ERNIE AND ERNESTINA: The Writer, His Wife, and their Afterlife

Book One, Part One, Chapter 27: The Big Novel

Ernie begins his Big Novel.

“This is the blockbuster, Ernestina. This will be our Best Seller, if I can get it done. It’s all in my head. I know the characters. First there’s Bryan and Arabella. They’ve known each other since childhood and just now realize they’ve fallen in love. The story’s set in the Bluegrass, on a horse farm, in the 1940s. It opens the spring before Pearl Harbor. Bryan’s father is the trainer for Taylor Farm, owned by Arabella’s father, Colonel Malory Leigh Taylor, third-generation horseman. It’s the colonel’s burning desire to win the Kentucky Derby. His father did and his grandfather did. But I can’t tell you anything else about it. I need the pressure of the story to build up in me. I want the writing to gush out like a fountain.”

When Ernie wants a break from the writing, he goes to the track, and he takes Joshua with him. Joshua hates school and loves the track. He loves to be with his daddy. He stands in the betting line and cashing line next to Ernie. All the pari-mutuel clerks know Ernie and Joshua, and Ernie and Joshua come to know the Churchill regulars. Ernie gives them names. Grump and Pigeon Man and Sarge. Dan the Man and The Stick Man and Bud and Oz.

Ernie goes back and forth, from the novel to the track. One bleeds into the other. Colonel Taylor wants to win the Silver Jubilee Derby, and Ernie wants to win the Pick Six. He recruits Don, a sculptor friend, and Mike, owner of the liquor store where Ernie buys his racing forms, to invest with him on big Pick-Six tickets. Joshua studies the racing form, too.

I don’t go to the track. I can’t bear to lose. I get angry at Ernie and Joshua when they do lose. “What? You left that horse out? How could you have left that horse out?”

When they lose, they hate to come home. “That’s worse than losing,” Ernie tells me, “to have to face you and hear you gripe.”

He finishes The Thoroughbreds and sends off query letters to New York literary agents. Ann Elmo, owner of a top agency, agrees to represent him. He’s elated. “Money is freedom, Ernestina. I want money. That’s why I want a Best Seller. That’s why I play the Pick Six. For the Big Hit. Then I can do what I want to do.”

And what does Ernie want to do? Play the horses? Write? He wants to write, of course. Writing is his first love. The track is child’s play.