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  He was everything a fan could hope for. He was collegial with Arnold and Snyder, more playfully goofy with the younger boys. Every single member received a poster—a Virgil Finlay illustration for Masquerade Digest with a one-eyed Martian removing a fake human mask (Virgil Finlay, value in 1955 set at $10,600, which I know because Snyder owned the original when it went to auction). And then, even more wonderful, Mr. Moses distributed one-eyed monster masks (all missing by 1955, and probably valueless even if they hadn’t been).

  Being a girl and thus an eternal non-member, I was banished from the club’s secret after-dinner meeting even though I’d read every copy of Monsters in the Movies from under Snyder’s bed and examined them page by page before returning them in pristine order to the places Snyder was sure I would never find. Mom saw me hanging around the doorway leading to the basement—down to the place where what really mattered was happening—and she swatted me away. “That’s all nonsense anyway,” she said. But if it was so nonsensical, why was she breaking all her rules about waste and sugar and roast beef on vegetable dinner night? When she got busy elsewhere I crept as far as the third stair down and sat myself down just out of everybody’s sight.

  At the time I wouldn’t have put it this way because I was thirteen years old, but I look back now with a clearer idea about what was radiating from all these little boys. I felt it then but I didn’t understand it. Those pictures of decapitated humans and creatures with eviscerated trunks—they kicked off a kind of anxious, thrilling, physical, dark sweetness. I wasn’t old enough at the time to call that sweetness sexual, but I felt something even back then that I might have called desire. I didn’t know what it was desire for, but I guess the Monsters in the Movies club members were confused about that question as well.

  The visit from Mr. Moses temporarily changed Snyder’s life. He went from solitary weirdo with a pile of magazines under his bed to King of the Comic-Book People. Other human beings wrote down his telephone number and then actually used it. They asked him what he thought about Princess of Mars and Space Girl and the Masked Monkeys and listened respectfully when he told them. I think our mom hoped this would happen, and that was why she baked cookies and passed them out like they were loaves and fishes. She wanted Snyder to have a Sermon on the Mount moment. Everybody has a hope, and this was our mom’s hope—that Snyder would be happy. It’s the burden we lay down on the people we love, but there’s nothing else for it—they have to bear it.

  WHAT WE CALL ROMANCE:

  The Pirate Lover

  When I’d asked Mrs. Daniels what exactly the word “romance” meant when it referred to books, she said it just meant an adventure story with travel and monsters and “Triumph in the End.” But most people nowadays, she said with a sigh, think it just means an adventure for girls that leads to a wedding. Like mixing up Nancy Drew and Odysseus? I asked. She thought about that and said no, she didn’t think that was quite right.

  I’d only just met Nancy Drew. The sports car seemed like it was there to make me admire her for being rich, which I didn’t. The pleasantly chubby sidekick with “unruly hair” just seemed to be there to make Nancy herself look prettier, which it did, and which I resented, being myself a little unruly and maybe even to some people’s way of looking at girls, a little chubby. I expressed these reservations to Mrs. Daniels, who said she understood completely and threw The Hidden Staircase into the fire. It was mostly a symbolic gesture. We dug it back out before it burst into flame because the truth is we liked Nancy Drew mysteries even if we had occasional doubts about Nancy herself.

  I had not given up The Pirate Lover. In fact, I had reread it three times. The secrecy, the scuttling if I was called to dinner or chores so nobody would go looking and find me in the closet—it gave the illicit story more power over me. I read slowly, lived it over a much longer period of time than I would have if I hadn’t been hiding it. A person thinks about the interrupted story in ways that a straight shot through doesn’t invite. The Pirate Lover had my complete attention, as it should have. A story that could hollow out a stomach or set a little tingling current up a neck deserves your respect. I gave myself over to it.

  THE PIRATE LOVER

  The Dance at Last

  Electra had not informed her mother of her change in costume, and when she appeared at the bottom of the stairs on the evening of the ball in her Marais gown, her reception was icy. She was ordered to change her clothing. She refused coolly.

  “You can flaunt this little independence now, my girl, but when you step into the ballroom you will do as I have told you to do! You will follow the order of your dance card and step out first with Monsieur Y and last with Monsieur X. I will say to you only once more that I hope you conduct yourself more circumspectly than this new fey and willful attitude makes me fear you will conduct yourself. Electra, you must not finish the season without an offer, and both these men are eminently desirable. You risk everything by appearing in a dress so clearly immodest. Every single girl in Paris envies you for the names on that dance card, and if you throw away this chance at security for us both…” Her mother did not finish this sentence but stumbled on, near tears. “I remind you that we are poor, Electra, and you do not have the right to behave like a girl who is anything but what you are.”

  Anything but what she was. And what was that? Electra mused. So different were the feelings she had experienced in the last weeks that she could not be sure what she was. Typically when she stepped into a room she attracted the warm approval that a pretty girl will attract. But that night something in her caused every head to swivel in her direction and the gazes she drew could not be accurately described as warm or approving. It was not simply the provocative dress that had accomplished this change. When she passed a mirror she was startled herself at her new carriage, the sweeping energy of her movement. Something had changed, and it left her indifferent to the gossip that she heard flowing around her. Parisian social circles at this level concerned themselves very little with a powerless young woman’s feelings. No one cared if she overheard words about “knowing one’s place” or “draggle-tail dress” so why should she herself care? The women kept their distance; the men did not. Electra kept her shoulders square and her expression amused as she took Monsieur X’s hand, and then Monsieur Y’s, and then any number of eager young men’s hands as they argued for the few empty places on her dance card. But they fell away when Basil Le Cherche stepped to her side. “Mademoiselle?” he murmured, bowing slightly.

  “I do not believe you have the next dance, sir,” she said mildly, lifting her dance card toward him just the slightest bit.

  “Monsieur W and I have spoken about his place on your dance card and he has generously yielded it to me.” He took her hand and led her to the floor. “You are looking ravishing tonight.”

  “You are too forward, sir.”

  “Am I?”

  “You ask as if you did not know your reputation as a rake.” The words flew out of her mouth before she could withdraw them, and she found that after an instant’s shock at her own indiscretion she did not care what he thought.

  “Truly?” He smiled. “How kind of you to take an interest in my reputation. But I tell you, on my own behalf, that I only seduce or am seduced by women who are themselves rakes. They understand what they wager with me,” he said, taking her hand and then drawing her into the dance, moving as close as custom allowed. Perhaps a little closer. “You have been told that I am wealthy? And so you assumed I was the target of these ambitious young women’s plans?”

  “You speak carelessly of young women whose choices are very narrow, sir, and whose path calls up judgment on all sides. You know nothing of being a young woman.”

  “This is true. However, you may rest assured that these young women regard me as unmarriageable, as I am.”

  “Is this because you are a pirate?”

  “I am no pirate, my dear, but a privateer. I carry a letter of marque, which gives me permission to act as a ship of war again
st our enemies. It keeps my men safe from ships whose captains would enjoy pressing them into service.”

  “Why are you here?”

  “Here at this cotillion instead of at sea?”

  She nodded.

  “I was born into this world. And it suits me to observe it on occasion. I am regarded as interesting, and that, along with my wealth, is why I am admitted here and anywhere I choose to go. I move in circles here, in Venice, in London … in certain Far Eastern ports.”

  She did not say, though she thought, that his beauty also made him welcome at these superficial gatherings where the ability to carry off the latest fashions mattered perhaps more than one’s goodness. Le Cherche seemed to move in the crowded ballroom with complete unselfconsciousness—possessed, distant, fluid, quick. He turned her gracefully, a perfect partner if he had not been a seducer and pirate as well. At the dance’s end she pulled away.

  “This next dance is already given,” she said when he kept her hand firmly in his own.

  He smiled and slipped an arm around her, his hand set firmly at the center of her back. Le Cherche brushed aside the man who tried to take his place as Electra’s rightful partner for the next dance. She began to protest, but Le Cherche’s authority was so complete that she found herself being guided smoothly to the center of the room for the Valse a Deux Temps. Ballroom dancing was relatively new to Paris, and opinions were still divided as to whether it was too immodestly intimate. Older guests were still uncomfortable with the sight of a roomful of women being held in men’s arms, faces so close that one’s lips might accidentally brush a strand of the partner’s hair. Electra had been prepared for this new fashion at the balls, given lessons not only on where to place her feet but her eyes, taught how to gently repel advances that could possibly make her vulnerable to charges of immodesty. In Le Cherche’s arms, however, she found herself led by a man who was not accustomed to resistance in his partners. His hands, the set of his shoulders and torso, the quick shift in the position of his hips in relation to her own—her lessons had been with an inexpensive, second-rate dancing master whose lumbering exactitude had demanded concentration on her part—but this partner was effortlessly nimble. He seemed to not only guide her movements but anticipate them. She felt herself stepping perhaps too close, inhaling the scent of his hair when a turn brought her into contact with a tendril. Worse, she felt him feel her pleasure, felt him respond by offering new chances to test the limits of the dance’s illicit opportunities. Midway through the dance she became aware of stares, unfriendly and coolly assessing stares that presaged gossip linking her to this arrogant man. She pulled abruptly away. “Thank you for the dance, Monsieur Le Cherche,” she said hastily, and turned her back upon him as she retreated. “Momma, it is time to go,” she said quietly when she reached the room where the evening’s midnight repast was just being laid out and her mother lingered at the edge of a circle discussing new matches being made that night. “Call the carriage. Please.” Something about her daughter’s expression led the older woman to make her apologies without hesitation.

  “Did something happen?” her mother asked when they were alone in the carriage.

  “Nothing, Mother. I am simply tired.”

  But they both knew this was a lie.

  * * *

  On my next reading afternoon with Mrs. Daniels I found her flipping through a much, much handled book. The pages had swollen with damp and then been awkwardly pressed again, leaving the whole thing lumpy. The spine was broken in so many places that some pages were threatening to flutter out and away. She handed it to me.

  “Start in the middle of the page,” she told me. “Our main character and her employer are talking to each other after she’s just saved his life by smelling smoke, running into his bedroom, and putting out a fire.” She jabbed at the line she wanted and handed over a thick book. I read:

  ‘I knew,’ he continued, you would do me good in some way, at some time;—I saw it in your eyes when I first beheld you: their expression and smile did not—did not—strike delight to my very inmost heart so for nothing. People talk of natural sympathies; I have heard of good genii—there are grains of truth in the wildest fable. My cherished preserver, good night!’

  Strange energy was in his voice, strange fire in his look.

  Till morning dawned I was tossed on a buoyant but unquiet sea, where billows of trouble rolled under surges of joy. I thought sometimes I saw beyond its wild waters a shore, sweet as the hills of Beulah, and now and then a freshening gale wakened by hope, bore my spirit triumphantly towards the bourne; but I could not reach it, even in fancy,—a counteracting breeze blew off land, and continually drove me back. Sense would resist delirium, judgment would warm passion. Too feverish to rest, I rose as soon as day dawned.

  “What’s wrong with the lady?” I asked.

  “She is falling in love with the man whose life she has just saved. In these kinds of stories it is a requirement that someone’s life be saved.”

  “What was the good thing she did for him?”

  Mrs. Daniels sighed the sigh she sighed when she thought my question was tiresome. “The man, unknown to the young woman who is too feverish to rest, has a wife. That wife set his bed on fire, trying to kill him.”

  “Why would his wife set him on fire?”

  “Who knows why any wife wants to set her husband on fire, my dear, but in this case it’s possible that the wife knows that her husband is falling in love with another woman—our heroine. Also, he locked the wife in his attic and hired a woman named Grace Poole to keep her prisoner there. Perhaps this too disturbs her.”

  “Why would the man lock up his wife?”

  “He argues that his wife is intemperate, wild, impetuous, unfaithful. Crazy.”

  “Is she?”

  “Possibly. But then again, those words describe the husband himself to a tee, so perhaps he misreads the lady.”

  Mrs. Daniels put on her glasses and turned to the last third of the book, checking margins and dog-eared pages. She found a spot, hit it with her pointer finger, and passed it back to me. “Here,” she said, “I give you the attic-bound wife.”

  In the deep shade, at the further end of the room, a figure ran backwards and forwards. What it was, whether beast or human being, one could not, at first sight, tell; it groveled, seemingly, on all fours; it snatched and growled like some strange wild animal: but it was covered with clothing; and a quantity of dark, grizzled hair, wild as a mane, hid its head and face.

  “Mrs. Daniels, this lady looks definitely crazy to me.” I had heard Arnold Strato use the word “definitely” on Tuesday and had used it myself about seven times since then. “Definitely.” Eight times. I set the book down. “Is she okay in the end?”

  “I’m afraid the things that happened to her destroy her. She is not saved.”

  “Oh.”

  “Oh, indeed.” Mrs. Daniels nodded.

  “How could she have been saved?” I asked.

  “She needed to be beheld, seen by someone who loves what he or she sees.”

  “Mrs. Daniels, have you ever saved a man?”

  “Perhaps. The man in question believed that I had.”

  “What did your husband need to be saved from?”

  “The man in question was not my husband.”

  “Oh.”

  “It isn’t quite as simple as Miss Eyre would lead us to believe, but she does manage to touch on some of the salient feelings. That is why I read her every now and then. Also, she reminds me.”

  I wasn’t sure what she was thinking of, but I determined right on the spot that I too was going to have things I wanted to be reminded of. Whatever they were.

  NEAVE

  Christmas

  In 1939, Daddy was relieved of his job at the General Electric boiler room. Fired, in other words. They’d lost a contract, they said. I’d never had much interest in what Daddy did when he left in the morning but life was certainly easier when he was busy and away. Now he was around
, frowzy and irritable. Our mother got quieter and quieter. Roast beef disappeared from our lives and was replaced with vegetable casseroles, ground chuck, and the less glamorous parts of pigs.

  No one told Jane that when your father doesn’t have a job at Christmas that you should dampen down your hopes, present-wise. This didn’t discourage her. Disappointment and disaster have never been more than the drama that precedes the happy ending to her. Then and now, Jane believed that in the end your wishes come true, and if something besides the wish showed up, then you must have made a mistake about what you thought you wanted. That was how Jane Terhune managed her life.

  But back to 1939, a year with carefully parceled-out coal and lots of vegetable dinners. We told her that ponies don’t fit in Santa’s sleigh and they made reindeer nervous, but she went ahead and wrote PONEE on her Christmas list anyhow, all capitals and an illustration of the kind of pony she wanted directly below the list: a little piebald stocky thing with ears that looked like a rabbit’s. She picked out a name and had a serious talk with the ice man, who had a gray gelding named Bonehead, about hay and grain and stabling. When once again there was a package with home-knitted mittens under the tree instead of a PONEE, she stuffed them with paper, had me help her sew button eyes on them, and arranged for the two mittens to fall in love by supper and be married by bedtime. By Epiphany she’d dressed empty thread spools in ribbons and toilet paper and made them the mittens’ children. I helped her.