a new respect for Mrs. Hogendobber. Rough terrain barely slowed her down.