Margaret put the short ribs on the table. Andrew said, “When you say that you lost all your money, do you really mean all?”
“My pockets were empty. But they aren’t quite empty now. I have a job training horses.” His travels had smoothed his accent still further—or else he wasn’t bothering to maintain it. It was now unidentifiable.
She said, “What kind of horses?”
“Racehorses. At Tanforan.” Tanforan was a racetrack somewhere south of San Francisco. Margaret had heard of it, but never been there. She said, “Racing is illegal in California, I thought.”
“Betting is illegal, but not for long. Training isn’t illegal. We just send them down to Caliente on the train when they’re ready.”
Andrew pressed him. “On your way to another fortune?”
He shrugged. But he grinned, too. “I’m living in a stall at the racetrack for the moment.”
Andrew said, “How is that?”
“Fragrant.”
They laughed. Andrew really laughed. Perhaps, Margaret thought, Andrew considered Pete his best friend.
“No, truly. It’s a fragrance I’m quite familiar with, and one that is very consoling to me. But I had to change my name to get a job as an assistant trainer.”
“What’s your name now?” said Andrew.
“Pete Moran. Irish is good at the racetrack—not so traceable as English, though I considered Peter Charles Cecil. I put on a bit of the Irish when I talk, and wrap those horses as if I larned the trick as a lad in Tipperary, and it works well enough. My chief is a fellow from Australia. Whatever I do is fine with him, as he’s crooked as an elbow.” Pete laughed this time.
Margaret said, “I think you’ve been Irish all along. Tipperary by way of Chicago.”
Pete grinned.
Margaret said, “What have you seen of Dora? We’ve lost track since she quit the paper. Andrew’s editor says she’s writing a book.”
“I did see her, twice. Just after the war, I saw her in Paris. I was walking down the Boulevard des Capucines, and there she was, dressed to go to the Opéra. She had on a nice hat with a peacock feather, and she was with a very famous man named Henri Bergson, who has made a whole career of books about laughing. They were laughing.” Now Pete laughed. “It was contagious just to see them, even though I had been mooning about the city, wondering what was to become of me.”
She waited for him to go on, and made herself not prompt him.
“The next day, I took her to lunch. She had spent all night interviewing prostitutes and hadn’t slept in thirty-six hours.”
“Interviewing prostitutes!”
“Yes, indeed. She interviewed them concerning their political opinions. She told me that no one ever asked them about those sorts of things, but they were happy to talk, because they had decided views and good ideas.”
“For her book?”
Pete nodded.
“Then I saw her three or four years ago in Menton, each day for six days or a week. I’m telling you, she is the toast of the Riviera. She knows everyone, and wealthy American visitors go first to Dora to be spruced up. To have a few ruffles removed and a few pleats added, you might say.”
“She was always very well dressed, even when she was sixteen and she looked a fright,” Margaret said.
“Practicing,” said Pete.
There was a pause, and then she said, “Were you ever going to marry her, Pete?”
“Dear Margaret,” he said, “you were the only person in the world who considered it at all desirable.”
The look he gave when he said this, though, told Margaret that there was one other person.
“How did you lose the last fortune, then?” Andrew insisted.
“I can barely remember, it was so long ago. Let me see. Of course, when I left here, I had a satchel full of dollars with me, which I should have left behind in a bank. My fatal mistake was that I thought I could do some good with it. I must have been thinking like an American! I thought I would help this friend in Petrograd and that relative in Moscow or Kiev. I should have remembered that what seems like a fortune when you embark here turns to nothing in Russia. My friends who were still in Petrograd were very deluded. They didn’t want to flee in a third-class coach from St. Petersburg as they still called it, and find themselves a room in an outer arrondissement in Paris. The fellows who were prepared for that had already done so. These friends who had shilly-shallied, some of them very dear, I must say, could