Skin of the Wolf (2 page)

Estelle glanced at her watch. “I’m sorry, but I have a meeting and then another showing.”

“Of the Ohtahyohnee?” Katherine asked. “And here I thought I was so special.”

“Of course you are, darling. It doesn’t go on view until tomorrow, after all. You’re the only prospective bidder getting a sneak preview. As a thanks for all your help.”

“I was Estelle’s outside consultant on the items for this auction,” Katherine told Livia. “For those very few times she didn’t know absolutely everything. But darling, you’re lying to my face. You just said you’re giving us the bum’s rush for your next sneak preview.”

“Ah, but this gentleman’s not a prospective bidder. He’s Native American. Community Relations asks us to give Native people
access whenever they request it, if we can. Enrolled tribal members with credentials, of course. Even items like this that are being held back. It can defuse potentially difficult situations.”

Livia took one last long look at the wolf mask and then shook Estelle’s hand. “Thank you so much. This was fascinating.”

“I’m glad you could come. I’m sorry to throw you out so unceremoniously. Perhaps we can get together later in the week? Brittany will show you to the elevator. Don’t forget to bundle up!”

Wrapped and buttoned and zipped and bundled, Livia and Katherine headed back toward the Met. “I have a meeting, too, and a few other things to do at the office, but we could get dinner after if you have time,” Katherine said as they worked their way uphill in the February darkness. Both walking and talking were easier with the wind behind them.

“Thanks,” Livia answered, “but I have dinner plans. A friend who’s living here now. Katherine?”

Katherine turned her head. “You sound strange. What’s up?”

“The mask.” Livia paused. “I think it’s a fake.”

“What? No, no possible way. Estelle’s very careful. If she says it has good provenance then it does. And you saw the carving, the skill—my God, the thing looks alive!”

“It looks alive. But it doesn’t . . . feel alive. I think,” Livia hurried on, “that the provenance is authentic, but somewhere along the line the mask was switched. The mask in the 1790 inventory may have been the real one, and later than that, too. But this one’s not.”

Katherine was silent while they crossed the street and said nothing until they were halfway down the block. Then she asked, “Why do you think so?”

This, Livia could not explain. Not to an Unchanged, no matter how close a friend.

“It’s just a feeling I have,” she said. “The mask does look alive. I think the carver of the original felt that it was, in some way.”

“That’s often true of a ritual object.”

“Yes. But this one, it seems to me to be a copy of a living mask. It’s a perfect copy, but I don’t get any sense that the artist felt that
this
mask was alive.” She paused. “I’m sorry, that sounds absurd. It’s not my area and I’m probably wrong. Forget I said anything. I just couldn’t let you go ahead and spend your donors’ seven million dollars on something that doesn’t feel right to me without speaking up.”

They’d reached the plaza in front of the Met. The basins, their fountains turned off for the winter, held autumn leaves frozen in ice.

“No,” Katherine said. “Something had been bothering me, too. I was just so taken with the beauty of it . . . but something does feel off. Missing. I’m not sure I’d have put it the same way you did, but I’m uncomfortable with something about it.”

“What will you do?”

“I’m not sure. If I decide not to bid I’ll have to explain it to the donors. But if we’re wrong . . . I have to think. But thank you for sharing your misgivings.”

“I’m sorry. No one likes to hear that kind of thing, even if it’s true.”

“Especially if it’s true. But better now than after I’ve spent the money. I have to go. Enjoy your dinner, and see you at the conference tomorrow.”

Livia gave Katherine a quick hug and headed to the bus stop. She’d have preferred to walk downtown, but the weather was just too cold.

L
ivia Pietro had been an art historian all her adult life. Forty-two years into that life, in 1915, she put art aside to become a battlefield nurse when her native Italy declared war on Austria-Hungary. A year later, during the Sixth Battle of the Isonzo, she was mortally wounded by a mortar shell.

The night after that, she awoke a Noantri.

A vampire.

The sergeant who’d saved her explained it was the only way; that what he’d done was wrong according to the Laws of his Community, but she’d been so brave, refusing to evacuate, staying to care for the wounded and the terrified, men in pain, boys who were dying. He didn’t think it fair that she should pay for her valor with her life. If she was horrified, the sergeant told her, if she didn’t want this Change, he’d reverse its effects. She would die, and, he was sure, be welcomed in Heaven. He waited fearfully for her response, while she felt the threads in the roughly laundered linen sheet that covered her, heard the voices of soldiers around the fires on the other side of the ridge—the sergeant had carried her to a copse and woven a roof of branches to protect her—and heard, also, the wind in the trees and the howling of wolves at what she knew, even then, to be a great
distance. She looked around, saw the colors in the darkness, deep reds and blues she’d never known before. The scent of loam, and the distant river, and the soldier’s coffee, and the sergeant’s sweat and worry, she could recognize them all, pick each one out. Her eyes met the sergeant’s and though she didn’t speak, his face lit with a relieved smile.

Livia had lived as a Noantri now for a hundred years, faithfully following the Laws of the Community into which she had been initiated and of which she felt honored to be part. She remained a nurse until the end of the war—who better, now?—and afterwards she returned to her old work with new abilities and gifts. Blessings, the Noantri called them.

It was these Blessings, indirectly, that had involved her in the events in Rome last autumn; these Blessings that had enabled her to play her role in resolving that crisis; and these Blessings that had spoken to her of the counterfeit nature of the Ohtahyohnee she’d just seen.

The skill of the carver was inarguable. The mask, in its way, was perfect. Livia had no doubt that the tree it was carved from, if tests of such precision were possible, would be shown to have been felled in the fifteenth or sixteenth century and that the pigments and the brushes used to apply them were formulated and made exactly as they would have been then. Katherine had said,
The thing looks alive!
It did. But to Livia’s Noantri senses, something was missing.

Contrary to the legends and myths that had always swirled around them, the Noantri had no supernatural dimension. What they had were enormously enhanced human senses and abilities—sight, for example, and strength—and a thirst for human blood. And also, eternal life. In the many, many centuries of Noantri existence before the coming of science, the unearthly explanation was the
only one that could account for these attributes, in the minds of both Noantri and Unchanged. The truth, still being unraveled by Noantri scientists, turned out to be both less mystical and more awe-inspiring. The qualities that made the Noantri eternal, and eternally different from the Unchanged, were, the scientists had found, the result of a microbe and the DNA changes it wrought.

When Katherine asked why Livia thought the mask was not authentic she said it was “just a feeling.” In truth, it was a lack of feeling. One of the Blessings that had come to Livia with her Change—a Blessing that filled her with deep joy—was the ability, if she contemplated a work long enough and seriously enough, to understand the artist’s way through it. She hadn’t had nearly enough time with the Ohtahyohnee to fully understand the piece, but the tiny contractions in her hands and arms as she explored it had told her this: the mask had not been made in a state of passion, a fever of inspiration. The artist had worked methodically, carefully, step by step.

Without doubt, stunning, even transcendent art could be produced that way. A muse-driven frenzy was not necessary for beauty, could in fact often be a hindrance. But the original of this Ohtahyohnee, she was convinced, had been made by someone to whom it was alive. More: someone who felt, or hoped, he was bringing it to life by the work he was doing. An artist approaching a work that way starts and stops, fears, rushes in, hesitates, backs out. He may take great care, but he’s not methodical. In her brief experience of this wolf mask Livia felt none of that. Her muscles and nerve fibers conveyed to her no emotion at all, save a sharp, steady, single-minded focus.

T
homas Kelly had been early to the restaurant, in happy anticipation of seeing Livia Pietro, but became so absorbed in the book he’d brought that he jumped when she spoke.

“Nice to see you’re as studious as ever, Father Kelly.”

He tried to stand and turn at the same time and nearly knocked his chair over. “I’m sorry, I didn’t see you come in! I guess I was distracted—I just always have a book because in case—please, sit down, I’m so happy you could—” He stopped and grinned at her. “This is exactly how we met, isn’t it?”

“I ambushed you over a book, yes.” Livia smiled also as she moved around the table and sat. “I’m so glad to see you, Thomas. I’m sorry for the short notice and I’m so pleased you weren’t too busy. You look well. New York suits you, I think.”

“You look wonderful yourself.”

“Thank you,” she said, her eyes sparkling, and he understood: wonderful, or awful, or anything in between, she looked exactly as she had the last time he saw her.

Before he’d met Livia and others in her Community, Thomas had never noticed how so much of what we look for when we see our friends, especially after an absence, is how they wear time. Thomas
himself had a few more lines on his freckled face, a touch more gray in his red hair, than when he and Livia Pietro first encountered each other in the Vatican Library a few months earlier. But Livia, being Noantri, never changed. Her heart, her mind, her spirit, yes; but in appearance, she was and would always be the woman he’d met last fall: a middle-aged
Professoressa
, lively, self-possessed, her eyes still a surprising emerald color, her long black hair streaked with silver.

Tonight she was dressed in a boxy soft black jacket and a black wool skirt, and she wore her hair braided and pinned up. A discreet gold bracelet glowed on her wrist. The scent he faintly caught was not, he thought, the same as she’d worn in Rome; this one was lighter, more citrusy, but maybe women wore different perfumes in different cities and why was he noticing anyway? No, he knew why, and allowed himself a rueful smile. The effect Livia had on him, she’d explained in Rome, was a natural reaction of his Unchanged body to her Noantri one, a result of their different physiologies. But, Thomas thought, not entirely. He accepted that the physical component of his attraction to Livia was attributable to biology. In truth, though, concerning physical desire, wasn’t that always so? Did our bodies—Unchanged or Noantri—not have their own laws, their own reasons? Which didn’t stop Thomas from bringing his desire, for Livia or any woman, into the confessional, didn’t stop it from being something he worked to subdue.

However, he was also sure of another thing. His joyful eagerness for her arrival and his delight in seeing her tonight had an additional component entirely, one as powerful and one that luckily was no sin: a connection begun in mutual antipathy, transformed through painful shared experience, and ultimately grown into a deep and sincere friendship.

“I’d have canceled whatever I had to when you said you were
coming.” He settled back into his seat. “My schedule’s my own. You’re the one who’s busy. With the conference and everything. Couldn’t you have come for longer? A week before or after?”

Livia shook her head. “I wish I could have. But you know how it is. The university was happy I’d been invited to present a paper so they gave me the week, but even then I’m expected to make it up.”

Thomas nodded. A familiarity with the sometimes unreasonable demands of academia was one of the bonds they shared.

That, and the memory of what had happened in Rome last fall.

The waiter appeared and after a brief consultation they ordered a bottle of Frascati, a crisp white from vineyards near Rome. They both took a few moments to contemplate dinner—the restaurant was the Blue Water Grill, Thomas’s selection after intensive research following Livia’s request for seafood—and then Livia closed her menu and asked, “What are you reading?”

Thomas glanced at the volume beside him. “François Roustang’s book on the history of the Jesuits in North America.”

She tilted her head to see the cover. “In French?”

“I didn’t dare try the translation. He’s opaque enough in the original.”

Livia’s face grew serious. “Thomas, I want to tell you how glad I am . . . When you said . . . When you told me . . . Why am I having trouble phrasing this?”

“I think, because you’re not sure how to talk to a priest about his vocation?”

She visibly relaxed. “That’s exactly it. I know you left Rome uncertain about your future. It’s really none of my business, but I think your decision to remain a priest must be the right one because now that I see you, you seem so happy.”

“That may just be because
I’m
seeing
you
. No, I’m joking. I mean, I am happy to see you, but yes, I think abandoning my vocation because of . . . what we
learned, would have been a mistake. I still haven’t fully assimilated it. I meditate on it daily. But being a priest—it’s really who I am, you know?”

She smiled. “Oh, yes, I do know.”

The waiter arrived with their wine. He displayed the label for Thomas, but Thomas pointed to Livia; her senses were much more nuanced than his, and he didn’t want to accept a bottle that she’d find undrinkable. She tasted it, nodded, and their glasses were filled. He lifted his. “To the future.” The meaning of that was different for each of them, but she met his gaze and raised her glass, too.

They ordered dinner, the waiter left, and Livia said, “Now tell me about your research.”

“Are you sure? When I get started you know I can go on for hours.”

“I’ll stop you when you start using words I don’t know. Please, I’m interested.”

“Well.” Thomas sat forward. “I told you I took your advice, right? About changing my focus?”

Livia raised her eyebrows. “I didn’t mean that as advice. Just, for me, it seemed like a way to get some distance for a while.”

“The more I thought about it, the more it seemed like that to me, too. Fordham asked me to work with two students writing theses in my area, and I told them I would, but that my own research would be heading off in another direction.”

“And they’re happy with that? Of course they are, they’re lucky to have landed that eminent Church historian, Father Thomas Kelly, and they know it.” Thomas felt himself blushing. He knew Livia
could sense his embarrassment even if she couldn’t see his face flush in the dim light, but he’d gotten used to that. “So what is it you’re doing?”

“It actually almost touches on why you’re in town. The Lily of the Mohawks—is she familiar?”

“The first North American Native saint, am I right? I don’t know anything more than that.”

He grinned again. “You will when you read my book. Kateri Tekakwitha. Baptized as Catherine. She lived from 1656 to 1680, was beatified in 1980 and canonized in 2012. Church practice when a saint is canonized is to produce a biography. That was done for Tekakwitha but the Pope doesn’t like it.”

“Francis? He doesn’t?”

“Because he’s from the Americas and reportedly touchy about it. He thought the biography was minimal, pro forma, not serious scholarship. When I told my department chair—Monsignor Maxwell, Gerald Maxwell—that I wanted to look at early New World issues for a while, he asked what specific areas I was interested in, and when I said I hadn’t decided he asked if I’d want to take this project on. Further research into Tekakwitha, to provide something more detailed. It’s actually Father Maxwell’s own subject, the early Church in North America. He was looking for someone with, well, credentials. To make the Pope happy.”

“If you don’t mind my saying so, that sounds a little pro forma itself.”

“Perhaps. I’m enjoying the work, though.”

“She’s interesting, your saint?”

“Oh, yes, very. That whole world—the first contact between Europeans and the Native tribes—is fascinating, except of course Europeans didn’t acquit themselves very well. Though the early
missionaries of my order”—he tapped the book—“seem to have behaved decently, at times even in ways I’m proud of. Standing for the tribes against the governments—the French, the English, later the Canadians and the U.S.”

“Hmm.” Livia frowned in mock consternation. “But pride’s a sin.”

“Not if you’re proud of someone else.”

“I suppose that’s true, as long as you’re humble about it. Oh, good, here’s the soup. I don’t think I’m prepared for a theological debate.”