Incubus

by Carol Goodman

  After a few days of walking along the Battery Park Esplanade through gale-force icy winds and eating expensive ice cream I was tired of feeling sorry for myself. On the 24th I called Annie and asked if I could spend Christmas Eve with her and Maxine.

  “If you don’t mind delivering bread,” she told me.

  I’d forgotten that she and Maxine donated bread to homeless shelters on Christmas.

  “Sure,” I told her. “I can’t imagine a better way of spending the holiday.”

  An hour later Annie picked me up at the hotel. The bakery van was warm and smelled like fresh baked bread. Annie gave me a bone-crunching hug that left me covered with flour and thawed the ice in my heart for the first time in two days. I promptly burst into tears.

  “Spill it!” Annie ordered, pulling into traffic.

  I told Annie about the break up, about Rita and the Wall Street job and being left alone in a hotel room all by myself. I’d worked myself up into a snit of self-pity by the end of it.

  “There’s something you’re not telling me,” she said when I was done.

  “About Paul?” I asked, shamming innocence. “I think I told you everything he said …”

  “No, not about Paul. About what led up to Paul.”

  “But I told you about the plane and the storm and Rita …”

  “I don’t mean all that,” she said impatiently, shaking her head. Her dark curly hair was tied up in a high ponytail that swished angrily. I realized that some of the specks I’d thought were flour were gray hairs. “Paul would never have fallen in love with someone else if you hadn’t checked out first.”

  “Oh, so it’s my fault,” I said angrily, remembering now how judgmental Annie could be sometimes. “I didn’t know you were such a big fan of Paul’s.”

  “I’ve never said anything against Paul. As I’ve told you many times, I just didn’t think he was the right guy for you. I still don’t. If you had broken up with him I’d be saying ‘about time,’ but for him to break up with you means you haven’t been trying. And if you’ve been as out of it with him as you have been with me since September, I can understand why he went and fell in love with the first girl who held his hand on a bumpy flight.”

  “Hey, that’s not fair!” I said, swiveling around in my seat to face Annie. “When you first got together with Maxine I barely saw you for six months.”

  Annie raised one dark eyebrow, but kept her eyes on the road as she turned onto Canal Street. “True,” she said. “So is that why I’ve barely heard from you these last three months? You’ve been having great sex with someone new?”

  I began to splutter a denial, but one cool look from Annie silenced me. With Paul I’d been able to cling to the technicality that sex with an incubus – and one kiss with Liam Doyle – didn’t really count as cheating, but I wasn’t going to pull the wool over Annie’s keen hazel eyes.

  “Sort of,” I answered. “It depends on how you define sex.”

  “Well, hello, Bill Clinton!” Annie grinned. “And you’ve been keeping this from me because I’m so conservative and judgmental?”

  “No, I’ve been keeping this from you because you’ll think I’m crazy.”

  We’d pulled up in front of the Bowery Mission. Annie turned to me and shook her head. “Sweetie, who did I go to when I was thirteen and realized I liked girls better than boys? Who told me I wasn’t crazy, I was just gay?”

  I returned her smile. “I’m afraid this is a bit more complicated, but if you’re sure you want to hear it …”

  Annie crossed her eyes at me. “Complicated, crazy, unbelievable sex? Please honey, start talking.”

  And so I did. In between delivering fresh bread to more than a dozen shelters and soup kitchens, from the Bowery to Chelsea to Hell’s Kitchen and the Upper West Side, I told Annie everything that had happened at Fairwick from the first visitation of the incubus to his banishment and about all the creatures I’d met – the witches, fairies, brownies, dwarves, gnomes, vampires, and magical doormice – and the tantalizing glimpse I’d had of the world of Faerie through the triptych door on the Solstice. She listened in silence, her lips pursed, her eyes focused on the city traffic, opening her mouth only to hurl invectives at an S.U.V. with New Jersey plates that cut her off. I finished just as we reached our last stop, the men’s shelter at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine.

  She switched the engine off and turned to me. I was expecting her to tell me that I needed to get professional help. Knowing Annie, she’d offer to go with me and support me in any way she could. But all she said was, “Come with me. There’s something I need to show you.”

  She asked two of the helpers at the soup kitchen if they wouldn’t mind unloading the bread (they didn’t), and took me up a flight of back stairs to the cathedral. While at grad school at Columbia I’d gotten into the habit of visiting the massive, unfinished Episcopalian cathedral. I didn’t consider myself religious, but I liked the peace of the hushed, vaulted space and the beauty of the stained-glass windows. I liked, too, the Cathedral’s philosophy of interaction with the modern world. I had learned on a tour that each of the side aisle windows was devoted to an aspect of human endeavor, such as the arts and communication. These windows had secular and often surprisingly modern details – like a panel with Jack Benny playing his violin in front of a microphone in the Communications window. I also liked St. John’s mission. First constructed in 1893, the same year as Ellis Island, the cathedral was dedicated to aiding immigrants. There was a sense of inclusion and tolerance – symbolized perhaps most notably by the huge gold menorahs and Shinto vases flanking the altar, but also by the Chapels of the Seven Tongues which circled the apse, each one dedicated to an immigrant group. It was to the Italian chapel – St. Ambrose’s – that Annie now took me.

  “Did you know I used to come here to pray when we were in high school?” she asked as we entered the ornate, Renaissance-style chapel.

  “No,” I said, sitting down beside her on a folding chair. “I thought you gave up the Church in the eighth grade.”

  “The Catholic church,” she said, folding her hands and looking up at the altar. “I figured why should I keep going to a church that told me I was going to hell because of what I was? But after a while I missed something – a feeling I’d gotten at Mass sometimes, you know?”

  She looked at me, an uncharacteristically uncertain look on her face, and I realized she was embarrassed. We talked plenty about our sex lives, but never about religion. “Yeah,” I said, “I think I know what you mean. I used to come to the Cathedral between classes – for cultural and art history reasons, I’d tell myself – but also for the feeling I got sitting here.”

  “Huh, so we’re both closet church groupies and we never knew it.” She grinned, looking more like the self-assured Annie I knew. “I came to this chapel in particular because it’s dedicated to an Italian saint. I figured it was one thing to give up being a Catholic, and another to give up being Italian.”

  “Dio mio!” I exclaimed in mock horror. “Perish the thought!” And then, in a more serious voice, I asked, “Did you really think you’d have to give up being Italian because you’re gay?”

  “I know it sounds stupid, but I didn’t know what – or who – I might have to give up. I was relieved that I didn’t have to give up my best friend—” she gave my hand a quick squeeze “—but you know I didn’t tell my mother until I was sixteen. The day I was going to tell her I came here first. I prayed that my mother wouldn’t be too upset, and that I wouldn’t lose my temper if she was, and that she wouldn’t … stop loving me.” Annie’s voice broke on the last words and I reached over and gave her hand a squeeze. I kept hold of it while she continued. “So I’m sitting here and this old woman comes in and sits down next to me. She looks like your typical Italian nonna. Black dress, black kerchief tied over her hair, which was gray – I was sure it was gray when she sat down – a widow’s hump the size of a basketball, no teeth. She was muttering something under her breath whe
n she came in. Some prayer, I figured, although it didn’t sound like Italian or English or even Latin. Anyway, we’re both sitting here and after a couple of minutes she puts her hand on mine, just like you have your hand on mine now, and she says to me, ‘There’s nothing to be afraid of, Anne Marie. Your mother loves you for who you are and she will always love you.’ I started to ask her how she knew what I was afraid of – did she know me? – but when I turned I was blinded by a light behind her, from the window, I thought, only it was an overcast day. I could still see her silhouetted against the light, but she was no longer stooped and old, and her hair was long and shiny white. Then I looked away for a moment and she was gone. Lying in the chair where she’d been was this …”

  Annie removed from her pocket a small, round, white stone. It was worn away in the center so that one edge formed a slender crescent. “I took it with me and held it in my hand when I told my mother I was gay. You know what she said, right?”

  “‘Better you should like women than be a puta like your cousin Esta,’” I said, repeating the line that Annie had told me years ago.

  “And then she hugged me and scolded me for not telling her sooner. The old woman was right. My mother never loved me any less …” Annie wiped her eyes. Sylvana Mastroanni had died of breast cancer when Annie was eighteen. “That old woman gave me the courage to face my mother and if I hadn’t – and she had died before I did …” Annie stopped, unable to finish the thought. After a few moments she continued. “I’ve always believed that old woman was some kind of angel … or maybe, after hearing what you’ve told me, a fairy or an ancient goddess. So I believe that you’ve ended up at a college for witches and fairies.” She smiled. “Hell, I’m not even that surprised. You were always a little … different.”

  “Thanks!” I said, swatting her on the arm. “You make me sound like a head case.”

  “No, I didn’t mean it like that. It’s just that your background – dead parents, frosty, forbidding grandmother …”

  “My grandmother wasn’t that bad,” I interrupted, thinking guiltily that I ought to call her tomorrow. I hadn’t spoken with her at all since I’d called to tell her that I’d gotten the job at Fairwick, but then she’d been so snippy that I hadn’t wanted to speak to her for a while. “And she did her best for a sixty-year-old woman suddenly saddled with an obnoxious pre-teen.”

  “Okay, okay, I meant no disrespect to Adelaide. I’m just pointing out that you always had the set-up to turn into the heroine of one of those gothic romances you’re always reading … and now you have.”

  “I’m not a heroine,” I pointed out, trying to hide my immense relief that Annie believed me behind a façade of grumpiness. “Merely an assistant professor. I don’t even have tenure yet.”

  Annie put her arm around my shoulder. “Hey, from what you told me, you’re important to these people … uh, fairies … witches … whatever they are. You’re the doorkeeper! They’ll have to give you tenure!”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  MOUSE OR NO mouse, waking up alone in a hotel room on Christmas morning was, I decided, the pits. Ralph’s company – he had taken to sleeping in the ice bucket with a shoeshine flannel for a blanket – just gave my solitude that little bit of Victorian piquancy needed to make my situation seem truly pathetic: like Cinderella who has only her little animal friends for company.

  I ordered us a big room service breakfast, price be damned, to cheer myself up, and then I did what I’d been thinking I should do last night: I called my grandmother in Santa Fe. I got her voicemail. I wished her a merry Christmas and told her I’d thought of her last night at St. John the Divine. Then I hung up feeling that I’d done my duty without actually having to talk to her. Ten minutes later the phone rang.

  “So you’re in town,” my grandmother said without a hello or seasons’s greetings. “Have you come to your senses and left that second-rate college?”

  “No, Adelaide.” She had dispensed with me calling her Grandma when I was ten because she said it made her feel old. “I’m just in town for a few days …”

  “Good,” she cut me off briskly. “So am I. I’m staying at my club. If you don’t have any other plans for the day we could have tea here.”

  For a moment I considered telling her I was going to Annie’s. I hated admitting to her that I was friendless on Christmas Day, but then I realized that she was apparently alone – and lonely enough to be checking her home voicemail by remote – and chided myself for my selfishness.

  “I’d love to,” I told her.

  “Come at one,” she answered crisply. “And remember, the Grove Club doesn’t allow jeans.”

  I hung up, feeling like a sulky teenager who had to be reminded to dress properly for her college interviews, and remembering why I always tried to keep my interactions with my grandmother brief. I’d meant it when I defended her to Annie last night – she wasn’t that bad. She could have sent me off to boarding school, but she’d opened her small, tidy two-bedroom apartment to me, giving up her study for me to use as a bedroom (although many of her books and papers remained stored in my closet), and dutifully oversaw my education until I went to college. It had been a little jarring when she retired to Santa Fe the same week I graduated from high school. It meant that I had to spend all my holidays either in the dorm or on a friend’s couch. But I couldn’t really blame her. At least she’d waited until I graduated high school to move. She’d been complaining about the New York winters and talking about retiring to Santa Fe, where she had a house she’d inherited from an aunt, for years. I was surprised that she’d come back to New York during the winter.

  I dressed carefully in a wool skirt and cashmere sweater and put my hair up, recalling that Adelaide always commented on how long it was if I left it down. I left early, figuring the subways would run slowly on Christmas Day. I still had an hour to kill, though, when I reached Midtown. I walked along Fifth Avenue, looking at the Christmas windows in Lord & Taylor, recalling a Christmas my mother had taken me to see the windows.

  “Look, fairies!” she had said, pointing to a flock of winged figures crafted out of silk and gauze hovering above a snow-covered diorama of Central Park. “If only they really looked like that.”

  I’d always thought that she had meant “If only they really existed!” but now I wondered if my mother had known enough about fairies to know they weren’t quite so sweet and adorable. Diana Hart had said I had fairy blood, but from whom? My mother or my father? I supposed I could ask my grandmother, but phrasing such a question to Adelaide Danbury was unthinkable.

  As I walked past the public library’s main branch I realized guiltily that there were other more pressing genealogical questions. I’d meant to use my time in the city to look up the descendants of Hiram Scudder and Abigail Fisk, but I’d been too caught up in my own break-up drama to make it here. Now it was too late. The library was obviously closed on Christmas Day … unless …

  I dug into my wallet, pulled out the I.M.P. card Liz Book had given me, and read the back.

  ACCESS TO SPECIAL COLLECTIONS AND EXCLUSIVE HOURS AT PARTICIPATING INSTITUTIONS.

  Liz had said the main branch was a participating institution, but did I have to make an appointment? I really should get Liz Book to find my orientation packet and give me some hands-on training in casting spells. My knees were still stinging from the tumble I’d taken when I’d cast the wrong spell on the Solstice … but in the meantime, it couldn’t hurt to see if the card could get me in the library.

  Feeling pretty foolish, I walked up the granite steps, past Patience and Fortitude, the twin lions, resplendent in their Christmas wreaths. When I got to the locked and gated doors I felt even more foolish. What had I thought? That I’d wave my membership card in front of the lock and the great brass doors would swing open?

  I did notice, though, that etched amid the swirling acanthus filigree were two crescent moons facing away from each other, just like on the I.M.P. card, which I still had in my hand. Feeling
sillier than ever I swiped the card over the moons on the door.

  Something clicked.

  I stared at the door until another click startled me out of my surprise. I tried the handle. It didn’t move. But then, remembering how time sensitive the buzzer on my apartment door was I tried it again. As soon as I heard the click I pulled the door handle. The door opened.

  I stood gaping at the open door for several moments until a voice called from inside.

  “Are you coming in or not? You’re letting in a draft.”

  I opened the heavy door and stepped into the great marble foyer. The giant marble candelabra and hanging lamps were unlit. The only light came from the clerestory arches. In one of the deepest shadows a slim young man muffled in a heavy wool coat and voluminous scarf sat on a folding chair. He had been reading a book with the aid of a clip-on book light, but was now looking up at me, his bony hand reaching toward me.

  “Card, please.”

  I handed over my I.M.P. card, hoping I wasn’t violating some academic protocol by barging into the library on Christmas Day. The young man held the card up to a weak ray of light and tilted it back and forth. The moons waxed full and waned to slim crescents on the plastic surface.

  “Okay,” he said, getting to his feet with a sigh and a creak of bones. Although he couldn’t be more than thirty, his sandy hair was thinning on top and he acted like an old man – and dressed like one. Underneath the heavy tweed overcoat he wore a plaid vest with pocket watch and tie.

  “Justin Plean,” he said, holding out a raw-boned hand. “Very Special Collections. What can I help you with today?”

  “I’m trying to track down the descendants of two … um … persons.”

  “What sort of persons?”

  “Um … I’m not sure … do you mean …?”

  “Fairies, witches, demons, or miscellaneous?”

  “Witches,” I replied, wondering what “miscellaneous” covered.

  “Very good,” he replied, all business. “Come with me.”