The Eighty-Dollar Champion - Elizabeth Letts [88]
Late that afternoon, Harry was stunned when he heard his name being announced over the PA system. He was needed back home at Hollandia immediately. Harry suppressed the impulse to panic. Calling long-distance and trying to find him at the show could only mean one thing: disaster must have struck at home. Harry’s mind flitted through the possibilities—Johanna would not call unless there was a real calamity at home, perhaps a barn fire or one of the children seriously hurt.
Harry rushed home feeling sick with apprehension. His own problems were bad enough; he could not bear to think that something had happened to someone else in the family.
But after the long drive back from New Jersey, his mind spinning away with the possibilities, he arrived at the house to see that nothing appeared amiss. Inside, he found Johanna.
“You need to call the doctor right away,” she told him. “There was a message that it’s urgent.”
Harry had a sinking feeling. What could the doctor possibly tell him that was that important? He already knew the worst. How much worse could it be?
Harry picked up the phone and called the office, and the receptionist put him right through. The doctor had astonishing news. Something just hadn’t sat right with him; Harry was young and healthy and did not smoke or use tobacco, which would put him at risk. The doctor had been so concerned, in fact, that he had driven into New York to check on it.
And it turned out that his hunch had been right.
Harry’s slide had gotten mixed up with that of another fellow—an older man who was a heavy smoker and had been in for a biopsy on the same day. Harry’s slide had been fine—the abscess on his tongue was nothing serious. It was totally benign, nothing more than a nagging virus that would heal on its own. No need to sell his horses or give up his career.
The whole world opened up again in front of Harry de Leyer.
With a little time and Johanna’s cooking, Harry quickly regained his strength. It was August now and the summer season would soon draw to a close. Once Knox was in session, Harry would not be able to continue traveling to shows.
There was one last important show before the school year started: Piping Rock, farther west on the island in Locust Valley, near Oyster Bay, the famed enclave where the Roosevelts had their summer home.
The competition here would be stiffer than any Harry and Snowman had ever faced before. The U.S. Equestrian Team would be back from the summer season in Europe. Sharpened from international competition, they would be competing at Piping Rock in preparation for the fall indoor season leading up to the National in November.
As summer drew to a close, the trees around St. James formed broad leafy canopies, the air was humid, and a low buzzing of mosquitoes hummed in the background, but soon enough there would be a fall nip in the air. Harry was feeling stronger; he was still putting on weight, his illness almost just a memory.
The beginning of the Knox school year was pressing in fast, but right now, his mind was on Piping Rock.
17
Piping Rock
Locust Valley, Long Island, 1958
The satirist Dorothy Parker once said, “If you want to know what God thinks of money, look at the people he gave it to.” She might have added, “And if you want to see the people he gave it to, head to the Piping Rock Club.” In September 1958, the Piping Rock Horse Show was in its fifty-third year.
It was not a long drive from Harry’s converted chicken farm in St. James to the grounds of the Piping Rock Club, but what a world away it was. Set along Long Island’s Gold Coast, the area made famous by jazz-era novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald in The Great Gatsby, the Piping Rock Club prided itself on its exclusivity. The elite of New York society congregated in Locust Valley at its cluster of genteel clubs. The Seawanhaka Corinthian Yacht Club, the Creek Club, and Piping Rock were gathering places for the country’s “elegantsia.” It was