The Thanatos Syndrome

accommodate whatever nation prevailed. German Zweig and Weiss often became La Branche and Le Blanc. Le Blanc and Weiss have been known to become White. No one cares. I know a man named Harry Threefoot whose family changed their name from Dreyfus. From French-Jewish to Choctaw. Why? Who knows? And in Louisiana who cares? Harry laughed about it. No, the little pique of interest comes from another small scrap of memory. A couple of years ago Mickey LaFaye, not then a horsewoman, lying on my couch, was going on in her old derisive tone about her husband, Durel, and his exclusive Feliciana Hunt Club, the old-line names and the old money it took to get in, the snobbery of it, the silliness and cruelty of fox hunting and so on, then less derisively about an attractive doctor she’d met at the Hunt Club, Dr. Robert Comeaux, newly arrived at Fedville but not one of your D.C. bureaucrats, no, he was old-line Delaware Huguenot stock. Voted into the club on the first ballot. Something occurred to me. Two years ago. My eyes went up to my bookshelves. My father subscribed to a yearly tome, the U.S. Medical Directory. I took down the most recent, ten years old. There he was: Dr. Robert D’Angelo Como, b. Long Island City, N.Y., C.C.N.Y., Columbia University’s College of Physicians & Surgeons …
    A small thing, but puzzling. Why would anybody want to change Como to Comeaux nowadays? Why would anyone prefer to be thought Huguenot and not Italian? I’ve known plenty of both, and frankly—
    A small thing, but enough to make him skittish with me. But he’s very much at his ease now, clicking his spurs against the terrazzo and pushing off the wall by ducking his dark head just graying at the temples, neither Sicilian nor Huguenot now but very much the English gent in his muddy field boots. He smiles his new, brilliant smile.
    â€œBob, what’s this about a fire and vandalism out at Mickey’s ranch? Did something happen out there? Something about a groom?”
    â€œOh boy.” Bob’s face goes grave, showing white around the eyes inside the tan. With his deep tan and flashing white smile suddenly going grave, Bob is as handsome as a young George Hamilton. “Oh boy, it was more than that. The fire was the least of it. Tom, Mickey took it into her head one day last week to remove her husband’s .45 automatic from the closet shelf, drive out to the ranch, and begin shooting her thoroughbreds, beginning with the least valuable, fortunately—you know, she’s got over two million in horseflesh out there—until she was stopped and disarmed by a groom. Those horses weren’t burned. She shot them. Then she deceived the groom by pretending contrition, talked him out of the gun, headed back to the house. Tom, I’m afraid she intended harm to herself or her children or both.”
    â€œHow do you know that?”
    â€œShe told me.”
    â€œHow did she tell you? In her present state I can’t see her telling a story, relating an event.”
    â€œYou noticed that.” Bob Comeaux gives me a keen-eyed look. “You would. You’re quite right. You get it out of her by questioning her like a child. But she’ll tell you!”
    â€œWhat’s this about some sort of sexual business between her and the groom? Did the groom attack her?”
    Bob looks grave. “I fear not, Tom.” He stands quite close, facing me, head down, talking so low that not even Sue Brown, who’s back, now six feet away, can hear. “She was coming on to him, Tom.”
    â€œThat’s the groom’s story?”
    â€œYes, and I didn’t believe it at first. But she told me herself, quite openly.”
    We fall silent, pondering. Now Bob is back against the wall, speaking in our old offhand style.
    â€œTom, you asked me earlier, with your typical Freudian skepticism, just how did I propose to modify her behavior and what sort of behavior I wanted from her.” Actually I didn’t ask him any such question. “Well, you’ve seen for yourself. Wouldn’t you say that such behavior needs modifying—entirely apart from whatever is going on in her subconscious mind, as I believe you call it.”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œYou know, Doctor, you and I might just be the ones to achieve a meeting of minds over the old mind-body problem, that ancient senseless quarrel. What do you think?”
    â€œOur minds might.”
    â€œHa ha. Never