The Society of S

by Susan Hubbard

Page 2

  “It’s her old cookbook. ” Mrs. McGarritt began to gather up spoons and measuring cups and bowls. She put them in the sink. “And it will be yours. I should have given it to you, I suppose. It’s always been on that shelf ” — she gestured toward a wall shelf near the stove — “ever since I came to work here. ”

  The recipe called for one-half cup each of flour and honey, three eggs, and assorted spices. “‘Our lavender honey,’” I read again. “What does that mean, Mrs. McG?”

  Mrs. McGarritt had turned on the tap, and when she turned it off I repeated my question.

  “Oh, that’s honey made from bees that drink from the lavender flowers,” she said, without turning from the sink. “You know that big patch of lavender by the fence outside?”

  I knew it. The same flowers were on the wallpaper of the room upstairs that had once been shared by my parents. “How is honey made?” I asked.

  Mrs. McGarritt began to make too much noise splashing the dishes in soapy water, and I knew she didn’t have an answer. “You should ask your father, Ari,” she said finally.

  When I went back to the library, I pulled out the small spiral notebook I always carried and added the word honey to the list of questions I’d already made for the afternoon’s lessons.

  Every day at one p. m. my father came upstairs from the basement. He spent mornings working in his lab; his biomedical research company is called Seradrone.

  He taught me in the library from one until five, with two breaks in between: one for yoga and meditation, one for snacks. Sometimes, if weather permitted, I’d walk in the garden and pet Marmalade, the neighbor’s orange tabby cat, who liked to sun herself near the lavender plants. I’d come back inside to join my father in the living room, where he read his journals (some scientific, some literary; he had a peculiar fondness for 19th-century literary scholarship, particularly work concerning Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe). I could read anything I liked from the library, but I mostly chose fairy tales.

  At five we moved into the living room. He sat in the deep-green leather chair, and I sat in a dark red velvet-covered slipper chair that fitted me perfectly. Sometimes he asked me to open an envelope; he had trouble opening things, he said. Behind us stood a fireplace that had never been used, as far as I knew. A glass fire screen with butterflies embedded in it stood on the hearth. I sipped rice milk, and he drank a red cocktail that he said was “Picardo. ” He wouldn’t let me taste it, saying, “You’re too young. ” It seemed I was always too young, in those days.

  Here I want to describe my father: a tall man, six foot four, with broad shoulders and a narrow waist, muscular arms, beautiful feet (I only realized later how beautiful, when I saw how ugly most people’s feet are). Straight black brows and level dark green eyes, pale skin, a long straight nose, a thin mouth whose upper lip curves in a bow and lower lip turns down at its corners. His hair is satin black and springs back from his forehead. Even when I was small, I knew instinctively that my father was an extraordinarily good-looking man. He moved like a dancer, light and lithe. You never heard him come and go, but you sensed his presence the moment he entered a room. I felt that if I’d been blindfolded and deafened I’d know if he were there; the air around him took on a palpable shimmer.

  “How is honey made?” I asked him that afternoon.

  His eyes widened. He said, “It begins with bees. ”

  And he traced the process, from nectar to comb to collection. “The workers are sterile females,” he said. “The males are largely useless. Their only function is to mate with the queen. They live for a few months, and then they die. ” His mouth moved stiffly around the word “die,” as if it were from an unfamiliar language. Then he described the way bees dance when they return to the hive: he used his hands to loop and waggle, and his voice made it all sound too beautiful to be real.

  When he got to the part about beekeepers, he went to a bookshelf and came back with a volume of the encyclopedia. He showed me an illustration of a man wearing a large-brimmed hat, a veil masking his face, holding a device with a nozzle to smoke out the hives.

  Now I had an image of my mother: a woman wearing thick gloves, draped in a long veil. But I didn’t mention that to my father, or ask him about “our lavender honey. ” He never answered questions about my mother. Usually he changed the subject. Once he said such questions made him sad.

  I wondered what lavender honey might taste like. The only honey I’d eaten came from clover, according to the label on the jar, and it conjured the green flavor of summer meadows. Lavender, I thought, would have a stronger, sharper taste, floral with perhaps a hint of smoke in it. It would taste violet blue — the color of a twilight sky.

  In my father’s world, time had no meaning. I don’t think he looked once at the grandfather clock in the library. Yet he kept a regular schedule — largely, I suspect, for my sake. Every evening at six he sat with me while I had the supper that Mrs. McG (I’m tired of writing out her name, and that’s what I called her, anyway) always left in the warming oven: macaroni and cheese, or tofu casserole, or vegetarian chili. It all tasted undercooked at the bottom and burnt at the top, bland and wholesome. After I’d finished, my father ran my bath.

  Once I’d turned seven, he left me alone to bathe. He asked me if, as a big girl, I still wanted him to read to me before I fell asleep, and of course I said yes. His voice had texture like velvet. When I was six he’d read me Plutarch and Plato, but Dennis must have said something to him, because after that he read Black Beauty and Heidi and The Princess and the Goblin.

  I’d asked my father why he didn’t dine with me, and he said he preferred to eat downstairs at a later hour. There was a second kitchen (I called it the night kitchen) in the basement, along with two enormous furnaces, a laboratory where my father worked with Dennis, and three bedrooms originally intended for servants. I rarely visited the basement; it wasn’t explicitly forbidden me, but sometimes the upstairs kitchen door to the basement was locked, and even if it wasn’t, I knew I wasn’t wanted there. In any case, I didn’t like the smells: chemicals from the laboratory, gamey cooking from the night kitchen, mixed with the odor of hot metal from the furnaces. Yes, I preferred the smell of starch. My father’s cook and all-purpose assistant, the loathsome Mary Ellis Root, ruled the basement domain, and she always looked at me with eyes that radiated hostility.

  “How did you like it?” Mrs. McG hovered over the breakfast table, twisting a towel in her hands. Her face was shiny and her glasses needed cleaning, but her spotless red and green plaid housedress, belted at the waist, had been ironed, and its skirt fell in crisp folds.

  She was asking about the honey cake. “Very good,” I said — almost truthfully. The cake, a slice of which I’d eaten for dessert the previous evening, had a wonderful dense richness; if it had been baked a bit less, and if the pan had been greased more liberally, it might truly have been delicious.

  “If I’d made it at home, I’d have used lard,” she said. “But your father is such a strict vegetarian. ”

  A moment later Mary Ellis Root slammed open the door that led to the basement and stormed in.

  “What did you tell the courier service?” she said to Mrs. McG. Her voice sounded hoarse and low.

  Mrs. McG and I stared blankly at her. It was unlike her to set foot upstairs, and never this early. Her black hair bristled with static, and her eyes blazed, yet she never made eye contact with either of us. On her chin three long dark hairs grew from a bumpy mole; they quivered when she spoke. Sometimes I imagined yanking them out, but the thought of touching her made me nauseous. She wore an enormous black, greasy-looking dress that smelled of metal and strained to contain her, and she paced the room like a beetle — impervious to anything but its insect agenda — pausing only to slam her fat fist on the table.

  “Well, are you going to answer me? It’s almost ten and no one has come. ”

  The silver courier van stopped at our hou
se two or three times a week, bringing supplies for my father’s research and taking away flat white cartons labeled SERADRONE. On the van’s doors and sides were the company name and logo: GREEN CROSS.

  Mrs. McG said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. ” Nonetheless, her left eyebrow and right hand twitched.

  Mary Ellis Root made a low-pitched sound, a kind of growl, and slammed her way back to the basement, trailed by a lingering odor of metal.

  “I never talk to the Green Cross man,” Mrs. McG said.

  The deliveries always came to the back door that opened into the basement. Mrs. McG’s face said that her day had been ruined in the space of a minute.

  I left my chair. I took my mother’s cookbook down from its shelf and leafed through it. “Look,” I said, to distract her. “She put four stars next to this one. ”

  It was a recipe for cheese bread made with honey. Mrs. McG peered over my shoulder at the recipe, her face doubtful. I leaned back slightly to feel the warmth of her body, without touching her. I felt that this was as close to a mother as I was likely to come.

  Being home-schooled had some advantages, I suppose. I didn’t have to worry about what to wear to school or how to make friends. Periodically I had to take a state-mandated examination, and every time I answered all the questions correctly. My father had stuffed my brain with knowledge of history and mathematics and literature; I could read Latin and some Greek and French and Spanish, and my English vocabulary was so advanced that I sometimes had to define for Mrs. McG the words I used. Occasionally Dennis taught me science; he’d been a medical student at one time, he said, but switched to biology, which he taught part-time at the college not far away. Because of his training, Dennis served as our family doctor and dentist, except when I was very ill, as I was two or three times; then Dr. Wilson was called in. But Dennis gave my father and me vaccinations and annual checkups. Luckily, I had strong teeth.

  Dennis taught me how to swim, using the college pool, and he was my friend as well. He was the only person in our house who liked to laugh and to make me laugh. (Mrs. McG was too nervous to do more than smile, and even then it was a nervous smile. ) Dennis had dark red wavy hair that he had cut every month or so; in between it grew almost to his shoulders. His freckled nose curved like a hawk’s beak. Like my father, he was tall, around six foot three, but Dennis was stockier. He had a temper, too; he never hesitated to tell off Root when she was particularly rude or abrasive, and that made him a hero to me.

  One late winter day when I was twelve, Dennis told me “the facts of life. ” He blushed when I asked him questions, but he answered every one. He patted me on the head when I couldn’t think of any more questions. After he’d gone back downstairs, I went to the bathroom mirror and looked at myself. Dark hair like my father’s, blue eyes, pale skin. Something stubborn in my face.

  Later that same afternoon I sat and watched the icicles that hung like awnings outside the living room windows slowly drip drip drip. For months the days had been one color: gray. Now I listened to the coming of a new season.

  Outside, my father stood in the driveway. He seemed to be talking to himself. From time to time I’d see him there, oblivious to the weather, deep in conversation with no one.

  Mrs. McG asked me once if I was lonely, and I had no idea what to answer. I knew from books that people had friends, children had playmates. But I had my father and Dennis and Mrs. McG (and Mary Ellis Root, alas), and I had all the books I wanted. So after a few seconds I replied that no, I wasn’t lonely.

  Mrs. McG apparently wasn’t convinced. I heard her talking to Dennis about my “need to get out of the house. ” She went on, “I know how much he loves her, but overprotection can’t be good. ”

  And soon after that, I found myself in Mrs. McG’s car one rainy afternoon. The idea was that I’d come to dinner at her house, meet her family, then be driven home well before my ten p. m. bedtime.

  It was raining so hard that the windshield filmed with water immediately after the pass of the wiper blades. I remember Mrs. McG’s hands clutching the steering wheel. And I remember the calm when the car drove beneath an underpass — I marveled at how suddenly things could change from one state to another, then revert.

  Was I excited? Frightened, more likely. I left the house rarely, only to be shepherded to periodic examinations at a local public school. Today I had no idea what to expect. My father had told me that I had a weak immune system, that he himself had one, that it was better for us to stay away from crowds. I’d been a small, fragile-looking child, but now that I was twelve I seemed to myself sturdier, and my curiosity about the world had grown stronger, too.

  Not to say that I wasn’t “worldly. ” I’d read widely; I knew “the facts of life. ” But nothing had prepared me for Mrs. McG’s house.

  She lived on the south side of Saratoga Springs. The house was painted white — or had been, some time ago. Winters had worn away paint, and the house looked a little shabby.