But there was one burning matter which Reuben could not leave unresolved.
There was something he had to know, and he had to know it now.
He followed Felix, to whom he felt closest, into the library and caught up with him as he was lighting the fire.
"What is it, little brother?" asked Felix. "You look troubled. I thought the meeting went well."
"But Laura," Reuben whispered. "What about Laura? Will you give the Chrism to Laura? Must I ask you, or ask Margon or - ."
"She,s worthy," said Felix. "That was decided immediately. I didn,t know there was the slightest doubt. She knows this. There have been no secrets kept from Laura. When she,s ready, she has but to ask."
Reuben,s heart had started to skip. He couldn,t meet Felix,s gaze. He felt Felix clasp his shoulder. He felt the strong fingers on his arm.
"And if she wants it," asked Reuben, "you will do it? You?"
"Yes. If she wants it. Margon or I. We will."
Why was this so painful? Wasn,t this exactly what he,d wanted to know?
He saw her again in his mind,s eye, as he,d first seen her that night on the edge of Muir Woods, when he,d come singing into the grassy clearing behind her house, and she had appeared to him, as if out of nowhere, standing on the back porch of her little house, in her long white flannel gown.
"I must be the most selfish man in all creation," he whispered.
"No, you,re not," said Felix. "But it is her decision."
"I don,t understand myself," he said.
"I understand you," said Felix.
Moments passed.
Felix struck the long fireplace match and ignited the kindling. There came that familiar roar as the kindling caught and the flames danced up the bricks.
Felix stood there patiently, waiting. Then he said softly, "You are such remarkable children. I envy you your brand-new world. I don,t know that I would have the courage for it if you were not here with me."
Chapter Forty
IT WAS THE FORTNIGHT of many things.
Margon drove Stuart down to pick up his car in Santa Rosa, an old Jaguar convertible that had once belonged to his father. And they visited Stuart,s mother who was in a psychiatric facility but "bored to death" and "sick of all the crummy magazines" and ready to get a whole new wardrobe to help her cope. Her agent had called from Hollywood to say she was hot again. Well, that was an overstatement. But they had work for her if she could get herself on a plane. Maybe she,d go shopping on Rodeo Drive.
Grace, anointed as the most articulate and significant of the witnesses to the Man Wolf,s latest attack in Mendocino County, made the rounds of the talk shows, convincing the world in reasonable terms of her theory that this unfortunate creature was the victim of a congenital condition or a subsequent illness that had left it physically deformed and mentally challenged, but that it would soon blunder into the hands of authorities and get the confinement and treatment which it required.
Over and over again the investigators from the attorney general,s office, and from the FBI, and from the San Francisco Police Department came back to interview Stuart and Reuben, as they had been the mysterious focus of more than one Man Wolf attack.
This was difficult for Stuart and for Reuben, as neither was a skilled liar, but they soon learned the trick of minimal answers, murmurs, and mumbles as they went the distance and were finally left alone.
Reuben wrote a long comprehensive piece for the San Francisco Observer which essentially synthesized his earlier pieces, spiked with his own vivid descriptions of the Man Wolf attack, "the first" he,d seen with his own eyes. His conclusions were predictable. It was no superhero, and the adulation and fan worship should come to an end. Yet it had left us with many questions. Why had it been so easy for so many to embrace a creature so uncompromisingly cruel? Was the Man Wolf a throwback to a time when we had all been cruel and happy to be so?
Meanwhile the beast had made one last spectacular appearance deep in Mexico, slaying a murderer in Acapulco, and passed for the moment into oblivion.
Frank Vandover, tall, black-haired, with very fair skin and his handsome Cupid,s-bow mouth, had returned with the Nordic giant Sergei Gorlagon - filling the house with quasi-humorous tales as to