The Society of S (9 page)

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.”

I was skeptical of all superstitions, but I didn’t want to hurt her feelings. “It’s very thoughtful of you,” I said.

“Put it on,” she said. Her eyes flashed at me.

I slid the string over my head.

She nodded vigorously. “Much better,” she said. “Thank goodness. I don’t sleep some nights, thinking of you. What if your father crept into your room some night and bit your neck?”

“That’s ridiculous.” The idea was too preposterous to make me angry.

She held up her hand. “I know that you love your father, Ari. But what if he can’t control himself?”

“Thank you for worrying about me,” I said, feeling she’d gone too far, “but your worry is misplaced.”

She shook her head. “Promise me you’ll wear it.”

I planned to take it off the minute she left. To placate her, I’d wear it for now. At least it smelled good.

But I kept the amulet on — not because I feared my father, but because I wanted to please Kathleen, and the little bag of lavender was a token of her love for me. There, I’ve said it —
love
. What existed between my father and me was something else, involving intellectual discourse and mutual respect and familial obligation — none of which should ever be underestimated — but love? If we felt it, we never used the word.

O
nly when you look directly at a thing, can you truly see it. Most people go through life unaware of the limitations of their eyes. But you will never be among them.

Focus on the word
pine
in this sentence. At the same time, try to read the other words to the right and the left. You may be able to decipher
word
and
in this
, depending on how far the page is from your eyes. But
pine
will be the clearest, since the center of your field of vision is directed at it.

That center is called the fovea, and it’s the part of the eye where cones are most tightly packed together. The fovea occupies roughly the same percentage of your eye as the moon occupies the night sky.

Everything else is peripheral vision. Peripheral vision is effective in detecting motion, and it helps locate predators in the dark. Animals have a much stronger sense of peripheral vision than humans. Vampires fall somewhere in between.