The Book of Knowledge

by Doris Grumbach

  Caleb went downstairs to find Kate. She was reading a new library book about a boy named Christopher Robin and his teddy bear, a childish story that her brother had scorned when she told him the story.

  ‘Robin! Pooh! What can we do with that silly stuff?’

  Now he suggested they pretend being their parents, an old favorite game they had played many times before, with variations. He took her hand:

  ‘Miss McDermott, would you care to come upstairs and be my wife?’

  Still wearing his father’s clothes, he took Kate’s hand and led her upstairs to Kate’s room. He took off the hat, the big coat, and the gloves and lay down beside her. He had thought of a new way of being married. He opened the buttons of his trousers, pulled down her silk underpants, and placed his penis gently along her small, damp seam.

  For some time they lay there, facing each other and staring into each other’s eyes. An unaccustomed warmth suffused Caleb’s chest, his throat, his loins. His penis grew larger, causing Kate’s small crevice to widen.

  It was a revelation to them. Caleb thought of his independent-seeming organ as something apart from himself, a separate object that came to life without his willing it, an extension of some active agency within him over which he had no control. Kate too thought of the moving thing between them as a third party, a new character in their game.

  Then, having been assigned no active role in the drama, the member subsided. They were uncertain how to proceed, holding each other tightly in the clasp of confused children. Caleb wet his lips at the thought of the wondrous pleasures Edmund Flowers might soon receive from Emma McDermott, using what he now knew to be his own capable weapon. Kate, having no capacity for such a vision, believed they had gone as far as would ever be necessary to effect a true marriage.

  Caleb returned to the attic carrying his father’s clothes. Startled by the sound of something stirring, he dropped them on the top of the trunk and walked cautiously toward the noise. Two brown bats rushed past him, their winged arms extended from their furry bodies, their round eyes glittering with astonishment (Caleb thought) at being disturbed in a place they must consider their own. They settled into the rafters, hanging by their webbed forearms, their little heads down, seeming not to see him, not to be watching the intruder. As they hung, their slender bodies touched, their soft coats (it seemed to Caleb) rubbed reassuringly against each other. He put the clothes he had worn into the trunk and sat down on its cover to watch the two bats, who seemed now to be watching him.

  He was fired by a new idea: he and Kate could enact the lives of these two warmly connubial creatures.

  On Kate’s bed that night they played at being bats, according to the new scenario Caleb had devised in the attic.

  ‘We are to wear no clothes at all,’ he told Kate.

  She lay face down, her arms outspread, her toes pointed down over the edge of the bed, trying to imitate the flattenedout hind limbs of the bat as Caleb had described them. He smoothed himself on top of her, his thin arms and legs stretched along hers. He straightened his toes, like a dancer’s on point, so he could align himself to Kate’s body. Placing his head sideways on hers, he was able to cup her small ear in his. It was in this way that he envisioned the soft, webbed creatures in the attic coupling. So strong was his vision that he could sense the gauzes connecting his arms to his body and then to Kate.

  ‘Like tissue paper,’ he whispered. ‘Now open your eyes and stare straight ahead, as they do.’

  Caleb lay relaxed upon his sister. His cock—he enjoyed thinking of the new term he had learned from Roslyn—swelled downward, becoming hard and straight between Kate’s buttocks. Wishing to recreate the private pleasure he had long ago discovered he could obtain by rubbing this part, he began to move gently from side to side.

  Kate, obedient to his instructions, did not move. She concentrated on staring ahead as she had been told to do. She thought his movements were in emulation of the bats he had observed. Unsurprised, she continued to lie still. Then, after a time, he began to weigh heavily on her. She pushed up against him as hard as she could and felt a warm jet of liquid between her legs, in the area from which she peed. Not wanting to disturb the bat trance she thought he was in, she said nothing.

  Nor did he. There was a fine satisfaction, a strange novelty, in using Kate’s lovely tight buttocks and soft thighs for the pleasure he had hitherto given himself. It was as if she were joined in some magical way to his marvelous release. He heard her sigh and realized that his weight was oppressing her. Moving onto his side, he looked into her eyes. They both smiled, a long, knowing, identical, loving smile.

  ‘Is that what you saw the bats in the attic do?’

  Caleb said nothing. Kate waited and then she asked:

  ‘Do you think we will have babies?’

  ‘Bats, I’ve read, have only one. Sometimes, but very rarely, twins.’

  ‘Well, then, one baby?’

  ‘No, I don’t think so.’

  ‘Too bad. I think it would be fun, don’t you?’

  ‘No. Not yet.’

  Tired from the strain of looking at each other, they closed their eyes and lay still, pressed close, wet, weary, and very comfortable. Caleb was filled with a contentment he had never felt before. He wanted never to leave Kate’s bed.

  He whispered: ‘I love you, Kate. I want to marry you.’

  Holding her underpants against the wet that covered her upper legs, she said: ‘I accept.’

  At summer’s end, as if to anticipate the approaching separation, the Flowers children drew even further apart from their friends. There were no more croquet games and very few excursions to the beach, which by now had lost much of its allure. The air and sand, even the ocean, having cooled a little, none of them went racing down over hot sand to be refreshed in the surf.

  The summer parents talked vaguely about a farewell party to be held the day before they returned to the City. Their children looked forward to ice cream from Huyler’s and cake baked by the Hellmans’ maid. But somehow, like so many adult plans for children, in the press of packing and eagerness to get back to the City, it never came to pass.

  In early September, before Labor Day and the last time the children would be together in the country, Roslyn and Lion went to Larch Street. Roslyn wanted to collect acorns from the bare spaces under their oak trees to take home as souvenirs.

  Caleb and Kate came down from their veranda to join them, bringing wooden pails they always used for the collection of what Caleb called specimens. The four crawled about, gathering only prime acorns, the best examples of green and brown, polished-looking seeds, each one set upright in a woody, stiff, brown collar.

  During the collection process, Caleb and Roslyn became competitive, trying to outdo each other in locating the biggest, most splendid specimens, pushing against each other when they thought they had spotted them. At one point, Roslyn held up a true beauty, perfect except for the absence of its cupped holder.

  ‘It looks like my father’s thumbnail,’ she said, and then returned to her search for other superlative examples. Caleb was irritated by what seemed to him to be a foolish boast. Roslyn’s unconditional admiration of her father extended, he thought, to the tips of his fingers, to his carved leg, to his status, she often said, as the City’s most successful broker.

  Caleb had never noticed any similarity between acorns and Mr. Hellman’s fingertips. But now that Roslyn had pointed it out, he began to imagine that all the scattered acorns he saw were disconnected nails, removed from the poor man’s thumbs at the same time as his leg had been taken. He stopped collecting, sat back on his heels, and began to compose a scenario:

  Terrible corporeal punishment had been inflicted on a tribe of conquered giants. Now, minus the ends of their fingers, they roamed the dark outer shore of the Rockaway peninsula. Globules of blood fell from their useless hands. Who had committed these atrocities? Retributive animals whose only food was the succulent nails of goliaths? No. Tribal enemies who punis
hed their captives by biting off the ends of the giants’ fingers with their sharp teeth, and consumed them as an essential part of their diets.

  ‘Caleb. Listen to me,’ said Roslyn.

  ‘What?’ Caleb disliked having to return from the country of bloody punishments.

  ‘I’ve called the Talkies to order. We’re going to play marbles with the acorns, the ones without their collars.’

  ‘All right,’ Caleb said with some reluctance.

  Kate and Lion were summoned from scavenging under trees farthest from the house. Their collecting had been indiscriminate, with none of the older children’s concern for color, completeness, and perfection of shape. So their pails were full and heavy. Putting them down, they stood waiting to be instructed in the rules of Roslyn’s new game.

  She placed the largest acorn she could find, a prize picked up unaccountably by Lion, in the middle of a wide space in the dirt and drew a circle with a stick. Each child took up a position on the diameter and tried to hit the prime seed with smaller, less valuable ones. Whoever managed this was awarded the acorn in the center.

  ‘Be careful, Roslyn,’ said Lion. ‘Don’t throw so hard. I don’t want my good one to get dented.’

  ‘That’s what it’s there for,’ said Roslyn loftily. As hard as she could she threw her missile at Lion’s prized acquisition, and hit it.

  The new game, like Roslyn’s other enterprises that summer, ended abruptly. Lion started to cry. Roslyn threw his center piece back at him, having to retrieve it from her pile. Caleb accused her of purposeful brutality. Lion started down the street, and Roslyn, angry at everyone, followed the weeping boy.

  No farewells were exchanged among the four friends, nor did the Flowers children see the Schwartzes and the Hellmans on the morning after Labor Day when two black sedans carried them and their maids northwest on the Long Island roads. The De Soto and the La Salle (for Lester Schwartz had just acquired a new car) joined the long lines of vehicles leaving the seashore towns for the beloved City, as most of the summer vacationers thought of it. The two families had had enough of sun, fresh air, salt water, and empty evenings and, in fact, of all the ever-green outdoors that the short country exile had offered them. They were delighted to be returning to ‘civilization,’ a word they used for the cement caverns of New York City.

  The remainder of September was unusually warm. The Flowers children found it difficult to return to school, but they were resigned and went dutifully. They did not get home until well after three o’clock and then were sent immediately to their rooms to rest. Emma thought ceaselessly about the polio warnings. She was sure that contact with other children at school, as well as the enduring heat, threatened her son and daughter.

  ‘An hour of rest on your beds before supper,’ she ordered from her chair in the corner of the parlor where she sat, fanning herself.

  When they came down, they did their homework seated on each end of the cretonne-covered davenport. After dinner they listened to the humorous black talk of Amos ’n Andy on the radio, turned up very loud for their mother’s comfort. Discouraged by the volume, they decided upon an early bedtime.

  With Roslyn no longer there to make demands upon his allegiance, Caleb returned happily to Kate. Their love for each other expanded to fill all the space around them. Whenever they could arrange it, sometimes at odd times of the day, they plotted to be alone, their hungry hands journeying from one stopping place to another on their bodies. Prodding, stroking, exploring, caressing, imagining the pleasures of those they knew about from history and myth, they approached each other courteously, almost deferentially, disguising, or perhaps still not entirely aware of, the depth of their passion.

  After the accident-ridden summer, and the catastrophic fall of 1929 that changed their lives, Roslyn and Lionel never returned to Far Rockaway. On the 24th of October, a cloudy Thursday in New York City, the stock market, in which their fathers had worked so profitably, plummeted a disastrous thirty points. Brokers and speculators alike were thrown into a state of confusion. In three days, despair and bankruptcy had spread to businessmen all over the country. Lester Schwartz and Max Hellman, investors like their clients, were wiped out the next day, unable to make full payments for their stocks held on margin. Small brokerage firms, like theirs, closed, ‘temporarily,’ it was announced.

  In December, Max Hellman began to look for employment. For the first time since the Great War his stump caused him much pain as he walked the unyielding sidewalks of the City in search of a job. Almost at the end of his endurance, he was saved by his brother-in-law, a prosperous Brooklyn butcher who had not been affected by the Crash because he had never believed in buying stocks and bonds.

  The butcher worked Max hard. In whatever time he had left after he worked on the store’s accounts, Max had to help with cleaning the floors covered with bloody sawdust after the store closed at seven in the evening. His misery at being deprived of the stimulating life on the Street was very great, and he was always aware of the butcher’s pleasure, his barely concealed gloating, at his relative’s downfall, and the unending recriminations of his wife.

  He moved Rose and Roslyn from their apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan to a much smaller one down the street from Prospect Park in Brooklyn, ten long (for his bad leg) blocks from the kosher meat market where he worked. His walk to and from work was slow and painful; the De Soto Six had been the first of his assets to be sold.

  Protesting tearfully, Rose settled into the cramped quarters. The softness and tenderness that prosperity had nurtured in her died under the stress of her now deprived life. She became a constant complainer, a fountain of weeping, a compendium of small illnesses. Roslyn was transferred to a public high school in Brooklyn, one with very few good students and athletes. Quickly she became the star of her classroom and the czarina of the playground.

  Together with pride in her academic success, Roslyn began to develop a poorly disguised scorn of her neurasthenic mother. Of her father, she was openly contemptuous. At first he had seemed to her an unjustly deposed hero, of the same stature as a wounded soldier in the war. But as time passed and his spotted apron and straw hat in the butcher store where he scrubbed gory chopping blocks and swept up stained sawdust became his familiar garb, he lost her respect. In her lofty view, his blighted Wall Street career became the deserved sequel to his earlier dismemberment. But now it was the result of ineptitude and worthlessness: She thought of him as a hapless cripple.

  Whatever pathos the fall of Max Hellman contained, the fate of Lester Schwartz was even less fortunate. Accustomed all his life to widespread admiration for his money-making prowess, Lester lost his self-esteem along with his holdings and his job when the market crashed. One morning in late November he kissed Sadie goodbye in his usual warm fashion, patted the top of Lionel’s blond head as he sat eating his Post Toasties, and picked up his briefcase. He had not been able to bring himself to confess to his wife that he had not looked for employment since his brokerage office closed; his savings permitted him the deception that he still took his usual taxi down to Wall Street, where he did something, Sadie was not quite sure what.

  Instead, one day, he took the subway to Forty-second Street, walked two blocks north on Broadway to the Loew’s State Building, where, before the Crash, he had visited a client in the theater business. He took the elevator to the top floor, climbed a short set of iron steps, walked out onto the flat tarred roof, and took off his suit jacket, vest, tie, and fedora. He put an envelope addressed to SADIE on the roof beside his briefcase.

  With what remained of his old, aggressive self-possession, he climbed over the parapet, pushed his hands against the ledge, and went down into the cold, descending air.

  It may have been the cold that had seeped into the straw seats of the train. Or perhaps it was the strangeness of the Jewish service for Lester Schwartz she had sat through, unable to hear very much and understanding nothing of what was audible to her. Or it may have been that the funeral for the
dead father brought to her mind Edmund Flowers’ memorial service. Whatever the cause for her unexpected and extraordinary departure from myth, her excursion into the truth, Emma told her restless children the true story of their father’s funeral.

  ‘It was held in a nondenominational chapel near Inwood, not far from where we live. Because he was a soldier it was a military affair, and very patriotic. Like a lot of his fallen comrades he was buried somewhere in France, I never knew where. Two corporals wearing new uniforms drove from a base on Long Island to bring his parcel of belongings to me, his shaving stuff, comb, fatigue cap, and such. The two corporals stood at attention on each side of the platform, and a minister in an officer’s uniform read the service. It seemed very long to me. I didn’t hear most of what he said, because I was worried about having left my babies—you two—back at the house with a neighbor’s young daughter to look after you. I didn’t know her well, so I worried. I never heard the chaplain call your father “Edward,” two or three times. An acquaintance told me about that, later. When the formalities were over, and I was leaving the chapel carrying your father’s package, I was stopped by a lady, a stranger, who told me she had known Edmund Flowers in the City.

  ‘“Before the war,” she said. “I was a close friend.” She spoke in a low voice.

  ‘The lady, who told me her name but I did not catch it, wore a large black straw hat with many roses on the brim, a black dress which seemed to me to be tight on her, and a black sable cape. Her black gloves reached to her elbows. To me, her clothing seemed somewhat excessive for the occasion. She told me she had indulged in the extravagance of a Checker taxicab to come from her apartment in Chelsea to Inwood.