The Book of Knowledge

by Doris Grumbach

Roslyn walked away with Fritzie.

  ‘Is your boyfriend here?’

  ‘My fiancé? Yes, he’s here.’

  Roslyn decided to make one last grand gesture.

  ‘I hope you’ll be happy.’

  ‘Thank you, Roz,’ she said, and, feeling she owed the girl a bit of kindness, she kissed her on the cheek.

  Roslyn stood still, as if she were suffering under her touch, and stared at her counselor.

  Fritzie laughed, said goodbye, ‘See you next summer,’ and walked away down the platform toward Joe Lyons.

  ‘Not bloody likely,’ said Roslyn aloud.

  ‘It’s something,’ she thought. ‘She likes me. I still love her. Emma may grow her tail back and be whole. My stomach still aches a little, and that silly pad between my legs is beginning to make me sore. But I’m beginning to feel better.’

  From a distance Dolly waved to Amiel. He waved back and then turned to the Maggios. Mr. Maggio, holding on proudly to two red woven belts, shook the doctor’s hand vigorously.

  ‘I want to thank you, Doctor, for the good care you gave my girl here.’ He slapped him twice on the back and then handed him an envelope.

  ‘It’s a small token of my appreciation, Doctor.’

  Mrs. Maggio nodded to the doctor. Despite the warm day, she was wearing a fur stole, a large string of pearls, and gold jewelry.

  The doctor thanked Mr. Maggio and said: ‘It was nothing, sir,’ a literal truth, since Cindy Maggio had never been sick. He gave her father the health report and looked around to see if the circle of counselors around Mrs. Ehrlich had thinned out.

  Three abreast, the Maggios walked toward the ferry slip.

  ‘Never once was in the goddamn infirmary,’ said Cindy to her father.

  Mrs. Ehrlich watched the family group get on the ferry. She had been informed by Rae that the junior camper’s vocabulary had been more colorful this year than last. She resolved not to call on the family this winter in order to remove Cindy and her language from the camp roster.

  But she need not have worried. The Ehrlichs were to be saved by a kindly Fate. Through the newspapers, they learned that the Maggios had gone abroad to visit relatives in Sicily soon after the closing of camp. There was a gathering of the large Maggio clan. While they ate hugely of pasta and drank much grappa, an investigation into Mafia activities in the United States revealed that Constanzo Maggio, Cindy’s generous father, had been involved, in a suspicious manner, in Brooklyn politics. The borough’s district attorney informed Sicilian officials, through federal representatives there, that the Maggios would not be welcomed back into the country. Cindy Maggio’s vulgarity would no longer be a threat to the sheltered minds of junior campers.

  Dr. Amiel took his envelope from Mrs. Ehrlich and shook her hand.

  ‘Have a nice winter in Florida. I’ve enjoyed the summer.’

  ‘I’m glad.’

  ‘Where’s Oscar?’

  ‘He made the first ferry. There’s a movie in the City he wanted to see. Called Public Enemy, I think.’

  ‘I hope he’ll be all right. Try to get him to lose some weight.’

  ‘Yes. But you know him. I’m not worried about that. It’s … his behavior. What am I going to do about that?’

  ‘Why don’t you take him to a psychiatrist?’

  ‘That Freud stuff? I don’t believe in it.’

  ‘Well, maybe you’re right. I hope his eye clears up,’ he said, anxious to get away from Oscar’s multiple troubles and to make the ferry. ‘You take care. Say goodbye for me to your … to Mr. Ehrlich.’

  ‘Thank you. I will.’

  For a few moments after the doctor left, Mrs. Ehrlich stood alone, feeling deserted and defenseless, without her supportive head counselor, without useful Grete, without her brother or her son. She saw Muggs coming toward her. Immediately she resumed her old confident stance.

  ‘Goodbye, Mrs. Ehrlich,’ Muggs said. She was dressed in a handsome blue skirt and blouse that Mrs. Ehrlich thought looked as if it had come from Saks Fifth Avenue. Her heels were very high, displaying the elegance of her arches.

  ‘I’m sorry about the belt business. Maybe I shouldn’t have said …’

  ‘Maybe not,’ said Mrs. Ehrlich coolly. She handed Muggs her check.

  ‘Are you making this ferry?’ she asked the counselor as she started to turn away.

  ‘No. I’m driving back.’

  ‘Driving back?’

  ‘Uh, well, yes. The chauffeur brought my car.’

  Mrs. Ehrlich stared. For the first time since she had hired her, three summers ago, she remembered about Margaret Stewart. Not just the arts and crafts counselor, or the betrayer of her son, but one of New York’s rich girls. Maybe she should have had her to dinner one night. …

  Margaret Stewart said, waving the check: ‘Thank you for this,’ and smiled. Her receding chin seemed even more in retreat.

  Mrs. Ehrlich said: ‘Yes. Good. Well, goodbye,’ and turned to greet the Hellmans.

  Dr. Amiel made his way through the diminishing crowd to the ferry. He felt healthy but depressed, sunburned and well exercised but, for some reason, sad: sad about Dolly, apprehensive about his internship at Bellevue, which began in a few days, dejected at the thought that the noose of his marriage was about to descend upon him. He found a place at the rail on the upper deck and leaned against it to watch the boat make its slow, decorous way across the Hudson to Manhattan. For some reason, he suddenly remembered Grandmother Ehrlich.

  ‘I’m sick of myself,’ he said into the sea breeze, and laughed.

  After all the farewells and pleasantries were over, Rae and Will made the last ferry. They went to the lower-deck rail. Will started to shake as she saw the water swirling about the prow of the boat. Rae took her arm.

  ‘Willie dear. Let’s go into the cabin.’

  They took a bench at the back. A boy offered them hot dogs and soda. They refused, and sat very close to each other.

  ‘Where are we staying?’ Will asked.

  ‘At the Lafayette. In the Village. I thought we’d blow a little of my ill-gotten gains on some luxury.’

  ‘For how long?’

  ‘Not very. We won’t be able to afford it. Three days, maybe.’

  Will shivered.

  ‘What’s the matter, love?’

  ‘I hate being on water as much as I hate being in it,’ Will said.

  Roslyn had a superstitious concern: she wanted everything to come out even. If she lost something, she worried that she would not find something else to make up for it. When she used up all the envelopes in her stationery box, she worried about what to do with the orphaned writing paper. Sometimes she wrote longer letters so there would be no leftover sheets.

  On the last day of camp, the shaky balance between good and bad things tipped for her. Things had not come out even. Everything she had seen, felt, heard, and overheard this summer was bad: thievery, death, rejection, uncontrollable bleeding, and what she surmised was the fate of Ruth Kress.

  Crossing the river, the Hellmans and Aunt Sophie stood at the prow of the ferry. Roslyn held on to the chain that separated the cars from the drive-off ramp. Jean carried her hockey stick and tennis racket under one arm and held on to Roslyn with the other. Jean had just given her the belt she had made. Roslyn put it on over the top of her cotton skirt. She was pleased that Jean had done such a nice thing, but still it did not balance all the other …

  She felt her father’s hand on her shoulder. She thought: ‘We are sailing the ocean blue—well, the river. Our parents are glad, at the moment, to have us back. Jean’s got her gold medal around her neck. She keeps looking down at it. She’s proud. I’m carrying nothing. I threw my tin pin into the woods before we left. But it was nice of her to make me a belt, the one good thing that’s happened, well, maybe after the kiss on my cheek. I don’t think I’ll ever wash it off.

  ‘I can smell the salt of the ocean. It’s a Riverside Drive smell. Whenever I come upon it, I know I’m going to
the City. I felt like I’d been expelled from it. It was like this when we came back from Far Rockaway. A coming-home odor. New York City used to smell of fall streets, delis, and fresh morning newspapers, the wind from the river and the dust of the gutters, movie theaters and lighted stores. Then it all disappeared with the Crash. Brooklyn is another country, but then, there’s always the subway.’

  Left behind were the pine-woods and clear-lake scents and silences that, for the rest of her life, would define country to her. Sweet, wet, heavy, sharp, they were the smells of a world outside the City, the aroma that would fasten itself to her memory of first love and the inevitable disorders of deception, death, and anatomy.

  In the Catskill woods, at a summer camp on a clear but lethal lake, in late August 1930, Roslyn had made rapid advances out of her girlhood. She had left it behind in exchange for the pains and torments of being a woman. And, like everyone else in the world, she had learned that she was vulnerable to everything. And like so many others, she would come to know that she was one of life’s neediest cases.

  3

  Telluride

  A self-governing community of about twenty-five male students, chosen for their promise and achievement to attend Cornell University. Free room and board are provided, in return for assuming responsibility for the operation of the House, and for continued academic performance and agreeable communal behavior. The House: a simple, solid brick building, erected in 1910 in the Prairie style originated by Frank Lloyd Wright.

  CALEB FLOWERS SPENT the first months at college desperately sick for home. His dormitory, North Baker Hall, had provided its students with only three public telephone booths. So, every other evening, after dinner, he lined up before one of them to wait his turn. He could go just so long without speaking to his mother and sister in Far Rockaway.

  For their benefit he affected a tone of cheery good humor. Yes, his room was fine, his roommate was swell, his studies were going very well, his social life was good, well yes, it was okay.

  ‘And how are things going at home?’ he would always ask, striving to keep his voice strong yet concerned and tender.

  He listened patiently to their reports, the tenor of which never varied: everything was fine, Kate was studying hard for her midterms, Emma was reading a new novel by James Hilton (‘somewhat nasty,’ she reported), they missed him very much and were eagerly looking forward to Thanksgiving holiday and then Christmas recess and then spring vacation and, of course, the summer. …

  When Caleb had shut the glass door behind him and gone to his room, he would break down. Beleaguered by the rigidity of daily academic assignments—forty pages of this, three chapters of that, a paper for the day after tomorrow—he could not rid himself of the memory of his mother’s wonderfully lax and undemanding ways of living, her patient and selective deafness, her uncritical admiration of him. But most painful were the haunting recollections of Kate, his loving, beautiful sister, whose ethereal presence was constant and troubling.

  His roommate was an athletic fellow from upstate New York who wanted Caleb, and everyone else in Baker Hall, to like him. Boris, who asked to be called Bo, was agreeable, obliging, and sociable: everyone was invited to their room at any hour. He was a jovial host to strays and popular freshmen alike. Caleb, unaccustomed to rowdy horseplay and constant, surreptitious drinking (for prohibition was still practiced by the Cornell administration even after its repeal the year before by the national government), felt out of place and alien in their populous room.

  On the evenings of his telephone calls he was always relieved to come back to find his room empty. He could indulge his tears and rid himself privately of all traces of his childish sorrow. He felt guilty about his sadness, believing no other man of college age on the entire campus could be found indulging in this foolish state. It drove him out of Baker and across the field to the library, because he knew that his room would soon fill up with boys playing Tommy Dorsey and Paul Whiteman records over and over on the Victrola, drinking gin and pineapple juice, and talking about the girls undoubtedly waiting in the parlor of Sage Hall for the boys to call.

  In the first year, as a result of his retreat from sociability, Caleb achieved high grades, placing him on the Dean’s List and guaranteeing the renewal of his tuition scholarship. And what was more, and most surprising to him, one day he found in his mailbox an invitation to spend his sophomore year as a resident of Telluride, the prestigious house for distinguished undergraduates, graduate students, and a few chosen faculty.

  Curiously enough after his long year of homesickness, Caleb decided to spend the summer in Ithaca, putting files in order in the office of the Cornell Daily Sun. He told his mother he needed the experience because he was considering a career in journalism, a decision he had not given a thought to until he uttered those words to her. His real reason for not going home, until two weeks before the fall semester began, was more self-serving. He was not willing to suffer through another period of bruising displacement after indulging himself in a long summer’s feast of familial comfort and affection. Better to have no taste of it at all, he decided, than to starve once again for its richness.

  To satisfy his conscience, he went to Far Rockaway for the last weekend in August.

  Emma found his news hard to believe. Caleb showed her his letter.

  ‘Room and board?’ she said.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘It’s a wonderful house. Lovely parlor, big rooms, a porch, fireplace, everything. I’ll have a room to myself, I think. But it doesn’t matter. Everyone there takes his studies very seriously. No drinking or fooling around with girls, and such.’

  ‘It must be much in demand. How many boys live there?’

  ‘Men, mother, men. Not boys. This year I’m told there will be about twenty-five.’

  ‘How did you come to get in, Caleb?’

  ‘Well, Mother, I heard about the house, so I applied. In my spare time at the paper, I wrote the essay they asked for and took it over to West Street, where the house is, not far from where I lived this year. Then I went back a few weeks ago to be interviewed. Last Tuesday, just before I left, I got the letter.’

  ‘It’s wonderful. Isn’t it wonderful, Kate?’

  ‘It is wonderful,’ said Kate soberly. ‘Congratulations, Caleb.’

  Kate had found Caleb’s late return home that summer very difficult. Her summer had been uneventful, an unmarked transition from a dull senior year in high school. She had waited eagerly for his vacations, planning the time for his return, hoping to renew the warmth of the friendship she had not been able to transfer to any other person at school.

  But his short stays at home had been painful failures for her. Caleb seemed afraid to come close to her in the old way. When she looked at him, as she could not help doing because in her eyes he grew more beautiful every time she saw him, he met her eyes and then quickly looked away, as though he did not wish to be inspected in this way. Or perhaps he did not wish to return her glance, to see her as she was growing up to be. Or perhaps, she thought, he was feeling a reluctance to face her, because he no longer shared the same need she was feeling.

  He was interested in her plans, no longer in her person, she believed. But she wanted so much to lie in his arms in the old way, to hear his wonderful stories, to play his lady, his amorous companion, his love, his wife. Since he had gone away, she had found the realities of her life disappointing. She went on reading myths, fairy tales, and sagas, rereading the romantic fiction from which he used to draw his games, but now she found them painful to review in his absence. Only the memory of the part they had played in their shared past sustained her.

  ‘Where will you go next year, Kate? Where have you applied?’

  ‘That’s the trouble,’ Emma said. ‘Nowhere. I keep asking her, but she won’t decide. I’ve suggested Cornell, to be near you, but she won’t do anything about that.’

  ‘I like it here,’ said Kate. ‘I don’t see why I have to go to college. What would I study? What do I want
to be?’

  ‘You once said you might like to be a teacher,’ Caleb said. He felt no enthusiasm for her attendance at Cornell but had no wish to reveal his opposition. He felt he had cured himself, after great pain, of his long boyhood obsession with Kate. Now he was afraid to test his belief by her proximity to him.

  ‘No, not anymore. Besides, it costs a lot to go. I don’t have a Regents scholarship like you. And I’m a girl. So I can’t get into some house that gives you free room and board, can I, Caleb?’

  ‘No. It’s only for men.’

  Emma said: ‘But, Kate, I’ve told you. I can manage.’

  ‘But I told you, Mother, I don’t want to go.’

  By denying to them what she secretly wished for, Kate thought she was punishing Caleb for his desertion. She wanted to repay his cavalier indifference to what he should have longingly remembered during the winter of his first year at college. Now, if she insisted on staying at home, doing nothing but living Emma’s somnolent life, and Caleb went about making his successful way in the world, she might elicit some pity from him. He might be moved to comfort her in the old, wonderful way, even to return to her the one thing she cared about in this world: his love.

  But it did not happen. Claiming he had much settling in to do in his new quarters, Caleb left Far Rockaway a day early. He could not disguise his eagerness to get to the new house, to begin his college life afresh, and to register for Professor Harry Caplan’s classics course. He had heard, he told his mother and Kate, that it was difficult for a sophomore to get into it. Also, in the privacy of his single room, he wanted to try out the phonograph Emma had given him as reward for his freshman grades.

  Kate said goodbye. She waited for him to offer to kiss her when he approached her. They looked at each other awkwardly, he at the top of her head, she at his hands, each trying hard not to recall the old ardor of their embraces. Emma hugged him and told him to come home soon.

  The Greyhound bus ride to Ithaca went very quickly. He occupied himself with savoring his relief at his escape from his family and anticipating the new semester and the new place he was going to live.