Skin of the Wolf

by Sam Cabot

  “That’s not recorded. The few missionaries who mentioned them never said how they were used.”

  “Sounds like a major omission, based on the Jesuits I know.”

  “Oh, it has to be deliberate. And once the Jesuits were gone, animal masks never appear again in accounts of the Eastern nations. Estelle, where did it come from?”

  Estelle shook her head. “The seller insists on staying anonymous. The provenance, as I said, is completely convincing and will be provided to the buyer, but even they won’t get the seller’s name. But Katherine, this will interest you. The provenance starts with a Jesuit missionary. The first mention of the mask, in the household inventory of an Irish family called Hammill from 1790, says it was acquired years earlier from a Father Etienne Ravenelle by the owner’s grandfather.”

  “Really? 1790, someone’s grandfather—Ravenelle would have sold it or given it to the grandfather right around the time he was ordered back to France.”

  “I suppose he didn’t want to take it with him.”

  “Or he was worried he wouldn’t make it. In those years the British were hanging Catholic priests wholesale when they found them. How did Ravenelle come to have it?”

  “The inventory doesn’t say that or anything else about it. Just lists and describes it.”

  “Specifically enough to be sure it’s this same piece?”

  “Minutely. A very detailed description, and see this nick next to the stripe at the ear? It’s listed, and so is this gouge underneath, here, and a few others. Almost as though the owner didn’t want to be blamed for the damage.”

  “Maybe he was told it was a valuable piece when he inherited it,” Livia said.

  “Doubtful.” Katherine pursed her lips. “In 1790 Indian artifacts only had curiosity value, if that. It’s odd someone would have cared enough then to make any kind of detailed record.”

  “May I pick it up?” Livia suddenly asked.

  “Of course. Brittany, please.”

  The assistant jumped up, opened a drawer in a breakfront, and handed Livia a pair of gloves. Livia pulled them on and lifted the mask, feeling the solidity of it, the weight. She first looked at it straight on, then traced her index finger along the snout, the painted teeth, the curled lip, the tip of one ear. She turned it this way and that, examining the back, the carved fur, the inside. Within, the mask was carved but not painted, and bore what looked like sweat stains where it would have touched the wearer’s skin.

  “Has there been a lot of interest?” Katherine had also donned gloves, and Livia passed the mask to her.

  “Is the Pope Catholic?” Estelle grinned. “Even here, the European Painting Specialists who generally don’t give us the time of day are clamoring to sit next to me in the commissary. Our phone hasn’t stopped ringing. I haven’t been this popular since my junior prom.” She added, “I hate to tell you, Katherine, but the estimate’s gone up. As of this morning we had it at seven million.”

  Katherine shrugged. “What can I do?”

  Livia asked Katherine, “The Met will be bidding?”

  “Yes,” Katherine said, turning the mask in her hands. “I have donors who’ll underwrite the purchase. They think a major museum is the best place for something this—amazing.”

  “I happen to agree,” Estelle said, “but some other major museums are interested, too. And of course private collectors.”

  “What about the tribes?” Livia asked. “Didn’t I read about a lawsuit? Claiming they’re religious artifacts, not art, and shouldn’t be sold at all?”

  “That involved some of the Hopi artifacts, and they’ve been withdrawn while it’s litigated. But most of what we have here is unattributed or orphaned, or can be supported by bills of sale.”

  “‘Orphaned’?”

  Katherine and Estelle exchanged glances. “The tribe that created this Ohtahyohnee is long gone,” Katherine explained. “According to the Hammill papers they were one of the Huron tribes, wiped out by European diseases and Europeans. No one’s left to lay claim.”

  Both women had the grace to look sheepish. Livia, a guest here, didn’t pursue it. The history of art collecting did not bear close inspection, anywhere in the world, at any time.

  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.

  3

  Livia 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.

  4

  Thomas 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 we
re 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?”