The club had surprised our mom but pleased her. It looked like a big social breakthrough for Snyder, that’s for sure. The boys pooled their money and ordered member buttons and a member whistling coffin. The instructions in the magazine for club formation suggested that all meetings begin with the coffin opening and a reading of club rules. From my perch on the stairs I heard the first suggestions for rules lean toward bloody bonding rituals that were sure to send somebody home crying if not to a doctor. Then Arnold suggested musical armpit fart combinations to start every meeting and that set them in a safer direction. By the time of Mr. Moses’s visit in June, five other boys had joined them, all friends of Arnold’s. Even in this fanatic subgroup of the still-gangly boy population, only Snyder had a budding fantasy comic collection. Only Snyder invested in an untouchable backup copy of every comic he loved. Scantily clothed Martian women with interesting radioactive parts hung all over his walls. The alien women in his pictures pursued men with lassos and Radiation Project Heat Ray guns or stood over them from craggy moonscapes, their balloon-like breasts and tremendous thighs either beckoning or threatening. Maybe both. Sometimes they fell in love with handsome scientists in white coats. Sometimes they became slaves or admiring colleagues of Earth Men.
But back to Mr. Moses, who wrote to Snyder to say that if the host group was amenable, he’d be there on June 14. He would love to meet with the local fan club, and appreciated the offer of a place to rest his head that night. Mom wanted it to be a success for Snyder. She hated visitors, and hated spending money, but she loved Snyder and she suffered when he was unhappy. She bought a roast in the middle of the week, which meant something in our house, and baked what looked like hundreds of cookies—an impulse that only Christmas itself had summoned before that afternoon.
Mr. Moses had called from his last stop (Hartford, Connecticut) to say he expected to be at our house around four, and by two o’clock most of the members of the Lynn, Massachusetts, Monsters in the Movies Fan Club were standing in our driveway, staring down the road. Also me. Janey was too young to be interested. Lilly stood around in the front yard for a while and imitated them, craning her neck and making mummy noises, but when they paid no attention to her she drifted off. I was the only non-club person keeping watch and staying as close to Arnold Strato as I could. Mom came out after about an hour to give us lemonade and encouragement—I think she doubted Mr. Moses and was starting to dread what it was going to feel like when he never showed up.
Every minute past four o’clock was agony. At five fifteen, when the dusty Ford station wagon holding Mr. Moses and half a ton of back copies of Monsters in the Movies turned the corner, the little group went off like a bunch of sparklers. The man had to force his car door open against the bodies pressing up against it, but when he got out and onto his own two feet, his manners were perfection. He greeted the jiggling club members like they were the reason he’d been born, which they probably were. He asked to be taken to the grown-ups in exactly the same tone an arriving alien would say he wanted to be escorted to their leader, and they pulled him into the kitchen. Mr. Moses swept my mother’s hand to his lips and thanked her for her hospitality. It’s a cliché gesture, a little piece of melodramatic trash, but it’s amazingly effective if you can get just the slightest hint of irony in it, which Mr. Moses managed. He was a smart man even if he did make his living by writing a magazine about movie monsters. She smiled and told him there was roast beef for dinner, and he said, “Superb.”
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