The succubus

Chapter 7 of Our Lady of Brattle Street, copyright (c) 2026 by Richard Smoley

7

The Succubus

It must be admitted that the portrait of Artemus Rostrum given up to this point is unfair and one-sided. To judge from this narrative so far, he was a squirrely little academic lost in a project about the invalid wife of an increasingly obscure president and afraid to confront his own adulterous wife.

Some additional details are necessary. In the first place, both he and wife were satisfied with the situation. He did not care that she had a lover. If he wanted to take one himself, it would have been fully within his rights, but the idea did not appeal to him. And if she wanted to leave him for her lover, she probably would have told him so.

Moreover, Artemus Rostrum was a man of immense learning, which spanned the Western humanities from the beginning to the present. He knew the ancient languages, French, German, Italian, Spanish, as well as biblical Hebrew and some Sanskrit, Arabic, and Russian. He was the author of Gilt and Gold: American History from the Civil War to World War I, generally regarded as the standard work on the subject, which won several major awards (perhaps a source of jealousy for Rosenzweig), and he had conceived of his life of Ida McKinley as a prism through which to view the whole history of the United States in the last third of the nineteenth century. His students were constantly astonished by the range of literary and historical references that he inserted effortlessly into his lectures, and a number of them said that he was the smartest man they had ever met. Although his colleagues would never say such a thing—every Harvard professor thinks he is the smartest man he has ever met—their attitude was correspondingly respectful. As we have seen, no one doubted his capacity for heading the university’s history department.

On top of this, Artemus was regarded as an exemplar of probity, kindness, and respect by all of his students, even the most obnoxious (Harvard has some of these). Rosenzweig let the lolli business drop because he knew full well that it was unprovoked and undesired. One is even tempted to apply the term “beloved” to Professor Artemus Rostrum.

During the equivocal New England spring, Artemus had to make his way more than once through Harvard Yard when it was occupied by students protesting Israel’s treatment of Palestine. He had no comment about the action; he neither joined in nor condemned it. When he saw one or two students he recognized or thought he recognized, he waved and smiled at them.

Once as he passed, Artemus looked up at a room in Grays Hall that had been his freshman residence. He had been there at a quieter time, but he knew that there are quieter times and less quiet times, and one finds oneself in them more or less as a matter of chance. He had been an undergraduate long after the disturbances of the Vietnam era, but he had heard enough about them, and he knew that back in Revolutionary times, students had rioted more than once to protest bad beer. The cycles go round, although no one knows the exact pattern by which they do.

The single most important influence on Artemus’s view of history was Tolstoy’s epilogue to War and Peace. Although it was acknowledged to be the greatest novel of all time, Artemus was piqued by the fact that Tolstoy’s reflections on history were mostly dismissed as eccentricity. He thought that Tolstoy understood history better than anyone he had ever read, including Thucydides, Tacitus, and Gibbon. And what did it amount to? History is the manifestation of the collective will of all those involved, whether or not they are aware of it. Over 600,000 men had followed Napoleon to Russia; only 18,000 of them came back. To this one could only append the comment that may be the epitaph of the human race: it seemed like a good idea at the time.

It was the same now in Palestine. Bernard Shaw had seen the situation a hundred years ago. During the First World War, the British foreign secretary issued a disingenuous little memorandum: “His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people . . . it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.” Just as Allenby and T.E. Lawrence were making equivalent promises to the Arabs. Over a hundred years later, children were still dying. Perhaps the worst part was that people thought they understood why.

In short, everything in history happened exactly as it had to happen, not because of some unseen hand guiding events, but because the events were the sum total of all the factors operating at the time. Tolstoy understood this. This meant that current events were almost unchangeable: they were results of forces that had been set in motion long before. Possibly one could change the future by means of present acts; but one had no reassurance that these acts would be any less misguided than those of the past.

For these reasons, Artemus refused to take sides. He felt that one more shrill voice added to the noise would do no good. Perhaps the United States government had to look at the matter differently, but the United States government had not asked for his opinion, and he did not offer it.

Thucydides’ famous passage on revolution said that in such times, those who strove for moderation were suspected and attacked by both parties.

The protestors themselves—the students—were like students of every generation: idealistic, arrogant, and insecure, their arrogance arising from their insecurity. Artemus marveled at how much they looked like the Harvard students of his time, forty years earlier. No wonder: they came from the same milieus and social classes. He thought he recognized some of them, and more than once he had discovered that he was teaching the son or daughter of an old classmate.

But the same applied to these students: the forces that drove them to their actions, external and internal, were no different from those that drove all others. There are external and internal conditions which affect the determination of our will upon our actions. Artemus did not believe in karma, although he recognized that human behavior as the sum total of all the forces operating on it was functionally the same. If one thing could be different, everything would be different.

None of this helped him puzzle through his personal dilemmas. Very well: the odd gentleman was a hallucination, a manifestation of some inner aspect of himself. But the gentleman said he wished Artemus nothing but evil. It stood to reason that some part of his mind hated him and wished to destroy him—something that no psychologist to his knowledge had ever observed: Freud’s Thanatos concept did not quite answer.

During such musings, Artemus had a habit of performing a half-conscious bibliomancy. He wandered around his house, looking at books on his shelves, picking out one that attracted his attention, and paging through it. Sometimes he found an insight that cleared things up.

In this case, Artemus, pacing in his study, happened upon a book he had read long ago and of which he remembered very little: Journeyman, by Erskine Caldwell. Artemus liked Caldwell and preferred him to Faulkner, whose bombast quickly bored him. Caldwell did not engage in such bombast: he simply gave his bald narrative, which did not reflect well on the poor whites of the former Confederacy. Artemus wondered if Caldwell had ever been lynched in effigy. Probably not: the people he was portraying were not likely to get the jibes; they might have even acknowledged them as accurate portraits of themselves.

Artemus pulled the volume off his shelf. It was a first edition, published by Viking in 1935, and he marveled at the high quality of the printing and binding: laid paper stock, rough-cut edges, and binding in signatures instead of the cheap “perfect” binding used by publishers today. Artemus wished that his own books had been given such treatment.

He paged through the novel and happened on this passage toward the end. A fraudulent preacher was addressing some women: “To think that underneath all those pretty dresses that you spend so much care on washing and starching and ironing, frilling and folding—to think that under there is a black sinful soul that hisses its wickedness like a poisonous snake!” And the congregation accepted his words without question.

Perhaps religious charlatans understood something that eluded the Freuds. Despite his recent experience at the Ritz, Artemus did not believe in the Devil, but he realized that there has to be something in the human mind that makes the Devil believable.

These reflections did not get him very far. A couple of days later, he went into the Harvard Coop and only half intentionally made his way to the section at the far back that dealt with the New Age, astrology, and the occult. He was ashamed of how much he feared that anyone he knew would see him there.

Gazing idly across the shelves, he pulled out a thick, dark blue hardcover volume entitled A Course in Miracles. He had heard of it: it was well-known, although he did not remember any favorable comments about it.

He paged through the book and decided to buy it as a curiosity. Later, at home, he perused it. On the first page, he read:

“Miracles are everyone’s birthright, but purification is necessary first.” Then a long and puzzling discussion of the Atonement. Artemus could see that it was using the terms of Christian theology but in an unaccustomed way, and he did not want to figure it all out. Paging through the volume, he came across a line that said, “I am never upset for the reason I think.”

This idea reminded him of something, but he did not know what and did not want to find out what the book might have meant by it. He put it on a shelf dedicated to other literary curiosities and did not think of it again.

Around this time, Artemus had an experience with a Lady of quite a different kind. One morning, in a dream, he saw a girl who reminded him of girls he had known in his prep school days: affectedly casual in dress, in a checked, flannel shirt with worn jeans, she made him think of one girl in particular he had known—but never well, and with whom he barely ever spoke. She was slender, with reddish cheeks, reddish-brown hair, and a turned-up nose, pretty but not unusually so. He could see her quite clearly—as in waking life—and they began to indulge in sex play.

He opened her shirt. She was not wearing a bra, and her breasts were small but well-shaped, with long nipples. He began to suck on them. She got on top of him, squatted over him, and shat on his chest. When she finished, she washed the shit off with her piss. Then she kissed him and said, “I want to do all those things to do that you’re not going to do in real life.”

By now, he was very erect, and the girl—who said her name was Shelley—squatting over him, inserted his penis into her. She rocked back and forth on him, cackling in a weird ecstasy.

Finally he ejaculated and woke up. Rolling over onto the other side of the mattress, he saw his semen speckling the sheet. He did not see the girl now, being fully awake, but he heard her voice in his head, saying, “Almost done.” He lay there for a few minutes. Then he heard her voice: “All finished.” He heard her cackle again with an insane delight, then he heard from her no more.

He lay back, as contented as if he had had intercourse with a physical woman. He dozed for fifteen or twenty minutes, during which he had a vivid dream. He was in some kind of ruined temple complex, probably in India (though he had never been there), surrounded by a thick grove. There was a kind of open space in the middle. A man came in with two baskets of fruit and dumped it all on the ground.

Immediately the surrounding trees were filled with monkeys, glaring with blank yet hostile eyes. Some of them jumped down from the trees and scooped up the fruit. Others jumped down after them and began with chatter and fight the first monkeys for the fruit. The fight became noisy and violent. Yet the ground was covered by fruit that had been completely forgotten in the fighting.

As often happens, the dream had no obvious connection with Shelley. But now he was wide awake. He got up and wiped up the semen off the sheets.

The experience was so bizarre that he felt the need to write it down in his journal (which he seldom bothered with). His mind drifted to legends of medieval succubi, who lay with men in the night to engender spirit children. He got a strange sense that he now had another child in some unaccountable faery realm. But he had no more experiences like this, and eventually the encounter drifted to the back of his mind and toward the approaching summer.

Artemus’s wife invariably spent some part of the season at her family’s cottage in Cape Ann. Artemus never went with her: he had detached himself from his in-laws long before. She sometimes stayed two or three weeks, sometimes came home after a long weekend. Her litany upon her return was always the same: “Never again!” But she went every year, and he had every reason to expect that she would do so again.

It occurred to Artemus that he might take a trip of his own, if only to avoid the miserable Cambridge summer. His thoughts drifted toward San Francisco, where the summers were pleasant and cool. He had had his first teaching post at San Francisco State and had lived in the city for ten years. It would be agreeable to get a short-term rental, eat out at local restaurants (he preferred the cheaper, down-to-earth Asian and Mexican places to the upscale establishments on which the city preened itself), and shop at whatever bookstores were left in the area. Besides, he still had many friends from his years there, and it would be good to catch up with them.

Artemus wanted to see all his old friends, of course, but he was really going because he wanted to talk to John Staub.