Husbands And Lap Dogs Breathe Their Last Read Online Free Page A

the other men?” Cummings whispered back.
    “The second man must be his husband, Sebastian Grinnell. He owns a few bars in Boys Town. I don’t know who the red-haired one is,” Luther said.
     
     
    Anunciación had everyone introduce themselves again, and then lunch was served. An hour later it was cleared away. Anunciación rang her bell again and called the meeting to order.
    “As the President of the Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers Society, I am very pleased to welcome you to our 245 th monthly meeting. As many of you know, Mathers was an English occultist of the Edwardian era. He was a radical vegetarian, an early translator of neglected occult texts, and using his mediumistic talents, a passionate player of chess with the Gods. Unfortunately, he did not leave a record of his wins and losses.
    “The Mathers Society meets once a month to advance the knowledge of the arcane. We dance with the unusual and delight in the obscure, don’t you know. When it appeared about ten years ago, we embraced Steampunk as a modern aesthetic reinterpretation of the English occult consciousness we bring from the past. Thus, we have fused these elements in a historical yet modern whole.”
    Cummings coughed. He wished someone would put out the incense.
    “We are privileged today,” Anunciación continued, “for another presentation in our mini-series on famous women of the occult. As you all know, Surendra Hickok is a historian of the occult and the author of a biography of Wilhelm Reich. Today, she will speak on her latest project, a biography of Ida Craddock. Surendra?”
    Surendra strode to the podium and planted herself confidently before the microphone. She lifted her bridal veil.
    “Good afternoon, everybody. Thank you for coming. For those of you who don’t know me, I’m Surendra Hickok. My passion is writing biographies. I’ve published two. The first, co-authored with my sister, was on the early twentieth-century astrologer, Evangeline Adams. Last year I completed a study of Wilhelm Reich, the renegade disciple of Freud and inventor of the orgone. I am now working on a biography of Ida Craddock. How many of you recognize that name?”
    A number of hands went up. This impressed Cummings, as he had no idea who Ida Craddock was. He’d never heard of Evangeline Adams either. Wilhelm Reich’s name sounded somewhat familiar, though he was sure he couldn’t have accurately identified him.
    “Ida Craddock was a nineteenth-century mystic and sexual explorer, born in Philadelphia in 1857. She would have been the first female admitted to the University of Pennsylvania, had the Trustees not blocked her admission. At around the age of thirty, she became active in the Theosophical Society. As most of you know, the Theosophical Society was founded in New York City in 1875 to investigate the nature of the universe and humanity’s place in it. In their sheltering arms Ida studied the sexual wisdom paths of various traditions, such as tantra.”
    “What’s a sexual wisdom path?” Cummings whispered to Luther.
    “I do not have any idea, but it does not sound Baptist,” Luther whispered back.
    “Ultimately she said she had married and had an active sexual life with an angel named Soph,” Hickok continued. “Of course it is difficult for most of us to imagine this, but she seemed to be insistent about it. I’m wearing this wedding dress today to acknowledge Ida’s truth, even though I can’t claim to truly understand it myself. I’m also wearing the Craddock brooch.” She indicated a pendant on a chain about her neck. “It is said to have healing properties.
    “Eventually Ida opened an office in Chicago to offer sexual counseling to married couples, a truly radical undertaking in Ida’s time. She wrote widely on the subject of marital sexuality, achieving sufficient notoriety by 1899 to run into legal persecution, notably from Anthony Comstock. He, of course, was the founder of the New York Society for the Suppression