The Horses of the Night (21 page)

“He died when I was in college. It broke my mother's spirit. It forced her back into her past. In a way, she reacted like your mother, only much less violently. She moved back into her old neighborhood, and lived quietly and peacefully in a world of soap operas and bridge games where she was born and raised, in Minneapolis. I think seeing me reminded her of what she couldn't bear to remember. My father was that special. When she died it was as though she made up her mind not to breathe anymore.

“I would be proud to accomplish one-third of the good he was able to work in his lifetime. And one thing he bequeathed to me, one precept, that I swear to live out each day: Be true. Be honest. Don't lie, especially not to yourself. If you don't know, admit it. Be ignorant and brave.”

I had never heard her describe her parents in quite this way. There had been, naturally, the occasional anecdote. I had thought that I was getting to know Nona. But now I saw that she was a person I was only beginning to know, and that I could spend years with her, as in a new, unfamiliar country, and still find her amazing.

“I never mentioned why I decided to study psychiatry,” she said. Without waiting for me to respond, she continued, “I had problems of my own. They are all far behind me, thank God. I got the help of someone very capable.”

“I think your father would be proud of you,” I said.

My words touched her. She ran her hand through my hair. She kissed me, her lips the flavor of cinnamon, sunlight. Then she kept her hand there, on my head, as though in an effort to bless me, to give me peace. “Something is after you, Stratton. After your soul. I don't know what it is. But I'm going to fight with you against it.”

“It might be a mistake.”

“Whatever it is, Stratton—it makes me afraid. And it has convinced me: I'm moving in with you. Today.”

29

Anna Wick, DeVere's long-time “right hand and confidante,” as one TV reporter put it, spoke at DeVere's memorial service, an invitation-only affair at the Palace of Fine Arts. The service resembled a pageant more than a ceremony of mourning, and police video cameras swept the crowd. “Looking for crooks,” said the matron behind me in a stage whisper.

“One thing is clear to all of us today: we will never forget Ty DeVere,” said Anna. Black suited her well, as did an expression of thoughtful sadness. She had evidently taken diction training at an early stage in her career. She had the clear tone of a woman reading poetry on educational radio, or a stewardess accustomed to working first class. “His name will be forever a part of our times. When they think of us, they will not remember our individual names, or our faces. They will remember Ty DeVere.”

At his request, his ashes had been scattered in the Pacific. This was a surprising decision, dictated by DeVere's attorneys, although it is possible that DeVere had seen this as less a final annihilation than a way of blessing that largest of oceans with his remains.

Dr. Skeat called late one afternoon. “Please don't visit her again without my permission,” he said.

I prepared myself for bad news. “Is she worse?”

“We adjusted her medication.”

“I'm sorry,” I said.

“An apology won't do a whole lot of good,” said Dr. Skeat. “She needs to be protected.”

“But it's a pretty terrible situation when a woman has to be protected from her sons.”

He agreed that it was. “Apparently you don't realize the corrosive nature of your family.”

“We're loving people—”

“Family love isn't always motivated by wisdom, Mr. Fields. It can be possessive, manipulative, and it can kill people. In your mother's case, we have a reactive trauma if we so much as mention your father.”

My voice was ragged with feeling. “We love her.”

“We have to be careful. Especially in a family like yours.”

He must have sensed my anger over the phone.

“Please, Mr. Fields. Stay away.”

It wasn't fair, I thought, hanging up the phone, stepping to the window. But this was a feeble complaint. Since when was the world just? Besides, Dr. Skeat had been chosen by my brother and myself out of a long list of “sensitive professionals.”

I gazed out the window at the street. My family was—I groped for pale, dried-up phrases: honorable, civic-minded. We were decent people.

I could not keep myself from wondering if the occasional figures strolling in the dark, walking a dog, smoking, were decent, innocent people, or individuals sent to watch us, to remind us that they were out there, waiting.

A few days went by, cue cards splashed with bold letters: good news. More money. Commissions, interviews.

Strengthened by Nona, I entered each new day, very much a man who expects to be attacked, taken at any intersection, any restaurant or gallery. I kept myself at ease, inwardly alert. I was anxious. I was happy.

Fern arranged his hours around my schedule. He drove us to the symphony, to my appointments with potential clients, and I was familiar enough with the way of such guardians that I came to enjoy him without giving him much thought, as one enjoys the shade of a landmark elm.

Packard, the contractor, finished the walls, plastered, painted. The house looked now as I had dreamed it would.

Collie arrived each morning to whisk her ostrich-feather duster about the new furniture arrangement, offered the usual assortment of splendid salads for lunch, and yet I could tell that she understood the household to be under some manner of siege. She appeared pleased at the thought, involved in an important ordeal, inspired, perhaps, by my calm.

My career was unfolding. International calls imprinted themselves on my answering machine, and the planning chiefs of what the financial pages called “energy consortiums” and “communications empires” were planning visits to San Francisco. Notice of my career was printed not on the society pages, and not in a paragraph in a review of local art shows, but on the business pages. It was clear to me that not only was success coming my way, it was coming quite literally to my doorstep.

Time
magazine flew its chief photographer in for a sitting.
Vanity Fair
magazine shot me playing frisbee with Nona at the Marina. The events of these days seemed sacred, devoid as they were of any taint of the uncanny. Rick, and his creditors, played no further part in my life for the time being. This was not unusual. It was typical of Rick to spin through my life with a vivid problem and then vanish.

In all ways my life was becoming a chain of ordered, connected events. It is that characteristic of dailiness that makes us enjoy films, stories, even travel. We intuit that the flow of things, the episodic spill of occurrence, is the natural state of our lives. It is only when a death, or something flavored with death, takes place that we awaken.

People accepted DeVere's death as a suicide. Collie suggested that people at the checkout at Lucky's felt it was “bad conscience he couldn't live with because he tried to hurt the Fieldses.” People doubted his death was murder, apparently, but would not have been terribly outraged if I had, in truth, taken DeVere's life. When an article in the Sunday supplement referred to our family as “the modern day Borgias” it was intended as a compliment.

Fern was tight lipped. When I asked him what was wrong he would say, “Let me take care of it.” He would shake his head, keep driving, keep standing behind me at the art gallery, keep his place at the curb while Nona and I window shopped.

I glanced up from time to time to wonder if the van at the stoplight next to me was really a carpet cleaner's. But with each lulling hour I was becoming tarnished, sleepy, returning to my faith in life.

I believed, as days followed one another, that the troubled times were behind us.

30

One evening Nona and I were dining in Christophe's, off Geary, enjoying the post-posttheater quiet. We enjoyed brook trout, Montrachet, and candlelight in a corner of the restaurant the maître d' always managed to have reserved for me.

It was that time of night that is actually very early morning, a time so far removed from business and appointment books that one can actually believe that no further harm will ever take place in the world.

Nona's dark hair was more radiant than ever, the deep, hidden burgundy hue of her brunette catching the candlelight. She was peaceful, in a way that was distinctively her own. She was sure of herself, and of her life.

Landscaping was a matter of illusion, I was saying. “If you want a blue garden to look blue, it should be twenty percent yellow,” I said. “If you want your garden to look old, plant poplars. No tree grows faster in Northern California.”

I had managed to spend an hour or two that afternoon beginning to restore my hothouse. I had been busy composting, opening new bags of potting soil, writing orders for new plants.

“It's all magic, then,” said Nona.

“It's a matter of glamour. In the sense of ‘artifice.' The flower has to attract the bee. The blossom is a natural form of cosmetic. A botanical fashion statement.”

Coffee arrived. We chatted about recent staffing changes at the Medical Center, the progress of a local theater, my own good prospects for a contract with a Japanese financial firm, and then she reached out her hand, and closed it over mine, a gesture that I recognized.

She had something important to say. I encouraged her with a look, but she was oddly reluctant to continue.

At last she said, “There's someone I want you to talk to.”

When she did not immediately continue, I urged her. “Please tell me.”

“You'll be angry.”

I laughed. “Impossible.”

“You will, Strater. You'll think I've been working behind your back.”

“Have you been?”

She paused. Nona rarely needed to be encouraged to share her thoughts. I opened my hands to say: please go on.

“I shared your story with someone I know—someone who understands such things.”

For some reason I decided to be just a little bit difficult. “Such things as what?”

She waved her hand: you know.

I did not want to remember the hallucinations, or whatever they had been. I sipped my coffee. “Who is this remarkable individual?”

“His name is Victor Valfort.”

“I've seen his books. He was one of your teachers.”

“Something of a magician, too.”

“In the sense of ‘artifice'?”

“He uses hypnotherapy. He is an adept, if I can use that word, in dealing with the trance state. He's been very successful at curing what used to be called hysterical symptoms.”

“But it's been two or three weeks since I had any sort of vision.” I tried to give the word
vision
a certain spin as I said it, as though having a hallucination was like having a cramp, or a spell of dizziness. I did not convince myself. I know I did not convince Nona.

Her voice was low. She toyed with her spoon. “I study dying. How it happens, and what it means to the psyche as people—especially children—approach it. I can help children. I don't know how to help you.”

“And this man does.” It was not a question.

“He's in Paris.”

“When will he be here?”

“I'm suggesting that you go see him.”

“You must be joking. You've seen all my appointments. I'm too busy.” I lowered my voice. “I'm all right now. Look at me—everything's fine.”

“Your symptoms are probably situational,” she began. “They will return when the conditions that caused them return. Right now you're satisfied. Things are going well. In a crisis, your body chemistry will change. And your visions will come back.”

“You have it all figured out.”

“I knew you'd be angry.”

“I'm not angry. It's just that I think there's no emergency.”

“I don't want to say anything that might hurt your feelings,” she said.

“Such as?”

“I think there's something inside you. Buried. Some secret, or series of secrets.”

I did not quite understand why her comments made me feel so tense. I glanced over at Fern. His radio was plugged into his ear, a black coiled wire out of his jacket collar that he kept adjusting. His eyes met mine. I tried to read his expression. Was there something wrong?

I watched the candle flame, its untrembling blade tapering to a long, golden needle. The candlelight on Nona's skin made her look like a woman shaped from oldest Egyptian gold. Her face was the mask of a Sybil. “I want you to promise to go see him,” she said.

“I love Paris. When I get the chance—”

Her hand was on mine now, squeezing. “Soon. Please.”

My laugh was easy, relaxed. “I think I'm beginning to feel jealous of this magus.”

“There's no reason to.”

“He certainly made a strong impression on you. Nona, look at me. I'm reliable. Steady. Sane.”

“It's called denial, Strater. Sooner or later, the hallucinations will come back.”

31

The night was calm. There were low clouds overhead, and a light drizzle. Some of the taller buildings seemed to vanish in the mist.

Fern slid into the front seat, started the car, and the Mercedes floated into the traffic. The armored vehicle moved at a stately pace.

“I have a good deal of faith in Dr. Valfort,” said Nona. “But I think you should be forewarned.”

I had not agreed to see him. She was pursuing the subject. I chuckled, hoping to feel as good-humored as I sounded. “Don't tell me. Let me guess. He's not one of those physicians who study the psyche because he's completely mad.”

“He has very strong opinions.”

“That's the warning?” I could not stand the friction between us, so leaned to her ear and kissed the soft, invisible down of her earlobe.

“Maybe we can take the trip together,” I said.

“Promise?”