Sister Wolf (7 page)

“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 Marit. 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.

Marit got out of bed to find an extra comforter. If she was warm enough, she might conk out and sleep it off. As she raised the lid of the blanket chest, she remembered that he had not asked for another meeting. She let the lid fall, and began to make up her bed.

C
OLMAN MEYERLING, BISHOP OF
Hart County and dean of Confessors and Martyrs in Ackroyd, Massachusetts, was not a model for converts or new communicants. As a shepherd of men, he was an uninviting figure. He scowled down at the babies he baptized, as soon as smiled at them. He stood watch by the beds of the dying with an eye on his wristwatch. Bishop or not, he felt that his faith was his own concern, and that religious matters ranked below ailments and surgery as topics of conversation. He sneered at doe-eyed devouts like his heir and nephew, Hugo, or glad-handers like his curate, Father Zack, who were walking human billboards for the church.

The Bishop was a wiry small man with muscular arms and legs. He had developed the muscles restraining big hunters and polo ponies. In the First Great War he had served as a cavalry officer. His mount had stumbled during a charge at Herstal, and thrown him flat on his back on the rocky Belgian field. When he was well again, his back had healed into a hump, a hump like a hiker’s pack, set up high on his shoulders. People thought that he had joined the clergy because of his fall, out of thanks to God for sparing the life of a rake. They were not far wrong, but the hump, not the fall, was the reason. He took his new appendage as a sign of the sin in his nature, and held himself fortunate. The run of men, looking into the mirror, see themselves whole and unblemished, and are duped into thinking that their souls are also intact. The Bishop’s hump was the badge of his continuing need for grace. Lest he forget that without God’s help he was less than a worm, he began to decorate his hump, so that it should always be new to his attention and his vain human eyes never tempted to smooth it out. His clerical robes were layered with extra lace, sewn over the hump. When he was at home, alone or receiving, he also wore robes, loose caftans that came from Algeria, a country he knew from his days as a sport and a hellion. These robes were encrusted across the shoulders with panels of beading, embroidered by a native tailor at his commission. His parishioners assumed that he meant to disguise his hump; it was the only vanity of his that they could pardon.

“That pagan temple up at Niles” they could not forgive. Wrestling Brewster, the Bishop’s own deacon, had been smuggling the cathedral account books home with him for years, hoping and praying he could prove that Meyerling had been built with church funds. At last he found an entry for a shipment of Vermont marble dating back to 1925, when Meyerling was rising from its foundations. When he discovered, by cross-checking the parish history, that repairs had been made that same year on the fonts and altars, Brewster began to gasp for air and fell off his desk chair in a faint. His attack was not a stroke, said the doctor, though it had all the earmarks.

Vlado and Luba Deym had played backgammon at Meyerling. They played for high stakes—Luba’s sapphires; Vlado’s Roman coins; or scraps from the Bishop’s collection of antique laces. They played late into the summer nights, at a backgammon table set up on the marble terrace, which was lit by torches. A crimson awning, tilted up like a baldaquin, protected their heads from the heavy fall of dew. When the moon was bright, they looked down to a man-made lake and a gondola rocking gently by a little dock. The gondola had been painted gold, but the gilt was beginning to rub off. The Bishop had won the gondola in another backgammon tourney, played with the Countess Valmarana, on another marble terrace, overlooking the Brenta River.

Every summer, the Bishop hired the stroke from the Yale or Harvard crew to pole the golden barge around the pond wearing no covering above the waist but a red neckerchief. The strokes could not sing, so the Bishop applied to the Boston Conservatory, requesting poor Italian tenors who were studying there on scholarship. The gondola and half-naked gondolier irked local Yankee scruples more than the mansion itself, which was designed on a Palladian model, with the innovation of a colonnaded upper story. It pleased the Bishop to live outside his century, just as it saddened him that he had merely been born an Anglican. Since he could never wear a Cardinal’s red hat, or be referred to as a Prince of the Church, he indulged his princely tastes at his summer cottage. To Vlado and Luba he was neither affected nor trivial. They were at home with him, since they had spent most of their youth at the courts of deposed crowned heads, in outposts more remote and provincial than Niles, Massachusetts.

During his last season at Niles, the Bishop received the summer colony on his deathbed; he held open house around the clock because he could not sleep. There was a cancer in his blood, which had drained the strength from his powerful trunk and limbs. Just his hands and his mind were active; he seemed to be all head and hands. He was living on grapes and cheese, and refused any medicine. Luba Deym often came to sit beside him in the early morning. She slept like a cat at night, dozing off for a matter of minutes and waking with a start, as if her name had been called. By 4 a.m., she was fretful and restless, so she would drive over to Meyerling, wearing her taffeta greatcoat with the Pierrot collar, and satin
pantoufles
with pointed toes that curled up backward. The pockets of her taffeta dressing gown were stuffed with treats and remedies like a grandmother’s reticule. She carried a bar of the Bishop’s favorite white chocolate, a bottle of hyssop water to refresh his forehead, and the pack of tarot cards that she was teaching him to read.

One morning she found him rapping his knuckles with the crucifix that he always held, a gesture which for a well man would have been like pacing the floor. There was a bitter smell in the room.

“Pouff, Colly, you have been burning paper. Surely it is dangerous.”

“Hugo’s letter,” the Bishop rasped. “Hugo asks my permission to marry the Thielens girl.”

“But he is a eunuch,” said Luba firmly. She pronounced it “ainche,” as if it were a French word.

“No, no,” said the Bishop, “you are judging by his pasty complexion. They want to marry and have a tribe of pasty babies. They intend to turn Meyerling into a shelter for derelict men.”