Hunger of the Wolf

by Stephen Marche

  The friendship between George and Lee had a dark margin, and they could tease out their joy only so far. When night fell, Lee would have to slip across the ice to the coach house, where no one ever saw his mother, where even the milkmen and the bread men and the men from the general store learned not to knock but to leave their offerings on the stoop like devotees to a silent idol. Lee entered the coach house each night and escaped each morning like a continuous sacrifice continuously reborn.

  George wondered if he should tell his father about Lee’s invisible mother. Then again: Tell him what?

  *

  On George’s thirteenth birthday, he learned that he was not an ordinary rich kid with a distant father but a monster out of legend.

  “I got something to show you tonight,” Dale whispered, leaning in with his smell of railways and leather and Brylcreem as the black forest birthday cake was cleared away. The whole family encircling the massive dining room table seemed to look away at once.

  His father led him outside, to the edge of the rink where the evening was setting in scratched and shaved purple reflection. His father’s arm was on his shoulder, a rare experience, and the frozen air shivered with vague significance. Dale pointed up to the moon rising over the world for the three billionth time or so. “Better hurry,” he said.

  He led the boy to the door into the basement, a door George had never seen opened, and then down closed concrete stairs. There were three large connected cages with a large door. George had not known that he had been living in a house of cages. To cage what? Father and son walked without comment into the largest, whose door clanged shut. Dale started shouldering off his suit, then unbuckling his pants. “You better get naked, son. You may as well see.”

  Dale gestured to a hanger on the back of the cage and George began timidly to unbutton his shirt. They were really going to get naked? The dose of fear was mixed with absurdity.

  “I don’t know if it’ll be tonight, my boy.” Dale hung his trousers over a wooden press fold in the corner. Why was he being so meticulous in his gestures? Why wasn’t he explaining?

  “If what will be tonight?” George asked, turning to pull his sweater over his head.

  Already in the cage with him, a gray wolf, menacing in its calm, panted with killing in its clear eyes. George called for his mother and tumbled against the bars of the cage, bumped his lip, the taste of blood in his teeth. He looked back. The wolf had cocked his head, curious. The roar of the fear slowly diminished. The wolf was Father. George thought: Of course. George thought: The house of my parents makes sense. George thought: I have always known that my father is a wolf. Only the name of his origin had escaped him. George thought: I too am the wolf.

  *

  From that night, George Wylie spent every full moon in the cage. Sometimes his father was with him and sometimes he was away on business. When the transformation came, engulfing George’s flesh in agony, shooting the boiling blood into his eyeballs, furring his skin, razoring his teeth and claws, Dale happened to be home, and they woke up in a naked heap together. Dale said, “Now you know.”

  George knew but at school he found questions intruding: What did he know? He knew the wolf was another nature. He knew the wolf was a secret. His mother never mentioned the monthly trips to the basement. No one ever offered any explanation, any possibility of meaning. Were they alone in a private mystery? Or did every family in the world huddle underground three days a month?

  Perhaps he could tell Lee. But Lee was sprouting in his own furies. It began when Lee made the Hamilton College hockey team and George didn’t, which made no sense. George was an excellent defender. He could scallop-skate backward, and Lee couldn’t. Lee was only good at the long pass, and two-line passes were illegal in the interschool league anyway. But Coach Tomson was always respected for the unusual selections he made. He never played favorites: He frequently picked the least likely, the least popular kids. The Hamilton Hellcats always made the league finals anyway, didn’t they? Even the weak players, the slow-footed forward, the dekeable defensemen, were tokens of Coach’s transcendent comprehension of hockey talent, his deep insight into the game.

  It was as random as the wolf. Coach Tomson had stared into their hearts and uncovered the mysterious reality only he could see. Lee could play. George could not.

  *

  WylieCorp became an empire in 1947. The empire had an elaborate, unique constitution: Dale’s will, a contract of succession which he constructed so that none of the firstborn male children could abdicate, nor could the company be sold out from under them. If the company collapsed, the family collapsed, and vice versa. He wrote it to be unbreakable. He had been scared by the collapse of the Soltanto chain of grocery stores. Old Enzo Soltanto had built a single store in Seattle into nearly a billion dollars’ worth of fronts before he died in a brothel in 1936. In some of Dale’s districts, ads from Soltanto’s amounted to twenty percent of all buys. The two Soltanto sons, one a moron, the other a gambler, drowned the property like a puppy. The business could have survived one or the other but together their squabbling had ruined all hope. That wouldn’t happen to WylieCorp. Dale would leave behind clarity, above all.

  Dale Wylie’s life passed by windows looking out onto fleeting landscapes. A man who sits by the window of a train owns an ersatz wisdom. He knows that everything passes. A clump of evergreen, a clump of deciduous in yellow, then red, a farm that needs paint, a shiny metallic silo, a Presbyterian church, a boy standing in a slough staring up resentfully as the engine of the world chuffs past, two girls in red hats, a clump of evergreen, a rusty abandoned truck, a rusty abandoned forklift, a rusty abandoned bulldozer, a sign that claims JESUS SAVES. One thing after another. Never his brother. One thing after another after another. The slow shudder into the station brought stuttering confusion. How are we supposed to live in the here and now after an endless mocking stream of theres and thens and thens and theres? His will was an answer of a kind: the business would not die.

  Dale stopped for an occasional three days at the cottage in North Lake with George. For them, that scarred country was a rich void. They could run as wolves for days through the clear-cut wasteland, lapping waters from the translucent creeks and chasing down the fawns, shredding the throats of pawed hares, digging up squirrels, sleeping piled together in cougar-dug holes at night, then chasing through the morning in the camouflage of high grasses, the useless forests remaindered by the mills and the new forests springing up in sapling and brush. Their severed lives in school and on the road healed without scar, and they were simply father and son. Terror washed away from their skin in bliss. There is no luxury more intense than running through the country of yourself.

  One morning, crumpled and aching on the cold hearthstones of the North Lake cottage, Dale returned to his humanity and George was not beside him. Dale found his shirt and slacks where they always were, behind his bedroom door, and, tossing them on, stumbled out and down to the lakeshore, to alleviate the quiet sadness that always followed the beastliness in Alberta.

  George was already up, hugging his knees, looking over the lake at the sun infiltrating through the screen of pines. They sat in a failing silence.

  “Dad? Are there any others like us?”

  Dale breathed and pretended to consider. “I told you about your uncle Max.”

  “Yeah, you told me about Uncle Max. Nobody knows about Uncle Max, right? Maybe there are others that nobody knows about.”

  The crisscross yellow of daybreak was looming on the water. Dale breathed in the air of the past, cleansing and ugly. “I’ll tell you the truth, son. Max is probably dead, or he’s straight wolf.”

  “But he could be alive. He could come back. What if there are others out there like us? What if the world is full of us and everybody knows? What if we keep it a secret for no reason?” George looked at his father, slightly embarrassed by himself.

  “Uncle Max isn’t coming back,” Dale said. “And he’s the only one I know. And my father. Nobo
dy else. We left nobody in Abermarley.”

  “What about the Taggarts?” George asked.

  “You’ve seen something with Lee?” Dale was curious.

  “No, but he hasn’t seen anything of me.”

  Dale yawned. “I think that might be your answer.”

  George flopped back in the grass, ruminating, and Dale left the boy to his thoughts. The idle thoughts of youth are the subterranean pipelines of our lives. A moment of startled languor can twist a fate, through underground angles, underworld passageways flowing with nameless spirits. Fathers can only ever half understand anyway. George wanted there to be other wolves, with all the chambers of his heart. If there were other wolves, his secret life would not be the same as his family life, and the curse would not be the inescapable rage in his blood.

  *

  There are many aristocracies in the world, aristocracies of title and of money and of talent. But no aristocracy rules as thoroughly as the aristocracy of boy athletes.

  That winter the ice on the rink between the houses on Larchmount Crescent was either empty or crowded; they played with the lads or not at all. Lee was permitted on the overnight trips to the academy farm, where the celebrated hockey players, the chosen ones, missed an entire week of school. Booze and dirty magazines, too, the envious school whispered, to the hardest-working boys.

  Everybody played, the sons of steel mill owners and the sons of unemployed steelworkers, all the young men eager to forget for a couple of hours the desperate vanity of their fathers. Everybody played until the early darkness began to settle, and one by one they slunk away, with final insults and promises of minor revenges until only George and Lee sat on a snow mound untying their skates.

  “I’m glad you’re still willing to play with a crabby failure like me,” George said. He was thinking about Christmas, and about Lee’s Christmas in the coach house, whose curtains never even ruffled.

  “I’m quitting the team after Christmas,” Lee said.

  “What?”

  “I’m not going to play for Coach Tomson anymore.”

  Lee was unlacing his skates with mechanistic ferocity. The last of the light was collapsing and soon mothers and aunts would be hollering, but not for Lee. Never for Lee. His house was silence. The rumors George had heard about the coach “in the corners” must be true. The boys found enough courage for a single look and glutted on horror and compassion. Then the stars began to rise up, and the moon.

  *

  Dale lived for Alberta, but even that cherished respite soon vanished. The boys were soon to go. George would be off to Harvard in the fall. Lee was going to Blind River, Minnesota, as a sales assistant for the Wylie radio station WKPG, his first step in joining the company.

  The compensation was a number. Dale was shaving in the train, the hot foam slicked on his cheek, the blade lifted a fraction below his left ear, when the tumult of calculation from fifty different companies, debts and revenue projections and realized profits and implied obligations, reconfigured and then resolved themselves into a single figure. Twenty million. He was worth twenty million dollars. Two with seven zeroes. Catching his own eye in the mirror, Dale began to bark with laughter, his jaw clenched, unable to stop. Then a howl triumphed up and out of him, ending in anguish. The memory of Max’s eyes, flush with dumb-luck money, coming to call him into the night.

  There was nobody else to call but Jack. He found his employee in a hotel room in Maine, the silvery laughter of various women pealing in the background. “What do you want, Dale?” Jack asked. “I’m busy. I told you to leave me alone when I’m making deals.”

  “I just had to tell you. Twenty million. I’m worth twenty million.”

  “Good for you. Why are you calling me?”

  “I thought you might like to know.”

  The silence crackled with distance and suppressed indifference. A hard woman’s laugh rang out like dropped change. “Listen, Dale, you gotta decide right now. Do you want more?”

  Dale didn’t need to think. “I do.”

  “Then leave me the hell alone, you dumb rich bastard.”

  *

  Before George and Lee separated, before the end of what they would have to call their childhoods, there was time for one more revelation. On the night of their graduation ceremony from Hamilton, George took Lee down to the basement of Larchmount Crescent. The leashes, the cages.

  For a few moments, they inhaled the smell of animal life, the perfuming rot and consumption and rage.

  “Did this come with the property?” Lee asked.

  “My father built it. He built all of this.”

  “For himself?”

  “For both of us.”

  Lee opened the cage, gingerly creaking the joints, surprised at its realism. He stepped inside and closed the door. Lee’s blank gaze posed a kind of question on the other side of the bars: Are you going to tell me or aren’t you? The secret fell out of George: “Three days out of the month, we are wolves. We chain ourselves down here. I don’t know if there are any others like us.”

  Lee was still. Eventually he moistened his lips with a tongue tip. “I guess we’re even,” he said.

  “I guess.”

  They were children of the same secrets. Even in the deepest, most unspeakable matters, George was practical. One lesson he had learned from his father without ever having to be told was that no matter what nightmares came roaring out of him the business had to go on. Someday the business would pass to George and he himself was not smart enough to run it; Lee would be. He knew all of this when he was seventeen.

  *

  One final mystery remained. When Lee no longer returned to Larchmount Crescent, the coach house was empty. Outside the door, the newspapers stacked up, the milk soured on the stoop. Apparently, the boy, who was no longer a boy, had been living alone. And Scarlet Taggart? No one—certainly none of the Wylie women who had lived beside her for ten years and more—could say whether she had left or when. Once called, the police discovered a neat, well-maintained suite of properly decorated, thoroughly swept rooms. Were they dealing with a murder or a failure to cancel subscriptions? Lee was riding a train to Blind River, unavailable for questioning. Jack Taggart was somewhere in the South swallowing up newspapers and radio stations. Dale was in Atkinson, George at Harvard. What would they know anyway? Ultimately not even a missing person report was filed. There’s too much oblivion in the world to keep track of it all.

  THREE

  *

  Six weeks after the party, “the personal concierge to Poppy Wylie”—that was his title, right under his name—answered my seventeenth or eighteenth request for an interview: “Ms. Wylie will grant you a media availability,” the e-mail read. I called Leo at home to exult but he was away in Los Angeles for an audience with an idol of his own. Kate shared in my triumph, though she was more amused by my excitement than the note itself.

  “Now we know what you give the woman who has everything,” she said.

  “A personal concierge?”

  “Fame. The love that moves the sun and the other stars.”

  Ordinarily with an interview like this, I would have thrown myself into preparations. The key with celebrities, even pseudo-celebrities, is to remember details of their lives they themselves have forgotten—movies straight to video, childhood indiscretions hushed up long ago, friends abandoned decades previously, any detail that gives the interviewer an asymmetry of information. But I had been preparing to interview Poppy since her limousine had curled up outside the house in North Lake. My childhood had been preparation.

  *

  Poppy Wylie’s personal concierge was a fastidious blond man named Marcus Koenig, a professional of the eccentric protocols and mannerisms of the ultrawealthy. The shade of overcome insecurities haunted his bright confidence. Maybe terrible acne as a kid? Maybe growing up gay in a small Midwestern town? Maybe a drunk mother? Maybe all of the above? Like everyone else on Poppy’s staff, and there were at least a half dozen, Marcus wore press
ed chinos and a pleated white shirt, the cuffs rolled perplexingly to the midpoint of the forearm. With slightly effeminate sandals, the look bordered on cabana boy even in the marble-paneled octagon foyer of a suite of apartments by Central Park.

  Marcus led me to a small side table in the passageway off the kitchen, where a contract the size of a small book waited. I flipped through the pages. A standard attempt at post-interview approval. Marcus frowned judgmentally when I lied, obviously, and told him I’d sign it later. What was he going to do, disappoint his mistress? At first I disliked the man’s affectation; he seemed to be imitating a butler he had seen on television. Later I understood how much effort went into maintaining the chaos of Poppy’s life. Nothing requires more concentration than the enactment of whims.

  I was Poppy’s whim that day, so Marcus guided me into a gumwood-paneled library whose view of the park was pure will to power—as if the whole of New York had been built as an immense shrine around the patch of trees right there. Her magazine spreads spilled over the low table, Vogue from 1988, Tattler from 1991, Esquire, all informing me what I already knew: I was meeting one of the most beautiful women who had ever lived. And yet I almost failed to notice her, still as a fallen leaf on the window ledge, her face darkened by the flood of light behind her.

  “You made it,” she said, beginning to wring her hands nervously. Her impossibly elegant silken black blouse and pantaloons could have served either as a pajama or a ball gown. She could have taken off her watch to go to bed, or put on diamonds to go to the Oscars. “I hope this is the right thing,” she said. “Leo told me you were all right.”