Photo of Gertrude Stein from Ovation TV.

I was possibly the only seven year old in the world whose mother read Gertrude Stein out loud to her. At the kitchen table Mom would puzzle through the books she checked out of the Wilmington Public Library, boring her reluctant audience of one. It became a joke between us, the dazed child resting her head on the table, lulled into submission by the tediousness of Gertrude Stein. “A cheeseburger is a cheeseburger is a cheeseburger is a cheeseburger,” I would tease Mom, and we’d laugh.

So it shouldn’t have been a surprise when she picked an Edgar Allen Poe story as a Halloween treat for two nine-year-olds. We were living in Newark, Delaware, in a one-bedroom, student family housing apartment. My friend MaryAnn was spending the night and we did the rounds of our complex. Many neighbors didn’t expect trick or treaters, and the ones that did weren’t passing out Hersey bars or KitKats. There were several international families living there and I remember getting strange candies, sweet wafers, little trinkets.

Most people didn’t even open their doors, like the hulking single guy who now lived in my friend Belinda’s old apartment (student family housing?). Belinda had lived there with her mother and younger sister and we had spent most of the previous summer together, organizing skits in the little playground and running around the adjacent field where the University of Delaware marching band held their practices. A long scar traced the length of Belinda’s chest, the mark of two surgeries to correct a congenital heart condition. She had another round of operations scheduled in a couple of years. Though Belinda didn’t seem particularly fragile, I wanted to protect her from harm. When she and her family moved to Michigan in late August, we were both bereft and worried about dealing with new schools on our own.

I wanted to go to her apartment, stare down the guy I blamed for her move, get a little restitution Halloween candy. MaryAnn and I walked up the stairs through the dreary light of humming florescents, up one flight to Belinda's place. The strings of my Cousin It costume kept getting under my feet as they brushed against each stair. The hulk's television was on, blaring some sports event. “Trick or treat!” I yelled, pounding on the hollow metal door. No response. MaryAnn looked at me skeptically through her Wonder Woman mask. “Let’s just go back to your place.”

Poster available from All Posters.

Maybe my mother decided to read “Murders in the Rue Morgue” to help us get over our candy haul doldrums. Perhaps she was hoping for a good, old-fashioned Halloween scare. The story, written in 1841, starts slowly (so slowly that she couldn’t have possibly started at the beginning. Even a nine-year-old raised on Gertrude Stein would have protested), but it sped up when she got to the crime scene. Two women have been brutally murdered. Here is the description of one of the corpses, courtesy of the Poe Museum:

"After a thorough investigation of every portion of the house, without farther discovery, the party made its way into a small paved yard in the rear of the building, where lay the corpse of the old lady, with her throat so entirely cut that, upon an attempt to raise her, the head fell off. The body, as well as the head, was fearfully mutilated --the former so much so as scarcely to retain any semblance of humanity. "To this horrible mystery there is not as yet, we believe, the slightest clew."

We didn't get very far through the story before MaryAnn became hysterical. She was frightened. She wanted to go home. Finally, Mom called her parents and they picked up my friend half an hour later.

She never spent the night at my place again.

Tags: Gertude Stein, Halloween, Edgar Allen Poe, Murders in the Rue Morgue, Mom, storytelling, Delaware