The Haunted Library

by Jean Roberta

Sitting in the room my spouse & I call “the library,” where our computer is surrounded by bookshelves, I see a hodge-podge of books, loosely organized into different categories so we can find them. (This doesn’t always work – read on.)

In what I think of as the spooky/spiritual section on the highest shelf to my left, I see a very thick paperback. The title on the spine is Ghosts: True Encounters with the World Beyond by Hans Holzer. This book is packed with stories and photos from the files of one of the world’s foremost ghosthunters, and it threatens to suck me in again. The last time I read it, I had to stop before reaching the end so I could keep up with my day job.

Next to this is The Complete Prophesies of Nostradamus, several books on modern witchcraft, including three by Starhawk (one bought directly from her when she came to my town on tour), The Tibetan Book of the Dead (a gift from one of my stepsons), a hardcover Bible (originally bought for my six-year-old daughter, in which she drew a picture of a smiling man with a beard, named “God”) and a small, hardcover English translation of The Koran. Strangely enough, this last book is the only one in this section that I inherited from my parents after their deaths in 2009. They were agnostics who never showed a great interest in religion in any form. However, they probably thought (as I do) that as academics, they needed to have some knowledge of the holy books of the world’s major religions.

This library is very eclectic because many of the books were given to me, inherited, or they belonged to my spouse before we joined households. In some sense, it is full of ghosts that constantly threaten to pull me away from more pressing concerns.

After my parents passed away, I let my two sisters take the bulk of their books, since I already had enough of my own. Several of our mother’s books of literary criticism are now neatly arranged on the shelves in my office at the university. A few of our father’s books on political theory are still in the home library, including two by John Raulston Saul: Voltaire’s Bastards and The Unconscious Civilization. I think my father enjoyed Saul’s skeptical look at the long-term political effects of Enlightenment idealism.

I can still hear a conversation I had with my dad when he was still an Economics professor and I was still reeling from four hard months as a student English teacher in a local high school. “Has it ever occurred to you,” I asked him, “that the idea of universal education is a well-intended 18th-century plan that has never worked as it was intended to?”

“Exactly!” he replied with delight.

“But before you propose to tear down the public school system,” I said, “I’d like to know what you would put in its place.” He just laughed.

One of the books I inherited from my father is one that Spouse and I gave to him for Christmas in 2000. It’s An Illustrated History of the Royal Navy by John Winton, in association with the Royal Naval Museum in Portsmouth, England. It’s a big coffee-table book full of full-colour paintings, engravings and photos of ships of the British Empire and the men who sailed them. I knew my dad would like this. Ever since he joined the U.S. Navy as a young man in the Second World War, he loved boats of all kinds.

In the fiction section, I have a well-preserved hardcover copy of War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy, published in 1942 with detailed maps of battle zones and a foreword by eminent critic Clifton Fadiman, who points out the parallels between the Napoleonic wars of the early nineteenth century and the “current European conflict.” I inherited this book from a woman I never knew: a locally-famous hairdresser who had recently passed away, and whose family invited people she knew (including a male hairdresser friend of mine) to browse her shelves and take whatever they wanted. A grown son of the deceased woman assured me that I was welcome to take whatever was left, since the family had already made their choices.

Among Spouse’s books are several about John Lennon and Che Guevara, the two heroes of her youth, and a biography of Lenin. Her oldest books are in Spanish, and these include material on leftist political theory and alternative Christianity (for lack of a clearer term), e.g. a history of the Rosicrucians and Dan Brown-esque investigations of the history of the Catholic Church. The Spanish-language section has its own shelf.

At one time, I had a collection of books by J.R. Tolkien, including The Hobbit and all three volumes of The Lord of the Rings, including one unauthorized book that was sold openly in a bookstore in small-town Idaho. (No one seems to remember any more that in the 1960s, an American publisher brought out a pirated edition, and Tolkien sued.) When I looked for The Hobbit to skim through it before going to the second-installment movie (The Desolation of Smaug), I couldn’t find it. This isn’t surprising. It could have left my house with my grown daughter or either of my grown stepsons. If so, I won’t demand it back. I’ll just have to buy a replacement copy before the third-installment movie comes out.

Of course, there is an erotic section in my library. It’s on two bottom shelves which can be camouflaged by other objects if necessary. That section deserves a post unto itself, but I'm coming to the end of this one.

A lot of memories are in this room.

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Catechism

By Lisabet Sarai



“In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Ghost, amen.”

“That's good, but fold your hands at the end. It's a prayer, after all.”

“Yes, I know...In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost, amen.”

“Perfect. Now the Hail Mary...”

“Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with Thee. Blessed art Thou among women and blessed is the fruit of Thy womb Jesus... What does 'fruit of Thy womb' mean?”

“Her child, silly. 'Womb' is a fancy word for stomach.”

“Oh. Thanks.”

“I think you're ready. We'll do it tomorrow. But you can't tell anyone. If you do, you'll go to Hell.”

I was born into a Jewish family, so you might be surprised by how much I know about Roman Catholic ritual. I can recite the Hail Mary and the Lord's Prayer. I know the sacraments and the difference between a mortal and a venal sin. Given a bit of time to search my memory, I can probably tell you the names of many of the more important Catholic saints and explain why they were canonized.

The story behind all this knowledge? I was baptized a Catholic by my best friend when I was eight.

Bridget McNulty (not her real name) lived down the street from us with her parents and a constantly growing assortment of siblings. Her family were not fundamentalists, particularly by today's standards, but Bridget, the first born, was especially devout. She dreamed of becoming a missionary nun. And for some reason she decided that I should be her first convert.

Not that I put up any sort of fight. My religious upbringing was lackadaisical at best. We only went to synagogue (at my grandparents') on Rosh Hashonah and Yom Kippur. Hanukah meant gifts, potato pancakes and gambling with the little tops called dreidels. Passover was a chance to taste the wine and to look for the afikomen, the special piece of matzoh secreted away by the leader of the seder. The child who discovered its hiding place received a shiny quarter. I had little sense of the theological basis of my religion. Yet I think I must have harbored some sort of yearning for spiritual knowledge. When Bridget proposed that she tutor me in the details of her faith, I agreed with enthusiasm. Furthermore, I took my new knowledge seriously – far more seriously than the faith of my fathers.

Every day after school, I'd go over to her house to “play”. We'd crawl into our private place, a hollow inside her hedge, and she'd teach me about original sin and immaculate conception, communion and extreme unction. She set up an altar there, with a crucifix, and taught me to pray. Finally, when she decided that I had assimilated all the requisite information, she blessed some tap water and christened me with a new name.

The funny thing is, I remember much of this quite clearly, but I can't recall what we decided I should be called. Maybe Mary? Or Christine? Of course no one ever called me by that name – not even Bridget. In fact, after my baptism, she seemed to lose interest in our joint rituals to some extent.

A year or so later, Bridget's family moved to another town. My conversion stuck, however. I considered myself Catholic, although I scarcely knew what that meant. I worried about the end of the world. During the New England summer, you sometimes get this atmospheric phenomenon, where thunder clouds will be heaped up on the horizon but a few rays of sun slant through to reach the ground. The sharply defined beams of light look like paths upon which the angels would dance, coming down to announce the Apocalypse. On afternoons like these, I wondered if the prophesies were at last coming true.

(Of course, this was during the Cold War, when we all were sure that the Russians would drop the bomb any day. I figured that was the most likely way that the world would end.)

My secret conversion was responsible for engendering a sense of sexual sin. I didn't exactly know what the mortal sin of “adultery” meant, but I gathered it was something dirty. I started to feel guilty when I stuck my pillow between my legs and rocked back and forth until the good feelings came. I was uncomfortably certain that I was committing adultery, and that I was bound for eternal torment, or at least Purgatory.

It took quite a few years for me to get over the effects of Bridget's catechism. However, becoming a teenager brought so many more immediate problems than whether I'd go to hell that I forgot to worry about it. Still, I think the experience of conversion and the times I accompanied Bridget to Mass (my mother didn't care), listening to the Latin chants, breathing in the incense, inculcated a sense of reverence that I still feel today.

Bridget would probably be shocked if she knew how my life turned out: BDSM, bisexuality, ménages, swinging, and lots and lots of smut. The ultimate sin in her eyes would most likely be the fact that I've used Catholic rituals and beliefs in some of my stories, most notably “Communion” and “Higher Power”. I have to smile, wondering how I got from there to here.

At the same time, that experience touched something in me, wakened a hunger for spiritual experience that still gnaws me. Now, strangely enough, I feed that hunger by writing erotica. I find a connection to the Infinite in the connection with a lover. And I still pray, though I long ago abandoned the formulas Bridget taught.

The conversion is still a secret, too. I've never told anyone who's part of my “real life” that I've been baptized. (And I don't question whether the baptism was legitimate. Somehow I feel that if Bridget and I both believed it, then it was.) Only you, my readers and colleagues, who know my alter ego, are party to this forbidden knowledge.

Keep it quiet, okay? I don't want to go to Hell.