“No, he hasn’t told me. I know you’re fighting over them, Margon. I saw you. I heard you.”
“Well, you let Felix explain to you who they are, and while he’s at it, he might explain to you his entire philosophy of life, his insistence that all sentient beings can live in harmony.”
“You don’t believe they can?” Reuben asked. He was struggling to keep Margon there, keep Margon talking.
Margon sighed. “Well, let’s put it this way. I’d rather live in harmony in this world without the Forest Gentry, without spirits in general. I’d rather people my world with those creatures who are flesh and blood, no matter how mutant, unpredictable, or misbegotten they may be. I have a deep abiding respect for matter.” He repeated the word, “Matter!”
“Like Teilhard de Chardin,” said Reuben. He thought of the little book he’d found before he’d met either Margon or Felix, the little book of Teilhard’s theological reflections inscribed to Felix by Margon. Teilhard had said he was in love with matter.
“Well, yes,” Margon said with faint smile. “Rather like Teilhard. But Teilhard was a priest, like your brother. Teilhard believed things I have never believed. I don’t have an orthodoxy, remember.”
“I think you do,” said Reuben. “But it’s your own godless orthodoxy.”
“Oh, you’re right, of course,” said Margon. “And perhaps I’m wrong to argue for the superiority of it. Let’s just say I believe in the superiority of the biological over the spiritual. I look for the spiritual in the biological and no place else.”
And he left without another word.
Reuben sat back in the chair, gazing dully at the distant window. The panes were wet and clear and made up the many lead-framed squares of a perfect mirror.
After a long time and gazing at the distant reflection of the fire in a glass—a tiny blaze that seemed to float in nothingness—he whispered: “Are you here, Marchent?”
Slowly against the mirror, her shape took form, and as he stared fixedly at it, the shape was colored in, became solid, plastic and three-dimensional. She sat in the window seat again, but she did not look the same. She wore the brown dress she’d worn that day he’d met her. Her face was vividly moist and flushed as if with life, but sad, so sad. Her soft bobbed hair appeared combed. Her tears were glistening on her cheeks.
“Tell me what you want,” he said, trying desperately to stifle his fear. He started to get up, to go to her.
But the image was already dissolving. There seemed a flurry of movement, the fleeting shape of her reaching out, but it thinned, vanished—as if made of pixels and color and light. She was gone. And he was standing there, shaken as badly as before, his heart in his throat, staring at his own reflection in the window.
11
REUBEN SLEPT TILL AFTERNOON, when a phone call from Grace awakened him. He had best come down now, she said, to sign the marriage documents and get the ceremony done tomorrow morning. He agreed with her.
He stopped on his way out only to look for Felix, but Felix was nowhere around, and Lisa thought he had perhaps gone down to Nideck to supervise plans for the Christmas festival.
“We are all so busy,” said Lisa, her eyes glowing, but she insisted Reuben have some lunch. She and Heddy and Jean Pierre had the long dining room table covered in sterling-silver chafing dishes, bowls, and platters. Pantry doors stood open, and a stack of flatware chests stood on the floor by the table. “Now listen to me, you must eat,” she said, quickly heading for the kitchen.
He told her no, he’d dine with his family in San Francisco. “But it’s fun to see all these preparations.”
And it was. He realized that the big party was only seven days away.
The oak forest outside was swarming with workmen, who were covering the thick gray branches of the oaks with tiny Christmas lights. And tents were already being erected on the terrace in front of the house. Galton and his carpenter cousins were coming and going. The magnificent marble statues for the creche had been carted to the end of the terrace and stood in a wet confused grouping, waiting to be appropriately housed, and there was a flock of workmen building something, in spite of the light rain, that just might have been a Christmas stable.
He hated to leave but felt he had little choice in the matter. As for the journey ahead, well, he wouldn’t be stopping for Laura, but she would meet the wedding party at City Hall tomorrow.
As it turned out, things went worse than he’d ever expected.
Caught in a downpour before he reached the Golden Gate Bridge, he took more than two hours to reach the Russian Hill house, and the storm showed no signs of letting up. It was the kind of rain that drenches one just running from the car to the front door, and he arrived disheveled and having to change immediately.
But that was the least of his problems.
The signing of the papers with Simon Oliver went smoothly, but Celeste was in a paroxysm of rage, which showed itself in unending resentful sarcastic comments as she signed over the baby to Reuben. Reuben inwardly gasped when he saw the amounts of money that were being transferred, but of course he said nothing.
He didn’t know what it meant to carry a child and he never would, and he couldn’t grasp what it meant to give one up. He was happy for Celeste that she’d walk away with enough cash to keep her secure for the rest of her life if she planned things right.
But after the lawyers had gone away, and the dinner had been endured in silence, then Celeste exploded in a tirade of rushing words, accusing Reuben of being one of the most worthless and uninteresting human beings ever born on the planet.
This wasn’t easy at all for Grace or Phil to hear, but they remained at the table, Grace gesturing covertly to Reuben for patience. As for Jim, his expression was compassionate, but oddly fixed, as though this were a willful attitude rather than a reflective one. He was as always neatly dressed in his black clerical suit and shirtfront with his Roman collar, and every bit the movie star priest in Reuben’s opinion, with his neat dark brown wavy hair and his extremely agreeable and engaging eyes. He was a handsome man, Jim, but nobody ever talked about it, not when they could talk about Reuben’s looks instead.
Reuben said little or nothing for the first twenty minutes as Celeste castigated him as lazy, a pretty boy, a time waster, a ne’er-do-well, a glorified bum, the vapid airhead boy who dated the cheerleaders of the world, and an ambitionless brat to whom everything came so easy he had not the slightest moral fiber. Born beautiful and rich, he’d wasted his life.
After a while, Reuben looked away. Had her face not been red and knotted with anger and tears, he might have become angry himself. As it was he felt pity and a certain contempt for her.
He’d never been lazy in his life, and he knew this. And he’d never been the “vapid airhead boy who dated the cheerleaders of the world” but he had no intention of saying so. He began to feel a cool detachment, even a little sadness. Celeste had never known him at all, and maybe he’d never known her, and thank God this was a temporary marriage. What if they’d attempted to marry in earnest?
And each time she mentioned his “looks,” he came to realize something ever more deeply. She despised him personally; she despised him physically. This woman with whom he’d been intimate countless times couldn’t stand him physically. And this caused the tiny hairs to rise on his neck when he thought about it, and how ghastly a real marriage with Celeste might have been.
“And so the world just gives you a baby, the way the world’s given you everything else,” she said finally, apparently wrapping up, her fury spent, her lips quivering. “I’ll hate you to my dying day,” she added.
She was about to go on when he turned and looked at her. He no longer felt pity. He felt hurt and he eyed her without a word. She went silent looking into his eyes, and then for the first time, for the first time in months, she seemed slightly afraid. Indeed she looked afraid of him the way she had when he’d first experienced the influence of the Chrism, and when he’d begun to change in so many subtle ways before the wolf transformation. He hadn’t understood then, and, of course, she’d never understood it. But she’d been afraid.
It seemed the others had sensed some deepening of the collective misery, and Grace started to speak, but Phil urged her to be quiet.
Suddenly, in a low tortured voice, Celeste said, “I’ve had to work all my life. I had to work hard when I was
