have sent them to herself. He insisted tat 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 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 by 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 solid about his interpretation that compares poorly with what I believe Dad was grasping for. 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 – why 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 kidnaper perhaps, an abductor of prepubescent girls? Best, I decide, to be on my way.
When 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.
'How's it going, old boy?'
I look up to confront the cloying grin of Waldo's successor, Spencer Deval, flaunting his trademark open collar and silk ascot.
'Mind if I join you?' he asks.
'Actually I'm waiting for someone,' I tell him, covering my drawing while easing my shoulder from his grasp.
'Oh, I know. She'll be down in a bit. Meantime, I thought we might chat.' He perches uninvited on the bar stool to my right. Though he's short and stout, I notice he sits erect, angling up his chin to assert dominance.
'What about?' I ask him. 'We don't really know one another.'
'I'd rather like to get to know you,' he says, voice warm, unctuous. 'I'm a great admirer of your work.'
I make a point of not returning the compliment. His raspy pseudo-British accent amuses me, but his transparent attempt at flattery annoys. Having long disdained him from a distance, I find I'm not yet ready to join his following.
'Rumor has it you're looking into one of our old unsolved murder cases. Fascinating city, Calista, from the unsolved crime point of view. That old Flamingo Motel case, for instance. Lot more interesting than Foster- Meadows. Or maybe you just feel that way because you're bored.'
How would he know how I feel? 'Who told you I was looking into it?' I ask, wondering if Deval was the man who'd asked Johnny whether I'd been around the Flamingo Court.
'Oh… a little birdie told me.' He lisps out the words in a musical birdlike voice, then adds a silent tweet- tweet with his lips.
A little birdie: the same phrase Waldo used to source the blind item he ran about Dad and Barbara in his
