Prologue
Tennessee, 1988
Yes, you have come to the right place. Dr. Howard Stovall Bennett III at your service.
Hand me that magnifying glass, will you, and I’ll have a look at what you’ve got there. That’s me, all right, the tall one in the beat-up Stetson, surrounded by all the ladies. When I first got that hat I had to run it over with the ranch’s station wagon so it didn’t look too new. I must have been, let me see now, twenty-four, twenty-five years old. Hard to believe I was ever that young. I was flat broke, but I was pretty then, and jobs were hard to come by during the Depression. If somebody offered me one, I took it. Working on a dude ranch outside Reno that catered to the divorce trade beat the heck out of digging ditches, I can tell you that.
Some men are born gigolos; others have it thrust upon them. That’s a little joke I always told myself in later years when a nurse or one of my fellow doctors noted the excellence of my bedside manner. Some knuckleheads seem to think bedside manner can’t be taught. Hogwash. Anybody with a lick of sense and a little compassion can pick up the essentials. Make eye contact, let the person hurting tell you what pains them, and for heaven’s sake, if you have cold hands, run them under hot water or rub your palms together before you start examining a patient.
Of course I’m joking when I say that. A gigolo? Far from it. The cowboys at the Flying Leap were there to look at, not to touch. Fraternization with our guests was in fact grounds for getting yourself fired. We were on hand to do chores around the ranch, of course, but mostly we were hired to squire rich, brokenhearted ladies around Reno, hold their purses while they shopped, and lead them on trail rides through the high desert. We chatted with them about the weather, offered a sympathetic ear when they wanted to talk about their troubles, told them they looked good when they needed to hear it most. All excellent training for a career in medicine, if you ask me.
So, sure, pull up a chair. I’d be happy to tell you what I know. No, I don’t mind if you record our conversation. This will be a treat for me, particularly after all these years. I learned long ago not to talk about my cowboy past because people have such lurid tabloid sensibilities that it was hard to make anybody understand what that job was like. I’m as bad as anybody, I guess, making light of something I have no business making jokes about. It was serious work, taking care of our ladies during such a painful time in their lives. I think I learned more about the subtleties of suffering and the milk of human kindness working on the ranch than I did in all the years that came after. I wouldn’t take anything for that experience.
Let’s see if I can identify the other characters in this photograph for you. First and last names? Well, I’ll try. Here’s the other cowboy who worked alongside me. Sam. He favors Gary Cooper in High Noon, don’t you think? What? You’ve never seen it? Well, you’re missing out. It’s a good one. Was on the late show just last week. I stayed up half the night watching it. An upside of retirement, knowing nobody needs you to be anywhere that matters in the morning. Nobody cares anymore.
Sam’s last name was Vittori, that I know. Now, this gentleman in the sharp-looking suit, that’s Max. Maxwell Gregory. Used to be some kind of businessman in Chicago. Came to Reno looking for fresh air and investment opportunities and a way out of the big bad city. Margaret, here, with the curly black hair and Shirley Temple dimples, his partner in business and in life, ran the house, kept the books, dispensed wisdom. She’d read about divorce ranches in a movie magazine, as I remember, and convinced Max to buy a washed-up cattle ranch and set up shop. The idea of busting out of failed marriages and starting fresh was more or less a new idea then, you see, and Reno was the place to do it. After six weeks hand-running of residency there our guests were legally unhitched by the great state of Nevada. Free to roll the dice again, if they so desired. Many a second marriage I know of has outperformed the first. Yes. Exactly. Not going in with blinders on. It’s when you get up into the third and fourth and seventh ones that people may start to wonder, but who’s to say? It might take that many tries to pick a winner.
Anyway. Max hired a Hollywood set designer to make the place over into the movie-magazine version of the Old West—boulders, sagebrush, a corral, what have you. Margaret renamed the ranch The Flying Leap and got it outfitted with the modern amenities the clientele they were after wouldn’t want to do without—electricity, indoor plumbing, a telephone. The two of them were such delightful hosts that the well-heeled and often-married set came back there for all their divorces, or tried to.
This blonde on my left who’s as tall as I am, for example, was one of our repeat customers, Nina O’Malley. Max and Margaret loved her. So did Sam. So did I, eventually. Her partner in crime that go-round was this one, Emily Sommer. Nina and Emily must be old women now, or dead. Imagine that. These other half a dozen ladies, give me some time and maybe their names will come to me.
You know, I used to have a copy of this very photograph. Funny, isn’t it, how you’re sure you’ll never want to see a thing again but after it’s lost to you, you wish you had it back again. How much time you got? I believe I could fill your whole book with the shenanigans from that single six-week cycle. It came right at the tail end of my time there, as it happens, so I remember it better than I might otherwise. Something like fifty years ago now. Hard to believe.
Chapter One
Nevada, June 1938
I drove the stagecoach to the airport to pick up Nina.
Back when Max and the Hollywood set designer had been shopping for frontier paraphernalia for the ranch, they’d stumbled onto it rotting under a tarp in a shed over in Virginia City. Max bought the stagecoach on the spot, figuring it would be a smart promotional gimmick, the ideal vehicle for picking up ladies at the train. He got that creaky old gut-juggler refurbished and painted a Pegasus on its doors. The winged horse, yes, jumping through a hoop of words that read The Flying Leap Dude Ranch. Max wanted to add a slogan, a line a Reno judge used every time he gaveled a woman from wife to divorcée: Better luck next time. But Margaret, always the voice of reason, put the kibosh on that.
I don’t know how much Max paid for our antediluvian taxi, but it was worth every penny. It was all but guaranteed a guest’s face would light up when she realized the coach had come for her. You could see her thinking that her once-upon-a-time might not be over and done with yet if such a good-looking cowboy awaited her, ready to relieve her of her baggage and hand her inside that carriage. Max called that old rattletrap conveyance the Mixmaster because he swore an hour of being shaken half to death inside it could make friends of women with little in common other than great wealth and marital distress. Friends, if not for life, at least for their stretch with us, which was what we cared about.
The day Nina arrived I’d shucked off my shirt while I hitched four of our six horses to the coach. My mother would have had the vapors if she’d caught me working shirtless anyplace where a lady might lay eyes on me. Max, however, instructed us to strip to the waist whenever we did chores, weather permitting. A little perk for the clientele, honest labor and rippling muscles being two things our affluent ladies might not have seen very much of lately, or at all.