tell, to fly. It was tormenting to her that everything she noticed about them endeared them to her, and yet proved to her that they were doomed.
Two days later, there was one left. The next day, that one was gone. She did weep tears. She did. She also took Mr. Kimura’s picture off the wall and put it in a closet.
ON the way home from a talk in Salinas, Andrew and Len stopped at the racetrack and visited Pete at his stall. Len found the denizens of the racetrack “low,” but Andrew was reminded of times he had enjoyed with his mother at Saratoga and somewhere in Europe. The visit made him jovial for a day or two, and he kept saying, “My dear, you should visit him. He asked for you. You would enjoy the equines a great deal.” And again, “The air is quite bracing there, my dear. It would do you good.” And again, “A change is always revivifying.”
Margaret felt herself resist until he said, “And why don’t you take those screens of his back to him? The scroll, too.”
She said, “Surely he doesn’t want to keep them in a horse stall at the racetrack.”
“Then, my dear, he will find a place for them or sell them.”
She loaded the artworks in the back of the Franklin and dropped Andrew and Len at the train station so they could go to Santa Barbara for Andrew’s talk at the Club of Fifty. The Club of Fifty was giving them first-class tickets, overnight accommodations at the recently opened Biltmore in Montecito, and a fee of four hundred dollars. Andrew was very excited, and both of them had been looking forward to the date for two and a half months. His topic was to be “Are New Ideas in Science Inherently Different from Old Ones?” That answer, of course, was “no.” His audience would be uniformly old, so he expected them to be receptive.
She circumnavigated the bay west of Oakland, then cut across by means of the Dumbarton Bridge, where she was stopped for quite a while when it lifted to allow a ship to pass, but the lifting itself was rather an interesting sight, and so she didn’t mind. What was funny to her was how archaic the Franklin looked among all the other cars, but it was still beautiful, and it ran perfectly.
She drove through the gates at Tanforan, and heads turned and men in fedoras with cigars poking out of their faces and little books and pencils in their hands smiled at her. It was just after eight, and horses were still training. As Pete had told Andrew, there was as yet no racing. Most of the horses wore blankets over their haunches, and their riders leaned into themselves, keeping one hand on the reins and putting the other in their armpits. They all had their caps pulled down over their ears, breath pluming out of their mouths. The horses’ shoes rang on the cold ground. Piles of soiled bedding seemed to smoke between the barns. And the fragrance did please her.
She found Pete walking from the track behind three of his animals. When he saw her, he said, “Goodness me, an apparition!” He kissed her on the cheek before he looked around, then he said, “Where is Andrew?”
“On the way to Santa Barbara with Len. I have your screens.”
“I thought you might.” He peeked in the window, then said, “Andrew has been warning me of their return.” He didn’t look disappointed.
“Show me a horse.”
“My pleasure!” He was perfectly turned out, even in his horse-keeping clothes. He waited as she parked the Franklin, and then two of the grooms took the artworks and carried them away. He led her down the barn aisle. Grooms and trainers touched the bills of their caps and dipped their heads to her in a friendly manner. There was no sign of the crooked Australian. After she had appreciated how the horses arched their necks over the tops of the stall doors and put their noses out for lumps of sugar, Pete had his own four stripped of their blankets and led out for her appreciation. There were two bays, a chestnut, and a gray.
“This one is by Fair Play, goes back to Bend Or on both sides. Dam’s by Tetratema, that’s where he gets the gray color. This filly is by a nice French horse named Rose Prince, dam’s by Son-in-Law. That’s a very prepotent sire. All …”
She could make nothing of