Should he know? Or has he forgotten much that he should know?
With his subtle seductive reproachful air Duke glances over at Persia, says, "Your mother at least seems to be enjoying herself," and then, when Iris merely nods, Iris can't think of any response so she merely nods, Duke says, "This might be a special day, honey. A day to remember. Might just be that Daddy has a nice little surprise up his sleeve." Now Iris's interest is quickened; he presses a forefinger against his lips and against hers. "But I don't want your mother to suspect. I want to watch her face... so don't breathe a word."
Iris asks, "What is it? What surprise?"
"Uh-uh, sweetie. Mum's the word."
"Daddy, tell me."
Duke hugs her and turns her away from the crowd, saying, as if this were the true subject of their conversation, "You know I love you, Iris, don't you? You and your mother both?"
"Yes, Daddy."
"No matter the knotty times we've gone through, the three of us? No matter the... bad things your mother might have told you, about me?"
Iris's eyes are downcast, shy.
"Guess she's told you some things about me, huh? No need to go into details."
Iris says nothing.
Duke is talking, talking with passion yet in a way vaguely, as if, even as he speaks, he is thinking of other things; his attention is on other things. Turning his nearly empty glass of Scotch so that the melting ice cubes shift and tinkle like dice. "Law of nature, Darwinian evolution... the family, genetic unit. And a law of human morality.
Blood. Bloodlines. Connections between people...
their actual physical selves... bodies Iris wants to ask what the surprise is, the surprise that's a secret, but she knows better than to interrupt.
Down on the sunny track one of the horses suddenly breaks stride; he'd been pacing and now he's cantering, he's veering and plunging but his driver is strong-wristed and brings him back into control.
As Duke Courtney has said about races and horses and breeding, that's all it's about: control.
"You understand, don't you? My love for my family has always come first. I'd kill any man who tried to interfere with my family, any man that ever... it's just that life sometimes fights life."
This peculiar remark hovers in the air; Iris Courtney will remember it forever life sometimes fights life-even as Duke Courtney's voice lifts, evaporates. In the midst of his urgency he's staring out the window-who can blame him?-those beautiful trotters and pacers, the drivers in their bright silks, the impending races.
And the crowd in the grandstand: thousands of excited men and women, strangers, shimmering and winking particles of light, a hive of featureless faces, souls, It's just the world, Duke Courtney seems to be telling his daughter, the world's infinite richness, and you a single heartbeat among so many.
Iris says smartly, on the edge of insolence but not quite, "Of course I understand, I'm not a total fool."
* * * Their seats for the afternoon of racing are in a specially reserved area of the clubhouse section, courtesy of Mr. Calvin Yard.
Directly above the finish line, the blinding autumn sun comfortably at their backs. The best seats at Schoharie Downs.
"Great, huh? These seats? So aren't you glad you came, lion, instead of... moping around at home?"
Privilege gives a harsh tawny flare to Duke Courtney's eyes.
He's a gentleman who takes no favors for granted and never forgets a friend... or an enemy.
Persia says, "Yes. I suppose.
Persia has always feared the racetrack atmosphere, it goes so swiftly to her head. Like a Bloody Mary before noon: that innocent tarty tomato taste, the terrible thrumming kick beneath. Before you know it every old vexation in your blood has turned to mere bubbles that pop." pop." pop."
But Persia laughs; Persia is beginning to enjoy herself.
Iris sits beside her gnawing at a thumbnail as the preliminary races pass loosed and uncontrolled as dreams. The speed of horses' bodies is always a sobering sight: the thudding hooves, the straining heads and necks. In the second race, at the half-mile point, a horse in the midst of the thunderous pack wobbles sideways and in an instant there's a tangle of horses, bikes, drivers..
. the stands ripple with little screams... Iris hides her eyes.
The spill involves three horses; there are Injuries, a medical team in attendance.
In a gesture both grandiloquent and resigned, Duke Courtney tears up his ticket for that race, lets the green pieces flutter away in the wind.
Persia casually inquires, "How much did you lose?"
In a navy blue sheath with a wide-shouldered little jacket, in a hat with a graceful scalloped brim and a single cloth gardenia, warm skin, red mouth, something stark and scared about the eyes, Persia Courtney is going to be tactful with her husband, and she is going to be careful with her husband... knowing now that she loves him, loves him more than life itself.
Plunging his life into her, tearing open her body between the legs.
We're fated.
These are small pari-mutuel bets, Duke assures her. Token bets of $35, $50. His only true interest of the afternoon is the Eastern States Sires race... that is, his interest conjoining with Mr. Yard's: Lodestar. Lodestar and what he might, he just might, do this afternoon on the 'track. A colt wl"o broke two rnin'rte5 at his first qualifying heat, Mho5e sire is a Hambletonian winner and whose dam is... how many thousands of dollars, hundreds of thousands, perhaps even millions, might a horse of such quality earn for his owners? Duke stabs at his upper lip with a forefinger. "If only I had the money to invest, if only I'd acted in time..
"How long have you known Cal Yard?" Persia asks.
"Oh, not long," Duke says. Then, shifting his shoulders inside his linen blazer, "Long enough."
Persia's thoughts, loosened by alcohol, are adrift: there's the October rent to be paid... there's last month's utility bill.
payment on the new car (1953 Mercury bought secondhand from a man Persia knows at work)... payments on the old debt...
life insurance, hospital insurance, dental work for all three of them.
a new winter coat for Iris since the old is shabby and humiliating and the water heater is always breaking down and if their landlord won't pay to have it repaired... Persia sighs. "Oh, shit."
A silver flask, initials C.T.Y is in her hand; a lipsticksmudged paper cup, her own, is in her other hand.
Before the races began Mr. Yard had taken them off to the paddock to see his colt. So many handsome horses in so many stalls, so many grooms, drivers, owners, guests of owners, so much excitement, expectation, hope-at such moments, though happy social celebratory moments, you feel the true chill of human futility: we are too many, too many, too many. At Lodestar's stall, Mr. Yard made a point of drawing Persia forward, Persia who is shy of horses, saying, "Come meet my beauty," saying gaily, "Beauty-meet beauty!"
Persia found herself staring eye to eye with the young trotter, surprised to see him still so coltish in his bones, so subdued, with a look almost of animal melancholy... secured in his stall, a light cotton horse blanket draping his neck, back, hindquarters like a shroud. Lodestar is a bay with a lovely white blaze on his forehead and four uneven white "socks," not inordinately tall, rather slender, with a moderately broad chest. "He is beautiful," Persia said.
Thinking that all expensive horses are beautiful, their expense is the point of the beauty.
Everyone crowded around, murmuring praise. Lodestar held his ground, blinking steadily, twitching his nostrils. The stalls were so clean in the paddock, there wasn't a fly to be seen.... In the stalls beside Lodestar were horses, rivals, seemingly more spirited than he: taller, broader-chested, more assured. Iris murmured in her mother's ear, "He seems so sad."
Now Persia says, "I thought Mr. Yard's horse looked a little well, quiet. And sort of small-boned too, compared withDuke says, "He isn't a giant. But he's very fast, and he's very smart." The mobile starting gate is moving down the track, a parade of horses close behind. Skeins of braided light move across the track like part-formed thoughts. "He's conserving his strength.
Biding his time. You'll see. You have a surprise in store. I've seen that horse in action, don't forget."
"Yes," says Persia. "I know."
'And Cal Yard is my friend."
"Yes."
"He wouldn't mislead me."
"No."
Persia feels mildly dazed as if Duke has suddenly begun to speed their car... inching them toward 100 miles an hour.
Persia and Duke aren't quarreling and are not going to quarrel. Not now that they are together again, more in love than ever before.
But Duke persists. "Cal's impressed with you. I knew he would be."
Persia says, "He doesn't know me.
Duke says, "He knows what he sees."
Persia has no idea what they are talking about.
Beside her, Iris is listening, though pretending otherwise.
Persia knows very well that her daughter is keenly aware of what's being said, sly child, smarter than she lets on, knows more than she should know. In the past year or so Persia has sometimes heard Iris crying in the bathroom or in her bed, a muffled coughing sound, and it worries her (as she complains to Madelyn) that Iris won't cry in Persia's arms... refuses to cry with her. In fact, seeing Persia in tears, she's impatient, jeering, stamps out of the room, Oh, Mother, will you for God's sake stop that!
Madelyn says, Now that Duke is back there won't be any need for crying.
How they stare, these thousands of spectators, as the horses run the mile track, each race a miracle of concentration, building to almost unbearable suspense in the home stretch.
Iris too is caught up in the collective excitement, the horses' straining necks, the colorful head numbers... legs, manes, tails drivers and bikes plunging in a single straining motion. For the approximate two minutes of each hard-run race, a gigantic happiness.
A happiness she'd like to swallow swallow swallow.
"But it seems such a pity to disqualify that horse if he could continue with the race. Why is it so important to keep the gait?"
Persia asks. Duke exclaims softly, "Darling, is that a serious question?" And Mr. Yard, two seats down, leans over to say, "But Mrs. Courtney, that's the point of the sport: the discipline, the training, the gait. You are either a pacer or you are a trotter."
"Yes," says Persia, laughing, rummaging in her purse for her pack of cigarettes, "but why?" Failing to find her cigarettes she slips a hand into Duke's inside coat pocket and extracts, like an expert pickpocket, his pack of Camels. It is a half-hour break before the Eastern States Sires race and everyone is tense, no one more tense than Duke Courtney.
.. though, as he's said, he has bet only $ 100 on his friend's horse.
They talk about harness racing: the history, the tradition. Mr. Yard says, "Chariot racing is the oldest form of racing and the most noble.
It doesn't dehle the horses figure by putting some 5 little monkey of a man on his back." Persia says, "But why are Standardbreds trained to run so"-she searches for the word she wants "artificially?
You force an animal to run against the grain of his nature, then he's penalized if-" Mr. Yard laughs in protest, saying, "But Persia, dear, that's the beauty of it, don't you see? It's like poetry, or music, or... whatever. The way the horse runs.
Persia persists. "But it's so artificial. The pacers especially, swinging along like that. If I 'were four-legged, I'd go mad having to run that way. She shivers and laughs and exhales smoke from both nostrils, as if the vision of herself, down on all fours, naked, right arm and right leg in tandem, left leg and left arm in tandem, has gripped her imagination. The men are laughing at her, but their laughter has the ring of affection. She says, 'An animal should be allowed its own nature!"
Duke says, 'All sports are artificial, Persia. Sports and games.
That's how we tell them from life. They have beginnings and endings; they have rules... boundaries... absolute winners and absolute losers, most of the time." He's speaking rapidly, aware of the time monitored on the payoff board; he's starting to sweat inside his clothes, thinking of the upcoming race. He forces himself to smile at his wife; he squeezes her fingers in his... these many fingers surprisingly cool, considering the heat of the discussion. 'As far as that goes, sweetheart, who isn't an animal? On two legs or four?
Aren't you? Inside your clothes? Inside your makeup? Inside you?"
Less than ten minutes before the start of the Eastern States Sires competition, Duke Courtney groans aloud as if in sexual frustration: God, how he'd like to up his ante on this race: to $300! to $500!
