Sister Wolf

by Ann Arensberg

  Marit thought that the blind children would have that look if their eyes were not dead. This model blind farm, with its euphemistic name, was a cageless zoo where natural instincts were slowly being blunted. Nine- and ten-year-olds slept in the five tent during summer camp season; in three years’ time no more fights would break out, wherever they were housed. Meyerling modulated the voices of its wards along with their personalities. A soft, low voice is considered an excellent thing in the blind. By the time they lined up at graduation, dressed in white regardless of their sex, these same scrappy boys and girls would resemble postulants to a contemplative order, with their bowed heads and bowed shoulders, unlined faces, and pallid complexions. Enclosure and meditation are better than any cream or cosmetic for the life of the skin, but not for the condition of the spirit, walled up before its time. If the journey from birth to death spans seven ages, Meyerling wanted its charges to leap from the dependency of childhood to the resignation of old age, skipping the glory or the conflict in between. Meyerling filed the teeth of its young inmates and declawed them, as some heinous owners do with feline pets.

  Marit sat up to halt the course of her thoughts. She was faced with indicting Gabriel along with Meyerling. He worked here; therefore he must have bought the message. He had said that blindness was a privilege. Things were looking bad for Gabriel and worse for her illusions. Gazing clear-eyed at the loved one is just as dangerous as looking straight at the Medusa. All these meek and thwarted children, offered up as testimony to the high intentions of their preceptors: Marit’s back was to the wall, staving off a vision of Gabriel drawing uplift and humility from the blind for the sake of his conscience, not for their salvation, the sin that all philanthropists are heir to.

  Marit stood up and started to pace the room. The room was small and crowded. She did not pace so much as pick her way through the furniture. What girl infected by Romance wants the itch to subside and the swelling to go down? Objectivity was the salve, but she refused it. She was too new to the fevers, knots, breathlessness, waiting, throes, and skipped heartbeats. The machine of Romance had been idling; she cranked it up and opened the throttle wide. Gabriel was like a peregrine, leashed at the leg and hooded, in training for immolation, not for combat. She loved the bird, but not the equipment of self-denial. She had the power to make some inroads on his higher nature. The way to his sense of humor was through his appetites.

  The door, exactly half open, swayed to three-quarters. The girl in the doorway advanced with her arms outstretched, holding her palms up to feel for obstacles, like the newly blind. She moved in short, quick steps, then braked. Her hands made contact with the top of an armchair. Marit held her breath and stood as still as an Indian. Two chairs stood between her and the intruder; their inert mass might block the magnetic circuit.

  “Gabriel?” said the girl.

  Gabriel was the only teacher who was ever called by his first name. The girl turned her face in Marit’s direction. Marit recognized her and remembered her live slanted eyes.

  “Who are you?” demanded the girl.

  Marit did not like to be challenged. All her fine thoughts flew out the window. This was one blind person who did not know her place, this girl with the fancy name, Aimée, who was as plain as an oatcake, actually, who had the sexual assurance of a beauty, who would snake your beau as soon as look at him.

  “I can’t help you,” said Marit. “He is somewhere on the grounds with Miss Fellowes.”

  “I have to see him,” ordered Aimée. “I had another one of my nightmares.”

  “At five o’clock in the afternoon?” Marit did not know when to quit.

  “He knows what to do. He has healing hands. Please tell him I want him.”

  “What is your name?”

  “Aimée Dupuis.” The girl frowned in some surprise, like a movie star who is asked by a bank clerk to prove her signature.

  Marit watched her retreat. She did not like what the girl had said. Ministers and doctors lay on hands, on the patient’s head or on the affected part directly. What part of a troubled sleeper has a nightmare? If the seat of the unconscious is the brain, the brain is safely lodged above the neck. But dreams are the fumes of the sexual furnace, which is located in the belly and below. Where were Gabriel’s blunt healing workman’s hands getting to? “Another nightmare” implied that he had held more than one healing session. Did he work through the clothes or on bare skin? The body of this blind healee was rounded beyond her years. As she had felt her way out of the room, Marit had observed a perfect muscular crupper, like a well-made pony’s. Any man—philanthropist, poet, or healer—would enjoy the feel of that backside under his fingers. Marit became aware of a slow, pulling sensation in her lower torso. It is one of jealousy’s dirty secrets that it causes an engorgement of blood.

  The harried suitor was back, reaching out to her, hoping to make some compensation for his absence. If a sweet disarray is exciting in women’s clothes, Gabriel had achieved the counterpart for men—the shirt unbuttoned to the third button, the cuffs folded back and rolled unevenly above the elbows, judicious grass stains on his rumpled linen trousers. Marit tried to summon her recent detachment; it was no match for arousal. She let him pull her into his arms and hold her against him. Her own arms hung down at her sides. This ambiguous jealous lust had turned her to stone.

  “You had a caller,” she said. She was able to meet his eyes.

  He butted the chair with his fist. “Who wants a piece of me now?”

  Marit grinned as if she sympathized sincerely. “A girl with one of those little princess names. A French name.”

  Gabriel became alert and professional. “Aimée. The new senior. A case of hysterical blindness.”

  “She did mention a nightmare.” Marit wondered if the hysterical factor would reduce the girl’s pathos and allure, or serve to increase it.

  “That’s not good. I’ll have to take care of it.” Gabriel addressed her as one colleague to another. There was no wild, torn look in his eyes. He had changed from a falcon into the falconer.

  “How will you take care of it?” asked Marit.

  “I never know from one to the next. It depends on the subject matter of the dream.”

  “Does she dream in color?” Marit’s throat was closing as if strong fingers had a grip on it. Gabriel was talking about his work. That was a sign, or even the cornerstone, of intimacy. The thought did not soothe her.

  “Would that matter? She is always a victim. Wild dogs licking her face, nuns holding scissors, parrots wheeling over her bed.”

  “Sexual uproar.” To her own ears, Marit’s voice sounded like a mouse squeak.

  Gabriel had heard her. He did not seem to like the notion. “She is still a child, Marit.”

  Marit felt the reproof. She would have taken a pair of scissors to him herself if they had been handy. The little princess was inventing dreams in order to bind him to her. She was another Francesca, one of those girls who had been a special case from babyhood, another idol in Gabriel’s female martyrology, another one of his opportunities for self-transcendence, unlike scaly, earthbound Marit, that sulphurous toad, who would drag him away from the light and feast on his blood.

  Gabriel was thumbing through a row of books on an upper shelf. He pushed aside several and pulled out one that had fallen behind. It was a narrow book with a glossy cream-colored jacket. She could read the black print on the cover before he took it: Selected Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke. Gabriel was pioneering in bibliotherapy.

  “I can’t wait for you,” said Marit.

  He turned around and gave her a look of infinite sweetness.

  “I wish you could,” he said, and left the room.

  If Gabriel heard the sound of his traveling alarm clock smashing against the wall, he did not stop in his tracks, forsake his mission, and fly back to investigate. He was too far down the hall to hear his desk chair kicked to the floor.

  EIGHT

  BISHOP MEYERLING HAD FALLEN in love, once
in his life and stunningly, before he was a bishop or even a dean, and before he was misshapen in the First World War. It was a great love, in the style of the period, with an odor of violets and chivalry, unrequited because his lady was married and of severe virtue. Lucy Backhouse was a heroine of the period, with piles of soft hair pinned up high, dark un-trimmed eyebrows (“thy brows like brushing wings”), and smoky patches under her eyes—a sign, it seemed to him, that this angel would not dwell long among mortal men.

  Colman Meyerling cherished this society portraitist’s image of his beloved, but the angel was made of tougher fiber. Jack Backhouse, who had cornered the market in coffee, was a permissive husband, and not a vain one. He had not married Lucy for her beauty, but for her coffee shares. His commodities empire was the only ornament to his manhood that he needed. Jack’s respect for hard work and his lack of interest in his wife were on Lucy’s side. When she spent her days at a charity hospital, and refused to attend all but the six or seven balls, benefits, and opening nights that couples in the Backhouses’ position could not decently evade, she was not violating their marital covenant. She was giving Jack more time at his office on Battery Park.

  Without Jack’s protection Lucy would have been a scandal. If she had taken up hospital work before she had married him, she would have remained a spinster, an untouchable like the poor and the cancerous and the syphilitic whom she cared for. Lucy with the queenly walk and noble brow did not wheel book carts through wards of convalescents, soothing their irritability with a smile, plumping up a pillow, deflecting harsh sunlight by angling a shutter. Her patients were emergencies and incurables. She put her hands on them. She saw parts of the body that should always be covered by clothing. She heard ugly words spoken to her because she had swabbed too deep, or ripped away a dressing. At the end of a morning her apron was splashed with blood and pus.

  Lucy had studied nursing by apprenticeship, not in school. She would not have been allowed to go to school even if she had chosen a sanitary subject like the classics. Her tutor had been dismissed when she was seventeen, the year before her coming-out. When she was twenty-one and a married woman with access to her own money, she had gone to see a cousin of her mother’s, a surgeon on the board of Bathgate Charity, and offered him a bribe large enough to pay the salaries of three new staff members. What she asked in return was the chance to learn by working. Her first job was as a mangler in the Bathgate laundry.

  Colman Meyerling heard of her work before he was shipped to France. He arranged to have himself seated next to her at one of the rare formal dinners she attended. If his orders had not come through, he would never have been so forward. After the required ten minutes with his partner on the other side, he turned to Lucy and praised her for her life of sacrifice. He got the tartest, most dismissive answer.

  Lucy was not a saint. Sickness and misery brought out her Dutch inheritance. She approached a patient like a compulsive housekeeper tackling a room. Sores, abscesses, infections, and twisted limbs were disorderly and inefficient. A cured and tidy body brought her peace of mind, short-lived, however, since the amount of disease and suffering in the world was at least equal to the grains of soot that piled up on clean windowsills every day. What Lucy had said to the future bishop—the exact words changed in his memory with time—was “The only place, sir, for martyrdom is on the battlefield.” It took all his restraint to keep from boasting that he had enlisted.

  Colman dreamed of her throughout the war, when he was not having more tainted thoughts about women closer to hand. While his back was mending, he imagined that she had chosen war work, that she would appear in a halo of light and make him straight again. These daydreams might have brought on melancholia if the nurse on his ward had not been pleased to dispel his tensions. When he came home newly humpbacked, with plans for entering the clergy, he did not try to see her. He put Lucy away, along with his polo sticks, riding crop, and silver punch bowls.

  Fifteen years later, the Bishop built a dwarf Gothic chapel on his grounds at Meyerling, and dedicated it to St. Lucy, virgin and martyr. Not long after the chapel was finished, he received word that John Backhouse had died on a trip to the Amazon. It is clear that the Bishop pondered bringing suit to the widow, but custom required that she spend twelve months in mourning and seclusion. At the end of the year (1934), Lucy married the chief of staff at Bathgate Charity, who was a specialist in diseases of the joints.

  The Bishop indulged himself in a useless show of spite. As soon as he learned the news of Lucy’s marriage, he marched into the chapel, ripped the altar cloth athwart, and stamped it underfoot. Then his eye fell on the statue of St. Lucy, standing in a little niche behind the pulpit. He stood on a pile of hymnals, seized the doll-sized wooden image by the neck, and hurled her the length of the chapel, where she broke on the wall. The pile of hymnals slid to the floor, and the Bishop with them. The heavy cast that was put on his hip served to punish him for many months for his blasphemous act.

  Now English ivy covered the gaudy little building. Ivy also darkened the stained-glass window, which showed Lucy’s eyes being snatched out by Roman soldiers and used to play marbles; and had been called by reviewers in architectural journals “the goriest window in the non-Spanish-speaking world.” The chapel had been gutted and stripped of the altar block and pews. Folding chairs were stacked in piles inside the vestibule. The building was now used for assemblies, chorus rehearsals, morning meditations, and classes like Gabriel’s poetry workshop that needed exercise room. Marit loved the chapel and thought that God probably still kept it on His checklist. She loved the story of the Bishop’s undeclared passion and his revenge—Luba’s version of the story, therefore highly colored.

  A double row of Scotch pines backed the apse end of the chapel. Their needles screened the narrow windows, which were set with clear glass—old, hand-poured panes that were bubbly and distorting. Marit pushed through the outer branches and made a space to peer through. She did not need the antique glass to queer her vision. Gabriel’s workshop was held on Mondays after supper. It was seven o’clock, and the class was half over. She had had no sign from Gabriel since the girl with the nightmare had claimed him. The girl was there in the circle of students seated on the floor, directly across from Gabriel in the circle, leaning back on her elbows with her knees raised, wearing little shorts.

  Marit had rarely spied before, except by accident. Once in New York, during a long school break at Easter, she had left a subscription dance early without her escort. With the back-door key, borrowed from the doorman, she had let herself into the apartment very cautiously. Her plan was to hide in the laundry room until an hour that was late enough to convince her mother she had had a good time, and then go downstairs and ride up again by the front elevator. She had removed her shoes and started down the servants’ hallway when she heard Luba’s voice from the kitchen: “I will not stand this.” Marit sighed, turned around, and got ready for a scolding. Luba spoke again, so low that she was almost whispering: “You ask me to escape a sick man.” There was a short pause, the sound of choked tears, and the receiver banging down on the hook. Marit was too relieved to consider what she had heard.

  That was one count of eavesdropping acquitted, which left a charge of prying to examine. After school one day, she had been sorting through her father’s old shirts; he never gave, or threw, anything away. Oversized men’s shirts were the fashion, and Vlado’s were made of silk. At the bottom of a drawer her hand had fastened on a wad of paper. She found twelve suicide notes in all, the same note with small changes in wording, like a literary exercise. Vlado was perfectly well at the time; she had just left him in the pantry, taking the electric can opener apart. There was a third charge of snooping pending, but Marit no longer felt that she had to answer for searching Gabriel’s wallet. She saw no need to be fair, since love was a war of nerves.

  There was science to Marit’s spying on Gabriel’s workshop, and it was based on deductive reasoning: she had come to prove a hypothesis, no
t to form one. Jealous people are logical beings. Their logic is inflexible and airtight. Marit approached her subject with the loftiest disinterest. All her findings would go against her; yet she was never tempted to juggle data in her favor.

  Gabriel was a helper. She offered him nothing to prick his sense of responsibility as this young girl did. Marit was not blind, dead, maimed, halt, leprous, indigent, or meek. Sexual passion would never hold him; it was too rich a diet. In the long run he was vegetarian in matters of sex. He would never give her a rival who was her own size, only a trail of beggars with their hands out, stinking of weakness. Over the last forty-eight hours he had made her snivel, like one of them. She could win him back if she told him how she had waited for him, staying close to the house like a tethered dog, retching on a mouthful of soup, flicking her thumbnail inside the nail of her ring finger at the rate of the second hand circling the face of the clock.

  Marit had not changed her clothes since Saturday afternoon, groomed her hair, or washed her teeth, except to rinse out her mouth occasionally with cold water. The boggy smell of her shirt and trousers was not her own. Nikolai had gone swimming and come home with his coat wet and mud-caked, needing affection. Marit was pleased with her unkempt body. The lines of dirt around her wrists, the frayed ends of her shoelaces gave her integrity in her rejected state. The girl with the French name, spreading her knees in Gabriel’s direction, was as fresh and washed as a child brought in by the nurse to kiss its parents good night. Those same knees had a rosy tinge that matched her cheeks. She would have a closed child’s slit between her legs, the kind that men preferred, covered with fine blonde down.