Sister Wolf by Ann Arensberg

bludgeon or a loaded gun. She was standing in front of the door, both hands behind her back, grasping the doorknob, her breast thrust forward, heaving. It occurred to him that she was acting and, in the next instant, that it did not matter; she was so absorbed in her role that the line between pretense and belief was nonexistent. He moved a half-step toward her and she screamed like a weasel being hoisted in a snare. The ugly noise set him on fire. For the first time in three years he yelled his brains out, liberated by the injustice of her reaction. He heard his own voice thundering in his ears, drowning out the sound of the door as it slammed behind her. He kept on yelling to an empty house, until his knees buckled and he fell on the couch, lightheaded and punch-drunk and spent.
    The telephone woke him out of a stony sleep. An intern at the Hope-Downtown emergency room wanted him to come over and claim the body of a young blonde girl who had crossed Greenwich Avenue in the middle of traffic and been hit by a tow truck. There had been nothing to identify the victim except a frayed name tag on her underpants—sewed on by Francesca’s mother when she had sent her, at age thirteen, to summer camp.
    Francesca was buried in the old graveyard of All Souls in Matlock, which lay one town east of Niles Village. Earlier Hadleys had summered in Hart County. They had endowed the porch and bell tower of the church, in exchange for a bucolic resting place. Francesca’s headstone was a thin marble slab carved to imitate the primitive markers that surrounded it. Very soon it began to tilt, like the older stones. Gabriel traveled to the graveyard every weekend. He took the night owl up and the milk train back, laying his sleepless nights on Francesca’s grave instead of flowers. He got an offer to teach at the Meyerling Community. The location would ease the toil of visitation, but he debated, for that very reason, whether he should take it. He bargained himself into the job: while he worked at Meyerling, he would visit Francesca’s grave twice a week, instead of only once, and he would walk to Matlock in any kind of weather, five miles going and five miles coming. He had been keeping her memory alive in a listless, automatic sort of way, like a bored and feverish child picking at chicken-pox scabs. He could not mourn, but he felt that he ought to. He made another bargain with himself. If he used the hike to Matlock as one focused act of grieving, like a meditation, he could have the rest of his days clear and unencumbered. Little sticky bits of Francesca’s personality still clung to him, and he needed more time to work them off.
    Gabriel began to hike off his liability to Francesca, and never thought of her betweentimes. He stopped hunching over and stood as straight as a recruit again, reaching for every fraction of an inch of height. He was free to think. The inside of his head was blue horizonless space, where before his thoughts had been penned in his brain like rats in an attic room. Under so much light, his own vocation began to grow. One evening he sat at his desk facing an empty yellow sheet of legal foolscap. He was expected to contribute a report to the case file of a disturbed girl student. He was poised for the task, but the Muse sometimes operates by stealth. From his pen, like automatic writing, came the First Exercise in Self-Mastery, for the book of poems that would become his life’s work. For some weeks he sat down at his desk every night. He pushed well into the Third Exercise. He lived and wrote like a column of white fire. But every forward movement breeds inertia, and one day Gabriel lost his balance, in a sweat, and stumbled back to safety, as if writing poems were as dangerous as walking a tightrope across a canyon. Writing poems distracted the soul and led to selfishness. The disturbed student, Aimée Dupuis, had followed him out of the classroom, plucking at his sleeve. She wanted to tell him her nightmare,