The Wolf Gift (The Wolf Gift Chronicles 1)

He looked up at the old dark wood paneling above the fireplace, rectangles neatly trimmed in deeply carved egg-and-dart molding, and at the similar paneling that covered the walls. There were bookcases flanking the fireplace, stuffed with old volumes, leather, cloth, even paperbacks, and far to the right over his shoulder he glimpsed an east-facing room that looked like a vintage paneled library, the kind he,d always dreamed of having for himself. There was a fire in there too.

"It takes my breath away," he said. He could see his father sitting here, shuffling his poems as he made his endless notes. Yes, he would love this place, no doubt of it. It was the place for cosmic reflections and decisions. And how shocked everybody would be if - .

And why wouldn,t his mother be glad? They loved each other, his mother and father, but they did not get along. Phil tolerated Grace,s doctor friends; and Grace found his few old academic friends an absolute bore. Poetry reading made her furious on general principles. The movies he liked she abhorred. If he spoke his opinion at a dinner party, she changed the subject with the person next to her, or left the room for another bottle of wine, or started to cough.

It wasn,t deliberate, really. His mom wasn,t mean. His mom was full of enthusiasm for the things she loved, and she adored Reuben and he knew this had given him a confidence many people never enjoyed. It was just that she couldn,t stand her husband, and for most of his life Reuben had actually understood.

It was harder to take these days, however, because his mom seemed powerful and timeless, a compulsive worker with a divine vocation; and his father seemed now worn out and obscenely old. Celeste had become his mom,s fast friend ("We are both driven women!") and sometime lunch companion, but she ignored the "old man," as she called him. And now and then she even said ominously to Reuben, "Look, do you want to turn out like him?"

Well, how would you like to live here, Dad, Reuben thought. And we,d go walking in the redwoods together, and maybe fix up that old dilapidated guesthouse for the poet friends, but of course there,s room for all of them in the house, why you could have a regular seminar up here with them anytime you wanted, and Mom could come up when she chose.

That would be never, most likely.

Oh, hell, he couldn,t work out the fantasy right now, could he? Marchent was looking sadly into the fire, and he should be asking questions. "Let me get this straight," Celeste would say, "I work seven days a week and you,re supposed to be a reporter now and you,re going to, what, drive four hours a day to get to work?"

This would be for Celeste the final disappointment, the first being that he didn,t know who he was. She,d gone through law school like a rocket and passed the bar at age twenty-two. He,d quit the English Ph.D. program over the foreign-language requirements, and really didn,t have a life plan at all. Wasn,t it his right to listen to opera, read poetry and adventure novels, go to Europe every couple of months for some reason or another, and drive his Porsche over the speed limit until he found out who he was? He,d asked that once, in just those words, and she,d laughed. They,d both laughed. "Nice work if you can get it, Sunshine Boy," she said. "I,m due in court."

Marchent was tasting the coffee. "Hot enough," she said.

She filled a china cup with coffee for him and gestured to the silver cream pitcher, and the little pile of sugar cubes in the silver dish. All of it so pretty, so nice. And Celeste would think, How dreary, and his mother might not notice at all. Grace had an aversion to all matters domestic, except festive cooking. Celeste said kitchens were for storing Diet Coke. His father would like it - his father had a general fund of knowledge about all manner of things, including silver and china, the history of the fork, holiday customs the world over, the evolution of fashion, cuckoo clocks, whales, wines, and architectural styles. His private nickname for himself was "Miniver Cheevy."

But the point was Reuben liked all this. Reuben loved it. Reuben was Reuben, and Reuben liked the great stone mantelpiece with its scroll supports very much as well.

"So what are you writing in your poetic head just now?" Marchent asked.

"Hmmm. The ceiling beams, they,re enormous, and just possibly the longest ceiling beams I,ve ever seen. The carpets are Persian, all floral designs, except for the little prayer rug there. And there are no evil spirits under this roof."

" ,No bad vibrations, is what you mean," she said. "And I agree with you. But I,m sure you realize that I would never be able to stop grieving for Uncle Felix if I stayed on. He was a titan of a man. I,ll tell you, it,s all come back to me, Felix and his disappearing, I mean, I hadn,t brooded over it all for some time. I was eighteen when he walked out that door for the Middle East."

"Why the Middle East?" he asked. "Where was he headed?"

"An archaeological dig, that was often the reason for his trips. That last time it was in Iraq, something about a new city, as old as Mari or Uruk. I could never get any corroboration that sounded right. Anyway, he was unusually excited about where he was going, I remember that. He,d been talking on the phone long-distance to his friends all over the world. I didn,t think much of it. He was always going, and always coming back. If it wasn,t a dig, then he was off to some foreign library to look at a fragment of manuscript that had just been unearthed in some unpublished collection by one of his many students. He paid them by the dozens. They were always sending information. He lived in his own fully detached and lively world."

"He must have left papers behind," said Reuben, "a man engaged in all that."

"Papers! Reuben, you have no idea. There are rooms upstairs that are filled with nothing but papers, manuscripts, binders, crumbling books. There is so much to be gone through, so many decisions to be made. But if the house sells tomorrow, I,m ready to ship it all to climate-controlled storage and work with it from there."

"Was he searching for something, something in particular?"

"Well, if he was, he never said. One time he did say, ,This world needs witnesses. Too much is lost., But I think it was a general complaint. He financed digs, I know that. And often met with archaeology students and history students who didn,t work for him. I recall them coming and going here. He would give out his own little private grants."

"What a great thing," Reuben said, "to live like that."

"Well, he had the money, as I well know now. There was never any doubt he was rich, but I didn,t know how rich until everything came to me. Come, shall we have a look around?"