The Book of Knowledge

by Doris Grumbach

  ‘“Where is Chelsea?” I asked.

  ‘“Near the garment district in Manhattan,” she said.

  ‘I wished to be polite to someone who had traveled so far. So I invited her back to our house, where a few friends and neighbors were to gather for what I called a requiem supper.

  ‘There, after tea and sandwiches, sherry and Nabisco shortbreads, the flamboyant lady told me that your father had come to her apartment for his Friday nights in the City. With her red-lipped smile, she implied that he had often, urn, well, shared her bed—I cannot remember exactly how she suggested this. She made it clear to me that theirs was a most discreet affair, continuing when Edmund stopped in the City at the end of his furloughs on his way back to Fort Dix. It was a very warm friendship, she said, close enough for her to wonder, now that he had passed on, about the contents of his will. Before he left for France, he had suggested to her, she said, that she would not be forgotten.’

  Having told this much of the story, to her amazement, Emma realized she had gone far beyond the bounds of propriety. The funeral must have unloosed her tongue, she thought. Never before had she said a word of this to anyone. How could she have told her innocent children the brutal truth about their father? She felt ashamed, and then, after a moment, a new thought relieved her: it was possible they would have understood very little of what she had said.

  ‘Was she, Moth?’ asked Caleb.

  ‘Was she what?’

  ‘Was she included in father’s will.’

  ‘No. Not a penny.’

  Having said so much, Emma felt she could not retreat. She decided to finish, as writers of fables always do, with a moral they might understand.

  ‘But it was a lesson for me. Your father always appeared to be so … so devoted. He seemed to be … an honest man. From what that lady told me, I learned that none of this was so. I learned never to believe in appearances. Nothing is ever what it seems. The surface is always deceiving.’

  Caleb and Kate pressed her hands in theirs, kissed her, and told her how sorry they were to learn of the faithlessness of their father. They said nothing about their own feelings, but they were quite sure of them. On the spot they had become disbelievers in their father’s myth and absolute supporters of their brave mother. Their games of fictional romances had prepared them for such codas of disappointment and deception, an education their mother was not aware of when she felt she might have foolishly, prematurely disillusioned them.

  As the train began to move at last, the three sat very close together on one seat, creating their customary tableau of familial affection. The train made its slow way through the heavy snow that obscured all the windows. The children pondered the cost of replacing the heroic saga of their father’s life with the radically revised account. Caleb did not hesitate. He had begun to translate what he had heard into material for a new game:

  ‘Friday nights I will go to visit Kate, the lady in Chelsea who is wearing a black dress and roses on her hat. Although I am married, I will take off my derby and satin-collared overcoat, all my city clothes, and will come into bed with her …’ Caleb smiled delightedly at his mother, relishing the prospect of a new fiction between him and Kate.

  That night, in Kate’s bedroom, the children discussed the lesson Moth said she had learned.

  ‘Do you suppose she loved him … after that?’ Kate asked.

  ‘I couldn’t tell, from what she said. I guess she didn’t.’

  Kate thought about the curious revelation. Then, with a daughter’s characteristically rapid assimilation of her mother’s wisdom, she said slyly:

  ‘Seems. But you never can be sure. It may only be appearances. She may be deceiving us.’

  In these various ways, the four children lost their early, happy visions of their fathers.

  2

  Camp

  One is not born a woman, one becomes one.

  —SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR

  IN JUNE OF 1930, Rose Hellman began sewing name tapes on Roslyn’s camp uniforms. Max had told his wife he wanted the summer for themselves. He felt they needed to be free of Roslyn’s demands for transportation to the City and movies they could no longer afford. Rose agreed. She went further: secretly, she wished to be left to herself in the small, train-shaped apartment, where she could indulge her resentment against her husband and her intense dislike of Brooklyn. She believed that only the poor, the immigrant, and the Irish lived in that borough. Rarely did she leave the apartment during the day for fear she would be seen on the streets and taken to be one of the newly arrived Polish Jews.

  But Max, now away from the competitive demands of Wall Street, found some benefits to his new state. In his prosperous days he had been a lover of spectator sports and had shared a pair of tickets to many events with his client Fire Commissioner John J. Geoghegan. Whenever Max could extricate himself from the demands and the omnipresence of Rose and his daughter, they went to boxing matches at Madison Square Garden and to the baseball games at the Polo Grounds.

  After the Crash, the Commissioner was kind to his former broker, with whom he shared an affliction. As a young man, Geoghegan had lost a leg in a warehouse fire in Manhattan. The two cripples liked to joke that side by side, they composed one whole man. Joined by their common disability and by a genuine affection for each other, they continued to attend sporting events, the Commissioner paying for both tickets.

  ‘For the time being,’ Max reminded him.

  The Commissioner enjoyed his new posture as source of the tickets. He had let it be known among his department’s contractors that he was amenable to granting contracts for rubber suits and boots, in return for box-office favors. This summer promised some extraordinary events: the Giants and the Yankees were expected to win pennants in their respective leagues. Max was hoping to be free of his obligations to the despondent Rose and the scornful Roslyn so he could spend his Saturdays at one stadium or another with the Commissioner on their complimentary tickets.

  When Aunt Sophie, her mother’s sister, offered to send Roslyn to camp again and her parents gratefully accepted, Roslyn understood she was considered an impediment to her parents’ private plans for the summer. Aunt Sophie was a widow who had been left ‘comfortable,’ as Rose put it, when her husband died of a heart attack at the age of forty-two. She had a daughter, Jean, a pretty but somewhat shy girl two years younger than Roslyn who had been sent to camp to her delight since she was eight. Aunt Sophie thought that Roslyn provided her daughter with a useful model of greater self-assurance.

  In the nine months since her father’s fall, as she thought of it, Roslyn had become an avid, almost obsessed movie-loving adolescent, addicted to the entertainment pages of the newspapers. Without an adequate allowance, she had developed a trick of standing by the back door of the movie theater near her, waiting for the door to open from the inside when a patron left, and slipping in just as the door was shutting. Most Saturdays she succeeded in this free entry. She stayed for hours, sometimes seeing the two features over again. When she left, dazed by the glamorous sets, the lovely clothes, and the suggestive love scenes, she felt herself unfit for ordinary existence and depressed by the fact that, at the moment, she had no way of avoiding it.

  Roslyn shuddered at the thought of being sent back to the camp in the Catskill Mountains where the Sunday-night movie was three years old and divided into reels so she had to endure delays while they were changed. Even worse was the realization that she would see few newspapers for two months. For at the same time that her love of movies grew, she had learned to attract the attention of her high school classmates by telling them she was a ‘radical.’ From the editorial page of the Daily Mirror she discovered it was a much-disliked but still intellectual thing to be. She bragged in history class about her wholehearted support of the doctrines of Marx and Lenin, her Communist leanings and anarchist tendencies. But she ignored the front page of the Times, where, in the spring of that year, and unknown to her, it was reported that the Soviet government had ex
ecuted all the old Bolshevik followers of her political hero, Leon Trotsky.

  Under duress, Roslyn packed her camp trunk while her mother supervised. Rose inspected every piece of clothing for name tapes while Roslyn rehearsed her resentment against her parents for making her leave the City, the new movies, the entertainment sections of the daily newspaper, for the boring, boring mountains.

  While, in places far from the serenity of camp, the forces of imperial Japan were preparing, with great show of aerial splendor, to bomb the ancient cities of China, and thirteen hundred banks began their descent into closure in the United States, and Rastafarians in the British West Indies celebrated the elevation of the new Emperor Haile Selassie, thus fulfilling Marcus Garvey’s prediction that in Africa ‘a new king shall be crowned and then the day of deliverance shall be near,’ and in India Mahatma Gandhi started to defy the British forces by leading a march to the coast, Roslyn, the self-styled radical, was arguing angrily with Rose and Max that she was being cruelly and unjustly deprived of her chance to go to the opening of Anna Christie with Greta Garbo, a thrill she did not wish to miss because of the promise that Garbo would talk on screen for the first time.

  Her only consolation was the camp director’s promise that she could practice her tennis whenever she wished, if the courts were not being used for scheduled matches. She had taken lessons when they lived near a club in Manhattan. It was the only sport she liked, even if it did involve an opponent.

  ‘Well, if I have to go, I am going to improve my backhand. Then can I have a new racket for my birthday?’

  Max sighed and said: ‘Not this year.’

  ‘Well, I’m not going to let them make me learn to dive. Let Jean do that. She likes water.’ In her last visit to Aunt Sophie’s apartment she had seen Jean’s bathing suit hanging to air on the post at the foot of her bed. Nastily, she asked her cousin if she kept it at the ready so she could take a quick plunge into the refreshing waters of West End Avenue. Jean blushed and said:

  ‘No, it’s there so I won’t forget to pack it.’

  Camp Clear Lake, familiarly called CCL, was for city girls. It was highly competitive and very athletic. As a result, by the end of the summer two years ago, when Roslyn had been a junior camper, she had grown to hate all group games. If she was not chosen to be captain—and her bossiness precluded that—she did not want to play at all. She believed that team sports detracted from her intellectual energies, and her forehand.

  For purposes of orderly competition the counselors had divided the camp into two teams, the Blues and the Grays. To her dismay, Roslyn had found herself on the winning side, although she herself had done very little to contribute to the victory. The campers carried on their noisy celebrations, which, to Roslyn, were vulgar, silly, and childish. Hugs, kisses, handshakes, and high-pitched shouts accompanied the announcement of the Blues’ triumph. Roslyn’s mood was hardly noticed in the happy confusion.

  Roslyn remembered that she had gone back to her bunk to scowl over her unread copy of David Copperfield. She lay on her bed, her long, black hair covering as much of her face as she could manage. She was furious at what the rest of the camp was doing, the mindless, loud celebration of, to her, a meaningless victory. She vowed never again to be caught up, even anonymously, with a winning team. She hated the camp, she hated all the campers, she told herself. She vowed she would never let her parents send her back.

  All that despised summer, full of interludes when she had turned her back on what she did not want to do and gone to lie on her bunk while the other juniors fought for the team banner, Roslyn had never got beyond the first chapters of Dickens. She brought it back home and put it on the shelf. The margins of page twenty-six were dotted with mineral oil in which the angry swirls of her thumbprints were darkly embedded.

  ‘You’re lucky to be getting out of the hot city,’ her mother said again, as she had two years ago. ‘No polio worries. Think of us sweltering here.’

  Roslyn regarded this as a sign of her mother’s extreme selfishness. She herself had never given the disease, or the heat, a thought. Which was strange, because now she always seemed to dwell on the dark side of things. After the Crash, she had turned into a pessimist whose view of the world was colored by her father’s fall from eminence and her mother’s constant complaints. Now she expected all her plans and hopes to be defeated. At almost fourteen, nothing she wanted to do seemed without its hazards. She lived in dread that no one in the narrow scope of her life would be able to escape catastrophe, including herself. It had already struck down her father and her whining, gloomy mother.

  Well, she thought, perhaps there is one virtue to having to go to camp again. The two months might serve as a hiatus in her expectation of misfortune. Everyone at a summer camp was young and healthy and had a job and seemed to have enough money. The air was fresh and cool, and she, fortunately parentless for those two months, and solitary if she resisted being put on a team, might at least for a time avoid all the nameless disasters that were inevitably part of life in the city.

  On July 6, a warm Sunday, the Hellman family took the ferry to Hoboken. Waiting on the train platform for the counselors, conspicuous in their uniform skirts and monogrammed CCL caps, to assemble those whose names appeared on their clipboards, the Hellmans grew restless.

  ‘They said eleven o’clock. It’s eleven now,’ Max said to his wife in his new, impatient tone that Roslyn recognized as dating from the October of his failure. These days he did not speak very much, and when he did, it was to express his dissatisfaction with the butcher business, or the demands of his family, or other people’s tardiness.

  Rose could hardly disguise her impatience. She put her hand on Roslyn’s shoulder. Her affection for her daughter had not diminished. But the prospect of two months’ freedom from having to think about her enabled Rose to make a small gesture. She seldom embraced her child any longer or allowed her husband to approach her affectionately. Resentment against what she thought of as the unfair turn of fate had turned her into an emotional recluse.

  Max said: We’ll borrow Sophie’s car and drive up to see you on your birthday.’

  Pleased as she was to hear this—the visit two years ago on her twelfth birthday had meant presents from her bunkmates and Muggs, her counselor, and a cake from the baker to impress her parents, she thought—Roslyn foresaw only disappointment if she were to allow herself to look forward to their visit. She remembered the last one: they had arrived in late afternoon. She had been called to the gate from the volleyball court to greet them.

  Her father had filled the first hour with her by describing minutely the roads he had selected for the trip in the De Soto, the mileage they had consumed, the time the journey had taken from the City to the town of Liberty near the camp, and the stops for nourishment they had made. Then he took his watch from his pocket and inspected it carefully, as if he were studying it for facial flaws. Roslyn knew what that meant. He was ready to go back, now that they had arrived safely and seen that she was in good health. She was sure it would happen the same way this year.

  She put her hands on her hips and looked down at her new white Keds.

  ‘Goody,’ she said.

  She turned so that her mother’s hand slipped off her shoulder.

  ‘Bring the movie section of the Sunday paper when you come, will you? And a new racket.’

  ‘No new racket this year,’ her father said, his eyes on the large round white face of the station clock.

  Rose studied the crowd gathered on the platform. ‘I don’t see Sophie and Jean anywhere. But over there, look, there’s Fritzie,’ she said to Roslyn. ‘I wonder if you’re in her bungalow this year.’

  Roslyn looked to where her mother pointed. There she was, her beloved Fritzie. She was plump and soft-looking, her liberal figure seeming to strain her counselor’s green skirt. Under her open jacket she wore a white middy blouse held together low on her bosom by a green cotton sailor’s tie. Roslyn noted all the details of her uniform an
d her figure because, two summers ago, she had developed a great fondness for Fritzie. That year her counselor had been Muggs, for whom Roslyn felt nothing at all; Muggs was homely, had a very large nose and a small, fallen-away chin.

  Even at the great distance of a junior camper from an intermediate counselor, Roslyn’s admiration for Fritzie’s elfin grin, her tightly curled cap of black hair, and her capacious bosom was unbounded. Last February, before St. Valentine’s Day, she had made her an anonymous, much be-laced card declaring her undying love. But she did not know Fritzie’s last name or address and was too ashamed to ask her mother if she did. So she could not send it.

  Roslyn watched Fritzie, who seemed to be checking a list. She thought: ‘She’d hate having me in her bunk. She referees sports, so she won’t like me. I know that already.’ She felt a burning in her chest. Her mother pulled her over toward the counselor.

  ‘Hi, Roslyn,’ Fritzie said, and smiled at her. For a moment Roslyn’s life seemed to light up like a stage as the curtain goes up. She thought there might be a midge of hope for her hitherto doomed destiny. She knew the word for the fast beating of her heart as she looked at Fritzie: she had a ‘crush’ on her. That was not so unusual, of course. Everyone in her bunk two years ago had crushes, or so they claimed. It was very fashionable to have them. A crush, Roslyn had decided, was a cruel blow lowered by pitiless fate upon the hearts of passionate twelve-year-old campers.

  What the poor victims felt for the counselor of their choice was intense adoration. But it was against the code, the law governing such things, to mention this passion to the objects of their affection. Having a crush colored their free hours, filling their midday rest period with fantasies, their bedtime moments before they fell asleep with the pains of unrequited love. Their conversations with the similarly afflicted overflowed with their misery; their locked diaries recorded the private details of their suffering.