A heavy frost coated the ground. Fox-hunting season ended a week earlier, which was a pity because the day was good for scent. Fox-hunting suffers from an erroneous reputation. Pictures of aristocrats in pink coats flash through people’s minds. That’s like believing that everyone who plays tennis was born with a silver knife in her back. Working at the Clarion had taught me that people believe what they want to believe—don’t disturb them with the facts. I no longer rose to the defense of fox-hunting in particular and equine sports in general.
Kenny, my aging gelding, stood still while I brushed him. Pewter, purring madly, rested on his back. Cats love horses and horses love cats, or at least that’s been my observation. Pewter meowed with delight whenever the Jeep turned into the small stable, Darby’s Folly, where I kept Kenny. Lolly liked horses but she wasn’t rapturous about them unless I took her on a trail ride. Lolly was rapturous about the bits of bran and grain scattered on the floor. She licked the center aisle clean.
“Hey, girl.” Regina came into the stall and rubbed Kenny’s chin. “Kenny, wish I had a dozen like you.”
“Me, too, except younger. You know, I don’t know what I’m going to do when this guy’s too old to go out, and that day approaches.”
“The day of the thousand-dollar field hunter is over. You’ll have to pay, mmm, seven thousand at least. You could do better, Nickie, if you’d take a chance on a two-year-old and start working with him.”
“I haven’t got the time, and truthfully, I’m not that good. Muffin should do it.” Muffin was the stable’s trainer.
“Got time for a quick spin? Half hour, forty-five minutes?”
“You bet.”
I tacked up while Regina generously waited. For a well-coordinated woman I still fumble with my tack. Pewter bitched because she knew she was going to be left in the barn. Her swishing around my legs and Kenny’s didn’t help, because Kenny didn’t like it when Pewter became upset. In warm weather or even crisp weather Pewter would come out too. She’d run along until she’d had enough of it and then she’d crawl up my leg—my chaps on, thankfully—and sit in front of me on the saddle or she’d head back to the barn. But today was downright cold and Miss Pewter hated it. By the time I was ready to go, Regina had warmed up in the ring.
Also in the ring were Ursie’s daughters, two unsavory specimens, Harmony, sixteen, and Tiffany, fourteen. Muffin Barnes shouted at them: “Sloppy, you’re so sloppy! That jump was awful. You did everything wrong! Think of a jump as an interruption in your flat work. Now do it again, Tiff. You too, Harmony. You’ve done nothing to brag about today. Keep your eyes up. More leg, Tiffany. Leg! Leg! Leg!” Dutifully the girls broke into a trot and jumped again. It wasn’t that Harmony and Tiffany were bad kids as much as they were unable to cope with anything except success and money. When you buy children $60,000 show horses you’re bound to destroy their initiative. Tiffany and Harmony had specially made tack trunks in their favorite colors, with their initials emblazoned on the front and the top. Blue and white were Tiffany’s colors and red and gold were Harmony’s, which pissed me off because red and gold are my colors and Ursie well knew it too.
As Regina and I walked away from the ring, Muffin’s voice faded in the background. The rolling hills of Maryland, slick with the cold, beckoned.
“I never get tired of seeing this, do you?” Regina asked me.
“No. What surprises me is that there are millions of people who can live without it.”
“Be thankful. What would happen if they all left the cities?”
“Make the developers happy.”
“They’re happy enough.” Regina scanned the skyline. “Dante?”
“Dante and Dad.”
With that we cantered down into the little valley and back up the hill on the other side. We’d really made a semicircle around Darby’s Folly, because the road below us would lead us back to the stable if we wanted to go on the road, which we did not. High on the hill was Runnymede’s cemetery. Celeste Chalfonte, beloved friend and employer of my grandmother, was buried there at the very top with the biggest monument I’d seen this side of the Washington Monument, that unfortunately shaped memento to our founding father. I guess they wanted to emphasize the father idea. My father was buried there, as were Grandma—Cora Hunsenmeir—and Dad’s parents, the Smiths. I could walk through these stones and find ancestors dating back to the late 1600s. Someday I’d be resting up here, too, but no time soon, I hoped. Regina’s family, the Clavells, as well as her husband’s people, the Frosts, slumbered here. But what had fascinated us since we were children together was the beautifully carved white marble monument to Dante, the firehorse of South Runnymede and beloved of all. He was born in 1878 and died in 1907, having lived a long and useful life. Dante had a bigger stone than my father, but then Dante, at the turn of the century, benefited from lower prices. Besides, the firehouse gang took up a collection. Dad had only Mother and me to pay his final bill back in 1961. I was still in high school. I figured Dad would understand.
We dismounted to give our horses a break from our weight and to give Lolly a breather too.
Frozen flowers rested on Dante’s grave.
“Kids are still bringing Dante flowers.” Regina smiled. “Remember when we used to do it?”
“Maybe it was how we learned about death. And Dante’s birthday is an annual firehouse celebration, so we were reminded of him, his heroics. Anyway, kids love animals, even dead ones.”
“To what do I owe this burst of analysis?”
“I don’t know.” I shrugged.
“Paper?”
“Uh-huh.” I’d told her about Charles’s impending sale. What I didn’t tell her about was my other preoccupations, preoccupations closer to home. Hers and mine.
“Has Wheezie recovered from her party?”
“Pretty much.”
“Do you know that was one of the few times I’ve been in your esteemed aunt’s presence when she didn’t try to convert me to Catholicism.”
“Mother and I want to put her on rosary methadone.”
“Good luck.” Regina remounted. “Let’s get back before Ursie comes to pick up her munchkins. She’ll start on me about our annual Tri-Delta alumnae horse show.”
“That’s months away.” I stood on a tombstone to get up on Kenny, who was sixteen hands and too big for me to leap up on. Regina, much taller than I, could gracefully swing her leg over any animal this side of seventeen hands. I envied her that. I envied her other things, too, namely that she was our Master of Foxhounds—that and Jackson.
“You know how compulsive she is. I swear Ursie has lists and then lists of her lists. She also wants to talk hunt club business—the newsletter.” Regina rolled her eyes.
“You should never have given her that job.” I pushed Kenny onward.
“Given it to her! I begged you to take it.”
“Come on, Gene, we’ve been over this ad infinitum. My doing the newsletter is like taking coals to Newcastle. I’m on the breakfast committee.”
“You’re rather bad at that.”
“I am?” This surprised me. Lolly stopped for a tantalizing sniff of something. “Lolly Mabel, come on.” She lifted her leonine head and hurried after me.
“You don’t care much about food, Nickel, and while you’re a wonderful organizer—don’t get me wrong—you’re terrible with menus.”
“But it’s not my job to plan the menus. It’s only my job to get people to sponsor breakfasts after our hunts.”
“Yes and no.” Regina patiently continued. “You should supervise the menus to make certain there are no duplications and that the food is good.”
“Let Verna BonBon do it.”
“Verna’s not a member of the hunt club.”
I knew that. I also knew that Regina was right but one of the great advantages of having an old friend is that you can be childish and irrational. It refreshes both parties.
“Bet Ursie was the first to bitch, too, wasn’t she?” I had advanced from kindergarten to junior high school in my approach.
“Actually, no. She was the second.”
We trotted a bit. The frost flew from under our horses’ hooves. Their breath, our breath, and Lolly’s breath escaped from our mouths like billows of creamy cumulus clouds. When Regina pulled up for a walk my nose was no longer out of joint.
“I’m sorry.”
“I accept your resignation. You are now appointed to the newsletter.”
“Gene! What a sneak you are, a real sneaky pie. Ursie will never stand for it.”
“Ursie is now head of the breakfast committee and all entertainments, assuming you will take over the newsletter. She thinks she has more power in the club because of it.”
“Does she?”
“Of course not. Whoever controls the information and the purse strings runs the show in any organization. You know that.”
In fact, I did. “Ursie’s not dumb. She wants something.”
“She wants to run for County Board of Supervisors and she figures if she entertains people handsomely for a year she’ll be a shoo-in.”
My mouth was on my chest. “You lie.”
“Have I ever lied to you?”
“Give me time. I’ll think of something.”
“Or you’ll make it up and then accuse me of a faulty memory if I don’t recall the incident.”
We headed toward the barn jabbering excitedly about Ursie’s hidden agenda. Ursula Yost, well-heeled and well-educated, would make a good public servant in many respects. She was conscientious, hardworking, committed to no-growth, which meant she was a deadly foe to any real estate developer or chain store—a mixed blessing, but I was more with her than against her on that one. Her girls would soon be at college and she was looking for a new career, I guess. I’d vote for her, of course, when the time came. Just because I couldn’t stand the ground the woman walked on didn’t mean I was blind to her virtues. Politics makes strange bedfellows. The word bedfellow in this context gave me a shudder.