The Society of S

by Hubbard, Susan

  The child in me wondered, What if he doesn’t like monkeys?

  Nobody spoke. Then the quiet was shattered by a sound: “Wha-wha-wha!”

  I was the only one who jumped. Harris actually reached over and patted my hand.

  The noise repeated, and this time it was answered by another sound: “Who-whoo.”

  The exchanges went on for nearly a minute. I couldn’t tell where they were coming from. Then, they faded away, until all we heard was the drone of mosquitoes again.

  “Owls?” I whispered, and the others nodded.

  “Barred owls,” Dashay said.

  Suddenly I thought of my father’s lullaby. Across from me, my mother’s eyes flashed in the moonlight. She began to sing, to the melody he’d sung to me: “Jacaré tutu / Jacaré mandu / tutu vai embora / Não leva méia filhinha / Murucututu.” Her voice was dark silver — as haunting as his, but sharper, sadder — and it shimmered in the moonlight. When she stopped, there was silence. Even the mosquitoes were quiet, for a moment.

  Then I heard my voice. “What do the words mean?”

  She said, “A parent is asking for her child’s protection. She asks the alligator and the other beasts of the night to go away, to leave the child alone. Murucututu is the owl, the mother of sleep.”

  “How do you know it?”

  “Your father,” she said. “He sang it to you, before you were born.”

  Next morning I decided to press on, regardless of the consequences.

  I began with Seradrone and Green Cross. Both had websites — dull, jargon-ridden websites, but at least they provided contact numbers.

  Seradrone had a Saratoga Springs area code. But when I called, I reached the familiar recording: the number was no longer in service. Next I dialed Green Cross. I expect a terrorist calling the Pentagon might have got more answers.

  I said, “I heard that Seradrone went out of business, and I wondered whether we’ll still be able to get Sangfroid.”

  “Where did you hear that?” The voice on the other end was clipped, precise as a computer’s speech simulator. I couldn’t even tell the sex of the speaker.

  “My mother told me,” I said, keeping my voice young and innocent.

  “What’s her name?”

  “Her name’s Sara Stephenson.” Should I have said that? I wondered.

  “You may tell your mother that deliveries will continue as scheduled,” the voice said, and the connection went dead.

  Thanks so much, I thought. I went into the kitchen. Mãe was kneading bread dough at the table. The dough was a deep red color.

  “Why are the Green Cross people so rude?” I asked her.

  “Well, for starters, they’re not people.” She looked up at me, her hands still working the dough. “Want to have a try?”

  “Not today.” I didn’t have much interest in cooking, anyway. In that, I guess, I took after my father. “Mãe, who makes Sangfroid? Didn’t you say it comes from Albany?”

  “Check the can.”

  I pulled down the black and red tin container from the pantry shelf. Its back panel read: “Made in USA. (c) LER Co., Albany, NY.”

  Back in Mãe’s study, I used her computer to find a phone number for LER Co. An operator connected me to an extension for “consumer relations,” whose voice mail took my request for a return call.

  I went back to the kitchen. “Mãe, how do I dial London? I want to call my father’s tailor.”

  She was washing her hands in the sink. The bread must be in the oven.

  “Gieves & Hawkes,” she said. “Number One Savile Row. I saw that label often enough.” She reached for a towel, then turned to me. “Ariella, you’re not going to call them?”

  “Why not?”

  “They won’t tell you anything.” She rubbed her hands dry. “British tailors are as secretive as the CIA. Probably more so.”

  “They can’t be worse than Green Cross.” I thought of telling her that I’d used her name, then thought I’d better not.

  But she shook her head as if she already knew. “Green Cross won’t give out information, even to other vampires,” she said. “Medical couriers have to maintain confidentiality.”

  I was running out of ideas. “Maybe I’ll call Dennis.” But I didn’t look forward to talking with him — the man who’d helped Malcolm steal my mother.

  My mother opened the oven door and looked in at her dark red loaves. “Can you smell the honey?”

  “It smells pink,” I said.

  “To me it’s the color of the poppies in the back garden.” She closed the oven door.

  Another call, another voice mail message. Dennis would be out of the office until August 15. I didn’t leave a response, and I hung up feeling more relieved than disappointed.

  But the Recovery Plan options were running out.

  A few days later the Green Cross delivery van showed up. I met the driver with a smile and several questions. He said he didn’t know anything about making Sangfroid, and he hinted strongly that if he did, he wouldn’t tell a stranger.

  I turned away. My mother came from the stables carrying two large baskets of Mayapple leaves and roots, which we’d harvested the previous day in the forest. Mayapple’s other name is American Mandrake. American Indians used it as a medicine, and now it’s being tested as a possible treatment for cancer. My mother traded it with Green Cross in exchange for blood supplements.

  “We’ll need two boxes of the Sangfroid,” she said. “I trust the quality will be as high as the last batch.”

  The deliveryman loaded the baskets into the back of the van, then handed her two cartons marked LER CO. “No worries,” he said. “Nothing’s changed.”

  “I wonder where I’ll live when I grow up,” I said. “I mean, when I’m older.”

  My mother and I sat in the living room. A faint strain of music came from outside. Dashay and Bennett were out on the grass with a transistor radio, dancing.

  Mãe looked stern. “You won’t be older. You realize that, don’t you?” Her voice sounded frustrated. “Didn’t your father teach you anything?”

  Of course he had. But I’d never thought through the implications: once you’re an other, your biological clock is stopped. You don’t age. You don’t grow. Only your mind can grow.

  “How old do I look?” I asked.

  “Some days you look twenty.” Her voice was dry. “Tonight you look twelve.”

  Somewhat insulted, I stood up and went to the window. Bennett and Dashay were in each other’s arms, waltzing so gracefully that I shivered. I wondered if I’d ever be able to dance like that.

  Why is it that the obvious answer to a problem often is the last one we consider?

  Within one’s field of consciousness, certain elements are the focus of attention, and certain others lie at the periphery. My attention tends to focus on what strikes me as unusual or problematic. Is it that way for you? Right now, I’m focusing on how to describe consciousness, and I’m paying little attention to the cat sitting at my feet, or the scent of the humid air around me.

  You might say I’m unconscious of those familiar things. But they’re part of my peripheral consciousness; the proof is, I can shift my focus to stroke the cat or mop my brow. Those things lie within my consciousness, even if I don’t choose to pay attention to them.

  Why didn’t I notice the copies of The Poe Journal on my mother’s coffee table? They were a familiar sight. My father had kept a similar stack on the table next to his chair in our living room. I suppose that if you’d asked me, when I was growing up, whether the average American family subscribed to The Poe Journal or TV Guide, I’d have guessed that they preferred Poe.

  Having been out in the world, I now knew better.

  I dialed the number on The Poe Journal’s masthead.

  “My father is ill,” I told the man who answered. And this voice decisively belonged to a male human. “He says he hasn’t been getting his copy of the journal,” I said. “I told him I’d call you.”

&nbs
p; “Let me see if I may help.” The man’s concern sounded genuine.

  I gave him my father’s name and address in Saratoga Springs.

  In a few moments he came back on the line. “Ms. Montero?” he said.

  “Ariella Montero,” I said.

  “Yes,” he said. “Well, it appears that your father’s subscription has been transferred. This is most awkward. Someone called back in February and asked for the subscription to be transferred.”

  “Oh,” I said, thinking fast. “To my uncle?”

  “That would be Mr. Pym?”

  “What was the address?”

  “6705 Midnight Pass Road,” he said. “Is that correct?”

  “Of course,” I said. “He must have forgotten he’d made the change. So sorry to trouble you.”

  “I do hope that your father’s health improves,” the man said. “If he decides he’d like to receive the journal again, please let us know.”

  I thanked him and said goodbye. I never did find out the name of the man at The Poe Journal, but he gave me reassurance that good manners weren’t entirely obsolete. I’m sorry that I had to lie to him.

  Chapter Sixteen

  One of the small ironies of my education took place the day my father lectured on John Dewey and the Pragmatists. Dewey, my father said, believed that learning came from action and inquiry. Knowledge grew from experience and events. Only years later did I see that all of my early learning had been passive, thanks to a life designed to be orderly, predictable, dull. Since I’d left Saratoga Springs, my learning had certainly been more active.

  It took Mãe’s computer approximately one minute to locate Midnight Pass in Siesta Key, part of Sarasota, Florida, and another minute for the online directory to inform me that there was no telephone listing on that street for any Pym. But the number might be unlisted, I thought, or listed in someone else’s name.

  Sarasota! My father was a creature of habit indeed — if Pym were in fact my father. One way or another, I was going to meet him and find out.

  All I needed to figure out now was the best way to travel, and whether or not to tell Mãe I was going.

  I’d come to appreciate the use of maps. Sarasota wasn’t far, only about a hundred miles south of Homosassa. I could make it in a few hours.

  Why, then, was I lying on the living room floor eating peanuts with my favorite monkey? I blamed the heat for my inertia. Walking outside felt like wading through a bowl of soup. The air smelled of overripe fruit ready to rot. It was too hot for any action, I told myself.

  But I knew the true reason for my hesitation: the question my mother had asked. What if you do find him, Ariella?

  And I remembered something he’d said, only months ago: Life is all about people leaving.

  That night, as Mãe and I were washing dishes, I said, “I think I know where my father is.”

  Mãe let a plate slip from her hands into the sudsy water. She picked it up again, and began to wash it.

  “I think he’s in Sarasota.” I rinsed the last glass and set it in the drying rack.

  My mother said, “He always liked it there.” Her voice was flat, emotionless. I couldn’t make out her thoughts, only a buzz of confusion.

  “Of course I’m not sure yet that the name I tracked down is him.” I took the plate she handed me and rinsed it.

  She was washing another plate. “Why don’t you call him?” she said.

  I explained my unsuccessful hunt to find any telephone number for Mr. Pym.

  “Pym,” she said. She removed the sink stopper, and we watched the water spiral down the drain. “So what do you propose to do now, Ariella?”

  I’d hoped that she’d tell me what to do. “I think I might go to Sarasota,” I said. I hung up the linen dish towel. “I think I need to know if he’s still alive, Mãe.”

  “In that case,” she said, “I think I’d better go with you.”

  Sarasota is a strange mix of rich and poor, natural beauty and ostentation — a hard place to know, because every mile changes your impressions of it. On its outskirts we drove past the same strip malls and signs for gated communities that characterize nearly every Florida town. But the inner city comprised older, smaller buildings that seemed to come from another era.

  As we stopped at a traffic light downtown, I saw two women, probably mother and daughter, wearing brightly patterned sun-dresses and dark glasses, reading a menu posted in a restaurant window. I envied them having nothing more pressing to decide than where to have lunch and where to go shopping.

  Mãe said, “We could use some new clothes.”

  She swerved the truck out of traffic and angled it into a parking space. “Come on, Ariella. You don’t want to meet your father looking crunchy.”

  I said, “Then you do think he’s here.”

  “Who knows?” she said. “Anyway, it’s good to be in Sarasota again.”

  My mother proved to be a power shopper — in seconds she surveyed what was available and made her decisions, not bothering to try things on. I was slow. Except for thrifting with Jane, I hadn’t done any shopping since roaming the Saratoga Springs mall with Kathleen.

  The shops here were smaller, more specialized, expensive. It was fun to feel like a girl again.

  I modeled dresses, and my mother nodded or shook her head. I liked a shirt patterned with hibiscus flowers, but she said, “Come on. You know how he is about patterns. That would freak him out.” This might have gone on for hours, but we both grew hungry.

  We decided to wear two of our purchases — a square-necked blue silk sheath for her, a smoke-colored halter dress for me — and we put the others in the truck, fed the parking meter, and headed for a café that advertised seafood.

  My mother ordered Picardo on the rocks, and she tipped half of it into my glass of cola.

  (Anyone concerned about vampires’ relatively high rates of alcohol consumption may wish to read Dr. Graham Wilson’s monograph “Metabolic Aspects of Alcohol in Clinical Nutrition Trials.” Apparently, we have extraordinary livers.)

  We ordered fish — blackened grouper for her and mahi-mahi for me. When the food came, she produced a small bottle from her handbag and shook it liberally over our food. It looked like red pepper flakes, but it tasted like Sangfroid.

  “Freeze-dried,” she said. “I carry condiments wherever I go.”

  On the drive to Midnight Pass, my mother pointed out landmarks familiar to her. “Over to the west are the Selby Botanical Gardens. That’s where we were married.”

  “I know,” I said. “I’ve got the pictures.”

  Mãe said, “I haven’t seen those pictures in years.”

  I wondered what it would feel like to lose all one’s possessions, even one’s wedding album. Should I give her the album? Or would it make her sad?

  We drove over a causeway. Sailboats dotted the bay, and I tried to picture my father living alongside a sandy white beach. My hopes began to fade as we drove down Midnight Pass Road, past row after row of high-rise buildings.

  “This doesn’t look like his scene,” I said.

  “His scene?” She was grinning. “What exactly would your father’s scene look like?”

  “More like the house in Saratoga Springs,” I said. “Old and gray and gloomy.”

  “You won’t find gloom here.” My mother turned the car into a driveway. “And not much that’s old. You said the number was 6705, right?”

  The building loomed before us, thirteen stories made of pale pink stucco. Its name, engraved in a stone slab set into a circular patch of fountain grass, was Xanadu.

  Mãe and I looked at each other. We both knew the Coleridge poem, and we mentally traded verses: “In Xanadu did Kubla Khan / A stately pleasure-dome decree: / Where Alph, the sacred river, ran / Through caverns measureless to man / Down to a sunless sea.”

  I didn’t feel optimistic. The last place in the world I would have expected to find my father was in a Florida condominium named Xanadu. The lush verses, supposedly written w
hen Coleridge was in the throes of an opium-induced dream, weren’t to my father’s taste.

  But my mother was grinning. “Remember the line about the ‘woman wailing for her demon lover’?” she said. “Ariella, if he does live here, imagine how embarrassed he must feel.”

  After we parked the truck, Mãe and I realized we had no idea where my father might be. All we had was the street number. We stared up at the anonymous doors and balconies above us. I hadn’t anticipated this problem — I’d imagined him living in a house.

  For a while we took turns in the mostly vacant parking lot, asking strangers if they could help us find our friend Mr. Pym. Strangers were few and far between. The third person I asked looked at me with so much suspicion that I went back to the truck.

  “Where is everyone?” I asked Mãe.

  “The snowbirds have flown north,” she said. “It’s a Florida phenomenon. Come May, many condos are deserted.”

  She was stretched back in the seat, listening to the radio. Johnny Cash was singing a song called “Hurt,” a cover of a Nine Inch Nails song. By now I knew most of his music. No matter what buttons you pressed on the jukebox at Flo’s Place, you got music by Cash or Nine Inch Nails.

  “The Recovery Plan needs a new strategy,” I told her.

  “Hmm?” She sat up. Then she motioned for me to hand her my cell phone.

  She punched some buttons, asked for the home office of Green Cross. Then she punched some more, and finally she must have reached a voice. “Where’s our delivery?” she said, her voice alarmingly similar to Mary Ellis Root’s. “I’m calling for Mr. Pym on Midnight Pass, Siesta Key, Florida.” She winked at me.

  “You did?” she said. “Where did you leave it?”

  A few seconds later, she said, “Well, it’s not here. Yes, you’d better do that. We’ll be expecting you.”

  She ended the call and handed me the phone. “It’s number 1235,” she said. “And tomorrow, Mr. Pym or whoever lives there will be getting another delivery of who knows what.”