Sister Wolf (19 page)

The lower windowpane, attached by a chain, was hanging open. The bottom panes of all the windows could be let down to supply ventilation, although the chapel was built of granite, which locked in the cool. Marit heard the sound of Gabriel’s voice and pushed in a little closer to make out the words. She could anticipate what he was saying. If outside noises drowned out parts of his talk, she could supply the missing words herself.

Gabriel moved around the circle of students as he spoke, using his hands to express a point. Most sighted people were sensory morons, he was explaining, smug and happy with the visible surfaces of things, connecting nothing seen with the unseen, letting their eyeballs do their living for them. Eyesight kept experience at a safe remove; eyesight led to labeling, judging, and other restrictive mental habits. Sighted people were brains without bodies who called the other senses the animal faculties. Gabriel looked up at the vaulted ceiling like an actor giving a soliloquy. Whose standard ranked psychic gifts as “‘second’ sight”? Of what use were eyes for telepathy, or precognition, or discourse with God? Blind Homer, blind Milton, St. Teresa in bliss—there were more names in Gabriel’s roster of the transcendent sightless; but pine needles were brushing Marit’s nostrils, and she sneezed.

She sneezed loud enough to have to duck down for cover. She waited for sounds of alarm or the rush of stampeding children. Then she heard the thin notes of a melody with a heavy beat, music from a ballet that was too familiar to recall. She raised herself up by inches and looked inside. Gabriel was clapping his hands, exciting his pupils to their feet to begin the movement portion of the workshop.

Three times over, surefooted and rapt, nine youngsters swayed through a repetition of the vowels, leaving off
y.
The ballet music came from a tape recorder, music bland enough not to dictate individual moves, nor to overpower the chanting of vowel sounds and words incarnating vowels. She heard Gabriel’s voice over the music, leading the exercise: vowels were like gems in a matrix of iron ore; vowels were the life and soul of a word; consonants were the hide and bone.

There was a series of little mutinies inside the group. Some of the children had begun to act out words of their own.

“Ah, ah!” One boy jumped to the
a,
his skinny chest swollen with the indrawn breath.

“
O, o,
hole,” moaned Aimée, tracing a circle and slumping over into it.

“Sting!” yelled a fat boy next to her, making conductor’s passes at an imaginary orchestra with his hands.

Gabriel knew when to get his charges back in line. He called each one to his place and pointed all of them toward the center of the circle. There were two or three whom he had to sit down bodily. When they were gathered into a circle on the floor, he asked them what they had discovered during the exercise.

The fat boy took over. “
I
is a nervous itchy vowel!” It was a signal for riot. Suddenly nine fidgety blind adolescents all wanted to do
i,
began impersonating the whole phonetic spectrum from
ih
to
eee,
hopping and shrieking, until Gabriel cupped his hands around his mouth to magnify his voice, ordering them back to the use of
i
in poetry, and got them droning and stressing the couplet to Shakespeare’s Sonnet XXVII:

Lo, thus, by day my limbs/by night my mind,

For thee and for myself/no quiet find.

The chapel emptied out as if a drain had been unstopped. The boys whooped through the door, celebrating their freedom. The girls clustered at the entrance and moved out as one, like a single-celled organism. Marit stayed behind the pines, watching Gabriel unplug the tape recorder and roll an upright piano back against the wall. She was losing hold of her purpose. A teacher is an impersonal figure, and Gabriel took on stature in front of a class. He had told her that after teaching he felt flushed with stimulation, that his body felt light, that he would run up three flights of stairs on the way to his room. It would do her no good to intrude on his exaltation. If she appeared in his path, she would break his stride, like a stone or a root over which a runner stumbles. The act of spying had drawn some of the evil out of her. She had better slink back to the road where she had left her car.

Gabriel walked over to a metal plate on the wall. The first two switches he pressed darkened the apse and the vestibule. The third switch controlled every light except four spots in the ceiling. Into that spotlit central space Aimée made an entrance, holding her head up and taking her time, with confidence in her movements. There is always one student who hangs around after class, asking for extra reading, or pretending to be confused about a point in the lecture. Marit had seen these girls making up to the teacher, hugging their textbooks and ducking their chins as if they had conquered years of shyness in order to voice one question. This girl in shorts, with honey-colored skin, seemed to have arrived by preappointment, so that Gabriel’s attention was her due. She occupied the lighted nave with the ease of a born performer.

Gabriel did not keep her waiting. He dropped his book bag and hurried up to her, reaching out a hand to stroke her hair. They kept a short space between them, the distance reserved for private conversations, that electric interval which is only inches wider than a lovers’ tryst. Marit heard the murmur of their voices, but the words they were saying did not carry. She could see smiling and nodding and other signs of animation, the give and take of two people who are already in perfect agreement. Gabriel and Aimée were physically matched. They were equal in height. She was curved; he was flat. He was brown; she was gold. Marit and Gabriel, under that light, would be ill-assorted, hard and lean like two boys. No feature of their two silhouettes would show the pull between male and female. They did not make a couple.

Marit had learned to stand with her arms crossed over her breasts to disguise their size. This upstart blind girl used her breasts to express herself, the way Latins use their hands. Gabriel’s hands were jammed into the pockets of his trousers. Was he forcing himself to contain them, since of their own accord they would cup, knead, mold, unbutton, and stroke? There had been male teachers at Marit’s female college; half the faculty were men. Any candidate for Master of Arts was fair game and no danger to their jobs; by unwritten rule they did not poach on undergraduates. There had to be a law at Meyerling, not unwritten but codified, preventing Gabriel from moving one step closer to this girl of sixteen, a minor and a cripple.

As if Marit had willed it with that part of her mind that could still act in his interest, Gabriel took a step backward. His hands came out of his pockets, and for one instant it seemed as if the assignation had ended. Then he moved forward, grasped the girl’s shoulders, and placed a kiss like a star at the center of her forehead, holding his lips to her forehead long enough to brand her. Her chin sunk to her chest. She stood limp between his hands. He turned her around and guided her a few steps in the direction of the chapel door. He left her abruptly and walked into the shadowy aisle, stiffening his neck in order not to look back at her.

Marit had begun to see everything with captions, as if she were perusing a series of eighteenth-century erotic prints. This last scene was entitled “The False Renunciation,” in which the shepherd forswears the lady for the sake of her honor and the distance between their stations. The next picture would be “The Happenstance Reunion,” and show the lady weeping in the glade that had sheltered their meetings, while the shepherd approaches, with eyes cast down, on the same sad pilgrimage. “The Ecstasy” is the last number in the series, a flurry of petticoats and a rubble of crooks and slippers.

The jealous person, like the contemplative, reaches a high degree of single-pointed focus. Marit had fixed her mind on one interpretation, ruling out commonplace human motives which had the power to comfort her. The teacher might have been persuading his blind pupil to take the walk back to the main house without assistance. The pupil, a nubile girl, might have been making female overtures to the teacher, who had checked them with fatherly treatment. The pupil might have wanted the teacher’s time to discuss a problem, and been put off, since he was expected at other activities.

The lights in the chapel went out. Marit could not hear Gabriel’s footsteps across the floor, but she heard the door close. She crawled out from behind the pine trees, hurting her knee on a half-buried rock, and made her way around the side of the chapel, silent and hunched down. There was a path that led straight to the mansion, lined on both sides with yews. Gabriel was on the path, walking briskly, his book bag slung over one shoulder.

Marit darted across to the farther side, where the yews were tall enough to hide her if she bowed her neck. There was a cover of needles on the ground which would deaden her footfall. As she moved, leaning sideways, she peered through openings in the evergreens. She was all eyes, she was one huge eye, floating like the moon—which was rising—among the branches.

It was clear to her that the girl would not take dismissal easily. She would dawdle up ahead, pacing herself, laying another trap for Gabriel, who would have used up his resistance dodging the first one. Marit wanted proof to end the cycle of suspicion, not thinking that she would then need firmer evidence and harder clues, that she would have to pile up certainty after certainty, the way incurables try new doctors and stronger remedies. She had witnessed a kiss on the forehead, which portended a kiss on the mouth. When she caught them embracing mouth-to-mouth, she could infer the act of rapture. If she saw them naked and joined, her knowledge would still be partial. They might have glutted their appetite in one bout, or whetted it for future engagements. How many return engagements and on what terms? Would they be using each other’s bodies or making love? The more Marit knew, the more her knowledge would fail her.

The path ended at a line of rhododendrons bordering the expanse of lawn that surrounded the manor house. The windows of Meyerling cast bands of light over the lawn. Gabriel’s figure receded slowly from her view, until he became a black shape climbing the terrace steps. She could not see him crossing the terrace; then his outline appeared in the open door. Marit waited for the girl to make her move. The lawn was empty. The door to the terrace closed. The girl must have gone inside by another entrance.

Marit felt like a plainclothesman on a stakeout after a twelve-hour watch with nothing to report. The material of her trousers was sticking to one knee. She pulled at the cloth and winced in pain. Her banged knee had bled and now she had opened the sore. The Berkshire Hills can cool off fast when the sun goes down. Marit’s arms were bare. She was wearing an old shirt with the sleeves ripped out at the arm-holes. There was a piece of chocolate wrapped in tinfoil in one of her pockets. It had melted a little and conformed to the curve of her hip. She ate the chocolate and found that she was no less hungry. Her plans were blocked, just as her endurance was dwindling. Her imagination goaded her on, but lazily, as if she were writing a story: penetrate Meyerling through boiler room; sneak up three flights; take up station in vacant room opposite Gabriel’s; observe girl gaining admittance … Her mind lost the thread. Her body wanted some respite. A picture of the living room at home glowed in her memory, like a place she could not get back to: the same house that she was never at ease in after dark, the same living room with its massive furniture and velvet draperies, scaled down, in her recollection, to cottage size, with a fire burning in the grate, for cheer as much as for warmth.

Hot milk, flannel robes, Fig Newtons, wood smoke; tuned pianos, wildlife journals, snoring malamutes. Building this roster of small pleasures as a charm against sadness and the chilly air, Marit began to walk to keep her limbs in motion, paying little attention to the course her steps were taking. She might have wandered any distance in distraction if a noise, somewhere on her left, had not aroused her. A bleating or a cheeping noise, on a faltering note, without the mechanical tone produced by birds or sheep. Then a ragged sound, like breath catching in the throat. Someone needed help. There was a full infirmary at Meyerling and a nurse in residence. Marit listened again. The same rough, choking sound. It did not weep. It could not be a person. She forced herself to keep still. Even injured, a frightened animal would try to run. It would see her as an enemy, not a rescuer. She widened her eyes to look for signs of movement.

Marit had good night vision. She did not have to use it. The moon, which was almost full or almost waning, was high enough now to shine through the tallest trees. For the first time since she had strayed off the chapel path, Marit took stock of the space around her. She glanced backward to get her bearings by the lights of Meyerling. She wheeled to one side, then the other. The house was missing. Her gaze traveled upward, following a cloudy shaft of moonlight, measuring the long and branchless trunks of giant trees whose crowns seemed to brush the surface of the moon. Her eyes had adjusted to the mist that hung over the forest floor. There was no scrub in this wood, only scattered bushes and a few creepers putting out tendrils over a mat of fallen leaves. The bark of the trees stood out in high relief, scaly and deeply furrowed. The trunks of these trees had grown to their full diameter, three or four feet across, the sign of victory in a fight for space that had lasted centuries.

This was the ancient hardwood forest—black maple, oak, and hemlock—that had survived uncut between her land and Meyerling. It belonged to neither property. Her parents and the Bishop had willed it to the State of Massachusetts, with the condition that it be preserved intact and used for study, not for recreation. After her parents had died, Marit had come a short way into the woods with the state surveyor, by daylight, in late November when the leaves were down. So much sky showed through the bare branches at that season that the trees had seemed diminished. By night, under spreading canopies of leaves, they regained the magnitude that fit their age.