The Wolf Gift (2 page)

She had a twinkle in her eye. “Tell me—how old are you, Reuben? I’m thirty-eight. How is that for total honesty? Do you know many women who volunteer that they’re thirty-eight?”

“You don’t look it,” he said. And he meant it. What he wanted to say was
You’re rather perfect, if you ask me
. “I’m twenty-three,” he confessed.

“Twenty-three? You’re just a boy.”

Of course. “Sunshine Boy,” as his girlfriend Celeste always called him. “Little Boy,” according to his big brother, Fr. Jim. And “Baby Boy,” according to his mother, who still called him that in front of people. Only his dad consistently called him Reuben and saw only him when their eyes met.
Dad, you should see this house! Talk about a place for writing, talk about a getaway, talk about a landscape for a creative mind
.

He shoved his freezing hands in his pockets and tried to ignore the sting of the wind in his eyes. They were making their way back up to the promise of hot coffee and a fire.

“And so tall for that age,” she said. “I think you’re uncommonly sensitive, Reuben, to appreciate this rather cold and grim corner of the earth. When I was twenty-three I wanted to be in New York and Paris. I was in New York and Paris. I wanted the capitals of the world. What, have I insulted you?”

“No, certainly not,” he said. He was reddening again. “I’m talking too much about myself, Marchent. My mind’s on the story, never fear. Scrub oak, high grass, damp earth, ferns, I’m recording everything.”

“Ah yes, the fresh young mind and memory, nothing like it,” she said. “Darling, we’re going to spend two days together, aren’t we? Expect me to be personal. You’re ashamed of being young, aren’t you? Well, you needn’t be. And you’re distractingly handsome, you know, why you’re just about the most adorable boy I’ve ever seen in my entire life. No, I mean it. With looks like yours, you don’t have to be much of anything, you know.”

He shook his head. If she only knew. He hated it when people called him handsome, adorable, cute, to die for. “And how will you feel if they ever stop?” his girlfriend Celeste had asked him. “Ever think about that? Look, Sunshine Boy, with me, it’s strictly your looks.” She had a way of teasing with an edge, Celeste did. Maybe all teasing had an edge.

“Now, I really have insulted you, haven’t I?” asked Marchent. “Forgive me. I think all of us ordinary mortals tend to mythologize people as good-looking as you. But of course what makes you so remarkable is that you have a poet’s soul.”

They had reached the edge of the flagstone terrace.

Something had changed in the air. The wind was even more cutting. The sun was indeed dying behind the silver clouds and headed for the darkening sea.

She stopped for a moment, as if to catch her breath, but he couldn’t tell. The wind whipped the tendrils of her hair around her face, and she put a hand up to shelter her eyes. She looked at the high windows of the house as if searching for something, and there came over Reuben the most forlorn feeling. The loneliness of the place pressed in.

They were miles from the little town of Nideck and Nideck had, what, two hundred real inhabitants? He’d stopped there on the way in and found most of the shops on the little main street were closed. The bed-and-breakfast had been for sale “forever,” said the clerk at the gas station, but yes, you have cell phone and Internet connections everywhere in the county, no need to worry about that.

Right now, the world beyond this windswept terrace seemed unreal.

“Does it have ghosts, Marchent?” he asked, following her gaze to the windows.

“It doesn’t need them,” she declared. “The recent history is grim enough.”

“Well, I love it,” he said. “The Nidecks were people of remarkable vision. Something tells me you’ll get a very romantic buyer, one who can transform it into a unique and unforgettable hotel.”

“Now that’s a thought,” she said. “But why would anyone come here, in particular, Reuben? The beach is narrow and hard to reach. The redwoods are glorious but you don’t have to drive four hours from San Francisco to reach glorious redwoods in California. And you saw the town. There is nothing here really except Nideck Point, as you call it. I have a suffocating feeling sometimes that this house won’t be standing much longer.”

“Oh, no! Let’s not even think of that. Why, no one would dare—.”

She took his arm again and they moved on over the sandy flags, past his car, and towards the distant front door. “I’d fall in love with you if you were my age,” she said. “If I’d met anyone quite as charming as you, I wouldn’t be alone now, would I?”

“Why would a woman like you ever have to be alone?” he asked. He had seldom met someone so confident and graceful. Even now after the trek in the woods, she looked as collected and groomed as a woman shopping on Rodeo Drive. There was a thin little bracelet around her left wrist, a pearl chain, he believed they called it, and it gave her easy gestures an added glamour. He couldn’t quite tell why.

There were no trees to the west of them. The view was open for all the obvious reasons. But the wind was positively howling off the ocean now, and the gray mist was descending on the last sparkle of the sea. I’ll get the mood of all this, he thought. I’ll get this strange darkening moment. And a little shadow fell deliciously over his soul.

He wanted this place. Maybe it would have been better if they’d sent someone else to do this story, but they’d sent him. What remarkable luck.

“Good Lord, it’s getting colder by the second,” she said as they hurried. “I forget the way the temperature drops on the coast here. I grew up with it, but I’m always taken by surprise.” Yet she stopped once more and looked up at the towering façade of the house as though she was searching for someone, and then she shaded her eyes and looked out into the advancing mist.

Yes, she may come to regret selling this place terribly, he thought. But then again, she may have to. And who was he to make her feel the pain of that if she didn’t want to address it herself?

For a moment, he was keenly ashamed that he himself had the money to buy the property and he felt he should make some disclaimer, but that would have been unspeakably rude. Nevertheless, he was calculating and dreaming.

The clouds were darkening, lowering. And the air was very damp. He followed her gaze again to the great shadowy façade of the house, with those diamond-pane windows twinkling dimly, and at the masses of redwood trees that rose behind it and to the east, a monstrous soaring forest of coastal sequoia out of proportion with all else.

“Tell me,” she said. “What are your thoughts right now?”

“Oh, nothing, really. I was thinking about the redwoods and the way they always make me feel. They’re so out of proportion to everything around them. It’s as if they’re always saying, ‘We were here before your kind ever visited these shores, and we will be here when you and your houses are no more.’ ”

There was something unmistakably tragic in her eyes as she smiled at him. “That’s so true. How my uncle Felix loved them,” she said. “They’re protected, you know, those trees. They can’t be logged. Uncle Felix saw to that.”

“Thank heavens,” he whispered. “I shudder when I see all those old photographs of the loggers up here in the old days, chopping down redwoods that had been alive for a thousand years. Think of it, a thousand years.”

“That’s precisely what Uncle Felix said once, damn near word for word.”

“He wouldn’t want to see this house torn down, would he?” He was immediately ashamed. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.”

“Oh, but you’re absolutely right. He wouldn’t have wanted it, no, never. He loved this house. He was in the process of restoring it when he disappeared.”

She looked off again, wistfully, longingly.

“And we’ll never know, I don’t suppose,” she said, sighing.

“What is that, Marchent?”

“Oh, you know, how my great-uncle actually disappeared.” She made
a soft derisive sound. “We are all such superstitious creatures, really. Disappeared! Well, I suppose he is as dead in real life as he is legally. But it seems I’m giving up on him now in selling the old place, that I’m saying, ‘Well, we will never know and he will never come through that door there again.’ ”

“I understand,” he whispered. The fact was he knew absolutely nothing about death. His mother and father and brother and girlfriend told him that in one way or another just about every day. His mother lived and breathed the Trauma Center at San Francisco General. His girlfriend knew absolutely the worst side of human nature from the cases she handled in the D.A.’s office every day. As for his father, he saw death in the falling leaves.

Reuben had written six articles and covered two murders in his time at the
San Francisco Observer
. And both the women in his life had praised his writing to the skies, and lectured him at length on what he failed to grasp.

Something his father said came back to him. “You’re innocent, Reuben, yes, but life will teach you what you need to know soon enough.” Phil was always making rather unusual pronouncements. He said at dinner last night, “Not a day goes by, when I don’t ask a cosmic question. Does life have meaning? Or is this all smoke and mirrors? Are we all doomed?”

“You know, Sunshine Boy, I know why nothing really penetrates with you,” Celeste had said later. “Your mother talks in detail about her surgeries over shrimp cocktail, and your father will only talk about what absolutely does not matter at all. I’ll take your easy brand of optimism any day. The fact is, you make me feel good.”

Had that made him feel good? No. Not at all. But the strange thing about Celeste was that she was far more affectionate and kindly than her words ever indicated. She was a killer of an attorney, a five-foot-two firebrand on the job, but with him, she was cuddly and downright sweet. She fussed over his clothes, and always answered her phone. She had lawyer friends on speed dial to answer any questions he encountered in his reporting. But her tongue? Her tongue was a little sharp.

The fact is, Reuben thought suddenly, secretively, there is something dark and tragic about this house that I want to know. The house made him think of cello music, deep, rich, a little rough, and uncompromising
The house was talking to him, or maybe it would talk to him if he’d stop listening to the voices of home.

He felt his cell phone vibrate in his pocket. Without taking his eyes off the house, he turned it off.

“Oh good gracious, look at you,” said Marchent. “You’re freezing, dear boy. How utterly thoughtless of me. Come, we must get you inside.”

“I’m a San Francisco kid,” he muttered. “I’ve slept all my life on Russian Hill with the window wide open. I should have been prepared.”

He followed her up the stone steps, and through the massive arched front door.

The warmth of the room was immediate and delicious, even though it was a vast space, under a high beamed ceiling, its dark oak floors stretching on forever in a kind of airy gloom.

The blazing fireplace was distant but cavernous, facing them directly from across a dark expanse of rather shapeless old couches and chairs.

He’d smelled the oak logs burning earlier, just a whiff here and there as they’d walked on the hillside, and he’d loved that.

She led him to the velvet couch right beside the hearth. There was a silver coffee service on the large marble coffee table.

“You get warm,” she said. And she stood there herself before the flames warming her hands.

There were huge old brass andirons and a fender, and the bricks on the back of the fireplace were black.

She turned and moved about almost silently on the old worn Oriental carpets, turning on the many scattered lamps.

Slowly the room took on a cheerful glow.

The furniture was immense, but comfortable, with worn but serviceable slipcovers and occasional caramel-colored leather chairs. There were a few hulking bronze sculptures, all of predictable mythological figures, very old-fashioned. And a number of dark landscapes in heavy gilt frames hanging here and there.

The warmth was now relentless. In a few minutes he would be taking off his scarf and his coat.

He looked up at the old dark wood paneling above the fireplace, rectangles neatly trimmed in deeply carved egg-and-dart molding, and at the similar paneling that covered the walls. There were bookcases flanking the fireplace, stuffed with old volumes, leather, cloth, even paperbacks,
and far to the right over his shoulder he glimpsed an east-facing room that looked like a vintage paneled library, the kind he’d always dreamed of having for himself. There was a fire in there too.

“It takes my breath away,” he said. He could see his father sitting here, shuffling his poems as he made his endless notes. Yes, he would love this place, no doubt of it. It was the place for cosmic reflections and decisions. And how shocked everybody would be if—.

And why wouldn’t his mother be glad? They loved each other, his mother and father, but they did not get along. Phil tolerated Grace’s doctor friends; and Grace found his few old academic friends an absolute bore. Poetry reading made her furious on general principles. The movies he liked she abhorred. If he spoke his opinion at a dinner party, she changed the subject with the person next to her, or left the room for another bottle of wine, or started to cough.

It wasn’t deliberate, really. His mom wasn’t mean. His mom was full of enthusiasm for the things she loved, and she adored Reuben and he knew this had given him a confidence many people never enjoyed. It was just that she couldn’t stand her husband, and for most of his life Reuben had actually understood.

It was harder to take these days, however, because his mom seemed powerful and timeless, a compulsive worker with a divine vocation; and his father seemed now worn out and obscenely old. Celeste had become his mom’s fast friend (“We are both driven women!”) and sometime lunch companion, but she ignored the “old man,” as she called him. And now and then she even said ominously to Reuben, “Look, do you want to turn out like him?”

Well, how would you like to live here, Dad, Reuben thought. And we’d go walking in the redwoods together, and maybe fix up that old dilapidated guesthouse for the poet friends, but of course there’s room for all of them in the house, why you could have a regular seminar up here with them anytime you wanted, and Mom could come up when she chose.