Sister Wolf Read online

  Now he was down on the floor in front of her, so nimble and goatlike that she had not heard him climb off the bed. He leaned over to kiss her shoulder, just above her breast. She reached out and cupped his soft penis, forgetting that she had no rights, that her head was on the block for committing Pandora’s crime. He took the wallet away from her and opened it. She had not filed the full-face snapshot, which floated down on the rug.

  “My poor Francesca.” He shook his head. “We were going to be married. I killed her.”

  Marit shifted her position. There was a note of piety in his voice that made her restless. He clasped his hands in his lap and lifted up his eyes, like old paintings of St. Peter Martyr with the axe through his skull.

  “I blew up at her,” Gabriel recited, “about a piece of nonsense. She ran out of the house in front of a truck. She is buried at Matlock. I go there to see her. For a while I used to go there twice a week.”

  Marit reached for her shirt, in case it could give her some protection. She pulled it on.

  “I have a black temper,” Gabriel challenged her. “My temper killed her.”

  Marit stood up and backed away to the window, pulling her shirttails together to cover her groin.

  “Now she’s your life’s work.” Marit faced him with her chin up. “Is that what you’re telling me?”

  Gabriel frowned. He did not unclasp his hands.

  “It gives your life a shape,” said Marit, “mourning and repenting.”

  He drew his knees in close to his chest and dug his clasped knuckles into his forehead.

  “I want to be rid of her,” he said. “She clings to me. She wants to take me with her.”

  “You adore it.” Marit showed her teeth. “You’re a living shrine.”

  Gabriel lay back on the floor, one arm covering his face. When he spoke he sounded sad and far away.

  “How hard your voice is.”

  Marit took criticism badly, especially when it was justified. It is truer to say that she took any comment on her actions, however apt, and heard it as criticism. When she was stung, she raised the ante and fought like an animal. In another century she would have whipped her critic for lèse majesté. The process was circular: in the end it was herself she was punishing, hating herself more than she hated her critic, so that there was no way out but weeping and groveling and prostration.

  “I see. I’ve nicked your plaster saint. I’ve tracked mud into the shrine.” She could not stop. Her nostrils began to prickle, an early warning of tears.

  He propped himself up on his elbows and looked at her with calm, mild eyes. His nakedness was noble and candid, and gave him the advantage over her.

  “I told you something that I am ashamed of. I wanted your help. Instead you are jealous of a dead girl.”

  “I’m jealous, all right.” Marit was all precarious swagger. “I’d like to uproot her and scatter her.”

  “Jealousy is a demeaning emotion. It is a waste of energy for a spirit like yours.”

  Marit felt a knot forming under her rib cage. She had gone too far. His lofty tone was a sign that he had hardened his heart against her. A wave of grief or sickness made her dizzy. She slid to the floor and tried to meet his eyes. He was smoothing the young girl’s photograph between his palms, as if Marit’s touch had wrinkled and bent the paper.

  Marit had never asked for pardon since her childhood, and her lips would not pronounce the simple formula. She said his name and waited for an answer. She spoke again, “Please, Gabriel”; and once more, “Please …”

  He looked at her with courteous disinterest, like a doctor who has squeezed an ailing patient into a schedule that was already overcrowded.

  “Please talk to me. I have to hear. What was she like?” Marit pressed her back against the wall to brace herself for what he might disclose.

  “She was gentle and frail.” He studied the picture. He spoke like someone who is thinking aloud. “She forgot to eat. I had to feed her. I cut the pieces of food very small, or she couldn’t swallow. I gave her drinks made with eggs and she sipped them from a spoon.”

  “Was she ill?” Marit kept her voice steady by biting her lip.

  “She was ill as a child. I think she had rheumatic fever. She missed a year of school, but she read so much that they put her two grades ahead.”

  “A prodigy,” said Marit, whose lower lip was taking a beating. Gabriel stared into the middle distance. He had not heard her.

  “She was so small. It was caused by the fever. Her hands were tiny. She had boneless little feet. I came home with a colleague one night and he saw her boots drying outside the door. ‘I didn’t know you had children,’ he said. That was one of our jokes.”

  It did not sound funny to Marit, who was trying to take her punishment like a man. She did not question the fitness of her ordeal. If Hell had ten circles, instead of only nine, the tenth would be reserved for the jealous, who must listen, until the trump sounded, to the voice of their lovers extolling the merits of a rival.

  Gabriel turned to Marit, but his eyes were fixed and dull. If she left the room, he would have gone on talking, in a voice that was as flat as his gaze, a voice more suited to confessing sins than to singing praises.

  “She had no one else to take care of her. Her father was old, the age of a grandfather. Her mother was dead. She was a late-life child. Late-life children are usually gifted, like Francesca.”

  Marit tasted blood. She had bitten her lip open. She ground her back teeth together to keep from venting her hatred of the frail, small, late-life child. She feared that Gabriel would see her jaws working, and, in fact, he was watching her now, as if he were observing a sample of tissue under a microscope to find out if the cells were healthy or diseased. He was testing her, trying to provoke another jealous lapse, proving her worth by putting her through fire. The heat of jealousy was easier to bear than the fact that he had named himself her censor.

  He looked her straight in the eye and went on talking, rolling over her pain like a mower over grass, which cuts down frogs and insects as well as plants, specks of life which are invisible from the mower’s height.

  “I loved her because she lived inside her head. She drew pictures of Persian princes hunting tigers. She thought that the outside world was like those pictures. …”

  Marit gave up fighting. She knew from her terms in school that every test is rigged against the candidate.

  “You’re lying. You didn’t love her. You were her nursemaid.”

  Gabriel smiled. She thought he smiled with satisfaction. She had failed the test, just as he had predicted.

  “That was part of it. I signed on for it. I also loved her.”

  “You liked being stronger. You wanted to keep her weak.”

  Gabriel refused to engage with Marit at her level. “I would be lying if I pretended I didn’t love her.”

  Marit bowed her head. “You’re still in love with her.”

  “Who are you hurting by twisting my words? You’re hurting yourself.”

  “I heard you say it. You said you loved her.”

  Gabriel stood up and pulled on his trousers. He looked down at Marit.

  “I come with a past. I’m stuck with my past the way I’m stuck with being short. If you want me, you take the whole package.”

  “You don’t want me. You’re leaving.”

  “Why should I hang around? This is your scenario and I don’t know the lines.”

  “I’ve had my last chance. I’m expunged from the moral record.” Marit’s mouth was working wildly. She was trying to talk over sobs.

  “Then you’ve expunged yourself. I’m not going to take that rap.”

  “You’re condemning me.” Marit covered her face with her hands. “You have your rules and I’ve broken all of them.” Her fingers were working as if she could tear her flesh.

  Gabriel was dressed. He began to pick up her clothes.

  “I love you. I don’t love your behavior.”

  “They’re t
he same god-damned thing!”

  “You have your behavior, but you are not your behavior.”

  “You’re talking Chinese.” The words came out like a hiccup, or a question, with a note of hope behind them, as if she had discovered the thread in the labyrinth.

  He sat on the bed with his feet on the floor and his hands on his knees, tranquil and untouchable. If he had been an elderly person, he would have steepled his fingers.

  “You’re going to have to get used to the fact that I am not judgmental. If I love you, I approve you unconditionally.”

  “Then you should also approve my behavior.” Marit was petitioning, but she could not help it.

  “I love you for what you are. Your actions are ephemeral.”

  She felt ragged and hot and grimy. Because of the strife or the pious conundrums, she was getting a headache. Her uncombed hair and her dirty knees might be ephemeral, but they were all, for the moment, that he could see of her; therefore they were her. Her inner light would not iron her shirt or wash her feet. It seemed to her that what Gabriel wanted was perfection, that her surface should always reflect her essence, and that her inside always illuminate her outside.

  “You need to be alone,” he said.

  “Don’t tell me what I need if you’re going to leave me.”

  He went over to her and kissed her on the forehead, a pastoral kiss of love and absolution.

  “I can’t put you back on course. You have to do that for yourself.”

  He walked to the bedroom door and smiled back from the sill.

  “I’m your good girl,” she called.

  He did not answer. She heard him pad down the hall in his sneakers. She heard him jog down the stairs. He was hurrying to be gone. He was tripping down the drive, as free as air, leaving her hunched and smarting, like Caliban under Prospero’s censure.

  If she believed in his unconditional love, she would be a dupe. Life is a court; the trial lasts a lifetime; the jury sits in perpetuity. Every person is a machine adding up grievances and faults and ticking away. When the machine reaches fault one thousand, or one hundred thousand, or any number, love is cut off, automatically and forever. If Gabriel maintained that he was non-judgmental, he was imitating God. All that any humble person should say is that he is less judgmental than other people, that you can commit more errors in his presence without forfeiting his love than you can in the presence of someone else. Since Gabriel was not God, the number of free faults that he would allow was finite. If she committed one error over his free-fault capacity, her head would come off, she would burn, she would hang, like the lowest of criminals.

  A dog barked and kept on barking, drawing Marit out of her thoughts. It was Nikolai, trying to tell her that he was hungry. Gabriel had put her slacks on the chair, but she had to grope under the bed for her sandals. There was one lamp burning in Luba’s room. The rest of the rooms were dark. She went downstairs to turn on the lights and reclaim the house.

  SIX

  LUBA DEYM HAD NEVER read aloud to her daughter at bedtime. She had told her stories instead, which began while Marit was undressing, continued through her bath and teeth-brushing, and went on after she was tucked under the covers, with the lights out. There were no ducks, beavers, bears, or orphans in Luba’s repertory, so Marit had been raised on were-beasts, enchanted suits of armor and heath wraiths. These spectral friends were some of Marit’s favorites, as was the child-vampire, but the stories that she liked best belonged to the buried-alive cycle, which Luba had heard at the feet of her own grandmother, Pàla, when she was a child herself, in Hungary.

  Luba’s accounts of being buried alive started with someone waking up in a very tight space, raising his arms or lifting his head, and striking a solid barrier, which was then perceived as wood or metal and followed by the instantaneous recognition that he was in a coffin. Then came the horrific shrieks, the banging of the fists on the lid, the bloodying of the fists from much banging on the wood, the calculation of the air supply, and the gasping and heaving from the anticipation of smothering.

  Then Luba would switch the viewpoint: she moved outside the coffin, to the dark nave of a church or a side chapel; to a parlor where the coffin stands in the center of the rug, banked by waxy flowers; or to the cemetery where fresh earth shows the outline of the grave and no headstone has yet been planted. In the church an ancient sacristan makes his rounds. He is partially deaf, so he cannot hear the noises until he passes by the candlelit Lady chapel. Fists banging sound like mice scrabbling to his ears, but his attention is fixed by the lid of the coffin being raised, just inches, and falling to. The prisoner within is too weak to throw the lid aside. The sacristan is terrified, suspects a supernatural incident, and stumbles out to wake the vicar. (In some versions Luba’s sacristan was not only deaf but drunk, and went back to his pile of blankets in the crypt to drink himself from delirium to oblivion.)

  In the mansion containing the lying-in-state parlor, the children’s governess wakes from a nightmare, and for precious minutes thinks that the muffled screams she hears are a continuation of the dream. Or the overweight housemaid has crept down to the kitchen, lured by a cold meat pie, and is cutting very thin slices so that no one will notice the theft. Five thin slices add up to one thick one, however, and the cook has an eagle eye. With the fifth slice halfway to her mouth, the housemaid hears moans coming from the parlor and drops the pie onto the floor, to incriminate her forever.

  In the cemetery, the cries from the coffin alternate with owls hooting, and no human hears them, unless Luba introduced a pair of adventurous lovers into the story. What the grave-robber would see if the coffin lid was not nailed down securely is a white forearm reaching through the dirt, with fingers splayed and bloody. The frightened lovers might run to the local constabulary, or they might not. If the constable, who has been dragged away from a nap in his desk chair, arrives at the grave before its inhabitant chokes to death on a mouthful of crumbly earth, he will only be able to effect a partial rescue: his Lazarus will be alive, but raving.

  Luba was the queen of fireside storytellers, but she was not, by American standards, a fit mother. She felt that children enjoyed being frightened, that it enlivened their imaginations and gave them a healthy respect for the unknown. To give her credit, Luba took care to ground her tales in reality. Before medicine was a science, she would explain, doctors could not tell if a person was dead or only in coma. If the corpse woke up and tried to struggle out of his grave, peasants (never noblemen, to Marit’s recollection) would cry out that the dead were walking. Premature burial, in Luba’s theory, was the origin of vampires, zombies, and ghouls. Marit had memorized the names and traits of the undead before she learned to recite the kings of England and France. She begged her mother to tell her more stories; she also begged for a night-light.

  Perhaps Luba had run out of stories, or perhaps she was tired of embroidering the old tales over and over again. One night she brought out a new one, but she claimed that it was factual. Marit was nine years old, and Luba may have thought she had grown unshockable. Luba was a performer as well as a storyteller, and Marit was not just her child, but her audience. Lately Marit had been scratching and yawning during the story, and Luba searched her mind for ways to refurbish her repertory. Nothing excuses the story she then told, or the harm that it did. The story was about Marit herself, and it had happened in the Windward Islands. Marit could not remember a trip to the islands, though she had seen pictures of herself as a smaller child on a broad white beach.

  When Marit was three, according to Luba, they had gone to Bacou, in the Grenadines. Vlado had started work on a new invention, so he stayed behind. He had drawn preliminary sketches for the automatic cigarette smoker: an ashtray designed to light a cigarette, advance it on a metal arm to the smoker’s lips at measured intervals, then incinerate the fag end so that no ash was left, just a fine white dust. When his wife and daughter sailed, he was failing to solve the problem of the self-incinerator.

  One da
y Marit had come up to her mother, who was oiling herself on the beach. “A red bee bit me,” she had said, chattering with fever, and held out her swollen left wrist to show her the bite. The best balm for bee-sting is a paste of bicarbonate of soda, and Luba had applied it to the hardened swelling. No ordinary insect had bitten Marit, for within an hour her fever had risen to one hundred and five, and the paste on her wrist had flaked off from the burning heat. After the fever had come delirium, after delirium unconsciousness, after coma the cessation of all life signs—a process so formal and inferential that Death might have been a logician demonstrating a theorem on the blackboard for his slowest pupil.

  Death’s interest in Marit was only theoretical, but his pupil had a literal turn of mind. The medical eminence on Bacou was Dr. Iñiguez, the hotelkeeper, who had left an unaccredited dental practice on the Venezuelan mainland to cash in on the tourist business. Dr. Iñiguez, with hair in his ears and warty thumbs, was enraptured by Marit’s case: “No hay duda, Madang Deng, Marita está con los ángeles.” Why he did not doubt that she was with the angels when her cheeks still flushed pink and her limbs remained un-stiffened, Luba never questioned. She was in a walking coma herself and could not speak to give instructions. Iñiguez wired to Union Island on the Coast Guard radio, not for medical corroboration, but for a priest.

  “Tenemos que encajonarla, Madang,” worried Dr. Iñiguez. Since there was no ready-made coffin to embox her, to protect her from insects and larger meat-eaters, they laid her in Luba’s lacquered steamer trunk, on a bed of the rose tissue paper that Vilma had packed with. “Parece una muñeca,” wept Mrs. Iñiguez. After taking Luba to her room, Mrs. Iñiguez dressed Marit in white, fluffed out her hair, and dabbed a touch of carmine on her lips, so that she looked more like a doll than ever.