Beauty Queen

aggressive to the other children. She is going to hold the child back a year. She still insisted that a psychiatrist should see the child, and that she must be put on Ritalin, or she will disrupt the class next year too. And of course, I will not be railroaded into having the child drugged, when it's simply a question of discipline. The question, Reverend Irving, is zvhat discipline? Thank God for Steve, my one good child."
    A little while later, she was walking back down the flagstone walk to her car. The visit with Reverend Irving, instead of uplifting her spirit, had left her feeling depressed and helpless.
    She drove back to 22, swung north, passed the Bel Aire Motel.
    At Pawling, she took the familiar turnoff to the east, and shortly the car was shooting up along the hairpin curves that led to the top of Quaker Hill. Tires screeched a little on the curves, and the scented air of the woods blew softly through her open window.
    Quaker Hill was a choice residential enclave in Dutchess County. In the old days, the area had been settled mainly by Baptists and Quakers. Now it was protected from urban invasion by strict zoning laws and a staunch little landowners' association who fought change and modernity. Its far-flung mansions, and its colonial and Victorian homes, sheltering amid massive oaks and maples, were homes for conservative-minded people like Lowell Thomas, Norman Vincent Peale and top executives of the Reader's Digest.
    It was with a feeling of foreboding that she pulled the car into the drive of 11 Ichabod Road, and sat looking at the house.
    Ever since she was eleven, this had been the family place. Her father hadn't really wanted a country place, but Cora had come to hate New York City and she had insisted. So he had scraped together his savings, plus a loan, for the down payment on this beautiful 100-year-old house, and the barn and twenty acres that went with it. It was just a little above his means, but—typical of her mother—when her husband made his first million and could afford a more splendid place somewhere else in Quaker Hill, she still said that she was satisfied. She named it Windfall, because of the apples she had found in the grass in the untended old orchard.
    The rambling clapboard house was painted a soft yellow. Big poplars threw a screen of sparkling hght and shade across the wide veranda where unpainted wicker chairs invited rest and thought. Baroque scrolls over the windows and the front door gave the place a touch of grandeur. Inside, the fifteen rooms were ample enough to give Jeannie and her husband privacy when they married, and the same to the grandchildren when they grew. Despite Cora's death, it had remained a family home.
    Across the lawn to the south, the gnarled apple trees, now pruned, bore many apples once again, like Sarah bringing forth her child in her old age.
    Looking at the house, Jeannie could recall her surprise at first learning that there was something called the country. The wide sunny spaces, the grass, the insects—all terrified her at first. But she got used to it quickly. Even now, though she felt that God called her to stay in the city, she felt deeply drawn to the peace and innocence of this place.
    Getting slowly out of the car, she walked up the flagstone path toward the house. Little by little, the feeling of balance that she'd had before talking to Reverend Irving was coming back to her.
    Then her dreamlike state was shattered by a fierce ululating war whoop. She turned, and saw her smallest daughter, Jessica, galloping madly toward her on the black Welsh pony, Jet. Jessica, whom the teachers at the Lerner Day School found too much of a tornado to contain in their classrooms. Jessica was wearing a pair of Steve's too-large jeans, which were strictly forbidden to her, and she was riding like a warrior, clamped boldly to the pony's round back with her little legs. One fist clenched the mane and the reins, and the other pounded at Jet's fat black rump with a birch stick.
    "Woo-wooo-wooo-wooo!" Jessica was yelping in the most blood-thirsty fashion she could manage. "Yeeooo-wooo-wooo-wooo!"
    Jeannie gave a little shriek as the pony buzzed past her, spraying her with clods of grass and dirt.
    "Jessica!" she yelled. "Come here this instant!"
    Deaf as Reverend Irving to anything she didn't want to hear, Jessica galloped on across the lawn.
    "Jess!" her mother thundered. "Do—you—hear—me!"
    Pony and girl plunged off into the orchard, out of