Fiddler Fair (anthology)

revival and naturalism. And really, Ruth St. Denis and Agnes de Mille were doing what I would have been doing. Agnes was doing more; she was putting decent dancing into motion pictures, where millions of little children would see it. When I think about it, I don’t think Isadora Duncan would have made any earth­shaking contributions to dancing.” Then she gave him her famous impish smile, the one that peeled twenty years off of her. “On the other hand, every Grand Prix driver out there does the ‘Duncan dive’ to hit the cockpit. And they are starting to wear the driving suits I’ve been working on. So I’ve done that much for ­racing.”

The kid nodded; he started to ask something else, but the scream of approaching engines made him shake his head before she held up her hand.

Jimmy was still there, still within striking distance of the leaders. But there was trouble developing—because the Ford drivers were doing just what Dora had feared they would do. They were driving as a team—in two formations of three cars each. Quite enough to block. Illegal as hell, but only if the race officials caught on and they could get someone on the Ford team to spill the beans. Obvious as it might be, the worst the drivers would get would be fines, unless someone fessed up that it was premeditated—then the whole team could be disqualified.

Illegal as hell, and more than illegal—dangerous. Dora bit her lip, wondering if they really knew just how dangerous.

Halfway through the race, and already the kid had more than earned his pit-pass. Porsche was out, bullied into the wall by the Ford flying-wedge, in a crash that sent the driver to the hospital. Ferrari was out too, victim of the same crash; both their LMCs had taken shrapnel that had nicked fuel-lines. Thank God Paul’d been close to the pits when the leaking fuel caught fire. The Ferrari had come in trailing a tail of fire and smoke and the kid was right in there, the first one on the scene with his fire-bottle, foaming the driver down first then going under the car with the nozzle. He’d probably prevented a worse fire—And now the alliances in the pits had undergone an abrupt shift. It was now the Europeans and the independents against the Ford monolith. Porsche and Ferrari had just come to her—her, who Porsche had never been willing to give the time of day!—­offering whatever they had left. “Somehow” the race officials were being incredibly blind to the illegal moves Ford was pulling.

Then again . . . how close was Detroit to ­Wisconsin?

It had happened before, and would happen again, for as long as businessmen made money on sport. All the post-race sanctions in the world weren’t going to help that driver in the hospital, and no fines would change the outcome of the inevitable crashes.

The sad, charred hulk of the Ferrari had been towed, its once-proud red paint blistered and cracked; the pit crew was dejectedly cleaning up the oil and foam.

On the track, Jimmy still held his position, despite two attempts by one of the Ford wedges to shove him out of the way. That was the advantage of a vehicle like the Bugatti, as she and the engineers had ­designed it for him. The handling left something to be desired, at least so far as she was concerned, but it was Jimmy’s kind of car. Like the 550 Porsche he drove for pleasure now, that he used to drive in races, she’d built it for speed. “Point and squirt,” was how she often put it, dryly. Point it in the direction you wanted to go, and let the horses do the work.

The same thing seemed to be passing through Paul’s mind, as he watched Jimmy scream by, accelerating out of another attempt by Ford to pin him behind their wedge. He shook his head, and Dora elbowed him.

“You don’t approve?” she asked.

“It’s not that,” he said, as if carefully choosing his words. “It’s just not my kind of driving. I like handling; I like to slip through the pack like—like I was a fish and they were the water. Or I was dancing on the track—”

She had to smile. “Are you quoting that, or did you not know that was how they described my French and Monte Carlo Grand Prix wins?”

His eyes widened. “I didn’t know—” he stammered, blushing. “Honest! I—”

She patted his shoulder, maternally. “That’s fine, Paul. It’s a natural analogy. Although I bet you don’t know where I got my training.”

He grinned. “Bet I do! Dodging bombs! I read you were an ambulance driver in Italy during the war. Is that when you met Ettore Bugatti?”

She nodded, absently, her attention on the cars roaring by. Was there a faint sound of strain in her engine? For a moment her nerves chilled.

But no, it was just another acceleration; a little one, just enough to blow Jimmy around the curve ahead of the Mercedes.

Her immediate reaction was annoyance; he shouldn’t have had to power his way out of that, he should have been able to drive his way out. He was putting more stress on the engine than she was happy with.

Then she mentally slapped her own hand. She wasn’t the driver, he was.

But now she knew how Ettore Bugatti felt when she took the wheel in that first Monte Carlo Grand Prix.

“You know, Bugatti was one of my passengers,” she said, thinking aloud, without looking to see if Paul was listening. “He was with the Resistance in the Italian Alps. You had to be as much a mechanic as a driver, those ambulances were falling apart half the time, and he saw me doing both before I got him to the field hospital.”

Sometimes, she woke up in the middle of the night, hearing the bombs falling, the screams of the attack- fighters strafing the road— Seeing the road disintegrate in a flash of fire and smoke behind her, in front of her; hearing the moans of the wounded in her battered converted bread-truck.

All too well, she remembered those frantic ­moments when getting the ambulance moving meant getting herself and her wounded passengers out of there ­before the fighter-planes came back. And for a ­moment, she heard those planes— No, it was the cars ­returning. She shook her head to free it of unwanted memories. She had never lost a passenger, or a truck, although it had been a near thing more times than she cared to count. Whenever the memories came between her and a quiet sleep, she told herself that—and reminded herself why she had volunteered in the first place.

Because her brother, the darling of the Metaphysical set, was hiding from the draft at home by remaining in England among the blue-haired old ladies and balletomanes who he charmed. Because, since they would not accept her as a combatant, she enlisted as a noncombatant.