Free Daughter of the King by Sandra Lansky Page A

didn’t inspire me, but the horses did. At first I hated the lessons as punishment, but I quickly took to riding and all the cool outfits, leather boots and hats, and saddles and riding accessories. Daddy was so proud that I could ride and had the potential to become a sportswoman that for my seventh birthday he bought me a horse. I named her Bazookie, not my misspelling of the bazooka weapons that I’d constantly heard about because of the war, but rather a tribute to an older girl neighbor named Sookie in the Beresford who was nice to me. Grandpa Citron was so amazed that I could ride, and so proud, that every week he’d send his chauffeur, Major, in his limousine to deliver a case of the freshest carrots to Bazookie, straight from one of Grandpa’s produce suppliers in New Jersey. What luxury!
    At the stables, which became my second home, and sometimes more like my first one, I also made another less-privileged friend, who, like Terry, would become a pal for life. This was Eileen Sheridan, whose father was a trainer at the stables. The family lived in an unfancy part of the Upper East Side, all the way over near the Third Avenue El, the elevated line that was torn down in 1955. Eileen, who was there to help her dad, was rough and ready and afraid of nothing. I wanted to be alone with Eileen, but my overprotective mother always came with me to Aldrich. I had to figure out a route to independence, and eventually I did. One day Mommy and I were riding together, and I used my riding crop to startle her horse, so it would run off in theopposite direction. After that, Mommy stopped riding with me. She would drop me off and pick me up, and I felt free for the first time in my young life. Like Terry, Eileen was also a Catholic and went to parochial school. Daddy liked both Terry and Eileen and was impressed that both were hard-working students at Catholic schools, which he held in high regard. That man had a huge thing for education. I think he was hoping, against hope, that some of it would rub off on me. Eileen’s parents, like Terry’s, took me to their Catholic church. However, after the priest did something to bless my throat, sprinkling holy water or crossing it with candles, I came down with a terrible case of the mumps. I stopped going to any church after that. I thought God was trying to tell me something, giving me a sign.
    After our summers in Deal, we spent our winters in Miami, travelling down to Florida on trains with names like the Havana Special. Courtly black porters waited on us in the luxurious Pullman cars. I loved sleeping on the trains, although I never slept, too excited to look out the window all night as Baltimore became Washington became Richmond became Rocky Mount became Columbia and on through the swamps down to Miami, sunny and perfect, while New York was gray and cold. The one thing I didn’t like about Miami was seeing two lines of people at the water fountains, with big signs “White” and “Colored.” That seemed mean and wrong. It was just water. I wondered where Nig Rosen would be allowed to drink.
    Otherwise I loved Miami Beach. And the Roney Plaza Hotel where we stayed. The Roney Plaza was also the winter headquarters for Walter Winchell, who broadcast from the lobby and always said hello to me in the nicest way, although I gathered he could be very nasty to everyone else. My favorite restaurant was a run-down roadhouse called Pickin’ Chicken. The place was a dive, but the food was great there. I’m sure Daddy would have preferred that I go to a real restaurant, but he was so grateful to see me eat that he endured sitting through our excursions there.
    If Dad co-owned New Jersey, he had an even bigger stake in Florida, with a number of grand nightclubs in Broward County, just over the line from Miami’s Dade County. That line was significant, because the officials of Broward were much more enlightened toward entertainment than their compatriots a little to the south. They welcomed