The Last Virginia Gentleman

by Michael Kilian

  He only sighed.

  “Like the first time, David. When I was such a blushing young virgin. Here in the grass. ‘Oh white woman whom nobody loves, why do you walk through the fields in gloves, when the grass is as soft as the breast of doves?’”

  They’d been only twenty then. She hadn’t been a virgin, and two years later, she’d left him for a moneyed older man from Philadelphia. Showers had no money. It took him many years to get over the sadness, but he’d wished her well.

  “Please, Lenore.”

  “Please, indeed. You owe me quite a debt, sir. Lynwood wouldn’t have let you ride Moonsugar if I hadn’t prevailed upon him with my lovely charm.”

  “You may choose to believe that.”

  She began to laugh, then stopped. Her voice became soft and melancholy, almost poetic. She always knew what got to him.

  “When I lay there, such an innocent girl, my hair spread in the grass, you swore an oath to me. You pledged yourself to me forever. My lover and my champion.”

  For all the heat and smell of whiskey, for all his weariness and distress, the beauty of this odd moment was not lost on him—a lovely woman even lovelier in her nakedness, kneeling before him in the soft summer night, offering him the oblivion of abandon; escape from all the wretchedness and emptiness of that day, of all his days.

  “It would be quite dishonorable to deny me, after all those fine words long ago.” She rose and came forward. “Someday I’ll prove to you that Lynwood Fairbrother is not your friend.”

  He set down his glass, and let her come into his arms. Nothing his grandfather had taught him had prepared him for Lenore. No one ever denied Lenore anything—not when she really wanted it.

  He touched and held her breast. They kissed, her warmth one with the summer night. His hand slid to her waist and hip and below. And then he froze.

  “David …”

  “No.” He released her and moved away. “For God’s sake. I’m going to ride his horse tomorrow.”

  “Oh, please, David. Please? Pretty, pretty please, darling? I know how much you want me. Your thingie’s very hard. I could feel it, David.” She moved close to him again. “I must have you tonight. Tonight, tonight, another night of nights, to remember forever and ever and ever. Please?”

  He stood up. “Stop it, Lenore. If you don’t, I’ll call Lynwood and have him come and get you.”

  “You wouldn’t.”

  “I would. I’ll just tell him you’re drunk again and making a fool of yourself. Again.”

  “He never cares.”

  “I care. I can’t stand it when you’re like this.”

  The word “it” was in lieu of “you.”

  She folded her arms, an unhappy child. He expected her to say something nasty. She had a large repertoire of biting remarks suitable for such occasions. But she fooled him.

  “David. I love you. You know that. Who have I ever loved but you?”

  “You left me, Lenore. I asked you to stay and you treated it like an amusing joke.”

  “But David, you were so poor.”

  “So there we are.”

  They sat quietly for a long moment. A sudden noise proved to be Showers’ border collie, bounding up the drive. He entered the reach of the house lights and stopped, looking at them, then bent back his head and neck to scratch.

  “Oh, dear, dear David,” Lenore said, rising. “You’re such a prig.”

  With a sashaying walk, she returned to her car, getting into it and driving away without a second’s backward look.

  She left all of her clothes on his lawn.

  Three

  The bodies of Vicky Clay and her husband lay undetected on their bed until late the next morning. The young chambermaid at the inn left their room until last, knowing it was occupied by Vicky and fearful, from embarrassing experience, of what she might well encounter were she to enter it earlier. Once, though there had been no DO NOT DISTURB sign hanging from the door and no response to her knock, she’d come in on Vicky sitting stark naked on the master of the hunt’s face.

  The first race of the day—a pony chase for young riders—began at eleven. A few minutes before, presuming everyone would be at the steeplechase course, the maid finally tried the Clays’ door, but, glimpsing the naked forms on the bed, she closed it quickly, not returning for an hour. The next time, noting that the bodies were in exactly the same position, she hesitated on the threshold, saw how still and sickly yellow they looked, and became very worried. Peering more closely, she saw the bloody scratches on Meade Clay’s back and the hypodermic in his hand. Frightened, she fled downstairs to the front desk.

  The desk clerk, a young man not much older than the maid and like her a student at the University of Virginia, went unhappily upstairs to investigate. He came down again very quickly.

  “They must have OD’d,” he said, hastily dialing the phone. “I wonder what in the hell they were using.”

  “Are you calling the hospital?”

  “Hospital? They’re dead. Cold as ice. I’m calling the sheriff. God.”

  The line was busy. Nearly everyone in the Banastre County sheriff’s department had been assigned to traffic and crowd control at the Dandytown steeplechase course that day.

  “They must have been making love when it hit them,” the young man said. “You should have seen the way she clawed his back.”

  “I saw,” said the maid. She slumped down in one of the lobby chairs, and began to feel very ill.

  The early June day was brilliant, the warm air full of the scent of grass and blossoms, the colors of sky, meadow, and green woodland so vivid and perfect the scene might have come from an antique painting. Only the line of expensive cars parked along the rail of the VIP section of the racecourse testified to the contemporariness of the moment. The mounted race officials in their hunting pinks, the jockeys in white breeches and racing silks, the gentlemen spectators in their elegant jackets and ladies in flowery summer dresses and picture hats—they all could have been figures in one of the framed equestrian prints so ubiquitous on the walls of Virginia horse-country houses.

  Robert Moody appreciated the painterly scene. What preyed upon him was that he did not belong in it.

  He was standing in a group of well-dressed people by the open trunk of Bernie Bloch’s big Rolls-Royce Corniche parked at Bernie’s “box” along the rail, a roped-off patch of grass in a prestigious location near the ornate wooden tower of the officials’ stand. Bloch had paid a substantial amount of money for that box, but no amount of money, it seemed, would have sufficed to make the race fans in the adjoining boxes behave in friendly fashion to him and his guests. Moody had said good morning to an elderly woman in a flowered straw hat seated on a folding chair just across the rope divider from him, but she’d paid him no more attention than she would have to a buzzing fly. Perhaps she was hard of hearing, though he doubted it.

  This was only Moody’s second day of steeplechase but he was really coming to hate these people. Years before, when his daughter May was a little girl taking riding classes, he’d accompanied her to a few horse shows in Maryland, but he’d never mingled with the horse folk much, not even when he was governor of the state. They seemed inhabitants of another culture, another race. It wasn’t simply their clothes or wealth or accents or obsessive habits. It was their attitude of difference, their unassailable nonchalance and perfect lack of self-consciousness, an unstudied poise that sustained them even when they were staggering drunk—even when they’d lost a big race. They lavished fortunes on their animals but never seemed to mind losing. It confounded him. Moody was a winner. He’d won at everything he’d put his hand and mind to—the law, real estate, politics, the Washington game. America made sense because it was a country that had always honored winners. These people only honored themselves, win or lose.

  Moody rubbed his chin, wondering how soon he’d have to shave again. When he was feeling insecure like this, he sometimes shaved three times in a single day, scraping away at the dam
nable blue-black shadow that never left him.

  It amazed him that his daughter could resemble him so greatly, yet be such an extraordinary beauty, an actress who had been celebrated in Hollywood as much for her looks as for her talent, which was considerable enough to have won her a Tony when she was working on Broadway.

  May’s long hair was as dark as his, as were her eyes, though her complexion was pale, like her mother’s. Her features bore many hints of his, but showed more of the Irish in their ancestry. Slightly irregular, they lent her beauty a touch of wildness. He had called her “my little wild rose” when she was changing from girl to woman, when she still doted on him. He carried an old photograph of her from that time in his wallet.

  Moody photographed horribly, but May had never taken a bad picture. He used to brag about her constantly, back when she was still talking to him, before he had left her mother.

  Moody’s hand came away from his face wet with sweat. He had bought the gray flannels and expensive tweed jacket he was wearing especially for this weekend—copying the style of horse people he had seen in Town and Country pictorials, forgetting that it was now the brink of summer, and that the swells and toffs he’d seen in the pictures were dressed for a different season—not this heat.

  He wondered how many were noticing his discomfort. Probably everyone who saw him.

  Anxious about Central America—the Guatemalan and Mexican armies had gone on alert—and the gathering threats to the president’s pending Earth Treaty, Moody had been on the phone much of the morning. Secretary of State Hollis had been reached and informed of the Belize situation, but, with the president remaining on Cape Cod, had decided not to return.

  Moody’s people had tracked down Senator Reidy and Senator Sorenson and Moody had persuaded them both to meet with him at the White House early Monday morning. During the night, there had been an oil tanker spill off the north coast of Florida, but that was good news. It would help the Earth Treaty.

  Bloch walked up, handing Moody a gin and tonic. He’d been preparing drinks for his guests from the fairly elaborate bar he’d set up in the trunk of the Rolls.

  “You look hot, Bobby,” Bernie said. “Take off your coat. Relax a little. We’re here to have fun.”

  Moody accepted the icy drink, nodding his thanks, but made no effort to remove his jacket. He’d read a lot of Thomas Wolfe when he was in college and there was a passage in The Web and the Rock that had never left him. It was about a visit by the young hero to a friend’s very wealthy family in New York’s Westchester County. The patriarch of that clan had insisted that a gentleman never removed his coat in public. Moody now never took his off, even when the president was in shirtsleeves.

  “I’m all right.”

  “My trainer hasn’t shown up. I wonder who she was screwing last night.”

  “She may have just been with her husband.”

  “Come on, Bobby. You know what she’s like. You’ve given her a little poke yourself.”

  Moody looked away. “What are you talking about?”

  “Last month, when we were all in Baltimore for the Preakness.” Bloch gave him a friendly jab in the shoulder. “S’all right. Why do you think I keep her around? She’s hell on my horses but she keeps my friends happy. Keeps me happy, too.”

  “She’s a nice girl.”

  Bloch laughed. “She’s a lot of things, but nice isn’t one of them.” He paused, lowering his voice. “I wouldn’t fuck around with her anymore, Bobby. She’s a cocaine junkie. She’s done a little time on drug charges. A man in your position doesn’t need that kind of trouble.”

  “I think you’re exaggerating my interest in her,” Moody said quietly.

  “I’m glad to hear that.”

  “Why did you hire her?”

  “I’m not too popular out here. She was the only trainer I could get who’s any good with jumping horses.”

  “Shouldn’t someone be looking for her?”

  “She’ll show up. She’s probably just sleeping off her bad night.” He glanced at his other guests. “I gotta mingle. You should too. You’re the politician, right?”

  “I’m off duty.”

  “You’ve never been off duty, Bobby. Not in all the years I’ve known you.”

  Bloch moved away. He was wearing a lightweight baby blue blazer over a yellow Lacoste polo shirt that clung comfortably to his overlarge belly. Bernie always looked comfortable. Moody felt as miserable as he must look. The tweed seemed to bite through the back of his shirt like a weave of thorns.

  His wife, Deena, was at the track rail, talking cheerfully with Bloch’s wife, Sherrie, and another couple. Catching Moody’s eye, she gave him a quick smile and tiny wave, then returned to her chatter. She didn’t look as though she belonged here, either, though she’d tried. Her much festooned, wide-brimmed hat was too elaborate, her platinum hair too bleached, the pink of her dress and shoes far too bright and the bodice too flamboyantly low cut—the sort of clothes one would expect to see at a racetrack in Miami.

  But she was happy, in what she considered “her element”—rich people, expensive cars and playthings, a very social setting. If anyone looked down on her, she pretended not to notice. She was Southern, originally from Kentucky. Women like her were good at that.

  Fifteen years younger than Moody, she’d been a good wife to him thus far, as compliant and attentive in their public life as she was in their bed, always willing to do what he deemed correct or necessary or politic, his agreeable junior partner in the Washington game, where she was treated like a very major player by everyone except the first lady and her circle. What haunted him was the fear, bordering on certainty, that she would flee him in a moment should he lose his position—faster than that if he should lose his money. He was her third husband, and she was only thirty-eight.

  The nation had elected at least one president who was a compulsive womanizer and another who had been divorced. It had never elected one with a wife who’d made a career of marriages.

  Moody retreated to one of the white folding chairs set up to the side of Bloch’s Rolls, being careful not to lean against the back as he sat down. He sipped his drink, impatient for the next race to begin, impatient for the entire racing program to be over.

  It wasn’t as though he’d been treated as a pariah. The race announcer on the official’s stand had announced his presence along with other important guests and celebrities over the public address system. A number of people had come up to greet him or introduce themselves. But they were just Washington graspers—a lot of them rich, powerful Republicans of the sort ever on the hunt for friends who might aid them in the maintenance of their success and station in Washington, friends even in a Democratic administration like Moody’s. They were here as guests. They didn’t really belong, either.

  In the distance, beyond the farthest rise of meadow, he could see the pale, hazy line of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Beyond them was the rugged, endlessly hilly terrain of the state of West Virginia. A hundred or more miles west of the border, lying in the fold between two long mountain ridges, was the wretched, ramshackle coal town where Moody had grown up—near it, the grubby little ramshackle village where he’d been born. He hadn’t been back to either for more than two decades. Now they seemed oddly near, as though he could just get up and walk over that ridge on the horizon and be there.

  He had wanted to go back, sometimes. Twice he had actually started the trip. But each time he had succumbed to a superstitious foreboding and turned away. It was as though the decaying little towns with their unpainted buildings and vacant stores and auto-strewn front yards might somehow reclaim him, enfold him in their poverty and ugliness, and never let him leave again.

  His first wife, Geneva, May’s mother, had gone back. He had made her a very wealthy woman by West Virginia standards with his divorce settlement—one of the richest women in the mountains—but she lived comfortably rather than grandly, using her money mostly to make a difference in the community. Moody had read in som
e government report or another that coal mining jobs in West Virginia had diminished by half since 1980. Through Geneva, his money was helping—a little.

  The Earth Treaty, waiting for him back in Washington like an execution order condemning an old friend, could eliminate the rest of those jobs, if the Senate ratified it and the Congress passed the accompanying environmental legislation that would enable the government to comply with the treaty’s strict terms. West Virginia coal was about the dirtiest in the nation.

  Moody picked up his racing program, turning past the Mercedes-Benz and perfume and champagne advertisements to study the field for the next race, the Valley Dragoon Chase, a three-mile run twice around the course, over timber—unyielding three- and four-foot-high wooden fences that in a race the previous fall had killed a rider and three horses.

  Bloch’s mount, a big chestnut, was called Sherrie’s Dream, a name that had prompted a lot of jokes about Bloch’s wife’s sex life. Bernie had said his biggest competition in the race was Lynwood Fairbrother’s gray horse, Moonsugar. The rider listed in the program was Captain David Showers. Moody looked over at the paddock. Showers and the other jockeys were preparing their mounts for the race. He’d changed from his navy blazer to the pink and green racing silks of the Fairbrother stable. Showers was taller than the other riders, but not by much.

  Moody thought for a moment of summoning Showers over at some point in all this equestrian pageantry. Make him stand obediently in the midst of Bloch’s little Rolls-Royce circle here. Ask him how the State Department was coming with the various treaty analyses he had asked for. Dismiss the man after he gave his answer.

  It was a bad idea. The arrogant charade would be recognized for what it was. Showers might not even respond, making Moody look like the chump. Moody had noticed a number of people out here like “the captain.” Nobodies in Washington. Somebodies in Horse Land. One young woman was nothing but a press assistant in one of the Smithsonian museums, yet she had walked right up to the officials’ stand as though she owned the place. The British ambassador had nodded to her as she passed, almost a bow. Moody recalled her last name. It was one he had seen in a local Washington society magazine. She had passed by him, too, without saying a word, even though the head of the Smithsonian was a friend of the president, and his phone calls came through Moody’s office.