The Wolves of Midwinter (10 page)

He put down the phone. He was staring at nothing, and thinking over a multitude of things, and that happiness was blazing now, making him positively giddy, and then he heard Felix’s voice, gentle and confiding.

“Reuben, don’t you see? This is the only normal human child you will have.”

He looked up at Felix. He was smiling foolishly, he knew it. He was almost laughing for pure happiness. But he was speechless.

The phone was ringing again, but he scarcely heard it. Images were cascading through his mind. And out of the chaos of his conflicting emotions a resolve had formed.

Felix answered the phone and held the receiver out to him. “Your mother.”

“Darling, I hope you’re happy with this. Listen, I’ve told her we’ll
take care of everything. We’ll take the baby. I’ll take the baby. I’ll care for this baby.”

“Mom, I want my son,” he said. “I’m happy, Mom. I’m so happy, really, I can’t figure quite what to say. I tried to tell Celeste, but she wouldn’t listen. She didn’t want to listen. Mom, I am so happy. Dear God, I am so happy.”

Celeste’s stinging words were coming back to him, confusing him. What in the world had she meant by all that invective? It just didn’t matter, really. What mattered was the baby.

“I knew you would be, Reuben,” Grace was saying. “I knew you wouldn’t let us down. She had the appointment for the abortion when she told me! But I said, ‘Celeste, you can’t do this, please.’ She didn’t want to do it, Reuben. She wouldn’t have told anyone if she’d really wanted the abortion. We would never have known. She gave in right away. Look, Reuben, she’s just angry right now.”

“But Mom, I mean, I just don’t understand Celeste,” he said. “Let’s just do whatever we can to make her happy.”

“Well, we will, Reuben. But having a baby’s painful. She’s already requested a leave from the district attorney’s office and she’s talking about relocating in Southern California after this is over. Mort’s applying to UC Riverside for a job. And it looks good. And I’m talking about giving her whatever she needs to get settled there and start over again. You know, a house, a condo, whatever we can do. She’ll land on her feet, Reuben. But she’s mad. So let her be mad. And let’s be happy.”

“Mom, you’re not taking off from work for a year,” Reuben said. “You don’t have to.” He looked up at Felix. Felix nodded. “This boy is going to grow up here with his father. You’re not giving up your career for him, Mom. He’s coming here to live, and I’ll be bringing him down every weekend to see you, you understand? Why, the room right next to mine, it’s Laura’s office, but we’ll turn that into a nursery. There are plenty of rooms for Laura’s office. Laura’s going to be excited when I tell her this.”

His mother was crying. Phil came on the line and said, “Congratulations, son. I’m so happy for you. When you hold your firstborn in
your arms, well, Reuben, that’s when you understand your own life for the first time. I know that sounds trite, but it’s true. You wait and see.”

“Thanks, Dad,” said Reuben. He was surprised at how glad he was to hear his father’s voice.

They went round and round for several minutes, and then Grace said she had to get off and call Jim. Jim was scared to death that Celeste would change her mind and call the abortion clinic again and she had to let Jim know everything was all right. Celeste was coming for lunch, and if Reuben called the florist on Columbus Avenue they could have flowers here by one o’clock. Would Reuben please do that?

Yes, he would do that, he said, he would do that right now.

“Look, Mom, I’m going to pay for everything,” Reuben said. “I’ll call Simon Oliver myself. Let me do this. Let me make the arrangements.”

“No, no, I’ll handle it,” said Grace. “Reuben, you’re our only child, really. Jim’s never going to be anything but a Catholic priest. He’ll never marry, or have children. I resigned myself to that a long time ago. And when we go, what’s ours is yours. It’s six of one, half dozen of another who pays Celeste on all this.”

Finally she rang off.

He called the florist immediately. “Just something big and beautiful and cheerful,” he told the guy. “Like this lady loves roses of all colors, but what have you got to make it look like spring?” He was looking at the gray light coming in the windows.

At last, he was able to pick up the mug of coffee, take a deep drink of it, and sit back in the chair and think. He really had no idea how Laura would take it, but she’d know as surely as he knew that what Felix had just said was true.

Fate had given him an extraordinary gift.

This was the only natural child to which he’d ever be a father in this world. It frightened him suddenly to realize this had almost not happened. But it had happened. He was going to be a father. He was going to “give” Grace and Phil a grandson and he would be a wholly human grandson who could grow up before their eyes. He didn’t know what the world had in store for him on that score, but this changed
everything. He was grateful, grateful to whom he wasn’t sure—to God, to fate, to fortune—to Grace, who’d swayed Celeste, and to Celeste, who was giving him his baby, and to Celeste that she existed and to the Fates that he’d had what he had with her. And then the words ran out.

Felix stood with his back to the fire watching him. He was smiling, but his eyes were glazed and faintly red and he looked terribly sad, suddenly, his smile what people call philosophical.

“I’m happy for you,” he whispered. “So happy for you. I cannot say.”

“Good Lord,” Reuben said. “I’d give her everything I had in this world for that child. And she hates me.”

“She doesn’t hate you, son,” said Felix mildly. “She simply doesn’t love you, and never did, and she feels quite guilty and uncomfortable about it.”

“You think so?”

“Of course,” he said. “I knew the first time I encountered her and heard her endless speeches about your ‘charmed life’ and ‘irresponsible behavior’ and all her advice on how you ought to plan your entire existence.”

“Everybody knew it,” said Reuben. “Everybody. I was the only one who didn’t know it. But why were we ever engaged then?”

“Hard to say,” Felix answered. “But she does not want a child now and so she will sign the baby over to you, and I’d act on that promptly if I were you. And she will happily marry your best friend, Mort, of whom she is not mortally resentful apparently, and may perhaps have a child with him later on. She’s a practical woman, and she’s beautiful, and she’s very smart.”

“Yes to all of that,” said Reuben.

His mind was running with the most unexpected thoughts, thoughts of baby clothes, and cribs and nannies, and picture books, and soft fleeting images of a little boy seated in the window seat against the diamond-paned glass and him, Reuben, reading to that child from a book. Why, all Reuben’s favorite children’s books were still in the attic on Russian Hill, weren’t they, the lavishly illustrated
Treasure
Island
and
Kidnapped
, and the venerable old poetry books from which Phil so loved to read.

Some hazy sense of the future emerged in which a boy was striding through the front door with a backpack full of textbooks, and then it seemed he was grown into a man. And the future shifted, clouded, became a fog in which Reuben would have to leave the warm circle of his family, and his son—have to, have to flee—unable any longer to disguise the fact that he wasn’t growing older, that nothing was changing in him—but then this boy, this young man, this son, would be with them, with Grace and Phil, and Jim, and with Celeste, too, and Mort perhaps, a part of them, after Reuben was gone.

He looked at the windows, and suddenly this little world he’d constructed collapsed. In his memory, he saw Marchent beyond the glass, and he was shuddering once again.

It seemed a long time passed in which Reuben sat there in silence, and Felix stood quietly by the fire.

“My boy,” said Felix softly. “I hate to intrude on your happiness just now, but I was wondering. Would you come along with me, perhaps, to the Nideck Cemetery? I thought you might want to come. I talked to our attorney this morning, you know, Arthur Hammermill. And well, it seems Marchent was indeed buried there.”

“Oh yes, I do want to go with you,” said Reuben. “But there’s something I must tell you first. I saw her again. It was last night.”

And slowly, methodically, he relived the chilling details.

T
HEY HEADED FOR
the Nideck Cemetery under a leaden sky, the rain reduced to a drizzle in the surrounding forest. Felix was at the wheel of his heavy Mercedes sedan.

Arthur Hammermill had seen to Marchent’s interment in the family mausoleum, Felix explained, according to clear instructions in Marchent’s will. Hammermill himself attended a small ceremony for which a few residents of Nideck had gathered, including the Galtons and their cousins, though there had been no public announcement at all. As for the murderous brothers, they had been cremated, based on their own instructions to “friends.”

“I’m ashamed that I never thought to visit her grave,” said Reuben. “I’m ashamed. There can’t be the slightest doubt that whatever is causing her to haunt, she’s unhappy.”

Felix never once took his eyes off the road.

“I didn’t visit the grave myself,” said Felix in a tormented voice. “I had some convenient notion that she’d been buried in South America. But that is no excuse.” His voice went dry as if he were on the verge of breaking down. “And she was the very last of my own blood descendants.”

Reuben looked at him, wanting so badly to ask how this had played out.

“The very last of those related to me by blood in this world, as far as I know. Since every other scion of my family has long ago withered or vanished. And I didn’t visit her grave, no, I did not. And that is why we are doing it now, isn’t it? Both of us are visiting her grave.”

The cemetery was behind the town, and occupied about two city blocks, flanked by scattered houses on all four sides. The road here
was patchy, badly in need of repair, but the homes were all vintage Victorian, small, simple, but well-built frame houses with peak roofs much like the Victorians Reuben had always loved in countless other old California towns. That several here and there were brightly painted with fresh pastel colors and white trim struck him as good for the town of Nideck. There were multicolored Christmas lights twinkling in windows here and there. And the cemetery itself, bound by an iron picket fence with more than one open gate, was rather a picturesque spot with well-kept grass and a great sprinkling of old monuments.

The rain had let up, and they didn’t need the umbrellas they’d brought with them, though Reuben wound his scarf around his neck against the eternal chill. The sky was dark and featureless, and a white mist enveloped the top of the forest.

Small rounded tombstones made up most of the graves. Many had rich scrollwork and deep lettering, and here and there Reuben glimpsed a poetic epitaph. There was one small mausoleum, a house of stone blocks with a flat roof and an iron door, and this bore the name
NIDECK
in ornate letters, while several other Nideck tombstones were scattered to its left and right.

Felix had a key for the iron door.

It made Reuben very uneasy to hear the key grind in the old lock, but they were soon standing in a very dusty little passage illuminated by a single leaded-glass window in the back of the little building, with evidence of what must have been coffin-length crypts on either side.

Marchent had been laid to rest to the right, and a rectangular stone had been fitted in place near the head or the foot of the coffin, Reuben could not guess which. It gave her name, Marchent Sophia Nideck, the dates of her life, and a line of poetry, which surprised Reuben. It read:
WE MUST LOVE ONE ANOTHER OR DIE
. The poet was W. H. Auden, and his name was inscribed in small letters beneath the quote.

Reuben felt light-headed. He felt trapped and sick, and almost on the edge of collapsing in this little space.

Quickly, he hurried outside, back into the damp air, and left Felix alone inside the little building. He was trembling, and he stood still, fighting the nausea.

It seemed more than ever ghastly to him, perfectly ghastly, that Marchent was dead. He saw Celeste’s face, he saw some sweetly illuminated image of the child he was now dreaming of, he saw all the faces of those he loved, including Laura, beautiful Laura, and he felt the grief for Marchent like a sickness that would turn him inside out.

So this is one of the big secrets of life, is it?—you cope with loss sooner or later, and then one loss after another most likely, and it probably never gets any easier than this, and each time you’re looking at what is going to happen to you, only this won’t happen to me. It won’t. And I can’t quite make that real
.

He stared dully ahead of him and was only vaguely aware that a man was coming across the graveyard from a truck parked on the road, and that he was carrying a large bouquet of white roses, arranged in green ferns, that was fitted into what appeared to be a stone vase.

He thought of the roses he’d sent to Celeste. He felt like crying. He saw Marchent’s tormented face again right near him, so near. He felt he was going to go crazy here.

He moved away as the man approached the little mausoleum but he could still hear Felix thanking the man and telling him that the flowers should be placed outside. He heard the rasp of the key in the lock. Then the man was gone, and Reuben was staring at a long row of yew trees, grown far too tall to be picturesque anymore, that divided the graveyard from the quaint and pretty houses across the way. Such pretty bay windows, outlined with red and green lights. Such pretty gingerbread trim. A mass of dark pines rose behind the houses. Indeed the dark woods encroached on all sides, and the houses in all directions looked small and bold against the giant fir trees. The trees were so horribly out of scale with the little streetscape and the community of small graves that slumbered here amid the velvet green grass.

He wanted to turn back, find Felix, say something comforting, but he was so deeply immersed now in the vision of last night, in seeing Marchent’s face, feeling her cold hand on his hand, that he couldn’t move or speak.