A Private Sorcery Read Online Free PDF

in touch with him without my knowing it. I don’t know, it was just a thought I had.”
    Morton keeps his poker face, but it dawns on Rena from the way he doesn’t ask her for Reed’s last name that Saul has already told him about Reed, and then she wonders if Morton’s not asking is purposeful, that he can’t tell them what Saul has told him so he’s leaving them this clue.
    â€œAnybody else he’d see regularly?”
    â€œHow about Santiago?” Leonard says. “Didn’t he read to him every week?”
    â€œWho’s that?”
    â€œHe was a professor of Saul’s at Swarthmore,” Leonard says. “A political scientist from Cuba. He came here in the fifties to take a position at Temple University, then lost his visa during the McCarthy era and had to leave to teach in Mexico. When he came back, he and his wife settled here in New York and he did some visiting teaching jobs. He was in his seventies by then, but still a marvelous teacher.”
    Morton glances at Rena, checking her reaction.
    â€œSantiago had a big influence on Saul,” Leonard continues. “He introduced him to Marxist theory, really made it come alive for him. Then, the year after Saul met him, Santiago’s son disappeared in Guatemala. It was clearly a kidnapping, but unclear who had done it. Saul was convinced it was a paramilitary police faction and that the CIA had been involved. He organized a committee to help raise money for Santiago and his wife to carry on their search.”
    â€œDid they find him?”
    â€œNo. Not even a trace. Then Santiago went blind. He was too old and dispirited to learn braille. When Saul came to New York for medical school, he became one of Santiago’s readers.”
    â€œHow often would he see him?”
    â€œEvery Tuesday,” Rena says. “Though this past year, I think it was pretty irregular.”
    â€œWhat’s your take on him?” Morton asks Rena.
    â€œI never met him. He and Saul had their routine, and …” She stops, reluctant to admit that she’d never wanted to meet Santiago, not because he didn’t sound interesting—she’d enjoyed hearing Saul’s stories about him—but rather because of a wariness about getting drawn into his life, into someone else’s grief.
    To Rena’s relief, Morton abruptly shifts gears, turning his inquiry to Leonard’s demographics: age, address, occupation, legal history. At occupation, he raises an eyebrow. “Two shrinks?”
    â€œWell, not really. I haven’t seen patients since 1955. I taught the history of psychiatry to medical students and residents. I retired two years ago.”
    â€œSo let’s hear your two cents on what might have happened here.” Leonard adds very little to what Rena has already said: he knew Saul had been having a hard time since the boy who threw himself in front of the train, they’d been less in touch this past year, he guesses he’d placed too much stock in the good cheer Saul had shown at his birthday party.
    Listening to Leonard, Rena’s fatigue surfaces—a dry burning around her eyes, her thoughts slow and muffled as though they’ve traveled down a long corridor to reach her mind. A sharp tone in Leonard’s voice jolts her back to alertness.
    â€œI’d been hoping this would be a two-way exchange, that you’d tell us how Saul is, what’s going to happen next, what we can do.”
    Morton lowers his feet. He folds his hands and leans forward, a sequence so often repeated, she can see, it’s no longer deliberate. “Look, this is a complicated thing and I’m going to talk to you two straight because you’re both educated people, not like some of the know-nothings I see in this office. The law says that what the client tells me belongs to the client and I can’t reveal that to anyone, not even our creator above. But you know and I know that