The Wolves of Midwinter

even when she said, “I do.” Jim stood in the corner of the room with his arms folded and his eyes down.

They were almost to the front doors of the building when Celeste announced that she had something to say, and asked that they all step to one side.

“I’m sorry for all I said yesterday,” she said. Her voice was flat and unfeeling. “You were right. None of this is your fault, Reuben. It’s my fault. And I’m sorry. And I’m sorry about what I said to Phil. I never should have gone off on Phil like that.”

Reuben smiled and nodded gratefully, and once again, as he’d done last night, he kissed her on the cheek.

Laura was visibly confused and a little anxious, glancing from one of them to the other. But Grace and Phil were remarkably calm, as if they’d had some warning that this was coming.

“We all understand,” said Grace. “You’re carrying a child and your nerves are on edge. And everyone knows this. Reuben knows this.”

“Anything I can do to make this easier, I’ll do it,” said Reuben. “You want me in the delivery room? I’ll be there.”

“Oh, don’t be so damned obsequious,” Celeste responded sharply. “I’m not capable of aborting a baby just because it’s inconvenient. Nobody has to pay me to have a baby. If I could abort a baby, the baby would be gone by now.”

Jim came forward at once and put his right arm around Celeste. He clasped Grace’s hand with his left hand. “St. Augustine wrote something once, something I think about often,” he said. “ ‘God triumphs on the ruins of our plans.’ And maybe that is what is happening here. We make blunders, we make mistakes, and somehow new doors open, new possibilities arise, opportunities of which we’ve never dreamed. Let’s trust that that is what is happening here for each of us.”

Celeste kissed Jim quickly, and then embraced him and laid her head against his chest.

“We’re with you every step of the way, darling,” Jim said. He stood there like an oak. “All of us.”

It was a masterly performance, done with conviction, thought Reuben. It was plainly obvious to him that Jim loathed Celeste. But then again, maybe Jim was simply loving her, really loving her as he tried to love everybody. What do I know, Reuben thought.

Without another word, the little gathering broke up, Grace and Phil ushering Celeste away, Jim to go off back to St. Francis Church, and Reuben to take Laura to lunch.

When they sat down in the dim interior of the Italian restaurant, they finally spoke, and Reuben told Laura briefly and in a spiritless voice about what had happened last night and how he’d hurt Celeste. “I shouldn’t have done it,” he said, suddenly crestfallen. “But I just, I had to say something. I tell you I think being hated is painful, but being deeply disliked is even more painful, and that’s what I feel coming from her. Intense dislike. And it’s like a flame. And I’ve always felt it when I was with her, and it’s made my soul wither. I know this now because I dislike her. And God help me, maybe I always did and I’m as guilty of dishonesty as she is.”

What he wanted to talk about was Marchent. He needed to talk about Marchent. He wanted to be back in the world of Nideck Point, but he was caught here, out of his element, in his old world, and was eager to escape all of it.

“Reuben, Celeste never loved you,” said Laura. “She went out with you for two reasons—your family and your money. She loved both and she couldn’t admit it.”

Reuben didn’t answer. The truth was he couldn’t believe Celeste capable of such a thing.

“I understood it as soon as I spent time with her,” said Laura. “She was intimidated by you, by your education, your travel, your way with words, your polish. She wanted all those things for herself, and she was burning with guilt, burning. It came out in her sarcasm, her constant digs—the way she kept on even when you were no longer engaged, the way she just couldn’t let it go. She never loved you. And now, don’t you see, she’s pregnant and she hates it but she’s living in your parents’ beautiful home, and she’s taking money for the child, lots of money, I suspect, and she’s ashamed and she can hardly stand it.”

That did make sense. In fact, that quite suddenly made perfect sense, and it seemed a light had flared in his mind by which he could read his strange past with Celeste clearly for the first time.

“It’s probably like a nightmare for her,” said Laura. “Reuben, money confuses people. It does. That’s a fact of life. It confuses people. Your family has plenty. They don’t act like they do. Your mom works all the time, like a driven self-made woman, your father is an idealist and a poet who wears clothes he bought twenty years ago, and Jim comes off the same way, otherworldly, spiritual, driving himself to minister to others so that he’s perpetually exhausted. Your dad’s always struggling with his old work, or taking notes in a book as if he had to give a lecture in the morning. Your mother rarely gets a good night’s sleep. And you come across a bit that way too, working night and day on your essays for Billie at the paper, pounding away on the computer till you practically fall asleep over it. But you do have money, and really no idea what it’s like to be without it.”

“You’re right,” he said.

“Look, she didn’t plan it. She just didn’t know what she was doing. But why did you ever listen to her, that’s what I’ve always wondered?”

That rang a bell with him. Marchent had said something so very similar to him but now the words escaped him—something about the mystery being that he listened to those who criticized him and cut him down. And his family certainly did a lot of that and had done a lot of that before Celeste ever joined the chorus. Maybe they’d unwittingly invited Celeste to join the chorus. Maybe that had been her ticket in, though he and Celeste had never realized it. Once she’d taken up the relentless scrutiny of Sunshine Boy, Baby Boy, Little Boy—well, it was established that she spoke the common language. Maybe he’d felt comfortable with her for speaking that common language.

“In the beginning, I liked her a lot,” he said in a small voice. “I had fun with her. I thought she was pretty. I liked that she was a smart. I like smart women. I liked being around her and then things started to go wrong. I should have spoken up. I should have told her how uncomfortable I was.”

“And you would have in time,” said Laura. “It would have ended in some completely natural and inevitable way, if you had never gone to Nideck Point. It had ended in a natural way. Except now there’s the baby.”

He didn’t answer.

The restaurant was becoming crowded, but they sat in a little zone of privacy at their corner table, the lights dim, and the heavy draperies and framed pictures around them absorbing the noise.

“Is it so difficult for someone to love me?” he asked.

“You know it’s not,” she said smiling. “You’re easy to love, so easy that just about everybody who meets you loves you. Felix adores you. Thibault loves you. They all love you. Even Stuart loves you! And Stuart’s a kid who’s supposed to be in love with himself at his age. You’re a nice guy, Reuben. You’re a nice and gentle guy. And I’ll tell you something else. You have a kind of humility, Reuben. And some people just don’t understand humility. You have a way of opening yourself to what interests you, opening yourself to other people, like Felix, for instance, in order to learn from them. You can sit at the table at Nideck Point and listen calmly to all the elders of the Morphenkinder tribe with amazing humility. Stuart can’t do it. Stuart has to flex his muscles, challenge, tease, provoke. But you just keep on learning. Unfortunately some people think that’s weakness.”

“That’s too generous an assessment, Laura,” he said. He smiled. “But I like the way you see things.”

Laura sighed. “Reuben, Celeste is not really part of you now. She can’t be.” Laura frowned, her mouth twisting a little as though she found this particularly painful to say, and then she went on in a low voice. “She’ll live and die like other human beings. Her road will always be hard. She’ll soon discover how little money will change it for her. You can afford to forgive her all this, can’t you?”

He stared into Laura’s soft blue eyes.

“Please?” she said. “She’ll never know for one moment the kind of life that’s opening now for both of us.”

He knew what these words meant grammatically, intelligently, but he didn’t know what they meant emotionally. But he did know what he had to do.

He picked up his phone, and he texted Celeste. He wrote in full and complete words, “I’m sorry. Truly I am. I want you to be happy. When this is all over, I want you to be happy.”

What a cowardly thing to do, to tap it into his iPhone when he couldn’t say it to her in person.