Country of the Bad Wolfes

SISTER OF FORTUNA

In mid-summer they passed their bar examinations, John Roger with ease, Jimmy by the skin of his teeth—a fact in which he seemed to take perverse pride—and they were hired as junior members at Fletcher, McIntosh & Bartlett. To mark the occasion, Sebastian Bartlett invited a host of friends to a Saturday picnic on his riverside lawn, to be followed by a ballroom dance that evening.

The day of the picnic was blessed with ideal weather, the turnout large and in festive spirit. A bandstand had been erected on the lawn and a brass ensemble played gaily through the afternoon. Jimmy’s sister, Elizabeth Anne, would not arrive until later in the day, coming by coach from Exeter, where she had been spending the past weeks with friends, following her graduation from the Athenian Female Seminary. Her oil portrait hung on the parlor wall of the Merrimack house and John Roger had often paused to admire it. As pictured, she was truly beautiful. Hair the color of polished copper in green-ribboned ringlets to her bare shoulders, the ribbons matching the color of her eyes. An elegant throat necklaced with pearls. Full lips in a small smile suggestive of some secret amusement. John Roger suspected that the artist may have gilded the lily in gratitude for Mr Bartlett’s no-doubt-hefty commission.

Jimmy told him the painting of Lizzie—as he and his father called her, while Mrs Bartlett referred to her by no name but Elizabeth—had been done less than a year before. “You’d never know by that picture what a tomboy she was,” Jimmy said. All through girlhood she had been one for foot-racing, climbing trees, flying kites, chucking stones. She had badgered their father into teaching her to swim at a much younger age than Jimmy had learned, and then pestered Jimmy into instructing her how to sail his gaff-rigged pram. She was a constant fret to their mother, who was ever upbraiding her to behave herself as a respectable young lady ought. Even though Jimmy and his friends refused to let her join their Adventurers’ Club, she persisted in swimming with them in the river. “We all wanted to dunk her,” Jimmy said, “but none of us could catch her. She swims like an otter. I don’t care to say how many times she beat me in races. She could beat all of us.”

Their mother thought it unseemly that Lizzie was frisking in the river with the boys, but their father, who was proud of her aquatic superiority, believed it was simple innocent fun. Then came the family’s first swim of the summer when she was fourteen and her sodden bathing costume clung to her in startling new ways. “You could see the fruit was getting ripe, if you know what I mean,” Jimmy said. Her evident physical bloom effected an abrupt change in Mr Bartlett’s outlook and he told her there would be no more swimming in company with boys. Lizzie alleged not to understand his objection and for days persisted in asking an explanation of him, and he would every time reiterate that it simply wasn’t proper. But how was it improper, Lizzie would demand to know, and red-faced Mr Bartlett would sputter that she should ask her mother. “She didn’t have to ask Mum,” Jimmy said. “Lizzie knew very well what Father was talking about. She was just deviling him for the fun of it. It’s how she’s always been.”

The same devilment was at the root of what Jimmy called the music scandal. His sister was a fine pianist, trained in the classics, but their parents had been unaware of the bohemian element in her repertoire until one evening when she was entertaining the family after supper and segued from “Für Elise” into a rousing dance-hall number of recent French import. Jimmy had heard her play the bawdy music once before, when their parents were away from the house, and had cautioned her against it, and she’d shown him her tongue in retort. But as he’d warned, their mother was dismayed by the lewd composition and she ordered Lizzie to desist from it at once. Very well, the girl said, and banged the fallboard over the keys and got up from the bench and—humming the sprightly tune—danced about the parlor with her skirts swirling to her knees. “Mum barely spoke to her for the next couple of days,” Jimmy said.

Mrs Bartlett was finally pushed past her wit’s end with her audacious daughter when the girl was seen mounted astride her stallion as she rode on the public road flanking their property. When Lizzie countered her mother’s angry reprimand with the contention that it was the more sensible as well as more comfortable way to ride, Mrs Bartlett called upon Mr Bartlett to prohibit her from riding until she promised to do so in the proper, sidesaddle fashion. Lizzie was so cross, Jimmy said, that she threatened to run away and live among the Indians. Her parents never knew for sure when she was joking, but such impertinence was anyway the concluding proof to Mrs Bartlett that the girl was in critical need of social remediation before it was too late. “Do something, Sebastian,” she told her husband.

Mr Bartlett dismissed Lizzie’s private tutors and enrolled her at the Athenian Seminary for her final year of schooling. Renowned for its instruction in the social graces as much as for its rigorous academic curriculum, the institution had molded more than one recalcitrant miss into a decorous young lady. When Elizabeth came home for Christmas holiday at the end of her first semester, she comported herself as the very model of refined femininity her mother had prayed for.

“That’s when she sat for that picture on the wall,” Jimmy said.

And now, as John Roger and Jimmy stood talking on the riverside lawn, Mrs Bartlett came up behind them, saying, “John, dear, here is someone you must meet.” The happy matron was hugging the arm of the young woman she presented as her daughter, Elizabeth. In the dusky gold light of late afternoon the girl was smiling at him as in the painting. She was surprisingly tall, her eyes almost on a level with his, and both leaner and more buxom than her portrait suggested. He thought her even lovelier than her picture, and only by force of will kept his jaw from going slack.

“Mr Wolfe,” she said, offering her hand, “Jimmy has written me so much about you, I feel as though we’ve long been acquainted.”

He said the pleasure was entirely his and kissed her hand. Her eyes went brighter. Her mother tittered.

Before the end of their first dance that evening he knew he was in love, though she would later say that he may not have known it until then but she knew he had fallen in love the minute their eyes met. Directly on the heels of his dancefloor insight, however, he had the distressing thought that she might already have a beau—or worse, be betrothed. He could not muster the boldness to ask directly if she were spoken for, and as they waltzed about the floor he was frantic for some clever way to find out.

His worry was more evident than he knew, and she intuited its cause. “If it’s of concern to anyone you know, Mr Wolfe,” she said during a dance, “I’m under no obligation to any party whatever.” He flushed in surprise at both her acuity and her candor. His relief was so manifest she nearly laughed aloud—and so endearing she had to resist the urge to kiss him right there on the dance floor.

Later in the evening they went out to the garden under an oblong ivory moon and followed a winding pathway to a low rock wall bordering the lawn. A mild breeze carried the scents of night flowers and the river, stirring the trees, swaying the shadows. The ballroom music was faint at this distance. Against the house lights filtering through the foliage she was mostly silhouette. An undulant wisp of moonlight played on her hair and glinted on an earring. He said he had heard many an interesting tale of her rowdy tomboy days with the gents of the Adventurers’ Club.

“Oh, those rascals,” she said. “They never did let me be a member, you know.” She leaned closer and said in lowered voice, “But that club was never so interesting as the one I belong to at the seminary. It’s a most clandestine association, so I mustn’t tell you anything of it unless you promise absolutely never to repeat it to a living soul.”

John Roger swore her secret was safe with him.

They were the Sisters of Fortuna, she said, and they performed such rituals as would have surely got them burned for witches not so long ago. He heard a timbre of mischief in her voice and suspected she was having sport with him, yet her daring insinuations at once amused and beguiled him. He asked what sorts of rituals.

She leaned closer still and told him the Sisters met only on nights of the full moon, in a meadow deep in the woods, even on the coldest nights. They would build a large bonfire and then remove their cloaks, under which they wore only thin white nightdresses and black woolen stockings. They would sing hymns to Fortuna and dance like dervishes in a circle round the fire, their loosed hair flinging and nightdresses awhirl.

He felt her perfumed warmth on his face, her breath at his ear as she whispered, “We dance faster and faster, and my heart just pounds against my ribs like . . . like some wild thing in a cage. And then . . .” she took a deep breath, “then we throw off our nightdresses and dance naked but for our stockings. Naked.”

She quickly drew back to look at his face—which felt to him on fire. In a bobbing shard of moonlight he glimpsed a bright eye and flash of grin. Then she kissed him full on the lips—and before he could even think to react she darted away toward the ballroom, glancing back over her shoulder and saying, “Close your mouth, Mr Wolfe, before an insect flies into it. And hurry, or we’ll miss the last dance.”

In the years ahead he would from time to time and with feigned casualness ask her if there had really been a Sisters of Fortuna sorority. And she would each time respond with no more than her smile of secret amusement.

Through the rest of the summer they saw each other every day. They went for walks along the river. They went rowing. They went riding—and yes, she rode astraddle. They went swimming with Jimmy and his latest sweetheart, a girl named Madeline Groom, whose father was a federal judge. Even in her woolen neck-to-ankle bathing outfit Elizabeth Anne easily outdistanced John Roger in a race. “Told you so,” Jimmy said. Out of earshot of the others, Elizabeth Anne said to John Roger, “How mush faster I could swim if I took off this foolish costume. Just imagine it.” He imagined it—and she smiled at the look on his face.

It came as no surprise to him that she was a fine sailor, as he learned at the Rockport estate when they went out on the Hecuba. Or that she was an ace pistolshot, having learned to shoot from Jimmy when she was thirteen. At her suggestion, the three of them spent an afternoon firing the family caplocks at a variety of small targets set upon a fence rail. When she demolished a potato from forty paces, a shot John Roger had just missed, she smiled and blew the powdersmoke from the muzzle as she’d seen trickshooters do at county fairs, then slipped the pistol into the belt of her skirt and stood with hands on hips, grinning at him.

“Humiliating, isn’t it?” Jimmy said. “Bad enough she can outswim us, but outshoot? It’s more than shameful. I couldn’t bring myself to say anything to you about it till she beat you too. It’s the same with the Colt. She needs both hands just to aim that monster and still shoots it better than me. I tell you, chum, there’s something supernatural about this wench.”

She affected a ghostly apparition, wriggling the fingers of her raised hands and saying, “Woooooooo.”

They passed the evenings on the Bartlett’s porch glider, holding hands and conversing in low voice, and the next day John Roger would have poor recollection of what they had talked about, so distracted had he been by the nearness of her—and even more so by the kisses they shared at every opportunity. The first time she eased her tongue into his mouth he nearly flinched in his astonishment before going lightheaded with the thrill of it and responding in kind. When they broke for breath, she said she had never kissed anyone that way before but had heard talk of it among some of the Sisters of Fortuna. It was said to be a French innovation. Some of the Sisters had thought the idea vile but most were curious about it. Elizabeth Anne said she herself had been intrigued by it and had made a secret vow to try it sometime.

“Now that you’ve tried it,” he said, “what do you think of it?”

“What do you think I think of it?”

And they did it again. And found it was possible to smile, even giggle, while they were at it. But he was in such a state of arousal—and would be in every instance of such kissing—that he was reluctant to uncross his legs for fear that even in the dim light of the porch she might notice his condition and be repulsed by his baseness.

He proposed to her in early October, during a Bartlett dinner party on an Indian-summer evening. They went out along the moonlit riverbank and he got down on one knee. His heart heaving as much in terror that she would refuse him as with the bedazzling possibility of her acceptance. He stammered on the word “marry” and she covered her smile with her hand. Then lowered the hand to his hair and said, “Of course I will, my beloved.”

He jumped up and they kissed for a time and then rushed hand in hand up the sloping yard and into the house to make the announcement—both of them breathless, Elizabeth Anne radiant, John Roger happy and red-faced and oblivious of her lip paint on his mouth and the mud caked on his knee. The Bartletts were jubilant at the news, so too their guests. Mrs Bartlett wept as she hugged her daughter and John Roger in turn. Elizabeth Anne later joked to him that she suspected her mother’s tears were as much of relief that her errant daughter had managed to attract any husband at all as they were of joy that she had acquired such a prize as John Roger. Sebastian Bartlett pumped John Roger’s hand and welcomed him to the family. Jimmy clapped him on the shoulder and wished him luck, saying that with his sister he would surely need it, and then laughed at Elizabeth Anne’s slap to his arm. The dinner party became a celebration that lasted until dawn.

They married in the First Congregational Church in Concord on a bright but chilly March morning, then were conveyed to the station by landau and boarded a coach for Boston, where they would spend a week’s honeymoon in a fine hotel overlooking the Charles. The other passengers smiled on the happy newlyweds and wished them well.

Underlying John Roger’s happiness, however, was a mounting apprehension as the wedding night drew near. He’d had no sexual mating other than his initiation by the tattooed whore in Portsmouth, and he was afraid he would prove a maladroit lover to his bride. Throughout their college days Jimmy Bartlett had favored occasional sprees in Portland’s infamous brothels, and during the first year of their friendship he never failed to ask John Roger to go along. But he each time begged off with some excuse until Jimmy finally shrugged and said, “So be it, chum. Every man to his own foibles.”

The truth was that throughout his college years John Roger had an ardent crave of sexual pleasure. But he had never wholly recovered from the wrenching dread of infection that had haunted him for weeks after his lark with the Blue Mermaid whore. Not only had he never again patronized a brothel, he had even shied from his opportunities with women who were neither whores nor models of virtue. He believed his sexual phobia was absurd but he had not been able to overcome it. Until the advent of Elizabeth Anne, he had feared he was doomed to a lonely and masturbatory bachelorhood. But while his desire for her was rooted in love and free of all fear of disease, he had begun to fret more and more that his lack of experience would render him inadequate in the marriage bed.

On their wedding night, as he lay abed in their room while she finished with her bath, his apprehension grew overwhelming and he was certain of impotence. She emerged with her face rosy from the bath and the heat of her own excitement, her hair a lustrous spill on the shoulders of her white gown. But as she approached the bed she sensed his tension and in the low candlelight saw the alarm in his eyes. An instinct she hadn’t known she possessed prompted her to kiss a fingertip and put it to his lips, and then she stepped back and turned about and unbelted her gown and let it cascade to her feet. He gaped at her pale nakedness in the lampglow, the shadowed groove of spine and cleft of buttocks. She hummed a tune he did not recognize and slowly turned to face him, smiling her secret smile in the low light, one arm partially covering her breasts, her other hand over her sex. His anxiety gave way to a rush of desire. She flung her arms wide in a presentation of her stark nakedness, breasts upraised and nipples puckered and lean belly sloping to a rubric delta—then swooped down to kiss him, her tongue slicking into his mouth, her breasts pressing to his chest. He broke the kiss with a gasp and pulled her onto the bed and rolled up over her and clumsily positioned himself as her hand went under his nightshirt and found him ready and guided him into her. They cried out together and almost at once, he in the convulsive onset of his climax and she in a momentary twinge and ensuing flash of pleasure. He collapsed on her and rolled onto his side, breathless as one who’s been saved from drowning.

After a time he raised up on an elbow to look at her. “Are you . . . all right?” And saw that she was smiling.

And then they were kissing and making bold explorations with their hands as their breath and eager blood quickened yet again. He broke for a moment to fling off his nightshirt and they joined once more. And this time were longer about it.

They did not fall asleep until nearly dawn, John Roger spooned against her from behind, his face in her hair. Not an hour later he woke to find her turned toward him and studying his face. “What?” he said. “This.” She kissed him. Closed her hand on him. And they coupled again.

Such concupiscence on a wedding night is of course hardly uncommon—the wonder would be that their carnal appetite for one another would not abate over the years. Hugging him close in the early light of their first day as Mr and Mrs John Roger Wolfe, she told him she had not believed she would ever find a mate with whom she could be her true self. He said he never believed he would cease to envy other men for their amorous adventures. She kissed his ear and her smile was sly as she asked, “And now?” Now, he said, he knew that she was the quintessential amorous adventure. They laughed in their happiness at making believers of each other.