The Dream of the Broken Horses (9 page)

"Give it to him, Mark!"

"Beat the crap out of him!" yelled Mark's brother, Robin, who would be acting as Mark's second.

I think I might have choked out of sheer loneliness if Jerry Glickman hadn't come forward then to encourage me and help me with my gloves. Since psychology is half of any battle, choking up would have doomed me for sure. But thanks to Jerry, despite the favoritism of the crowd, I managed to keep my head.

"He's too cocky," Jerry whispered. "He's riding for a fall."

Filled with gratitude, I looked around for Tim, my other friend. Appalled to find him in Mark's corner whispering encouragement, I heard mumbling in the audience: "Hawthorn's turned. Hawthorn's rooting for Fulraine!"

You will be betrayed.

That was the first lesson I learned that Friday afternoon. But strangely instead of eroding my confidence, Tim's betrayal gave me strength. I'll show him! I remember thinking. And at that I focused my anger on my betrayer, glaring at him so hard I forced him to lower his eyes.

The Hayes School, now coed but in those days exclusively for boys, prided itself on its instruction in manly sporting arts and values. Hayes boys, we were taught, played fair and true. Hayes football players never shirked a tackle, Hayes basketball players always leapt for heaven, and, in the boxing ring, Hayes boys gave all with honor and heart.

Mr. Jessup came over to check my mouthpiece and gloves.

"Everything okay?" he asked. I nodded. "Best now you do like Mark, shadowbox a little to warm up," he advised.

I nodded again, then stood and joined Mark, flamboyantly shadowboxing around the ring. Then Mr. Jessup beckoned us to the center to instruct us in the rules.

"Three two-minute rounds. Compulsory ten count on a knockdown. Break when I tell you. If either of you wants to stop, say so and it's over."

Mark and I nodded.

"Good! Now come out swinging. May the best man win!"

Mark and I briefly touch gloved hands, Jessup stood back, then Mark and I began to fight.

I don't remember much about the bout, have no memory of particular blows. But I do remember they came fast and hard, and that after a slow start, to my surprise, I began to give as good as I got. There was ebb and flow; at times I became the aggressor, pursuing Mark across the ring. Other times he backed me against the ropes with a flurry of hooks and jabs. I remember Jerry encouraging me while offering me water during the breaks. I also recall Robin Fulraine yelling taunts from the opposing corner. At one point, I remember connecting a right and feeling great satisfaction as Mark's eyes clouded and blood spurted from his nose. I wasn't aware how bloodied up I was myself till the second rest period when I looked with shock at the red towel in Jerry's hand.

"You're a mess, but you're doing great," Jerry assured me.

Mr. Jessup came over.

"You okay?"

I nodded.

"Good! Terrific fight," he said, then moved away.

If I had managed to hold my own in the first two rounds, things fell apart for me in the third. Perhaps it was exhaustion, also Mark's superior athletic ability. Whatever the cause, I realized I was getting beaten. Then suddenly, I remember, I felt my legs give out from under me as I was rocked by a terrific blow to the chin. I fell to the mat. I remember Mr. Jessup
 
giving me a ten count as I struggled to stand up, then shaking my gloves and staring deeply into my eyes while motioning Mark back. I remember standing there stunned, barely able to raise my gloves, as Mark attacked, hitting me in the stomach, then letting loose with a vicious blow to my lower belly that sent me down again.

I remember writhing on the mat in pain and blood, feeling I was going to throw up. It was so obviously an illegal low blow, Mr. Jessup should have stopped the bout right there. Instead he methodically counted me out, yanked me up, then raised Mark's arm in victory. Then amidst cheers from the crowd, he instructed us to shake hands . . . which we did.

Later in the locker room, Jerry beside me while I bent over a sink trying to stanch a cut on my lip, several kids came up to say I'd gotten a rotten deal, that after the low blow Jessup should have stopped the fight and called a draw. Better still, Mark Fulraine came over to apologize.

"The low blow was an accident. I don't fight dirty," he said solemnly. "I still don't like that picture you drew," he added before going off with his friends.

Still later, showered and dressed, crossing the empty gym, I remember watching as a school janitor mopped our blood off the white rubber cover they used to protect the mats.

Contrary to schoolboy mythology, Mark Fulraine and I did not become friends. But after our fight he showed me decent respect, his way, I guess, of saying he was sorry for what he'd said. Suddenly more kids seemed to like me, too. On Graduation Day, there was an exhibition of my sketches in one of the hallways of Lower School. Several boys made a point of introducing me as "class artist" to their parents.

I'
ve been drawing here in the gym for nearly an hour. Now, hearing the sounds of kids returning from soccer practice, I put down my pencil and examine my work. I've got the fight down pretty well, I think. Rather than depicting myself as victim, a role I dislike, I've drawn Mark and me as equally fierce competitors. I also have Mr. Jessup as he appeared to me that day, aloof and out of touch; Jerry, my friend, rooting for me in my corner; and Tim, my betrayer, half turned away, treason in his eyes. But it's my depiction of the audience I like best, their faces filled with those particular
pleasureful
expressions boys assume while watching other boys fight—identification with aggression, intense interest in the outcome, enjoying too the suffering and debasement of the loser.

As for Mr. Jessup, though he never acknowledged that he'd refereed unfairly, in class he continued to praise my work. Still I soured on him. I assumed he'd favored Mark because of the Fulraine family connection to the school. It was only later that I found out that Mrs. Fulraine had hired him that spring to give private tennis and boxing lessons to Mark and Robin, and that, in the early days of their romance, those coaching sessions served as the pretext for Tom to visit the Fulraine estate, where, afterwards, while the boys frolicked in the family pool, he and Barbara Fulraine retreated to her bedroom to make frantic, illicit love.

T
om Jessup had a secret.
 
I was convinced of it. There was something different about him that spring, the way he spoke and moved, which, perhaps because of my hurt over his betrayal, I was eager to understand. The sincere and boyish young schoolmaster, previously so generous and kind, seemed somehow to have changed.

Almost immediately upon his arrival the previous autumn, our new French teacher had become one of the most popular instructors at Hayes. Young, eager, not jaded like the older masters, he had that rare teacher's gift of making a foreign language come alive. Though a conscientious objector, he hadn't fled the country but had served heroically as an army medic in Vietnam. After discharge, he'd worked his way through State, majoring in romance languages. In short, a man I could admire.

But in the spring, his teaching went flat. It was clear that whatever was going on in his interior life was not concern over the education and coaching of pubescent boys. Until the Flamingo shootings the following August, I had no idea why he'd changed. Then it was all over the newspapers, his affair with Barbara Fulraine. The most surprising part of their story, at least to Jerry Glickman and me, was the news that they'd met at Hayes the preceding April on Parents Day.

In September following the shootings, when school resumed for the new term, that meeting became a subject of endless speculation. Jerry and I, then new seventh graders, spent hours going over the events of that day, trying to imagine how it had occurred. We remembered Mrs. Fulraine. Even if nothing dramatic had followed, it would have been impossible to forget her, she was so beautiful, gracious, and glamorously dressed.

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 curving drive that wound up to the front of Hayes was lined with parents' 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 seeing 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 naive.

"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.

H
ilda 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.