Dream of The Broken Horses, The Read online

  Fortunately for Hayes it had been a beautiful spring day; the previous year Parents Day had been rained out. Flower beds were in full bloom; playing fields shimmered green beneath the afternoon sun. The cars — shiny station wagons, splendid Jaguars, Mercedes, BMWs, a Rolls or two. Parents wandered the campus, fathers in tweed jackets, mothers in gaily colored frocks. Mrs. Fulraine, we recalled, wore a sleeveless off-white linen dress that glistened in the light.

  The purpose of Parents Day was to give parents an opportunity to see the school in action, visit classes, view scheduled sporting events, and most particularly meet with those in whose tender care they had entrusted the education of their sons. Teachers were primed not only to discuss schoolwork but also their students' moral progress, the true and underlying purpose, our headmaster often proclaimed, of a Hayes education.

  I recall standing to the side that day as my parents discussed me with my favorite teacher, Miss Hilda Tucker, who had guided and encouraged my interest in art throughout my Hayes career.

  Mark's younger brother Robin was in fifth grade. His homeroom teacher was Mr. Jessup. Thus it was natural that Mrs. Fulraine seek an audience to find out how Robin was doing. Replaying the swirl of events that afternoon, Jerry Glickman and I recalled the two of them speaking quietly somewhat apart from the crowd of parents, teachers, and boys, with a greater intensity and for a longer span of time than normal between a mother and teacher.

  As seventh graders, our fantasies about their conversation were naïve.

  "Maybe he told her she had great tits," Jerry offered.

  My response: "Maybe she stared down at his crotch."

  We agreed it couldn't have happened that way.

  "Then how did it happen?" Jerry asked.

  I scratched my head. "They talked about Robin and Mark, what great little guys they were. Maybe she told him she was worried how, with the divorce and all, they weren't getting the kind of fathering boys need."

  "So then—?"

  I improvised. "He told her they were doing great, but he was available if they needed extra help... like coaching, tutoring, and such."

  "What about sex?"

  "They didn't get to that. They were attracted, but they were smooth about it. By offering extra help, Mr. Jessup signaled he was interested in coming out to the house."

  "Right. So if she took him up on it, he'd figure she was interested too."

  "Yeah!"

  Now standing where Tom and Barbara stood that day, by the fountain in the paved school courtyard bounded by the Common Room and classroom wings, I imagine the play of their eyes, their searching looks, the unspoken yearning each sensed and felt.

  Perhaps Barbara, being a vibrant, sensual woman, felt a sudden, unaccountable animal hunger for this attractive young man standing so straight and attentive before her — fresh, lean, clean-cut, the very opposite of the stout, lined, jaded quasi-gangster with whom she'd had slimy sex earlier that afternoon.

  Tom, I think, would have been shattered by her beauty and entranced by her sultry gaze. No other mother that day had looked at him like this. No other mother exuded such pure and forceful sexual energy. Since starting at Hayes, his life had been consumed by boys. He'd had no time to date, no opportunity to meet young women. Now, suddenly, here was a person in whose eyes he could read desire.

  Whatever they said to one another — and it was probably fairly close to what Jerry and I imagined once we got over our first crude fantasies — it was the silent dance of their eyes that pierced those secret places in human hearts where attraction and love are suddenly born. This eye-ballet would have been further enhanced by their surroundings — spring air scented by flowers and freshly mowed grass, a special slant of golden afternoon light, most of all the warm air bath that raised an attractive gloss from their sun-washed skin while releasing those aromatic attractors Mr. Butterfield, our science teacher, told us were called pheromones.

  I'd like to draw them as they stood together that day, two gorgeous, silent, poised about-to-become lovers facing one another just outside the jabbering crowd. But it's getting late, the light is failing, I may not have the skill... and also, I have an appointment I must keep.

  * * * * *

  Hilda Tucker taught art at Hayes for thirty years. She was already in her forties when I entered the school in the first grade, a patient, nurturing buxom woman, who, from the first day, recognizing a slim talent, took me under her gentle wing.

  "Work hard on your drawing, David," she would tell me. "Drawing is the basis of art."

  I believed her, worked hard on my drawing, ending up not the painter she'd hoped, but a glib draftsman specializing in eyewitness portraits and, my latest incarnation, rapidly drawn courtroom caricatures.

  She still lives in the small tract house just two miles down the road from Hayes, from which she would bicycle to and from school every day, except during snowstorms when she walked. Driving up to the house, I distill an image of her from my schooldays, not crouched over the handlebars of her bike the way people ride today, but sitting upright in the traditional manner, pedaling proudly, cheerfully oblivious to passing cars.

  "David...!" She embraces me at her door with the same warm, welcoming expression she always displayed when greeting me at school. "I've been looking forward to this all week!"

  She ushers me into a small living room dominated by a baby grand piano covered with framed photographs of former students. The paintings clustered on the walls are not at all conventional — brilliant color-filled landscapes reminiscent of the French Fauves. I gaze at them and then at Miss Tucker and then at her canvasses again, executed on her annual summer trips to France where she'd set up her easel in a field or by the side of a road, then proceed, as she used to put it, to ‘paint the light."

  "Your paintings still move me."

  "So kind of you to say that, David."

  "The large one over the mantle — didn't it used to hang in your classroom beside the door?" She nods. "Now seeing so many together, I understand what you were doing. Why, I wonder, didn't I see it before?"

  "Simple, David. You were a child. Now you're an adult, an artist, too."

  She leaves me with her pictures while she retreats to her backyard garden to fetch her companion, Helen Slater. Miss Slater, also retired, taught music for years at Ashley-Burnett, the private school for girls in Van Buren Heights attended by my sister, Rachel.

  A couple minutes later Miss Tucker returns.

  "Helen'll be in soon. Still got some weeding to do. I do miss our summers in France, but the garden's a great joy. Not quite so glorious as our bicycle trips through Provence..." she smiles, "but nearly so." She pauses. "You know, David, back when you were in school, people called our relationship, Helen's and mine, a ‘Boston marriage.’ Times have changed. Now we're just ‘those two old dykes across the road.’"

  She skakes her head when I protest. "We really are old," she says. "But I don't regret a thing. Not even giving the better part of my life to the art education of little boys. Students like you, who took up art as a career, made it all worthwhile."

  "I'm not really an artist," I remind her gently. "Just an illustrator."

  "I wouldn't care if you drew comic books. You've chosen to live in the realm of art." Her gentle brown eyes settle upon me. "It pleases me to think I had something to do with that."

  She had much to do with it. She also instilled in me standards according to which I came to understand, my second year at Pratt, that I was never going to be a serious painter. For one thing, I wasn't interested in conceptual art or in using artwork to explore theory. For another, I was fascinated with character as revealed in portraits. Yet the prospect of painting flattering commissioned portraits of social and corporate types filled me with despair. Better, I thought, to use whatever skill I had to explore the dark side, to draw kidnappers, murderers, and rapists.

  "I've been recalling Tom Jessup ever since you phoned," Miss Tucker tells me. "It's been years since I've thought of him. I was
probably his closest friend on the faculty. Those old Hayes teachers didn't take kindly to new blood. You had to put in ten years of drudgery before they'd accept you as a peer. Tom was sweet, innocent, almost naïve. He didn't understand their coldness. ‘What's their problem, Hildy?’ He always called me that. ‘Why won't they help me out?’ Tom wanted to be a great teacher. He thought of teaching as a calling. He couldn't understand why those old farts wouldn't mentor him a bit."

  "Was he really so innocent?" I ask. "After all, he went into that affair."

  "Yes... of course... but for me that's the proof. A more sophisticated man would have had the good sense to stay away from a woman like that. She was too rich, too beautiful, much too high above his station, plus she was older and the mother of two of his students. You don't come new into a school like Hayes and start sleeping around with your students' parents. Barbara Fulraine, as we all later found out, had been around the block a few times. Just the sort of woman who could bring ruin upon a young man. Once she tired of Tom, and sooner or later she would, she'd have left him miserable if not destroyed. So, you see, I think it was innocent of him to get involved with her. I'm sure it was loneliness that drove him to it. And her guile."

  Guile: You don't hear a word like that too often these days, but Hilda Tucker employs it straight-faced. It's clear she still feels distaste for Barbara Fulraine and blames her for everything that happened.

  "No one hated Tom," she says. "No one wanted him dead. It was her they were after. And since he was with her, they killed him too."

  I don't tell her that for a while I actually did hate Tom Jessup, that, even after he was dead, when I found out that he'd been privately coaching the Fulraine boys, I remained angry at him for his favoritism.

  "You describe him as sweet and naïve," I tell her, "but for me that's much too vague. What was he really like? What were his passions? Surely he'd had girlfriends before."

  "That's true," she says. "There was a girl, Susan something — I can't remember her name. They met in college, lived together. He didn't talk much about her, just mentioned that it hadn't worked out. She moved to New York, became a stockbroker. They stayed friends, kept in touch by phone. I don't think you know, David, how lonely the man was. He lived in a rooming house on Ohio Street down near the university. Had virtually no social life, barely knew anybody in town. As Lower School French teacher and coach, he was surrounded all day by little boys. Every so often Helen and I would have him for dinner. He was an excellent guest — bright, charming, full of life. The three of us would speak French, his, of course, a lot better than ours. We loved those evenings. It was good practice for our summers. I remember too he'd always bring a bouquet and a bottle of wine."

  I'm not buying it.

  "Wasn't there anything wrong with this guy?"

  She gazes at me.

  "Actually, there was," she says finally. "Not wrong exactly. In fact not wrong at all. But he was so innocent he thought it was wrong. We talked about it. I was touched he chose me as his confidante. Later Helen, too. We both tried to help.

  "What?"

  "Seems there was a young woman in his rooming house, a high-strung grad student who occupied the room next door. Somehow she became smitten with him to the extent she'd wait by her door until she heard him leaving, then step into the hallway, acting as if these meetings were just amusing coincidences. When that didn't get her anywhere, she became more aggressive, once actually bursting in one him when he was showering in the shared bathroom down the hall. Tom took a kind tack with her but only increased her interest. Finally, to put an end to it, he fibbed and told her he was gay. Once it was clear there was no possibility of romance, she was content just to be his friend."

  "Seems a good solution. I don't see why he was upset about it."

  "Tom was so honest it pained him to tell a lie. And now the big lie he'd told her led to a whole series of little lies, which became a terrible burden on his conscience and his time."

  "Why didn't he just move out?"

  "That's what we advised. But he had the guilts over this girl, was afraid if he left suddenly she'd be hurt. They did a lot of things together — went to the movies, took hikes, stuff like that. His plan was to leave at the end of spring term, go off for the summer, maybe take a camp counseling job, then find a new place to live come fall. But I had my own theory."

  "Which was—?"

  "That because he was so lonely he became attached to her, and, more interesting, that there was a side of him that enjoyed the deceit. Tom's whole life had been devoted to virtue. At one point, he told us, he seriously considered attending divinity school. He'd been a Boy Scout as a kid, then an Eagle Scout, then a conscientious objector who'd volunteered to be a field medic, one of the most dangerous jobs in the Vietnam War. He'd always been a straight-shooter — kind, generous, the sort who'd always tried to do the right thing. Now he was deep into deception with this girl, and the thicker the web of lies the more rotten he felt about it. And yet in some weird way he didn't understand and to which he couldn't admit, I believe he reveled in his deception."

  "That is weird!"

  "It was all those lies, I think, that set him up for the affair with Mrs. Fulraine. We didn't know who she was, of course. Not at the time. All we knew was she was someone in society. That worried us. Helen and I talked about it that summer in France. Then when we heard what happened and who she was — well, we just felt awful, felt that we'd failed him, hadn't helped him understand where he was going with his life."

  Miss Tucker shakes her head. "I think what happened to Tom is that his rectitude burned out. He'd come to a point where he needed to go down a different path, and that woman showed him just how to do it."

  I stare at her, surprised at the revelation. That Tom Jessup, in his affair with Barbara, was exploring the dark side of his nature had never occurred to me. But now, thinking about it, a new set of ideas starts taking shape. All the passion of that summer, the obsessive lovemaking — was that but a means for Tom to discover the kind of person he really was?

  "Do you think there was love between them?"

  Miss Tucker scoffs. "He may have deluded himself. I'm sure she didn't. I'm certain that when he stopped satisfying and amusing her, she'd have dumped him, harshly too. As for Tom, all the sneaking around probably added to his excitement. Plus the novelty of being with such an experienced woman. Poor boy! He was blinded — by her position, money, beauty, and guile. My God! She was sleeping with a gangster! She wasn't the sort of person you could be tender with. She was exploiting him, using him to make the other man jealous."

  Helen Slater enters the room. A handsome, gray-haired woman in tanktop and shorts, she greets me with a warm smile.

  "I remember you well," she says. "Hildy spoke about you often. ‘There's this one kid over there who can really draw!’ I also remember teaching your sister at Ashley-Burnett. We've followed your career, David. All those killers! Who'd have thought you'd end up drawing people like that!"

  We talk about the Foster trial. Because both victim and accused were musicians, Helen's fascinated and wants to hear all the gossip. While I fill her in, Miss Tucker retires to prepare tea. When she appears again, with a tray holding a teapot, cups, and a platter of sweets, I turn the conversation back to Tom Jessup.

  Helen's view is similar to Helen's, but they differ in their appraisal.

  "He was morally immature," Helen says. "I think he could have gone either way, stuck to virtue, become a professional do-gooder, or gone over the edge exploring his selfish side. But I think if he hadn't been killed and his affair with that woman had fizzled, he'd have fallen into a depression, then pulled himself out pretty quickly. Hildy, of course, thinks he would have been shattered." She puts her arm lovingly around her companion. "Anyhow, I like to think Tom found some happiness those last steamy months of his life."

  At the door I remind Miss Tucker of something she whispered to me my last day at Hayes.

  "‘Don't think you can snatch a
leaf from the laurel tree of art without paying for it with your life.’"

  "Yes, of course," she says, beaming. "From Tonio Kröger by Thomas Mann. It's still one of my favorite quotes." She turns to Helen. "It's true too, don't you think?"

  Helen nods. "Oh, so true," she agrees.

  6

  A different feeling in Waldo's tonight. People seem to be in a rotten mood. I learn that an hour ago a CNN cameraman and a local soundman got in a fistfight.

  Tony the barman fills me in. Seems that while competing for position to pick up the day's crucial sound bite, the local stepped on the network guy's foot.

  "It wasn't about his foot."

  Tony and I look up. This offering comes from Sylvia Browne, the black reporter from Chicago under contract to write a book. She's perched on her usual stool at the end of the bar.

  "What was it about, Sylvie?" Tony asks.

  "A woman," she says.

  Tony rolls his eyes. "Isn't it always?"

  "What woman?" I ask.

  "Actually your girlfriend."

  "Pam?"

  Sylvie grins. "More than one girlfriend, David?"

  "What'd it have to do with Pam?"

  "This afternoon she elbowed the local station's girl reporter aside. The foot stamping was retaliation."

  "How do you know this?"

  Sylvie beams. "I observe. What's interesting here isn't the trial, it's the media battles surrounding it. It's all going into my book. By the way, David — you better watch out. This morning CNN fired Henderson. I hear they're bringing in Washburn. He's good." She giggles, then turns away.

  I step out to the lobby to call Pam on my cell phone.

  "Where are you?" I ask when she picks up.

  "Production suite."

  "Hear about the fight?"

  "Yeah. Boys'll be boys."

  "Is it true Henderson's out and Washburn's in?"

  "You've got good sources, David. I'm with Wash now."

  You really call him that?"