The Dream of the Broken Horses (10 page)

"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 shakes 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 naive. 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 naive," 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 anyone 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 the 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 on him when he was showering in the shared bathroom down the hall. Tom took a kind tack with her, but that 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 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 Hilda'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
Kroger
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.

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 into 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 Sylvie 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."