The Book of Knowledge

by Doris Grumbach

  Lieutenant DeMarco sat down and returned to his paper.

  Clearly annoyed, the officer of the day said to him: ‘Your orders will be ready tomorrow, about four bells.’

  Without looking up, DeMarco said: ‘Whenever the hell that is. I’ll clear out my desk this afternoon.’

  ‘Good.’

  The officer of the day, making no reference to Lieutenant DeMarco’s behavior, walked with Roslyn to the elevator. ‘We use it to abandon ship in case of fire,’ he said. ‘The captain takes his command very seriously.’

  ‘Yes. I can see that. Well, I’ll report early in the morning. Thank you for showing me around.’

  ‘Not at all. It’s part of my duty. See you then.’

  When Roslyn got to DeMarco’s desk the next day it was almost empty. In one drawer she found the burnt-out stub of a Camel cigarette, and in another half a Nabisco cookie. She sat in his seat and spent the day reading the handbook of censorship regulations. When her shift was over, she lined up at the elevator as she had been instructed, in full uniform, her hat squared on her head, her sweaty hands in her white gloves, her blue tie buttoned tightly under her collar. As she rode down in the company of three other officers similarly attired, one of them, a lieutenant junior grade, said to her:

  ‘I’m Judy Bowes. Care to come along for a drink before you go home? I’m going up to the Fairmont for the usual before dinner.’

  ‘I’m Roslyn Hellman.’ They shook hands. ‘Very nice of you to ask. I would like that.’

  Roslyn was delighted by the invitation, thinking how nice it would be to spend the evening with this handsome and hospitable WAVE officer, to escape her loneliness and the return to her shabby rooming house. She might even be able to share with another woman (a fellow sufferer, maybe?) her thoughts about the oppressive misogyny of the regular Navy. Perhaps (was it remotely possible?) they might have more than that in common. …

  At the Fairmont bar, Ensign Hellman decided that Lieutenant Bowes had taken pity on her, the new girl on the station in a strange city. It was not only that. Judy Bowes was a large, hearty, generous-minded woman who thought of the service as a kind of family party to which everyone was invited. She had been born in Atlanta and had about her the warm inclusiveness of her region. ‘Y’all come’ sounded in her broad Southern accent even if she did not say those words.

  Waiting for her at the bar, with a stool reserved by his hat, was a burly, smiling naval aviator. He spotted her at once, smiled as he stood up, and gestured to the empty seat. Judy Bowes introduced Roslyn to ‘my friend Lieutenant Commander Owen Hayes.’ He invited Roslyn to take his stool and stood gallantly between the two women at the bar.

  A tight row of navy-blue-clad shoulders pushed against each other as waiters tried to insert themselves between customers to give orders to the barman. Roslyn was pressed against the aviator on one side and a strange officer on the other, feeling, pleasantly, part of a great and noble whole, a phalanx of similarly destined persons laughing and joking together in the face of approaching danger. She remembered having felt this concord when they had all lined up at the flagpole, patriotic intermediate campers in their uniform bloomers, pledging allegiance with their hands over their hearts, the only moments in that traumatic summer years ago when she had felt part of anything.

  The three officers downed their Scotch and sodas, one after another, until close to seven o’clock. It was too noisy to carry on any sort of conversation, so they sat looking ahead at their mirrored selves, sinking deeper into the solitude that often accompanies persons in a large crowd. Other officers and WAVES, straight from their stations, it seemed, came in to replace those who had left to go on duty.

  ‘They’re changing guard at the Fairmont Hotel,’ Roslyn said, and Judy smiled.

  ‘Christopher Robin went down with Alice,’ she added.

  ‘A soldier’s life is terrible hard,’ said Owen, and they all laughed, pleased with their common childhood memory.

  Roslyn shared a cab with them until it reached Van Ness Avenue.

  ‘I’ll get out here,’ she told them. ‘I’m just up this street. Thanks for the nice evening.’

  ‘Not at all,’ said Judy in her sweet Southern drawl. ‘See you at seven, God help us all. Bye.’

  Roslyn walked up the hill to her rooming house, feeling the inevitable depression of the solitary person who knows the others have gone on to a companionable night. Her earlier mood, compounded of drinks and the proximity of young, uniformed society, fell abruptly. In her room she could hear the footsteps of two persons on the floor above her, the light heels of a woman, the heavy rubber-heeled tread of a man.

  ‘Couples, always couples,’ she thought, ‘couples everywhere but in this room.’ Not for the first time, it occurred to her that she had spent much of her life alone in the company of others, and that she had made little progress toward changing her singularity. Marriage had never been an option to her, perhaps because she had never sought it, and certainly because it had never been suggested to her, she thought grimly, taking off her too-tight tie and her low, uncomfortable pumps. She felt no affinity for men, and the friendships with women she wanted had never been offered to her. After all the drinks, and the peanuts at the bar, she decided not to go out again for dinner. She took off her uniform and hung it carefully on a wire hanger, and lay down on the bed to consider her case: in exile once again, in a strange place, needing friends and doing work that would probably turn out to be routine, like all the other assignments in her disappointing life.

  Six months later, settled into her job on New Montgomery Street, Roslyn learned that Lieutenant DeMarco had shipped out on a cruiser, the Helena, on its way to the Solomon Islands. Two weeks after that, Judy Bowes brought a cable to her desk.

  ‘See this? Did you get a copy?’

  ‘No, I don’t think so. I’ve been working on press stuff.’

  ‘Wasn’t Lewis DeMarco on the Helena?’

  ‘I think so, yes. Why?’

  ‘This says the cruiser Helena was sunk day before last at Kula Gulf. All hands reported lost.’

  ‘My God.’

  After Judy left, Roslyn sat at DeMarco’s desk, as she was to think of it now, her head in her hands, her eyes closed to hold back her unmilitary tears. For the next three days she felt she was working surrounded by an impenetrable fog invisible to everyone else on the station, sunk in the unshared misery that a catastrophe bestows upon the individual sufferer.

  She had begun to recover, to accept the sinking of the Helena as part of the common condition of war, when she looked up at the end of her shift to find a young woman standing at her desk. She was carelessly dressed, as if her clothes had been thrown over her very thin body. Her short red hair did not fit under the cloche jammed down on her head, but stood out at all sides. Her eyes were wet and red.

  In a voice so rough and loud that everyone nearby turned to see what was happening, she shouted at Roslyn: ‘Now do you know what you have done?’

  A terrible realization of who this angry and disheveled woman must be swept over Roslyn, but she said: ‘No. What have I done?’

  ‘You’ve made me a widow, you goddamn WAVE, and my child an orphan. That’s what you’ve done.’

  Roslyn stood up and tried to touch Mrs. DeMarco’s shoulder, but she jerked herself away.

  ‘Lew would still be here, sitting right here, if you hadn’t …’

  She lowered her head and wiped her eyes with a man’s handkerchief she had pulled from her pocket. A yellow paper fell to the floor at the same time. She snatched it up and threw it at Roslyn.

  ‘There. That’s for you. You can read it over and over, like I have. Put it in with your medals and show it to your children. It’s for you to keep.’

  Roslyn was speechless before the force of the woman’s furious grief. She caught the telegram and read that it began: ‘The Department of the Navy regrets to inform you …’ She did not read the rest but saw the signature: ‘Frank Knox, Secretary of the Navy.’
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  Mrs. DeMarco was standing waiting at the elevator, sobbing into her handkerchief, when Roslyn felt able to move from behind her desk and walk toward her. When she reached the elevator, Mrs. DeMarco was gone. Judy Bowes came from her desk and put her arm around Roslyn.

  ‘Pay her no mind, dearie. You’re not to blame. It’s the war. It’s not your fault.’

  Roslyn shook her head and said: ‘Thank you. Yes, I know that. Of course.’

  But all day (and for years to come) she thought about the lieutenant she had unseated and sent, without her being aware of it, to his grave at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. She thought she saw an ironic connection between him and her friend who had died in Spain during the Civil War fighting with the Loyalists, shot through the head by a drunken American comrade. She now thought of Lieutenant DeMarco as her victim, dead of friendly fire from her WAVES orders.

  For years she was to keep in her small, gray lock box, together with her discharge papers, a communication from James V. Forrestal, Secretary of the Navy, commending her for service to her country. He went on to inform her: ‘The WAVES have released enough men for duty afloat to man completely a major task force.’ Clipped to it was a newspaper summary she had saved, about women’s contribution to the war. It was a testimonial to the bitterness about the war she was never to lose. According to the article, by releasing enlisted men and male officers for active duty, women had made possible the crewing of ten battleships, ten aircraft carriers, fifty destroyers, and twenty-eight cruisers.

  ‘Especially the Helena,’ she used to say to herself when she came upon the papers. ‘Especially Lieutenant senior grade Lewis DeMarco. Released to die by Ensign Roslyn Hellman.’

  6

  Futurity

  Why do we remember the past and not the future?

  —STEPHEN HAWKING

  IT IS TRUE of all human beings that they are dualities, two persons: who they are in the red marrow of their bones and in the tiny convolutions of gray and white matter of the cerebrum, and in the unlocalized site of what is often called the soul; and what they appear to be to the world which has told them who they are. The lifelong conflict between the two persons, the struggle for the interior self to triumph over the exterior, given self: herein lies all the bloody warfare in the person, to be who we are and not what we have been made to be.

  For everyone, the future is similarly divided, into what the Flowerses and Hellmans, the Schwartzes and DeMarcos envisioned it would be and, when unalterable reality settled down heavily upon them after their great expectations, the actuality, the inevitable truths that comprised their lives. Often, it takes a decade or more to solidify this duality. For the persons in this narrative it happened at the end of an extraordinary fifteen years in which the nadir of financial ruin and depression reached the zenith of war and prosperity. The present bifurcated into the future, et eo ipso, brought their histories to a close.

  It is the last day of the war. Soon a huge military parade will start up Broadway, a victorious commanding general waving with both arms from an open car in a storm of ticker tape. At this moment, recently discharged Lieutenant Roslyn Hellman is sitting on a camp stool in an almost empty two-room apartment she has just rented in the East Village, drinking cold coffee from a paper cup, having returned once again to her beloved City after her long banishment in San Francisco.

  She sits idly, projecting herself into futurity. Taking what she has learned about publishing during her years of apprenticeship before the war, she envisions the next years. She will acquire her own Vandercook press and place it centrally in this room. Aides working nearby will make paper and sew bindings by hand. She will print elegant limited editions of excellent poetry and her own prose. In this way she will avoid all the ego-breaking hassles of the publishing world, in much the same way as Walt Whitman and Mark Twain did, on occasion. She will enter the literary scene by the back door of her own imprint.

  Then she will teach her craft to a young assistant, who will, in gratitude and affection, live with her in an apartment above the studio. They will spend their weekends in a small country house not too far from the City—somewhere in Westchester County?—and their vacations abroad—Scotland, Tuscany, the Greek islands, of course—but always they will return to the place central to her life and work, the City, the only City, New York.

  Her press’s name will be In the House of Sappho, the logo for which she will design herself. It will suit the flourishing enterprise. Because everyone involved with it, the poets and prose writers she will publish, the press operators and typographers, paper makers, binders, and, of course, her apprentice-companion and herself, everyone in the house, will be female … so Roslyn forsaw her future.

  Did she also envision the reality of the future? Did she see that, on the other hand, desperate for company, money, and legitimacy in a new, changed, postwar City, she would marry a recently widowed osteopath whom she had met in a coffee shop on University Place? His practice was in Indianapolis. He was spending two weeks in the City taking his children to Radio City and the circus, to the top of the Empire State Building, for rides on the Staten Island Ferry, and to climb the Statue of Liberty.

  In a suburb of the sprawling Midwestern city, Roslyn Hellman Cooke settled into the calm, matronly, unexceptional existence of a doctor’s wife and the mother of two young stepsons. She wrote the monthly bulletin of the PTA, and served as recording secretary of the Garden Club. She cultivated roses and azaleas, she went to dinner parties and gave them for her husband’s colleagues and their wives. She lived out her uneventful life in Indiana by choice, because she could not bear to revisit the City she had loved so much in her youth.

  Every ten years or so she refurnished her large, comfortable, many-bedroomed ranch house, surrounded by other ranch houses of the same design. She moved without audible complaint through her long life, a tamed spirit who had buried her dreams of glory in her prize beds of tulips and cosmos. Occasionally, in a rare sleepless hour of early morning as she grew old, she wondered why it was that it had happened this way.

  On the same day that Roslyn sat on the stool in the East Village planning her press, Dr. Caleb Flowers, assistant professor of medieval literature, was at his desk in the English department office of his college in Kansas City, reading, with no strong desire to learn from it, a recently published volume on the language of The Canterbury Tales. As he turned the pages, he fantasized about his future, seeing in his mind’s eye an endless series of nights in which Lionel Schwartz would lie beside him as they both delighted in all the juvenescent pleasures of their arcane sex.

  They will walk along the green banks of the Missouri River in early summer, their white, graceful hands barely touching. Their days will be rich with the soprano sounds from Lily Pons records, the lovely speech and sonorous sentences of French novels, many prints of Impressionist paintings decorating their walls. And, best of all, entirely free of onerous familial responsibility.

  For the rest of their long lives, they will be, quietly, lovers, entirely acceptable bachelors in a gracious academic society, companions of the flesh and, when they grow older, of the mind, lying together in their secret, comforting bed. Then, pensioned and secure, they will go to live in Paris, in a community of their drinking, smoking, wildly conversing and sexually compatible fellows, the descendants of the aging, expatriate persons that Professor Alexander Lang must have known before his death ten years ago.

  At that moment was Caleb able to see reality as clearly as the dream? For his fears and ambitions caused him to marry Meta Holmes, the daughter of the provost of his college, a plain-faced, pale, very thin, but most pleasant woman who bore him three sturdy, intelligent children. Working very hard while fighting a tendency to periodic depression, he was still able to publish two well-received books on medieval rhetoric. Every Christmas he traveled to whatever city the Modern Language Association happened to be meeting in, always accompanied by Meta, who enjoyed the society of other academic wives.

  In middle
age he bought the secondhand but very well maintained Cadillac he had yearned for all his adult life, and he serviced it himself until, many years later, he lost interest in it. He became chairman of his department, and then dean of the college before he retired at seventy. Almost at once, as if he had been waiting for his freedom from schedules and academic semesters, he sank into a long depression from which numerous psychotherapists were unable to rouse him. He lived on, indifferent to automobiles, friends, his wife’s kindnesses to him, and the genuine concern of his grown children. It should be said that, since the night he said farewell to Lionel Schwartz in the parlor at Telluride, Caleb Flowers lived unhappily ever after.

  In the evening of that same day at the end of the war, the novice Kate Flowers kneels with her sisters in Christ for compline prayers. Her life has reached a crossroad, but, curiously, the two parts consist of present reality and dreams of the past. Scrupulously avoiding any thought of the future, she entrusts all such concerns to her Mother Superior, her confessor, and God Himself. As Sister Mary Christina, still some years away from taking her final vows, she is content to lead the orderly, prayerful, antiseptic, obedient, and almost pure life she has chosen. She is aware of no desire for any other.

  But in her long, faithful life to come, she was never able to expel Caleb from her thoughts. Her guilt at their love could not be erased by prayer or self-denial. Even her general confession, made just before she was finally accepted into the Order, did not succeed in wiping out the memories that continued for a long time to warm her body on frigid nights in her narrow bed.

  Every time she heard Deuteronomy read in chapel—‘A curse upon him who lies with his sister’—she felt that heavy sentence upon her own head. To atone, she gave up writing to Caleb at Christmas, although she longed for a letter from him which never came. She prayed for him, without knowing what had become of his life. In her missal was a slip of paper on which she had printed a sentence from Paul’s letter to the Romans. She read it often, with some anguish, without acknowledging to herself its private meaning: ‘For just as in a single human body there are many limbs and organs, all with different functions, so all of us, united in Christ, form one body, serving individually as limbs and organs to one another.’