Jerry Keating: ‘How about one for the road, girls? On me.’
Rae said: ‘Not for me, thanks.’ The others said yes and thanked him.
Aware of what the approaching academic year meant to their friends, Tori, Hozzle, and Fritzie made no reference to any future beyond the next day. Fritzie felt the fire of her high spirits at the thought of seeing Joe (maybe tomorrow—who knows?) dampened by Will’s depression.
‘Why don’t we have a midwinter reunion in Hagerstown, maybe around Christmas?’ Tori said in a halfhearted attempt to lighten the atmosphere.
Fritzie: ‘Swell.’ Privately she doubted she would be there. She and Joe had talked about skiing in Vermont.
Will: ‘I’ll try to come,’ knowing nothing in this world would keep her away if Rae was going to be there.
Tori stood up and said she ought to get to bed early, because tomorrow …
They all looked at their watches. Rae put fifty cents down under her glass for Keating’s tip.
He thanked her and said: ‘So long, girls. See you next summer. Don’t take any wooden nickels.’
‘We won’t,’ said Fritzie dutifully.
At the door they called back, almost in unison: ‘Goodbye, Jerry.’
‘Bye. Erin go Bragh,’ he said to their backs. As he wiped the bar he shook his head at his wasted allegiance.
The ride back to camp, always before part of the final celebration, turned into a dirge. Separation sadness affected them all, making them aware of their approaching loneliness, of the end to the short, comforting comradeship of the summer. Even cheerful Fritzie felt low and threatened. Squeezed in between hefty Hozzle and Tori in the glum darkness of the car, she wondered whether Joe had met someone during his summer out West, where he had worked on a dude ranch. Sinking lower, she decided he probably had.
‘I will have to get to know some new guys on campus, now that he has probably ridden off into the Western sunset with a cowgirl in Montana.’
She felt tears on her cheeks and closed her eyes, filled with sudden affection for the unfaithful Joe.
A heavy, late-summer rain fell as the camp awakened to Friday, going-home day. Reveille was late because Ellie, the bugler, had been up ‘until all hours,’ as she put it, rehashing Wednesday’s extraordinary events and the minor excitements of the banquet. She had overslept, and so had everyone else.
The rain darkened the sky. The campers in their olive-green raincoats sloshed unhappily through puddles to the Mess Hall almost an hour late for breakfast. There was no point in raising the flag for the half-day, so they went directly to their benches inside. Most of them were silently celebrating the thought of going home; only a few, like Jean, felt depressed about their return.
The counselors were in foul humors. There were no fresh-baked muffins. The cook had made cocoa but by now it was cool, the coffee weak, the milk stale-tasting. The campers asked for buns and were told there were none. They all ate day-old bread and jam, cold cereal, and hard-boiled eggs. Unbroken gloom sat among the breakfasters. Only Grete, running back and forth between the kitchen and the dining room, had risen to a good day, her fantasies suddenly transformed into sunny reality. Helping the cook to boil more eggs, she smiled secretly into the rising steam.
Roslyn had always liked rainy days. For one thing, she didn’t have to play games or go swimming. But today the rain matched her bad mood. She had awakened with a worse stomach ache and gone to the bathroom. There it was, blood in the bowl, blood on the paper, blood between her legs and all over her pajama bottoms.
She had been caught unawares. It had come too fast for her to rally her planned defense. Depressed by her failure, she stuffed toilet paper between her legs and walked carefully to her packed trunk to find the ‘things’ her mother had made her bring. She was prepared, but defeated.
After breakfast she sat glumly on the bottom step of the bungalow, her bare feet in the mud, avoiding as long as possible the cleaning-up efforts of her bunkmates going on behind her. Red salamanders were out in large numbers, scooting through puddles and paddling with their miniature webbed feet in the muddy alleys between the bungalows.
Roslyn stretched out her hand in readiness. She was one of the camp’s best catchers of small amphibians. She captured one now, holding the small, wet body close to her face. She watched as it raised its thin, diamond-shaped head to look at her, she thought, as if it knew it was a prisoner of her curiosity and was equally curious about her.
She considered how she would describe the little amphibian in science class this winter. ‘This salamander, the Catskill Mountains kind, has little black eyes, set way back in its head, which is shaped like a pen point. Its arms’—if that’s what they’re called on a salamander—‘have five fingers’—called what?—‘one of which is a small thumb like ours. But on its legs’—called what?—‘there are only four fingers.
‘I don’t know why there should be different kinds, but there are. My mother told me they are green in Florida. But in the Catskills where I had to spend my summer vacation they are bright red with spots of brown on their backs, especially after a rain. Then they change. The brown spots get bigger and spread out until they cover the red and the salamanders are brown everywhere and you can’t tell them apart from the mud they like so much. Some people call them chameleons because they change color so fast. That may not be the right name for this kind of salamander.’
On the spur of the moment, Roslyn named the salamander in her hand Emma after Caleb’s mother, whom she remembered liking because she was so silent most of the time. She thought about the beach at Far Rockaway, about how she had lectured to the others about lemmings, describing their curious habits. She wished she knew more about whether the little creature in her hand had the same self-destructive instincts. Yes, she remembered something. She had heard that if she held it by its paper-thin tail it would not like it and would abandon it in her hand.
‘Come on in here and sweep under your bed,’ Fritzie called. Startled, Roslyn clamped down on Emma, who panicked and moved. Roslyn grabbed again, and looked. All that was left of Emma between her fingers was the flat tail. The salamander had leaped into a puddle without it, and disappeared.
Roslyn looked for blood at the end where it had been attached to the wet slippery body. There was none. A bloodless detachment, she thought. She wished she had been able to manage something like that in the bathroom this morning. She carried the tail into the bungalow, handling it with great care, and laid it on her bare pillow. Fritzie had stripped her cot while she was out catching salamanders.
‘Icky. What is that?’ said Loo.
‘Emma the salamander’s tail. She left it with me as a going-home present.’
‘You’re cruel,’ said Jo.
‘Yes, you are,’ said Aggie.
Muriel, who had been lying on her bare cot, came over to see the tail. She looked as if she was going to cry.
Fritzie put a broom into Roslyn’s hand and said:
‘Come on, kids. No time for anything but cleanup if you don’t want to miss lunch before we leave.’
‘If lunch is anything like breakfast, that will be okay with me,’ Roslyn said. She put the tail, now shriveling, between two pages of her notebook, as if it were a treasured fall leaf, and stuffed the book into her overfull trunk. She doubted she’d need to take notes on the train ride home.
Fritzie folded sheets on Loo’s bed, next to Roslyn’s. Loo had gone to the bathroom. Roslyn sat on her cot, holding the broom, and whispered to Fritzie:
‘Is it true they’re not married?’
‘What? Who?’
‘The Ehrlichs.’
‘My God. You are something, Roz. Where did you hear that? Of course it’s not true.’
‘I just did. But it is true, isn’t it?’
‘No.’ Then Fritzie realized Roslyn was grinning at her. She whispered angrily: ‘Don’t go blabbing that to everyone.’
‘So it is true,’ she thought. ‘My love Fritzie is lying to me. She’s no
t as good as I thought she was.’ Roslyn shuddered at this newly revealed flaw in Fritzie’s character.
While Fritzie sat down hard on the top of her trunk to get it closed, Roslyn went out on the porch to nurse her disappointment. ‘Maybe that’s the way it will be all my life. All my loves will turn out to be imperfect. Everyone will have something that I will come to hate them for. But that’s okay: I’ll hold on to their weak point so I can feel better when they don’t love me back.’
She decided love must be like a salamander with an expendable tail, joined so tenuously that it comes off if you reach out to grab it, and then the rest of it slithers away and disappears into the mud. Or like the lemmings who (probably in despair, she thought now) dive into the sea and drown. These similes, imperfect as they were, made her feel very grown-up. She had become capable of creating figures of speech, a literary practice more adult than copying newspaper plots.
After her trunk had been forced shut and locked, and the dust balls removed from under her bed and swept into the middle of the floor, out the door, and down the front steps to join the muddy path, Roslyn reclaimed her observation post on the steps. It had stopped raining, and a weak, almost fall sun was trying to shine. She saw Fatto walking up the line toward Rae’s bungalow, carrying a gym bag.
Fritzie was sweeping the porch behind her. Roslyn saw her look at Fatto and then look away, pretending she hadn’t seen him and his bag.
‘Don’t worry,’ Roslyn said smugly. ‘I already know about him.’
‘My God, Roz. Is there anything that goes on in this camp that you don’t know about?’
‘It’s my job to know things.’
‘What job?’
‘Writing. I’m a writer.’
‘What have you written, may I ask?’
‘Well, nothing yet. Except in my head. But I’m getting ready.’
‘Well, that’s good to know. I’ll be more careful around you from now on.’
‘Someday I’m going to write about you.’
‘For God’s sake, don’t.’
‘Well, maybe not you so much. I don’t happen to know much about you. But about my feelings for you.’
‘That too. But you’ll forget all about that by the day after tomorrow. Even maybe tomorrow.’
‘Never. I’ll never forget.’
‘Okay. You can show me your feelings now. Go and put your shoes on so you can help me move the trunks to the porch. Carmen will be coming by in a little while to get them. And wipe the mud off your feet before you put your socks on. Your mother will think you never washed.’
Furious, Roslyn stamped into the bungalow. ‘She was making fun of me again, rejecting me.’ She vowed that if she ever came back here (God forbid, as Fritzie would say), she would concentrate on snakes. She was already fond of their sleek, green, shining bodies and wet, white underbellies. She would launch a campaign against anyone catching them in order to use their skins as belts. Instead she would make pets of them. They ought to be good for new similes and metaphors.
Grete put her belongings into a large packing case. She tied it with heavy twine and wrote MISS GRETE OLSSEN and her address on both its top and its bottom.
‘For sureness,’ she told herself.
She went down the hall to Carmen’s room. His belongings were neatly folded in a still-open camp trunk outside his door.
Carmen opened the door.
‘Oh say. Meant to come by. Sorry about Ib.’
‘It is all right. But thank you. I came to ask. Do you want his clothes? I think they fit you.’
‘Sure. I’ll take them.’
They went to Grete’s room.
‘Over there,’ she said and pointed. ‘In the corner.’
Carmen scooped up two bundles and carried them to his room. When he came back to thank her, Grete was sitting on her bed, her feet up on the rung of a chair. She was drinking from a quart bottle of ale.
‘Jumpin Jehoshaphat. Didn’t know you ever drank. And so early in the day.’
‘So early? Yes. I am just finishing this bottle. Ib’s from Wednesday. I am thirsty.’
Oscar said to Cindy Maggio, who was taking a damp suit off the line: ‘Here’s your belt. I found it.’
‘Where?’
‘In the grass somewhere.’
‘Son of a bitch,’ she said.
Before she could get out the accusation that came to her mind, he had started down the line. At Rae’s bungalow he paused, swallowed, and wiped his forehead. He went in. Rae was packing. Another counselor whose name he did not know was sitting on Rae’s bed watching her.
‘My mother made me come to give you this.’ He handed her the gym bag.
‘What is it?
Oscar swallowed again and said nothing. As she started to open it he left, clumping down the steps. He went around the bungalow towards the woods.
Rae pulled out a tangle of purses, belts, lariats, underpants, and money.
‘Jesus Christ,’ said Will.
Rae looked troubled. ‘How can she expect me to return all this stuff?’
‘You could set up a booth in Hoboken and invite the owners to claim their stolen property.’
‘A good idea, in part. Hoboken, no. It would make a bad impression on the parents. But I’ll find Muggs. She can say she located the stuff somewhere. The kids can come to her for their, uh, their lost-and-found possessions on their way to the buses.’
Will reached into the pile and separated a ten-dollar bill and two ones.
‘I’ll bet these are Hozzle’s. I’ll give them to her on my way down. It’ll make her happy for the rest of the winter.’
Rae smiled wanly: ‘I wish we were going to be.’
‘Going to be what?’
‘Happy. For the winter.’
‘In that I join you, my friend,’ said Will. She reached over and brushed her finger against Rae’s cheek.
At two-thirty the buses were parked at the camp gate, behind the trucks loaded with trunks and cardboard boxes. Counselors shepherded their bunkies down the line. Rae, looking weary and dispirited, her familiar clipboard in hand, inspected each bungalow as it was vacated for campers’ possessions, made a check on her list, and then moved on.
Mrs. Ehrlich was nowhere to be seen. Mr. Ehrlich gave the bus drivers their orders to depart when their bus was full, and waved to the campers, who were singing camp songs as they leaned out of the windows. Filled with the pleasure of departure and thoughts of dinner tonight with their families, they waved back happily to the director.
On the last bus, the doctor and nurse sat together. Dr. Amiel had hoped to ride to the station with Dolly, but she had taken an earlier bus with Fritzie and her campers.
‘Stuck with me, Doctor,’ said the nurse when she saw him looking around.
‘Yup. Guess so.’
‘Glad it’s all over?’
‘Am I ever. All those infernal baseball fingers.’
‘When does your wife arrive?’
‘In a few days, I think. Why do you want to know?’
‘No reason. Are you looking forward to her coming?’
‘What is this, the Inquisition?’
‘What about Dolly, your great love?’
‘I will look back on all that with the greatest pleasure, Nurse Jody.’
‘You bastard,’ she said, her words heavy with the bitterness of the everlasting underling.
Dr. Amiel smiled at Nurse Jody.
‘Yup,’ he said, with professional arrogance.
Between them, Mr. Ehrlich and Oscar lifted Grandmother Ehrlich into the backseat of the sedan. Mrs. Ehrlich came out of the cottage carrying a gray lap robe, which she tucked around the old lady’s legs.
‘Where am I going?’ she asked her daughter.
‘To New York. To the apartment. I’ll see you there.’
‘Enjoy the ride,’ Oscar said and stood back beside his mother. His face was very red, and one eyelid, rosier than the other, was swollen shut by his sty.
‘Don’t
forget the checks, Lena.’
Mrs. Ehrlich said: ‘When have I ever forgotten the checks?’
Mr. Ehrlich got into the car. Carmen started the motor. Mr. Ehrlich turned around and said to his mother: ‘Just relax. You’ll be fine.’
‘When?’ she said.
The station platform was crowded with noisy reunions. Parents listened delightedly as their daughters reported their athletic triumphs, their achievements in the water, their medals and pins. The parents exclaimed over how brown their daughters were, how healthy they looked, how they’d grown. When the fathers said goodbye, they pressed ten-dollar bills into the hands of the counselors they considered responsible for these satisfactory states.
Fritzie saw Joe Lyons’s bearded face far down the platform. She resisted the impulse to run to him, because Muriel, unable to locate her parents in the confusion, clung to her arm, and Roslyn, who appeared to be more interested in Fritzie than in finding the Hellmans, held her hand. The Kresses found Muriel. As they hugged her, she stood very still, not raising her arms to them, her eyes wide with recognition that what she had guessed, had felt, was true. She noticed her parents’ somber clothing among the other summer-clad parents, their stricken faces, the absence of her sister. … Fritzie handed Muriel’s health report to Mr. Kress, and then stood back, still held captive by Roslyn.
Roslyn whispered to her: ‘Where’s Ruth?’
Fritzie said: ‘I don’t know.’
Roslyn thought: ‘She’s lying. Why isn’t she here? Why are they wearing black? I bet I know.’
Alert to fictional possibilities, Roslyn decided Ruth was very sick. Then too, she might be dead. The awfulness of this thought went through her, and made her hands shake. She wasn’t brave enough to stay around the Kresses any longer, to learn the truth. Maybe I don’t have what it takes to be a writer.
She called over to Muriel: ‘So long. See you next year.’ She knew at once it was a stupid thing to say, but she couldn’t think of anything else.
Muriel appeared not to hear her. She was crying into her mother’s shoulder. The Kresses paid no attention to Roslyn or Fritzie.
The Book of Knowledge Page 15