Horse Heaven

by Jane Smiley

  The image of her mother came into her mind. How many years had she spent listening to her friends complain about their mothers? Forty? And she had never joined in. Rosalind’s mother was someone you could not complain about, try as you might. She was calm, affectionate, stoic without being long-suffering. She had never spoken to Rosalind or either of her sisters in an unreasonable voice. She had a beautiful smile. It was a smile that a daughter could not get tired of. Rosalind supposed that she had been quite enamored of her mother. Her sisters had been, too. No disagreement there. But even so, her mother had always said, “Children are such a responsibility.” And she had taken her responsibility toward them very seriously, doing homework with them, sewing their clothes, making sure that they had the most nutritious possible meals, talking to them seriously about boys and dating and sex, showing them how to clean their rooms, how to do laundry properly (she had a special thing about leaving clothes in the dryer after it stopped—no matter what she was doing, she would leap up and run down into the basement to take out the clothes and hang them or fold them), how to make a white sauce and a pie crust. She had overseen their piano practicing and gone to every school function. It was clear from every moment of Rosalind’s childhood that motherhood left no time for anything else, and was not an enterprise to be entered upon with a light heart, though, of course, Rosalind’s mother didn’t have a naturally light heart, either. Ah, well. Sometimes Rosalind didn’t miss her. Sometimes her sisters didn’t miss her. They had confided that to one another once, in Antigua.

  She thought she could almost feel a bit of resentment rising up within. And then a man who was passing said to her, “Here’s the bus you want.”

  There were buses right in front of her. She hadn’t noticed them, and didn’t want one.

  “This is the one that will take you. You go to the end of the line, and get off right there. It’s only about a twenty-minute ride.”

  “Are you talking to me?” said Rosalind. The man was very handsome, about forty, she thought, in a soft blue sweater.

  “Better get on, luv,” he said. “He’s ready to leave.”

  And so she did. He waved to her as the bus pulled away from the curb. She waved back, and mouthed, “Thank you.”

  She settled back into the seat, prepared to take on her resentment of her mother, but then she couldn’t find it. Her mother was her mother. It was as if she had left her resentment standing at the bus stop. She laughed. Was it as easy as that? Did you leave your emotions behind you, holograms of yourself dotting the landscape? It seemed as though you could, in Ireland.

  The bus went away, crossed a river—that would be the Liffey—then sped onward. It was about half full. Once in a while it stopped, but no one got off or on. Somehow, the fact that it was an Irish bus explained this, and so Rosalind stopped wondering about it. The scenes they passed were flat, not picturesque in particular. At the end of the line, they came to a large, surprisingly green space for this time of year. When the bus stopped, she said to the driver, “Where are we now?”

  “This is Phoenix Park, dear. The bus leaves here for the city center every twenty minutes until six this evening, then every forty minutes thereafter.” And she got off. She looked at her watch. It was almost noon. Maybe it had been a decade or two since she had spent an afternoon in a park. In the first place, she was a culture girl, not a nature girl, and in the second place, walking in the park was for people who had nothing else to do and no money to do it with. In the third place, it was the third of January, which was, perhaps, why the place was deserted. And so she walked in the park.

  What exactly her mood was, she could not say. Normally, she would be feeling a certain impatience, a certain fear of boredom at the prospect of an afternoon alone with trees and grass. She was fifty years old now. For the last thirty years, with a machinelike implacability, she had planned her days, her weeks, her years. She traveled with guidebooks and systems. When she came away from the new place, she had an excellent overview of historic sites, fine-art and decorative-arts museums, better shopping, restaurants, and musical venues. When she came back to these places later, she always knew what she had missed and wanted to see this time. Her friends called her all the time and asked her what they should see and where they should eat in any given spot, and she always had a brilliant suggestion. In retrospect, it was as if she had been mapping the world. But what for? Perhaps, she was willing to admit, it was because she didn’t have anything better to do.

  Here in this park, with no one around, it was easy to think of all the things that there were to do in the world. She was standing in this still, empty center, and spiraling around her in a great galaxy of activity were five, six billion people, all of them busy except her, and she would be busy again soon. In one of the outer arms of the galaxy was Al, who was walking with some men around a site. Everyone was talking excitedly in English and Russian about building a road, bringing in water, carrying off wastes. It was a vast undertaking, made all the more exciting by the prevailing local conditions, which were worse than primitive—the original, primitive potential of the site had been destroyed. Rebuilding was next to impossible, and so the challenge was even more exhilarating. In another arm was Dick, now just getting to the track, just beginning to sort through the daily requirements of fifty horses, ten exercise riders, eighteen grooms, twenty owners, five hot walkers, the feed man, the vets, the bookkeeper, all the others. It was a vast undertaking, made all the more exciting by the unknowability of the horses and the myriad opinions clinging to every one of them. Her friends in New York would still be sleeping, but they were busy, too, dreaming one dream after another. How many children were there in the world? And so how many mothers and fathers and grandmothers and aunts and uncles and child-minders were wiping faces, offering food, pushing little arms through little sleeves, tying shoes, talking about, reading aloud to, reprimanding, kissing, tucking in, looking for, playing pattycake with, lamenting over, cleaning up after, walking beside, throwing into the air, explaining something to, ignoring the cries of, beating, hugging, expecting, missing, touching the face of, holding the hand of one child or another? How many were hoeing, planting, cultivating, pruning, harvesting something or another? How many were cooking? How many were eating? How many were defecating? How many were picking up their tools, putting down their tools, turning on the television, turning off the television, placing telephone calls, playing a musical instrument, dancing? How many were talking? Arguing? Making love? Picking up weapons? How many were whispering a secret to someone else? How many were answering the telephone calls that others had just placed? How many were waiting for something? How many were standing in line, driving cars, riding buses, hailing taxicabs, climbing onto trains, walking down jetways, taking off? How many were walking down a lane in the country? Mucking out after cows or pigs, walking dogs? How many were planning to buy? How many were planning to sell? How many were worrying about money? How many were placing one stone upon another? How many were felling trees? How many were reading quietly? How many were looking at paintings? How many were logging on to the Internet? How many were floating on a lake, a river, the ocean? How many were making their way through heavy jungle, up steep mountain slopes, over ice fields, down Broadway, down Rodeo Drive, along the Champs-Élysées, through Tiananmen Square, through the Piazza San Marco? How many were looking at the moon? How many were looking at the sun? How many were contemplating death, marriage, love? Billions and billions, of course.

  But even though she was doing none of these things, even though she was just standing there, Rosalind was not unhappy. It was a relief to be freed of those activities for a moment, to stand here and feel a space open up right here, in Phoenix Park, a circle around her in which there was nothing at all. She took a deep breath. It went through her, top to bottom. She took another. The same thing happened. It was like a sigh. Dick had told her once that he loved to hear a horse sigh. The sound of a horse sighing was the sound of a horse giving up his fear. She took another br
eath. It seemed possible to walk around the park, and so she did.

  Of course there had been someone. For twenty-seven years she had been careful not to make too big a deal of this someone, Henry Dixon. She saw his name from time to time still. He had spent his life rebuilding lofts in SoHo. She didn’t know anything else about his life, whether he had children or wives, for example. He would be almost sixty now, because he had been thirty-two to her twenty-three when they were seeing each other. She hadn’t had the experience to comprehend Henry when they were together, but later, with all the builders and remodelers she worked with, she saw that he had a methodical quality the rest of them shared that was reassuring, a way of moving easily back and forth between the larger project and its details. But, of course, once she was knowing builders, then she was hiring them. She could have hired Henry, had she wanted a loft in SoHo, and paid him anytime with a check. She had thought that evil thought from time to time, hadn’t she?

  And why was that? Henry had treated her with perfect kindness. He was cordial, almost formal; he thanked her, he greeted her, he inquired about her day, he apologized. He was no less mannerly at the end of their affair than he had been at the beginning, and she had resented that, as if he was holding her at arm’s length. He was handsome and well formed. He touched her. He held her hand, rubbed his thumb over hers, put his arm around her waist, her shoulders, kept her against him. He seemed always to be appreciating her with his hands, no matter what else they were doing. Affection untainted by resentment. How often did you find that? She had never found it since.

  Such a thing was more unique than lots of money, in her experience, but she hadn’t known that then. She’d thought the affection belonged to her desirableness, not to his sweetness. Affectionateness was something she would be grateful for now. And he was a good lover. He taught her how to make love to him, and she had thought, for a while, that that was something as well that she possessed by herself, rather than something they possessed together. And then she’d discovered it wasn’t, and then she had forgotten about it. It wasn’t uncommon, among the women she knew, to regret the poor man you’d missed out on, to wonder, privately, if the habit of big money had a bad effect, since so many of their husbands seemed unhappy themselves, or made others unhappy. Rosalind’s mother and father would have said that big money did have a bad effect, but, then, so did everything else. Experience itself had a bad effect, and the only thing you could do in the face of it was to keep quiet and endure.

  Looking back at Henry Dixon, all she could say was that it seemed like he had had a larger capacity for love than she had, that she had measured his capacity by her own, that she had failed to decide, and they had gone their separate ways, and what she turned out to have chosen was not a life based on love but a life based on something else, let’s say knowing what she wanted, which required knowing what there was to want, which required casting a cool eye over everything, judging workmanship and value, being skeptical and hard to fool. But, then, she had a been a fool about Dick Winterson, hadn’t she?

  She sat down on a bench and crossed her legs. Looking out over a large lawn dotted with trees, she remembered something about Henry Dixon that she hadn’t thought of in years. He had tucked her into him when they slept. Now, of course, she and Al slept in a huge bed, far enough away from one another so that their separate sides of the bed were warmed only by the tiny, futile attempts of Eileen. But Henry Dixon had kept her close to him and it had been comforting and safe. How lonely had she been since then, since Henry Dixon? So lonely, she thought, that she had made a whole world of it. And she burst into tears.

  Well, she cried and cried. She smeared her makeup and disarranged her hair and got herself wet, all the time knowing that she was feeling very sorry for herself. Loneliness, even saying that’s what she was feeling, was as common as air, was the necessary cost of autonomy, was it not? It was lonely at the top, it was lonely at the bottom, it was lonely in between, it was lonely in a group or not. Loneliness was something, she realized, that you always felt, but sometimes, for a while, forgot about. So, if you always felt it, then there was no reason to make this tremendous spectacle about it. But she did anyway. She cried some more, then pulled herself together, then cried some more, then pulled herself together again, even going so far as to take down her hair, comb it out, and pin it up again, and then, when she was putting in the last pin, she started crying again, as if it were possible for all of her bodily fluids to empty themselves through her tear ducts. She cried until she had forgotten almost entirely about Henry Dixon, and was just a self-perpetuating crying machine, and then she cried some more, until a voice very nearby said, “Och, don’t be wiping your face on your skirt, dear. You’ll never get that out of the fabric. Here, I’ve got quite a large hankie with me, and it’s clean, to boot.”

  Rosalind sat up. Next to her on the bench was a woman of about her own age, but not so well preserved. She had dark, dull hair, with streaks of gray, and she was wearing a shapeless gray sweater over another shapeless pink sweater and a mackintosh thrown open over that. She had on a pink wool skirt, and dark-brown shoes. She smiled and said, “Crying in the park. Don’t I know all about that? Maybe I’ve cried in one park or another every day of my life. Does you good.”

  “Do you think so?”

  “Och. Of course it does. Keeps things moving at the very least. Myself, I find it relaxing. I go home a more patient woman than I was when I stormed out of the house.”

  “I don’t think I’ve cried in years.”

  “Must have hurt you to do so now, then.”

  “Maybe. I don’t know. I’m a mess, I’m sure.”

  “Yes you are. You’re soakin’ wet, you are. But it’s a sunny day today. You’ll soon dry.”

  Rosalind had expected the woman to offer to take her home, perhaps, and let her clean up there. A shuddering sigh came up right then, and Rosalind sensed that it was the last one, and she was done crying for now. She yawned. The woman said, “There you go. You’ll be takin’ a nap soon, if you don’t watch out.”

  “I do feel a little sleepy.”

  “No doubt.”

  “I thought maybe I had forgotten to marry the man I really loved. That’s why I was crying.”

  “Must have felt lovely, then, a good cry over a vain regret like that. That’s a grief to be cultivated, because you can come back to that one every time you need relief.”

  Rosalind laughed.

  “Och, it’s true. The lovely young lad, so handsome and true, the lovely young lass, yourself, of course, always perfectly dressed and pretty and sweet, and the life they would have had, aging gracefully and kindly, not so much the harridan you’ve gotten to be married to the tyrant you’ve made of your old man. Was he Irish, this fellow you should have loved?”

  “Maybe. Most people in America are in some way or another. He was charming.”

  “You know that I am one of twelve sisters?”

  “No, I—”

  “Twelve sisters. And I myself have ten daughters, and each of my sisters who isn’t a nun has eight daughters or more. They wrote about us in the newspapers. No one in the family has had a son in a hundred years, and we’ve given it quite a go. My husband, he said we eat those y-chromosomes for breakfast, us O’Malley girls. It’s a joke now, really. But I’ll tell you something I know from watching all these dozens of girls.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It never matters who you love or who loves you. Your fate is your own after all. And it doesn’t matter a whit if you celebrate it or if you bemoan it. It’s yours anyway.”

  “That sounds very bleak.”

  “Does it?”

  “Right now it does.”

  “Well, maybe. But maybe you’ll see it differently sometime.” The woman got up. She said, “You may keep the hankie. I’ve got piles.”

  She went off, and that was that. Rosalind sighed and stood up. She felt emptied out now, as if the floor had dropped out of the containment building and ever
ything inside had drained away. She began to walk.

  PERHAPS IT WAS the moon that awakened her. Certainly when she opened her eyes it was right there, framed by the drapes and the window sill. It was good to see it, and to recognize it, because she didn’t recognize anything else. The room was large and ornate in a well-taken-care-of but dated way. There was a door to her left, a door to her right across the room, and a pair of French doors at the end of the bed. There was a telephone next to the bed. She recognized that, too, a hotel phone. She picked it up and pushed the “0.” When a voice answered, in English, she said, “Where am I?”

  “Ah, good evening, Mrs. Maybrick. You are at the Royal Ireland Hotel in Dublin, Ireland.”

  Rosalind thanked him.

  When she stood up to close the blinds, she had no clothes on, and she saw that her clothes, much wrinkled and very dirty, lay on the floor between the bed and one of the doors. Without closing the blinds, she sat down on the edge of the bed and picked up her skirt and a shoe. The skirt was soiled everywhere, and her shoe was muddy, too. Rosalind looked at them in wonder. Then she stood up again and looked into the mirror. Her hands went immediately to her hair, which was still partially pinned up. Sleep, or something, had put it into a terrific tangle. There were leaves and grass in it, which, looking in the mirror, she began to pick out. The light of the moon was that bright. She recognized that this was an unusual way for her to be, naked and disheveled, but, in fact, it didn’t worry her. She looked at her watch. Her watch was gone. She knew that, whatever had happened to her, nothing had happened to her. She was safe and warm in her hotel room. She could see no cuts or bruises in the mirror, and she felt no pain anywhere. She put her arms above her head and stretched. She felt good. Rested and alert. She bent down and picked up her clothes—stockings, the other shoe, camisole and slip, jacket. Bunched in the pocket of the jacket was a large handkerchief. Her handbag was beside the door. She opened it and looked inside. Everything was there. She folded her clothes and set the pile on the desk. Now she lay down on the bed again, and applied herself to remembering what had happened to her between the departure of the lady who had given her the handkerchief and right now. Had she gotten lost? Had she fallen asleep somehow, laying her head on leaves? Had she met anyone else? Her mood as she asked these questions was only interested, not disturbed, and that, plus her freedom from any evidence of injury, reassured her that whatever had happened it was benign enough.