Free Horse Heaven by Jane Smiley Page A

circuit were still her best friends, partly because she still had an eye for a good potential jumper who might make a match with a rider she knew. More than a few runners she had retired showed up in
The Chronicle of the Horse
, their necks arched and their knees neatly folded over impressive obstacles, but she never went to watch them, and the people sheknew at the track acted as if that world didn’t even exist except below a certain fiscal horizon. And it didn’t. The racetrack, even in Maryland, where the big money most assuredly was not, thought of itself as Hollywood or Big Oil, and of the jumper circuit as writing poetry or owning a family restaurant—a good enough way to while away a life, but nothing Important.
    It was thinking these sorts of thoughts at the track that kept Deirdre Donohue silent and pissed off.
    It was only with her bookkeeper, Helen, and her assistant trainer, George Donohue, an actual second cousin who hailed from five miles away from the Curragh itself, that Deirdre put on her other personality, which was the one the horses knew—attentive, thoughtful, kindly, thoughtful, generous, thoughtful, and thoughtful. It was Helen, who had been keeping Deirdre’s books since she had her first jumper barn when she was twenty-four, who had once pointed out to Deirdre that she had this alternative personality, and she often urged her to trot it out in company, but Deirdre kept it under wraps. To Helen, she said, “The men around here wouldn’t recognize it if they saw it,” and Helen had to admit this was true.
    It was George who had all the Irish charm and all the Irish looks and all the Irish capacity for a wee drop, but at twenty-four himself, he had only risen about fifteen degrees on his alcoholic trajectory, and had many useful years left in him before he had to be shipped back to the old sod. The other thing about him was that, even though Deirdre’s owners’ wives didn’t know it, it was George who was gay. That was why he had been shipped over in the first place.
    They were a pretty good close knot of a threesome, and as a result, Deirdre was in a better mood than she had been in years. Life with horses had taught her to accept, expect, and even to enjoy the temporary quality of all good things. She, George, and Helen were a good thing. At the moment, she was sitting with one of her owning couples. Deirdre never made the mistake that some trainers did, which was talking to the man and ignoring the woman. In the first place, she would never do that, and in the second place, most owners came as a couple, and whoever had first accrued the money didn’t matter, and neither did whoever first got interested in horses. In most, though not all, cases, horses seemed eventually to suck them in equally. Now she was listening intently to the Hollisters and making faces. She knew that Helen, who kept glancing in the window, was trying to signal to her to stop making faces, but she couldn’t help it. What the Hollisters were saying was pushing every button she had.
    Daniel Hollister said, “He’s a good trainer. I asked around.”
    “You asked around?” exclaimed Mary Lynn Hollister. “Why in the world would you ask around?”
    “It’s called research.”
    “It’s called gossip, Skippy.”
    Deirdre was almost always able to suppress a bark of laughter when Mary Lynn called Daniel Hollister, who was an anti-trust lawyer and Washington power-broker of nearly stratospheric importance, “Skippy.”
    “He said the horse could have won. I mean, everyone always says that, but he came right up to me and said, ‘That horse won, didn’t he?,’ like there was a rumor that the horse won.” He stuck in a note of petulance. “Like everyone around expected the horse to win.”
    “Not me,” said Deirdre.
    “Well, then,” said Skippy Hollister.
    Quod erat demonstrandum. Deirdre had had an excellent Catholic education that had left her with a whole collection of Latin phrases that no one else but