Passion Play (6 page)

Friends advised him to enter the world of state and national horse shows, not in the role of judge, which he frequently accepted, but as a competing entrant. They pointed out that the horse show had progressed from the local pleasure of the entry of
the family back-garden horse to the big business of keen international competition, the winning horses commanding staggering prizes, their value increasing with every championship they won. His friends tried to persuade him that his prestige as a polo player, coupled with the distinction he now commanded as a writer on equestrian art, would compensate for his defects in horsemanship and would persuade some of the better-known stables and individual owners or breeders to hire him and exploit his minor celebrity to win attention for their horses at major shows and events.

But competition of this order was foreign to Fabian. In one-on-one meets, he fought another man for supremacy in the short span of their play, submitting to rules that both contestants obeyed, without an umpire, away from the fickleness of a public that might choose favorites. Horse shows rated men and animals according to an order of excellence and accomplishment that did not interest Fabian. The essence of competition, for him, lay not in the challenge offered by others but always in the challenge posed by oneself.

Fabian lay in wait for fall in Massachusetts or Vermont, sometimes along the shallows, pleasant dunes and stretches of the coast, but mostly in the northern reaches of the East, where summer put up its fiercest resistance, until the last, to break with life.

There the leaves defiantly clung to the trees, and the mantling shrubbery, misted by the mild noon of autumn, bristled at the frosting chill of night.

Fabian’s thirst for this spectacle, for its prick and stir, the immolation of odor and hectic bloom that only autumn offered, would come as suddenly as any other, ignited by a whiff of bark or mealy oats, the supple aroma of leather or hide, the musk of roots trailing a wind along the highway. He took it as a longing for something apart from thought, different from memory, beyond them, something to which one could stake no claim of one’s own, a realm outside the deed of charter or possession.

When, in that season, Fabian would find his road approaching some grand estate, a frontier of thickly wooded land dense about it, acre on virgin acre, he would drive off the highway into a clearing nearby and park his VanHome, the signs
PERISHABLE
clearly fixed to its sides. Avidly, like a boy on the scent of play,
he would saddle his ponies quickly and, in a white polo helmet and padded knee guards that protected him from branches and underbrush, he would cut into the wood, astride one horse, the other, also saddled, on a lead rein, the ponies snorting, jostling in the promise of the run, plunging through the wiry brambles, thrusting forward, great plows scything the earth, tearing the ligaments and arteries of the stubborn thistles, the prickly shrubs, leaves in their clustering.

Picking his way through the thicket, he would wade through layers of leaves, stalks, roots and stumps heaped in profusion, their dry, crackling billows making a sea music, soughing, the tidal lap rising about his ears, muting even the drum of the horses’ hoofs. The woods folded before him in silence: pine and fir, oak and beech sentinels of his transit.

Perched on shoots of burdock, humiliated by the brawl of color that framed them, a flock of blackbirds, motionless, would watch Fabian’s caravan sailing along channels and freshets of hazel and hornbeam, blackberry and sumac. Like a skiff bringing up the rear, a solitary leaf, its fretted veins a lair for the sun, would scud in his wake, gliding through the dappled air. At a pond, its surface brackish, mantled with mottled leaves, random patches of turbid fluid between brownish clumps reflected the yellow leaves of an overhanging tree.

Breaking into an open path, his chest thrust out as if to take the crest of the wind, Fabian would sink into the saddle, his knees and calves firm about the horse as he threw it into a canter; then, rising in the saddle, his weight full in the heels, he would prod it into a gallop, his eyes taut as bowstrings, reaching ahead, his hands on the reins alerting the horse to every shape, every color, the animal swift in its leap over a branch bent across the path or a fallen log. The other horse galloped directly behind or, in the unexpected spaciousness of a clearing, alongside; in another stretch, he would goad them again into a canter, then slow abruptly, huddling in the saddle, and pick his way through pits and claws of broken branches, pools of stagnant water. Roots and clusters of stones, cradled like nuts beneath the dead leaves, peeled out from under the horses’ assault, then shards of sundered rock, clumps of soil; he breasted the barricades of old dislodged tree trunks, their bark gone leprous, bald, dangling in strips,
naked stumps like beggars guarding the dark corners of the wood.

Sometimes Fabian would chance upon others: a troop of boys wandering from the usual ruts, playing at scout and pioneer; a family encamped in a clearing, knapsacks and sleeping bags strewn about, children idling with heaps of cones or stalking the fleet, scattering life of the underbrush.

Erupting from a brake in the woods, Fabian’s convoy could stir alarm and a flush of panic; people would halt at a distance far enough to take flight, yet near enough to see the figure of a rider framed against the trees, helmeted in white, booted in long sheaths of black and brown rising from the crested gleam of spurs to the armor of his knee guards, a black gloved hand curved about the poised lance of his long whip. A child, even one six or eight years old, would often break into howls of fear. Boys would scamper in yelps of confusion at this sudden apparition from a realm of fantasy and early memory. A man and woman, paling, agape, would draw children close, uncertain of what they were looking at, puzzling out its incongruity, calculating how to make a truce. Fabian’s easy greeting would calm them. Stammering, they would explain that there were no stables where they came from, that horses were too expensive for people like them to have anything to do with; they might even admit, embarrassed, a little hesitant, that not only their children but even they themselves had not seen a horse and rider so near to them, except on television. Most children stayed wary, distant, sneaking glances at Fabian and his ponies from behind the secure wall of their parents. Typically, a girl would ask her father why the horses were so much bigger than they looked on television, or a boy would wonder if the man on the horse was going to shoot him and his family down. Fabian would declare that his ponies were as tame as kittens and ask the boy to touch the horse or to see what it was like to sit with him in the saddle for a moment; the boy, silent, pondering, would almost always refuse.

Fabian’s path would at times take him onto a narrow bridge, a concrete wedge suspended above the highway that knifed across the forest. Lingering at its brink, returned again to the hurtling clamor of men and the machines they had contrived, he would look down at cars streaking in whatever freedom the highway
allowed, each blur a rider buckled in his plastic-covered saddle, in command of his solitary mount, his energy and surge a fusion of oil and flame, his tack and harness a cocoon of glass and steel. On impulse, Fabian might raise an arm in greeting; as metal, rubber and flesh hurtled below him, he was aware of heads turned for an instant from the asphalt belt to a man on a horse, the bizarre sentry standing guard on the overpass. Eager again for the woods, lost to everything but his senses, Fabian would turn the horse on its haunches and trot back into the thicket, cutting through huge stalks of hornbeam, sumac and boxwood.

Toward dusk, he would ride easily back to his VanHome, relishing the promise of the meal he would soon prepare. From the refrigerator in his galley he would take a thick slab of beef, glistening and marbled, its bone doubling its weight, a ribbon of fat hemming the piece like lace. Studding it with spikes of garlic, dusting it with pepper and salt and herbs, he would place it between layers of onion and leave it to marinate, the meat now a pungent sandwich of bathing scent, before he sallied forth to ready his forest banquet.

Taking a canvas bag or a sack, he would gather scraps and strips of bark, the season’s maple and birch, chestnut, oak, sheaves of the narrow-leaved branches of spruce and fir and pine, then a variety of cones, the springy pliant ones, young and full, as well as the desiccated, withered husks. The sack swelled with great clumps of weeds and damp grass mingling with batches of common fern, ribbons of liverwort, some moss, a heap of quillworts, whatever plants and herbs he chanced upon in trampling the brush.

Windless evenings were best for the rites of forest, food and solitude, and he would make a shelter for himself secured by the barrier of his VanHome, cloistered from the gusting invasion of the breeze. Scooping out a shallow hollow of earth for his fireplace, he would bolster it with shoals of stone, then bridge the stones with an old iron triple bar from a stable. He would first set a match to a layer of coarse bark, then feed the fire with dried-out clusters of pine cones and perhaps a branch or two of spruce or larch, but when the flames spread to swamp the wood, he tamped them down with splashes of water he brought from his
galley, until the hollow was only a dull amber glow. He heaped the embers then with the verdant plunder he had gathered in the forest, shuffling the heap until smoke appeared.

He would put the meat on the bars, suspended high enough above the smoking fire to escape searing by a stray raw flame erupting through the layers of leaves and moss, fern and pine. The smoke clotted, its tang more acrid, the meat starting to sweat, then recoiling and shriveling, the fat a trickling dribble prodding the fire to yet another volley of blue and orange flame. When Fabian turned it over the first time, the steak had already changed color; soon it was time for more salt and pepper, the herbs anointing its gleaming surface, then more heat, a fresh slew of the greenery that would mute the flames, and again the cycle of rotation.

The process was long; twilight dissolved into night. Fabian would settle down to his meal, the banked embers flickering out, the smoke a trailing funnel above him, his hands and clothes and the forest enclave liquid with the aroma of cooked flesh, the steak as docile and comforting in his mouth, without taint of char or scorch, as it had been in the mouth of the boy, a farmhand long ago, when he had had to smoke chunks of horseflesh for the farmer’s family, making certain that the cherished meat, hoarded for months, would be spared the open flame, the essence of its life preserved, its tender substance sheltered by the gentle smoke long after the heat was gone from it.

The country’s major polo resorts at which Fabian could have played, whether those in the Midwest, where polo was a game of summer and early fall, or the lavish, sunny retreats of Florida’s Sunshine Belt, where it was a winter pastime, were closed to him for a variety of reasons. They offered accommodations and their sumptuous facilities of fields, stables and quarters only to those who, first, bought and maintained the extravagant villas and condominiums that fell within their purview, and second, could meet the rigid, exclusive social and financial conditions that governed admission to the ruling country clubs.

Even those qualifying for membership in the clubs, should they
or their guests actually wish to play polo, were required to furnish and maintain at least one string of five or six ponies, together with the grooms to tend them. On those rare occasions when friendship or chance brought him into the recesses of one of these prodigal polo resorts, Fabian was not at all surprised to learn that the purchase and annual maintenance of a modest string of ponies and gear, and the expense of transporting them, could easily amount to a sum comparable to the salary of the head of a flourishing corporate enterprise.

Denied access to the central circuits of the game, unable to meet on common ground those who would be open to playing with him, Fabian was forced into his nomadic existence as much by necessity as by choice. The irony did not escape him that, of all the sports in which he might have excelled, polo was the one in which only a millionaire several times over could still afford to indulge, and at that, so few of them did.

The closing and decisive game of the Third International Eugene Stanhope Polo Tournament, played annually at Stanhope Estates, one of the country’s major polo and golf centers, near Chicago, for the Grail Industries Trophy and, not incidentally, a purse of a quarter-million dollars, was delayed by a downpour. In the stands and around the field, more than three thousand polo fans shuffled their umbrellas and raincoats, wondering noisily whether the South American Centauros and New Zealand’s Hybrids would be able to play on a marshy field. But the rain stopped as abruptly as it had begun. Near Fabian, a silver-haired woman in a tweed suit folded an umbrella that she had been holding over a young man. Fabian saw that the young mans head, neck and torso were trapped by tightly fitted aluminum railing and knobs. His face—pale, pure features, oddly serene within that cage—seemed familiar; Fabian recognized him as an American polo player who a few months earlier had broken his neck in a game in the Midwest. At a sound coming over the loudspeakers, the young man twirled a knob at his hip; the contraption rotated him in the direction of a loge in the front row.

There Commodore Ernest Tenet Stanhope, once an eminent
polo player himself and now the family’s ninety-year-old patriarch, had risen to speak into the microphone. Wearing the customary white polo breeches and British helmet, he announced that, as honorary chairman of the tournament named in memory of his late son, Eugene, he had just been informed that his other and only surviving son, Patrick Stanhope, would regrettably not be able to attend; his obligations as president and executive director of Grail Industries, the Stanhope family enterprise and the nation’s largest electronics manufacturer, detained him. He had, however, generously made available the helicopters which would help to dry the field, so as to permit the tournament to take place. A roar went up from the stands, and then the patriarch passed the microphone to Lucretia Stanhope, his daughter-in-law, a stately widow of forty. Serene in her position as chief organizer, she apologized briefly for the delay.