Saint Peter’s Wolf (12 page)

Eileen Ashby, Dr. Ashby's sister, opened the door and smiled. She was a thin, quiet woman, just touched with gray. She wore an expression of such patience that she was unbeautiful. She had always attended her brother's affairs, and I had never understood their relationship. He was several years older, and I saw, now, that she had always expected her brother to need her in this way, that she had always anticipated that her more robust and more gifted sibling would be leveled by illness. Perhaps her smile was the smile of a grieving victor.

“For only a moment,” she said. She added, “He tires so.”

I felt myself growing weak, following Eileen up the stairs. She slipped in ahead of me, and I stood on the carpeted landing, my hand on the oak banister, remembering how wise Dr. Ashby had always seemed, and how important he was to my way of looking at the world. I braced myself against the shock of seeing him stricken, and as I entered the room I was, indeed, shocked.

The wiry, white-maned giant was a figure carved of soap, pale, unmoving. His eyes were closed, the lids like two bruises. He was an erased version of himself, and as if to compensate for his frailty I boomed, “I am so glad to see you, Dr. Ashby.” I nearly compounded my foolishness by telling him how well he looked, but he lifted a finger.

“I am not deaf, Benjamin,” he said.

I blinked tears of relief. Wise Dr. Ashby was still here, still himself. “I was so sorry when I heard,” I began, and stammered what one says at times like this, and meant every syllable. How I'd hurried to see him. How heartily I hoped for his recovery. At last Dr. Ashby lifted the same forefinger.

He did not speak for a while, but his silence was commanding. At last he said, “One minute I was raking leaves. The next minute I was out.”

His voice was thin, his face pinched, and I saw what a blow a stroke must be. Some essential girder of his mental and physical health had fallen away. It should not have shocked me so, but it did: he was mortal.

I felt that I should say something healthful, even health-giving if I could, but to spare me he said, “I read your article before the stroke. Symbolic castration. It was very well done.”

I was embarrassed. That he should have spent any of his health on something I wrote struck me as a waste. “I know you think castration as a primal fear is overrated.”

The briefest wrinkle of a smile appeared, and for the first time he opened an eye and saw me. He closed it again, and said, “I think the penis is overrated. I am a pioneer in the field of sexual common sense.” We had argued happily over this. Freud's Oedipal theory, Dr. Ashby had eloquently contended, was at heart a fear-of-castration theory. The boy did not want to commit the taboo not simply because it was forbidden, but because the father would cut off the offending member. The entire crux of psychoanalysis was, then, the meat cleaver, or its equivalent.

Dr. Ashby had always explained, and lucidly, that castration could be survived, and that there were many losses—like the loss of a head—which were more severe. The penis was merely a symbolic self, and its loss was like the loss of a doll that was not merely a source of pleasure, but a magical representation of one's ego. Dr. Ashby had always spoken in a cogent, involved way, so that one had never felt lost or found oneself thinking that the theories had little to do with the world of stock markets and freeways. His mind had been a wonder of life, like a favorite star.

“I know,” I said, “that you don't really agree with me.”

The wrinkle again. “I'm proud of you.”

I was so surprised at this, and so pleased, that I nearly wept. To keep from breaking completely I found myself looking around the room. There was a crucifix, dating, I guessed, from the sixteenth century, beside a Russian Orthodox Christ, perhaps nineteenth century, and a wooden Saint Peter, late medieval, and probably Florentine. It was perhaps a meter high, of worm-drilled oak. He shouldered his massive key like a gun.

Another object caught me as I touched my sleeve to my eye, a small, dark figurine, a bronze perhaps a hand-width high. It was a female wolf, perhaps Sienese, probably fifteenth century, judging by the unnaturalistic snout, and the five stylized teats. I registered its characteristics as a mental habit. But I could not stop gazing at her.

Look upon me, she seemed to say.

You are one of mine.

I stared as avidly as I had stood stunned as a teenager by a photograph of a naked woman. It was impossible, but she seemed to look into me, her lips curled back, her teats so full of milk they would have been agonizing.

“One of my favorite pieces,” said Dr. Ashby, because, to my surprise, he had opened his eyes again.

I felt that I had been discovered doing something nearly unholy; I could not guess why. I tried to explain away my interest, but Dr. Ashby was merely stimulated by my embarrassment. He had always had this power of guessing my obsessions. “The wolf is a worthy object of love,” he said.

He closed his eyes, and spoke as though reading a faded text. “Rome was founded by wolfen sucklings.” He smiled, as though remembering the two babes. “And in Romania there is an interesting tradition. They say there that Saint Peter was jealous of God, and asked to have the power to create a beast of his own, one that was strong and wise as he was, although perhaps not as imbued with divinity as the other creatures, yet deserving the love of a saint. And so God decreed that Saint Peter could create an animal of his choosing, and Saint Peter created the wolf.”

I could not respond.

“I remember your dream, Benjamin. The dream you had as a child so many times. We never did quite get to the bottom of that, did we?”

Tell him about the dream, I thought. Tell him that it has come back, and that it has changed. Tell him—he would find it fascinating, and you need to share it with someone.

Even more, tell him about the fangs.

As soon as I thought that I stood. Never. I must never tell anyone else about the fangs. Too many people knew already.

I was amazed at myself. I was trembling, and I did not understand why.

Dr. Ashby sensed my sudden movement, and found me with his eyes. He was about to speak when Eileen bustled into the room, adjusting the blanket that covered his lap. He lifted his hand to pat her arm and missed, and found it on a second try.

“Thank you for visiting us,” she said.

“Visit me again,” said Dr. Ashby, and his voice was even more dry than before. “And next time tell me what you've been doing.”

I made myself chuckle. “Why? Does it look like I've been doing something peculiar?”

Eileen took my arm, and her fingers were iron. “Please come again,” she said.

Dr. Ashby could not manage even a faint smile. He waited for his strength to gather. Then he said, “There's something different about you. Different, and very strange.”

Fourteen

Leaving Dr. Ashby, I was stung by both his poor health and what he had said. I let the car glide down Marin Avenue, the autumn-naked sycamores playing shadows over the car, and when I reached the traffic circle there was an accident.

It was the sort of occurrence one would do anything to avoid seeing. A boy about Carliss's age was crossing the street, carrying a pack in one hand, and he stopped to let a speeding pickup truck go by, and it all happened as though choreographed in exactly this way.

The truck brushed him. Just that—a nudge as it went by, green and mud-spattered. And my first thought was: surely he's not hurt. It had all looked so easy, so harmless. The boy turned in midstreet, gazing about him as though he had lost something essential, but still holding his pack in one hand. And nothing else seemed to move.

There was nothing but the boy, and he was fine, turning back to see where he had come from. And then it was plain that he was swiveling on one leg, the single, riveted leg swiveling under him nauseatingly, planted in the asphalt. The boy danced around and around and the black puddle expanded around his foot.

The boy collapsed, and through my rolled-up windows came his cry, like a thin, golden wire, a sound I could actually feel. I lurched my car to the curb, and flung myself toward him, but there was already a small crowd, and someone running for help.

A fire truck rumbled, its siren swelling, but it did not seem to grow any closer. What had appeared black was, when I glanced down at it, impossible vermilion.

Blood. So much of it, blue where it reflected the sky. I turned away. So many terrible things can happen, I told myself. Surely the boy would recover. The fire engine was so close that the grind of its engine was as loud as its siren.

And then I crouched on the sidewalk, actually fell to my knees, and breathed deeply through my nostrils. I felt something that stunned me. A response that shocked me, and yet it was so vivid it captured me, and I could do nothing but what I did. For the first time in my life I actually smelled blood. I drank in the delicious fragrance.

I must have noticed the smell before, but I had never savored it as I did now. It was a fragrance far more profound than the smell of the most delicious beef. It was the smell of food, this blood, and what made it hard for me to rise to my feet was the realization that my response to the accident, shock and compassion aside, was amazing and foreign to anything I had felt in such a circumstance before.

I was suddenly hungry.

Forget about it, I told myself. Forget about it, and make it through the afternoon.

It was an elegant lounge on Van Ness, all ferns and polished brass. Stan and I had agreed on it, and then regretted our decision as soon as we sat down. Stan had wanted a beer, and I had wanted a soda of some kind. For some reason I did not feel like drinking alcohol these days. We had hoped for a simple bar. Instead we had a waiter in a tuxedo, made sporting with a bright red bowtie. Chamber music, a piece I recognized, a string quartet by Ravel, worked on our moods as we both picked up the napkins, read the matchbook, and generally doubted that we would be comfortable here. From the corner of my eye I saw the cellist's elbow, sawing back and forth.

I had not even wanted to meet with him. But Stan, in a pleasant way, had insisted. It was always cheering to see him, and so I had agreed.

My visit with Dr. Ashby, and the accident just three hours before, had shaken me, but I put on a smile. This was not going to be a delightful conversation. I could tell that Stan had something he thought would be unpleasant for me to hear. He toyed with a match he had torn from the book.

We chatted about his children and his business, which was thriving, until the waiter brought our drinks on a silver-plated tray.

At last Stan said, “Well, I found out everything I could about those … things,” he said. “Those teeth.”

This much he had told me already over the phone. “They're real, right?” I pretended to be slightly bored.

“It depends on what you mean by real. They aren't an illusion. They exist.”

“What is this, Philosophy 1A? Are they actual teeth from an actual animal or what?”

“They're actual teeth. I knew that before you left the office because spectographically they match up with the material from other teeth. And I've used the photographs to do some further digging. They aren't leopard teeth. Or baboon. I was hoping baboon, or gorilla, actually.”

My feigned boredom did not prevent me from asking, too quickly, “Why were you hoping for a primate?”

He said nothing for a moment. “I was really hoping for gorilla, but a glance at an anthropoid molar chart canceled that idea. They are the teeth of a very, very large beast.”

“What sort of beast?”

He did not meet my eyes. “I don't even like to try to guess. Something incredible.”

I shivered. A thrill like nothing I had ever felt.

He continued, “I say incredible. Because I think this is some sort of hoax. I don't know why you in particular would play a joke of this sort on me. So maybe someone is deceiving you, or having some fun with you.”

“It's not impossible,” I said.

“I don't know what the metal is. Some sort of silver alloy, but it's not a blend of nickel or copper or zinc. I could do extremely deep tests, but that would run into several weeks.”

“You hate them, don't you?”

“They aren't a Fabergé egg, face it.”

“But you deeply dislike them.”

“I don't have to like them.”

“What sort of teeth are they, specifically?”

Stan saw how interested I really was. The fact that I had pretended a lack of interest made him lean forward and speak in a low, tense voice. “I've been working from photographs. I can't be completely conclusive.”

The thrill again. I knew what they were, and so did he. I clasped my hands together in front of me so he wouldn't see how they were shaking. “This isn't much of a report.”

But he had seen how I felt. He smiled, an attempt at courage, perhaps, and to remind me that he was still my friend. “A few years ago a scholar brought back a group of silver objects from Mexico. He left them at the lab to be dated and cleaned. They had been discovered in Guadalajara when a
brujo
was arrested for kidnapping and dismembering a few fellow citizens, eating their brains, tearing out their hearts—a hideous crime. A few of the objects, a knife, a few saint's charms, looked old. I could hardly work with these objects. I was puzzled—I'm not superstitious. But I like sun, children, games. I prefer light to dark. Some objects seem steeped in evil, by which I mean the desire to cause harm. To cause pain. To do real hurt to people. And that's what I thought when I first saw the fangs. That these were a witch's doing, an object created to do evil.”

He looked away for a moment, and then met my eyes again. “And I think you're way too caught up with these things.” He said “things” like an epithet.

I was not surprised by what he was telling me. I was surprised at my own anger, a fury that made the room fade, and made me grip the tablecloth, bunching it in my fist. What had he said to make me so angry?