Chip looked around dubiously at all those pages. “None of these dogs?”
“They don't even bark,” Brett assured him. “They don't even know how to wag the silly little stumps of their tails.”
BRETT BEGAN WRITING manically the next morning—the same story, with Elizabeth and Ratty, but completely from scratch. Was it any good? We had no idea. “It's the same novel in a way, and yet not the same at all” was all she would tell us. She didn't want to show us one word until she was far enough along to be certain it wasn't as inconsequential as everything else she'd ever written—that was the way she put it, those aren't my words. But there was this, at least: that draft came pouring out in a great gush she could barely type fast enough to catch.
“THE ONLY RULES you've got to follow,” Kath said when she invited us to a Derby party at her house that spring, just the Wednesday Sisters and our husbands for some good ol' Kentucky fun, “are that you wear a hat, and you tuck a little money in your pocketbook, to wager, like. Study well on that hat, too, ladies, because sure 'nough it will give you luck with your bets!”
No, Lee had not left Kath yet. And yes, Kath was still clinging to the illusion that nothing was wrong, as if the whole Gatsby car-bashing fiasco had never occurred.
Kath and Lee lived in Old Palo Alto, which was—then even more than now—the most exclusive neighborhood in town (and I mean that in a good way, although a neighbor who was one of the first engineers at Hewlett-Packard did once tell me he moved into the Community Center neighborhood in the 1940s because even Stanford-educated kind-as-anyone-you've-ever-met Asians weren't welcome in the Old Palo Alto, Crescent Park, or Professorville neighborhoods back then). Still, I'd been surprised the first time I saw Kath's house, a great big old thing that looked like a miniature version of the Museum of Science and Industry back in Chicago. It was stone, with huge, frilly columns out front—Corinthian?—and everywhere else those column façades plastered against the house (pilasters, Danny says). It was the kind of place that might have had a fountain out front. Kath said it reminded Lee of the Governor's Mansion back in Kentucky; it was the first house they'd seen in California that looked like a real house, so they bought it even though it cost twice what they'd planned to spend.
Madison Leland Montgomery IV. But they'd been just Kath and Lee, and I'd written off Kath's careful presentation of herself as insecurity. I was glad I'd gotten to know her before I saw her house.
“What does Lee do again?” Danny asked as we stood on Kath's front porch that Saturday afternoon, waiting for the bell to be answered. Before I could remind him that Lee was a surgery resident at Stanford, though, Lee opened the door, cigarette in hand.
Inside, a two-story foyer with a sweeping stairway opened to huge, high-ceilinged rooms with substantial moldings and an elaborate chair rail. The furniture was dark and serious, antiques that had been in their families for generations, and on the walls were paintings of their ancestors in heavy gold frames: a forbidding lady in folds of satin, whose chin was Kath's wide chin; a gentleman in judicial robes with the same arc of her brow; a young boy dressed in a lace christening dress, who had Lacy's curls encircling his chubby face.
“You're here and I haven't even got the mint juleps made yet,” Kath said when we found her in the kitchen dumping a big slug of Kentucky bourbon into a crystal pitcher. She smiled, but her eyes were red-rimmed, her face pasty. “And they're already running the races back home, too, aren't they, sugar?”
“Not the Derby,” Lee assured her. Then to Danny and me, “It's the ninth race this year. I don't quite understand why they only televise the Derby, but who am I to say?”
This was the first Derby either of them had missed seeing live since they were toddlers. Lee's family had a box at the track, as did Kath's. Back home, they'd start the party by midmorning. “With mimosas garnished with strawberries,” Kath said.
She pulled a huge jar from the refrigerator—simple syrup: equal parts sugar and water boiled together, then stuck into the refrigerator with six or eight sprigs of mint. She filled the bourbon pitcher with the syrup and tossed in some fresh mint, and Lee did the honors of pouring, smoothly wresting the job of host from Kath's hands after she'd done all the work. She'd even put crushed ice in sterling silver drinking cups, each adorned with a row of roses at the bottom, a monogram, and an upside-down horseshoe with a year engraved inside.
My cup—1967—was engraved with Kath's married initials, but the cup Danny had—1950—was carved with her pre-marriage monogram, a Derby cup from long before she'd have been old enough to drink.