The Eighty-Dollar Champion - Elizabeth Letts [25]
Knox had a rule that every girl needed to attend a church service on Sunday morning. Harry never missed a Sunday mass, and even though most of the Knox girls were Protestant, the early Catholic mass at the nearby Saint Philip & James Church was the only service that would get them to the hunt on time.
With the truck idling in the parking lot and the horses munching from hay nets inside, all of the girls of any denomination, clad in boots and breeches and wool hunt coats, their hair up in nets, traipsed into the small white church. Parishioners grew used to the sight of the girls and the young riding master kneeling in their riding habits at six A.M. Sometimes the group would sneak out before mass was over, doing their best to tiptoe in their riding boots, then climb back into their waiting limousine. Once Harry jumped into the horse van, they’d be off toward the hunt meeting.
The hunt started at a different place each week, and usually ended with a formal breakfast at one of the grand estates around Smithtown. Bonnie remembers a hunt breakfast at the Gould estate, otherwise known as “Castle Gould.” Designed by Howard Gould, the son of railroad financier Jay Gould, the house, built of limestone and granite, was 225 feet long, 135 feet wide, and had three floors, forty rooms, and an 80-foot crenellated tower. The girls and their riding master, sweaty and dirty from a morning spent galloping pell-mell on horseback, stood around eating and socializing in the most opulent of surroundings.
Knox girls in their camel hair coats standing near the Knox School limousine. (illustration credits 5.4)
But the sight of polished silver and the sound of tinkling teacups in the halls of large mansions were familiar to the well-to-do girls. Often, it was the simpler times that stood out in their minds—ordinary occasions that normal teenagers took for granted. Knox girls, boarders, did not drive their own cars but got chauffeured around town in a big black Packard limousine. At the end of one day’s hunt, however, it was late—too late to find a driver to pick them up. Mr. D told them not to worry; he was heading back to the school anyway. He’d give them a ride in the van. The girls giggled as they climbed into the back and sat down in the straw, where the air was warm and heavy with the scent of horses, hay, and well-oiled tack as the truck rattled along the streets of St. James. They were all going to miss their dinner, so on the way home, Mr. D took the hungry girls out to dinner in a local diner, where they spent the meal dissecting the day’s activity. No dreary housemothers, no lessons in etiquette, just hamburgers and lively discussion—an opportunity to feel like ordinary teenagers. In a life filled with a tedious procession of stiff white-glove social events, laughter and chatter at a hamburger joint with Mr. D were a special treat.
Back at the stables, the girls were bone-weary, but they helped unload the van, put the horses away, and stow all of the tack. At last, their day over, they said good night to Mr. D and trudged back to the manor house to confide their memories in their diaries.
In the morning, the girls would get up and put on their scratchy wool skirts and cotton socks and saddle oxfords. They would sit with ramrod-straight posture in the stuffy rooms of the manor house, where the light leaked in through windows half-covered by heavy damask drapery. They would decline verbs in Latin and submit to the house-mistresses’ questions and commentary during their meals.
Then, at two o’clock in the afternoon, they would rush up the hill to the barn, and the routine would start again. Up on the backs of horses, under Mr. D’s tutelage, the girls would unlock their inner lionesses.
The two-legged teacher would join forces with his four-legged teachers, having an influence that would last the girls for the rest of their lives.
6
Hollandia Farms
St. James, Long Island, Spring 1956
Snowman’s winter and spring in the stables passed in a pleasant succession of lessons and trail