Rules of Civility - Amor Towles [44]
Fran poured me a cup of coffee. I hunched over it with the blanket on my shoulders like a Civil War soldier.
Having come to the track with his parents when he was in shorts, the whole excursion to the runarounds was like a return to summer camp for Grubb, full of sweet nostalgia and youthful fun. He quickly gave us a lay of the land—the size of the track, the qualifying horses, the importance of Belmont versus Saratoga—then, lowering his voice he pointed toward the paddock.
—Here comes the first horse.
On cue the motley assembly rose.
The jockey wasn’t wearing one of those brightly colored checkered outfits that helps the track pretend it’s festive. He was wearing a brown jumpsuit like a diminutive garage mechanic. As he walked the horse from the paddock out onto the track, steam rose from the horse’s nostrils. In the stillness, you could hear it whinny from five hundred feet. The jockey talked briefly to a man with a pipe (presumably the trainer) and then swung onto the horse’s back. He cantered a little so that the horse could take in its surroundings, circled and positioned for a start. A hush fell. Without the shot of a gun, horse and rider took off.
The sound of the horse’s hooves drifted up into the stands in muffled rhythm as clods of turf were kicked in the air. The jockey seemed to take the first lengths at an easy pace, holding his head about a foot above the horse’s. But at the second turn he urged the animal on. He drew his elbows inward and squeezed his thighs around the horse’s barrel. He tucked the side of his face against its neck so that he could whisper encouragements. The horse responded. Though it was getting farther away, you could tell it was running faster, thrusting its muzzle forward and drumming the ground with rhythmic precision. It turned the far corner and the beat of its hooves grew closer, louder, faster. Until it bolted through the imaginary finish line.
—That’s Pasteurized, Grubb said. The favorite.
I looked around the stands. There were no cheers. No applause. The onlookers, most of them men, offered the favorite silent recognition. They reviewed the time on their stopwatches and quietly conferred. A few shook their heads in appreciation or disappointment. I couldn’t tell which.
And then Pasteurized was cantered off the track to make way for Cravat.
By the third horse, I was getting a feel for the runarounds. I could see why Grubb thought them more exciting than the Stakes. Though the stands were occupied by only a few hundred people (instead of fifty thousand), to a man they were aficionados.
Huddled at the rail—the innermost circle of the stadium—were the gamblers with unkempt hair who in refining their “systems” had lost it all: their savings, their homes, their families. With fevered eyes and rumpled jackets, looking like they’d slept under the stands, these inveterates leaned on the rail and watched the horses with an occasional licking of the lips.
In the lower stands sat the men and women raised on racing as a great entertainment. They were the same sort that you’d find in the bleachers at Dodger Stadium: the sort who knew the names of the players and all the relevant statistics. They were men and women who, like Grubb, had been brought to the track as children and who one day would bring their children, with a sense of loyalty to an idea that they might only otherwise display in a time of war. They had picnic baskets and racing sheets and formed fast friendships with whomever they happened to sit.
In the boxes above them sat the owners in the company of young women and other hangers-on. All of the owners were rich, of course, but the ones who came to the runarounds weren’t the blue bloods or the dilettantes; they were the men who had earned every penny. One silver-haired magnate in a perfectly tailored suit leaned against the rail with both arms like an admiral at the helm. You could just tell that for him racing