Sister Wolf Read online

  The telephone woke him out of a stony sleep. An intern at the Hope-Downtown emergency room wanted him to come over and claim the body of a young blonde girl who had crossed Greenwich Avenue in the middle of traffic and been hit by a tow truck. There had been nothing to identify the victim except a frayed name tag on her underpants—sewed on by Francesca’s mother when she had sent her, at age thirteen, to summer camp.

  Francesca was buried in the old graveyard of All Souls in Matlock, which lay one town east of Niles Village. Earlier Hadleys had summered in Hart County. They had endowed the porch and bell tower of the church, in exchange for a bucolic resting place. Francesca’s headstone was a thin marble slab carved to imitate the primitive markers that surrounded it. Very soon it began to tilt, like the older stones. Gabriel traveled to the graveyard every weekend. He took the night owl up and the milk train back, laying his sleepless nights on Francesca’s grave instead of flowers. He got an offer to teach at the Meyerling Community. The location would ease the toil of visitation, but he debated, for that very reason, whether he should take it. He bargained himself into the job: while he worked at Meyerling, he would visit Francesca’s grave twice a week, instead of only once, and he would walk to Matlock in any kind of weather, five miles going and five miles coming. He had been keeping her memory alive in a listless, automatic sort of way, like a bored and feverish child picking at chicken-pox scabs. He could not mourn, but he felt that he ought to. He made another bargain with himself. If he used the hike to Matlock as one focused act of grieving, like a meditation, he could have the rest of his days clear and unencumbered. Little sticky bits of Francesca’s personality still clung to him, and he needed more time to work them off.

  Gabriel began to hike off his liability to Francesca, and never thought of her betweentimes. He stopped hunching over and stood as straight as a recruit again, reaching for every fraction of an inch of height. He was free to think. The inside of his head was blue horizonless space, where before his thoughts had been penned in his brain like rats in an attic room. Under so much light, his own vocation began to grow. One evening he sat at his desk facing an empty yellow sheet of legal foolscap. He was expected to contribute a report to the case file of a disturbed girl student. He was poised for the task, but the Muse sometimes operates by stealth. From his pen, like automatic writing, came the First Exercise in Self-Mastery, for the book of poems that would become his life’s work. For some weeks he sat down at his desk every night. He pushed well into the Third Exercise. He lived and wrote like a column of white fire. But every forward movement breeds inertia, and one day Gabriel lost his balance, in a sweat, and stumbled back to safety, as if writing poems were as dangerous as walking a tightrope across a canyon. Writing poems distracted the soul and led to selfishness. The disturbed student, Aimée Dupuis, had followed him out of the classroom, plucking at his sleeve. She wanted to tell him her nightmare, which was always the same one. He felt the plucking, but he did not hear her voice. He shook off her fingers as if he were brushing away a horsefly, and then a sound of a higher pitch reached his ears. The girl was crying, and he had made her cry.

  What distinguished any pillar of fire or poet from Attila or Tamburlaine? If he placed himself at the center of the universe, little people would be maimed and overrun. There was no room in his life of service for a poet’s hubris. Gabriel was in anguish. For a time he lived by shorter and shorter shrift. The Caretaker pushed the Poet down a manhole, fed him on scraps, and kept him in the dark.

  Gabriel looked around for tasks that would drain his time and energy. He set up sacrifices like trip wires, in order to thwart his passage back to poetry. Where he saw need, he dove in like a sponge-diver; and there was need and pathos everywhere he looked. Children are poignant in and of themselves. Children in institutions break your heart. Blind children in institutions are sacred trusts. Gabriel’s vision of these young blind was only partial. He willfully did not notice, nor could he recall, that Wyeth threw food, John stole cigarettes, and Preston had hoisted Nannie Phillips into an apple tree and run away while she was screaming to be let down. All that Gabriel saw, or would retain, was their habit of walking around with their faces lifted, as if they were holding sweet conversation with Our Lord. They were denied the world of appearances and its distractions, so they must be in closer touch with the realm of Ideas. If one of these vessels of truth and beauty should bruise its shin, Gabriel ministered to the hurt like the Magdalene anointing the feet of Christ. One day Nannie had sat at the back of his classroom, frowning. Tears flowed in a steady stream from her closed blind eyes. When the class was over, he dropped to his knees by her chair and enfolded her. He rocked her in his arms, and stroked her thick, dark hair. “What makes you cry, my poor Nannie? There is no trouble so big it can’t be talked about.” “For Pete’s sake,” said Nannie, wriggling free of him, “I’ve got hay fever and my eyes are watering awful.”

  After a number of these outbursts, the children began to avoid him. Gabriel’s timing was off, and he sounded false, even to himself. His chest was tight from the press of his humane obligations. He tried to force himself to move and speak legato, but he had developed the reflexes of an intern on call, a flair for emergency which alarmed his shy charges, who were as skittish as rabbits.

  One night he was putting the youngest boys to bed. They lived together in a dormitory room which held five cots. An hour after lights-out, as he made the usual bed check, he heard Michael—he thought it was Michael—whimpering under the covers. Dreading suffocation, meningitis, burst appendix, Gabriel crossed the room in one bound, knocking over a chair, which fell with a crack to the floor. The whimper spread from cot to cot, until five little boys sat rocking back and forth, fists pressed to their eyes, mewing and moaning for a night-lamp. Gabriel’s suddenness reminded them that they had been afraid of the dark before they lost their sight.

  Gabriel stayed in the room until the last boy fell asleep. He left one light burning when he tiptoed out. Stumbling the first few yards down the hall, clumsy from the shame of frightening children, he went up the stairs to his room. He paused for a moment outside his door; then he hurried down three flights of stairs without being seen, and left the house.

  Gabriel knew his way through the Deym woods as well as he knew the floor plan of his room. In the daytime he had used a square of hard white chalk to blaze his route. The chalk marks had stood up well against the rainfall. He counted on the moonlight to pick up the marks and show him the trail, but the blazes dimmed out at night and he could not find them. He was not afraid, but the woods were no longer familiar. He passed by a tree whose roots had straddled a boulder. There were rocks in his path, so he walked with his eyes on the ground. Damp seeped through the soles of his shoes and the earth felt spongy, as if there were springs running under this part of the wood. As he walked, he let his left palm drag across the bark of a row of pines, bark that was sharp enough to scrape but not pierce his skin. The alley of pines led him downhill into a clearing carpeted with moss that was as white as tundra lichen. He tore a moist clump of moss to hold in his smarting palm, put his face up to the moon, and closed his eyes. The warmish breeze stirred his hair and caressed his neck. Then a cold current shocked his eyes open—December air that might be sweeping down from a lunar plain. In the trees ahead he saw streaks of light, like a moonbeam running. The flash circled back beyond the right-hand edge of the clearing, and he watched it until his head could swivel no farther. He thought it might be marshfire, so he pushed on into the grove to see if he could find the bog that had sparked the lights.

  The grove was so dark, after the moonlit clearing, that it made his ears ring. He felt his way forward, groping for support. Both hands fell on coarse, dry tufts. Strange vegetation, springy like fur, long enough to tangle his fingers in. Then the fur bushes, thigh-high, lurched and bumped him, penning him in tight, making snarling and whirring sounds, breaking into a trot, and driving Gabriel between them.

  He made his mind as blank as the moon,
which shone brighter now, as he ran in that narrow, fur-bounded channel, out of the dense grove of birches and onto the meadow. He held his head up for fear of what he might see. Once he tripped and lost his gait. He felt a nip on his ankle: in the real world no bush has teeth. He looked down to identify the biter; he saw two yellow eyes. A nip on the other ankle. They were on a countdown. They herded him back in line, jostling him from flank to flank, two doglike creatures or creaturelike dogs, with plans of their own.

  When they reached the short grass, they raised a low, broken cry, whining or pleading. Above the lawn loomed a house. Someone stood at the top of the double staircase to the terrace, calling back in the same plaintive tone. They barked twice, and were answered by two barks. Gabriel had been running with his arms locked across his chest. Since the shape on the landing was human, he dropped his hands onto the back of each animal to balance him during the last sprint toward the house. Now they were his guardians, not his captors.

  Gabriel knew the house from his afternoon walks. It belonged to Marit Deym, a woman close to his age, who had a private zoo. He had heard the townspeople grumbling about the animals. He had never seen the owner of the house, who was descending the outside staircase, holding up two clean white bones.

  “Who are they?” asked Gabriel. He flinched, watching them lunge at the food she threw, growling and slavering as if the bones were small carcasses.

  “‘Who’ is good,” said Marit Deym. “I could weed people out by ‘who’ or ‘what.’” She called to one of the animals. “Swan! Take off.”

  The greater male, with the silver ruff, dropped the bone at his feet. The young male rolled over and lay with his paws upraised. They were sending a signal to their mistress, who knew the code and walked into their midst to scratch their ears and stomachs. She gave up scratching before they were ready, so they pulled her down with them, pinning her between their bodies and yipping for more. At one point Gabriel lost sight of her completely; she was buried under fur. Then she struggled free and clapped her hands smartly, three times. When the animals were on their feet, she shoved them forward. They loped away over the lawn and down the meadow.

  “Timber wolves,” thought Gabriel, but he was thinking out loud. He moved to the bottom step and sat down hard.

  “Wait here,” she commanded. “I have to lock them in.”

  If he had entered the religious life, Gabriel would have been well suited to it. He possessed discipline and a sense of culpability, and, above all, a quick acceptance of the marvelous. During his working day, he lived on red alert; in the midst of danger, he became serene. Disastrous expectations fulfilled made him loose and languid. A pair of wolves had seized him in the woods and delivered him to their keeper, who showed no surprise. He did not ask himself if they were acting under orders, or how she knew that he was on her land. It was easier to suspend debate and doubt, to take for a fact that the fiercest predators could be tamed by a girl in a bathrobe and bare feet.

  It was more comfortable to give up thinking for himself, to follow the girl across the terrace and through the French doors, to sink into the velvet cushions on the sofa, and to take a glass from her hand, although he did not drink liquor. There is a sensual release, in rigid, watchful people, that accompanies the surrender of the will. He sank back deeper into the cushions, which were a warm brown, the color of his eyes. The strange girl sat across from him in a wing chair, establishing lines of precedence, not of intimacy. One standing lamp was lit, behind her chair. The light glanced on her small straight nose and bare sharp knees. Her hair was short and cut in feathery layers. Her ears were pierced with tiny jeweled studs. The robe she wore was tied at the waist, but the sash had loosened enough to show that she wore no nightdress underneath. He had never known a slender girl with heavy breasts.

  If Gabriel had chosen a life of religion, he would have adapted without resentment to the rule of chastity. Every evening at bedtime he performed a review of the day, to monitor himself for lapses into anger. His vigilance held other physical instincts in check. He wanted to make restraint a matter of habit, like combing his hair and washing his hands before meals. Women liked him because he looked them in the face; they never caught him scanning their calves or their ankles with his eyes.

  Marit Deym’s face was in shadow. The lamplight modeled the triangle at the base of her neck. As she leaned forward, the folds of her robe fell open. The skin of her breast was smooth and very white. She was talking urgently, but he only heard snatches of words—sheriff, Dangerfield, license. At one point he gave her his name. She wanted him to forget that he had seen the wolves. She did not seem to notice that her robe was in disorder, unless she thought it was the surest way to get his promise. His palms began to feel alive, as if he were holding her breasts and weighing each one in his hands. She got up and moved toward the couch, tying her sash in an unconscious gesture. She had come to plead her cause at closer range, but his business with her was more serious. He held and kissed her haphazardly, a nostril, her jawbone, her clavicle, her windpipe, her chin. He could not find her mouth until she found it for him.

  The next day, when he was back on red alert again, he would remember that there seemed to be two of her, two lean flannel-robed Marits pressing in on either side of him as they went upstairs. Her bed was the size of a cot, and that cot felt as big as a soccer field. He had shared a large bed with Francesca, but the covers were neat in the morning and the sheets stayed tucked in. Francesca lay very still, with her arms at her sides. When he was finished, she would get into her favorite position, nestled up against him like a squirrel, with her knees in his stomach. When he turned over on his other side, she clamped onto him from behind. Francesca did not like to be wakened or handled once she had fallen asleep. The girl who kept wolves did not let him sleep all night.

  Gabriel had lived with his anger so long that he disregarded any other passion. He took for granted that anger had subsumed every troublesome impulse, weakening his sexual inclination as much as his appetite for food or luxury. His restricted experience had taught him that sex is useful for showing affection and releasing tension. He did not know, until that night with Marit, that joining with another person could make the life he was leading seem as vain and as sad as an exile’s. He had been living from day to day, without hope for the future, under a judgment that he himself had drafted and imposed. In the person of this tense, shy girl he saw a higher court, which could revoke his sentence and give him back his freedom. He wanted to speak, but she seemed so replete and peaceful that he kept his counsel. She would recoil if she heard a confession from a stranger. She would think that he was deluded or dishonest, turn him out of her bed, and banish him to Meyerling, that model prison for a model prisoner. He could not speak, but his body could speak for him, so he touched her lightly, and heard her murmur in response.

  Gabriel was up and gone by six o’clock, while the fields were fogbound. Marit’s wits were also fogbound; it was her first white night. Every time they had come apart, Gabriel lay separate, locked in his contours like a crusader on his slab. Didn’t lovers hold on to each other after disconnecting? She had kept quiet and cramped, for fear he might think she was expecting it; and when acknowledgment came—a flicker of fingers on her hip—she was startled, and made a queer sound.

  The last time, she held him and kissed him at the moment of severance, many kisses on his shoulder and the hollow of his throat. He pulled back but she pressed him down, a sign that she welcomed his weight, that he could not hurt her. When there was no space between them, she felt that nothing could hurt her. This slight fine-boned man was her creature. Now that she had found him, he could come to her every night. Her house would be the place where he rested and restored his forces. She would take him to the sanctuary and acquaint him with her work. She could not lock him in with the animals; she must let him come and go of his own free will.

  Gabriel slipped out of her arms, which had loosened their grip. He rolled over and faced the door, with his back to Ma
rit. She felt the blood rise to her face, a flush of embarrassment. She had held him too tightly. Perhaps she had obstructed his breathing. She was untutored in so many points of amorous etiquette. She was a rube at love, ham-handed and crude, and he was a gentleman. He must have acquired his grace and polish in other beds, refining his skills until they became instinctive. How many beds and how many partners? Which one had warned him that neither breast should be neglected? Which one had taught him the use of teeth and the art of tongues? She felt a sharp pain, exactly at the center of her ribs. She dug her face into the pillow to stifle a sudden cry.

  When Gabriel rose to dress, his eyes were hard and harried. His face had the pure, drawn look of a fallen anchorite. She had gone to bed with Pan and got up with St. Anthony the Hermit. The change in him frightened and smote her; she felt unworthy. She lay watching him put on his shirt, pulling the covers up under her nose, because her teeth were chattering. He dressed with his head down, half hidden behind the door. He yanked his belt through the buckle too tightly, so that it pinched in his waist. He started out the door. Halfway there he paused and thought better of it. He grabbed her toes, in an awkward gesture of intimacy. “Do you know what is happening to us?” he asked, and she thought he winced. He was out of the room like a shot, as if he were afraid to get an answer. She lay there and shivered, gripping the covers over her mouth, wondering why sexual bliss had left her so wretched and alert. She had presumed that pleasure of a certain order would give her back to herself. Instead she felt only a sense of loss, as if a limb had been cut off; and premonition, as if her future were at risk. She tried to put it down to the oddness of the event—a dark stripling appearing by moonlight, ushered in by wolves.