The Eighty-Dollar Champion - Elizabeth Letts [9]
Harry led the horse through the arched entrance into the school’s grand stable, which was prominently set just inside the front gates. Knox did not even look like a school. Tucked onto a spit of land between Stony Brook Harbor and Long Island Sound, its huge brick Georgian house, stables, and grounds resembled a wealthy tycoon’s country manor.
Ja, Harry remembered how he had felt the first time he set foot on the grounds of Knox, strangled by the unfamiliar necktie and bashful about his broken English. Maybe blazing bullets in wartime and Nazi troopers stomping through his village had taught Harry to be brave, but his interview at the Knox School—that had been a nerve-racking experience.
Inside the stable courtyard, Harry gave Snowman a pat on the neck and fished down into his pocket for a carrot. He could understand how the big horse must feel.
It is hard to imagine a place more serene than the setting of the Knox School. Gentle meadows ringed by dogwood trees flowed into wooded countryside crisscrossed by sandy trails. Off in the distance, down a pebbled lane, the mullioned windows of the manor house glittered as light glinted up off the water that lapped the campus’s edge. Here and there, girls in uniforms walked back and forth in twos and threes—lucky girls who were being educated in a manner befitting their backgrounds. It was a scene of entitled privilege.
Built for a United States senator, the estate was named Land of Clover, its manor house constructed of weathered brick imported from Virginia and its outbuildings including a grooms’ cottage, a trainer’s cottage, a henhouse, a caretaker’s house, and a piggery. But the senator’s family had fallen on hard times during the Great Depression and run out of money, finally putting the whole place up for sale in the late 1930s. Even in an economy still crippled by unemployment, the property sold for the astronomical sum of $100,000 to the La Rosa family, Italian-Americans who had made their fortune selling spaghetti with a pink rose on the box, made famous by radio pitchman Arthur Godfrey.
The gray-shingled stable was shaped like a horseshoe, its courtyard wide enough to accommodate the large carriages that had once graced the estate. Around the perimeter, stalls with green-and-white double Dutch doors faced inward onto a covered track. When the school had still been a private manor, Mr. La Rosa used to stand in the center with a long bullwhip and watch his fine hackney ponies go around him in a circle. When he cracked the whip, the ponies would stop on a dime, then turn around and circle the other way. The horseshoe-shaped stable at Land of Clover would eventually be declared a historic landmark, but now, in 1956, it was the gray plow horse’s new home.
Riding lessons in the courtyard of the horseshoe-shaped stable at Knox. (illustration credits 3.1)
Harry settled Snowman into one of the empty stalls, loaded up with fresh straw. The horse would like this stable—with its semicircular shape, the animals could see one another, as well as any activity in the courtyard, from any of the stalls. Snowman was a social animal; he liked to be around people and other horses. The girls of the Knox School might be to the manner born, but out at the stable, around the horses, they relaxed and turned friendly and happy, just like other kids. Harry thought the old teddy bear would like his new home.
The former Land of Clover was not the only large estate in the area. St. James’s gingerbread train depot had been one of the first stops built on the Long Island Rail Road, giving the area easy proximity to New York City. Around the turn of the twentieth century, prominent and wealthy New Yorkers had built grand estates ringing Long Island Sound. The famed society