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Authors: Ann Arensberg

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BOOK: Sister Wolf
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Airy fragile Francesca, a neutral reproof was like a tongue-lashing to her, a spark of irritation was an indictment of her whole character. “Shrink” and “cower” had been fancy metaphors to Gabriel, or something that puppies did when they wet the floor and not the newspapers. Francesca acted out both verbs when she was reprimanded, with some quailing and flinching thrown in besides. Gabriel practiced saying things like “There are eggshells in the laundry hamper” in a monotone, but her brows would knit and her mouth would start to tremble before he could finish the sentence. Living as he did under the myth of his own vile temper, he felt he was performing contortions of self-control. Still she would react as if he were a sadistic child with a toy chest full of stuffed animals to brutalize: some days she would be the rabbit whose ears he pulled off, and other days the bear whose glass eyes he extracted. He hated the image of himself that he saw in her eyes, but he bowed his neck to it. If he could get through a day, then a length of days, without making her cry, he could atone for his sins of anger and propitiate the violence within him. He saw clearly that it would be a lifelong task, so he asked her to marry him, and she said yes, with a fey, sweet smile.

He was asking too much of himself. Such marvels of therapeutic forbearance cannot be exercised in close domestic quarters. He began to wish for a neurosurgical procedure that would cut out his irritability without otherwise harming his brain. Free from criticism, Francesca thrived; she trilled and crowed and made messes like an infant, and never once caught him drumming his fingers or holding his tongue. He took no pride in his silence. Suppressing critical words was no good if he could not vanquish critical thoughts.

After months of this unnatural regime, he convinced himself that she was secure enough to let him speak and act normally again. She was a bubbly little sprite, and sprites, like cats, have many lives. He was pleased with himself, and began to relax his guard. One night he sat down to add some new exercises to his poetry workbook. The workbook was missing from his desk and from his shoulder bag. He thought he must have left it in his office at school. He went into the bathroom to wash his face. The soap slid out of his hands, onto the floor, and under the old claw-footed bathtub. On his hands and knees he reached for the soap, and saw a mustard-colored paperbound volume wedged between the tub and the bathroom wall. He pulled it loose, shredding the covers and several waterlogged pages as he did so. Francesca liked to read in the bathtub. She had so many fines for damaged books that Butler Library had cut off her borrowing privileges.

She was curled up on the sofa, eating an apple. Gabriel raised one eyebrow, in a parody of menace, and held the spongy workbook out in front of him. He might have been raising a dagger to smite her. The apple dropped out of her hand. She started to shake her head and shrink away from him. She kept opening her mouth, fishlike, trying to say “no,” but terror palsied her vocal cords. He stood watching, baffled and goggle-eyed, as she inched off the sofa and toward the door. He glanced quickly over his shoulder at the mirror on the wall to see if he was wearing the shape of a fiend. He looked at the workbook, which was still a workbook, not a bludgeon or a loaded gun. She was standing in front of the door, both hands behind her back, grasping the doorknob, her breast thrust forward, heaving. It occurred to him that she was acting and, in the next instant, that it did not matter; she was so absorbed in her role that the line between pretense and belief was nonexistent. He moved a half-step toward her and she screamed like a weasel being hoisted in a snare. The ugly noise set him on fire. For the first time in three years he yelled his brains out, liberated by the injustice of her reaction. He heard his own voice thundering in his ears, drowning out the sound of the door as it slammed behind her. He kept on yelling to an empty house, until his knees buckled and he fell on the couch, lightheaded and punch-drunk and spent.

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.

BOOK: Sister Wolf
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