Dispatch 35

A Family of Vampires

The one about the vampire family Lisa and G met in New York. Dispatch 35 begins beside the fire, where the narrator is answering a question from his grandson Smith: has he ever met a vampire? As it happens, he has. Not one vampire, but an entire family, encountered on a Manhattan street many years earlier after an evening at the theater with Lisa. The Roșus were an unusually beautiful family—pale, dark-haired, elegantly dressed, and just a little too attentive to one another. When their daughter stumbled at the curb, Lisa caught her by the arm. The mother explained that the girl hadn't eaten. A small kindness became an invitation upstairs for a drink, and Lisa, who believed unusual people were generally waiting for someone to ask the right question, was delighted to accept. Their apartment was dark, expensive, and strangely domestic. Velvet furnishings, covered windows, Chinese takeout cartons, a child's shoe beneath the sofa. The family drank from opaque glasses and watched their guests with an intensity the narrator initially attributed to the habits of fashionable New Yorkers. Yet beneath their impeccable manners was something harder to explain: a longing that seemed to involve all four of them. When the Roșus graciously insisted that their guests stay the night, refusing began to feel impolite. What followed was an unsettling discovery before dawn, a hurried departure, and a memory that would take decades to acquire its proper meaning. Throughout the telling, Smith asks the questions any sensible child would ask. Were there fangs? Bite marks? Blood? The narrator's answers are less satisfying than expected, because the strangest part of the encounter is not what the family did, but what they apparently chose not to do. At its center, A Family of Vampires is about the mystery of desire concealed beneath civility. The Roșus offered hospitality, intimacy, and perhaps something more, while Lisa and G understood only fragments of what was happening around them. Years later, the narrator can recognize what they were without understanding what they wanted. And that, he suggests, may be the more interesting question.