The Society of S

by Hubbard, Susan

  Malcolm spoke of mortals as if they were vampires’ worst enemies. “The world would be a better place if humans were extinct,” he said.

  I took another sip of Picardo, which sent a tingling sensation through my body. “Do you agree?”

  “Sometimes I’m tempted to agree.” My father waved his hand toward the shade-covered window. “When you walk around out there, you see so much unnecessary suffering, so much greed and malice. The abuse and murder of humans and animals — unnecessary, yet commonplace. Vampires — some of us — are always mindful of the ugliness. We’re a bit like God in that respect; you don’t recall that line of Spinoza’s, that to see things as God does is to see them under the aspect of eternity?”

  “I thought we didn’t believe in God.”

  He smiled. “We don’t know for certain, do we?”

  But Malcolm didn’t mention the problems, my father said — the terrible urge to feed, the mood swings, the vulnerabilities, and all of the ethical implications of the change of state.

  At first my father considered himself no better than a cannibal. Over time, he learned the truth of Bertrand Russell’s belief: by ordering one’s mind, happiness becomes accessible, even to an other.

  One night when my father was half conscious, he called for Sara. Malcolm reminded him of it afterward. He said the only right thing was never to see her again.

  “There’s a history that you don’t know yet,” Malcolm said. “Other vampires have tried to live with mortals, and it never works. The only alternative is to bite her. You could use her as a donor, so long as you never let her bite you. I personally would be disheartened if you made a woman one of us.” Malcolm was half-lying across a sofa in my father’s room as he said this, very like a character in an Oscar Wilde play — the consummate misanthrope.

  At the time, my father thought that Malcolm might be right — the kindest thing would be for him to end his relationship with Sara. He agonized over how to let her know what had happened. How could he tell her what had taken place? What sort of letter could he write?

  My mother wasn’t religious in a conventional sense, but she believed in a God among many gods, to whom she could pray in time of trouble. The rest of the time, she mostly ignored that God, as many mortals do. My father was afraid that his news could shock her into some irrational action. He considered never communicating with her again — simply moving to a place where she’d never find him.

  When Dennis took over Malcolm’s role as caretaker, my father began to look at the problem differently. Perhaps there were other alternative actions. At any rate, it was clear to him that the matter couldn’t be handled by a letter. No matter what he might write, she wouldn’t believe it — and she deserved to hear an explanation face to face.

  Some days, as he grew stronger, my father thought that he and my mother might be strong enough to weather the situation. Most times he felt otherwise. Malcolm had told him some odd tales while he was bedridden, and they persuaded him that any vampire union with a mortal was damned from the start.

  So, for the time being, he told my mother nothing.

  Surprisingly, Dennis raised the subject. “What will you tell Sara?”

  “I’ll tell her everything,” my father said, “once I see her.”

  “Isn’t that risky?”

  For a moment my father wondered if Dennis had been talking to Malcolm. But then he looked across at his friend — the freckled face, the wide brown eyes — and he realized again all Dennis had done for him. Dennis was holding a vial of blood at the time, preparing to inject him.

  “What’s life without risk?” my father said. “Nothing but mauvais foi.”

  He reminded me that mauvais foi means “bad faith.”

  “We need to spend a little more time with the Existentialists, don’t you think?” he said.

  “Father,” I said, “I’d be happy to spend more time with the Existentialists. And I do appreciate knowing these details. I do. But I can’t bear the idea of going to bed tonight still not knowing about my mother, or whether I’m going to die.”

  He stirred in his chair, and looked over at my now-empty plate. He said, “Then let’s move into the living room, and you shall have the rest of it.”

  In the end my father didn’t have to choose a way to tell my mother what had happened. She took one look at him at the airport, and she said, “You’ve changed.”

  Rather than bringing her back to Cambridge, my father took her to the Ritz Hotel in London, and they spent the next five days trying to come to terms with each other. Sara had packed carefully for the trip; she had a distinctive style, my father said, recalling in particular a green chiffon dress that rippled like romaine lettuce.

  But she didn’t have any reason to dress up. Instead of going to the theatre, or even downstairs for tea, they stayed in their suite, ordered room service every day, and fought bitterly over their future.

  When my father told her about his new state, she reacted as humans are said to react to news of a loved one’s death: with shock, denial, bargaining, guilt, anger, depression, and finally, some sort of acceptance.

  (He noted that I had not reacted in those ways to anything he’d told me. That alone, he said, suggested that I might be “one of us.”)

  My mother blamed herself for what my father had become. Why had she urged him to come to England? Then she blamed my father. Who had done this to him? Had he caused it to happen? Then she began to cry, and she wept for most of a day.

  My father held her when she’d let him, but held her gingerly, worried that she might tempt him somehow. He didn’t trust himself to relax around her.

  He told her he regretted the day he’d been born — and then he apologized for using a cliché. He would get out of her life at once, he said, for both their sakes.

  She refused to hear it. When her crying stopped, she grew insistent that they stay together. If my father left her, she said, she would take her own life.

  My father accused her of being melodramatic.

  “It’s you who’ve turned our lives melodramatic!” she said. “It’s you who managed to become a damned vampire.” Then she began to cry again.

  “Sara,” my father told me now, “even at the best of times, which this was not, had little talent for reasoned argument.”

  By the end of the week, my father felt emotionally and physically exhausted.

  Sara won. She went back to Savannah wearing an engagement ring: a replica of an Etruscan ring with a tiny bird perched on it, bought by my father when he’d first arrived in London. A few weeks later, he packed up his things and took a plane home.

  He joined Sara in the brick house by the cemetery, which indeed was haunted, and every day they learned new ways of accommodating what Sara called my father’s “affliction.” Dennis stayed in Cambridge, but he mailed my father freeze-dried “cocktails,” the formulae for which were ever-evolving to more closely approximate fresh human blood. This work was the beginning of what would become Seradrone.

  After a few months, my mother and father were married in Sarasota, a seaside town in Florida, and later they moved to Saratoga Springs. (Sara retained her fondness for the letter S, thinking it was lucky, and my father indulged her. He wanted to please her as much as he could, to compensate for his condition.)

  They settled into the Victorian house. In time, Dennis finished his research at Cambridge and found a job at one of the colleges in Saratoga Springs, so that he and my father could continue to work together. They formed the company called Seradrone and recruited Mary Ellis Root as an assistant; her training in hematology was truly outstanding, my father said. The three of them developed a blood purification method that has enabled transfusions all over the world.

  Sara kept busy at first, decorating the house, and tending the gardens and, later, her bees — she set up hives by the lavender patch in the garden. They were (my father spoke with some astonishment in his voice) happy.

  But for one thing: my mother wanted a child.


  “You were conceived in the usual way,” my father said, his voice dry. “Your birth was a long process, but your mother came through it quite well. She had real stamina.

  “You weighed only four pounds, Ari. You were born in the upstairs bedroom with the lavender wallpaper — your mother insisted upon that. Dennis and I handled the delivery. We both were concerned when you didn’t cry. You stared at me with dark blue eyes — far more focused than we expected a newborn’s eyes to be. You seemed to say hello to the world in a matter-of-fact way.

  “Your mother fell asleep almost at once, and we carried you downstairs to run some tests. When we tested your blood, we found you were anemic — we’d anticipated this possibility, since your mother was anemic throughout the pregnancy. We spent some minutes debating the best treatment. I even called Dr. Wilson. Then I carried you upstairs again.” Here he lifted both hands, in a gesture of helplessness. “Your mother was gone.”

  “Not dead,” I said.

  “Not dead. She simply wasn’t there. The bed was empty. And that’s when you first began to cry.”

  My father and I stayed up until four a.m., sorting out details.

  “Didn’t you look for her?” was my first question, and he said that yes, indeed they had. Dennis went out first, while my father fed me; they’d bought cans of infant formula in case my mother’s breast milk wasn’t adequate. When Dennis came back, he looked after me, and my father went out.

  “She didn’t take her purse,” he said, his voice dark with memories. “The front door was ajar. The car was in the garage. We found nothing to suggest where she might have gone. Who knows what went through her mind?”

  “Did you call the police?”

  “No.” My father left his chair and began to walk back and forth across the living room. “The police are so limited. I didn’t see any point of calling them, and I didn’t care to invite their scrutiny.”

  “But they might have found her!” I stood up, too. “Didn’t you care?”

  “Of course I cared. I do have feelings, after all. But I was sure that Dennis and I had a better chance of finding her on our own. And —” He hesitated. “I’m accustomed to being left.”

  I thought about his own mother, dying when he was a baby, and about what he’d said about bereaved children — how death informs them, marks them forever.

  He said he sometimes felt as if a veil hung between him and the world that kept him from directly experiencing it. “I don’t have your sense of immediacy,” he said. “In that, you’re like your mother. Everything was immediate to her.

  “When the shock of finding her gone began to fade, I thought back on things she’d said during the last few months. Frequently she’d been ill, and she clearly felt depressed and unhappy. She said things that weren’t rational, at times. She threatened to leave me, to leave you once you were born. She said she felt as if she were an animal trapped in a cage.”

  “She didn’t want me.” I sat down again.

  “She didn’t know what she wanted,” he said. “I thought that her hormones might be unbalanced. To be honest, I didn’t know what else to think. But for whatever reason, she chose to leave.” He looked at the floor. “Humans are always leaving, Ari. That’s one thing I’ve learned. Life is all about people leaving.”

  For a few seconds we didn’t speak. The grandfather clock struck four.

  “I telephoned her sister, Sophie, who lives in Savannah. She promised to call me if Sara turned up. About a month later, she did call. Sara had told her not to let me know where she was. Ari, she said she didn’t want to come back.”

  I felt empty inside, but the emptiness had weight and sharp edges. It hurt.

  “If I hadn’t been born, she’d still be here,” I said.

  “Ari, no. If you hadn’t been born, she would have been even more miserable. She so much wanted you, remember?”

  “And you didn’t?” I looked at him, and I knew I was right.

  “I didn’t think it was a good idea,” he said. He stretched his hands toward me, palms up, as if asking for mercy. “For all of the reasons I’ve told you, vampires aren’t meant to breed.”

  The emptiness in me turned to numbness. I’d gotten the answers to my questions, all right. My head was filled with them. But instead of bringing me any satisfaction, they made me feel sick.

  Chapter Nine

  When animals and humans are babies, they tend to imprint — they instinctively note the characteristics of their parents, and they mimic them. Newborn foals, for instance, imprint and follow whatever large being looms above them at the time of birth. After I was born, my father was the only parent to loom above me, and so I learned to mimic him.

  But in the womb, I must have listened hard to my mother. Otherwise, much of my later behavior couldn’t be explained — except, perhaps, genetically. And that’s a complicated matter that we’ll consider at another time, yes?

  Every January my father left the house for a week to attend a professional conference. Normally Dennis took over my lessons while my father was away.

  The night before my father left, Dennis joined us at dinner. Root had prepared an eggplant casserole (surprisingly much tastier than anything ever made by poor Mrs. McG), but after a forkful I had no appetite for more.

  Ari is depressed, I thought. Looking across at my father and Dennis, I knew they thought so, too. The worry on their faces made me feel a little guilty. They were pretending to talk about physics — in particular, electrodynamics, on which my next lessons would focus — but they really were talking about me.

  “You’ll begin with the review of atomic structure,” my father said to Dennis, his eyes on me.

  “Of course,” Dennis said. He hadn’t been around much since Kathleen’s death, but whenever he came by, he put his hands on my shoulders as if to strengthen me.

  Root came up from the basement with a large brown bottle in her hand. She set it on the table before my father, and he moved it to the side of my plate. Then she looked at me, and I looked back, and for a moment I saw a shred of sympathy in her black eyes. It disappeared almost at once, and she hurried back to the basement.

  “All right, then.” My father pushed back his chair. “Ari, I’ll be back next Friday, and I expect by then you’ll be ready to discuss quantum theory and relativity theory.”

  He stood there for a minute — my handsome father in his impeccable suit, his dark hair gleaming in the light from the chandelier over the table. I met his eyes for a second, then looked down at the tablecloth. You didn’t want me, I thought, and I hoped he heard.

  The new tonic tasted stronger than the previous one, and after I took the first spoonful I felt a surge of unfamiliar energy. But an hour later, I felt listless again.

  We didn’t have a scale upstairs; there was one in the basement, I suppose, but I didn’t want to go into Root’s domain. I knew I’d lost weight only because of the way my clothes fit. My jeans were baggy, and my t-shirts seemed a size larger. It was around this time that my periods stopped. Some months later, I realized I’d been anorexic.

  Dennis and I slogged our way through quantum theory. I listened to him without asking questions. At one point he stopped lecturing. “What’s wrong, Ari?” he said.

  I noticed that his reddish hair had a few strands of silver in it now. “Do you ever think about dying?” I asked.

  He rubbed his chin. “Every day of my life,” he said.

  “You’re my father’s best friend.” I listened to my words, wondering where they were heading. “But you’re not —”

  “I’m not like him.” He finished my sentence. “I know. Too bad, huh?”

  “You mean you wish you were?”

  He leaned back in his chair. “Yeah, of course I do. Who wouldn’t want the chance to be around forever? But I don’t know if he’d like me talking that way around you. You’re still kind of —”

  He hesitated. I finished his sentence: “— up for grabs.”

  “Whatever that means.” H
e grinned.

  “It means I get to choose,” I said. “That’s what he told me. But I don’t know how yet.”

  “I don’t know, either,” Dennis said. “Sorry. But I’m sure you’ll figure it out.”

  “That’s what he says.” I wished I had a mother to give me advice. I folded my arms across my chest. “So where is he, anyway? Some big blood conference? Why didn’t you go, too?”

  “He’s in Baltimore. Every year he goes there. But it’s not about blood. It’s something to do with the Edgar Allan Poe fan club, or society, or whatever they call themselves.” Dennis shook his head and reopened the physics book.

  We’d finished lessons, and I was doing yoga alone (Dennis had laughed when I suggested that he join me), when I heard the sound of the front door knocker. It was an old brass one with the face of Neptune on it, and I’d rarely heard it used before — mostly on Halloween nights, by trick-or-treaters whose expectations must have quickly deflated.

  When I opened the door, Agent Burton stood on the porch. “Morning, Miss Montero,” he said.

  “It’s actually afternoon,” I said.

  “So it is. How are you this afternoon?”

  “I’m okay.” If my father had been there, I’d have said very well, not okay.

  “Great, great.” He wore a camel’s hair coat over a dark suit, and his eyes were bloodshot, yet energetic. “Is your father at home?”

  “No,” I said.

  “When do you expect him?” He smiled as if he were a friend of the family.

  “Friday,” I said. “He’s at a conference.”

  “A conference.” Burton nodded, three times. “Tell him I stopped by, won’t you do that? Ask him to give me a call when he gets back. Please.”

  I said I would, and I was about to shut the door when he said, “Say, you wouldn’t know anything about kirigami, would you?”