The Book of Knowledge

by Doris Grumbach

  Caleb was an avid reader of the New York Herald Tribune, the newspaper his mother brought home every day from the village cigar store. The paper was always a day late, but she did not mind, and Caleb never noticed. He was indifferent to the news of the world or the nation or the City unless it pertained to particular persons, heroes and murderers, presidents and generals, titans of industry, starlets and movie moguls. What he read during the day he summarized for his sister and his mother at the dinner table. He excelled in combining stories so that details from one were cunningly inserted into another. This creative act transformed dull newspaper fact into lively personal fiction. Emma strained to hear his recountings, and Kate smiled with pleasure, accepting without question his résumés of human-interest stories, knowing that, later, they would serve as subject matter for their private games.

  It was a warm evening in late June, just after the arrival of the summer children on Linden Street. Emma sat near her children reading Sorrell and Son, a novel she had obtained after a long wait from Stark’s lending library. Warwick Deeping was her favorite writer; she had read all of his many novels at least twice. But this evening her attention to the book flagged. She concentrated on listening to her children’s conversation.

  Caleb asked Kate: ‘Were you flying the plane, Amelia?’

  ‘No, Charles. I was the passenger.’

  ‘But weren’t you the first to fly over the ocean?’

  ‘No. You were. I was the first woman.’

  ‘Yes, of course, I forgot. The first woman.’

  A long pause.

  Then Caleb asked: ‘Was the weather bad the whole way?’

  ‘Oh yes, it was. Especially over Newfoundland. The weather is always terrible there. And then over the mighty Atlantic. I hated that part of the trip. Thirty-three and a half hours. And then we landed in Wales. It was very foggy and very wet. We could hardly see the landing field.’

  ‘Oh, I know. It was like that in Paris when I came down there two years ago.’

  Silence. It was as if they had lost themselves in the high adventure of the past and did not know how to get back into the present. When they spoke again their voices were low: Emma surrendered to her deafness. As it was, she had not heard enough of their talk to understand its references. She opened Sorrell and Son at her place and began to read. Caleb’s voice dropped to a whisper.

  ‘Don’t you think famous aviators like us ought to be married to each other, Amelia?’

  Kate smiled and reached over to put her hand on Caleb’s shoulder. She whispered:

  ‘Yes, I do. I do. We would be the most famous flying couple in the whole world. But I think I’m married already.’

  Caleb tried to remember what he had read about Amelia Earhart’s life. Was she married? He had no idea. In his reconstructions from newspapers, details like this were often moved from one story to another to make the truth serve his inventions. He whispered:

  ‘You are not married. You are going to marry me. We’ll fly two planes across the Atlantic, one after the other, but very close together. This time we’ll go the other way, from Le Bourget to New York. Round trips, for both of us, when you add the two together.’

  ‘How long will that take?’

  ‘A day and a half, like the last time, if the weather and the winds are with us.’

  ‘Who will lead?’

  ‘I will. I know the way.’

  Kate said nothing. Caleb took her silence for agreement. He went on:

  ‘There’ll be a huge crowd waiting for us at Roosevelt Field. As it was two years ago in Paris. Only this time there’ll be banners with our names on them.’

  ‘Both our names?’

  ‘Sure. They’ll read, “Welcome Charles and Amelia Lindbergh.”

  Kate sighed at the obliteration of her famous last name. But she decided to accept the inevitable demotion and dwell on the pleasures of the event.

  ‘It will be wonderful,’ she said. ‘I can’t wait.’

  It is another warm evening. They sit on the veranda after supper. The bloated white faces of hydrangea bushes on each side of the steps shine up at them in the moonlight. Emma occupies the swing. Stretched out on the coarse hemp rug, the children are filled with unexpressed contentment. Once again they are renewing the ritual of their happy lives with their absorbed, silent mother.

  Emma gets up.

  ‘I must do my needlepoint by a better light,’ she says, and goes inside.

  Relieved of her presence, although they always feel sure she hears very little of what they say to each other when she is near, Kate and Caleb move to the swing and take up their game.

  Caleb creates their fictions. Kate listens, learns her assigned part, and feels pleased that her brother gives her a role. Often, persuaded by the bare facts of their mother’s often-repeated history, they start their pretending by assuming they are happily married to each other.

  Caleb begins: ‘Now about our daughter, the Samoan child …’

  At dinner Emma had told them about a book review she had read in the Tribune. It was of a book by a lady who had lived among the Polynesians, a native people who wore almost no clothes.

  Caleb’s foot pushes on the floor to keep the swing moving. He asks Kate if she thinks their daughter—he calls her Polly—would consider covering herself with a blouse if they brought her from the South Seas to Far Rockaway. For some time, before the light dies away and Emma sends them upstairs, they debate the virtues and the dangers of permitting Polly to be partially unclothed in public. Would she lead a happy life playing croquet on Larch Street or walking down Main Street with them to get ice cream?

  When Emma calls to them that it is bedtime, they make no protest. They kiss their mother and climb the stairs, Caleb leading the way. Taking advantage of the unlocked door between their bedrooms, they meet in Kate’s room and lie side by side, fully clothed, on her bed. They continue the discussion of South Sea Island customs. But verbal invention does not satisfy them for very long. To illustrate the reality of their story, Caleb removes his blouse and undershirt and Kate her blouse and chemise. With pleasure, they inspect each other’s similar flat chests. Caleb’s small pink nipples are surrounded by golden hairs. Kate wets her finger and teases them into wayward patterns. Tickled, Caleb laughs and squirms but does not remove her hand.

  Once Kate has replaced the little hairs, they begin to explore the intricacies of each other’s ears. They play with their hands, admiring the elegance of their long fingers and pale, tapered nails. Entwining their legs, they raise their heads to examine their straight toes, their slender knees, the tender, inner curves of their ankles. Lying down again, they turn their attention to the little bunched fleshy knobs of their elbows and then the fine lines of their identical blond eyebrows.

  Out of an unexpressed delicacy, the regions between their thighs remain untouched. They acknowledge a reticence about the single difference of which they are aware. It is that, but it is more. They do not wish to acknowledge any variation in their bodies that might distinguish them from each other. United by birth little more than a year apart, and by the circumstance of a single, uninvolved parent, into what seems to them a twinned sensibility, their love enables them to think of themselves as alike.

  All this gentle, limited exploration, these excursions into the shallow declivities of their bodies, are accompanied by low, wordless sounds of pleasure. The two are amazed by the discovery of their physical similarities. The realization always delights Kate, who thinks it a wonderment that her body, inferior in strength to her brother’s, should resemble his so closely in every other way. And Caleb: for him these nightly reminders of his sister’s likeness to him are to become the foundation of his burgeoning sexuality. Those he will seek out and love as a young man will be like Kate in their slenderness, their small-boned elegance, their soft, blond hair and skin.

  So it was in late June of 1929 that the Flowers children made their new friends from the City. School had provided them with few congenial companions, and
the neighbors on their street were elderly, or childless couples or spinsters and bachelors. Emma thought perhaps Kate and Caleb’s preference for each other had discouraged children from approaching them.

  Their new friends, Lionel Schwartz, whom they called Lion despite the unsuitability of the nickname to his gentle nature and small, unassertive frame, and Roslyn Hellman, were vacationing a street away. The four children discovered each other almost at once, the way children do, by means of an uncanny, generational sense that made them move toward one another.

  No such attraction operated among the adults. They made no efforts to become acquainted. Emma thought:

  ‘Summer renters. From the sound of their names they must be Jewish. I have no reason to get to know them.’

  But she was pleased for her children. This summer, she decided, it would be good for them to have playmates other than themselves. Comfortable as she found their contented exclusivity, occasionally she wondered about it. Then she dismissed her moment of concern as foolish. She knew she preferred having them always at home with her and with each other. Their quiet mutuality suited her own fondness for quiet and order. But still …

  Roslyn Hellman was a little older than Caleb. She was taller and more solidly built. Her straight black hair reached down her back to her waist, her eyes were large and black, her nose was high-bridged and prominent, giving her an air of natural superiority. She had spent the summer before at a girls’ camp in the Catskills, where she had acquired a taste for playing the main part in the Saturday-night plays and an active dislike of all sports on land and in the water if she was not selected as captain.

  Almost from her first day in Far Rockaway, Roslyn became the leader of the children in their games, the self-appointed president of their club. Indeed, it had been her idea to form a club, which she named ‘the Talkies,’ a word she came upon in the New York Times to describe a new kind of motion picture. When they were all together, in midmorning, and seated cross-legged in a circle on the Hellmans’ grass, she would call the Talkies to order and announce the game for the day. This strict scheduling she had learned from the head counselor at her camp. She found that coming to the circle with a plan awed the others. She would allow no challenge to her choice of entertainment. Only Caleb occasionally got up his courage to question her authority. But in the long run her firm posture of certainty defeated him.

  Lionel, the youngest of the four, was shy. His hair, eyebrows, and lashes were white, as if even slight coloration would appear to be too assertive. If he had not been so young he would have been taken for an albino or regarded as a child struck a great blow by the sun. He was almost a head shorter than Roslyn. Perhaps because of this disparity, or it may have been her manner of superiority, she was the object of his unquestioning admiration. The two had been friends in the City. They lived in the same apartment house on West Eighty-sixth Street and played stoopball against the facade of their building. In the late spring they squatted in the little square of earth that surrounded the plane tree to the side of their doorway and aimed their immies against a root in hopes that they would rebound and strike another marble out of the square. It was Roslyn, with her natural sense of the ironic, who had nicknamed him Lion. She relished his willingness to be her obedient follower.

  Their fathers both worked ‘in the market’ in the City, Roslyn informed the Flowers children. Lion phrased it differently:

  ‘My father works on the Street,’ he told them.

  Kate had no idea what sort of work was done in these places. She wondered whether there could be different names for the same place. Perhaps Roslyn’s father sold cod and haddock and mackerel; the fish market on Central Avenue owned by Mr. Elderly was the only kind of market she had ever seen. She pictured Mr. Hellman wrapping a flounder in damp newspapers for a customer to take home and keep fresh in the cold water of the bathtub. This, of course, was what Moth always did. She kept it captive there all day until it was time to decapitate it, remove the scales and tail, and bake it in the oven. Kate told Caleb she wondered if the bathtubs in Roslyn’s house were filled with fish.

  Caleb knew better. He had read about the stock market in the business section of the Tribune and he knew that men traded there with each other, although he was not sure what changed hands on Wall Street. Kate thought his explanation of the words most unlikely. She had already conjured up a vision of Mr. Schwartz’s street work: he must empty trash-filled gutters with a large dustpan and broom into a tin garbage container on wheels that he pushed ahead of him through the fish markets. Caleb said both surmises were foolish. Men who dressed every morning in black suits and brown fedoras and drove to their work in a touring car did not sell fish or clean streets. Of course, he said, they could be gangsters who went from street to street, and market to market, forcing merchants at gunpoint to pay for protection. He had read about Al Capone in Chicago, whose gang had ‘rubbed out’ seven members of the Moran gang in a dispute over just such matters: ‘turf warfare’ it was called.

  Whatever it was the fathers did, they left together every weekday morning and returned, saying they felt dusty and weary, and needing a rest and a bath, in the late afternoon. Then Caleb and Kate knew it was time for them to leave the broad lawns that stretched across the two houses on Linden Street and walk under darkening oak branches and colorless sky around the corner to their own house. There they waited in the swing until dinnertime, holding hands, relieved to be alone together, absorbed in themselves and each other.

  At dinner they told their mother that Mr. Schwartz had brought Lion a tennis racket from the City. Emma was silent. Then she said she regretted they did not have a father to come home to them bearing presents. The children left their chairs to come around the table. They hugged her from either side and assured her it did not matter in the least to them. She was a good father as well as a good mother, Caleb told her. Emma was pleased by the tribute. She hugged them and called them ‘my angels.’

  Soon after their arrival on Linden Street that summer, Roslyn and Lionel invented a private means of communication between their houses. Across a narrow strip of grass, their bedroom windows faced each other. They strung picture wire through the bottoms of round Mothers Oats containers. By means of these cardboard receivers they conversed for a while after their bedtimes.

  Lionel’s shy voice, ordinarily very light and segueing to a whisper at the end of his sentences, became strong while speaking on their wire, much as adult users of the early telephone shouted because they did not understand the operation of sound waves and wire. Roslyn and Lionel spoke very loudly despite their belief that their system worked well. So they heard each other clearly over the distance, permitting them to confide secrets they would not have shared under ordinary conditions, unaware that their parents, enjoying the cool air on their porches, listened to the innocent revelations of their children, smiling at their charming confidences.

  After a week of playing together, Roslyn and Lionel spent an afternoon on the veranda of the Flowerses’ house reading books from Caleb’s collection. Their telephone call that evening centered on their curiosity about their new friends.

  ‘They don’t have a father, do they?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Roslyn. ‘I’ve never seen one.’

  ‘Are they orphans?’ Lionel had always considered orphans to be both fortunate and very romantic.

  ‘I suppose. My cousin Jean’s father is dead and my mother always calls her that poor orphaned child.’

  ‘Their mother is very queer, isn’t she? All that time out there in the sun on the porch and it was hot and she never asked us in, only kept bringing out that sour lemonade and cookies and then going in herself.’

  Roslyn said yes, she was very queer. ‘I said “How do you do” when Caleb introduced us, but she never said anything. Or even after that. Do you suppose she’s deaf and dumb?’

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe. Caleb kept going up to his room to get his books. I wanted to see his room and his other books. I didn’t bring m
any books from home, did you?’

  ‘Not too many. There wasn’t room in the car.’

  Roslyn had struck a sympathetic note. Lionel was quick to agree:

  ‘There never is, for my stuff.’

  They were silent for a minute, and then Roslyn said: ‘I like Caleb a lot, don’t you?’

  ‘Oh yes. But I like Kate too.’ Lionel thought a moment and then, aware that his declaration might hurt his older friend’s feelings, he raised his voice: ‘But I like you best of all.’

  Roslyn smiled, decided this was a satisfactory time to end the call, said: ‘Night, Lion,’ and removed the Mothers Oats carton from her ear. It had been a nice day, she thought; she was ready, at last, to go to bed.

  The Talkies Club spent some warm afternoons at the beach under Emma’s care. She could not rest easy at home if Roslyn were left in charge, as Mrs. Hellman had suggested to her daughter. All the children played too close to the water, she believed, and ventured too far out into the surf. Mrs. Schwartz and Mrs. Hellman disliked the noisy, uninteresting ocean and the dangerous sun. They were satisfied to trust their children to an adult, even so odd a one as Mrs. Flowers, from the reports of their children, seemed to be.

  ‘Behave yourselves,’ they told Roslyn and Lionel. Then they went back into the cool parlor of one house or another to talk about their relatives, their husbands, their prospective fall wardrobes that they hoped to find at Russek’s or Franklin Simon’s, and the pleasures of the City in the season to come. In the comfortable release of a few hours away from their children they drank sugared hot tea from tall glasses, believing that such drinks in summer were cooling. Mrs. Schwartz was much preoccupied with considering the merits of a caracul coat versus a beaver one. Her husband had promised her a new fur for her birthday.

  At a short distance from the sea, Emma sat in a low wood-slatted chair. The children played at the edge. To shield her skin from the sun she held a broad black umbrella that had belonged to her husband. Her black silk bathing dress was covered, from wrist to ankle, by a full black blouse and long skirt. She took no chances of revealing her body to a passing glance or her face to the ruinous sun. Her hand was posed on her forehead to shade her eyes from the glare. The children were in her sight.