The Book of Knowledge

by Doris Grumbach

  ‘How lucky, That’s great for you. I had Strunk for freshman English too. And I had to get the little book. I learned a lot from him. He’s very funny in class, and very nice to students, although he holds to a hard line about how to write. Now, every time I use an adverb or extra words in a sentence in a paper I feel guilty.’

  The waiter set their dinners down and called their attention to the two frosted glasses he had brought. Caleb thanked him coolly, as if he had expected them as a matter of course, opened the ale, and poured two full glasses. They drank until the glasses were half empty and then stopped to look at each other.

  ‘Very good,’ said Lionel, raising his glass higher as though he were toasting Caleb. ‘Very refreshing. Thank you.’

  ‘I like ale better than Piel’s beer, which is what everyone drinks here,’ Caleb said, to make conversation. He was beginning to wonder how much more there was to say that did not bear on what he hoped was going on silently between them.

  ‘I wouldn’t know. They’re both new to me. Since my father died, my mother never has anything to drink in the apartment. I think she believes it’s disrespectful, or something. Of course, after that happened there was very little money for anything. These years have been rough.’

  ‘I’ll have to see that you get used to the pleasures of the glass. Even hard liquor, which my mother seems to prefer on occasion, according to my sister, who disapproves of anyone having even one drink of anything. Speaking of girls, do you ever see Roslyn Hellman?’

  ‘Now and then. We don’t get together much. She lives in Brooklyn and was going, I think, to college there, to a new branch of City College.’

  ‘What’s she like now? I remember her as bossy and pretty stuck on herself.’

  Lionel shook his head. ‘Do you? I guess I’ve always admired her, so I didn’t see that side of her. She’s tall, as tall as I am, thin, you know, and sort of flat-chested. She has black hair and wears it short, cropped off, sort of boyish. She’s the only girl I know who wears men’s shirts and ties.’

  ‘Does she live at home?’

  ‘Yes, to her disgust. She doesn’t get along with her mother. She told me she wanted to go to New York University so she could live in the Village and get away from home, but there was no money. So she’s stuck out there in Flatbush.’

  ‘You people in Manhattan always think of the other boroughs as distant and dismal swamps, don’t you?’

  ‘And how,’ said Lionel. ‘I can’t conceive of living out there among the savages.’

  ‘What about in Far Rockaway? Same thing?’

  Lionel laughed. ‘No, I’ve always thought of that place as rather civilized because the Flowerses lived there and, of course, I spent a summer there. That must have had some taming effect on the place, I’m sure.’

  Caleb smiled. ‘Well, I concede it’s not a great place to spend your life. I’d like to see Kate get out, but at the moment … Anyway, you never run into Roslyn?’

  ‘Rarely. We’ve gone to the movies a few times, and once, recently, by accident, we had dinner at the same table in the Jumble Shop in the Village. She had been at some student union meeting with a friend, and I had been looking for a book in the Eighth Street Bookstore. I think it was something on the Bauhaus. They didn’t have it, but they ordered it for me.

  ‘It was strange. We talked for a while about applying to colleges, and about money, or the lack of it. She told me that a friend of hers who’d gone to Spain with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade had died of a shot to his head. Her eyes filled with tears and I asked her what battle it was. “No battle,” she said. “He was shot in the head in a cantina by a soldier friend who was fooling around with his rifle. They were drinking wine.”

  ‘Then she broke down. I asked her if he was someone she had been in love with. “No, not at all. But we were friends. I cry when I think of the idiocy of it. So much for going off to fight against fascism and for democracy,” she said. I haven’t seen her since. I learned about her going to Brooklyn College from her mother when I called and she was out. She never called me back.’

  ‘More spaghetti?’ Caleb asked. ‘They give you a second portion here if you want it. Free.’

  ‘Not for me. Believe it or not, I’m finally filled up.’

  Caleb paid a dollar and fifty cents for the two dinners and thirty cents for the ale, and gave the waiter a twenty-five-cent tip. Some of the pale liquid remained in the bottle. He corked it and put the bottle under his arm.

  As they walked up the hill, Caleb put his hand on Lionel’s shoulder.

  ‘Shall we finish the bottle at Telluride?’ he asked.

  ‘Fine with me.’

  It was close to nine when they arrived at Caleb’s room. He had found two clean water glasses in the scullery and poured the ale into them.

  ‘Not much left,’ he said.

  ‘I don’t think I’m up to much more. I’ve got two classes tomorrow morning.’

  ‘Are you tired?’

  ‘A little. Are you?’

  They stood around the table that served as a desk, taking small drinks of ale and exchanging bits of talk, their eyes on each other. It was clear to them that the offhand questions and trite answers, the sips of ale, the talk about professors and classes, were of no importance beside the grave matter that inhabited their thoughts. Lionel was reluctant for the evening to end. Caleb sensed his unwillingness and shared it.

  ‘Like to lie down and rest before you take off?’

  Without replying, Lionel moved over to the bed and lay down. He placed his hands under his head and closed his eyes, feigning rest, Caleb thought. Perhaps Lionel was waiting for him to join him. He did, lying on his side so he could watch Lionel’s face until he opened his eyes.

  Lionel reached for Caleb’s hand and held it. It was this touch, the warm union of their fingers, the slight pressure that Caleb exerted in response to Lionel’s move, that brought the two of them to the point of acute knowledge. A curious climax had been reached, an epiphany without preparation. Having never thought about wanting to love one another in this way, suddenly they had no doubt that this was what they felt, what they had wanted all along.

  Still, they made no further move toward the other places on each other they wished to explore, although they knew well they were held on the bed by weighty urges to touch, to put their mouths together, to wipe out the distance between them by placing their erect members into orifices in a way they had never before considered.

  In the long silence that seemed to gather itself up into bubbles above their heads and then form into soundless clouds, they filled the room with their breathing and their heat. Without moving, they lay like the gilded human statues in the circus who, in their sculptured stillness, portray the living dead.

  At last Caleb could bear it no longer. He freed his hand to open the small buttons of Lionel’s fly, and wrapped his fingers around his firm part.

  ‘Is this all right? Do you mind?’ he asked.

  Lionel did not reply. Instead he broke Caleb’s hold on him, slid down to his crotch, unbuttoned him quickly, and moved close to take him in his mouth.

  ‘Will you like this?’ he asked in a voice so soft Caleb had to strain to hear.

  ‘And how,’ Caleb said, echoing Lionel’s favorite expression and offering colloquial proof of his delight at the proposal.

  The winter semester seemed to them to be over very quickly. They had tried hard to apportion their time so that they did not meet too often. They kept up their studies, perhaps because their pleasure with each other became so intense they could not bear to meet two evenings in a row.

  Caleb grew lax about calling home regularly. He found himself thinking about Kate now and then, and always when he looked at Lionel lying beside him: his fair skin, his thin, boyish pliant body, the way his hair curled about his ears. He still wished to think of a way to free her of her dutiful tie to their mother, but the joys of his present state kept him from doing anything about it.

  Lionel limited his c
ontacts with his mother to reassuring postcards at odd intervals. Caleb had become the kingbolt of his existence. He could not proceed in any direction without considering what Caleb’s wishes might be. The machinery of his daily life and his plans for the future ran smoothly on the paths laid down by Caleb; he could imagine no separate existence for himself.

  Neither of them gave a thought to anyone else. There was so much new subject matter to be explored; they were totally absorbed by it. They found the contents of their minds and their persons, and the miracle of their union, worthy of all the time they could be together. The sensual delights and the warm comradeship they had discovered occupied every moment they were not sleeping, in class, in the library, or, in Lionel’s case, in the laboratory or on the drill field. Lionel had been promoted to corporal in his ROTC platoon; Caleb took great pleasure at the sight of Lionel in his trim Army uniform.

  To the dismay of both mothers, to whom they reported that they needed the time to study in the library, and to Kate’s intense sorrow, the two men spent Thanksgiving recess and the Christmas holidays in Ithaca. Because college housing was closed during those times, they rented a small, sunny room in Snyder’s Tourist Home on North Aurora Street. Almost no one else remained in town during those times; Mrs. Snyder accommodated them for one dollar a night. Caleb willingly paid the bill. In early morning he went out to the bakery down the street for rolls and coffee and brought breakfast back to their room. They ate in bed, interrupted only by the now customary pleasures that punctuated the hours of their free days.

  They luxuriated in their contentment. In the afternoons, and before their late suppers in Johnny’s Coffee Shoppe (open day and night, its sign said proudly) or at the Senate, they read the texts assigned for the next semester, sometimes exchanging books to see what the other was reading, in much the same way as their sexual activities teeter-totted between them, one accepting and the other providing, one giving when the need was for donation and the other receiving, with grace, the alms of passion.

  At Easter, the spring break lasting two weeks, they agreed to spend the last weekend apart, in New York and in Far Rockaway. Separation was painful. Since the fall they had not been apart except for a few days. They had grown used to each other’s presence.

  Lionel took home a folder full of notes to write a term paper. Caleb filled his bag with books. They proceeded on the theory that the busier they were, or at least appeared to be, the easier it would be to plead unfinished work and so be able to leave early for Ithaca.

  Sadie Schwartz had grown even more resentful, Lionel found. Being alone had not improved her embittered disposition. During his few days with her in the small apartment on West Seventy-seventh Street, she seldom left his side or the room in which he was trying to write, except to prepare their meals, make his bed, and empty his wastebasket. Lionel understood that she was demonstrating, silently, how essential he was to her happiness, how necessary she was to his comfort.

  To underline her sacrificial approach to life, she told him that a neighbor in the apartment house, a widower named Ben Janowitz whom she had met seated in the sun on the Broadway benches, had suggested to her that they might marry. But it was impossible, she had told him. In deference to her concerns for Lionel and to the memory of her beloved Lester, she had turned him down.

  Lionel sighed, and made no response to this blighted prospect for his freedom.

  On Saturday (he had been home three days) he could bear her constant presence no longer. He telephoned Roslyn Hellman and asked her if she would like to see a play with him in New York.

  They had not met in more than a year. In front of the Maxine Elliott Theater they embraced and then stood back to inspect each other. Lionel was chagrined to see that Roslyn seemed to be taller than he; Roslyn noticed only Lionel’s fair hair and skin, and wondered if he yet was able to grow a beard.

  On line to get standing-room tickets—The Children’s Hour was a successful play with no seats to be had on Saturday night, especially the fifty-five-cent ones they could afford—the two old friends brought each other up to date on their lives. Roslyn was full of stories about the inadequacies of her parents. She had no good words for Brooklyn College, which was still struggling to become established. Some of the buildings were still without heat in this terribly cold winter.

  ‘I hate living at home,’ she told him. ‘But I have no choice, what with so little money and all. Even so, I had to wait more than a year to enter. Butchers aren’t paid the way brokers were, you know. But my parents are thinking of moving to Miami Beach next year, where my aunt and uncle have a winter house. It’s cheap there, no heating bills to worry about, no winter clothes, all that sort of thing. My father thinks he might find some sort of part-time work down there. I think they’ll be able to manage. Some of their friends have started to vacation down there in winter.’

  ‘That’s wonderful,’ said Lionel, inching closer to the box office. ‘Then you’ll be free.’

  ‘Well, yes, free, but pretty poor. I’ll have to get a job while I finish college. I’ll have to find a cheap place to live, in Brooklyn yet,’ she added, in a tone that suggested she would then be condemned to Siberian exile.

  They were lucky: they got the last two standing-room tickets and found themselves in the second row of standees with a good view of the stage. The play, set in a girls’ boarding school, started slowly. Standing close, the two friends shifted about, trying to get into comfortable positions. But when it became clear that the evil pupil had thought up a vengeful accusation against two of the women teachers, their attention was fastened to the stage. They hardly moved again.

  After the climactic second act, they went into the lobby, hoping to spot some departees whose seats they might claim for the last act.

  ‘It’s an interesting play, isn’t it?’ said Lionel, his eyes on the crowd.

  ‘Yes, very. And surprising, shocking in a way, for Broadway. Do you think the two women, well, you know, really love each other?’

  ‘I think the one does. The one who wants to marry, I suppose, does not.’

  Roslyn was silent. She had a sudden vision of herself walking beside Fritzie years ago, through the black night woods of the camp, waiting to hear her counselor’s response to her passionate letter.

  ‘Don’t you agree?’ Lionel saw himself sitting on the parapet over Cascadilla Falls waiting for Caleb to come to take him to dinner, worrying that he would arrive emptied, suddenly, inexplicably, of the measure of love he had expressed the day before.

  ‘I do, of course I do. But how do you think it will end?’

  ‘As plays like this usually do, I suppose. The one will marry that guy, and the other will look around for someone else. Most of these plays end happily, or they wouldn’t be hits on Broadway.’

  Lights flickered, signaling the start of the third act. They went back in, to stand in the newly opened spaces in the front row of the back of the orchestra. Vicariously, painfully, they entered into the ruined life of the woman on the stage who was unable to bear any longer the truth about herself.

  The suicide of the homosexual teacher that brought Lillian Hellman’s play to its conclusion stunned them. They walked to the corner of Forty-fourth Street and went into Child’s on Broadway to have coffee before Roslyn took the subway home.

  At first they said nothing, stirring cream and sugar into their full cups, mopping up the overflow with napkins, and trying to ignore conversation. They were still captives of the emotions the play had aroused in them.

  Lionel broke the silence with the only noncommittal question he could think of: ‘Are you by any chance a relative of the playwright’s?’

  Roslyn laughed, relieved that the spell of introspection had been broken. ‘Not that I know of,’ she said. ‘It would be nice, though. She’s very good, don’t you think?’

  Lionel did not reply. In his mind, he had moved far away, into the bedroom in Telluride that first evening when he and Caleb had lain together on Caleb’s bed. In the silence
that followed, they both felt a desire to relate their histories to the other. Roslyn wanted to say that she had once had a crush on a camp counselor. Lionel wanted to say, ‘I am gloriously, madly in love with Caleb Flowers.’

  But neither of them said anything, perhaps because they were unaccustomed to the luxury of baring their souls. Or it may be that they feared the burden of confession, the bestowing of any part of themselves on the other to carry away from this evening.

  The surface of Caleb’s return to his family was pleasant. His mother seemed to be in good spirits. Her deafness had increased to the point that communication was difficult, but still, she smiled whenever her eyes rested on him and reached out to touch him whenever he came close to her. He felt wanted, he sank back into the old security of being the beloved son.

  Emma was now obese and had lost her mobility. Stationary in her overstuffed living-room chair from early morning, her swollen feet elevated on a stool, her now rarely opened library book on the table beside her, she seemed to Caleb to be Buddhalike in her apparent contentment. Her eyes were always on him, waiting for him to sit beside her and tell her tales of life at college. At other times, she appeared to be waiting impatiently for Kate to serve her meals on the card table pulled up to her chair in front of the fireplace.

  It seemed to him that his mother had buried the history of her early life in layers of fat. Nothing could be sensed of her inner being. He saw only the constant, inappropriate smile she never allowed to vary. Her thoughts, if indeed she entertained any, were invisible, protected from expression by her overabundant flesh and the tight harness of deafness.