The Wolves of Midwinter Read online

“You were about eleven when I quit med school,” said Jim, “but you never really knew what went down. I hated it, studying to be a doctor, positively hated it. But that’s another whole story, how I let myself be drawn into something just because of Mom and Uncle Tim, because of some idea we were a family of doctors, because of Grandfather Spangler and how he doted on them and on me.”

  “I figured you didn’t want to do it. How else—?”

  “That’s not the important part,” said Jim. “I was drinking myself to death at Berkeley. I was really pushing it. And I was having an affair with the wife of one of my professors, a beautiful Englishwoman. Oh, the husband didn’t give a damn. Quite the contrary; he set it up. I realized that right off. He was twenty years older than her and wheelchair-bound since a motorcycle accident in England two years after they married. No kids, just him in his wheelchair, giving brilliant lectures at Berkeley, and Lorraine like some kind of angel caring for him as if he was her father. And he invites me to come study with him, at his house in south Berkeley, one of those beautiful old Berkeley homes with the dark paneling and the hardwood floors and the big old stone fireplaces, and the trees outside every window, and Professor Maitland turning in at eight o’clock and telling me to use the library as late as I wanted, spend the night in the guest room, you know, and ‘Here’s your own key.’ ”

  Reuben nodded. “Cushy situation.”

  “Oh, yes, and Lorraine, so sweet, you have no idea. Sweet, that’s the word I always come back to when I talk about Lorraine. So sweet. Gentle, thoughtful, with that silvery British accent, and the refrigerator filled with beer, an unending supply of beer, and the single malt Scotch on the sideboard, and in the guest bedroom, and I took advantage of the whole thing. I practically moved in. And about six months after this all started, I actually fell in love with her, if a twenty-four/seven drunk is capable of falling in love. I finally admitted how much I loved her. I was drinking myself into a stupor every night in that house, and pretty soon she was taking as much care of me as she did of the professor. She started handling all the messy stuff in my life.”

  Reuben nodded. This was all so new to him, so unimagined.

  “She was exceptional, she really was,” said Jim. “And I never knew if she fully understood the way Professor Maitland had set it all up. I knew, but she didn’t know. At the same time, she was resolved we’d never hurt him if we kept this strictly secret, and never showed a particle of special affection for one another when he was around. But she tried to help me. She wasn’t just sitting around filling my glass. She kept telling me, ‘Jamie, your problem is booze. You’ve got to stop.’ She actually dragged me to two AA meetings before I threw a tantrum. Time and again, she finished up my papers for me, worked out my little projects for me, got the books I needed from the University library, that kind of thing. But she kept saying, ‘You’ve got to get help.’ I was failing my classes and she knew it. Sometimes I played along, made a couple of promises, made love to her and then got drunk. Finally she gave up. She just accepted me the way I was, just like she accepted the professor.”

  “Were Mom and Dad suspicious about the drinking?”

  “Oh, highly. I was ducking them. Lorraine helped me to duck them. Lorraine made excuses for me when they came over the bridge to see me and I was dead drunk in the guest room at her place. But I’ll get to Mom and Dad in a minute. Lorraine got pregnant. It wasn’t supposed to happen but it did. And that’s when the crisis happened. I just about went nuts. I told her she had to get an abortion and I left her house in a rage.”

  “I see,” Reuben said.

  “No, you don’t. She came over to my apartment. She told me she’d never get an abortion, that she wanted this baby more than anything in the world. And that she’d leave Professor Maitland in a minute if I said the word. When Professor Maitland heard about the baby, he’d understand. He’d give her a divorce, no problem. She had a small income. She was ready to pack her bags and come to me. I was horrified, I mean in a state of shock.”

  “But you loved her.”

  “Yes, Reuben, I loved her, but I didn’t want the responsibility of anybody or anything. That’s why the affair with her had been so attractive. She was married! When she tried to lay anything on me, I could up and go back to my place and not answer the phone!”

  “I understand.”

  “And here, it had turned into a nightmare. She was begging me to marry her, become a husband, a father. This was the very last thing I wanted. Look, I was so into booze at that point all I could really think about was laying in a stash of beer and whiskey, locking the door, and chilling out. I tried to explain all this to her, that I was damaged, bad for her, that she couldn’t want me, that she had to get rid of the baby and now. But she wasn’t buying it. And the more she talked the drunker I got. At one point she tried to take the glass out of my hand. That tipped me right over. We got into a fight, I mean a veritable brawl. It started with me throwing things, slamming doors, breaking things. I was falling down drunk, saying the meanest things to her but she wouldn’t accept it. She kept telling me, ‘That’s the booze talking, Jamie. You don’t mean these things.’ I hit her, Reuben. I started slapping her, then beating her. I remember her face was covered in blood. I hit her over and over again, until she was down on the floor and I was kicking her, telling her she’d never understood me, she was a selfish bitch, a selfish slut. I said things to her that nobody should say to another human being. She curled up in a ball, trying to protect herself—.”

  “And that was the booze, Jim,” said Reuben in a soft voice. “You would never have done it if it hadn’t been for the booze.”

  “I don’t know about that, Reuben,” he said. “I was a pretty selfish guy. I am still basically a selfish guy. I thought the world revolved around me in those days. You were just eleven or twelve then. You had no idea what I was really like.”

  “She lost the child?”

  Jim nodded. He swallowed. He was staring into the gas fire beneath the mantel. “I passed out at some point. Blacked out. And when I woke up, she was gone. There was blood all over, blood on the carpet, blood on the floor boards, blood on the furniture, the walls. It was horrible. You cannot imagine how much blood there was. I went and followed a trail of blood right down the steps, and through the garden and to the street. Her car was gone.”

  Jim stopped. He closed his eyes. There was the soft beat of rain on the panes. Otherwise the room was silent. The house was silent. Then he started talking again.

  “I went on the longest worst bender I’d ever been on. I just shut the door and drank. I knew I’d killed that baby, but I was terrified that I might have killed her too. Any minute, I thought the police are going to be here. Any minute Professor Maitland is going to call. Any minute … I could easily have killed her beating her like that. The way I kicked her? It’s a wonder I didn’t. And for days I just lay in that apartment and drank. I’d always stockpiled enough booze to do this, and I don’t know how long it was before the booze started running out. I wasn’t eating. I wasn’t bathing, nothing. Just drinking, drinking and crawling around that place on my hands and knees at times, looking for bottles to see if there was anything left in them. Well, you can figure what happened.”

  “Mom and Dad.”

  “Right. There came a banging on the door and it was Mom and Dad. It had been ten days, it turned out, ten days, and it was my landlord who’d called them. I was overdue with the rent. And he was worried. He was a nice guy. Well, the bastard probably saved my life.”

  “Thank God for that,” said Reuben. He tried to picture all this, but he couldn’t. All he saw was his brother, looking collected and strong in his Roman collar and clerics, sitting in the chair opposite, pouring out a story he could scarcely believe.

  “I told them everything,” Jim said. “I just broke down and told them the whole thing. I was drunk, you understand, so it was easy—to slobber, to cry, to confess all I’d done. Confessing things when you’re blind drunk is a cinch. I fe
lt so sorry for myself! I’d wrecked my life. I’d hurt Lorraine. I was flunking out of school. I told Mom and Dad all of it, I just let it loose. And when Mom heard how I’d beaten Lorraine, how I’d kicked her, kicked the life out of that child, well, you can imagine the look on her face. When she saw the bloodstains all over that carpet, on the floor, on the walls … And then Mom and Dad just put me in the shower, cleaned me up, and drove me straight south to the Betty Ford Center in Rancho Mirage, California, and I was there for ninety days.”

  “Jim, I’m so sorry.”

  “Reuben, I was lucky. Lorraine could have put me behind bars for what I did to her. As it turned out, she and Professor Maitland had gone back to England before Mom and Dad ever came knocking on my door. Mom found out all that. The professor’s mother in Cheltenham had suffered a severe stroke. Lorraine had made all the arrangements with the university. So she was all right, it seemed. Mom was able to verify that. And the house in south Berkeley was up for sale. Whether Lorraine had checked into a hospital herself after I beat her, well, we never could find out.”

  “I hear you, Jim, I know what you’re telling me. I understand.”

  “Reuben, I am nobody’s hero, nobody’s saint. If it wasn’t for Mom and Dad, if they hadn’t taken me to Betty Ford, if they hadn’t stuck with me through that, I don’t know where I’d be now. I don’t know if I’d be alive. But look, listen to what I’m telling you. Play along with Celeste for the sake of the baby. That’s lesson number one. Let her have that baby, Reuben, because you do not know how you might regret it to your dying day if she gets rid of it because of something that you say! Reuben, there are times when it is so painful for me to even see children, to see little kids with their parents, I … I tell you, I don’t know if I could work in a regular Catholic parish, Reuben, with a school and kids. I just don’t. There’s a reason I’m deep in the Tenderloin. There’s a reason my mission is working with addicts. There’s a reason, all right.”

  “I understand. Look, I’m going to go talk to her now, apologize.”

  “Do it, please,” said Jim. “And who knows, Reuben? Maybe somehow this child can keep you connected to us, to me, to Mom and Dad, to your flesh and blood family, to things that matter for all of us in life.”

  Reuben went at once to knock on Celeste’s door. The house was quiet. But he could see the light was on in her room.

  She was in her nightgown but immediately invited him in. She was frosty, but polite. He stood there and made his apologies to her as sincerely as he could.

  “Oh, I understand,” she said with a faint sneer. “Don’t worry about it. This will all be over for us soon enough.”

  “I want you to be happy, Celeste,” he said.

  “I know that, Reuben, and I know you’ll be a good father to this baby. Even if Grace and Phil weren’t here to do the dirty work. I never had any real doubt about that. Sometimes the most childish and immature men make the best fathers.”

  “Thank you, Celeste,” he said, forcing an icy smile. He kissed her on the cheek.

  No need to repeat that parting shot to Jim when he went back to his room.

  Jim was by the fire still and obviously deep in his thoughts. Reuben settled into his chair as before.

  “Tell me,” Reuben said, “is this the real reason that you became a priest?”

  For a long moment Jim didn’t respond. Then he looked up as if he were slightly dazed. In a low voice, he said, “I became a priest because I wanted to, Reuben.”

  “I know that, Jim, but did you feel you had to make amends for the rest of your life?”

  “You don’t understand,” said Jim. He sounded weary, dispirited. “I took my time deciding what to do. I traveled. I spent months in a Catholic mission in the Amazon. I spent a year studying philosophy in Rome.”

  “I remember that,” Reuben said. “We’d get these great packages from Italy. And I couldn’t figure out why you weren’t coming home.”

  “I had a lot of choices, Reuben. Maybe for the first time in my life, I had real choices. And the archbishop asked me the very same question, actually, when I asked to enter the priesthood. We discussed the whole affair. I told him everything. We talked about atonement, and what it means to become a priest—to live as a priest year in and year out for the rest of one’s life. He insisted on another year of sobriety in the world before he’d accept my application to the seminary. Usually he demanded five years of sober living, but admittedly, my period of drinking had been relatively short. And then there was Grandfather Spangler’s donation and Mom’s ongoing support. I worked every day at St. Francis at Gubbio as a volunteer during that year. By the time I entered the seminary, I’d been sober three years, and I was on strict probation. One drink and I would be out. I went through all that because I wanted to, Reuben. I became a priest because that’s what I wanted to do with my life.”

  “What about faith?” Reuben asked. He was remembering what Margon had said, that Jim was a priest who didn’t believe in God.

  “Oh, it’s about faith,” said Jim. His voice was low now and more confidential. “Of course, it’s about faith—faith that this is God’s world and we’re God’s children. How could it not be about faith? I think if one truly loves God with all one’s heart, then one has to love everybody else. It’s not a choice. And you don’t love them because it scores you points with God. You love them because you are trying to see them and embrace them as God sees and embraces them. You are loving them because they are alive.”

  Reuben was unable to speak. He just shook his head.

  “Think about it,” Jim said in a whisper. “Looking at each person and thinking, ‘God made this being; God put a soul into this being!’ ” He sat back in the chair and sighed. “I try. I stumble. I get up. I try again.”

  “Amen,” said Reuben in a reverent whisper.

  “I wanted to work with addicts, with drunks, with people whose weaknesses I understood. Above all, I wanted to do something that mattered, and I was convinced that as a priest I could do that. I could make some difference in people’s lives. Maybe I could even save a life now and then—save a life, imagine—to make some kind of amends for the life I’d destroyed. You could say that AA and the Twelve Steps saved me along with Mom and Dad. And yes, they led to my decision. But I had choices. And faith is part of it. I came out of the whole nightmare having faith. And a kind of crazy gratitude that I did not have to be a doctor! I can’t tell you how much I really did not want to be a doctor! Medicine doesn’t need any more coldhearted selfish bastards. Thank God, I got out of that.”

  “I can’t quite understand it,” said Reuben. “But I’ve never had much faith in God myself.”

  “I know,” said Jim, looking into the little gas fire. “I knew that about you when you were a little kid. But I’ve always had faith in God. The creation speaks to me of God. I see God in the sky and in the falling leaves. That’s always the way it was for me.”

  “I think I know what you mean,” Reuben said in a low voice. He wanted Jim to go on.

  “I see God in the little kindnesses people do for one another. I see God in the eyes of the worst down-and-out derelicts I deal with.…” Jim broke off suddenly, shaking his head. “Faith isn’t a decision, is it? It’s something you admit to having, or something you admit that you don’t have.”

  “I think you’re right about that.”

  “That’s why I never preach to people about the supposed sin of not believing,” said Jim. “You’ll never hear me condemning a nonbeliever as a sinner. That makes no sense to me at all.”

  Reuben smiled. “And maybe that’s why you sometimes give people the wrong impression. They think you don’t believe when in fact you do.”

  “Yes, that does happen now and then,” said Jim, with a soft smile. “But it doesn’t matter. How people believe in God is a vast subject, isn’t it?”

  A silence fell between them. There was so much Reuben wanted to ask.

  “Did you ever see or hear from Lorraine?” he as
ked.

  “Yes,” he said. “I wrote an amends letter about a year after I left Betty Ford. I wrote more than one. But they came back to me from the forwarding address she’d left in Berkeley. Then I got Simon Oliver to confirm that she was in fact in Cheltenham and at that address. I couldn’t blame her for returning my letters. I wrote to her again, laying it all out in more candid terms. I told her how sorry I was, how in my eyes I was guilty of murder for what I’d done to the baby, how I feared I had irreparably hurt her so that she could never have a child. I got a brief but very compassionate note: she was all right; she was fine; not to worry. I had done her no lasting harm; I should go on with my life.

  “Then before I went into the seminary, I wrote to her again, asking after her welfare and telling her of my decision to become a priest. I told her that time had only deepened my sense of the wrong that I’d done to her. I told her how the Twelve Steps and my faith had changed my life. I put too damned much of my own plans and dreams and ego in that letter. It was selfish of me really, now that I look back on it. But it was an amends letter, too, of course. And she wrote back an extraordinary letter. Just extraordinary.”

  “How so?”

  “She told me, if you can believe it, that I had given her the only real happiness she’d known in recent years. She went on to say something about how miserable she’d been before I’d come into her life, how hopeless she had been until the day Professor Maitland brought me home. She said something about her life having been changed for the better completely by knowing me. And that she did not want me ever to worry that I had done her a particle of harm. She said she thought I would be a marvelous priest. Finding such a meaningful vocation in this world was indeed a ‘wondrous’ thing. I remember she used that word, ‘wondrous.’ She and the professor were doing ‘splendidly,’ she said. She wished me every blessing.”

  “That must have impressed the archbishop,” said Reuben.

  “Well, actually, it did.”

  Jim gave a short dismissive laugh. “That was Lorraine,” he said. “Forever kind, forever considerate, forever generous. Lorraine was always so sweet.” He closed his eyes for a moment and then went on. “About two years ago—I don’t remember the date actually—I read a brief obit for the professor in the New York Times. I hope Lorraine has remarried. I pray that she has.”