The father of Preston is named Charles Hale, and he is a retired judge of the circuit court, a stooped, courtly man with a cane, who had stood quietly by the lemonade table for ten minutes, watching. Now he turned to the little knot of guests gathered around the jockey and me. “Mr. Landry,” he said, “forgive an old man. How is it that you know the mother in law of my son?” Tommy Landry still had his arm around my shoulders. He is a small, wiry man of fifty, with a face weathered like a saddle and eyes that were wet.
“Judge, I will tell you,” Tommy said. “In 1996, I was a nineteen year old kid with a broken collarbone and no money, and my horse had to get from Louisville to a race in Saratoga by Friday. Nobody would take us. This lady drove the van herself.” He squeezed my shoulder. “Sixteen hours. She never charged me a nickel. She bought me a ham sandwich at a gas station in Pennsylvania and told me to get some sleep. I won the race that Saturday. I have never forgotten.” Behind him, my daughter Caroline put her hand over her mouth.
Preston Hale stood at the edge of the circle in a seersucker jacket, with a glass of iced tea he no longer seemed to know how to hold. He is forty seven, a tall, polished man with a gift for introductions, and he did the thing he does when cornered, which is to smile wider. “Corinne, I think there has been a misunderstanding,” he said. “Caroline said you were in a tight spot. We were trying to include you.” “Include me,” I said, “by having me pour lemonade for four hours.” I took from my purse the receipt from the auction house and set it on the table. “And by selling the silver trophy of Wade for nine thousand, four hundred dollars?”
A silver trophy cup vanished from a mantel and gave one horse hauler the afternoon of a polo fundraiser to bring her daughter and son in law back to the truth.
A hush went through the tent. Charles Hale looked at the receipt, and then at his son, with an expression I will not forget. “Preston,” he said, “whose trophy?” Caroline had gone gray. She is forty five, a graceful, quiet woman with the long hands of her father, and she took a step toward me. “Mama, he told me you wanted it gone,” she said. “He said you could not bear to look at it. He said you had asked him to take it.” “And did I?” “No,” she whispered. “You never said that. I wanted to believe it.”
I saw in my mind the empty place on my mantel, where the cup had stood for thirty one years. Wade won it in 1989, at the Keeneland meet, with a colt that nobody wanted. It was the only thing he ever kept in the living room. When he passed, I dusted it every Sunday. “That trophy is not worth nine thousand dollars,” I said. “It was worth nine thousand to the man who bought it. To me it was a Sunday morning. The hand of a man on my shoulder. A cup of coffee and a horse that would not lose.”
The mouth of Preston had gone dry. He set down his tea. “Corinne, I was going to buy it back,” he said. “I owed some money on the lake house, and the auction was a quick way, and I would have bought it back by Christmas.” “Preston,” said his father quietly. “Stop.” The old judge had put a hand on his cane, and I saw the knuckles whiten. “I sat on the bench thirty one years. I heard a great many men explain themselves. They never explained anything but what they had done.”
Charles Hale turned to me with a small bow. “Mrs. Ashby, I would like to make this right. With your permission, I will find the buyer, and I will pay whatever must be paid to restore the trophy to you. It will not come from my son. It will come from me, and he will repay me over time, with interest, as he would any bank.” “That is not necessary, Judge,” I said. “It is,” he said. “It is the only thing that is.” He looked at the tent, at the crowd, and raised his voice, once, not much. “Ladies and gentlemen, excuse the interruption.”
Tommy Landry went with the judge to find the buyer. It took two weeks. The man was an insurance agent in Lexington, a fellow with a collection of racing memorabilia, and when he heard whose trophy it was, he refused payment and drove it to my house himself, in a velvet lined case. He stood in my living room holding his hat. “Mrs. Ashby, I did not know. I would have done anything.” I made him sit down for pie. We put the cup back on the mantel together, and he straightened it a quarter inch, and said, “There.”
Preston came the next month. He stood on my porch with his hands in his pockets and said that he was sorry, in a flat voice, and I saw that he meant it, and that it had cost him. I said I would take it. “I have not decided what else I will take,” I said. “But I will take that.” He nodded. Caroline had come with him, and she walked into the kitchen without a word and began making the coffee, and I let her. That was her apology, and I understood it.
Every June, there is a polo fundraiser now. I still go. Last year I poured no lemonade. I sat in the front row beside Tommy Landry, who comes every year, in the good chair, with a cup of coffee, and watched the horses thunder across the green. At the break, Charles Hale came and sat on my other side, leaning on his cane, and said nothing for a while. Then he said, “Corinne, how far to Saratoga, in a van?” “Sixteen hours,” I said. “Come along,” he said. “I would like to see it.”
