Page 2 of The Bootlegger’s Bride

H azel Robinson shielded her face from the sun with her racing program as she stood leaning on the white-painted paddock rail watching the snorting thoroughbreds, led by stable hands, circling over the sawdust and sand.

Earthy aromas rose from the dirt and hung in the still afternoon air.

From a loudspeaker on the nearby grandstand came a scratchy announcement, “Ten minutes till post time.”

She loved the sleek muscled creatures with their somber eyes.

And when they thundered down the stretch, the diminutive jockeys in colorful silks perched crouching in the stirrups, her heart raced.

An apt contrast to the plodding that marked her life.

Though she shouldn’t complain. Count your blessings. Ditch the invidious metaphors.

Getting out of the house on a Saturday afternoon and away from her parents for the day was a breath of fresh air both literally and figuratively.

She was glad Helen and Raymond had thought to include her.

The hot arid summer seemed endless. She was keen to get back in her classroom despite its homeliness, but school’s start was still a steamy month away.

“Got any ideas?”

She glanced left toward the resonant voice. A man in Panama hat leaned on the rail a few feet away studying the Daily Racing Form . Clearly his question had been directed at her as there was no one else standing nearby in the blazing afternoon sun. Hazel returned her gaze to the circling horses.

“The chestnut’s a beauty,” she said.

“‘Beauty is as beauty does.’”

She flicked her eyes at him. Imagine that.

A racetrack tout quoting Chaucer. This made her curious enough to look him up and down.

Blonde hair beneath the hat. Roman profile, strong jaw albeit a bit pointy.

Thirtyish. Despite the day’s heat he wore a long-sleeved white shirt and blue silk tie beneath a seersucker sport coat.

“You have a better idea?”

“What about the filly?”

“Which one’s the filly?”

He smiled for an instant and bit his tongue. “The roan, Grey Doll.”

Hazel, dark hair fixed in a bun to cool her neck, turned to study the number four horse. Noticeably smaller than the others, her silver flanks glistened in the sunlight.

“What’s to like about her? I thought the girls weren’t as fast as the boys.”

“This one is. Though no one knows that quite yet. She’s an overlay.”

“A what?”

“An overlay. Meaning she’ll go off at good odds, better than she deserves. Likely six to one.”

“So, you think she’s going to win?”

He shrugged. “Who knows? They all got four legs.”

She nodded. “Good observation.”

He touched the brim of his hat. “Almost post time. I need to get my money down. Good luck.”

With that he turned and strolled off, Hazel eyeing his departure. He moved like a thoroughbred, muscular, controlled, relaxed. Purposeful, not plodding.

Hazel found Helen and Raymond where she had left them, standing in the shade of the tall wooden grandstand. She took a twenty-dollar bill from her clutch purse, gave it to her brother-in-law, and looked at the racing program in her hand.

“Please bet number four for me, Raymond. Grey Doll. To win.”

“There’s a switch from the place-and-show girl. How much?”

“All of it.”

Helen reached out to her sister. “Hazel! That’s as much as you earn in week!”

She set her jaw. “All of it.”

Raymond opened his mouth to protest, caught the look in her eye, and retreated in silence with the money, shaking his head.

Hazel had a feeling. An odd feeling for her.

She’d done everything according to the book her whole life—all twenty-three years of it—always thoughtful and cautious.

Worked hard in school and got good grades.

Went to the University of Illinois and did the same, studying English literature and linguistics and getting certified to teach in the state’s public schools.

Thanks to her father’s Granite City connections she landed a job when so many were still out of work, teaching first grade at Nameoki School, where one of his childhood pals was principal.

Still, it was a disappointment. Literature was her love, not the ABCs.

However her timing—rather, her parents’ procreative phasing—was bad.

Who knew that the Roaring Twenties would go out with a whimper—rather, a Crash and a whimper?

The Great Depression led to severe budget cutbacks for most public schools.

Some closed. Experienced English teachers got laid off.

She was lucky to have a job at all, everyone told her.

Though she didn’t feel particularly lucky. Until now.

For once in her orderly life she decided to take a risk—a small one in the larger scheme of things, a mere two sawbucks.

However, its impulsiveness—so out of character—made it loom large for her.

She sensed something bubbling up inside that made her feel like a different person from the Hazel Robinson she’d always known—suddenly a daring woman, though certainly not on the scale of Cleopatra, Cordelia, or Scarlett O’Hara.

When Raymond returned with her pari-mutuel ticket the three of them moved down to the rail, which now lay in shade as the sun lowered behind the grandstand, and the scent of the rich earth again rose to her.

The horses were being loaded into the gate a furlong to their left; the finish line lay just to their right.

Hazel would get to see them and feel them pound past twice on the mile oval for the mile-and-an-eighth route.

The sound of a school bell’s ring, the clang of the metal gates slamming open, and the raspy voice of the track announcer echoing from a loudspeaker on the grandstand behind them—“And they’re off!”

Hazel crossed her fingers.

The animals flew past bunched together, hooves hammering the sandy Fairmount Park dirt, not far from Helen’s Long Lake home on the American Bottom, where the Mississippi once flowed, leaving behind soft, rich soil.

At the first turn the horses all moved toward the infield rail and strung out in a line.

The only roan in a field of chestnuts and bays, Grey Doll was easy to pick out as the thoroughbreds raced down the backstretch.

Alas, she lagged at the back of the pack, and Hazel began to regret her rashness.

Whatever made her risk a week’s salary on the mere suggestion of a stranger?

This will teach the dreamy schoolmarm a lesson.

Then as the horses entered the final turn the filly livened and began to move up.

Hazel lost sight of her for a moment as the thoroughbreds fought into the stretch.

Then she spied the roan farthest from the rail coming head on but couldn’t tell how far back she was.

Now she heard the announcer’s call, “And that’s Grey Doll gaining on the far outside… ”

Hazel found herself screaming, “Come on, Grey Doll, come on!”

The ground shook as the horses hurled past, the roan now neck and neck with the chestnut for the lead.

“It’s Brokers Tip and Grey Doll!” came the call. “… Grey Doll and Brokers Tip… Brokers Tip and Grey Doll… And Grey Doll takes it by a head bob!”

Hazel hugged her sister. “I won! I won!”

“We won!” said Raymond. “I put two bucks on her myself. Thanks for the tip, Sis.”

“I’m not the one to thank…” She moved away from the rail and searched the crowd. Just beyond the finish line she spied the Panama hat and the handsome blond man. “There he is. Come with me.”

He saw her approaching and seemed to study her walk, looking her up and down as if appraising a racehorse at auction. Out of breath, Hazel put a hand to her heart when she got to him.

“Gosh, what a race!”

“Did you bet her?”

“All I had. I thought I would die at the end!”

“Sorry for all the excitement. Closer than it should have been,” he said, looking past her.

She turned. “This is my sister, Helen, and brother-in-law, Raymond. They won money, too. How can we thank you?”

His eyes were hazel, she now noticed as they fixed on her. A nice coincidence for Hazel Marie Robinson.

“You can let me buy you all a drink in the clubhouse.”

“The drinks should be on us!”

He waved away her suggestion. “The quinella paid even better. Come.”

Inside the clubhouse he doffed his Panama and said to the attendant at the high front desk, “These are my guests, Joe.”

“Of course, Mr. Nowak.”

Mr. Nowak—Jan, he had said when they exchanged names at the finish line—led them upstairs and outside to a table on the covered porch overlooking the track just past the finish line. When the waiter came everyone wanted beer on the hot afternoon. Jan ordered a pitcher of Hyde Park.

When the waiter returned with the beer and glasses Jan said, “I hope you’ll excuse my hometown loyalty. I know Stag’s the East Side favorite, but I’m from north St. Louis, born not too far from Hyde Park.”

“Loyalty’s a good thing,” said Raymond, and the others agreed.

Hazel studied Jan, pursing her lips. “I’m a little surprised,” she said.

“That I like Hyde Park Beer?”

“No, that you’re from north St. Louis. You have no trace of the local dialect.”

“There’s good reason for that. English is my second language.

We spoke Polish at home and in the Cass Avenue neighborhood where I grew up.

So I didn’t learn English from family or on the street, rather from schoolteachers who spoke grammatically and phonetically correct American and taught me the same. ”

“Hazel teaches school,” Helen said. “In Granite City.”

At the mention of her hometown Hazel noticed something in his eyes that made her think he had some history there, though something he didn’t want to share.

Then he looked away, focusing on a tall, dapper, dark-haired man in a straw boater who had just stepped through the door to the balcony. Jan gestured him over. “Come, Bogdan! Join us.”

Jan stood to shake hands and laid an arm across the man’s shoulder.

“Friends, this is Bob Wade, the source of our good fortune. He alerted me to Grey Doll.”

Bob Wade—or was it Bogdan?—stroked his chin, where an afternoon shadow of black stubble grew. “Happy you folks get in on it…” Here he turned to squint at Jan. “…Though I thought the odds would be a bit better.”

Jan threw back his head with a laugh. “My fault entirely, my friend, for sharing it with this young lady, Hazel Robinson, who turns out to be a high-stakes gambler and odds-buster.”

Bob shook her hand. “Good for you! You believe in long shots, Miss Robinson?”

She felt herself glowing, a happiness radiating throughout her.

“I think I could develop a taste for them… How did you know Grey Doll was going to win?”

Bob exchanged a glance with Jan and cleared his throat. “Got it straight from the horse’s mouth.”

The men sat. They all toasted to long shots and good luck. Helen unfolded a Kodak camera from her purse. Bob Wade insisted on playing the photographer and taking a picture of the smiling foursome. Then he turned the camera on Jan and Hazel.

“You two move closer… No smiling now.”

They put their heads together, and she breathed in Jan’s scent—tobacco, leather, and something that stirred her. Whatever it was she could not help but smile for the snapshot. He made her feel like Cinderella.

§

Motoring back to Granite City that afternoon Hazel asked Helen and Raymond to drop her off at a small downtown bookstore.

Inside she found exactly what she was looking for: a leather-bound blank book with gold-edged pages of smooth, ivory-colored stock, subtly lined.

On its shiny black cover a single word was embossed in a serif font: Journal.

Miss Pittman, the shop owner, raised her eyebrows when Hazel unfolded her racetrack winnings from her purse and peeled off two dollars to hand her.

Hazel caught the Madison Avenue bus, warm air wafting through the open windows.

She debarked before reaching Nameoki Road and walked two blocks to her childhood home facing Wilson Park as the sun lowered behind the tall sycamores there—worlds away, aesthetically at least, from the steel mills at the far side of town.

After dinner she went to her room, sat at her desk, and made her first journal entry: “A Day at the Races.” Hazel smiled recalling the Marx Brothers movie of the same name that she had seen the previous year at the Washington Theater.

Then she wrote about the race, the racetrack tout Jan Nowak, and how lucky he made her feel.