by Jane Smiley
Pete smiled.
She dared to say, “I am sure you live with some rich woman in Atherton. Maybe she will like the screens.”
Pete laughed.
She was glad she had come. The fragrance of the horses and the neat piles of horse clothing and equipment, the cold stables, the horses stamping and snorting—it was a change. Then he took her elbow. “I need some breakfast. Would you care for a pot of tea, madam? We can go to the canteen.”
As they were making their way around puddles and piles of dirt, she said, “Pete, you do seem at home.”
“You’re never old at a racetrack. There’s always someone older than you, who’s been around since the Civil War and was actually there to see Kincsem run—or Eclipse, for that matter.”
“You seem young to me.”
“I’m two years younger than that pig Lenin, and he’s been dead for five years now. So I’m old. In Russia, I would be dead. I’m older than you are.”
“Then you must be old.”
He said, “But see? Here you look especially elegant. I get on my pony named Ivan Grozny, who is the sleepiest, sweetest thing in the world, and I ride out to watch the boys train the horses and I feel very sprightly.”
He didn’t ask her about Andrew, and Margaret didn’t say a word about him, either.
The canteen was a humble place, but it had eggs and toast and coffee and tea, and it was another nice change to sit at a rickety table among all the men with their bits of paper on which they were scribbling numbers or hotly comparing their bits with the bits others were scribbling on. She saw that the men greeted Pete sociably, as if expecting a witticism or a canny remark. After a bit, though, the canteen emptied out. She said, “Must you leave, too?”
He shook his head. “Mine are finished for the day. If they would allow gambling in California, you could see them run.”
She nodded. Then, giddily emboldened by all these pleasures, she said, “Tell me something about you that I can’t imagine.”
He smiled. “I wore dresses until I was three years old.”
“That’s what boys did in those days. Something else.”
“How about this? When I first came to the States, I worked in vaudeville. As a regurgitator.”
“I don’t believe that!”
“You see, there you go.”
“What did you regurgitate?”
“I put out fires with sprays of regurgitated water.” He was grinning. “Or I was supposed to. I hadn’t quite perfected my act when I first went on in Vacaville, and the tube popped out from behind my ear. I got booed off the stage, and the theater manager fired me. Then I tried to join a circus, doing some horse vaulting, but they said they had Cossacks coming out of their ears, though most of the ones I saw were Mexicans or Italians. Now you tell me something.”
“Nothing I have to tell is interesting.”
“If I don’t know it, it’s interesting.”
“When I was eight, my older brother went down to the railyards with some friends. They found a blasting cap and affixed it to a piece of iron they found, and then one of the boys rubbed it against some bricks. It exploded and drove the length of iron right into my brother’s skull.”
“That was a very unlucky thing.”
“Yes, but unique. It seemed to me he couldn’t possibly have died like that, so it took me a very long time to believe that he had. I’d think of what happened and I would start to laugh. I had two brothers and they both died as boys. But in Missouri after the War Between the States, you didn’t expect boys to live, somehow.”
“I had an uncle gored by a bull. My mother’s brother.”
“I saw a hanging, they say. But I have never been able to recall it. I was five. I recall earlier things, but of that I only remember fragments. Once I thought I remembered the boy’s name, Claghorne. Such an odd name. Now I have no idea if that was really his name or not. He wore a red shirt. Maybe. My brother put me on his shoulders. Maybe! You’d think I would remember such a thing.”
“Have you heard of Sigmund Freud?”
She said, “No.”
There was a pause while he went to the counter for more coffee. She closed her eyes and made herself think of the hanging, but making herself think of it made it go away. When he sat down again, he said, “What were you like as a girl?”
“Oh, I don’t know. I was the third sister even though I’m the oldest. There’s always a beautiful sister and a smart sister, and then there’s a sister that’s not beautiful or smart.”
“You kept out of trouble, then.”
“Oh yes.”
“So few do.”
Now it was her turn to laugh. “But that’s why I loved Dora so from the first time I saw her. She was always scouting for mischief, and she always dressed for it. When I first met her, she had a bicycle and a very strange costume, with pantaloons, but it was the newest thing.”
“The first time I saw her, she had the shortest skirt in the restaurant, and you could almost see the swell of her calf. That was very daring then.”
“I miss Dora.”
“But she is returning! She should be here in a month.”
This was news to Margaret. She sipped her tea in confusion. Pete said, “I haven’t seen the painting.”
“Mr. Kimura’s painting?”
“I thought it would be good. He was very intent.”
“It is good. But I put it away. I can’t hang it.”
His eyebrow lifted. “Andrew?”
“No, no. No! All the coots were slaughtered. Parents, chicks, all of them.”
“Oh,” said Pete.
“Did everyone expect that besides me? Is that why everyone was always saying what common birds they were?”
He leaned forward and looked her intently in the face. He said, “Tell me something about you that I don’t know.”
Tears sprang into her eyes. He said, “Tell me.” He took her hand between his.
She said, “But you know it! Dora must have told you. Twenty years ago, my baby died,” and in a moment she was really weeping, in spite of all the years and all the layers of “all for the best in the end.” He did not grow restless in his chair. And he did not speak. He had seen a lot worse; wasn’t that the first thing you knew about him? But he didn’t mention any of those things, either. He waited for her to take her hands away from her face, and then he handed her his pink handkerchief. He said, “It was Kiku who told me.”
Margaret steadied her breath, then said, “Oh yes. She came and held the baby. I never knew why.”
“Well, she did tell me that, too.”
Margaret waited. It was surprising how even now she couldn’t ask the question. But Pete didn’t need to be asked. He said, “She had some herbs with her, to offer you. But when she held the baby, she saw—”
“That nothing would do any good.” But she was no longer weeping—she was again used to Alexander’s fate.
Pete nodded. He looked like the soul of kindness. She blew her nose. She said, “But the coots were also coots. I hated the way the last three babies staggered about together, looking for bits to eat. I hated how doomed they were.”
“Of course you did,” said Pete. That was all, but it was enough, she thought.
They drank the last bit of tea. It was getting colder and windier outside, and she began to think she should get home. He walked her to the Franklin. He held the door. She got in and put down the window. Her gloved hand was on the door as he closed it, and he took it in his and kissed it. Then he bowed slightly and turned away. She pressed the starter with her foot, but she didn’t drive off at once. She sat there until he disappeared through the gate, and even after that.
When she got home, she took out the picture. What she saw this time were the two curves—the steep rise of the hillside beyond the pond, and the answering flat line of the far edge of the pond itself. Beneath these two large shapes, almost lost among the waving grasses, were the cluster of coots in the right foreground, and the gay, foolhardy chick, swimming quickl
y (as demonstrated by the rivulets around him) to the left. His figure drew the eye, of course, and wasn’t the eye that was drawn her eye, but also the eye of the hawk, unseen, floating on an air current high above? She thought it was a wonderful but terrible picture, like the picture of the snake, and she put it back in the closet.
When Andrew inquired after Pete, she said that he seemed to be prospering. Andrew was gratified at the success of his scheme for her welfare, and suggested, “Perhaps, my dear, you need a biweekly outing, if not all the way to the racetrack, then to some other place of recreation.”
DORA finally came late in the winter, and what a winter it had been. The stock market had crashed, and the Bells had lost a lot of money. Margaret heard about it in every letter from Beatrice, who was in a panic, because Robert’s partner had killed himself, and the reasons why were still locked in the books (“the second set,” wrote Elizabeth, which could not be found). Andrew had lost some money, too, but not much. He was still planning to pay cash for the large Italianate house they were buying as a result of his retirement and his enforced move from the island to Vallejo. If he hadn’t had so much work to do with Len, he would have liked to deliver her to the Palace Hotel himself, and welcome Dora back to the West Coast personally. As it was, he inspected and approved her outfit before she left the house and said that he would meet the dinnertime ferry just to hear all about Dora’s recent adventures.
Dora maintained that the Crash would not affect her; her new paper (the New York Herald Tribune, much more fashionable than the Examiner) was actually beginning to turn a profit, and her editor was so intimidating that the publisher didn’t dare defy him. She was on a cross-country tour, interviewing victims of the Crash, high and low. Talking about the Crash took precedence in their conversation, as in every conversation Margaret had had in four months.
Dora said, “All the experts say this will be nothing truly fearsome.”
“Do you believe them?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because the ones with the money don’t have it anymore. It’s gone, and they know it’s gone. They don’t believe the experts, even though they hired them.”
“But Andrew says the stock market is going up again.”
Dora shrugged.
“What is it like in Europe?”
“Well”—she shook her head—“Italy, of course, is terrifying—more so every day. England is okay, but you know they’ll never recover from the Great War. I’m sure, if a real depression hits, they will blame the Americans somehow.”
“What about France?”
Dora smiled. “You know France. It’s nice there. When things start to go bad, for at least a while France freezes in place. You can go about your pleasures and say to yourself that disaster is coming, but this is a lovely peach and there are beautiful cows out in the field, and let’s go find a two-room apartment in Biarritz and sit this out. Darling, I wonder and I wonder where I want to be for the next few years, and I can’t come up with an answer. I just let the paper send me about, and count the places I don’t want to be.”
“Where don’t you want to be the most?”
“Missouri.”
“That’s the safest place, maybe.”
“Well, yes, darling. It’s unprecedented.”
When Dora probed Margaret, Margaret talked about the house—not up a steep hill, anyway—about the charitable work the ladies on the island were doing. Dora kept smiling, then said, “I love your life. When I would think about you in Europe, it was always such a comforting thought: Andrew like a big moving pillar, stalking down the street, never deviating from the path he had set, and you buzzing around him, his very own human being.”
“Dora!”
“Oh, I wasn’t thinking that you were enslaved or anything.” She peeped at Margaret from under the brim of her hat. “Or, rather, while there are those women’s rights advocates who think that marriage is a form of contract slavery at best, I wasn’t thinking of you in that way. The thought just always made me give thanks for soundness and stability and the knowledge that, somewhere in the world, things were going on as they always do.”
Margaret merely said, “You do talk like a woman who never got married.”
She meant to be saying one thing, but Dora thought she was saying another. She tossed her head. “Don’t you know? I was so short and plain and wayward, no amount of money could purchase me a husband.”
“You haven’t lived in St. Louis in thirty years. I’m sure there were candidates.”
Dora looked around the tearoom as a hostess might, watching her guests take their leave. Then she looked at Margaret. She said, “What was the last book you read?”
“So Big. I’d like to read Show Boat.”
“Have you heard of The Well of Loneliness?”
“No.”
“Gertrude Stein?”
“I know that name.”
“I’m going to give you a copy of The Well of Loneliness.”
“But what about Pete?”
“I told you that years ago.”
“That he asked you for money?”
“Did I say that? Didn’t I tell you—”
“What?”
“Darling, he is married. He’s always been married. He saw her when he was in Russia. She’s a terrible Bolshie, and he likes to pretend that she’s dead, but she isn’t dead at all. I think that’s why he changed his name, so she’ll think he is dead.”
“Do they have any children?”
“I don’t know. If you ask him, he’ll tell you that she strangled them in the cradle. I suppose that there’s always the chance that a child will turn up to haunt him, but he’s covered his tracks pretty well.”
“We know him.”
“But we don’t know anyone else who does, do we?”
“The Kimuras.”
“Secret-keepers extraordinaire, n’est-ce pas?”
“I hardly know them, but they’re very nice to me.”
“They don’t gossip, do they?”
“No.”
“There you go. Pete is safe with them.”
“And with you.”
“I don’t know enough to be a danger to him—no names.”
“But what did he do in the Revolution?”
“What did he tell you?”
“I got the impression that he escorted hapless aristocrats to Paris and rented apartments for them.”
“He did do that. Three times. He was good at that. But that wasn’t a full-time job.”
“What was a full-time job?”
“Have you heard of Antonov?”
She shook her head.
“Well, there were more factions in Russia than just the Reds and the Whites. There was a faction called the ‘SRs,’ who splintered off the Bolsheviks after the October Revolution, mostly because the peasants didn’t like Red grain seizures, and Antonov was their leader. All of Pete’s relatives in Ukraine hated the Bolsheviks because they were city boys and had no respect for peasants. By 1920, Antonov’s supporters were armed to the teeth. It was quite a popular and well-organized movement, and Antonov was a smart fellow.”
“What happened?”
“Well, I’m not sure in which order this was, but the Bolsheviks rounded up the women and children and put them in starvation camps as hostages. In the meantime, they cleared out the forests where Antonov’s army was hiding out, using gas. They just filled the forests with gas, and the Blacks, as they were called, died in droves.”
“We never heard about this.”
“Didn’t you?”
“Poison gas?”
“That’s the new way, I’m afraid. Pete says a million died, but I don’t know. I’m sure it seemed like the end of the world. Anyway, Pete was there part of the time, and part of the time he was beating the bushes for money and guns. But they hadn’t foreseen how ruthless the Bolsheviks were. Pete said to me, ‘I knew them all along. I just didn’t know this about them.’”
�
��The wife?”
“She must have been one of them. It’s a wonder to me that he escaped, and, having escaped, that he can smile at all, but Russians are fatalists first and foremost. Antonov was killed in ’22. After that, Pete was in Europe for a while. I don’t think he dares go back to the Soviet Union, of course.”
“Maybe he changed his name because of that.”
“Maybe.”
Margaret said, “I never believed he was Russian. I finally decided that he was an Irishman from Chicago pretending to be a Russian. His accent is so …”
“Fake?”
“Well, nonexistent now. But always uneven.”
Dora stirred her tea thoughtfully, then said, “I believe the big parts. Most of the big parts. I don’t mind the other parts. I don’t know about the accent. Other people have said that, too. But he grew up speaking lots of languages, and he’s a good mimic. I knew an actor in England who could speak in fifteen accents, including French, German, Italian, and Spanish, and if you heard him through a wall, you would think he was five or six men and women having a conversation.”
When the weather was pleasant, she went back to Tanforan with Dora. The banter between Pete and Dora was the same as it had always been—affectionate but ironical. At one point, Dora said, “I want to ride one,” and would not be denied. Pete said, “No, you may not, but if you come dressed properly, you may hack the pony.” They went on about this for ten minutes, laughing. Margaret trotted behind them, overlooked. As they left, though, Pete squeezed her hand, and said, “I’m settled now, you know. I’ve found a house in Atherton. Here’s the address. I was rather hoping that you could make the time to bring Andrew.” He pressed a square of paper into her hand. It had a telephone number, too. Andrew was fond of the telephone. He called Len late at night when he changed his views on things.
LELIE SCANLAN appeared unannounced on a train from the east, and Len acted as if he were happy to see her. She was no longer quite the pale, retiring thing she had appeared to be in her wedding picture. She came for supper twice and talked incessantly—it was really rather remarkable, Margaret thought, that her voice could hold out. Len, no mean talker himself, remained silent. The woman even out-talked Andrew, who didn’t say a word through dessert. Len had now completed his five-hundred-page manuscript entitled The Genius of Captain Andrew Jackson Jefferson Early. The publisher was in Kansas City. They planned to print a thousand copies. However, Len, they said, had to cut the manuscript to fifty thousand words. Andrew said, “They have told him, ‘Folks are interested in Captain Early as a specimen of a certain era, but not as interested as all that.’”
