“You’re always hopeful.”
“I’m an American. They’re Americans. When the you-know-what hits the fan, we do what has to be done, and it doesn’t matter when or where we were born. Doesn’t matter what color we are, what religion or none, what sex or how about having sex. Anyway, you get my drift.”
“I do. I’m still cynical.” She turned her head. “And speaking of that generation, here comes an extremely handsome member of it.” She smiled, holding out her hand as Walter took it, pressing it to his lips, then leaned over to kiss Sister’s cheek.
“You two look radiant.” Walter knew how to talk to women; beautiful would have been very nice but radiant showed imagination. “Sister, that color brings out your eyes.” He stopped, then lowered his voice. “Can’t get out of this.” He smiled big as a dark, intense, attractive man, early forties at most, pushed over to him. “Mrs. Bancroft, Mrs. Arnold, allow me to introduce Dr. Dalton Hill from Toronto. He’s come up from Williamsburg, where he gave a lecture this morning.”
Tedi, who’d looked him over, inquired, “How good of you to make the trip. What is your specialty, Dr. Hill?”
“Endocrinology.” He exuded a self-important air but had good manners, nonetheless. “However, my lecture was on the development of ornamentation in furniture during the eighteenth century.”
“A passion?” Tedi’s eyebrows lifted.
“Indeed.” He inclined his head.
“English and French furniture from the eighteenth century is beautiful,” Sister joined in. “Is there anyone who can make such pieces today?”
“Yes.” His voice was measured. “A few, precious few. It’s not talent, you see, it’s temperament.”
Both women smiled.
Walter said, “I never thought of that, Dr. Hill.”
“Call me Dalton, please.”
“Dalton, you hunt in Canada, don’t you?” asked Walter.
“If you’re going to be here for any time at all, please hunt with us.” Sister extended an invitation.
“You are the master, I believe?” Dalton had been informed of Sister’s status when he asked Bobby Franklin who the tall, striking-looking gray-haired woman was.
“I am, and I’m a lucky woman.”
Ronnie Haslip came by, Xavier and Dee behind him. They swept Walter and Dalton along with them after a few more comments.
“Has an air about him.” Tedi sniffed.
“Winding, are you, Tedi?”
They laughed and headed back to the bar. Tedi ordered another scotch on the rocks, and Sister asked for a tonic water on the rocks with a twist of lime.
Donnie, who had been nipping a little here and there behind the bar, quickly made the drinks. “Ladies.”
“I couldn’t help but notice your rifle and the scope the other day. What a beautiful piece of equipment.” Sister took her drink from him, fished a dollar bill out of the unobtrusive slit in her dress, dropped it in the tip glass.
“Thank you.” He nodded, then said, “I saved and saved. Cost me over two thousand five hundred dollars.” He paused for effect. “I’ll go without food to get the best. Makes a huge difference.”
“Yes, it does,” Sister replied.
“Clay Berry is tight as a tick with his employees.”
Tedi piped up. “I know you went without food.”
They moved back into the crowd, after a few more words with Donnie.
“I suppose I ought to find my husband. It’s ten, and the roads will be dreadful.”
“I ought to move on, too. Thought maybe Gray Lorillard would be here.”
“Do you know he’s rented the dependency over at Chapel Cross, the Vajay’s place? Haven’t they just brought that farm back to life?” Tedi paused. “Alex is here,” she mentioned the husband. “Solange should be here, too. Well, there’re so many people packed in here, I think I’ve missed half of them.”
Tedi put her drink down on a silver tray, half-finished. She’d had enough. “I study how different civilizations deal with wealth. How different people deal with it.” She could say anything to Sister. “The truth is, few people can handle it, whether it was China in the seventeenth century, a great industrial fortune in Germany in the nineteenth, or today, dotcom, that sort of thing.”
“You’ve managed.”
“I was trained since birth, Janie. When you make it in your lifetime, it’s quite savage really. You’re a stranger from your own children who never had to fight for it. I was fortunate in that our money was made with Fulton, with the steamboat fortune. It has been prudently invested and managed ever since. I grew up in a milieu that understood resources and understood restraint. Edward, of course, has more recent wealth. His grandfather developed refrigeration for food processing, transporting foods. But the Bancrofts were and are people of common sense. They kept working, kept producing. But we were all born and raised before the Second World War. Times have changed.”
“Yes, but they always have.”
“Then let’s hope there’s a pendulum. I was flipping through the channels last night before falling asleep, and I caught, for the barest second, a show where people had eaten a lot of food, consumed different colors of food dyes, then threw it all up to see who vomited the best color. That’s just unimaginable to me.”
“Me, too.” Sister leaned on Tedi, so petite. “If you’ve been watching the gross shows, then what do you think of the sex channels? Not that they’re gross, just hard-core.”
“Oh,” Tedi brightened, “I like them.”
They both laughed uproariously as the Kappas sang more lustily.
As Sister, Tedi, and a captured Edward stood outside the house, its windows ablaze, and casting a golden glow over the snow, sounds of merriment seeped from inside.
“Well, dear, win anything?” Tedi figured Edward had played pool.
“Forty dollars. Five bucks a game. Took five dollars from Ronnie. We needed smelling salts to revive him. I swear Ronnie has the first dollar he ever made, probably sewn over his heart.”
“Maybe that’s why he doesn’t have a boyfriend,” Tedi said forthrightly as they walked to their vehicles.
“Now why do you say that?” Sister listened to the crunch of packed snow under her heels.
She hated heels, but she looked so good in them, and they could jack up her six feet to six three if she wanted. She liked that.
“Too damn cheap. If a man dates another man, doesn’t he pay for dinner just as one would with a woman? And then if Ronnie found a partner, I bet he’d watch every penny and drive the other man insane.”
“Well, I think many men keep their finances separate,” Edward remarked. “Not quite like marriage or our version, I should say, because now even middle-class people sign prenuptials.”
“I think of the money at stake when we married, it’s a wonder we didn’t spend a year on prenuptials.”
“I know it’s wise, but it seems so calculating. Doesn’t seem like a good way to start a marriage,” Sister said.
Edward thought a moment. “You and Ray had no agreement concerning finances?”
As she opened the truck door, she answered, “No prenuptial. I didn’t have much. I mean, we were comfortable, but nothing extravagant. Ray was about the same. Everything we had, we made together, and we didn’t think divorce was an option. Look at our generation. How many divorced people do you know?”
“That’s true.” Edward waited as Sister, door open, changed into a pair of L. L. Bean boots.
“I can’t drive in these damned things.” She tossed her heels onto the seat. “Oh, who else did you clean out down there at the pool table?”
Edward puffed out his chest. “That Toronto doctor. Bragged about what a good pool player he was, so I let him have the first one, then I cleaned his clock. A bit of a pill, that one.”
“We thought so, too.” Tedi giggled.
“You drive safely now.” Edward pecked Sister on the cheek.
Tedi playfully kissed Sister, too, then said in her beg
uiling voice, “Minimalism is for the young.”
Cruising out the driveway, thinking of Tedi’s comment and all the money Izzy had spent to achieve the pared-down look, Sister laughed. She also noted a brilliant silver Mercedes 500SL, which passed her at the entrance gate. Bill Little, one of the men at Brown Mercedes on the Richmond road, carefully navigated the treacherous road. An enormous yellow ribbon and bow rested on the driver’s seat next to him.
She waved to Bill. He waved back.
On the way home she wondered just what Izzy did to get such a fabulous birthday gift. Then she laughed out loud, imagining she had a pretty good idea. Even as an adolescent, Clay exhibited an intense interest in sex.
Come to think of it, Sister thought to herself, Izzy earned that Mercedes.
CHAPTER 8
Those High Holy Days take it right out of me.“ Sister leaned over the counter at her equine vet’s office. ”Wish you’d come on out sometime.“
The assistant, Val, a trail rider, shook her head. “You all are crazy.”
“It helps.” She rolled her fingertips on top of the counter— one, two, three, four—a habit of hers when she was trying to set something in her mind. “If the weather holds, how about if I bring that mare down next Wednesday?”
Val checked the computer screen. “That’s fine. I’ll tell Anne.”
Anne Bonda, the vet, had a flourishing practice, although her clinic was located a little out of the way in Monroe, Virginia.
Sister had delivered many a foal in her time, but Anne had delivered thousands. If something were to go wrong, having the vet attending was far preferable to calling in the middle of a snowy night and asking for help. Yes, it might add a thousand dollars to the vet bill, but a healthy baby was worth it.
Sister bred for stamina, bone, and brain. She pored over thoroughbred pedigrees, studied stallions and their get. She needed the old, staying blood, blood now woefully out of fashion.
Rally, this particular mare, carried Stage Door Johnnie blood, blood for the long haul, and she’d been bred to an extremely beautiful son of Polish Navy, called Prussian Blue, standing in Maryland.
This year she’d bred three mares. Secretary’s Shorthand didn’t catch, a bitter disappointment since she was an old granddaughter of Secretariat. When an ultrasound was done on Shorthand, an embryo couldn’t be observed. Curtains Up, Sister’s other mare, was bred to an interesting, tough horse named Arroamanches. She took. You just never knew with mares.
Driving home, she noticed a line of Princess trees bordering a pasture. The dried fruits hung on the tree along with spring’s fat buds. The force of life may be sleeping, but is ever present. Four months from now, on some warm April day, huge clusters of lavender flowers would cover the tree, bringing a smile to all who beheld such beauty.
Thanks to traffic on Route 29, a highway she hated, she arrived at the Augusta Cooperative an hour later.
She pushed open the glass doors and called to Georgia at the cash register, “Forgot birdseed last week.”
“You just wanted an excuse to see me,” Georgia drolly replied.
“There’s truth to that. This is Gossip Central.”
“We have hot competition in the country club and Roger’s Corner,” Georgia fired back.
“Different kind of gossip,” Sister replied.
Georgia wrinkled her nose. “Not as wild.”
“All those Episcopalians.” She hoisted a twenty-five-pound bag of birdseed on the counter. “I say that being one.”
“You’re the exception that proves the rule.” Georgia, whose lipstick snuck up into the cracks of her upper lip, winked.
“An exceptional exception.” Sheriff Ben Sidell emerged from an aisle. He pushed a big wire cart, filled with a plumbing snake, bags of dog and cat food, a fifty-pound salt block, plus other items tucked between and behind the big ones.
“I didn’t recognize you there for a minute without your uniform and out of your riding clothes,” Sister said.
“Did you notice me with the Hilltoppers yesterday?”
“I did, and I’m so glad you’re sticking to your riding lessons.”
He leaned over the handle of the cart. “I had no idea there was so much to foxhunting. People see riders in their scarlet coats, ”What a bunch of snobs,“ they think. Not like that at all. I’m trying to hang on my horse, my wonderful Nonni, but every now and then, I’ll notice something, like when the temperature changes, everything changes with it.”
“You’re observant. Professional training,” Sister complimented him. “Strange things happen. For instance, the prevailing wisdom is that only gray foxes climb trees, and yet I have seen a red do it. That isn’t supposed to happen.” She played with the signet ring on her little finger. “Fortunately, for us, foxes don’t read books about how they’re supposed to behave.”
Ben smirked. “Be better off if people threw the books out as well. Everyone spouts watered-down psychology, another form of excusing bad behavior. Every criminal was abused. Well, I’d better stop before I—”
“Don’t. I’m interested. You know more about this than we do. I’ve always thought that some people were born bad. We can’t rehabilitate them.” Georgia looked at him.
Ben ran a hand through his close-cropped black hair. “There is not one doubt in my mind that there is such a thing as a criminal mind. Some people are born psychopaths, sociopaths, or just plain liars. Men born with an extra Y chromosome usually wind up in prison, usually can’t control their violent impulses.”
“Ben,” Sister’s deep, pleasing voice contained a hopeful note, “surely some men in prison really are there because of circumstances, something as mundane as falling in with the wrong crowd as a kid.”
Turning his brown eyes to look into hers, she was startled for a moment at their clarity and depth. “There are. Things happen. People can be in the wrong place at the wrong time or make a stupid decision, but I’m ready to go to bat and say that ninety percent of the men in prison are either of low normal intelligence or truly criminal. You can’t fix them. Can’t fix a child molester.”
“I got a fix for them.” Georgia pushed her eyeglasses on top of her abundant, colored hair.
“Yeah, well, I’m with you, Georgia,” Ben said, “but the laws don’t allow that.”
“What about rapists?” Sister was curious since she had so little contact with or knowledge about criminals or the prison system.
“Much more difficult.” Ben moved his cart back so another customer could pass. “There is an awful lot of debate in law enforcement concerning when rape becomes rape.”
“If she says no, it’s rape.” This seemed perfectly clear to Georgia.
Sister nodded. “But men are raised to believe that when a woman says maybe, it means yes, and when she says no, she means maybe. Whether we like it or not, there are an awful lot of women out there who use sex as a weapon. Sooner or later, some of them pay for that.”
“Yes, but it’s often the wrong woman.” Georgia nailed that one.
“This culture is still so dishonest and foolish about sex,” mused Sister. “I’m surprised we don’t have more damage than we do in the form of rapes and murders. It’s twisted.”
Ben blinked. He hadn’t expected to hear that from Sister, even though he knew she wasn’t a narrow-minded woman. “Twisted?”
“Ben, sex is used to sell everything except caskets. Every single day Americans are fed images of sexual content allied to commercial purpose. Popular music is one long note of masturbation; excuse me for being blunt. At the same time, young people are counseled not to engage in sex. Women are told no, no, no, and young men are given a mixed message. Twisted like a pretzel.”
“Hmm.” Georgia turned this over in her mind. “What you said about criminals, that people are born that way, Sheriff, do you think that’s true about alcoholics?”
“Yes.” Ben replied without hesitation.
Sister joined in. “I say yes, too, but what makes that dicey is no one put
s a gun to your head and says ‘Drink.” There is a matter of choice.“
“Make mine a margarita.” Georgia started whistling a Jimmy Buffet song.
“Interesting question.” Ben watched a customer load up his Volvo. “About drunks.”
“Runs in my family,” Georgia stated flatly.
Sister smiled at Georgia. “I expect it runs in most everyone’s family.”
“The Sidells have contributed their share of alcoholics to the nation,” Ben said ruefully.
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