The Last Summer of the Camperdowns (16 page)
“O
H, MY GOD, SO THAT’S WHAT THIS IS ALL ABOUT,” MY
mother said, stopping in her tracks as we rounded the stable corner. Audibly catching her breath, she instinctively reached out and placed the palm of her hand against my shoulder, stopping me in mid-stride.
“Wow,” she said.
“Wow.” For once my mother and I were in perfect agreement.
Directly in front of us in a large grassy paddock was a horse unlike any horse I had ever seen. Lush and sensuous, half black, half white, his piebald coat shone in the soft afternoon light. He was a midsize stallion, showing massive chest, short back and neatly cleaved apple butt, and had thick legs with long feathering. His head was refined-looking, slightly aquiline in shape, with short ears. He had a kind, intelligent expression and startling eyes, one blue eye and one brown. A double mane hung in long wavy tendrils that reached past his knees. Kicking up his heels, he cantered from one end of the enclosure to the other, his wide, thick tail so long it dragged on the ground.
“Good Lord, he looks like some sort of pre-Raphaelite painter’s version of Ophelia on testosterone,” my mother muttered.
“Or Ann-Margret,” I said, the prose to my mother’s poetry.
“So where is the Son of God? This must be the Second Coming,” my mother shouted out to Gin, crisp and shiny and compulsively cheerful, counterfeit as a grapefruit masquerading as an apple. I cringed with embarrassment. It was excruciating to watch my mother pretend happiness for others. Gin, meanwhile, appeared to be levitating as he approached, near deranged levels of enthusiasm lifting him several inches off the ground. He made me think of one of those flying monkeys in
The Wizard of Oz
.
“It is! It is! Isn’t he wonderful? I haven’t the words. I can’t believe it. Isn’t he the most beautiful thing you have ever set eyes on?”
Gin opened the paddock door and stepped inside as his dream horse trotted over to greet him. Closing his eyes, he locked his arms around the horse’s neck, burying his face in its long mane, peering at us through the thick curling tendrils, his ecstatic face framed on every side by that waterfall of hair. “Whatever happened to Baby Jane?” my mother asked as we stood watching Gin stroke the horse’s legs and back, in ways both intimate and sensuous, in what I can only describe as being three of the most uncomfortable moments I’ve ever spent.
“Any more of this display, Gin, and I’ll be reporting you to the relevant authorities,” Greer said before commenting, “Yes, he is nice,” her arm extended, calling out to Gin’s prize. It was the closest she had come in a long time to anything resembling a ringing endorsement.
“Nice? Is that the best you can do? Don’t you want to know all about him? Aren’t you dying, Greer? Oh, I can see it in your face. You are so jealous! I can’t stand it!” Gin was so giddy he was about to make the existential leap from human being to Silly Putty.
“So I take it this is the great secret? Another horse?” my mother asked.
“Not just another horse, Greer. A Gypsy horse. The only one in all of North America.”
“Where did he come from?” I asked.
“Ireland. That’s where I first saw them. In a farmer’s field. These marvelous horses, piebalds and skewbalds and chocolate palominos. I thought for a moment that I had stumbled into a fairy tale. The farmer was an Irish traveler. In the warm months he lived with his family in a horse-drawn caravan. He used to winter on a deserted farm by the ocean near the Cliffs of Moher. Honestly, Jimmy, these horses, they call them Irish tinkers, Gypsy cobs or Gypsy horses. They looked as if they’d descended to earth on a cloud.
“The Gypsies have been breeding them and trading them among themselves for years. They’re a very secretive bunch and they distrust Gorgios—that’s you and me, by the way. That’s what they call anyone who isn’t a Gypsy . . .”
“I suspect Riddle is a Gypsy at heart,” my mother interrupted, lighting up a cigarette.
“Gula and I went to Appleby this year—that’s the real reason I went to the UK. Gula offered to help me finally make this dream of acquiring a breeding pair come true. I intend to establish the breed in North America.”
“Appleby is the great Gypsy horse fair in England,” my mother explained.
“That horse is pure pornography.”
My mother and I both looked up at the sound of an unfamiliar voice, startled to see someone else emerge from within the stable.
“You scared me!” I gasped, hand at my heart.
“My, you’re jumpy these days, Jimmy,” Gin said.
“Harry Devlin, what would a good Catholic boy like you know about pornography?” my mother said, deftly concealing any surprise she might have felt seeing him there.
Harry laughed. “Let’s just say that I know it when I see it.”
“What are you doing here?” I asked as I climbed onto the top rung of the fence, my legs dangling over the side.
“Riddle, you shouldn’t be so direct,” Gin said. “It’s, well, I don’t know. What is it, Greer?”
“An expression of true feeling,” she said. “You always did have a morbid fear of authenticity.”
“What’s wrong with being direct?” Harry asked, hopping up on the fence and sitting next to me. “I don’t mind.” He grinned over at me as I reluctantly returned his smile.
Having him in such proximity, I suddenly felt in dire need of a blood transfusion. Harry was a living reminder of all that tormented me. The war between our fathers only magnified my discomfort.
“I wasn’t aware that you and Gin even knew each other,” my mother said, glaring over at Gin, who deliberately looked elsewhere.
“I guess you don’t know everything,” Gin said, staring down at the ground. “Gula and I were at the horse show in Rhode Island in the spring and I was so taken with Harry. He was riding Hal. Love that horse!” He looked up and clapped his hands over his mouth, immediately aware of the nuclear scope of his faux pas. “Oh!” Choking, Gin looked stricken as my mother’s lips curled in antipathy, revealing the vulpine flash of grinding teeth. I could have sworn that I heard the low rumble of a growl deep in her throat.
She was violently offended by any mention of a horse-and-rider combination that didn’t reference her. Gin coughed and backtracked, trying to choke down the radiation emanating from his atomic blunder. “Anyway, I was so impressed,” he sputtered weakly. “Harry is such a . . . such a . . . competent rider.” He was beginning to sound apologetic, drooping pathetically, like a daisy under direct assault by the sun. “I’ve known Michael for ages so I decided to approach his boy. Isn’t it marvelous to see Harry back on the estate where his father grew up? Seems so right somehow.”
He beamed at his young protégé. “Can’t you just see Michael when you look at him, Greer? Doesn’t it remind you of when we were all so young and beautiful and glamorous and brilliant? The dances. The parties. The world at our feet. No thought of what was to come.”
“Good God, Gin, beautiful? Brilliant? You weighed all of sixty pounds and had alopecia for years. Glamorous? Your second name is Mary, for Christ’s sake!”
“Greer, you know perfectly well it’s a family name,” Gin protested.
She turned away from Gin and directed her remarks to Harry and me. “He was so terrified of being drafted that his hair fell out and he stopped eating! I volunteered to shoot him in the foot but he was afraid I’d accidentally put a bullet between his eyes instead.” She swiveled back around to confront Gin as Harry laughed out loud.
“Sorry,” he said to Gin, who flapped his hand dismissively.
“Never mind. Lord knows I’m used to Greer by now. And just so you know, everyone used to say that I was the image of Roddy McDowall when I was young.”
“ ‘Everyone’ meaning your mother,” Greer chirped.
“Who’s Roddy McDowall?” I asked.
“Cornelius,” my mother said. “Dr. Zaius! Dr. Zaius!”
“Ohhhh!” Gin, deflating like a punctured tire, emitted a long and loud exhalation of breath before resuming. “Where was I? Ah, yes, Harry makes the decades disappear, watching him walking up the driveway, the very image of Michael, well, I could feel the years peeling away.”
Obviously tired of being spoken about in the third person, Harry interjected. “Gin told me he was importing this fantastic horse. He asked me if I would work with him.”
“It was Gula’s idea, Harry has so much experience with show jumping,” Gin said, looking around trying to recruit cheerleaders, unmindful that his seemingly innocent declaration had tripped all of my internal warning devices. I was going off like a police siren.
“Oh, really, has he? Why didn’t you ask me? Or Riddle for that matter?” Greer demanded.
I wished I could disappear. Blunt as an anvil, as usual. Had this woman never heard of passive aggression?
Harry spoke up. “I don’t want to cause any trouble here. I’ll step aside, no problem.”
“No!” I blurted out with more force than I intended. “No. You mustn’t. Please.”
I had no desire to work with Gin’s new horse. Harry could have his new assignment and the association with Gula that would surely come along with it.
My desperation was disproportionate enough to cause three sets of eyebrows to simultaneously shoot skyward. Harry attempted to speak and then stopped himself. A look of fleeting terror crossed his face as he scanned the immediate area. He was obviously stricken and contemplating a means of escape, fearful that I was about to wrap myself around his leg and beg him to marry me.
“It would seem that Riddle skipped the chapter on playing hard to get,” my mother said, at which point, already in the active stages of dying, I entered a long narrow tunnel, blinding white light beckoning to me from the beyond. Clutching at my throat, grip tightening, unable to speak, emitting a range of herky-jerky snorts and croaks that sounded something like a dog in a fit of reverse sneezing, I briefly wondered if it was possible to strangle yourself.
“I don’t appreciate being overlooked, Gin,” my mother said, getting back to the matter that most concerned her, my imminent demise being at the end of a long line of other priorities. Staring dumbly at the ground, I felt the light, comforting touch of Harry’s hand on my back. Looking up, I was relieved to see him smiling as if we were both in on the joke.
I smiled back at him and, looking into his face, felt a pang, my heart prolonging a beat, making its resonant point, like a sustained poignant note on a piano. He and Charlie looked so much alike that I was having trouble making the distinction between them. For a moment, I allowed myself to believe that he was Charlie, that I had somehow wished Charlie back to life with the power of my regret.
“What’s going on?” Harry said, conscious of my intense scrutiny. “My mascara running?”
“Oh, Greer, you know how much you loathe time commitments.” Gin was attempting to dig himself out. “I wouldn’t dream of imposing on your freedom. It’s taken me days just to get you over here for the unveiling.”
“Well, he can’t jump,” my mother said, drawing circles within circles on the ground with her riding crop, redirecting the conversation. “That is painfully obvious from looking at him.”
“Not so fast, Greer,” Gin said. “These Gypsy horses can do it all.”
“Gin, I know a jumper when I see one. That horse is not a jumper.”
“Well, what does it matter? If he can’t, he can’t. We’ll see. That’s what Harry is here for. Jumping isn’t the world, Greer.” Gin was growing impatient. Trying to chart the highs and lows of Gin’s vast range of emotions over the course of a few seconds would have stumped Magellan. “A fruit fly among men,” Camp called him.
My mother, in thrall always to the dissonant moment, reached into her jacket pocket and withdrew her cigarette case as Gin’s eyes watered and widened. He was visibly overheating. She lit up, her cigarette elegantly emblematic of her subversion, and, taking a deep drag, she blew smoke into the air, each ghostly puff dangling at eye level, daring Gin to object.
He had been doing a slow burn, but now he had reached the point of explosion. Pop! I could see the kernels exploding all around me. Pop! Pop!
“Greer, for heaven’s sake!”
“Don’t even think about it,” my mother warned, giving him a vicious sideways glance.
Fortunately, Gin’s brain continued to flit about from tree to tree, rarely settling anywhere for more than a few seconds. “Oh, look, here he is,” he said, pointing. “The man of the hour. Gula! Hurry! The show’s about to start.” Gin was frantically waving in Gula’s direction, urging him to join us.
“Lock up the silverware,” my mother stage-whispered to Harry, who seemed to be enjoying her irreverence. With a deep sigh, she turned around to greet the new arrival. Harry, following her lead, did the same. I was the last to follow suit—my neck, my head, my eyes, all actively ignoring my brain’s instructions to engage. It was as if, on hearing Gula’s name spoken, all that’s automatic about being alive—moving, breathing, seeing, hearing—had shuddered to a halt.
Ignoring Gin’s admonition to be quick, Gula was walking slowly and methodically toward us, morphing into something that crawled toward me on all fours in an undulatory prowl, zigzagging, yellow tongue darting, drooling with expectation, dripping poison, my world and the people in it growing smaller and narrower as with every step forward he gained in intensity and momentum and power until finally he was all I could see.
