Hunger of the Wolf by Stephen Marche

Author:Stephen Marche
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

The Wylie women died together in the winter of 1960. Danny Swift and Alfio Belpaese, snow removal men working for Champlain Township, noticed a drift curling up and spilling like an obscene white tongue through an open window on the first floor. To Alfio and Danny, trepidatiously investigating the freezing dark halls and then traumatically stumbling on the corpses, the women looked more still than dead—Marie posed palely on her red-satin covers in the bedroom, Kitty on the kitchen floor as if she had sat down one morning and simply forgotten to stand up. The whole town of Champlain whispered about suicide pacts, about murder followed by regret, about simultaneous accidental heart attacks. Champlain’s coroner, questioned at the Rotary Club or the hockey rink or the waffle house, would say nothing. He told his wife, who told everybody else, that Kitty had probably collapsed from an aneurysm and Marie, immobile in bed, had starved to death.

One fact was not in dispute. The Wylie men were elsewhere. At the moment the coroner’s report was declaring pneumonia the official cause of death, Dale was forking steak into his mouth, mid-negotiation for a television station in the barroom of the Hotel Vancouver in Seattle, George was shading his eyes from the glare of the sliver of Atlantic visible from the Wylie offices on Fifty-second Street in Manhattan, Lee was unsheathing from a manila envelope the production schedule of a paper mill in Butte, Montana, and Jack was tossing down the iced dregs of a Pimm’s with gin in a topless bar in New Orleans.

Dale rushed back to what he would have to call home and arrived just in time for the funeral. Graveside, the rest of the mourners were half-remembered boardinghouse women who had traveled from as far away as Texas and Maine and Florida, and who leaned in to articulate, with phrases borrowed from women’s magazines, the angelic selflessness, the seasonless generosity, the womanly givingness of Kitty and Marie Wylie. Dale was surprised by the dark. His heart was surprised to find itself drowning on a moon-heavy tide at the fancified gravesite that his wife and mother had orchestrated on the most expensive patch of Tender Hill Cemetery. Their monument was ridiculous. Carved from Carrera marble by a Baltimore sculptor who wore a lace cravat and quoted Walt Whitman at every opportunity, the grave lifted itself in a sickening boney glow. Even in the rain, the other graves seemed rotten by comparison. Kitty and Marie had splurged on immemorial grandeur after a life of scrimping cheapness, of pennies wrung from stained laundry. They had economized on a joint funeral at least. Dale was the only man there other than George: Who were these women who had been his?

* * *

The mechanism of WylieCorp had been rolling for thirty years, the whirlwind of credit sweeping all before it as the fifties blossomed into the sixties. Moths had fluttered from the closets. Children skipped down the thoroughfares where the Better Business Councils had paid for the planting of sugarplum pansies and buttery daffodils.

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