The Society of S

by Hubbard, Susan

  We scuffled back and forth until I managed to tear the photo in two and crumple the halves in my hand. Kathleen’s dejection made me laugh.

  The other photos lay forgotten on the bench, and we dove for them simultaneously. As usual, Kathleen got there first.

  “No more partial nudity shots, sad to say.” She riffled through the stack. “See? I wanted to show the gang what your mansion’s like.”

  An unconfident photographer, she’d taken several shots of the same places, and we went through them, one by one: The front stairway. The alcove with the stained-glass window. The entryway. The outer library. The living room. And then, my father’s green leather chair, with a kind of shimmer over it.

  “Where is he?” she said. “What happened?”

  “Something’s wrong with the camera,” I said. But I was thinking about the vampire movie we’d seen — the scene with the mirror that didn’t reflect Dracula. And though she didn’t say it, I had a sense that Kathleen was thinking about the same scene.

  The last photo was of me — taken just before she’d said I looked frightened. But the photo was so blurred, you couldn’t tell what I might have been feeling.

  In my mind, that day in August was the last day of the last summer of innocence.

  When Kathleen called later that evening, we didn’t talk about the photographs. We went out of our way not to mention them.

  Kathleen’s first day of school was coming up, and she said she felt nervous. She said we both needed “new images.” It would be a fine idea for us to have our ears pierced at the mall. But we needed to have parental consent, since we weren’t sixteen yet.

  “How’s your hunky dad?” she said, her voice artificially bright. “Will he let you get your ears pierced?”

  “Hunky dad is sad,” I said. “And I doubt it.”

  “We’ll work on him. First we need to cheer him up. He should start dating again,” Kathleen said. “Too bad I’m not older.”

  I made a disgusted sound. But we were both acting, playing roles that had been natural behavior only yesterday.

  “Tomorrow at seven,” she said, her voice tinny. “Our last date of the season with Justin and Trent.” Those were our pet names for our favorite horses.

  “Sleep tight,” I told her, and hung up. I went to say goodnight to my father, who was, as ever, reading The Poe Journal in the living room. I tried to envision him as a mere sheen of ectoplasm. He met my stare with level eyes that held a hint of amusement.

  After he’d told me to sleep well, I turned back to ask, “Do you ever get lonely?”

  He turned his head to one side. Then he smiled — one of his rare, lovely smiles that made him look like a shy boy. “How could I ever be lonely, Ari,” he said, “when I have you?”

  Chapter Three

  The Germans call it Ohrwurm, or earworm: a song stuck in one’s brain. All the next morning, as we watched the jockeys exercise the horses, my mind played the song from my dream.

  But today, the lyrics sounded slightly different:

  When evening falls

  Beyond the blue

  The blue beyond

  Is calling you

  I didn’t mind the song’s playing and replaying. My mind often played little games with me, a welcome distraction for an only child. Earlier that summer I’d begun dreaming crossword puzzles (does this happen to you?), dreaming clues and grids that came to me piecemeal, so that filling in more than one word at a time was barely possible. I’d awaken with a few clues — “tropical evergreen” (eight letters) or “islands of earth” (eight letters) — still in my head, frustrated that I couldn’t reconstruct the grid. But “The Blue Beyond” didn’t affect me one way or the other; it seemed a natural background, somehow.

  The other onlookers at the track must have been used to the sight of us by now, but no one ever spoke to us. I supposed they were wealthy horse owners, most of them. Even their casual clothes, however rumpled, looked expensive. They leaned against the white railings, not talking much, sipping from large aluminum cups; the smell of their coffee floated toward us through the damp morning air, along with the smells of horses and clover and hay — the green and golden essence of summer mornings in Saratoga Springs. I breathed it in, trying to hold it in my lungs. In a few days the season would be over, and everyone here would be someplace else. And the perfume of summer gradually would be replaced by scents of fireplace smoke and dead leaves steeped in rain, later supplanted by the icy white essence of snow.

  Separated from the rich ones only by yards was an entire community of workers: exercise riders, trainers, grooms, and “hot walkers.” Many of them spoke to each other in Spanish. Kathleen had told me they came to Saratoga Springs for the racing season, July through Labor Day. Then most of them moved on, who knew where.

  But Kathleen and I didn’t talk much, that morning. We seemed a little shy of each other. After we’d sent “see you next summer” messages to Justin and Trent, the horses we loved best, we headed downtown on our bicycles.

  We wound up at the library. Besides the library, the drugstore, and the park, there weren’t many options for two teenaged girls without much cash. The shopping mall was a little far to go to on bikes, as were the lake and the Yaddo Rose Garden.

  Downtown Saratoga Springs catered to upscale shoppers; along and off Broadway you could find coffee shops, clothing stores (Kathleen called them yuppie dudstores), several restaurants and bars, and an overpriced thrift shop full of moth-eaten cashmere cardigans and out-of-style “designer jeans.” Sometimes we’d go through the racks of old clothes, making fun of them, until the store owners told us we’d better move on.

  It was worse at the jewelry store; if the owner was there, we wouldn’t even enter, because he’d say, “On your way, ladies.” But if only the young saleswoman stood behind the counter, we’d swagger in and pore over the cases of glittering rings and necklaces and brooches. Kathleen favored diamonds and emeralds; I went for sapphires and peridots. We knew the name of every jewel in the store. If the saleswoman said anything to us, Kathleen had a bold reply: “You’d better be nice to us. We’re your future customers.”

  No one ever asked us to leave the library. We went straight to the computers to surf the Internet. Kathleen coached me. She sat at one terminal, checking her email and searching for the perfect boots, while at another I moved from website to website, determined to learn about vampires.

  Searching for “vampires and photographs” yielded more than eight million links to sites ranging from the fantastic to the obscene (which I couldn’t have accessed had I wanted to, thanks to the library’s built-in censorship system). However, I was able to visit a few websites that posted requests from vampires seeking other vampires for solace, instruction, or more arcane needs. A quick scan of the postings suggested many factions in the vampire community; some drank blood and others refrained (termed “wannabes” by one site, “psychic vampires” by another); some advertised themselves proudly as selfish and aggressive, while others sounded merely lonely, offering themselves as “donors.” But I found no mention of vampires in photographs.

  As I continued my research, I occasionally glanced over at Kathleen, but she seemed intent on her own quest and didn’t meet my eyes.

  The Wikipedia site offered a wealth of information. It talked about the origins of vampirism in folklore and fiction, and it linked to topics such as “Hematophagy” and “Pathology,” which I made a mental note to visit when I had more time. In terms of photographs, however, it offered only this: “Vampires typically cast no shadow and have no reflection. This mythical power is largely confined to European vampire myths and may be tied to folklore regarding the vampire’s lack of a soul. In modern fiction, this may extend to the idea that vampires cannot be photographed.”

  I sat back in my chair and glanced toward Kathleen. But her terminal was vacant. Then I felt her breathing, right behind me, and when I glanced over my shoulder, her eyes, full of questions, met mine.

  I carried
those questions home to my lessons that day, but I couldn’t bring myself to ask my father any of them. How do you ask your own father about the state of his soul?

  For that was one of the early definitions I’d found: upon becoming a vampire, a mortal sacrificed his soul.

  Of course I wasn’t sure I believed in souls. I was an agnostic — I believed that there was no proof of God’s existence, yet I didn’t deny the possibility that he might exist. I had read selected chapters of the Bible, Quran, Kabbalah, Tao Te Ching, Bhagavad Gita, the writings of Lao-Tse — but I had read all of them as literature and philosophy, and my father and I discussed them as such. We had no ritualized spiritual practice — we worshipped ideas.

  More specifically, we worshipped virtue, and the idea of the virtuous life. Plato talked of the importance of four virtues in particular: wisdom, courage, temperance, and justice. A disciplined education would allow one to learn virtue, according to Plato.

  Every Friday, my father asked me to summarize the various lessons of the week: history, philosophy, mathematics, literature, the sciences, art. Then he would synthesize my summaries, finding patterns and parallels and symmetries that often dazzled me. My father had the ability to trace the historical evolution of belief systems, linking them to politics, arts, and sciences in a cogent and comprehensive manner that I’m afraid I took for granted then; my actual experiences of the world have shown me over time that, sadly, few minds are capable of such thinking and such articulation.

  And why do you suppose that is the case? An argument could be made that only those who are free of the fear of death are able to truly apprehend human culture.

  Yes, I’ll get back to the story now. One day we met as usual in the library, and I think we were meant to be talking about Dickens. But I wanted to talk about Poe.

  After all my complaints, I’d decided on my own to take down The Essential Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe from the library shelf. During the previous week I’d read “The Tell-Tale Heart” without much interest, and “The Black Cat” with considerable un-ease (it conjured images of the unfortunate Marmalade), but “The Premature Burial” gave me a nightmare about being buried alive, and “Morella” caused me three sleepless nights.

  “Morella” is the name of a wife who tells her husband, “I am dying, yet shall I live.” She dies in childbirth, and her daughter grows up unnamed. When the daughter is at last baptized, her father names her “Morella,” whereupon she replies, “I am here!” and promptly dies. He carries her to her mother’s tomb, which is of course empty — because the daughter was the mother.

  Note how italics have crept into these pages. Blame Poe.

  In any case, I had questions about “Morella,” and about myself. I wondered how like my mother I was. I didn’t think I was my mother; from my first conscious thought, I’d had an intense, if sometimes conflicted, sense of self. But since I’d never known her, how could I be sure?

  My father, however, was not to be sidetracked. Today we would indeed talk about Dickens’s Hard Times. Tomorrow, if I insisted, we would return to Poe — but only after I’d read his essay, “The Philosophy of Composition.”

  Accordingly, the next day (having set aside Dickens) we did return to Poe — rather gingerly at first.

  “I approach this lesson with a certain trepidation,” my father began. “I hope that we’ll have no tears today.”

  I gave him a look that made him shake his head. “You’re changing, Ari. I appreciate that you’re growing older, and I know we’ll need to consider modifications in your education.”

  “And in the way we live,” I said, with emotion that sounded un-characteristic even to me.

  “And the way we live.” His voice had a skeptical-sounding inflection that made me look hard at him. But his face was as composed as ever. I recall gazing at his crisply starched shirt — deep blue, that day — with onyx cufflinks securing the precise folds of its cuffs, and recall wishing that, just once, I could find some small sign of disorder.

  “In any case, what did you make of the tales of Edgar Allan Poe?”

  It was my turn to shake my head. “Poe seems to have a grave fear of acts of passion.”

  He raised his eyebrows. “And you received that impression from which tales?”

  “Not so much from the tales,” I said. “By the way, they’re all overwritten, in my opinion. But his essay seems to me a flagrant rationalization, possibly premised on his fear of his own passions.”

  Yes, we really did talk that way. Our dialogues were conducted in precise, formal English — with lapses on my part only. With Kathleen and her family, I spoke a different language, and sometimes words from that language cropped up during my lessons.

  “The essay discusses the composition of ‘The Raven,’” I said, “as if the poem were a mathematical problem. Poe maintains that he used a formula to determine his choices of length, and tone, and meter, and phrasing. But to me, his claim isn’t credible. His ‘formula’ seems a desperate plea to be considered logical and reasoned, when in all likelihood he was anything but.”

  My father was smiling, now. “I’m glad to see that the essay provoked your interest to such an extent. Based on your reaction to ‘Annabel Lee,’ I’d anticipated something far less” — here he paused, as he sometimes did, as if trying to think of the most appropriate word; in fact, I think now, the pause was for emphasis and effect only — “far less engaged.”

  I smiled back, the sort of scholarly half-grimace I’d learned from him — wry, tight-lipped, nothing like his rare, shy smile of genuine pleasure. “For me, Poe will remain a taste to be acquired,” I said. “Or not.”

  “Or not.” He interlaced his fingers. “I agree, of course, that the writing style is florid, even overblown. All those italics!” He shook his head. “As one of his fellow poets said, Poe was ‘three-fifths genius and two-fifths fudge.’”

  I smiled (a real smile) at that.

  My father said, “Nonetheless, his mannerisms are designed to help the reader transcend the familiar, prosaic world. And for us, reading Poe provides a sort of comfort, I suppose.”

  He’d never before spoken of literature in such personal terms. I leaned forward. “Comfort?”

  “Well.” He seemed at a loss for words. “You see.” His eyes closed briefly, and while they were shut, he said, “I suppose, one might say, he describes the way I sometimes feel.” He opened his eyes.

  “Florid?” I said. “Overblown?”

  He nodded.

  “If you feel that way, you certainly don’t show it.” Part of me was marveling: My father is talking about his feelings?

  “I try not to,” he said. “You know, for all practical purposes Poe was an orphan. His mother died when he was very young. He was taken in by John Allan’s family, but never formally adopted. His life and his work exhibit classic symptoms of a bereaved child: an inability to accept the loss of a parent, a longing for reunion with the dead, a preference for imagination over reality.

  “In short, Poe was one of us.”

  Our conversation ended abruptly when Mary Ellis Root knocked loudly at the library door. My father went outside to confer with her.

  I felt on fire with so much unexpected information: One of us? My father was a “bereaved child” too?

  But I learned no more about him that day. Whatever issue Root had brought upstairs carried him down to the basement with her. I wandered up to my bedroom, my mind spinning.

  I thought of my father reading “Annabel Lee,” and I recalled Poe’s words in “The Philosophy of Composition”: “The death then of a beautiful woman is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world, and equally is it beyond doubt that the lips best suited for such topic are those of a bereaved lover.”

  And I thought of Morella, my mother, and me.

  Only a short time later, Kathleen telephoned. Her school year had begun, and I hadn’t seen much of her since that last day at the racetrack. School was over for the day, she said, and she needed to
see me.

  We met in the belvedere at the foot of the back garden. I haven’t mentioned that place before, have I? It was an open, six-sided structure with a small cupola and rotunda roof that mimicked the larger ones at the top of the house. Cushioned benches were its only furniture, and Kathleen and I had spent many afternoons sitting there, “hanging out,” as she phrased it. Belvedere means “beautiful view,” and ours was well named; it looked out at an ascending slope covered in vines and overgrown rosebushes, their dark crimson blossoms turning the air pink with perfume.

  I was lying across one of the benches watching a dragonfly — a Common Green Darner, though it seemed anything but common as its translucent wings slowly pulsed the air — poised on a cornice, when Kathleen raced in, her hair flying free and her face pink from the bicycle ride. The air was humid, promising one of the thunder-showers that punctuated many late summer afternoons.

  She stared down at me, panting to catch her breath, then began to laugh. “Look…at…you,” she said between breaths. “Lady…of…leisure.”

  “And who are you?” I said, sitting up.

  “I’m here to rescue you,” she said. She pulled a plastic bag out of her jeans pocket, opened it, and handed me a small blue flannel bag on a string. It smelled strongly of lavender.

  “Put it on,” she said.

  She wore a similar bag, strung around her neck.

  “Why?” I asked. The dragonfly, I noticed, had flown away.

  “For protection.” She fell back against the cushions of the bench facing mine. “I’ve been doing some research, Ari. Do you know anything about herbal witchcraft?”

  I didn’t. But Kathleen had spent some time at the library, and now she was an expert. “I got the lavender from your garden and marigold from a neighbor,” she said. “They’ll protect you from evil. I put basil from my mother’s kitchen in mine — spells work best if the herbs come from your own house. Oh, and the flannel? It’s from an old pillowcase. But I sewed the bags with silk thread.”