The Wolves of Midwinter (3 page)

She seemed to be weighing something. She started to speak but didn’t.

“I wanted to just take away all your pain,” he said. “And the more I learned of your pain the more I wanted to annihilate it. But of course I couldn’t do that. I could only compromise you, bring you halfway into this secret with me.”

“I wanted to come,” she said. “I wanted you. I wanted the secret, didn’t I?”

“But I was no primal beast of the woods,” he said, “I was no innocent hairy man of myth, I was Reuben Golding, the hunter, the killer, the Man Wolf.”

“I know,” she said. “And I loved you every step of the way to the knowledge of what you are, didn’t I?”

“Yes.” He sighed. “So what am I afraid of?”

“That you won’t love the Morphenkind that I become,” she said simply. “So you won’t love me when I’m as powerful as you are.”

He couldn’t reply.

He sucked in his breath. “And Felix, and Thibault, do they know how to control when the full change happens?”

“No. They said it would be soon.” She waited, and when he said nothing, she went on. “You’re scared you won’t love me anymore, that I won’t be that tender, vulnerable pink thing that you found in this house.”

He hated himself for not answering.

“You can’t be happy for me, you can’t be happy that I will share this with you, can you?”

“I’m trying,” he said. “I really am, I’m trying.”

“From the very first moment you loved me you were miserable that you couldn’t share it with me, you know you were,” she said. “We talked about it, and it was there when we didn’t talk about it—the fact that I could die, and you couldn’t give this gift to me for fear of killing me, the fact that I might never share it with you. We talked of that. We did.”

“I know that, Laura. You’ve every right to be furious with me. To be disappointed. God knows, I disappoint people.”

“No, you don’t,” she said. “Don’t say those things. If you’re talking about your mother and that dreadful Celeste, well, good, you disappoint them for being far more sensitive than they can guess, for not buying into their ruthless world with its greedy ambition and nauseating self-sacrifice. So what! Disappoint them.”

“Hmmm,” he whispered. “I’ve never heard you talk like that before.”

“Well, I’m not Little Red Riding Hood anymore, now, am I?” She laughed. “Seriously. They don’t know who you are. But I do and your father does, and so does Felix, and you’re not disappointing me. You love me. You love who I was and you’re afraid of losing that person. That’s not disappointing.”

“I think it should be.”

“It was all theoretical to you,” she said. “That you might share the
gift with me, that I might die if you didn’t. It was theoretical to you that you had it. It all happened too quickly for you.”

“That’s the truth,” he said.

“Look, I don’t expect anything of you that you can’t give,” she said. “Only allow me this. Allow me to be part of all of you, even if you and I can’t be lovers anymore. Allow that, that I’ll be part of you and Felix and Thibault and …”

“Of course, yes. Do you think they would ever allow me to drive you away? Do you think for a minute I’d do that? Laura!”

“Reuben, there isn’t a man alive who doesn’t feel possessive of the woman he loves, who doesn’t want to control his access to her and her access to him and his world.”

“Laura, I know all that—.”

“Reuben, you have to be feeling something about the fact that they gave me the Chrism, whether you wanted them to do it or not, that they made their decision about me and with me essentially without seeing me as part of you. And I made my decision the same way.”

“As it should be, for the love of—.”

He stopped.

“I don’t like what I’m finding out about myself,” he said. “But this is life and death, and it’s your choice. And do you think I could endure it if they’d left it up to me, if they’d treated you as if you were my possession?”

“No, I don’t,” she said. “But we can’t always reason with our feelings.”

“Well, I love you,” he said. “And I will accept this. I will. I will love you as much after as I love you now. My feelings might not listen to reason. But I’m giving them a direct order.”

She laughed. And he did in spite of himself.

“Now, tell me. Why are you here alone now, when the change might come at any time?”

“I’m not alone,” she said. “Thibault’s here. He’s been here since before dark. He’s out there, waiting for you to leave. He’ll be with me every night until it’s resolved.”

“Well, then why don’t you come home now?” he demanded.

She didn’t answer. She was looking off again as if listening to the sounds of the forest. “Come back with me now. Let’s pack up and get out of here.”

“You’re being very brave,” she said quietly. “But I want to see this through here. And you know that’s better for both of us.”

He couldn’t deny it. He couldn’t deny that he was terrified that the transformation might come on right now as they sat there. The mere thought of it was more than he could bear.

“You’re in safe hands with Thibault,” he said.

“Of course,” she said.

“If it was that Frank, I’d kill him with my bare claws.”

She smiled, but didn’t protest.

He was being ridiculous, wasn’t he? After all, hadn’t Thibault—whenever he’d received the gift—been invigorated by it? What was the practical difference between the two men? One looked like an elderly scholar and the other like a Don Juan. But they were both full-blooded Morphenkinder, weren’t they? Yet Thibault conveyed the grace of age, and Frank was forever in his prime. And it struck him suddenly with full force that she would look as beautiful as she was now forever; and he himself,
he himself
, would never grow older, or look older or seem older—never become the wise and venerable man that his father was, never ever age beyond this moment. He might as well have been the youth on Keats’s Grecian urn.

How could he have failed to realize these things, and what they must mean to her, and should mean to him? How had he not been transformed by that awareness, that secret knowledge? It was theoretical to him, she was right.

She
knew
. She’d always known what the full import of it all was. She’d tried to get him to realize it, and when he did let it penetrate now, he felt even more ashamed than ever of fearing the change in her.

He stood up and walked to the back bedroom. He felt dazed, almost sleepy. The rain was heavy now, pounding the old roof above. He felt an eagerness to get on the road, to be plowing north through the darkness.

“If Thibault weren’t here, I wouldn’t think of leaving,” he said. He
pulled on his clothes, hastily buttoning his shirt, and slipping on his coat.

Then he turned to her and the tears rose in his eyes.

“You will come home just as soon as you can,” he said.

She put her arms around him and he held her as tightly as he dared, rubbing his face in her hair, kissing her over and over again on her soft cheek. “I love you, Laura,” he said. “I love you with all my heart, Laura. I love you with all my soul. I’m young and foolish and I don’t understand all of it, but I love you, and I want you to come home. I don’t know what I have to offer you that the others can’t offer, and they’re stronger, finer, infinitely more experienced—.”

“Stop.” She put her fingers against his lips. “You are my love,” she whispered. “My only love.”

He went out the back door and down the steps in the rain. The forest was an invisible wall of darkness; only the wet grass showed in the lights from the house. And the rain stung him and he hated it.

“Reuben,” she called out. She stood on the porch as she had that first night. The Old West–style kerosene lantern was there on the bench but it was not lighted, and he could not make out the features of her face.

“What is it?”

She came down the steps, into the rain.

He couldn’t resist taking her in his arms again.

“Reuben, that night. You have to understand. I didn’t care what happened to me. I didn’t care at all.”

“I know.”

“I didn’t care whether I lived or died. Not at all.” The rain was flooding down on her hair, on her upturned face.

“I know.”

“I don’t know that you can know,” she said. “Reuben, nothing paranormal, psychic, supernatural has ever happened to me. Nothing. Never have I had a presentiment, or a foreboding dream. Never has the spirit of my father or my sister, or my husband or my children come to me, Reuben. Never has there been a comforting moment when I felt their presence. Never did I have an inkling that they were alive somewhere.
Never has there been the slightest breach of the rules of the natural world. That’s where I lived until you came, in the natural world.”

“I do understand,” he said.

“You were some kind of miracle, something monstrous yet fabulous, and the radio and the TV and the newspapers had been chattering about you, this Man Wolf thing, this incredible being, this hallucination, this spectacular chimera, I don’t know how to describe it—and there you were—there you were—and you were absolutely real, and I saw you and I touched you. And I didn’t care! I wasn’t going to turn away. I didn’t care.”

“I understand. I know. I knew it at the time.”

“Reuben, I want to live now. I want to be alive. I want to be alive with every fiber of my being, don’t you see, and for you and me, this is being alive.”

He was about to pick her up, to carry her back into the house, but she stepped away and put her hands up. Her nightgown was soaked and cleaving to her breasts, and her hair was dark around her face. He was chilled to the bone and it didn’t matter.

“No,” she said, stepping back, yet holding firmly to his lapels. “Listen to what I’m saying. I don’t believe in anything, Reuben. I don’t believe I’ll ever see my father again, or my kids, or my sister. I think they are just gone. But I want to be alive. And this thing means we don’t die.”

“I do understand,” he said.

“I care now, don’t you see?”

“Yes,” he answered. “And I want to understand more, Laura. And I will understand more. I promise you. I will.”

“Go now, please,” she said. “And I’ll be home soon.”

He passed Thibault on the way to his car. Thibault, portly and dignified, in a shining black raincoat standing under the great Douglas fir, with an umbrella, a big black umbrella, and maybe Thibault gave him a nod, he didn’t know. He just got in his car and headed north.

I
T WAS TEN O
’
CLOCK
when he reached home, and the house was cheerful, with a lot of the sweet-smelling evergreen garland already around the fireplaces, and the fires going as always, and a scattering of cheerful lamps lighted throughout the main rooms.

Felix was at the dining table, in fast conversation with Margon and Stuart about the plans for Yuletide, a map or diagram spread before them on butcher paper, and a couple of yellow notepads laid out with pens. The gentlemen were in their pajamas and Old World satin-lapel robes, while Stuart wore his usual dark sweatshirt and jeans. He looked like a wholesome American teenager who had wandered into a Claude Rains movie.

Reuben smiled to himself over that little bit of musing. It was wonderful to see them all so animated, so happy in the light of the fire, and to smell the tea and the cakes, and all the fragrances he now associated with home—wax, and polish, and the oak logs burning on the hearth, and of course the fresh smell of the rain that always worked its way into this big house, this house with its damp dark corners that surrounded so many yet never really embraced anyone.

The old French valet Jean Pierre took Reuben’s wet raincoat, and immediately set a cup of tea for him at the table.

Reuben sat quiet, drinking the tea, distracted, thinking of Laura, half listening and nodding to all the Christmas plans, vaguely aware that Felix was stimulated about all this, uncommonly happy.

“So you’re home, Reuben,” said Felix cheerfully, “and just in time to hear our grand designs, and to approve, and give us your permission and your blessing.” He had his usual radiance, dark eyes crinkled with good humor, his deep voice running on with easy enthusiasm.

“Home but dead tired,” Reuben confessed, “though I know I can’t sleep. Maybe this is my night to become a lone wolf and the scourge of Mendocino County.”

“No, no, no,” whispered Margon. “We’re all doing so well, cooperating with one another, aren’t we?”

“Being obedient to you, you mean,” said Stuart. “Maybe Reuben and I should go off together tonight and, you know, get in real trouble like the little wolves that we are.”

He made a fist and slammed Margon a little too hard on the arm.

“Did I ever explain to you boys,” asked Margon, “that this house has a dungeon?”

“Oh, complete with chains, no doubt,” said Stuart.

“Amazingly complete,” said Margon, narrowing his eyes as he gazed at Stuart. “And proverbially dark and damp and dismal. But that never stopped some of the expiring inmates from carving grim poetry into the walls. Would you like to spend some time there?”

“As long as I can have my blankie and my laptop,” said Stuart, “and meals on schedule. I might get some rest down there.”

Another mocking growl came from Margon and he shook his head. “ ‘They flee from me that sometime did me seek,’ ” he whispered.

“Oh not another secret poetic communication,” said Stuart. “I can’t stand it. The poetry’s getting so thick in here I can’t breathe.”

“Gentlemen, gentlemen,” said Felix. “Let’s keep it brisk and light and in keeping with the season.”

He looked intently at Reuben. “Speaking of dungeons, I want to show you the statues for the crèche. This will be a splendid Yuletide, young master of the house, if you’ll allow it.”

He went on quickly explaining. December sixteenth, two Sundays before Christmas, was the perfect day for the Christmas festival in Nideck, and the banquet here at the house, for all the people of the county. The booths and shops in the “village,” as Felix more often than not called it, would close at dark, and everyone would come up to Nideck Point for the evening festivities. Of course the families must come, Reuben’s and Stuart’s, and whatever old friends either wanted to include. This was the time to remember everybody. And Father Jim
must bring the “unfortunates” from his church in San Francisco, and buses could be provided for that.