Hunger of the Wolf (17 page)

By the time he walked down from the abbey, to the ivy-trellised garden table at the center of the grounds, the calm pools of cucumber soup had nearly evaporated into the chatter of the party. Dale bowed to apologize and Lord Fallis, at the head of the table, may or may not have acknowledged the gesture with a ruffle of eyebrow. Lady Fallis sat Dale beside the count and countess of Strathmore, graciously half covering her evident unhappiness at having invited an outsider into the house.

In person, Lord Fallis was the very figure of the post-imperial Englishman, maintaining exactly the right level of delusion—a fine balance between enough savvy to keep what belonged to him and enough
blindness not to recognize the parasitism of himself and everybody he knew. He lorded over the lunch in a mustachioed silence, nodding or frowning at the dishes and the conversation, complete in his complacent self-regard. For most Englishmen, the niggers begin at Calais; but Lord Fallis was an English gentleman; the niggers began at his bedroom door, and he slept alone.

“And where are you from, Mr. Wylie?” the countess of Strathmore asked, after their introduction.

“I'm from Pennsylvania—an American, I'm afraid.”

“How interesting. And what brings you here?”

“I recently purchased the local paper.”

“Ah,” said the count, who was at that moment desperate for money. “One of the lads from the village.”

Lady Fallis explained how Dale had rescued her from embarrassment at the post office, and the countess said that it was nice to see that chivalry still lived in these uncertain days, and the count said indeed, and asked Dale what he thought of the smoked salmon they were being served, and Dale said that narrow Scottish rivers often produced better fish than their wider American cousins, and the crisis was averted.

In hindsight, it was a very interesting party. If only they had known how everybody was going to die, the company might have enjoyed one another. Monty Wychwood, a somewhat notorious rapist in society circles, choked on his own vomit while partying with the Rolling Stones in France in the mid-seventies. Lord Fallis's youngest son, Richard, crashed his car into the American embassy in Morocco and was shot by sentries who were spooked by the recent bombing in Lebanon. The count of Strathmore, on an ecovacation to see the gorillas in the eastern Congo, was hacked apart by rebels and his body parts strewn along the hiking trail. The countess died in 2006 by the side
of the woman with whom she had been living for twenty years, Lady Fallis, who had returned to her maiden name, Marguerite La Montée. The hunters were not boring people. Yet they insisted on boring each other.

Dale was seated as far from Lord Fallis as possible, on Lady Fallis's left side. Conversation had turned to his son Roger's hair, which he had grown long; he could be confused with a “rock'n'roller,” somebody's aunt declared, with crafty suggestion. Lord Fallis, scrupulously intent on his shoulder of lamb until that point, made his only pronouncement of the luncheon: “Perhaps Mr. Wylie can help you with that, boy.”

The table failed to understand.

“Why would Mr. Wylie know what to do, darling?” Lady Fallis asked.

Dale answered. “I believe that Lord Fallis is referring to the fact that I am the son of a barber. But I assure you that we only ever did three basic cuts, and I doubt your son would want any of them.”

Awkwardness lingered until it dissolved in its own propriety. Lord Fallis, helpless in the welter of centuries of breeding, could not stop himself from offering tobacco to his guests, and then immediately began to leave for his postprandial solitude. Dale strolled after his host into the rose pleasance; everyone else assumed the old man reckoned his duties discharged.

“Lord Fallis, excuse me, I may never have another chance.”

“What's it?”

“I'll be brief. I want you to sell me the rural papers.”

“I'm sorry?”

“I turn around papers. That's my living. And they're sapping you, I know. Sell me
The Aberdeen Globe
anyway. You don't care.”

Lord Fallis's eyebrows rustled again.

“I'm afraid I never discuss matters of business at personal functions.”

“I understand. Send me a number.”

“Number?”

“A number. A price.”

Lord Fallis blinked. “I've heard that in America everything has its price,” he murmured.

Two days later, the boy who cleaned the knives and boots brought over the offer. Even Lord Fallis's stationery was godlike, yellow with age, the ink soaked into its weight, the number written in a broad, circuitous hand: two and a half million pounds. This for a paper with revenues of a hundred thousand a year. Two and a half million pounds was exactly the amount of seed money Dale had arranged on sufferance from the North American operations.

A rough roaring laughter swelled from Dale's gut, suffusing him with angry joy. He was glad of the insult. It had taught him why he had left America. He realized at last, through the dim lightening of envy, the motivations of his incomprehensible instinct: to conquer the old world. He relished the hunger. He basked in the envy. He was home again, at last.

*  *  *

In 1963, George began his tour of the family's North American properties, while Lee Taggart managed the business from the offices in Manhattan. The tour had been Lee's idea—George would gather the information only an owner could gather from the companies scattered over America and Lee would be left alone to run things in New York. George could also pick up what Lee had learned in the field as a kid, how the individual mechanisms of the businesses worked. But WylieCorp had changed from when Lee had started out in Blind River. Sometimes
WylieCorp acquired two or three properties in a week, and all over the world. George's tour became less a chance to gather information—the only information that really mattered to Lee and George was the size of the quarterly profit margin anyway—and more a chance to impose the Wylie spirit on the widening empire.

The visits were always the same, coming without warning; the chief executive of the factory or newspaper received a call at 4:58 p.m. that Mister Wylie would arrive the next morning at eight-thirty. At eight-thirty, the executive team arrayed themselves in the lobby, waiting for the owner's limousine and entourage. In their anxiety, they barely noticed a young man in a cheap suit pull a Dodge Dart into a far corner of the parking lot. Often George had to introduce himself. His years at Harvard had served him well and he knew how an aristocrat should behave. He never offered advice on the running of the company but he always brought a bag lunch of a peanut butter and grape jelly sandwich, an apple, and a Coke, and insisted on eating in the cafeteria. Kings displayed their power with splendor. The Wylies, growing richer than kings, regaled the world with their stinginess.

George was smart enough to understand his function, as an icon of property. He recognized that he filled a need in the heart of managers and workers. Somebody had to own things. His work was being there, existing. He watched in silence so the people who worked for him knew they were being watched. Every company was the same no matter what it made. He didn't care what they made. He cared that they saved as much money as possible. Soon he didn't bother going to New York. He made his arrangements out of Champlain and kept moving, company to company, town to town.

Into even the most quotidian dream a blue tiger may stride, and into the life of a George Wylie, a Lavinia Thibodeau.

Lavinia Thibodeau was famous by 1963, midway through her seventh world tour. At the age of twelve, in 1952, she had been described as “the prettiest performer in the Province of Quebec” by
The Montreal Gazette
, worshipped as much for her devout Catholicism as for her meticulous performances. Her precocious, traditional playing, at a time when every middle-class girl in Quebec was chained to the parlor piano, thrust her into the provincial iconocracy. Her father, an archconservative supporter of Quebec's corrupt, nationalistic Duplessis regime, dressed her in the party's blue for every concert. During election seasons, she even wore shoes with red soles, which she flashed to the chuckles of her knowing audiences, matching Duplessis's slogan
Le ciel est bleu, l'enfer est rouge.
(Heaven is blue. Hell is red. Blue was the color of the Unione Nationale, red of the Quebec Liberal Party.) She stuck mostly with Mozart and church recital music and won the Rubinstein Prize and the International Mozart Prize by the time she was fourteen.

At seventeen, she discovered the modernist compositions of Alban Berg. Even the possession of such music amounted to sin in her house, and she stashed the leaves under her mattress like pornography. She learned the music without playing, simply by studying. At a concert three days after Duplessis's death, she blazed onto the stage in a scarlet ball gown, an absurd luxury fringed with her grandmother's handmade lace. Instead of the Mozart piano sonatas Nos. 18 and 23, she sat down at the piano, lifting her legs to reveal light blue stockings, and strayed out into the great mathematical wilderness of Berg's sonata No. 1. She was booed offstage. Her father never spoke to her again. She had rejected the order of things.

In the shipwreck aftermath of that concert, she drifted, in her scarlet dress, to the Montreal home of a libertine aunt, whose house on
the Plateau was a refuge for experimental artists and proto-Separatists. They called themselves the neantists—the name they gave to their rejection of tradition and religion and politics. Instead of the cruel certainties of Quebec under
la grande noirceur,
everything was to be light. Painting was an experiment. Sex was an experiment, and money and underwear and music. The bedraggled, filthy guru of the neantist group was the composer Lefevre (better known as T.T.). Arrested seven times for homosexuality, and later beaten to death during the 1971 riots in Kingston Penitentiary in Ontario, he wrote the music of dumb luck. In his early “Goldfish Symphonies” three aquariums lined with musical staffs divided the stage, one each for the woodwinds, brass, and strings. Wherever the goldfish swam, the orchestra played. He also composed a violin octet, “Musical Chairs,” which worked exactly like the children's game except that the children playing were the performers of the music. For Lavinia, T.T. composed his most famous and disturbing piece, the “Duet for Piano and Lovebirds.” On the 1963 tour, the tour that was to swallow George Wylie's life, Lavinia performed Mozart's sonatas Nos. 18 and 23 before the intermission, with T.T.'s duet following.

George often went to hear classical music. On his endless tour of every town in America where WylieCorp owned a company, the ritual of the concert hall was appealing. He didn't know who was playing when he went to see Lavinia. He was in New York, staying close to Carnegie Hall. That's all he knew.

At the appointed hour, the polite conversation dutifully lowered and the overheads dimmed. To dutiful applause, a French-Canadian woman in an overdramatic scarlet dress and with a classical name walked onstage. She smiled and bowed and sat down at the piano. As the young woman plunked out some rather cheerful Mozart, George considered his plans. He was supposed to head to New Orleans the
next day, to visit
The Louisiana Sentinel
. The concert was good for planning things. The woman onstage was lovely but not lovely enough to disturb his composure, and the music lifted and dropped itself like a languorous youth on a willowed bankside. The melodies passed like well-mannered paintings. Everything was charming, easy, and the conclusion was obvious. The crowd was pleased that it knew exactly when to applaud.

George stayed in his seat during the intermission while the stagehands raised nets and dropped hoops from the ceiling. The net was enormous and very fine, like a malaria net, and the men raising it all wore black suits with white collars, like the surplices of priests, hollering to each other in pea-soup-thick patois, veiling the stage in a translucent scrim, a thin cloud.

After twenty minutes, the crowd filed back in. The overheads again dimmed. To dutiful applause and polite laughter, the woman entered carrying a cage of lovebirds. She released them into a chirruping—a gasp at the irresponsibility. The lorikeets fluttered into the net and back to the hanging hoops and she sat to play.

This music was not pretty. This music was not polite. This music shivered. The crowd who listened vanished into irrelevance. George was alone with the woman, gorgeous in her transport, caught behind a vague net there for the breaking. You could say that George Wylie fell in love, but
absolute recognition
would be more a precise phrase, abyss calling to abyss. The birds flew and cooed, paused on the hoops, and whenever they landed on the piano itself, Lavinia stopped playing until they fluttered off, which once took seven awkward minutes. Lavinia's concentration remained pure: At the still center of the swooping vibrancy and delirious chaos, she seemed to dance around the music and the birds rather than conjure them up. Her own beauty resonated from
the stage, too, a delicacy that was not fragile, a tender mastery over the sense and nonsense the music wrought.

The music ended only because all music ends.

*  *  *

From that moment George followed Lavinia Thibodeau. From Pittsburgh to Philadelphia, from Philadelphia to New York, from New York to London, from London to Paris, and from Paris to sixty-two other cities. At each show, he bought the front-row seat on the left aisle. He sat at the front, on the left, mildly smiling, always. He sat until the show ended, and the custodians had swept up the lorikeet droppings and the musicians had drifted away to whatever comforts they could cadge from foreign bars and alien churches. George stayed until they asked him to leave.

One of Lavinia's entourage first noticed the strange, dumbly smiling American in Leningrad. He had been in the same spot in Helsinki three nights earlier. How had he managed to fly to Leningrad? How had he managed a ticket to the show? A week later, in Moscow, Lavinia peeked from behind the curtain to glimpse her complacent admirer, who sat smiling in the front row, on the left. Who was he? Why was he there? His relentlessness began to unnerve her: He kept coming and coming with his mild smile, his silence. And he always stayed until the end.