The Sport of Kings (24 page)

Henry began sorting through the stacks of files and paper on his desk, tugging out a few documents and handing them in her direction. She took her future in her hands just as the heaters kicked on with a monitory rattle. The house breathed in her stead.

“Is this your will?” The calm sound of her voice surprised her. It seemed to come from a distance, from a body other than her own.

He looked up at her over the silver rim of his reading glasses. “In a few years, when you turn eighteen, I'll revise the will and you'll be named my sole heir in the event of my death. You'll have power of attorney if I were ever to become disabled. And these,” he said, reaching for another file, “are current copies of the insurance paperwork for the horses.”

There were policies for mortality, prospective foal and first season infertility cover paperwork, fire/lightning and transportation insurance, general liability. The premiums ranged from $5,000 to $25,000 each. She calculated the number of mares, stallions, and foals on the farm.

“You have to pay this every year?” she said quietly, stunned.

“That's only the first half,” he said. “This is the house.”

The stack of papers he handed her was as thick as a dictionary and just as heavy. She had to rest it on the leather top of the desk, which she discovered, as she began to flip through the documents, was made in seventeenth-century Italy of mahogany with secondary veneered rosettes in the shape of pinwheels across its front apron, its appraisal value $150,000. She'd never even looked at it before, not really.

“The leather has been replaced, and that's impacted the value. But it's an unusual piece for the house. Almost everything we have is American and English,” he said.

She read on. Here was the leggy chest of drawers in her bedroom, beneath which she had once played as a toddler, no longer a toy but a mahogany highboy of Boston provenance, worth $20,000 at the time of its appraisal eight years prior, worn jeans and underwear now stuffed to overflowing in its drawers. Her bedside table from the 1780s, New Haven. She flipped through the pages of abundance, of surfeit, that reached into every corner of the house, so that the sideboards—all six—were found not just in the dining room but in the hallways upstairs, one even in a guest bedroom, where it housed linens in its burled drawers, plus a dozen old Boston piecrust tables in various rooms, six more beds than people, Georgian secretaries and Regency chairs, lyre tables, mahogany-veneered butler's desks, a Sheraton chest of drawers with carved acanthus leaf columns and turned leonine feet, there were Empire lounges with velvet upholstery, two she had not ever lain on because they were in the attic, alabaster lamps, black marble lamps, a thousand first editions in the two libraries, Wedgwood pottery, mirrors from Philadelphia and London, claw-footed tubs, English brass flowerpots, three sets of Spode china, none used in her lifetime, and four Kentucky sugar chests, together worth over $40,000. Four sugar chests? Her mind balked. She could only think of the one in the living room with Nelson County bourbons tucked into its planed wells. She had no idea where in the great expanse of the house the others might be. Her eyes had overlooked them, overlooked all of this, because they had simply always been here like the lay of the land or the fact of her father.

Henry was watching her carefully as she read, watching the mysterious, obscure movements of her face. “This is your inheritance,” he said carefully. “I've saved this for you. I was aggressive with the investments and reversed the retrenchment of my father. Our money dates from at least the Revolution. It's survived five wars and untold market crashes. I hope I'm making clear the kind of obligation you'll be taking on. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” she said in a whisper.

“Henrietta, sometimes what looks like a big risk is actually controlled usage,” he said. “It's what I've striven for all my life. Orient all your internal resources to amplify your external resources. You walk the tipping point between disaster and perfection. Everything—I mean everything—is used for a greater purpose. Do you understand?”

But this time Henrietta was looking down at a page again, her eyes widening. She said, “Oh my God.”

The old print of two blue birds—had she ever imagined its worth? She turned and walked from the room, rushing through the hall, where she became suddenly and sharply aware of the ivory-inlaid sideboards, the sconces twinkling like unlit, dusky brown diamonds, the Aubusson runners damping the sounds of her passage to the parlor, so she was indistinguishable to the ear from any Forge who had come before. She felt her way to the light switch and, when she flipped it, realized how it brought to life a half dozen lamps and sconces simultaneously, so the room was bathed in the rosy ambient haze of a constructed evening. The parlor was perfection, curated like a museum, its complexity distilled and severely fine. She stopped before the print, where it had hung over the burgundy davenport for as long as she could remember. Columbia jays perched on a dead branch, both heads downcast in naïve ignorance of their own charm, oblivious to their dark martial crests and blue velvet coattails. The beauty of their blue pained the eye. Had the painter copied this pair from life or from death? Perhaps he had killed the birds for his picture. That sort of thing was done sometimes; people killed the very thing they professed to love. And maybe, just maybe—though Henrietta would only think this many years later, when she was pregnant with her child—the painter had imagined his own creation to be more beautiful than creation as he found it. Why, she thought now, could no one leave a thing alone?

“I found this in Philadelphia for twenty-five thousand dollars. First edition. A Kentucky original belongs in Kentucky, don't you think?”

She didn't turn, only felt the smallness of the two of them in the overriding catholic luxury of the house.

“This is yours,” he said again, and then she turned and, perhaps for the first time, really looked at him.

*   *   *

In her notebook she wrote:

You think you're so smart, but you're wrong. You're antediluvian. You're proud to be a Megatherium but, Father, a dinosaur is still a dinosaur. You're propagating the wrong memes, and the wrong ones parasitize the mind as well as the right ones.

—“Race” is a word, and someone made up the word. “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” is also a word.

—Racial categories are inconsistent, because what they measure is inconsistent. What's inconsistent isn't really real in any categorical sense.

—See, traits don't have distinct boundaries. There are gradations of every trait, including skin tone. Genes flow the way a glacier melts. Slowly.

—Racial groups aren't homogenous at all; 85 percent of variation occurs within any ethnic group.

—IQ? Men and women have different cranial capacities with no correlating IQ difference. Everybody's known this forever.

—The anthropologists beat the eugenicists a long time ago. Supposedly immutable traits are malleable under the forces of environment. “Genes have given away most of their sovereignty.” E. O. Wilson

—Difference is real, but the issue isn't racial difference. We're talking about tiny genetic differences created by transmutation under the limits of geography and climate. The limits change constantly, so the descriptors change constantly. Agassiz actually called blacks and whites separate species! Static definitions aren't useful.

Father, did you know they used to think there were only two kingdoms of life? Plantae and Animalia. They actually reduced the whole wide world to two. Then it started to look more complicated, and they decided there should be five kingdoms. They split Plantae into three additional groups: Monera, so bacteria and algae were together, Protista for eukaryotes, and another for the Fungi.

They used to think the big divisions occurred only between the higher plants and animals and everything else. But the closer you look, the more you see that big divisions occur between every two beings. It's an ontogeny/phylogeny problem. There are visible differences, but even more we can't see down at the chromosomal level, and every new life contains mutations—so the potential is always there for more. There should be 6 billion kingdoms on earth.

*   *   *

Two weeks after she returned from Germany she gave herself to the Irishman, and he took her. She didn't have to do much to make it happen. She simply followed him around the broodmare barn and gazed at him unblinkingly until he couldn't help but notice, and finally he curled his finger at her, and she followed him around a corner into the feed room. He kissed her breasts a little, told her she had a good body, and then lay down on her and did it to her that way. She said nothing at all. He lay on her afterward, bent awkwardly at the waist with his jeans pooled foolishly around his work boots, and then he had smiled at her—only the second smile she had ever seen on his face. But she recoiled from that smile. She was already renovating the act in her mind—how it could be different, better, how she wouldn't let anyone do it to her quite like that again. And she didn't. When the Irishman came to her the next time with his knowing grin and his game eyes, she stared right through him and began to walk away, and when he caught at her sleeve, she said, without explanation, “Just leave me alone.”

She tried it with other grooms, the ones who did not shy away from the unexpected advances of their employer's underage daughter. The few who accepted seemed doubly aroused by their own illicit desire and fear. These were the ones she had to battle against—they tried to pin her under their demanding, oblivious weight—to climb atop. She figured out quickly to take what she could get, because these men would offer her no pleasure of their own accord. She had no way of knowing that these men were the least worth having, the gates of their inhibition irreparably broken, any native compassion trampled by baser instincts. She didn't know how to want something better. Nothing mattered beyond the landscape of their hard, alien bodies, which she slid over, around. When she moved on them like that, she discovered that the old way of making herself feel good could be moved inward to some dark place that no one could see and no one had ever named for her. What had been up front and tinny and immediate was now shuddering and agonizingly deep. A birthing in. It was the only thing that was hers alone and it required no thought, and so she became addicted to it. But she had to have a man to do it. She had to have a man to bear down on.

*   *   *

She dutifully called her mother every other Sunday. When Judith picked up the receiver, before Henrietta could say anything more than “It's me,” her mother would burst into tears in a manner uncharacteristic but increasingly frequent. Her voice was urgent across the transcontinental air, the trackless air.

Judith: Oh, Henrietta, was I wrong to leave? Tell me your father's good to you.

Henrietta: I guess.

Judith: You guess? God, he better be. Sometimes I feel I should have fought for custody, but I never could have won against him. Sometimes I …

Henrietta: What?

Judith: I—I don't know … I don't know what I think. I guess I … it just seems like men aren't interested in knowing women. Even the decent ones. Everything is lonely after the excitement. Do you ever get lonely?

Henrietta: Not really.

Oh, Mommy …

Judith: Even though I'm not there?

Henrietta: No. I have Daddy. I guess I miss old Barlow.

Judith: Oh.

Henrietta: Don't cry, Mother.

Mommy, there's nothing here at all.

Judith: It's just … Why do you have to lose everything to understand just a little? I feel so powerless, like nothing ever really changes. You just trade one thing for the next thing, and it ends up being exactly the same thing. Whatever you do, Henrietta, don't grow up. I swear, they've rigged the whole game so women can't win. I don't know why they hate us so much.

Henrietta: I don't think I get to choose anything, Mom.

Judith: I wish you didn't know that yet.

Henrietta: Can't you come back?

Judith: Do you know I love you even though I'm all the way over here?

Then why did you leave me in this black breach?

Henrietta: I have to go now.

There are people ahead of us and people behind us, but there's no one else at all in the breach.

Judith: Oh, honey. They should have named me Regret, just like the goddamn horse.

*   *   *

She withdrew from the house and began to take long walks to be away from people. She wandered down the road past the Miller property where the curious, bellwethering cows streamed in her direction, following until they could follow no further, stopped short by the perimeter fencing. A coal-eyed, affectless crowd. She wondered what they would say to her if they could open their closed throats, what they would ask.

She discovered that 150 acres had been placed on the market a mile down the road. The property boasted two creeks and a white mansion on a slight rise of land like a white pillar on a plinth, near analog to the Forge land, though this house was even grander, and the land did not depress to a bowl behind the house. The family had left for Florida without waiting for a buyer. In their wake, winter had come. Every morning she hiked up the driveway, huffing frigid air in her exertions until she made her way to a frosted wall at the rear of the mansion where she could spy through the windows the gleaming glassed cabinetry of a white kitchen with its white tiles, where dusty boot marks remained from the movers who had last walked there. She would lean against the outside wall, pull her woolen hat low over her ears, stuff her winter-crimsoned hands into her parka pockets. Then, perfectly still in the freeze, she paid the land mind. The old pastures were deadened by winter—she liked that the season had no scruples, it swept out most of the life to be found there, leaving only spare, hardy, scavenging birds and some winter hares that foraged. The spent grasses waved, and the sky impoverished of clouds sent cold, furious, wasted breezes, far colder than the resting air, to toss the weeds, which were brittle and arthritic. Some days they appeared candied with light snow. She could remain a long time against that frozen wall, not moving, part of the motionless winter statuary that included the stolid trees, the black fencing now white, and the barns, only closing her eyes when the winds came in a flurry. Many hours would be spent in this manner.