by Jane Smiley
“What did you do?”
Farley leaned forward, his face very sober, and Oliver couldn’t turn his gaze away. He said, “I got up and got dressed to come to the track. I got in my car, and about ten minutes after I got onto the freeway, thinking all the time about this woman, I wrecked my car. There was a stray tire in the middle of the right lane, and I was so preoccupied that even though every car in front of me was going around it I hit it, deflected off it, went into a bridge abutment, and totaled the thing. I liked that car, too.”
“Shit, Farley.”
“It was shit, Oliver. But it was a good lesson.”
“Not to—”
“Not to think that I knew what I was doing.”
“Are you talking about winning? If you’re talking about winning, I don’t understand. All I know is, I want to win.”
“I like to win, too.”
“In any athletic thing, you’ve got to want to win more than anything!”
“I think in this it’s the horse who has to want to win more than anything. The humans have a little leeway.”
“Do we? I don’t know what’s going on!”
“Nor do I.”
“What lessons are we learning here?”
“I don’t know yet.”
“Why are we doing this if we aren’t winning?”
“I don’t know.”
“After all this time you don’t know?”
“I know less and less.”
“But you don’t sound upset by that.”
“I’m not at this very moment.”
“Why not?”
“If I were capable of knowing what is going on, there wouldn’t be all that much going on.”
Oliver sat back in his chair and looked out the window, wondering if it was time to change jobs again. The thing was, at the racetrack, if you weren’t winning, you were supposed to engage in irrational behavior until you started winning again. Cursing, anger, little good-luck rituals, at least courting some owners. He said, “What happened to that woman?”
“She got married. She has a baby now. She was a lot younger than I was.”
“What did you get out of waiting?”
“Well, she named the baby ‘Farley.’ ”
Oliver couldn’t see how that was much of a consolation, but Farley was smiling to himself, one of his beatific Farley smiles.
Oliver got up and went out of the office, no longer angry but only wondering if his confusion was terminal. As he passed the stall where the filly and the pig were keeping each other company, he saw that the filly was calmly eating her alfalfa and the pig was standing behind her. Just as Oliver glanced at them, the pig rose up on his hind legs and bit the filly on the left hock. She lifted her tail, dropped a load; the pig came down on his forelegs and went to work.
MAY
27 / TROISIÈME COURS
AUDREY SCHMIDT could not help thinking that, if it had been her father who had taken her on this outing, it would have been warm, with the sun shining. It seemed to her that every time over the years that her father had taken her on a special outing, and all of their outings were special, because they were planned for well in advance to accommodate his duties in the Army, it had been sunny. Her father, she would have said, though not aloud, came with a supply of sunshine. This was not sunny. It was so foggy that you could not see the château and you could barely see the railing on the other side of the course. Audrey and her mother stood quietly, Audrey’s shoulder against her mother’s arm. They did not complain.
Audrey held her mutuel strip in her hand. It was filmy and silver, the sort of thing you could easily drop or lose in your pocket. Her mother didn’t like to bet, but she was willing to give Audrey anything now, and so she had put a hundred francs down on a filly that Audrey liked, a horse named Zania, by Linamix out of a Darshaan mare. Audrey didn’t know as much as she would have liked about French horses, but her default option was always to bet the grays. Linamix’s offpring were gray. The horse was trained by a woman named Christiane Head, who was the most famous woman trainer in France. Audrey and her mother had watched Madame Head saddling the horse before the race. She had that way of doing things that Audrey liked in a woman—calm, steady, flowing. Audrey had stared at her for as long as she could.
Audrey had been anticipating this outing for so long and in such detail and it was so different from what she had imagined that it seemed like a different outing entirely, so different that it gave her a sense of being not inside her own self but inside the self of another eleven-year-old girl who was doing with her mother what Audrey herself was doing with her father. She almost thought that she could look to her left or to her right and see the real Audrey Schmidt with the real Richard Schmidt, standing in the spring sunshine comparing notes on how the horses looked and what they might do.
But the real Richard Schmidt was really dead—Audrey made herself say that word, “dead,” to force herself to believe it. He had gone off to work fourteen days minus one day ago, just as usual, and then, in the middle of the day, his commanding officer had shown up and told Audrey’s mother that her husband had suffered a massive heart attack at his desk and had not even lived to get to the hospital. Of course, everyone in the military was fully trained in CPR, but Audrey’s father had probably died before his head hit his desk. They had been in France exactly a month. Audrey had had to give up her riding lessons and her hopes of owning a horse in order to move here, and this outing was to have been a consolation prize.
How this death could have happened was not readily understood. Colonel Richard Schmidt had been patted and prodded and tested and adjusted and investigated as to his physical fitness every six months since he entered West Point. Colonel Richard Schmidt ran three miles every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and five miles every Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday. He lifted weights on Sunday. His hair was brown, his skin was ruddy, and no one could remember a day of illness. The chaplain kept telling Audrey’s mother, Florence, in Audrey’s hearing, that sometimes it is simply time to go. Florence nodded, as did Audrey. Its being time to go was a simple concept, in theory, if you didn’t ask why. After the chaplain left, Florence would stop nodding and start shaking her head. For now, Audrey saw that her mother was so amazed by what had happened to her father, and to them, that these were just about her only responses, nodding for a while, then shaking her head for a while, then nodding for a while. Florence had tried to sit down with Audrey and make something of it all, but had had no luck with that. Finally, after two tries, she said, “Audrey, I’ve got to ask you to wait for me. My mind is moving very slowly. I can’t seem to speed it up. But things will be all right.”
At any rate, the sunny two-day outing in the beautiful spring weather that Audrey and her father were supposed to be having here had turned out to be a foggy two-day outing of penetrating cold and loneliness. Not even visiting the horse museum the day before had lifted her spirits. Because of the weather, Audrey and her mother were two of only perhaps twenty-five people at the equestrian demonstration. The riders came out on two Lusitano horses, two grays. They trotted around very elegantly, then had the horses do some tricks, like bowing and sitting and lying down. When the horses finished and went back inside the stable, they were dripping, not with sweat, but with cold mist. Audrey felt sorry for them, having to leave their warm stalls and go outside. The exhibits in the museum were nice enough, mostly pictures. The stable was like a castle, not like any stable Audrey had ever been to at home. It was so elaborate and well built that the horses seemed like house dogs or house cats, not outdoor creatures at all.
After the horse museum, they had gone out to eat at a restaurant, and tried out local specialties that were heavy with cream, butter, and ham. Then they had gone back to the hotel and tried to read for the rest of the evening. There were no friends around. The fog was thick and scary for her mother to drive in. When they turned out the light at nine o’clock, Audrey heard her mother start to cry and knew that she herself dared not cry, beca
use if everyone in any one room cried then the sadness was too much to bear, and might finish them off. In the morning, Audrey woke up early and lay in bed pretending to be asleep. The hours passed very slowly, until at last she heard her mother roll over and sit up. Then her mother said, in a tone of amazed conviction, “I guess we’ll go back to Maryland. I certainly don’t want to go back to Texas.” Audrey didn’t reply. Then there was the relief of getting up.
Audrey’s own mind wasn’t moving all that quickly, either. What she was trying to do, the project she had set herself, was to hear her father’s voice in her head. So far, she had had no luck. This was the way, above all ways, that she knew he had vanished and was truly gone. All her life he had been busy and often absent, but always she had been able to hear his voice in her head, telling her to make her bed, to help her mother, to think happy thoughts, to act responsibly, to think of him while he was gone. From her earliest childhood, he had said to her, “If you miss me, just think of me, and I am with you.” She didn’t know how she could know he had said this to her without being able to hear him saying it, but she could, and since she couldn’t hear him saying it, she couldn’t feel that he was with her. It made her afraid.
The fog lifted a bit and the horses went to the start. There was something very unserious about this sort of racing, Audrey thought. The tractors and machinery and crowds and buildings and loudspeaker and litter of betting slips that she was used to in America were absent, especially today. Racing in America could be grim, but it was never lonely. In France, it looked like, it was probably never grim—the turf was too green for that—but today it was very lonely. Audrey’s mother said, “Now what?”
Audrey didn’t know what to answer, since she herself didn’t know now what, either. So she pressed her shoulder against her mother’s arm a little harder, and then her mother moved her arm and put it around Audrey. That reminded Audrey how small the two of them were. At least back in Paris the whole U.S. Army was trying to make up to them for her father’s death.
The fog lifted a bit more. Now you could see the equestrian museum, a thicker gray through the veil of the fog. The turf seemed to radiate its own green light, and the gate opened and the horses swarmed out of it silently, their hooves muffled by weather and turf. Even though she had a bet, it was hard for Audrey to get excited. And then, in the space of a few seconds, the fog dropped over the horses and removed them from this world. There was a silence in the crowd as the horses vanished, and then much conversation in French. Could anyone see them? Where were they? Would they stop the race? Audrey’s mother looked at her as if she would know the answer to this question, but Audrey shrugged. She knew she should worry about the horses—could they see anything? Might not someone be hurt? But the horses had vanished; what was there to worry about?
People started milling about and shouting in French, and the horses did not reappear. Audrey looked at her watch, but you could tell nothing from that—she hadn’t checked her watch when the horses disappeared. And then the fog fell upon them, and Audrey’s mother, too, vanished. Of course she was there—Audrey could feel her arm around her shoulders—but she could not see her mother at all—could not see her drawn face, her paleness, her grief, her confusion. Well, it was something of a relief, to stand there utterly alone and utterly surrounded. For the first time in two weeks, she felt a moment of rest. She took a deep breath through her nose and let it out her mouth. She rubbed her mutuel slip between her thumb and forefinger. And then the breeze came up and blew that fog backward, toward the grandstand, and there were the horses, right in front of them, galloping, racing, rolling, surging over the turf as hard as they could go, as if their eyes were foglights. They were all so wet that they were all dark-colored. You couldn’t tell who was who. And then, just before they crossed the finish line in a bunch, the fog enveloped them again. The photo was blank, gray. A few hooves appeared at the bottom, but no noses, no numbers, no jockeys.
“Well,” said Florence. “That was the strangest thing I ever saw.”
“Me, too,” said Audrey.
“I wish your father were here to see that!”
“Me, too,” said Audrey.
They sighed.
But, oddly, Audrey felt a little better. Something interesting had happened. By contrast, in the last two weeks, everything had been new but at the same time darkly tedious.
“Would you like something to eat, sweetheart?” said Florence.
Audrey nodded. Florence took her hand. After a few steps, Audrey said, “Dad could be with us, couldn’t he? He doesn’t seem to be, but he could be.”
Florence looked at her, then said, “Yes. Yes, he could be. Lots of people in the world would say that he is. But, you know, it’s not something that I’d made up my mind about.”
“Let’s say that he is and see what happens.”
“Yes,” said Florence, “let’s do just exactly that.”
28 / HUNTER-JUMPER
AS SOON AS DEIRDRE turned down Cold Spring Road and was driving between the white board fences that defined the contours of the land on either side of the gravel, her heart started to pound, and it kept pounding, faster and faster, as she drove into the parking lot beside the barn, pulled into a spot, turned off the ignition, and looked through the windshield. She had expected a reaction of some sort, for she had not been to her old barn in six years, since finally selling it off to Ellen. She had not consciously stayed away, she thought. Every type of horse business, she thought, was life-consuming. There were people at the track who never went anywhere else at all. That she sometimes took in a concert, she thought, or a good meal made her a degree less single-minded than many. But still.
Of course there were changes—Ellen had put up an indoor arena, which Deirdre had wished to do but been unable to afford. The barn had been repainted. Accent trim formerly green against the white walls was now black. The pastures had been divided, so that more horses could be turned out in less space. Deirdre found reassuring these little shoots of disapproval already cropping up around her chest-thumping anxiety. Disapproval of the way others ran their businesses and treated their horses was the meat and drink of the hunter-jumper business and still pleasantly nourishing after all these years. She opened her door and got out. The number of cars in the parking lot told her that plenty was going on, but it wasn’t until she rounded the end of the long center-aisle barn that she witnessed it.
At least ten people were riding, six in the main arena and four in the jumping arena. Two others were cooling out their horses on the grass. Three instructors, of which Ellen was one, were standing, staring at their charges in attitudes of dismay, real or mock. As Deirdre came onto the scene, she heard Ellen exclaim, “Lorelei! You are riding a horse, not a motorcycle! If you lean into the turn and don’t balance him up, he will stumble!”
Lorelei, on a little bay, nodded. Deirdre went up to the rail of the arena and leaned on it. Without glancing at her, Ellen called out, “May I help you?”
“Well, then, I don’t know, Miss. Have you a harse I might ride, then?” Deirdre put on the real Irish.
“Deirdre! You came! I’d lost hope!”
“A bit late, but better that than early.”
“Do you really want to ride?”
“That was just a bit of a joke.”
Well, she was very affectionate, coming over to the fence and giving Deirdre an uninvited hug and a kiss on both cheeks, not so bad, in its way, for it calmed her inner turmoil. She managed a grunt, just to reflect Ellen’s grin, and said, “When you called, I thought I’d better come over and see whether you’ve broken down that lovely filly I sent you in the winter.”
“Hot as a pistol! Can’t break her down if we can’t ride her!”
“You know the statistic about sixteen percent of any and every group of humans being jerks? Well, sixteen percent of all horses are useless as bent nails, and that filly is one of them, but you would have her!”
“I would have her, and you would sell her! How’s
George?”
“The curtain goes up on George’s play every single day and he does himself a star turn. It’s getting a bit boring the way they all light up when they see that boy. You’re lighting up yourself, and you know better.”
“No one knows better with George.”
“He’s just an Irish boy, no different from all the rest of ’em.”
“Ha. Well, he’s a lost cause, I know that, so we’d better go look at the horses.”
They came into the dark, wide aisle. Dust rose on every golden sunbeam that fell from the clerestory windows. At the sound of Ellen’s voice, a horse head popped over every stall guard, eyes alert and ears pricked. Right there at the front would be the Jackal, Ellen’s Grand Prix horse; Deirdre recognized the white diamond inside his left nostril. Deirdre had broken him as a two-year-old some twelve years before, when Ellen was just starting out with jumping and Deirdre would ride anything over anything at any speed in any type of class. She stepped up to the Jackal and cupped her hand under his chin. Smooth and whisker-free. She said, “Now, how do you expect the poor beast to find the grass if you shave him clean like this?”
Ellen laughed. “I’ve never seen him have a speck of trouble with that.”
“Then how do you expect him to sense the fairies and the ghosts all around?”
“Look at this one, Deirdre. I got him from Mike Huber in Texas. He had him up to Intermediate, but his rider couldn’t hold him cross-country even in a double-twisted wire snaffle, but he’s a great jumper. I’ve just got him in a full-cheek and he goes fine. He’s jumped six feet. I want to make him a Puissance horse.”
“Listen to you now, dearie. Who’s that girl who used to cry out, ‘Oh, Deirdre! Don’t put ’em up! Are they three feet? Don’t put ’em up!’ ” She was smiling again.
“Here’s the filly.”
Clean as a whistle and fat, the filly Deirdre had sold Ellen in the winter came out of the stall as out of a silk glove, on her toes, her ears pricked and her nostrils wide. She swept around them in the wide aisle, her tail flowing. Ellen said, “I put her out in the indoor and she goes over and looks in the mirror. This way, that way, posing. She’ll spend forty-five minutes at it, sometimes. I just love watching her.”