The Little Clan

by Iris Martin Cohen

  “I don’t think that’s me,” Ava said. “What’s going on?”

  “Well, these guys are stealing the fruits of my labor through the historical accumulation of capital.” Rodney had been trying to raise Ava’s consciousness, unsuccessfully, for as long as she worked there, and she was never sure when he was joking with her or not. It made her nervous.

  “I mean this afternoon.”

  “Well, it’s a constant process.” He smiled. “But if you’re referring to these bozos, they are apparently a bunch of people that think Sherlock Holmes is a real person. Want one?” He held out a sugared orange slice wrapped in cellophane. Rodney was good at pilfering the candy bowls of various Lazarus employees’ desks, or as he liked to refer to it, redistributing the spoils.

  She took it. “And maybe a glass of scotch? Neat.” Because she always dressed so nicely and lived on the premises, Aloysius allowed her to use the club facilities, a privilege not extended to the other employees. It was a strange in-between place to occupy in the establishment, but Ava liked it because it made her feel like a governess. Unfortunately, Aloysius was no Mr. Rochester.

  She sucked her candy and tried to casually look around the room. There were only a few stragglers left, chatting in small groups. A slim older man approached the bar, and Ava nervously sipped her glass. He spoke to her with the friendly ease of conventioneers. “Whiskey is the thing to drink while we are in New York City, yes?” He had a Pepé Le Pew French accent. Ava picked a cocktail napkin from a stack nearby and wiped her nose though she didn’t need to, nodding just enough to be ambiguous, in case he wasn’t actually talking to her. “I see you have chosen the same. To America.” He raised his glass.

  Rodney flicked at a spot of dust on the bar with the towel that hung from his waistband. “She’s drinking scotch,” he muttered.

  Ava obligingly clinked glasses. He had a slightly formal way of speaking, although the way he was looking at her left her trying to remember whether she was wearing nice underwear. “I don’t believe I saw you at last year’s gathering.” His dark hair was sprinkled with silver, his eyes above heavy circles were cerulean, his tweed blazer fit ostentatiously well. “I’m sure I would have remembered.”

  “You didn’t. I’m not supposed to be here. I’m not actually a member of the BSI.” It seemed better to confess right away.

  “I thought not. A member of the Lazarus Club then?”

  He didn’t appear offended or about to turn her out of the party, and this gave Ava courage. “Yes, well, no. I work here. I run the library upstairs. Or at least I keep a bunch of old books company.”

  “Lucky books.” It was only the slightest lift of the eyebrows.

  “I heard that the Baker Street Irregulars were downstairs, and I got so excited.”

  “Really?” The Frenchman looked genuinely surprised. “Well, what luck.” He turned to Rodney. “Another round for fate. For strangers who pass in the night.”

  Rodney shook his head. “Maybe it’s a librarian thing.”

  Ava downed her scotch. “I’ve read every story a million times. I have all the annotated works with the Sidney Paget illustrations, everything.” She felt hot as she spoke, a prickling heat that made her eyes water for no clear reason. To speak out loud about something so close to her heart was harder than she anticipated, and she tried to talk quickly so as to be able to stop sooner.

  When the Frenchman extended his hand, she felt very relieved. “Allow me to introduce myself. Jules Delauncy, BSI, president of the Sherlock Holmes Society of France.”

  “Ava.” The pause after her name seemed so empty of Holmesian credentials, she almost resolved to turn and run back to the library.

  Jules Delauncy didn’t seem to notice and, resting his elbows on the bar, spoke to the dim skylight with a drawling satisfaction. “Delighted. You know, Holmes had relations particular to France.”

  Ava glowed with the opportunity to prove herself. “His grandmother’s brother, the painter, Vernet.”

  Despite the low illumination of the room, his eyes visibly lit up. “You must meet the others.”

  “But I’m not even supposed to be here.”

  He took her elbow. “As my guest, please, you’re obviously one of the enlightened. And I have certain privileges as the president of the oldest and most influential Sherlock Holmes society in all of France. Please.” He gently inclined her toward a group of men nearby, chatting with the satisfied air of long-tenured English professors. The circle rippled open at her approach with some surprised throat clearing and tie straightening. One gentleman’s gesture of welcome was so enthusiastic, Amstel Light bubbled up and spilled all over his wrist.

  A few hours later, perched on top of her desk, Ava floated in a cloud of bliss. The treasurer of the Welsh Deerstalkers and the president elect of the Maiwand Jezails were perusing the shelves, delighted to have found a complete set of Hunting in Zambia, vols. I–IX. The great-grandnephew once removed of Arthur Conan Doyle hovered behind them, tall and thin, peering at the titles with a nearsighted squint, while a member of the Cimbrian Friends of Baker Street snored quietly in a chair by the cold marble fireplace, a copy of How to Be Your Own Barrister splayed open on his chest. The Baker Street Irregulars had been delighted to accept her invitation for tea in the library and had made themselves at home. She felt as though their appreciation of the surroundings reflected back on her, and while she wished more of them were actually talking to her, she didn’t want to push herself forward.

  A draft from the window ran across her neck. Against the late turning of a summer evening, the president of the Sherlock Holmes Society of France was sitting on the windowsill, letting the smoke from his calabash pipe float out into the streetlamp-spotted twilight. He gestured to her, and she sat next to him on the windowsill as if acknowledging a previous intimacy. There was something in the way he watched her, smiling, as she served tea to his colleagues, as though she was a discovery that he was showing off. She liked the feeling and had started leaning plantlike toward his warming approval. Finally after all those years of failure with the opposite sex, here was a man who understood her. He removed his pipe and indicated the room with it. “You are very fortunate to be able to work in such a Holmes-looking place. It makes you glow. I can imagine you there, trembling behind your veil, asking for his help, maybe to find a missing lover?”

  She paused. She never really imagined herself as a client like this, those inconsequential strangers just passing through the intimate world of Holmes and Watson, but her gratitude to have someone to talk to about these things made her overlook the slight. “I still need to hang up a Persian slipper,” she said finally. He chuckled and she flushed with pleasure.

  He looked closely at her. “But don’t you have somewhere you need to be on a Friday night, a beautiful young woman like yourself? No?” He began refilling his pipe. “How could you be unspoken for? What knowledge of the canon you have.”

  She waited, thinking this was perhaps the moment when he would invite her to join the BSI, but he didn’t. Maybe she was being presumptuous, and she coughed a little to cover her disappointment.

  The noise roused the great-grandnephew once removed of Conan Doyle, and he wandered over. “Is our Frenchman bothering you, the dirty old reprobate?” He elbowed his colleague. “Not that I blame him.” He lifted her hand, and his moustache tickled her knuckles. “You are a breath of delight in the musty halls of our middle-aged lives, like Miss Morstan in The Sign of the Four.”

  Ava dipped her shoulders in what would have been a curtsey were she not sitting on the window ledge. She wasn’t thrilled about the comparison with Watson’s wife either, so forgettable, he often forgot he was married in the later stories.

  “I hate to tear you away, Delauncy, but we’ve got to go check on the preparations for tonight. There’s not a damn hotel in this town that stocks a good Madeira, and my tails aren’t going to press th
emselves.”

  “Our annual banquet is tonight,” Jules explained, “and as mentioned, I have certain responsibilities.”

  Ava was so close to asking for an invitation, but she assumed the desire must be written all over her face, and if these two gentlemen were ignoring it, they must have a good reason. “Please, don’t let me keep you,” she said, and to cover up a yearning that was raw and ugly and very familiar, she picked up an empty teacup and saucer.

  Jules slid off of the ledge, tapping his pipe out of the window and slipping it into his jacket pocket. “Let me help you with those.” He picked up a teacup from the desk and followed her as she hurriedly thanked the other Irregulars, feeling ashamed of her temerity, and carried other cups into the hall.

  She ducked into a small alcove that had been fitted out with a sink and a hot plate, but Jules Delauncy stopped her. “Surely you don’t expect me to find her, the one, my very own Irene Adler here in this perfect building and let her escape from me so soon?” The sudden warmth in his tone surprised Ava; she was certainly no glamorous, mysterious Irene Adler, the only woman Sherlock Holmes could be said to have loved, but it was nice that he was still talking to her.

  Jules was handing her his teacup, but then somehow it appeared on her other side, and when she turned around, she landed right against the ardent lips of the president of the oldest and most prestigious Sherlock Holmes society in France. Ava’s first instinct was revulsion at this strange man’s tongue in her mouth, then flattery that such a preeminent Holmesian desired her, then surprised fascination at the kiss itself. She had never kissed an older man before. A succession of literary Frenchmen flew through her mind—waxed moustaches and champagne and amatory dexterity—and she was, finally, for one glorious moment, every Victorian ingenue, helpless in the arms of a passionate seducer. He had a warm smell that she couldn’t identify but that was all the same expected—leather, vetiver, bay rum, expensive shirts, masculine, slightly formal. With a dizzying sensation like trying to focus the two sides of an old-fashioned stereoscope, the outline of all her romantic fantasies came into line with the very real man pressing against her, and when he asked her to meet him later for a drink, she agreed. It was not exactly what she had imagined, but it was better than going home and drinking cough syrup and pretending it was laudanum.

  Later that night, reeling slightly from the three absinthe frappes Rodney had made for her and leaning heavily on the arm of Jules Delauncy’s dark tailcoat—she had never actually seen one in real life before and was thrilled to be allowed to press up against its severe elegance—she was crossing the marble foyer when Castor, the doorman, called to her.

  “Came today, Miss. Mr. Savoy tried to take them for you, but I wouldn’t let him.” He pointed at a bunch of daisies in a purple vase.

  Ava opened the card. “Happy Birthday!!! Do you know how hard you are to find? Do you even have a phone? I’m back. Call me. Stephanie.” There was a number on the bottom.

  “I knew it.” Jules Delauncy looked at the flowers suspiciously, pulling the cuffs down from his sleeves, and flashing links that read 221b. “An adventuress.”

  Cheered enormously that her friend was back and a bit pleased at the aspersion as well, Ava pulled him gently toward the elevator. Stephanie was going to love hearing about this.

  2

  A gentle whistling sounded somewhere in the distance. High, whining like the deflation of a tire, it rose, subsided and then summoned her again—insistent, exasperating. The press of a mattress, a strand of hair caught against her cheek—from the deep well where memory and sleep curl their fluid boundaries, Ava felt a gentle dissuasion urging her from waking up. A thick, queasy feeling whispered that she might be hungover, and from there she fell quickly into a vague, but seemingly significant awareness that she was naked. She opened her eyes and then shut them again immediately.

  Unfortunately, this only allowed the memory of the night before to reconstitute itself that much more clearly in the darkened screen of her eyelids. Jules Delauncy on one knee, in sock garters and graying undershirt, proposing to her in a fake Sherlock Holmes vernacular—would she be Irene to his Holmes, etc. Jules Delauncy taking down her hair and clumsily ripping long strands between the bobby pins despite the gravity of his gestures and expressions. Jules Delauncy climbing on top of her, and her romantic imagination receding before the tactile reality of flesh in flesh and leaving her alone and stranded beneath an unknown male animal.

  The college boys with whom she probably should have had this moment appeared to her mind with their fresh, American smell, deodorant and laundry detergent, innocent and eager, and in this moment as appealing as puppies. But a persistent romantic impulse had always kept her from this final gesture of surrendered intimacy; she had been saving herself. But when Delauncy entered her apartment and sat on her one chair, a green velvet chaise lounge, and looked around at her framed engravings, the candlesticks, the jumble of antiques lovingly collected over the years, and nodded with approval, her gratitude burst forth, a reckless courage propelling her past her reservations. Here was a man who cared as much as she did about the books that defined her life, who deserved her, who would understand her. At last she would be able to call her mother and tell her, “You see, Mom, I have a boyfriend. I’m not hopeless.” This impression of essential sympathy, however, had ended immediately upon penetration. He smelled musty, musky, old, and worse, once he began rocking away in his wheezy rhythm, it was like she wasn’t even there.

  An unpleasantly smooth, pale arm reached over and caressed her shoulder. She felt obliged to open her eyes. Jules Delauncy, looking even more French and craggy in the cool morning light, smiled a yellow smile at her. “Bonjour.” Her revulsion was visceral and she crawled out of bed avoiding the evidence of his continued interest poking at her sheet. “Irene, come back. Don’t leave our bed of love.”

  She was mortified for both of them. “My name is Ava.” Nearly tripping over Mycroft, who was rubbing against her ankles, she picked him up and brought him with her into the bathroom where she lay down on the floor, pressing her forehead against the not very clean tiles and aggressively rubbing the cat as if the repetitive motion could somehow soothe the anxious state of her mind. She wondered how long it would take this inconvenient stranger to leave on his own.

  A long time, apparently. Eventually, she opened the door and yelled through the crack that he needed to go. After a protracted negotiation and the proffering of very hurt feelings, he left swearing that he would return to win her heart and that, “as there was only one woman for Holmes, there could be only one woman for him, and that he would best her in this game of hearts.” Ava noted with annoyance that he still didn’t mention her joining the BSI.

  Alone finally, and back in bed, a satin pillow monogrammed with someone else’s initials sheltered Ava from the disappointed frown of a plaster Athena on her bookshelf. Little pads of pressure soon manifested against her forehead as Mycroft made himself comfortable on the pillow, the vibrations of his loud purring resonating through the down. No wonder ladies reacted so poorly to their deflowering in books. Throwing herself into a river seemed a perfectly reasonable response to this overpowering nausea, a deep physical disorder that started between her legs, radiating up through her body to her throbbing head. What did normal twenty-first-century girls do when they lost their virginity? Cry? Paint their nails? Clean their closets? Sleep? Maybe she would do all those things, but the last option seemed the nearest at hand, and she surrendered to its blessed oblivion. She dreamt of low, sweaty, overcast skies.

  When she woke, she stared at the ceiling and thought about making coffee, which seemed like a lot of effort. Then she remembered Stephanie’s card, and, happy to chase away the thoughts of the night before, she got out of bed to find out what exactly her tempest of a friend had been up to.

  As the phone rang, Ava thought about the few emails she had received from Stephanie at long and random i
ntervals, discursive and enthusiastic, and conveying almost no information, except that she was alive, and that the worst of Ava’s imaginings hadn’t come to pass. She had quickly abandoned “The International Model Agency,” but the flurry of adventures narrated from internet cafés across eastern Europe had not cleared up what she had been doing to support herself instead. But somehow in her tales of midnight trysts on cobblestone streets and passionate discussions in basement cafés, Stephanie cast herself beyond the realm of these pedestrian questions. She was living The Sun Also Rises, she was Lady Brett Ashley, the glittering expatriate, at least by mail, and Ava was curious.

  When the connection finally clicked through, Ava heard a familiar breathy hello. Stephanie always tried to speak in a register slightly lower and more sophisticated than her natural speaking voice, but often forgot, so her speech patterns had a constant rising and falling that always made her sound just a little drunk. Because it had been a while since Ava had heard this voice, it suddenly called to mind the first time she had seen Stephanie, the unlikely introduction to the woman who would become her devoted friend, an inseparable pair at the small liberal arts college they’d attended.

  Sprawled in the grass of the main quad, her blond hair spread like swirling buttercream, Stephanie had been sunbathing in a hot-pink bikini and enjoying a package of red licorice whips with casual obscenity. Passing professors nervously averted their eyes. A group of students in torn black clothes scornfully pretended not to see her. Even the hippies playing Frisbee affected to not notice her remarkable display and the audacious misplaced confidence of it all, like a cheerleader who wandered into the chess club. And Ava couldn’t help but notice the way that even just by making these different groups strain so hard to ignore her she had forcibly commanded everyone’s attention. Everyone’s gestures, especially those of the men, had taken on the unintentional awkwardness of people performing for an audience. Ava was spellbound by the whole performance, but Stephanie somehow always demanded that kind of irresistible, complicated attention. It had seemed impossible that when she had chosen a friend, she would have picked Ava, alone in the dining commons, reading Zola, and picking at the lint of her cardigan. But indeed she had.