The Book of Knowledge

by Doris Grumbach

  Caleb and Roslyn played in the surf, leaping over small waves and splashing through the water, pretending to be the heroic rescuers of the hapless victims of waterfalls, storms, and floods. They quickly tired of the weightlessness of their nonexistent sufferers and took the parts themselves, Caleb the drowning boy, Roslyn the brave lifeguard. This game entertained them for some time, until Caleb complained that his head ached from being dragged up on the beach by his hair.

  Lionel disliked violent activities like drowning and forcible saving. He spent his time constructing houses in the wet sand while Kate crouched down to watch him.

  ‘Why don’t you build castles?’ she asked him.

  ‘I like domestic architecture,’ he said loftily. ‘This is a single-story beach house, ranch style. It’ll have many porches and fireplaces in every room.’

  Roslyn and Caleb had come over to watch. They were irritated by the horizontal character of Lionel’s structure and the absence of dripped-sand towers. So they noted with pleasure the arrival of the tide that wiped out the sand veranda facing the sea. Then they turned back to the ocean.

  Standing in the water to her ankles, Roslyn called the Talkies over to her side. She announced that she had decided they now were all to pretend they were lemmings. She would be their queen.

  ‘What is a lemming?’ asked Kate.

  Roslyn said she knew all about lemmings; she had been reading about them in The Book of Knowledge.

  ‘They’re little rodents, like mice, and brown-colored. They live in Norway and Sweden. When there are too many of them, for some reason no one knows why, they start moving across the land, eating everything in their way. Some of them are eaten along the way by other animals. But some survive and go on until they arrive …’

  Roslyn raised her arms dramatically toward the horizon.

  ‘… at the sea!’

  ‘Can they swim?’ asked Lionel.

  ‘I think so. In shallow water, I guess. But even if they can’t, they’re so brave they plunge into the water as if they were still walking on land. They go out so far that they all drown. Not a single one is left.’

  ‘Do they know they are going to drown when they go into the water?’ asked Caleb.

  ‘How would I know that?’

  The three children stood looking at Roslyn, trying not to believe in the truth of her tragic story.

  Caleb said: ‘How do you know they have a queen?’

  Roslyn had invented the part about the ruler of the lemmings. But her quick wits saved her. ‘Well, they’re like bees in that way. They have a queen, don’t they?’

  ‘Why should you be the queen?’

  ‘Because I want to lead you all into the ocean to see if you will drown.’

  ‘Not me,’ said Caleb. ‘I can swim.’

  Lionel said: ‘I can’t. I haven’t learned yet.’

  Kate said nothing. She was afraid to play the game. But she knew if Caleb followed Roslyn into the ocean she would go in too. Nothing would part her from him, not for a moment. She thought her courage would keep her afloat, or perhaps maintain her at a depth just above her head, or she would be instantly granted the swimming skill she wanted so badly. And if not, Caleb would not let her drown. Of that she was certain.

  In the hot sun, Emma dozed off ‘for a mere second,’ she later told herself. A wheeling gull above her head woke her with its shrill cry. She sat up abruptly and looked for the children. Roslyn’s black head was immediately visible. Then she saw Caleb kneeling beside her, his hair dark with water. Both were bent over examining something at the edge of the sea. Then she saw Lionel sitting cross-legged, looking down. Kate was not to be seen.

  Emma ran, ignoring the pull of her long skirt. She reached the end of the sand and saw Kate stretched out, her eyes closed and water running from the side of her mouth. Caleb held her hand and with his other rubbed her forehead.

  Emma screamed and pushed Caleb and Roslyn aside as she bent to pick up her daughter. Kate opened her eyes, looked up at Emma, spat out water, and then smiled weakly.

  ‘Hello, Moth,’ she said.

  ‘What happened, Caleb?’ Emma said.

  Roslyn said: ‘It was her fault. She was a terrible lemming.’

  Caleb turned on her angrily. ‘She was not. It was all your dumb idea. You had to be a queen.’

  Emma wrapped Kate in her skirt, exposing her own bathing dress for the first time in many summers. Kate squirmed impatiently in her arms, wanting to be put down, but Emma insisted on carrying her. The other children trailed behind her shouting recriminations at each other, but Emma was unable to hear what they were saying.

  ‘Why didn’t she say she was afraid of the water? How could I know that?’ Roslyn’s voice was harsh with fright.

  ‘She’s not afraid. She just can’t swim. Like Lion.’

  ‘Yeah, but he didn’t go in. He’s not stupid.’

  ‘You’re stupid, stupid. Very, very stupid. And so are lemmings stupid. Maybe you read it wrong. Maybe they go the other way.’

  ‘What do you mean, “go the other way”?’

  ‘Maybe they come out of the ocean for no reason, like hermit crabs, so they won’t drown. Even you could be wrong, you know.’

  Emma carried Kate back to the chair and sat down, still holding her in her lap. She threw Caleb a towel. Roslyn and Lionel found their towels. For a few moments everyone was silent, occupied with drying off. Emma rubbed Kate so hard she began to cry. Caleb watched them. At this moment Kate seemed fragile to him, almost babylike. His throat ached as he looked at her. Then he knelt down beside her and took her hand.

  ‘Don’t cry, Kate. It’s over. You’re okay. You didn’t drown.’

  ‘I’m not crying about that.’ She tried to get off her mother’s lap, but Emma held her tight.

  ‘No, stay still.’ Emma was angry with herself for not having watched her children more closely, and at Caleb for not taking care of Kate when Roslyn, she had surmised, suggested some dangerous game or other.

  ‘Why didn’t you stop her?’

  ‘I didn’t see her go in. She was behind me.’

  Emma put Kate down and took up the wooden chair. They all walked slowly through the sand to a row of narrow, upright bathhouses resembling gray privies at the edge of the beach. Roslyn and Lionel went ahead to where they had left their clothes. Emma and Kate went into the one beside them, Caleb into the other. He pulled off his wet suit. On the other side of the wall he could hear Kate singing ‘Apples and oranges and lemmings’ over and over.

  When the children had changed, Emma still wearing her long wet skirts, which embarrassed her by clinging to her legs, they went to where Roslyn and Lionel were waiting at the Rockaway Beach Boulevard crossing. Without a word to each other they walked to Linden Street. Emma waved to the two mothers on the Schwartzes’ veranda, took Kate and Caleb by their hands, and turned back toward Larch Street.

  At their driveway she said: ‘Are you feeling better, Kate?’

  ‘Yes. But I didn’t feel that bad. It wasn’t anything. I just swallowed some water, that’s all. Caleb and Roslyn pulled me out right away.’

  The afternoon ended in reconciliation. Emma hugged Caleb and said: ‘Thank you.’ Caleb kissed Kate’s cold, salty lips and said: ‘I’m glad you’re okay.’ Kate kissed him back and said nothing.

  That evening Emma insisted they come early into the warm parlor. She was fearful that Kate had got chilled by the salt water. The children assumed their usual posture on the floor, disappointed that they could not go on with their new pretend-in-progress about the monk and the nun. But their mother’s clinging presence—after her fright at the beach, Emma felt the need to stay close to her children—caused them, instinctively, to suspend their play. They sensed that the content of this new game was not for her ears. In fact, they believed it unlikely that anyone else, even someone as dear as their Moth, would ever be able to understand the nature and intensity of their pretending, just as they were quite certain that their delicate exploratory
night unions should be kept secret from everyone, forever.

  They settled for a more acceptable game. Caleb took the white endpaper from the library book he had been reading. He tore it in half and, holding the ends between his thumb and first finger, carefully compressed them into a small roll and handed it, ceremonially, to Kate. Then he made another for himself.

  ‘Thank you so much,’ she said. ‘I was hoping to have a smoke. What brand are these?’

  ‘Lucky Strikes, I think. Light up, Kate.’ He held an imaginary lighter to the end of her rolled paper and then lit his own. He breathed deeply and blew a ring of invisible smoke.

  ‘Would you care for one?’ he asked his mother.

  ‘What was that?’

  ‘Would you care for a cigarette?’

  Emma took note of theirs and said: ‘I won’t use yours up. I’ll smoke my own.’ Pleased to be included in their game, she put a Camel cigarette into her ivory holder and lit it with her lighter.

  Smoking companionably, the three sat and talked about the sunny weather they had been having. For a while no one mentioned the accident of the afternoon.

  But then Emma said: ‘Caleb. You mustn’t always do what Roslyn tells you.’ She had spent much of the long silences at supper with her children planning a lecture to her son. She intended to impress upon him that his male seniority should make him more vigilant of his sister.

  ‘And also, you must not let Kate follow her.’

  ‘I won’t. I won’t let her. I’m sorry.’

  In this brief exchange, Emma had exhausted her energy for recriminations. No one said anything for a few moments. Caleb knew his mother was quite right. He had not acted in a proper, brotherly, protective way. But still: he then felt it necessary to defend to his mother the reasonableness of what they had pretended at the sea, the logic of emulating lemming behavior to the letter if they were going to play at all. Roslyn had made that clear to them, he said.

  ‘Not to do so would violate the laws of nature,’ he told her. Loyalty to Roslyn required him, almost against his will, to defend their leader against parental criticism. He put away the thought that, a few hours ago, he had angrily told Roslyn she might be entirely wrong about what she had read.

  That evening Roslyn pulled on the wire until Lionel shouted: ‘Yes, what is it?’ into his cardboard receiver.

  Roslyn shouted back: ‘Kate’s some dummy, isn’t she? Walking in like that.’

  ‘You told her to.’

  ‘Sure. But she didn’t have to do it.’

  Lionel said nothing for a few seconds. Then he said:

  ‘She almost drowned.’

  ‘She did not. I saved her. And Caleb helped. She’s a real dope is what she is.’

  On their veranda, seated beneath the mock telephone wire, the Hellmans gasped.

  The next day Caleb and Kate did not go over to play with the children on Linden Street. They walked into the village with their mother and watched while she examined the new books on the library shelf. Caleb read the jackets of a few and thought Emma should take out a book about children who are captured by pirates in the West Indies. Emma thought it sounded too much like a children’s book. But she accepted his suggestion, and added it to Magnificent Obsession by Lloyd Douglas, a writer she had not heard of before.

  ‘What is an obsession?’ Kate asked Emma.

  ‘What?’ asked Emma, using her deafness to play for time.

  ‘An obsession.’

  ‘Er … something that fills your mind so completely that you can think of nothing else.’ Emma looked at Kate as she spoke, suddenly remembering herself at that age when she could think of nothing but becoming a nun and living in what she imagined would be the happy, warm seclusion of a convent.

  ‘Did you ever have an obsession?’ Kate asked.

  ‘No,’ said Emma firmly.

  In the afternoon, while Emma took her customary nap to escape the heat, Caleb and Kate sat on the swing. Kate’s head rested on Caleb’s shoulder. He read to her from the beginning of A High Wind in Jamaica. He had persuaded Emma to let him borrow the book, from which now he was preparing a scenario for some future pretend session. From the idyllic picture of young contentment they presented to any spectator who might have passed by, there was no way of knowing that Caleb was planning cruelty and carnage of the highest order.

  One night, weary from an afternoon of hopscotch and king of the hill and hide and seek with Roslyn and Lionel, the brother and sister lay resting on Kate’s bed curled in each other’s arms. They had decided to embark on a new pretense. In a collection of tales by an Irish writer that Caleb had found in the library was the story of tragic lovers, his favorite subject. At once he recognized its dramatic possibilities. The parts seemed ideal for them. They played at being Héloïse and Peter Abelard until they could no longer stay awake.

  The next day, having spent a long afternoon at the beach by themselves with Moth (the parents of Roslyn and Lion had decided it would be wiser if their children did not go swimming unless their fathers were free on the weekend to accompany them), the tired Flowers children ate an early supper, carrying on their usual quiet dialogue. Silent and still absorbed in the Charles Morgan novel she had been reading, and, as usual, unable to hear them clearly, Emma at first made no effort to listen.

  ‘Do you mind being shut away like that in a cell?’ Caleb asked Kate. She folded her hands prayerfully and said:

  ‘No, I don’t, Peter, not too much. The bed is narrow but quite comfortable. And,’ she added, ‘I have a very good pillow.’

  Caleb shook his head. ‘I don’t think they have such things in nunneries, do you? I think they sleep on boards.’

  Kate accepted this correction as she did all of Caleb’s instructions.

  ‘Well, okay. But the board is very comfortable, thank you. I hope you will be able to get out of your monastery to visit me.’

  There was silence while Caleb tried to think of whether that would be possible given the strictures of his housing.

  Changing the subject abruptly, as they often did when the imaginative potentials of their stories, for the time being, were exhausted, they began to talk about Roslyn. She interested Caleb most when they had been apart for some days. He told Kate he admired Roslyn’s learning.

  ‘She can think up interesting things to do.’

  Kate said she didn’t find Roslyn so interesting. ‘In fact,’ she said, ‘I think she’s boring. Very boring.’

  ‘Boring?’ Caleb’s voice was loud with irritation. ‘Not at all. I think she’s very much like Héloïse.’

  Emma, startled, heard him. ‘Who?’ Héloïse was a personage who had been much discussed by the nuns in her high school.

  Caleb sensed danger and hesitated. But he could think of no way out of an explanation.

  ‘I meant Peter Abelard’s lady Héloïse, who went into a nunnery after her husband was taken captive by her uncle and some other evil men. She was brave and very smart, like Roslyn.’

  ‘What have you been reading, that you know about her?’

  ‘There’s a story about her in The Book of Knowledge. She lived in the Middle Ages. I don’t know exactly when that was, but it was quite long ago.’ Caleb had the feeling that temporal distance might reconcile his mother to their absorption in the tale.

  ‘What else did you read … about those two?’

  ‘Only that when the evil men caught up with Abelard “they perpetrated a most brutal mutilation upon him.”’

  ‘What? What did you say?’

  ‘“A brutal mutilation upon him,” the book said. I guess that means they cut off his hand or his ear, something like that. It could not have been his tongue. They did that to people in the Middle Ages when they were heretics. But Peter Abelard became a monk and went on teaching religion and philosophy for a very long time, so it could not have been his tongue.’

  Emma was aghast. But she said nothing, unable to formulate a suitable reproach to an innocent boy of twelve, no matter how precocious.


  Caleb continued to praise Roslyn. Kate grew resentful that she should be so admired by her beloved brother. Héloïse indeed. When they were finally upstairs alone together, she told him she felt jealous. Quickly, he reassured her. She was the only person he loved.

  ‘Except for Moth, of course. I do love her.’

  ‘And you like Roslyn, just like her?’

  ‘I admire her. She’s so forceful and strong … like a boy.’

  ‘And I’m like a girl, I suppose. Weak and …’

  ‘No, you’re like me, something in between. Whatever that is.’

  Caleb reached over to caress the warm, damp crook in Kate’s arm. She found the same place in his. It was cool and dry. Their gentle, amorous play began. Lingering at one place, they advanced slowly to the same places on each other’s bodies. As always, their explorations ended in giggles, which they tried to suppress for fear Moth would hear them and come up to find that Caleb was not asleep in his own bed.

  Soberly they began again, playing follow-the-leader to their underarms, then to the transparent slings of flesh between their fingers, then to the delicate declivities in their bellies, identical in form and depth, as if a branched umbilicus had held them at the same time attached to their mother.

  Deaf to most sounds above her head, Emma had caught their laughter. She called to them to go to sleep; she could not tell that they were together. Caleb kissed Kate on her narrow lips. He raised her hand to kiss it as had seen an actor playing a Frenchman do in the movies.

  ‘Good night, Sister Héloïse,’ he whispered. Reluctantly he climbed off the bed and left, closing the door between their rooms, and got into his own bed. If he had not worried that Emma would come upstairs in a little while ‘to tuck them in,’ as she always described it, even in summer when they slept on top of their sheets with no covering, he would have stayed in Kate’s bed, his arms around her shoulders, his tongue licking the salt from her eyelids, and then exploring the lovely wet folds of her neck and ears, imagining they were her secret, soft place where he had not yet been.