Country of the Bad Wolfes Read online

  He had not come out of his room for three days when his landlady, Mrs Burrows, who had doted on him through his freshman year, became concerned. She tapped at his door and asked if all was well. Then knocked louder but still received no reply. And so let herself into the shadowy quarters and discovered him abed and barely conscious, stewing in his own filth, unable to speak for the burning rawness of his throat.

  “Merciful Jesus.” She hastened to give him water, then opened the windows to air the room. Then cleaned him and dressed him in fresh nightclothes and helped him to sit in a chair so that she could change his bedding. Then fetched him a measure of whiskey and told him to sip it slowly. His eyes flooded at the burn of it.

  Over the next week she several times a day gave him spoonings of various nostrums. Each morning she changed his bedding and bore away his slops, then brought a breakfast of honeyed tea and parboiled eggs and soft breads. She brought dinners of mashed and buttered vegetables, supper broths of mutton and beef. In the first low raspings of his returning voice he told her of the recent notification that his brother, the last of his living kin, had been lost at sea. Her commiseration was tearful. She well knew the pain of losing loved ones, the loneliness of being without family. She had buried her only child, a month-old daughter, twenty-three years ago, and it was eighteen years now she had been widowed.

  He was physically recovered by the beginning of the academic year, though his voice had been permanently deepened to a raspy bass. His emotional recuperation took a while longer, but nothing else could have served it so well as the resumption of university life. His freshman year had been a notable triumph—he’d made the dean’s list both semesters, and his essay on the merits of Hamiltonian economics was published in a university review.

  His successes continued through the rest of his student years. He studied Spanish in ancillary courses and while still a sophomore became fluent enough to read Don Quixote in the original and write a monograph on it in Spanish. He had always enjoyed numbers but in college they became a passion and he dazzled his instructors in mathematics. Accounting was child’s play. His studies came to him with such ease that he had time for extracurricular pursuits. He joined the debate club and became a redoubtable adversary, winning the annual New England competition with a rousing defense of President Polk’s war in Mexico as essential to America’s Manifest Destiny. At the urging of a professor who admired his forensic flair, he auditioned for a junior-year production of Henry the Fourth and won praise for his rendition of Hotspur, and then as a senior he played the lead in Marlowe’s Faustus. On a dare, he enrolled in a fencing class and was as surprised as everyone else by his swiftly acquired proficiency with a foil. His style was unaggressive and lacked finesse but was marked by an impenetrable defense, relying on clockwork parries that inevitably frustrated his opponents into rash moves that left them open to counterthrust hits. He was recruited for the varsity team and within a year became its ace. In his junior year he was narrowly defeated by his Princeton opponent in the interscholastic finals, and then as a senior he beat the Brown University ace for the championship.

  All the while, through careful observation of his classmates, he learned the bearing of a gentleman. In emulation of his favorite professor he took up smoking a calabash pipe. He was popular among his fellows, a convivial companion who relished political argument and an occasional wager on a horse race, who enjoyed a pint and a ribald joke as well as the next man.

  And yet, for all his friends, he did not truly confide in any of them. He was amiably chary in all reference to family. The adventurous sire he’d admired as a boy had become a secret to guard against the social exclusion he was sure would befall him were it known he was son to a murderer. As far as anyone at Dartmouth knew, his parents had died when he was a young child and he and his brother had been raised in Portsmouth by a maiden aunt, the aunt now also deceased. He had admitted to a living brother only because he had expected Samuel Thomas sooner or later to show up in search of him, and he would have to introduce him to friends. He had told them Sammy was a junior officer on a merchant ship, an elevation in rank he was certain Sammy would enjoy simulating, just as he would surely understand why his classmates mustn’t know the truth about their father—though Sammy would doubtless have chivvied him for his social fastidiousness. He had been sure, too, that his friends would enjoy the surprise of seeing that they were twins. When he sadly told his fellows, at the start of sophomore year, that his brother’s ship had gone down in a storm off Hispaniola that summer and the entire crew with it, he was accorded the special sympathy reserved for those who have lost the last of their family.

  His only confidant during his Dartmouth years was a leatherbound ledger that served as a journal in which he made random entries with no purpose but to clarify to himself his own thoughts and reflections. Whenever he was unclear about some idea or emotion, uncertain in his perception of someone or vague about a memory, he sat to his journal and wrote as precisely as he could what he thought or felt or remembered, and thereby gave those thoughts and feelings and memories the solidity and authority of words recorded on a page. And by that simple act made of them his abiding truth.

  He graduated summa cum laude but was bested by a whisker for valedictorian and so delivered the salutatory address. Then went to work as a legal assistant in the Concord office of Fletcher, McIntosh & Bartlett. He gained the position through the influence of his best friend and fencing teammate, James Davison Bartlett, son to one of the firm’s partners and himself studying toward a legal career. A rakish sort, Jimmy Bartlett had once sneaked a young prostitute into his dormitory simply to prove he could do it, then was caught as he was trying to sneak her out again. It was one of numerous pranks for which he might have been expelled but for the might of his family name. The Bartletts had landed with the Pilgrims. They were among the first families of New Hampshire—and major benefactors of Dartmouth College. In addition to the builders of the paper mills on which the Bartlett fortune was founded and had continued to expand, the bloodline included a lieutenant governor, a state Supreme Court justice, and a state’s attorney general. Jimmy’s father, Sebastian, was one of the most highly respected contract lawyers in New England, and his Uncle Elliott was an administrator in the consular service. His mother, Alexandra Davison Bartlett, belonged to a prominent New York family long acquainted with the Sullivan County Van Burens, family of the former president of the United States.

  It was the most pleasant spring John Roger had known since boyhood. He fulfilled his office duties with precision and could research and annotate a point of law with utter thoroughness and dispatch. On his own initiative he devised and proposed a simpler but more efficient accounting system for the company, an innovation that earned him a handsome bonus and the partners’ unstinting praise. He kept a rented room on boisterous Center Street and gave his weekday evenings to reviewing Coke and Blackstone and other legal texts he’d been absorbing since his freshman year. But on almost every weekend he would be Jimmy’s guest at the Bartlett estate on the Merrimack. Except for Jimmy’s sister, who was away at school in Exeter, he made the acquaintance of all the Bartletts and enjoyed their company as much as they did his.

  He and Jimmy liked to scull on the river, liked to saddle a pair of the thoroughbreds stabled on the grounds and race each other across the meadows. The Bartletts also owned a seaside cottage near Rockport, Massachusetts, and he sometimes went there with Jimmy for holiday stays. They would sail off rocky Cape Ann in the family ketch Hecuba. They went for long hikes in the hilly woods. They did much target-shooting with Jimmy’s Colt Dragoon. The revolver was a graduation gift from his father, who’d received it from Samuel Colt himself in appreciation for his contractual expertise in establishing the Colt factory in Hartford. It was an imposing weapon, weighing above four pounds and firing a .44-caliber ball that would make hash of a man’s heart. “Picture yourself a hundred years ago in command of a militia company armed with the only ones of these in existence,”
Jimmy said. “You would’ve been the lords of the earth.”

  Once a week they practiced their swordsmanship, usually with the foils they had competed with at Dartmouth, but sometimes with the cavalry sabers Jimmy’s great-grandfather had acquired in the Revolutionary War. The first time John Roger hefted a saber he at once felt its difference from a fencing foil. This was no instrument of sport but a weapon of war. Its very heft evoked mortal menace. It was made for slashing as well as thrusting and its blade was grooved to allow for easier passage through a torso, for the run of blood. A saber contest called for greater strength and stamina than did rapier fencing, and its proper art entailed fighting with a two-handed grip when necessary. It was easy to get caught up in the flailing zeal of a saber match, and during one heated exchange John Roger inadvertently nicked Jimmy’s arm. For a week after, his friend bore the bandaged wound as proudly as a war veteran.

  SISTER OF FORTUNA

  In mid-summer they passed their bar examinations, John Roger with ease, Jimmy by the skin of his teeth—a fact in which he seemed to take perverse pride—and they were hired as junior members at Fletcher, McIntosh & Bartlett. To mark the occasion, Sebastian Bartlett invited a host of friends to a Saturday picnic on his riverside lawn, to be followed by a ballroom dance that evening.

  The day of the picnic was blessed with ideal weather, the turnout large and in festive spirit. A bandstand had been erected on the lawn and a brass ensemble played gaily through the afternoon. Jimmy’s sister, Elizabeth Anne, would not arrive until later in the day, coming by coach from Exeter, where she had been spending the past weeks with friends, following her graduation from the Athenian Female Seminary. Her oil portrait hung on the parlor wall of the Merrimack house and John Roger had often paused to admire it. As pictured, she was truly beautiful. Hair the color of polished copper in green-ribboned ringlets to her bare shoulders, the ribbons matching the color of her eyes. An elegant throat necklaced with pearls. Full lips in a small smile suggestive of some secret amusement. John Roger suspected that the artist may have gilded the lily in gratitude for Mr Bartlett’s no-doubt-hefty commission.

  Jimmy told him the painting of Lizzie—as he and his father called her, while Mrs Bartlett referred to her by no name but Elizabeth—had been done less than a year before. “You’d never know by that picture what a tomboy she was,” Jimmy said. All through girlhood she had been one for foot-racing, climbing trees, flying kites, chucking stones. She had badgered their father into teaching her to swim at a much younger age than Jimmy had learned, and then pestered Jimmy into instructing her how to sail his gaff-rigged pram. She was a constant fret to their mother, who was ever upbraiding her to behave herself as a respectable young lady ought. Even though Jimmy and his friends refused to let her join their Adventurers’ Club, she persisted in swimming with them in the river. “We all wanted to dunk her,” Jimmy said, “but none of us could catch her. She swims like an otter. I don’t care to say how many times she beat me in races. She could beat all of us.”

  Their mother thought it unseemly that Lizzie was frisking in the river with the boys, but their father, who was proud of her aquatic superiority, believed it was simple innocent fun. Then came the family’s first swim of the summer when she was fourteen and her sodden bathing costume clung to her in startling new ways. “You could see the fruit was getting ripe, if you know what I mean,” Jimmy said. Her evident physical bloom effected an abrupt change in Mr Bartlett’s outlook and he told her there would be no more swimming in company with boys. Lizzie alleged not to understand his objection and for days persisted in asking an explanation of him, and he would every time reiterate that it simply wasn’t proper. But how was it improper, Lizzie would demand to know, and red-faced Mr Bartlett would sputter that she should ask her mother. “She didn’t have to ask Mum,” Jimmy said. “Lizzie knew very well what Father was talking about. She was just deviling him for the fun of it. It’s how she’s always been.”

  The same devilment was at the root of what Jimmy called the music scandal. His sister was a fine pianist, trained in the classics, but their parents had been unaware of the bohemian element in her repertoire until one evening when she was entertaining the family after supper and segued from “Für Elise” into a rousing dance-hall number of recent French import. Jimmy had heard her play the bawdy music once before, when their parents were away from the house, and had cautioned her against it, and she’d shown him her tongue in retort. But as he’d warned, their mother was dismayed by the lewd composition and she ordered Lizzie to desist from it at once. Very well, the girl said, and banged the fallboard over the keys and got up from the bench and—humming the sprightly tune—danced about the parlor with her skirts swirling to her knees. “Mum barely spoke to her for the next couple of days,” Jimmy said.

  Mrs Bartlett was finally pushed past her wit’s end with her audacious daughter when the girl was seen mounted astride her stallion as she rode on the public road flanking their property. When Lizzie countered her mother’s angry reprimand with the contention that it was the more sensible as well as more comfortable way to ride, Mrs Bartlett called upon Mr Bartlett to prohibit her from riding until she promised to do so in the proper, sidesaddle fashion. Lizzie was so cross, Jimmy said, that she threatened to run away and live among the Indians. Her parents never knew for sure when she was joking, but such impertinence was anyway the concluding proof to Mrs Bartlett that the girl was in critical need of social remediation before it was too late. “Do something, Sebastian,” she told her husband.

  Mr Bartlett dismissed Lizzie’s private tutors and enrolled her at the Athenian Seminary for her final year of schooling. Renowned for its instruction in the social graces as much as for its rigorous academic curriculum, the institution had molded more than one recalcitrant miss into a decorous young lady. When Elizabeth came home for Christmas holiday at the end of her first semester, she comported herself as the very model of refined femininity her mother had prayed for.

  “That’s when she sat for that picture on the wall,” Jimmy said.

  And now, as John Roger and Jimmy stood talking on the riverside lawn, Mrs Bartlett came up behind them, saying, “John, dear, here is someone you must meet.” The happy matron was hugging the arm of the young woman she presented as her daughter, Elizabeth. In the dusky gold light of late afternoon the girl was smiling at him as in the painting. She was surprisingly tall, her eyes almost on a level with his, and both leaner and more buxom than her portrait suggested. He thought her even lovelier than her picture, and only by force of will kept his jaw from going slack.

  “Mr Wolfe,” she said, offering her hand, “Jimmy has written me so much about you, I feel as though we’ve long been acquainted.”

  He said the pleasure was entirely his and kissed her hand. Her eyes went brighter. Her mother tittered.

  Before the end of their first dance that evening he knew he was in love, though she would later say that he may not have known it until then but she knew he had fallen in love the minute their eyes met. Directly on the heels of his dancefloor insight, however, he had the distressing thought that she might already have a beau—or worse, be betrothed. He could not muster the boldness to ask directly if she were spoken for, and as they waltzed about the floor he was frantic for some clever way to find out.

  His worry was more evident than he knew, and she intuited its cause. “If it’s of concern to anyone you know, Mr Wolfe,” she said during a dance, “I’m under no obligation to any party whatever.” He flushed in surprise at both her acuity and her candor. His relief was so manifest she nearly laughed aloud—and so endearing she had to resist the urge to kiss him right there on the dance floor.

  Later in the evening they went out to the garden under an oblong ivory moon and followed a winding pathway to a low rock wall bordering the lawn. A mild breeze carried the scents of night flowers and the river, stirring the trees, swaying the shadows. The ballroom music was faint at this distance. Against the house lights filtering through the folia
ge she was mostly silhouette. An undulant wisp of moonlight played on her hair and glinted on an earring. He said he had heard many an interesting tale of her rowdy tomboy days with the gents of the Adventurers’ Club.

  “Oh, those rascals,” she said. “They never did let me be a member, you know.” She leaned closer and said in lowered voice, “But that club was never so interesting as the one I belong to at the seminary. It’s a most clandestine association, so I mustn’t tell you anything of it unless you promise absolutely never to repeat it to a living soul.”

  John Roger swore her secret was safe with him.

  They were the Sisters of Fortuna, she said, and they performed such rituals as would have surely got them burned for witches not so long ago. He heard a timbre of mischief in her voice and suspected she was having sport with him, yet her daring insinuations at once amused and beguiled him. He asked what sorts of rituals.

  She leaned closer still and told him the Sisters met only on nights of the full moon, in a meadow deep in the woods, even on the coldest nights. They would build a large bonfire and then remove their cloaks, under which they wore only thin white nightdresses and black woolen stockings. They would sing hymns to Fortuna and dance like dervishes in a circle round the fire, their loosed hair flinging and nightdresses awhirl.

  He felt her perfumed warmth on his face, her breath at his ear as she whispered, “We dance faster and faster, and my heart just pounds against my ribs like . . . like some wild thing in a cage. And then . . .” she took a deep breath, “then we throw off our nightdresses and dance naked but for our stockings. Naked.”

  She quickly drew back to look at his face—which felt to him on fire. In a bobbing shard of moonlight he glimpsed a bright eye and flash of grin. Then she kissed him full on the lips—and before he could even think to react she darted away toward the ballroom, glancing back over her shoulder and saying, “Close your mouth, Mr Wolfe, before an insect flies into it. And hurry, or we’ll miss the last dance.”