Menagerie

by Bradford Morrow

  3. Spartanette, 1951. Manufactured by Spartan Aircraft Company in Tulsa, OK. Managing Owner: J. Paul Getty.

  Under a mock highway overpass was a trailer resembling an upturned canned ham. Artificial weeds sprouted in cracks carved into the foam concrete. A light flickered inside the trailer’s single window. It was a wretched place, even in miniature. Back then, my career still so precarious, I could imagine myself inside the trailer, listening to the sounds of moving cars overhead.

  4. Boles Aero, 1948. Manufactured in Burbank, CA.

  The second-to-last miniature resembled a tall, elongated hearse. Or, more accurately, a railway car on tires. It rotated on a round glass mirror within a dark frame inlaid with triangles of knotted wood. On both sides of the vehicle, I saw three white-curtained windows in the middle and two small portholes, one at each flank.

  5. Raymond Roussel’s Maison Roulante, 1925. Manufactured by George Régis, coach maker, 14, Rue Sainte-Isaure, Paris 18e, at the cost of one million francs, measuring close to thirty feet long. Roussel had at his disposal a bedroom with a double bed, a studio, a bathroom, and a dormitory for two servants and a driver. The interiors were designed by Lacoste.

  The final diorama was at odds with the others; it lacked four wheels and a steel body. A she-wolf, carved in wood and painted delicately down to its blue irises, brown and gray fur, and the pink of its distended nipples, disgorged the upper torso of a girl through its sharp, yellow teeth. The girl appeared to be crawling out of the wolf—her hands were flexed and her chin was up, but her hair enveloped her face. The wolf’s tail curled under its body and between its legs.

  6. Wolf Interval, 1922. An antiquated and largely ignored female form of touring. Last seen Wolf Interval: 1964, in captivity.

  As book artists, you may find that the books of your childhood have left an indelible mark on your craft, from the dimensions of your page to the color contrast between your paste paper and book cloth. In front of the wolf figurine, I recalled a long-lost book, bright blue with piano keys on the cover, a kindergarten songbook. Our class had a favorite song. It was one of those tunes that children sing—like “Ring Around the Rosie”—that attempt to obscure horror with a major key and distracting gestures. How did it go? The she-wolf, the she-wolf, da da dum, da da da. I still have not been able to track down the words. But I do remember a mistake: I used to sing wishy-wolf, wishy-wolf.

  The song portrayed the dangers of traveling inside a wolf, of a daughter choosing to become the passenger of a Wolf Interval. The father shoots his daughter’s wolf by accident, trying to protect his flock of sheep. The girl suffocates while the wolf around her dies. The father discovers his intact daughter within an extra organ inside the wolf. He remembers her penchant for wandering and pledges that he will never kill again. In penitence, he becomes a star that protects travelers from misunderstandings.

  I asked the gallery owner about the curator, who he was, if he had a business card. He handed me a small, perfectly square booklet with a dove-gray cover. The title had been letterpressed—the ink impression perfect—and was the same as the exhibit. The authors were listed as Lotte N. Pfeiffer and C. R. Bailey. I asked if the authors had made any attempt to explain the history of the Wolf Interval. A paper band prevented me from opening the booklet and scanning the text.

  The gallery owner shook his head but agreed to let me remove the band. I was careful not to tear it or damage the fore edge. The title page bore a variant inscription: Lotte N. Pfeiffer and the Wolf Interval: A Biography, by C. R. Bailey. The printer had also neglected to provide a publication date or the name of the press. It was a single sheet, folded booklet (See Chapter 3, “Variations on the Accordion Binding”), the folds alternating between the spine edge and the head. A handmade book requires a quiet attention, and so I quickly paid the gallery owner what remained of a recent withdrawal from my bank account ($30, a dear sum), and returned to my apartment.

  A RETURN TO CRAFT

  Let us recall the importance of the grain. As you undoubtedly know by now (your sample books, your first attempts, may already have warped), the grain of the paper, book board, and book cloth must follow the direction of the spine. A book is a quick-tempered animal—you do not stroke a dog or a cat against the grain of its fur, do you? A sheet of paper folded into eighths and cut with a T-shape pattern will undoubtedly have two folds against the grain. This design flourish comes at the cost of preserving the booklet. But what wondrous spaces this form creates! What a joy to peek into a secret crease created by a fold at the head of the page!

  As I read Lotte N. Pfeiffer and the Wolf Interval: A Biography, I was pleased by how it made me hunt for the content, how between pages of text I had to tent the pages with my thumbs to open into the hidden illustrations. The first illustration within a head fold was an etching reproducing the Wolf Interval sculpture from the exhibit. On the verso page was the following caption:

  “How do I read this book?”

  “Carefully, as though you are about to enter the mouth of the wolf.”

  Lotte N. Pfeiffer and the Wolf Interval: A Biography

  by C. R. Bailey

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Before her death in 1975, Lotte N. Pfeiffer made it clear to me that she valued her privacy; it was in fact her inherently private nature that allowed her to retreat into the wolf on that summer day in 1914 near the Siskiyou Pass. In tracing Ms. Pfeiffer to her residence, in my efforts to record the reminiscences of the last Wolf Interval, I have stalked her in the manner that the biologically typical form of canis lupus stalks its prey. Ms. Pfeiffer, an altogether decent woman, responded to my incursions with the utmost grace.

  Now that this volume is complete, I feel it is necessary to extend my gratitude to the Pfeiffer family. Without their comments and corrections, this work would have been a lesser animal.

  INTRODUCTION

  Lotte, in her white boat-neck sweater and thick glasses, was not the imposing woman I imagined she would be. We sat in wicker chairs on the deck of her A-frame lodge and drank iced mint tea, enriched with ample helpings of sugar. As we set our interview calendar for the next two weeks, she called on me to research the etymological roots of the word “dwell” to understand the invisible history of the Wolf Interval.

  Perplexed, I went to the modest library in the town of L. and consulted the dictionary. After several afternoons in conversation with Lotte, we agreed that this information would be better addressed in the addendum to this booklet. At her insistence, I have followed her exacting instructions for the physical format of each page. Lotte also requested that I include a note that reading in sequence is not fundamental—“One is allowed to start at the end.”

  THE INTERVAL ORGAN

  Lotte N. Pfeiffer was born in St. Louis in 1904. Her father, Leonard Pfeiffer, died of tuberculosis two years later and Lotte and her mother, Adeline, were left in the care of a distant cousin, Gustavus Pfeiffer, an entrepreneur of a growing pharmaceutical company that specialized in effervescent lozenges, gum tablets, and mouthwash.

  The specific details of Lotte’s infancy and early childhood are valuable but nonetheless better off withheld, as they have no clear bearing on her departure from her mother’s home in 1911. Between 1907 and 1908 Adeline had a decisive break with Gustavus and she took her daughter west to Oregon by rail coach. They settled in the logging town of R., close to the Siskiyou Pass, where Adeline became the local schoolteacher. For a time, they lived in a cold, one-room cabin close to the mill while their Sears and Roebuck Model 115 home was constructed on River Street in R.

  One day, while netting butterflies in a cluster of horsetail and wild ginger, Lotte was troubled by an unusual smell.

  It was like rendered fat and almond extract. I saw white sparks in my vision and my palms went numb. Finally, I saw the she-wolf’s eyes and her gray body move behind the thin, red branches and the silver leaves of the manzanita bushes. We watched each other for a long time and I became aware of the smell of her breath, its sweetness and a
cridity.

  She moved closer to me, not standing her full height but crouched low to earth with her ears flat against her skull. I removed my pinafore, my long-shirt, my wool stockings, and my lace-up boots and approached her. We came to an understanding. She opened her mouth and though at first it seemed unlikely that I would fit, I put my chin and elbows on her velvety tongue and moved toward the spot where the ridges on the roof of her mouth ended. Once I had pushed half of my body into the wolf, I had to push with my heels on the backs of her yellowed canines to start the involuntary spasms in her throat.

  The typical wolf esophagus leads to the stomach. In the Wolf Interval, an interval organ bypasses the stomach. Like the stomach it can expand to a great capacity but it is designed to adjust to the contours of a small girl. What does it feel like to enter the interval organ? Accounts from the last three centuries have compared the squeezing to that of a boa constrictor. In the most recent modern accounts, the sensation has been described as a blood-pressure cuff tightening over the entirety of the body.

  Lotte, in a compression stupor, contemplated death and the poor decisions that had led her to the she-wolf’s mouth. She recalled her mother’s repeated warning about playing in the woods: “Only the homely girl calls out to a homely wolf.” But within the interval organ, the pressure eased. Let us remember that within the womb the child does not float in unbounded fluid. The fetus is pressed firmly from all angles. It was similar for Lotte within the wolf; she was blanketed in warm muscle, yet she could feel huffs of cool air within the dark cavity. Through the muscle she felt the wolf’s quick pulse, and at intervals, it aligned with her own.

  EDUCATION

  It was dark, but it was also vibrant. I had my eyes open the whole time and I might as well have been blind, but there were colors. Not colors that could be associated with the seeing spectrum but colors that could be felt in the throat—a kind of tickling. I could not conceive of a source or a purpose for this constant swallowing until I understood that it was how the Wolf Interval transmitted the outside space to me. At first these spaces were more like gestures, or cues. Then, slowly, the coloration fluctuated in transparency and opaqueness; it braided and thickened in the tubes and hollows of my skull. Now, even after all this time, it is difficult for me to look at you without feeling your shape somewhere between my jaw and my stomach. A side effect, I suppose.

  Having just grasped reading and writing after months at the slate with her mother guiding the chalk in her hand, Lotte was used to fatigue and incomprehension. However, inside the discolored darkness of the interval organ, her wakefulness fostered a pristine form of awareness. Moreover, her imperative to observe nourished her; the colors made her strong and healthy. Even while the wolf slept, the dark red of hares in the brush trickled along the smooth contours of her inner cheeks. If the Wolf Interval awoke and caught the hare in its jaws, then she would be nourished by that as well—the wolf’s pleasure in feeding would always be a thick, white lump close to her tonsils.

  Many biologists have developed theories about the nature of the symbiosis occurring between the passenger and the Wolf Interval, but few facts have been authenticated since the presumed extinction of the subspecies. We can now be assured that Lotte’s vigilance even during the animal’s sleep cycle aided the wolf in catching prey.

  It has been exceedingly difficult to dislodge the image of the “wild child” or the “child raised by wolves” from the collective imagination surrounding the Wolf Interval. Canonical imagery of the Wolf Interval always displays the external signs of motherhood—heavy teats and bowed ribs—these signs are not trivial. Lotte, unlike Remus and Romulus, never suckled at her vehicle. Instead, the teats discharged a fluid that resembled milk, which Lotte called “spill.”

  Spill would not nourish any animal. It was my waste product. The interval organ kept me clean and warm and well fed. It purified my body. The speculation regarding the motherhood of the Wolf Interval is strange; my vehicle was barren and I assume they all were.

  In traditional illustrations, the Wolf Interval is often depicted lying on her side, curled around the milk-fattened lost child. Rarely did passengers willingly egress the interval organ; they preferred the tranquillity of that unspoiled interior. To adjust to the growth spurts of a young girl’s adolescence, the Wolf Interval occasionally required one to four days of emptiness. Not only did this vacancy allow the interval organ tissue to regain some of its elasticity, but it also fortified the animal’s immune system.

  Whenever my Wolf Interval urged me out of her body, she made such wretched sounds—almost a woman’s pule. In the cold air, my feet and palms were too tender, so I shuffled on my knees (they were hardened from the position of the interval organ against the wolf’s ribs). In the snows I stayed crouched between the Wolf Interval’s front legs. In the summers I covered my skin in mud and long grasses, but my vehicle licked me clean again. If I smelled a settlement nearby, I would sneak to the clotheslines at night and steal bloomers or a silken chemise. Silk was the only fabric I didn’t find abhorrent. These I would roll into a ball and toss onto the back of my Wolf Interval’s tongue so that she would swallow them. But she fought me. She spit the clothes up, and rent them in her jaws. She refused to allow any other foreign objects into her body.

  It is here, with the dirty child stationed outside the Wolf Interval, that we begin to understand why so many of these shy creatures, masked in false maternity, were hunted and captured in the early decades of the twentieth century. The authors of the Interval Passenger Reeducation Act (IPRA) of 1922 expressed their opinions on the encroachment of the wolves in this manner: “The vermin steal our daughters and expose them to degenerate instincts. What possible value could a woman sustain in raising her own child when a wild animal threatens to usurp that fundamental role?”

  To observe the regrettable aftereffects of IPRA, one only need visit the San Francisco Academy of Sciences, nestled in a grid of severely trimmed sycamore trees inside Golden Gate Park. In the building’s atrium, adjacent to the albino alligator pit, is a glass enclosure containing an unusually large stuffed she-wolf. Her coat has been sun faded from dark black to reddish brown and the fur of her muzzle has been completely worn away, as though rubbed by numberless hands. Her blackened lips are curled over a pink-resin tongue—a benign pant. The long brass plaque at the display’s base reads: ATALANTA. Her provenance is supplied on a tilted information sign in front of the case:

  Atalanta was captured in 1924 by newspaper reporter Clark Woodward at the request of William Randolph Hearst. At that time, Atalanta was assumed to be the last wild wolf in California, though there were six other wolf sightings over the next eighteen years. For close to a decade, she howled within Golden Gate Park’s wolf enclosure. Field biologists, hoping to restore this noble predator to the state, are working diligently on a plan to create a wolf sanctuary in the Mono Basin.

  The sign omits Atalanta’s pedigree as a Wolf Interval as well as the startling information that she was euthanized in 1963. To this day, the Academy of Sciences has still not acknowledged the extraordinarily prolonged life of this animal or that of the young woman who was undoubtedly wrested from the wolf’s body.

  A majority of Atalanta’s life continued out of the public eye and her interval organ was tested, but not without several men of small build sustaining severe injuries to their forearms, necks, and waists. Taxidermists, while preserving Atalanta’s pelt, stuffed a chimpanzee skeleton into her interval organ as a private joke. No one found the skeleton or believed Atalanta to be an authentic Wolf Interval until the Loma Prieta earthquake of 1989 severely damaged the Academy of Sciences. Her pelt split open and the hardened gray sack slipped out, rattling with the chimpanzee’s bones.

  REUNION

  By the time Lotte was approximately twenty, her Wolf Interval had crossed the borders of twelve western states. Following a configuration of scents back to the Northwest, the animal and the woman returned to the outskirts of the town of R. Lotte recognized R.
after her extended absence, due in part to a “greenish-brown color, opaque at the edges and lemon yellow at its transparent center” low in her esophagus.

  At the time, Lotte had not been turned out in countless months, the need to do so having become especially rare given her petite and stable stature. In the woods at the edge of R., a feeling close to hunger wavered in her throat, though it certainly could have been a growl. For the first time in her travels, she wished to leave the boundaries of her vehicle. With great effort, she moved her hand from its position in front of her chest up to the sensitive and rough-textured aperture above her head. The Wolf Interval heaved and Lotte emerged, slick with saliva, her skin tan from the enzymes of her home. The wolf, feeling emptied and irritable, snapped at the air as though it were full of flies.

  Lotte waited for her Wolf Interval to dote on her, to burrow her snout into the crook of her elbow, sniff the crown of her head, or lick her cold and shuddering muscles, but the animal did not deign to soothe her. With high-pricked ears and a wrinkled brow, she stared at Lotte squarely before she stood and advanced into a glade. Lotte tried to follow on hand and knee. She found her limbs too aching even in the soft mud and wet grass.