Dedication
For my father, briefly the cowboy; and my mother, always the doctor.
Epigraph
A girl must marry for love, and keep marrying until she finds it.
—Zsa Zsa Gabor
Marriage is a wonderful institution. But who wants to live in an institution?
—Groucho Marx
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Chapter Twenty-five
Chapter Twenty-six
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Julia Claiborne Johnson
Copyright
About the Publisher
Prologue
Tennessee, 1988
Yes, you have come to the right place. Dr. Howard Stovall Bennett III at your service.
Hand me that magnifying glass, will you, and I’ll have a look at what you’ve got there. That’s me, all right, the tall one in the beat-up Stetson, surrounded by all the ladies. When I first got that hat I had to run it over with the ranch’s station wagon so it didn’t look too new. I must have been, let me see now, twenty-four, twenty-five years old. Hard to believe I was ever that young. I was flat broke, but I was pretty then, and jobs were hard to come by during the Depression. If somebody offered me one, I took it. Working on a dude ranch outside Reno that catered to the divorce trade beat the heck out of digging ditches, I can tell you that.
Some men are born gigolos; others have it thrust upon them. That’s a little joke I always told myself in later years when a nurse or one of my fellow doctors noted the excellence of my bedside manner. Some knuckleheads seem to think bedside manner can’t be taught. Hogwash. Anybody with a lick of sense and a little compassion can pick up the essentials. Make eye contact, let the person hurting tell you what pains them, and for heaven’s sake, if you have cold hands, run them under hot water or rub your palms together before you start examining a patient.
Of course I’m joking when I say that. A gigolo? Far from it. The cowboys at the Flying Leap were there to look at, not to touch. Fraternization with our guests was in fact grounds for getting yourself fired. We were on hand to do chores around the ranch, of course, but mostly we were hired to squire rich, brokenhearted ladies around Reno, hold their purses while they shopped, and lead them on trail rides through the high desert. We chatted with them about the weather, offered a sympathetic ear when they wanted to talk about their troubles, told them they looked good when they needed to hear it most. All excellent training for a career in medicine, if you ask me.
So, sure, pull up a chair. I’d be happy to tell you what I know. No, I don’t mind if you record our conversation. This will be a treat for me, particularly after all these years. I learned long ago not to talk about my cowboy past because people have such lurid tabloid sensibilities that it was hard to make anybody understand what that job was like. I’m as bad as anybody, I guess, making light of something I have no business making jokes about. It was serious work, taking care of our ladies during such a painful time in their lives. I think I learned more about the subtleties of suffering and the milk of human kindness working on the ranch than I did in all the years that came after. I wouldn’t take anything for that experience.
Let’s see if I can identify the other characters in this photograph for you. First and last names? Well, I’ll try. Here’s the other cowboy who worked alongside me. Sam. He favors Gary Cooper in High Noon, don’t you think? What? You’ve never seen it? Well, you’re missing out. It’s a good one. Was on the late show just last week. I stayed up half the night watching it. An upside of retirement, knowing nobody needs you to be anywhere that matters in the morning. Nobody cares anymore.
Sam’s last name was Vittori, that I know. Now, this gentleman in the sharp-looking suit, that’s Max. Maxwell Gregory. Used to be some kind of businessman in Chicago. Came to Reno looking for fresh air and investment opportunities and a way out of the big bad city. Margaret, here, with the curly black hair and Shirley Temple dimples, his partner in business and in life, ran the house, kept the books, dispensed wisdom. She’d read about divorce ranches in a movie magazine, as I remember, and convinced Max to buy a washed-up cattle ranch and set up shop. The idea of busting out of failed marriages and starting fresh was more or less a new idea then, you see, and Reno was the place to do it. After six weeks hand-running of residency there our guests were legally unhitched by the great state of Nevada. Free to roll the dice again, if they so desired. Many a second marriage I know of has outperformed the first. Yes. Exactly. Not going in with blinders on. It’s when you get up into the third and fourth and seventh ones that people may start to wonder, but who’s to say? It might take that many tries to pick a winner.
Anyway. Max hired a Hollywood set designer to make the place over into the movie-magazine version of the Old West—boulders, sagebrush, a corral, what have you. Margaret renamed the ranch The Flying Leap and got it outfitted with the modern amenities the clientele they were after wouldn’t want to do without—electricity, indoor plumbing, a telephone. The two of them were such delightful hosts that the well-heeled and often-married set came back there for all their divorces, or tried to.
This blonde on my left who’s as tall as I am, for example, was one of our repeat customers, Nina O’Malley. Max and Margaret loved her. So did Sam. So did I, eventually. Her partner in crime that go-round was this one, Emily Sommer. Nina and Emily must be old women now, or dead. Imagine that. These other half a dozen ladies, give me some time and maybe their names will come to me.
You know, I used to have a copy of this very photograph. Funny, isn’t it, how you’re sure you’ll never want to see a thing again but after it’s lost to you, you wish you had it back again. How much time you got? I believe I could fill your whole book with the shenanigans from that single six-week cycle. It came right at the tail end of my time there, as it happens, so I remember it better than I might otherwise. Something like fifty years ago now. Hard to believe.
Chapter One
Nevada, June 1938
I drove the stagecoach to the airport to pick up Nina.
Back when Max and the Hollywood set designer had been shopping for frontier paraphernalia for the ranch, they’d stumbled onto it rotting under a tarp in a shed over in Virginia City. Max bought the stagecoach on the spot, figuring it would be a smart promotional gimmick, the ideal vehicle for picking up ladies at the train. He got that creaky old gut-juggler refurbished and painted a Pegasus on its doors. The winged horse, yes, jumping through a hoop of words that read The Flying Leap Dude Ranch. Max wanted to add a slogan, a line a Reno judge used every time he gaveled a woman from wife to divorcée: Better luck next time. But Margaret, always the voice of reason, put the kibosh on that.
I don’t know how much Max paid for our antediluvian taxi, but it was worth every penny. It was all but guaranteed a guest’s face would light up when she realize
d the coach had come for her. You could see her thinking that her once-upon-a-time might not be over and done with yet if such a good-looking cowboy awaited her, ready to relieve her of her baggage and hand her inside that carriage. Max called that old rattletrap conveyance the Mixmaster because he swore an hour of being shaken half to death inside it could make friends of women with little in common other than great wealth and marital distress. Friends, if not for life, at least for their stretch with us, which was what we cared about.
The day Nina arrived I’d shucked off my shirt while I hitched four of our six horses to the coach. My mother would have had the vapors if she’d caught me working shirtless anyplace where a lady might lay eyes on me. Max, however, instructed us to strip to the waist whenever we did chores, weather permitting. A little perk for the clientele, honest labor and rippling muscles being two things our affluent ladies might not have seen very much of lately, or at all.
But that afternoon was hotter than the hinges of hell, so I had no qualms about going around half-naked. There was no one around to see, anyway, Sam having volunteered to drive all our other guests into town in the wood-paneled Chevrolet. Margaret was busy with the endless chores inside the house that came of taking care of the eight ladies, give or take, we had in residence at any one time. Max had gone to the courthouse to stand witness for a departing guest, swearing on a Bible that Suzy had not set foot outside Nevada for the past six weeks. As soon as the judge proclaimed Suzy Nevada’s newest legal resident and Reno’s freshest grass widow, she’d board a train for her real home, Chicago.
Emily, as it turned out, had stayed behind while the others went into town. She’d arrived at the ranch a few evenings earlier behind the wheel of a Pierce-Arrow she’d driven solo the two hundred or so miles from San Francisco, sitting on top of a big square pillow to make her tall enough to see over the steering wheel without getting a crick in her neck. She’d pulled into the barnyard just before dusk, the top of her convertible lowered for the breeze, her uncovered hair whipped into a rat’s nest. Darkness fell around 9:00 p.m. that time of year, so Emily’s arrival had raised quite a ruckus among our guests and also the chickens, both groups just starting to make noises about settling in for the night. By the time her luggage was unloaded and the cooling engine had stopped ticking, some of the poultry had roosted on the Pierce-Arrow’s windshield and the barn cats were sharpening their claws on its upholstery. I shooed the critters off and put the sedan in an outbuilding next to the stagecoach, then covered it with the Mixmaster’s antique tarp.
The other women congratulated Emily on her bravery for undertaking such an epic voyage alone. “Not brave,” she said. “Desperate. If I hadn’t left when I did, I wouldn’t have left at all.” She had the plummy accent of women who cycled through the Seven Sisters colleges back East, but her voice was surprisingly deep and gravelly for such a little thing.
“My dear, your voice,” one of our older ladies said. “You sound absolutely exhausted.”
“Oh, I always sound like this,” Emily said. “I’m sure it was cute when I was five years old, but now—” She shrugged and shook her head. “Fingernails on a chalkboard. According to my darling husband, anyway. But yes, I am very, very tired.”
A couple of days in Margaret’s care, however, had perked Emily up considerably. Just as I was hitching up the last of the horses to head over to the airport, she appeared at my elbow saying, “Well, if it isn’t Cary Grant in cowboy boots.”
She had on a pair of cowboy boots herself, with a loose summer dress, a look I’d never seen back then that I’ve noticed some of the young girls go for now. Emily always put her own spin on the rich-lady uniforms our guests wore at the ranch: the tight-legged, baggy-seated jodhpur pants and tall English boots they all brought along for horseback riding, for example, that they’d replace with cookie-cutter fancy western wear bought in Reno, which they’d abandon as soon as they were home again. There was a sameness about our guests’ coiffures, too, lacquered into submission usually and blond more often than could be natural from a statistical standpoint. What Sam used to call “suicide blondes,” as in “dyed by their own hands.” Emily’s hair, however, was an untamable mass of dark ringlets, the bedspring kind that begged to be pulled straight and released back into coiled spirals. She had huge, wide-set brown eyes and a Kewpie doll’s little curved mouth, which, along with her small stature, gave her the appearance of an unusually wise and solemn child. Until she spoke, that is, in a rasp that suggested her vocal cords had been freshly tuned up on a cheese grater.
As I’d thought Emily had gone into town with the others, I like to have jumped out of my skin when I heard her voice. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”
“I confess you got the drop on me, ma’am,” I said. While I was hitching up the team I’d fallen to brooding about a departed lacquered blonde just a year older than I was who I’d risked my job to be with the summer before. Now, what was her name? Rachel? Mitzi? Laura or, perhaps, Laurie? Funny, there was a time I believed I’d never forget that woman. Go figure. I do remember she always wore door-knocker-sized emerald earrings, day and night, that matched her green eyes. I know that because I remember thinking she must have paid as much for those earrings as my parents’ house was worth before the Crash.
From the way Emily had her eyes fastened on the bandana I had knotted at my neck, I suspected my naked chest was making her uncomfortable. I untied my shirt from around my waist, wiped my face on the sleeve, and pulled it on. “What can I do for you, ma’am?”
“So this is the stagecoach I’ve heard so much about,” Emily said. “Where are you taking it?”
“To pick up a guest.”
“Can I come, too?”
“I’m not going to the train depot, if that’s what you’re thinking,” I said. “The airport is in the opposite direction. If you wanted to go into Reno you should have gone in with Sam and the others when you had the chance.”
“I’ve been into town already. Yesterday. I bought these boots.” Her boots were red, intricately embroidered, and possibly cost more than a semester of Ivy League tuition. Emily seemed surprised to see them on her feet. “I didn’t think I needed cowboy boots, but the salesman said I had to have them if I was staying on a ranch. He told me they were the best insurance there was against rattlesnakes and other varmints. He used ‘varmint’ in a sentence. How could I resist that? My daughter’s feet are as big as mine are already, so I thought there was a chance she’d insist on taking these boots from me when I get home. I’ve already sent her a postcard telling her all about them. I figured she’d read a postcard whether she wanted to or not before tearing it up and throwing it in the trash, which is what she said she’d do with my letters so I shouldn’t waste my time writing any.”
She cleared her throat, then cleared it again and swallowed hard, all signs I’d come to recognize by then as precursors of a come-apart. “The other ladies said they were either going in to shop or gamble this afternoon,” she added with forced cheerfulness. “I decided not to go with them because I don’t like shopping much and I really don’t like gambling.”
And yet you got married, I thought but did not say. By the summer of 1938 I’d seen plenty of evidence that matrimony was about the biggest crapshoot going. There’s nothing like working a divorce ranch to make a person question the likelihood of happily ever after. I dug a bandana from my pocket and offered it to Emily just as her brimming eyes spilled over. Max equipped each of his ranch hands with an endless supply of these brightly patterned cowboy hankies for moments just like this. “What’s your daughter’s name?” I asked.
“Portia. I tried to get her to come with me, but—” She shook her head and looked away. “She’s thirteen. You know how that is.”
I didn’t, not then, but I nodded anyway. “Portia,” I said. “The pound-of-flesh girl in Shakespeare.”
“Oh. You know that play?” Emily asked, surprised. “It’s one of my favorites. All the characters g
et what’s coming to them. It almost makes a person believe there could be justice in the real world. What’s your name, cowboy?”
“Ward,” I said.
“How old are you, Ward? If you don’t mind me asking.”
“I’m twenty-five, ma’am. Almost.”
She smiled. “I remember being twenty-five, almost. Just barely. Portia was three years old. I don’t think I’d slept through the night once between then and the day she was born. I know Portia hadn’t. Do you know, I almost miss that time? She used to start crying if I left the room, and now she wants nothing to do with me. Before I left, my daughter told me I’m the dullest, most predictable person she’s ever met. That she can’t believe I waste my breath talking when she always knows exactly what I’m going to say. Can you imagine saying something so hurtful to your mother?”
“No, ma’am, I cannot,” I said. My mother, Pamela, and I were close, as close as people could be when one lived in Tennessee and the other in Nevada, back when nobody made long-distance phone calls unless somebody had died.
Emily gave me a watery smile. “Oh, well,” she said. “Would it be all right if I came along to the airport? The other women keep talking about riding in the stagecoach. I feel left out.”
I’d been looking forward to my solo journey out, me all by my lonesome up in the driver’s box, a double fistful of reins in my hands, parched sepia fields scrolling past, a Sam-rolled cigarette I’d never smoke tucked behind an ear. Somewhere some tattered scraps of poetry I wrote about such a day might still exist, but I sure hope not. “Maybe another time,” I said. “It’s hot as blazes inside the coach this time of day.” I stepped on the front carriage wheel and hoisted myself up top. “If you’ll pardon me, ma’am, I really have to get going now. I don’t want to keep our guest waiting.”
“If it’s so hot inside I could ride up there with you,” Emily said. “I promise I won’t say a word. You won’t even know I exist.”
Better Luck Next Time Page 1