The Dream of the Broken Horses (27 page)

"Let me tell you about that dream," Izzy says. "Tom thought he had it figured out. You probably saw where he was heading—toward a father/infant daughter seduction interpretation. As a child, Mrs. Fulraine was sexually touched by her father. Her 'Dream of the Broken Horses' was a vision of that trauma triggered by a deep sense of guilt and loss brought on by her own daughter's abduction. Tom felt that a good interpretation along those lines would help her overcome her erotomania. I had my own ideas. I still remember Tom coming to me after their first session. He was so excited. 'Izzy, this is what I've been waiting for my entire professional life, a multilayered dream with rich erotic content that cries out to be solved and written up.' "

Izzy smiles. "Of course, I encouraged him. No question he'd lucked into a glamorous patient. So many of our patients are tiresome. Listening to their drivel three and four hours a week—you can imagine what a drain that is. Now, of course, there aren't enough patients, with psychoanalysis so out of fashion."

Izzy's
sharp eyes tear up. His voice, soothing till now, starts to break.

"For all Tom's hopes, things didn't work out. He had this screwy idea he should 'enter in,' step inside her neurosis, work on it from the interior. He wasn't the first to try a move like that. But before you attempt something so extreme, you must closely examine your motives. Are you in love with the patient? In lust with her? Has she so entranced you that you're looking to therapeutically justify an affair? If she hadn't been murdered—God knows how it might have ended!"

He excuses himself, returns with two bottles of German beer, then suggests we sit outside.

His garden is subtly beautiful, a medley of muted greens and grays. A lively creek, winding though the property, creates a soothing sound. We sit on an old wooden bench, stick out our legs, and listen to the water running over smooth stones.

The garden, he tells me, was crucial to Lindstrom's concept for the house.

"I explained how my work involved me in turmoil. 'Give me a safe haven,' I said, 'a place to escape from other peoples' craziness.' Lindstrom liked that. It was a way to create a contrast to the clean, sharp lines of the building."

He turns to me. "Martha loved this place. That final summer, when she knew she was dying, she'd have me wheel her out here, then we'd sit for hours just listening to the water."

I remember Martha Mendoza, a quiet, sad-eyed lady, a talented art weaver who'd had several successful shows in New York. We had one of her strange, dark yarn sculptures hanging in our house.

"Listen, David, you have every right to look into your father's life. But I must advise you that the deeper you delve, the greater the possibility you'll become upset and depressed. So . . . as long as you're aware. . . ."

I assure him I am.

"Well, then, I'll tell you what I know. As I said, Tom was devastated when Mrs. Fulraine was killed. In his paper, he tells us proudly how he parried her seductions. In fact, I believe, he
was
seduced. It was the most severe case of counter-transference reaction I'd ever seen."

Izzy shakes his head. "He knew what was happening. At first he tried to convince himself it was just sex. She aroused him—simple as that. But it was so much more. He wanted her, needed her, lived for their sessions. When he came to me for help and I put him back on the couch, he told me his fantasy: that he'd solve her dream, show her how she could be happy, then, after a decent interval, divorce your mother and marry her. They'd become this great romantic couple, the rich girl and the shrink who'd cured her. I told him that was pretty much the story Scott Fitzgerald had written in Tender Is the Night, except the marriage in that novel turns out badly and in the end the shrink finds himself used up and destroyed."

Izzy takes a deep breath. "Then something happened, a clue to what she was up to. There was this columnist—"

"Waldo Channing?"

Izzy nods. "Nasty man, but he could turn a phrase. One day that summer Channing ran what they call a blind item. Knowing you were coming today, I dug it out."

He pulls a yellowed clipping from his breast pocket, puts on his glasses, reads the item aloud:

"'A little birdie tells us a certain well-known divorcée, one of Our Happy Few, has lately been making whoopee-do with her shrink. We know those weird guys use couches and get their patients to yap about sex, but this is the first we've heard of one getting down and dirty in the office. Guess all that sex talk can stir the bodily juices . . . so to speak.'"

Listening, I'm struck again by Channing's viciousness.

Izzy takes a sip of beer. "It hit Tom and your mother very hard. The giveaway was Channing's 'Happy Few.' Since his crowd consisted of a couple dozen people, it was obvious whom he meant. So was Tom making 'whoopee-do' with the lady? I asked him point-blank. That's when he told me she'd masturbated in his office. 'For God's sake,' I told him, 'you've got to get out of this! She's unstable. She'll end up suing you for malpractice!'

"Tom assured me that wouldn't happen, that he and Barbara were on the verge of a breakthrough." Izzy shakes his head. "For me it was clear. The woman was malicious. Her relationship with the gangster was part and parcel of her fantasy that she was some kind of femme fatale in a real-life film noir. Most likely she'd planted the item with Channing. Now she was pulling Tom into her vortex, and he was so besotted he didn't see it. 'She'll destroy you,' I told him. 'That column item's just a taste. Turn her over to someone else. If you like, I'll take her on myself.'

"Tom, I can tell you, was not at all happy to hear that. This was going to be
his
Great Case, and he wasn't turning it over to anybody, least of all me." Izzy looks at me. "You know about the condom?"

I shake my head.

Izzy gives me a quick glance. Over the last weeks of her life, Mrs. Fulraine received a number of envelopes addressed in block capitals. No writing inside, just artifacts, including, in one case, a condom."

I stare at him. "In what condition? I mean, was—?"

"—it
 
used?" Izzy shrugs. "It was filled with some sort of substance, then tied off at the top. Today, of course, with DNA testing, a semen sample, if indeed it was semen, would make powerful forensic evidence. But it was the sequence of those envelopes that was so disturbing, the ascending expression of rage. To Tom it looked like a cleverly contrived campaign of intimidation and terror."

"That's so vile! Why didn't Mrs. Fulraine go to the cops?"

"Tom urged her to, but she refused. She told him she believed the letters came from someone with whom she'd had a major falling out, that they were some sort of complex message about her daughter, money, and sex. I didn't believe that. I thought it was much too pat. I suggested to Tom that the letters were bogus, that she may have sent them to herself. He insisted that wasn't true, too adamantly, I thought. Then I wondered if Tom had gone off the deep end and sent them to her himself"

"Why? What could he have gained?"

"Drawn her closer. She brought out strange things in him. Since he was smitten by her, any behavior, even the most improbable, couldn't be ruled out. There's a reason I bring this up. It has to do with Mrs. Fulraine's dream and the possibility that, like the letters, the dream may have been bogus, too."

Bogus!
I find this notion disturbing, perhaps because it reminds me of how once I was disbelieved. Following Izzy back into the house, I'm drawn again to the "The
Wolfman's
Dream."

What if, I ask him, the patient Freud called The Wolfman made up his dream to gain Freud's attention? Or what if Freud made up the entire case to show off his brilliance? Can any dream be trusted? Any story? Don't humans depend on trust as a moral necessity? Isn't that why any breach, such as a shrink who sends crude anonymous letters to a patient or a patient who fabricates an erotic dream to seduce a shrink, strikes us as an outrageous breaking of a compact?

Izzy nods at each of my points.

"You're right to feel outraged," he says. "After all, how dare I question your father's integrity? But these are human failings I'm talking about, not issues of good and evil. No, I don't think Tom sent those letters and I don't really believe Mrs. Fulraine counterfeited her dream. I just raise those possibilities to show you how complicated the case was and the extent to which I'm still confused by it."

He positions himself before his fireplace, the Wolfman etching looming above his head.

"If I've learned anything," he says, "in all my years of practice, it's what my own training analyst, V. D.
Nadel
, told me when I started out—that the best interpretations, like the best equations in physics, are always the simplest, most aesthetic, most direct.

"I disagreed with your father's interpretation. I found it tortuously complex. For me, the dream of the broken horses was not about a girl being sexually touched by her father but was simply about sexual guilt.

"The elusive man on the horse ahead is Barbara's father, whom she lusts after and adores. The pursuing posse behind, horsemen of the apocalypse if you will, personified by the lone horsewoman with the red-lined hood, is her mother hounding her, threatening to punish her for her sexual feelings toward her father and by extension toward all men.

"The horse she rides is a generic lover, a stand-in for all the lovers she rode hard and crushed with her sex. The excitement-pain she feels as she rides is the pain of sex her mother warned her about when she explained menstruation and which her riding instructor so memorably referred to as her 'wound.'

"As for the end, the breaking of the horses—that's the crack-up, the destruction she brings to all her relationships, with parents, lovers, even her own children. In short, the broken horses are the wreckage she's made of her life."

He stops, looks at me as if to say:
Well, there it is!
But I'm not impressed. There's something stolid about his interpretation that compares poorly with what I believe Dad was grasping toward. Anyway, it's time for me to leave. I'm to meet Pam in half an hour.

At the door, I hesitate. "Dr. Mendoza, I can't leave without asking you this. Did Dad and Mrs. Fulraine have an affair?"

Izzy looks away. "She was a complex and highly sexed woman. Beside her Tom was relatively naive. So—did they make love? Tom never said they did, so I honestly don't know. Do I
think
they did? That's another question. Sadly my answer is—I do."

I
feel the encroaching darkness as I drive through the silent tree-lined streets of Van Buren Heights, streets with British-sounding names: Woodmere, Tawsingham, Clarence, Exeter, Greenwich, Oak Hollow, Somerset, Dorset Lane.

With the dusk, the oaks and maples cast heavy shadows upon the lawns, while the houses behind show well-made false fronts: Tudor, Georgian, Spanish colonial; there're even several little Norman chateaux with turret staircases and mansard roofs. Only occasionally do I pass pedestrians: a middle-aged man walking a tired dog; a girl on a bicycle, ponytail whipping behind, pedaling one-handed down a dark, tree-lined street.

Our old house on Demington is just blocks away. It won't take but a few extra minutes to stop by. I turn the corner at Winslow, drive a block, make a left on Stuart, a right on Oxford, then take the right fork where it intersects with Demington. The street curves gently here, winds its way between park land and the Pembroke Country Club golf course. After Talbot, it becomes residential again. This first block is where we lived. I used to know it cold, every bump in the street, every break in the sidewalks.
"Step on a crack, your mother gets a broken back,"
we kids on Demington would chant.

The windows in our old house are dark tonight, except for a flickering in what used to be my parents' bedroom on the second floor. It's a TV set, probably placed where my parents kept theirs, on a bureau facing their bed.

I pull over to the curb, cut my engine and lights. No sounds outside except the whisper of the hot August night wind. In the darkness I catch the trails of fireflies dancing in the sticky air above the front lawn. Then I hear crickets chirping in the hedges. Somewhere in the distance a dog howls sorrow.

We were happy here,
I think.
Or was that our family myth?
Remembering
Izzy's
last words to me minutes ago, I think:
Perhaps that summer we were the unhappiest family in all of Calista.

A light comes on across the street. I turn, spot a man poised upon his stoop, silhouetted against the interior of his house. He's staring at me, doubtless wondering what a stranger is doing at this hour sitting silent in a darkened car. Burglar scouting the neighborhood? Private detective collecting evidence? Or a kidnapper perhaps, an abductor of prepubescent girls? Best, I decide, to be on my way.

W
hen I step into Waldo's, Tony tells me Pam called minutes before to say she was running late.

"She's in a meeting with Mr.
Starret
. Says she'll be down soon as she's finished," Tony says, planting a perfect margarita before me on the bar.

I pull out my sketchbook and start to draw. I'm halfway finished with a sketch of Dad sitting in his car in the Flamingo parking lot, when a shadow crosses the page and a hand descends upon my shoulder.