Sister Wolf (3 page)

Marit loved wolves more than any other animal, because they were the most reclusive and least valued. They tallied with her image of herself, but she did not try to scale them to her size. They were creatures and she was human, and she cherished the difference more than any likeness. When she was close to the wolves, she would learn what they could teach her: loyalty, endurance, stoicism, and courage, the traits that made them symbols of survival.

She heard a thump and saw Joe leaning into the van. He took out a burlap sack and threw it into the woods. It was full of mice, and the bag was soaked with meat blood. The elder wolves regrouped and consulted in low growls. Swan took off after the lure, but the young wolves balked and whimpered until Lakona nudged them rudely from behind.

Joe shut the doors and locked the back end of the van.

“They’ve gone,” he called. “They’ll be safe now.”

Marit shook her head, but he could not see her. The van backed out and she fastened the gate behind it. She said nothing to Joe on the ride back to the house, and he knew her well enough to respect her silence.

F
OR A SHORT PERIOD
in the early nineteen-thirties, Niles, Massachusetts, was as fashionable a resort for New Yorkers as Bar Harbor or Fishers Island. Under the glass of history, this period would be reckoned as a hiccup, or the blinking of an eye. It took the new summer gentry about five years to lose patience with the rain, bad roads, and midges, the tranquility, the grandeur of the hills, and the lack of water sports.

One of these burned-out vacationers, a banker who was related to the horse-breeding Belmonts on his mother’s side, sold his new cottage as soon as it was built, before the lawns were seeded or the gutters were hung. Luba Deym did not like the country, but Vlado was coughing and his nerves were poor, and the banker’s house had many Gothic details, vaulted ceilings, a crenellated roof, and four pointed watchtowers. Seen from the front, the miniature battlements were an alternating pattern of rose and blue-gray bricks. The view from the battlements reminded Vladimir of Hungary because he could not see another human dwelling in any direction.

While the painters were changing the walls from oyster to ivory, Luba began to make lists of guests for weekend parties. Her first house party, held in the second month of their residence, was also her last. Vlado did not come downstairs to greet the Nelson Cuttings or the Princess Rakoczi, who brought a gap-toothed young Englishman as her escort. He did not leave his room on Saturday or Sunday, except to pick a book from the library or to serve himself from the sideboard at mealtimes. Wearing striped pajamas, bleached and ragged, he heaped up his plate, taking time to ponder his selections, padding around the buffet in his backless leather slippers, tasting some of the dishes with his fingers, and wiping his hand on the front of his pajama jacket. He took a glass from the place that had been laid for him at the table, and went upstairs to bed, where dabs of creamed veal or spinach puree found their way onto the sheets, angering the maid, who had permission to change his bed linen only once a week. Luba took her defeat with bad grace, but she gave up importing guests from the city, and tried to make do with the company at hand, patrician but more solitary folk, who withheld their acceptance of the Deyms until their second summer in Niles. Bishop Meyerling became their particular friend, and Mrs. Paul Gilliam, the publisher’s wife, who had been widowed by an idling tractor which slipped into reverse while her husband was working behind it.

When Marit was orphaned, she discovered her true social nature. Without Luba to hector and groom her, she fell into her father’s habits. She wore old clothes, stopped answering letters, and did not entertain. She pensioned off the butler and the housekeeper, and kept Mrs. Mayo, from the village, who cleaned the house twice a week and left a light supper in the oven. Because she was Luba’s daughter, Marit upheld her position. She attended civic functions, but only for groups of which she was a benefactor—the library, the hospital, the Meyerling Community, the historical society, and the woman’s industries—trading public patronage against the round of golf-club dances, bridge luncheons, and little dinners. As a social being, Marit was incompetent. She could not defer and she did not listen. If she was not drawn to a person at first introduction, she blanked him out. In her opinion most people were not well made and talked too slowly. Her manner was formal or caustic, and she made few friends. She did not need more than one person of either sex to share her life. She had not yet found the man; but she recognized Lola Brevard the moment she met her. Marit and Lola had met at a Meyerling prize-day tea, sneaked away from the ceremonies early and rudely, and stayed up talking all evening and through the night.

Mrs. Paul Gilliam was a native of Virginia. She had known Lola Brevard’s mother since girlhood, and they had grown up to be each other’s bridesmaids. When she wanted to engage a social secretary, she thought of Mary Brevard’s daughter. It was a nice job for a nice girl, and it left Lola free on Saturday afternoons, which she reserved for Marit. The sun was hot for the second week of June, so the two friends hosed down the lawn chairs and brought a pitcher of ginger ale and grape juice out to the terrace. At the moment, the ice was melting and watering down the mixture in their glasses. Marit stood at the parapet and pointed her binoculars toward the meadow by the sanctuary gate, moving the instrument up the meadow and toward the woods, at the entrance of which was a grove of white paper birches.

Lola was watching a bobtail cat stalking the peonies. The cat was a gypsy, not a stray, one of the barn cats from Jullian’s dairy farm, more than five miles away. He emerged from the bushes carrying a chipmunk by the neck. He dropped it and started to bat at it, leaping from side to side and pretending to pounce. Released from the monster’s mouth, the chipmunk played dead. By this time the cat was sitting back on his haunches. The chipmunk rose up on his two hind feet and did a dance step. Then he lifted his leg as if he were squirting or spraying.

“Get over here, Marit,” called Lola. “They’re playing a little death game.”

Marit kept her binoculars trained on the birch grove. She turned the dial that adjusts the focus, and got down on her knees so that the railing could support her elbows.

The cat had opened the chipmunk’s stomach, and sat washing his paws while it cooled. Lola walked over to Marit, scolding her as she went.

“You’ve got no business to be squeamish. What kind of nature person acts so squeamish?”

Marit did not address the question. She raised her hind end and leaned farther over the parapet.

“I don’t want any pious anarchic goddamned backpackers on my property.”

Lola grabbed the field glasses and moved them over the meadow.

“Where, darlin’?” She rubbed her eyes. “I swear I just see worse through these things.”

“Fling that riot of curls off your forehead and you might see better. There. That red spot.”

Lola pushed back her bangs and tried again. This time she succeeded.

“My, he’s puny. Why carry on about him?”

“They report the wild animals,” said Marit. “They want bunnies and bluebirds.”

“I thought you told me big animals didn’t go by the fence because it’s out in the open.”

“This is not a state park. I won’t have it. I’m going to do some reporting of my own.”

Marit made a move to recapture the binoculars, but Lola kept on spying. The figure below sat down and leaned against a birch, one leg extended and one knee cocked, a poet in repose.

“Gorgeous head,” said Lola, “like a falcon. He just might convert me.”

“Give me those, you Tidewater sapphic.” Marit raised the glasses and took another look. “Lord, you’re right. He’s what we used to call ‘cute.’ I was too mad to notice.”

Lola fanned her face with her hand and pinned her hair in a knot on the top of her head. Before she settled herself in her chair, she inspected the scene of the carnage. There was nothing left of the chipmunk but the tail, the ears, and a wet patch. The cat was rolling on the flagstones, having a dust bath. Lola sat down and began to rub baby oil on her face. Drops of oil kept landing on her sunglasses. She hiked her skirt up to the middle of her thighs, and pulled her blouse down to bare her shoulders. She closed her eyes and waved a hand at Marit.

“Keep an eye on your watch for me, honey; don’t let me go to sleep.”

“Why?” asked Marit, who had brought her chair to the full upright position, since lazing in the sun was not one of her talents. “Does that silly woman want you to sharpen the bridge pencils?”

“Rest it, Marit; it’s too hot.”

“You should quit. Your brain is going to turn to cottage cheese.”

Lola wiped her sunglasses on her skirt. “Don’t fuss at me, angel. We’ve had this conversation.”

“Oh, I do recall. The one about how soothing it is to live in an orderly universe. By which you meant that Mrs. Gilliam has lots of servants.”

Lola did not intend to swallow this remark. She brought up a topic which she knew would be inflammatory.

“We’re meeting about the cotillion. I believe I mentioned it?”

Niles Village, incorporated in 1747, had survived without a débutante cotillion for two hundred and eleven years. Lola had plotted the framework for the first Berkshire Ball, to be held on the Labor Day weekend, and for the decades of cotillions to come. Mrs. Gilliam had agreed to be the sponsor. Marit struggled with her temper for a moment, watching the bait dangling out in front of her. The bait was juicy, and she swallowed the hook. She pulled a cigarette out of the package in her shirt pocket. She chain-smoked when she was vexed.

“You love hiding, don’t you? What you really love is fooling people. Poor dim old Mrs. Gilliam, trying to fix you up and marry you off. Who do you think you are, a double agent?”

Lola bared her teeth. “If I were a Jew, I gather you’d want it branded on my arm?”

“I expect you to recognize that you’re acting like a hypocrite.”

“You backwards bigot,” said Lola, scraping the polish on her thumbnail. “I like dances and pretty clothes. I’m not a man, Marit. I will not wear pants and chop off my hair to suit your scruples.”

Marit eased up and took a safer tack. She and Lola had a peppery friendship, which allowed for a good portion of strenuous wrangling. Most of the time she admired Lola ungrudgingly for the way she juggled her public and private lives.

“I don’t approve of débutante mills. I think they are lowering.”

“Pooh,” said Lola, accepting Marit’s peace offering. “You’re just sour because Luba sent you to France instead.”

The season that Lola made her bow to society she was chosen Girl of the Year. In Cathorne, Virginia, mothers of belles still took their daughters down a peg or two by reminding them of Lola Paige Brevard. “She wore an ivy wreath on her head, and you’re bothering your daddy for orchids.” “Lola Paige never hung by the phone all day long.” “Serves you right. Lola Paige wouldn’t break a date for a better bid; if she did, she surely never got caught at it!” “There’s slouching
and
slouching, missy; Lola Paige stood just like a willow.”

Some part of the local myth was Lola’s beauty, which was not the regular classical kind, but much more vivid. She had short blonde hair that curled like a crown of light, and coal-black eyes that needed no definition from paints or shadows. She was tall, two inches under six feet, and as flat in front as she was behind, but she rustled and floated when she moved, and she was constantly in motion. Her profile made a straight unbroken line from her forehead to the tip of her nose. Her mouth was wide and thin, but she was always talking, so its lack of symmetry went unnoticed. When she talked, she used her hands like a Latin; they fluttered around her face like mating birds.

Some part of the myth was purely tactics. Lola made her Aunt Fanchon Pickett dress all in black and be her chaperone at big dances in Cathorne and Richmond. Lola broke the rule and wore white her whole coming-out year, even before her official bow at the Seventh Regiment. She made every entrance heavily veiled, in a white mantilla that completely covered her face, foiled by Aunt Fan, in shiny black, who carried Lola’s evening bag and dance card. The chaperone and the dance card were choice anachronisms, which got her equal marks for virtue among the parents and for affectation among her fellow débutantes. Neither opinion mattered to Lola; she knew that no Girl of the Year is ever well liked.

The chaperone was a dandy fake, had they but known it. Lola was wild, and Aunt Fan was the perfect cover. After the dances, Lola sent her aunt home in a hired car. Then she herded the timorous girls and swaggering boys into their cars, and led the caravan to the honky-tonks in nearby Gadsden. (She claimed she had once won an amateur striptease contest, and Marit believed her.) Back at home, Aunt Fan would knock on the Brevards’ bedroom door. They propped themselves up on pillows and tried to read until Lola got in, no matter how late. “Our baby is sound asleep,” Aunt Fan would whisper. “She could hardly stay awake to get undressed.”

Fanchon Pickett, grand-niece of General George, was as false as brass and as tart as a crabapple. There was nobody she liked, and only one thing in the world that she cared about. That year Lola paid all of Fan’s bridge debts (out of an allowance that had tripled when Lola was elected Valedictorian), and sent her spinster aunt off to Las Vegas, where she spent a week under the green light at the poker tables, sleeping two hours a night, waiting to retire until the Texas oilmen had packed it in.

Lola’s wildness was of the coltish or tomboy variety: breaking curfew; outdrinking boys on boilermakers; driving on the wrong side of route 46; not being too careful of her skirts when she got out of cars or taught the Lindy. She had a dirty mouth, and ran an uncatalogued course in sex education, but she was as safe from scandal as Christopher Robin. It got noised around that Maddie Blanton was two months pregnant. “Isn’t that just about the tackiest,” sighed Lola when she heard it; and sexual experiments in their group lost all prestige, at least for that season. Boys never tried anything with Lola, not since she had kissed Tilden Chace in the ninth grade and scared him blue by asking him kindly why he never used tongues. The boys figured that she had picked up all that sexual lore somewhere, and credited her with experience, rather than a talent for library research. Her knowledge kept them from taking liberties, or mooning at her, which was the way she wanted it.