Рита Браун: Fox Tracks

“Are you sure you don’t want to leave?”

“No, honey, I don’t. The girls will go back to Princeton tomorrow. I want to spend some time with them. I miss them.”

“I know.” He fiddled with a gold fox-head cuff link.

He’d found the stud. As Sister had surmised, it had slipped behind the backing of his jewelry box. There was a small tear in the fabric not easily seen. His jewelry box had a false bottom where the stud had landed.

Seated again, Sister turned to Gray. “I will live to see that bastard dead,” she said, staring again at Crawford’s retreating form.

CHAPTER 4

The band, a small orchestra actually, played wonderful old standards from the first half of the twentieth century. When they took a break, a rock band played for the younger hunting set.

Sister loved to dance and stayed on the dance floor a good long time before returning to the Jefferson Hunt table when the rock music started. Known behind her back and to her face as “The Steel Lady,” she didn’t feel like it at that moment, ten minutes past eleven PM.

“Tired?” asked Betty Franklin as the whipper-in joined her. The expensive annual ball was beyond the Franklins’ purse at this time, but Sister, well off, paid Bobby and Betty’s way. As far as she was concerned, they were hunt staff who had served her for over thirty years. They deserved it. Tootie and Val, on the other hand, had been born with silver spoons. Their fathers paid their tickets, declaring this was the last year they would do so. Derek, a scholarship student, worked after school but he came up with the cash. Tootie’s date, Baxter Chiles, also worked for his ticket. The fellows had bunked up together at a much cheaper hotel downtown.

Sister took note of everyone’s accommodations, and while she never interfered in anyone’s personal life unless they asked her to, she liked both these young men. The girls could do a whole lot worse, but they were young and who knows what will happen? Then again, thought Sister, she fell in love with Big Ray when she was just twenty-one. She was married at twenty-two. Fifty years ago, and yet it seemed like yesterday. Puzzling as this contradiction was to Sister, all her older friends felt the same way about powerful emotional events long distant. Nothing ever truly fades except one’s looks.

Betty affected a Philadelphia working-class accent, not Main Line, “I like da song. I can dance to it. Good beat.”

Sister leaned forward, resting her arms on the table, which would have brought a swift reprimand from her mother, “I just miss American Bandstand .”

Glowing, Betty recalled, “Daddy put up a radio in the garage and we’d dance almost every night when we’d come home from the barn. There we’d be, a bunch of barn rats, gyrating.”

“All girls?”

“For the most part. Sometimes the boys would come over after football practice in the fall or track-and-field in the spring. You know what was fabulous? We were having the time of our lives and we knew it. I don’t know if young people are as happy as we were.” She looked at the dance floor mostly filled with the young.

“Bet they are.” Sister smiled.

“But what I don’t understand is why they don’t learn ballroom dancing? It’s so, so erotic. A man holds you in his arms, you might even put your head on his shoulder and you move in rhythm. I like this kind of dancing, I’m not totally out of it, but there’s nothing like being held in a man’s arms.”

“Favorite song?”

Betty’s lips pursed. “I have so many. You know what I really love.” She began to sing, “Heaven, I’m in Heaven.”

The two of them finished “dancing cheek to cheek,” then clapped for the joy of it.

“It’s hard to sing with other music in the background.” Sister fiddled with her earring. “You know what I remember? Cotillion.”

Betty groaned as though in terrible pain. “The worst. The absolute worst and we’d have those hideous practice dances once a month. How did we live through it?”

“Fortitude. And we acquired considerable manners in the process. What I remember is sometimes we girls would practice. Not at cotillion, but sort of like you in your father’s garage. Loathed it.”

“Why? I thought it was fun.”

“Betty, you’re all of five foot six if you’re an inch. I’m six feet now and was even a tiny bit taller back then.”

“Well, so what?”

“I’d always have to lead. I really didn’t want to push another girl around the floor, plus they all had their noses smack in my cleavage.”

Betty stared at her dear friend’s rack. “Did anyone suffocate?”

Sister lightly slapped her. “Do you eat with that mouth?”

“I do, but if I were you, I certainly wouldn’t wear that gown near any hungry babies.”

Sister let out a whoop, and the two of them nearly fell off their chairs laughing. Is there a greater happiness than laughter with an old friend?

Once recovered, Sister swept her eyes across the dance floor. “I see what you mean. No one holds anyone. I never thought about it before. Well, I don’t think about much apart from hunting, geology, and history.”

“That’s not true. I’ve seen you work that credit card at Bergdorf’s.”

“Mmm. I like the men’s store better than the women’s. The tie display with all those colors in perfect silk.” She looked directly at her friend. “You’re right. It’s not very heterosexual, this kind of dancing,” she mused. “But I’m sure they’ll figure it out.”

“That they will, but they miss the frisson, the buildup, the gliding around, all that tension in your mind, all that music in your body.”

“It is an unromantic time,” said Sister. She noted the girls dancing with their dates. “Betty, I don’t envy them. I love those girls, as do you, but I would not want to be young now.”

“Me neither,” Betty said forcefully. “Hey, before I forget, we’re supposed to hunt at Old Paradise Tuesday. Bobby said he’d heard Art has fired up the old still just beyond the westernmost boundary.”

Art was the middle-aged son of Binky DuCharme, the father being half-owner of Old Paradise. Art never fulfilled his promise, that’s what his parents said, but they loved him anyway. Others said he was nice enough, but a bum.

“We’d better pray our fox doesn’t head his way.”

“The one time hounds ran through there, all that stuff exploded. Sounded like a small war. I never knew distilling could be so, uh, loud.”

“Sure was that time,” Sister agreed.

“They’re now selling country waters in small batches. I mean the authorities are allowing it, but the distiller has to go through the process so he gets the stamp put on it. I even think one of the brands from Nelson County is called Pure Moonshine.”

“More money to be made illegally.” Sister frowned for a moment. “Well, we know our foxes at Old Paradise, so if we hop the big red who heads straight west we’ll have to work to lift the pack, which I hate to do. They are doing their job. They should be rewarded, not thwarted.”

“It will be an interesting day.”

“Always is.” Sister thought for a moment, then said above the music: “Know your quarry.” She blinked. “I’m tired. It’s past my bedtime. I feel like I’ve been hit by a Mack truck.”

“You had a scare,” Betty said wisely. “It’s finally getting to you.”

“I think it is.” She looked directly into Betty’s eyes. “Tootie and I had been gone from the shop maybe five minutes.” She snapped her fingers. “Dead.”

“You never know. I used to think my mother was so tedious when she’d say, ‘Make every minute count.’ I know what she means now.” Betty inched closer to her friend. “You and Tootie didn’t have to come to the Ball. We’d have missed you, but everyone would understand.”