a baby-blue dress and sneakers, or maybe she was a cleaning person. Susan followed her down a white-walled hallway, their footfalls noiseless on the off-white carpet.
Chip sat on a floral couch in front of a large window. He was a dark form with the light behind him, but she could tell he was very old and thin, with white hair. He wore an argyle sweater. He must be in his nineties. Wind chimes hung behind him in multitudes: glass butterflies, aluminum pipes, hummingbirds dangling beneath bells.
But there couldn’t be wind; it was a picture window and did not open.
He struggled to rise, but she shook her head.
“Oh no, please. Mr. Sumter,” she said, and bent down to hold out her hand. His own was very soft. Behind him the fuzzy, blue-gray ocean was visible: he had been given a good room. Not all the residents could have so clear a view.
After she sat down across the wicker coffee table the cleaning woman brought them tea and poured the contents of two pink packets into his cup for him—or maybe not a cleaning woman, given the tea service. Her role remained unclear.
Susan told him who she was and asked if he had known her uncle, and when she said her great-uncle’s name a smile broke on the old guy’s face.
“Good old Bud,” he said fondly, and picked up his cup of tea.
“So how did you know him?” she asked. She was prepared to explain herself but Chip did not need an explanation. He was happy to talk and spoke slowly and carefully: they had known each other through the State Department, where Chip had been in service. But her great-uncle had not been in the department because he’d failed some kind of Foreign Service test, though Chip did not use the word fail. So Albert had not been a diplomat but because of his line of work, which was import-export, he had been a fixture in various expat communities during a certain era.
In Bali, said Chip, and Peru, and Japan, and Indochina under the French.
“He moved in our circles, you see,” said Chip warmly, and sipped his tea.
She remembered the phrase he had written. Much like what you’d expect of a modern Rajah.
“I found an old letter you wrote him,” she said, and fumbled to pull it from her purse and pass it across.
“Ah,” said Chip. He reached for his glasses, thick black-framed bifocals perched on an end table on top of a large-print book. He put them on and reached for the letter shakily.
“And I was wondering,” she said, “if you knew where he got so many trophies. I mean all the—I’m his heir, and the house is full of these—”
“The club,” said Chip. “Oh yes. Old Buddy ran the club.”
“He did?”
“He loved the hunt,” and Chip nodded. “He did. He loved the hunt. He liked the ponies, too.”
Then he was saying something about a horse race and a particular horse—the Belmont Stakes, he said, when it was won by the son of Man O’ War—did she know Man O’ War? Did she know Secretariat? The hats worn by the women, in times long past, he mused. The lack of hats in horse-racing nowadays—sometimes he went to Santa Anita, he said, or Del Mar or Hollywood Park to wager on the horse races and he was dismayed by the casual dress. In former times the ladies had worn hats.
“What club?” she asked.
“He started the club in that house, you see,” he said. “It moved, later—into the desert somewhere . . . published his own record books, even back then. The members’ books . . . trophy records, you know.”
“I haven’t seen those,” she said.
“All the big-game trophies. The trophies, owners’ names, the year they were taken . . . skin length.”
“There are so many,” she said. “There are hundreds.”
“Now, Teddy Roosevelt,” said Chip dreamily, “took down twelve thousand on his African safari. Of course some of those specimens were insects. Not all big game, you see. Big game alone, I think there were only five hundred. Had your rhinos, your elephants . . . my father knew Roosevelt. Called him T.R.”
“He knew him personally?”
The old man nodded absently.
“Buddy started the competitions. Started them and ran them, ran them for years. Who could have the most kills, you know. One of every kind of deer. Every bear. You won them all, you’d have to take maybe three hundred all by yourself . . . used to give them to the Smithsonian.