In jumping exhibitions, Imogen takes spills and pops right back up, undaunted. The crowd approves her spirit. She breaks a finger and rides with it splinted. Her wrists ache. She chews aspirin and ignores it.
Her mother thinks she’ll spend the summers at home in DC, maybe working as a salesgirl in a clothing store, but she’s got another think coming. Imogen finds a position as riding coach and counselor at an all-girl camp in the Poconos. The girls are young and soft, the horses old and for the most part mild, with one or two malicious tricksters. It’s like her old school patrol days, shepherding her little sisters across fields and creeks, down wooded paths. Her parents visit, querulous and tired from the long drive, and Imogen can finally see that they were old when they married, old when they gave birth to her. That perhaps the reason her mother never gave her a baby brother or sister was because she couldn’t.
Her mother does her yeoman job of making Imogen feel guilty. The house is so quiet . . . Poor Stubby doesn’t understand . . . It must be very exciting and free to get away from your parents . . .
Her dad, holding the camera, escapes long enough to snap the big barn and the bridge over the creek (gladdening his engineer’s heart) before being corralled by her mother to do what he came for. She orders Imogen to stand here and there, hold this and that, try not to be so . . . maybe that hair is the style today, but honestly, who could . . . ? Imogen stands alone, because her mother no longer tolerates having her own picture taken. “I used to be the beauty of the family,” she says, sighing. Old photos prove it. Grammie Eula always chirpily conceded she was the prettiest of her daughters. “She got the beauty fairy, so the brains fairy looked elsewhere.”
“Oh, the men were always—” and off her mother goes, reminiscing about balls and wintry wagon rides under compendious buffalo robes (but there was decorum and proper manners).
Then why’d it take you so damn long to marry? Imogen wants to ask.
“You’re still beautiful,” her husband avers, gesturing futilely for her to move into the frame. He means it. “How did I manage to catch such a beauty?” he’s often said. He’s a small man, five-five, bald at twenty-five, married at forty-four.
Because she saw you’d put up with her.
She looks at him standing there with the camera like a shield, the man her fellow counselors thought at first was her grandfather. You never defend me. He may marvel at her mother’s beauty, but on vacations he goes off on fishing trips with his buddies, never taking Imogen with him.
She gets back on her horse, returns to college. Her hands hurt like hell, the doctor says she has congenital arthritis, exacerbated by the demanding exercise in cold weather. She keeps chewing aspirin, keeps jumping, stops playing piano. Her mother complains, Imogen tunes her out.
Graduation Day. Of course her parents are there, and maybe there’s a bit of her mother in her, the foolish vain part, because she doesn’t wear her glasses for the procession, although she’s blind as a bat, and her dad snaps furiously as she marches by. Somehow she was off a horse long enough to get good grades and win an academic prize. She’s been accepted for the physics program at the University of Chicago, the first female physics graduate student in its history. (She switched to physics in her senior year to get away from her chemistry professor, Miss Edwards, who praised her and encouraged her and it turned out was in love with her and wanted to control her.) She’s proud and excited and secretly worried and in mourning for the loss of her horses, her stable, her fellow riders, irreplaceable every one.
Why graduate school? She wonders this herself. It seemed either that, or go back to live with her parents, or get married. Imogen assumes she will be married someday because she wants children, sweet little ones, like the younger siblings she never had. And goddamnit she’ll have more than one, she won’t do to any child what her mother did to her. But that’s off in the future, on the far side of more achievement and more horses and years of freedom and traveling.
On the last day in the dorm, her best friend of all, Mac, gives her a framed keepsake, a photo of Mac on rearing Baker Man. The stallion is nearly vertical, Mac poised and calmly smiling into the camera, heroic and in command. She has signed it, “To Imp, with love,” and scrawled across Baker Man’s chest a catchphrase from the Rubaiyat popular among the sisters working in the stables late into the night: “The idols I have loved so long . . .”
• • •
Six months later Mac marries, with Imogen as her maid of honor.
A year after that, Imogen marries and Mac returns the favor.
1926–1996
When Vernon worked at the Hanscom Field lab years later, Don and Mike would joke about the accident that burned his fingers. “I can see it perfectly,” Don would say, while Mike started laughing, and Don would put on a shit-eating grin, hide his eyes with one hand and stick the fingers of the other into an imaginary wall socket. Vernon would laugh, too. Don, Mike, and he were always popping into each other’s offices with a good joke they’d just heard. It kept the tedium of lab work and the inanities of dealing with the Air Force brass from killing them. The fingers haven’t hurt much for decades, but he has reduced sensitivity, especially in the middle finger, which lost its nail and half an inch of length. Women like to claim that nature spares them from remembering labor pain so they’ll go on to have more children, but
