So that day after I had finished work we would go racing. Some money had come from the Toronto paper that I did newspaper work for and we wanted a long shot if we could find one. My wife had a horse one time at Auteuil named Chèvre d’Or that was a hundred and twenty to one and leading by twenty lengths when he fell at the last jump with enough savings on him to keep us six months. We tried never to think of that. We were ahead on that year until Chèvre d’Or.
“Do we have enough money to really bet, Tatie?” my wife asked.
“No. We’ll just figure to spend what we take. Is there something else you’d rather spend it for?”
“Well,” she said.
“I know. It’s been terribly hard and I’ve been tight and mean about money.”
“No,” she said. “But—”
I knew how severe I had been and how bad things had been. The one who is doing his work and getting satisfaction from it is not the one the poverty bothers. I thought of bathtubs and showers and toilets that flushed as things that inferior people to us had or that you enjoyed when you made trips, which we often made.
There was always the public bathhouse down at the foot of the street by the river. My wife had never complained once about these things any more than she cried about Chèvre d’Or when he fell. She had cried for the horse, I remembered, but not for the money. I had been stupid when she needed a grey lamb jacket and had loved it once she had bought it.
I had been stupid about other things too. It was all part of the fight against poverty that you never win except by not spending. Especially if you buy pictures instead of clothes. But then we did not think ever of ourselves as poor. We did not accept it. We thought we were superior people and other people that we looked down on and rightly mistrusted were rich.
It had never seemed strange to me to wear sweatshirts for underwear to keep warm. It only seemed odd to the rich. We ate well and cheaply and drank well and cheaply and slept well and warm together and loved each other.
“I think we ought to go,” my wife said. “We haven’t been for such a long time. We’ll take a lunch and some wine. I’ll make good sandwiches.”
“We’ll go on the train and it’s cheap that way. But let’s not go if you don’t think we should. Anything we’d do today would be fun. It’s a wonderful day.”
“I think we should go.”
“You wouldn’t rather spend it some other way?”
“No,” she said arrogantly. She had the lovely high cheek-bones for arrogance. “Who are we anyway?”
So we went out by the train from the Gare du Nord through the dirtiest and saddest part of town and walked from the siding to the oasis of the track. It was early and we sat on my raincoat on the fresh cropped grass bank and had our lunch and drank from the wine bottle and looked at the old grandstand, the brown wooden betting booths, the green of the track, the darker green of the hurdles, and the brown shine of the water jumps and the whitewashed stone walls and white posts and rails, the paddock under the new leafed trees and the first horses being walked to the paddock. We drank more wine and studied the form in the paper and my wife lay down on the raincoat to sleep with the sun on her face. I went over and found someone I knew from the old days at San Siro in Milano. He gave me two horses.
“Mind, they’re no investment. But don’t let the price put you off.”
We won the first with half of the money that we had to spend and he paid twelve to one, jumping beautifully, taking command on the far side of the course and coming in four lengths ahead. We saved half of the money and put it away and bet the other half on the second horse who broke ahead, led all the way over the hurdles and on the flat just lasted to the finish line with the favorite gaining on him with every jump and the two whips flailing.
We went to have a glass of champagne at the bar under the stand and wait for the prices to go up.
“My, but racing is very hard on people,” my wife said. “Did you see that horse come up on him?”
“I can still feel it inside me.”
“What will he pay?”
“The cote was eighteen to one. But they may have bet him at the last.”
The horses came by, ours wet, with his nostrils working wide to breathe, the jockey patting him.
“Poor him,” my wife said. “We just bet.”
We watched them go on by and had another glass of champagne and then the winning price came up: 85. That meant he paid eighty-five francs for ten.
“They must have put a lot of money on at the end,” I said.
But we had made plenty of money, big money for us, and now we had spring and money too. I thought that was all we needed. A day like that one, if you split the winnings one quarter for each to spend, left a half for racing capital. I kept the racing capital secret and apart from all other capital.
Another day later that year when we had come back from one of our voyages and had good luck at some track again we stopped at Pruniers on the way home, going in to sit at the bar after looking at all the clearly priced wonders in the window.
We had oysters and crabe Mexicaine with glasses of Sancerre. We walked back through the Tuileries in the dark and stood and looked through the Arc du Carrousel up across the dark gardens with the lights of the Concorde behind the formal darkness and then the long rise of lights toward the Arc de Triomphe. Then we looked back toward the dark of the Louvre and I said, “Do you really think that the three arches are in line? These two and the Sermione in Milano?”
“I don’t know, Tatie. They say so and they ought to know. Do you remember when we came out into the spring on the Italian side of the St. Bernard after the climb in the snow, and you and Chink and I walked down all day in the spring to Aosta?”
“Chink called it ‘across the St. Bernard in street shoes.’ Remember your shoes?”
“My poor shoes. Do you remember us having fruit cup at Biffi’s in the Galleria with Capri and fresh peaches and wild strawberries in a tall glass pitcher with ice?”
“That time was what made me wonder about the three arches.”
“I remember the Sermione. It’s like this arch.”
“Do you remember the inn at Aigle where you and Chink sat in the garden that day and read while I fished?”
“Yes, Tatie.”
I remembered the Rhône, narrow and grey and full of snow water and the two trout streams on either side, the Stockalper and the Rhône canal. The Stockalper was really clear that day and the Rhône canal was still murky.
“Do you remember when the horse-chestnut trees were in bloom and how I tried to remember a story that Jim Gamble, I think, had told me about a wisteria vine and I couldn’t remember it?”
“Yes Tatie, and you and Chink always talking about how to make things true, writing them, and put them rightly and not describe. I remember everything. Sometimes he was right and sometimes you were right. I remember the lights and textures and the shapes you argued about.”
Now we had come out of the gateway through the Louvre and crossed the street outside and were standing on the bridge leaning on the stone and looking down at the river.
“We all three argued about everything and always specific things and we made fun of each other. I remember everything we ever did and everything we ever said on the whole trip,” Hadley said. “I do really. About everything. When you and Chink talked I was included. It wasn’t like being a wife at Miss Stein’s.”
“I wish I could remember the story about the wisteria vine.”
“It wasn’t important. It was the vine that was important, Tatie.”
“Do you remember I brought some wine from Aigle home to the chalet? They sold it to us at the inn. They said it should go with the trout. We brought it wrapped in copies of La gazette de Lucerne, I think.”
“The Sion wine was even better. Do you remember how Mrs. Gangeswisch cooked the trout au bleu when we got back to the chalet? They were such wonderful trout, Tatie, and we drank the Sion wine and ate out on the porch with the mountainside dropping off below and we could look across
