The Book of Knowledge

by Doris Grumbach

  Her losses were immediately apparent to her, unlike the hazy recollections that inhabit adult memories when, looking back, it is hard to locate the effects of crucial events in one’s early history. During the last days of camp, she felt herself aging. When the inspection of trunks was concluded, when the ambulance had pulled away from the lake road, guided to the gate by lucifer matches and flashlights, when her faith in true love shriveled up under the assault of brutal truth like a pin-struck balloon, and when her body failed her, she knew she had grown up, even grown old.

  She had always suspected that very few people were really happy. When, all at once, this proved painfully true, she thought that nothing would ever seem the same to her again. Compared to her end-of-summer-gained knowledge, her father’s descent from affluence to near poverty (as it seemed to her) last October was a minor fall. At a stroke, she thought, she had changed, grown ugly and disconsolate, like the mythic hero swept by a wave of a wand into the skin of a hideous frog. Now she was certain of what she had earlier suspected, that life was composed of a series of disillusioning revelations and disappointments.

  Most affected was her idea of love. She had thought she knew what it was, but in those last days she discovered its true nature. It was a well-camouflaged phantom, an avid, contemptuous, sneaky mob member, a guerrilla fighter prepared to destroy the natural peace of her heart, always secretly at war with her contentment. More terrible still, when her body betrayed her, she was taught that it was a wild child, capable of tantrums and tempers, furious deeds and appetites, and never never obedient to her will.

  It happened in this way.

  On what was to be a drama-laden day near the end of camp, Grete, fully dressed, woke Ib at six in the morning. A suggestion of light showed over the far side of the lake. In the help’s house it was still cool, as if fall had come, unexpectedly, to the summer place. Ib got up at once, accustomed to early rising because sweet buns and soft rolls had to be ready to be served in the mess hall at eight-thirty.

  He indulged in his ritual grumbling, followed by his soft, ropy cough.

  ‘From the flour, not the tobacco,’ he told Grete when she complained about it.

  The room the couple occupied in the house smelled of his midnight quart of ale and his badly decayed teeth. Grete reminded him of the birthday cake he had to bake for dinner and the extra loaves for the senior hike.

  ‘I know, I know. What do you think?’

  Grete made her escape into the warm, perfumed air of the Ehrlich’s cottage. This morning she found the kitchen marred by the remains in the sink of a late meal Oscar must have required two or three hours after his dinner. For the moment she ignored the mess and proceeded to make her own thick, black coffee in the Scandinavian way, and then a small pot of American coffee for Mrs. Ehrlich’s breakfast. Mr. Ehrlich had long since gone to Liberty to fetch the mail and provisions.

  Grete walked over to the bakery to obtain the fresh rolls from Ib’s tray. They said nothing to each other. She carried the little package back to the bungalow.

  Grete knocked and then pushed open Mrs. Ehrlich’s door with her firm, uniformed body, holding the tray against her midriff. Mrs. Ehrlich was asleep, curled into the center of her bed like a giant snail. The air around her was sweet and heavy with the effusions of her flesh, perfumed with Chanel No. 5 before going to bed.

  Grete pulled the blinds. Mrs. Ehrlich stirred, stretched, and sat up as the aroma of coffee and hot rolls reached her. Into the warm morning sunshine that reached her bed she smiled beneficently, luxuriating in the thought that the administrative tasks of the long summer were almost behind her. Was not the lovely sunshine of their place in Winter Haven about to descend on her? She had always moved contentedly through life, proceeding from one situation of physical comfort to the next—the bed, the sofa, the porch swing, the padded chair at the dining table, the soft armchair reserved for her at all camp events in the Amusement Hall—waited upon and cosseted by Mr. Ehrlich, regarded fondly but lazily by her son, and always certain that the present, demanding as it might be, would turn into easeful release in the near future.

  Her sole worry was for Grandmother Ehrlich, who had lived with them since the death of her husband. The details of her care during the summer in the cottage were left to her, Mr. Ehrlich, and a succession of helpers who came in from the village by the day. In winter, Mrs. Ehrlich was entirely free of these concerns. She was able to relax while she enjoyed her eight months in Florida. Grandmother Ehrlich was left behind in New York with a full-time caretaker.

  Only the cold February visit to New York to sign up campers for the following summer marred Mrs. Ehrlich’s long, hot, slothful holiday, which ended, sadly, in June when they had to return to oversee the refurbishment of the camp. Both directors agreed that it was necessary for them to be on the grounds when the effect of winter storms on the manicured appearance of fields and bungalows, docks and roadways was erased. They knew how important all this was to visiting parents.

  Grete poured Mrs. Ehrlich’s coffee and buttered her roll.

  ‘Bugle on time today. Campers and teachers are in Mess Hall. Flag is up like always,’ Grete said in the pleasant voice she always used to the directors. She felt it necessary to make this morning report to Mrs. Ehrlich as she lay in bed, knowing she was always pleased to hear that all was going well, as usual. Mrs. Ehrlich was the picture of contentment, stretching her short, fat legs under the sheet. Grete considered it important to ingratiate herself, because Ib’s drinking threatened their security. Summer jobs were essential to them.

  It was not that Grete loved Ib, not in the least, not ever. When he had too much to drink, he enjoyed using his belt on her buttocks and twisting her long hair so tightly it threatened to pull away from her head. Or he would extend her earlobes so painfully during his (never their) lovemaking as a show of force, accompanied by rough assaults on her breasts and thighs.

  Every night during the summer, full of drink, he demanded that she lie down under him; every night she wished him dead. After he fell into a heavy sleep, she planned the escapes she might make if cirrhotic death or lung disease did not claim him soon. To her, their union (he was Danish, she Norwegian) was an example of mistaken intermarriage. She had agreed to it because he was about to become an American citizen and she wished to realize the promises of the golden land of America she had come to: high salaries, new automobiles, fur coats, and modern kitchens.

  Ib’s motives for entering into marriage were equally crass. He had failed to find a woman in Copenhagen willing to submit for any length of time to his distinctive ways of achieving his pleasure, the same attacks he enjoyed inflicting on small animals, and upon men smaller and weaker than he. This uncontained violence, necessary to fire his arid soul and his lax sexual organ, had sent him to jail in Odensee, where he had gone to take a job as an apprentice baker and to find a willing female for his blows and pinches, yanks and drubbings.

  His incarceration there had been brief. He had been found guilty of drunkenness and assault upon a prostitute, both very minor offenses. He passed his days in jail baking for the prisoners and his nights methodically, pleasurably battering himself. Freed in a few months, and sick of Denmark, he obtained a berth as a baker on a steamship and sailed to New York. Immediately he applied for his papers.

  Almost as quickly he found a job with the Horn and Hardart Company, so easily were American employers persuaded that European-trained bakers must be superior to Americans. In time, he was promoted to supervising the mass production of chocolate-, vanilla-, and strawberry-frosted cupcakes, desserts then much favored in the Automats in New York City. Baked at three in the morning, the cakes were moved upstairs to be placed behind the little glass doors. They were readily available to thousands of thrifty citizens by the insertion of a nickel into a slot.

  In the basement kitchen he met Grete. She worked in the vegetable department. ‘I do cream spinach, butter carrots, and succotash,’ she told him at their first encounter. The next year
she agreed to marry him, his impulses and needs having been well hidden from her until the night after they signed a license before a magistrate of the City of New York. Similarly, he was unaware of her avarice, which became apparent later, after an argument about her savings and his nightly ale.

  ‘You are a cold woman,’ he told her when she refused to part with her Central Savings Bank passbook so he could buy his necessary drink.

  ‘You are a goat, a pig,’ she replied.

  Name-calling became their unvarying form of communication. Once, while Grete lay in bed engaged in her customary fantasy of getting free of her life with Ib, he stole her passbook and presented it at the glassed-in teller’s window together with a withdrawal slip. He was told he could not use it: her name, her maiden name, Grete Olssen, was on the account.

  After that, they endured each other in furious silence, broken only by expletives and business communication. They were united in their unspoken resolutions to avenge each other’s unbearable behavior. On the morning of the 27th of August, while Mrs. Ehrlich was dressing slowly with Grete’s help, Ib was taking his first bottle of ale from the bakery icebox. Now that all the boats had been lifted out of the water and heaped one upon the other in neat piles, he thought he might escape Grete’s witness of his drinking, take his bottle, lift down the top canoe, and go out for a peaceful, solitary late afternoon on the water. He might float around in the little hidden cove, the only break in the otherwise perfectly oval lake. There, unobserved from the shore and dock, he could drink his pale fire, dozing if he wished after its analgesic effects had dulled his senses. This would be his last chance for inebriated solitude, he thought. During these last days when camp was winding down, the help could ask permission to enjoy the pleasures of the lake.

  ‘Not at all have I been on the lake, not once all this summer,’ he thought, filled with resentment against his job, the owners, the counselors, the campers, even Grete, although he could not have said why.

  He gathered up ten long loaves of bread and took them out to the truck that was to follow the seniors on their hike. As he lifted them into the back of the truck, one loaf escaped his grasp and fell into the dust.

  ‘Jeg er nerves,’ he muttered. Carmen, the driver, free of his usual chores of lawn mowing and garbage collecting, laughed as he picked up the bread, blew on it, and put it with the others.

  ‘Pretty early in the day to be blotto,’ he said to Ib.

  ‘Horse. Turkey. Bastar.’

  Carmen laughed again. ‘Go put your head in the oven, Pop,’ the driver said.

  ‘Italian pig,’ said Ib.

  He went back to the bakery and soothed his rage with a long draw on the bottle of ale. He floured his hands, began work on the dough for lunch rolls, put the layers for one birthday cake for tonight into the oven, expressed his opinion loudly to the hot oven concerning the driver’s unlawful origins, and then sealed his view with another insult-quenching drink.

  After the water-sports contests of last week, the Grays were twelve points behind the Blues for the summer’s total. Roslyn was a Gray and happy not be on the winning side. To her, Gray represented the uniforms of the courageous, radical rebels of the War Between the States, the gallant subjects of a school paper she had written this year. Only a few competitions remained to be played in these final days. They would decide the Blue-Gray struggle: junior field hockey, freshman volleyball, mediate handball. Roslyn hoped she would be overlooked in the final handball pairings-off, for inevitably she would lose, and the winners would gloat. She would hate the whole exultory conclusion, especially the banquet with its stupid awards and medals. And the silly singing of victory songs. Oh jeepers.

  But Rae insisted. ‘You’ve done nothing at all for the Grays, Roz. Time to get out and show some team spirit.’

  ‘Jeepers,’ Roslyn said under her breath. ‘Team spirit.’

  She walked as slowly as she could down to the handball court, bearing witness, she hoped, by her slumped shoulders and clenched fists, to her disdain for the world of competition. For a moment, as she passed the Amusement Hall, where she knew Fritzie was going to meet with other counselors to plan activities for the next day and for the departure, she looked in. There she was, the lovely Fritzie, and here she was, the captive Roslyn. Suppose, by some miracle, she were to win. The Grays would gain a much-needed point, she supposed. But how could this possibly happen? Well, stringbean Loo, who was sure to be her opponent, a Blue who was good at this game, might sprain her ankle and concede to her. Or God would perform a miracle, endowing her own weak right hand and willowy wrist with Amazonian strength. Then, in a series of amazing acts, one firm stroke after another, hard palm to rubber ball to cement wall, her game might turn out to be a masterpiece of strategy and strength.

  Roslyn sat down on the grass, crouching low, hoping she would not be noticed. On the side bench, sitting with Will, Roslyn imagined she saw her beloved Fritzie. Will was the athletics counselor who refereed most of the games. Roslyn’s burning eyes squinted against the sun: her fantasy bloomed. Fritzie will watch her admiringly as she swings and swoops and slams. She will applaud the clever moves that lead to the final point, until Roslyn’s heart explodes with love for her generosity. Her life’s blood will leak from her palms as a result of glass-hard contact with the ball, coloring her sweat, covering her with the glowing sheen of a victor.

  She will bow gallantly to her disabled opponent, nod humbly to Will and then to her beloved, cutting the air with her CCL cap in one glorious sweep of cavalier grace. She will bow again, very low.

  Halfway through the match Roslyn tired. The long summer of relative inactivity had not prepared her for this last challenge. On the bench, Will appeared bored, looking often at her watch. Roslyn lost badly. Good, she thought. Another Blue point, and perhaps ultimate defeat for the Grays to which she had now contributed. Now she had good reason to skip the banquet and celebration by the gloating bad winners and the noisy good losers. She would stay in her bunk and try to finish up all her old newspapers, maybe even take a look at Ben Hur. But of course Fritzie probably would not let her.

  Will stood up, said she had a meeting, and left abruptly without congratulating Loo, who looked hurt. Roslyn shook hands with her and said: ‘Good game.’

  Loo raised her clasped hands above her head and said into the air: ‘Yessirree bob. Yay for the Blues.’

  To Roslyn she said, confidingly: ‘You know what? It’s a wonder I played so good. I feel lousy. Last night I fell off the roof.’

  ‘Falling off the roof’ was the popular camp expression for menstruation. Roslyn had learned it from Aggie. Jo, Loo, Aggie: all of them talked about their monthly troubles in this way. At first hearing, Roslyn had taken it literally and was startled. Then she reasoned it was most unlikely that three kids all would have suffered the same accident. What were they all doing up there, anyway?

  ‘Why do you call it that?’ she had asked Jo.

  Jo didn’t know. Nobody in the bungalow knew. Their disdain for Roslyn’s immaturity ruled her out of the suffering sorority. So they made no attempt to invent something or venture a guess at a reason. Roslyn was not offended at their conspiratorial silence. She had already worked out her own explanation. If you fell off a roof you were very apt to bleed uncontrollably. So the expression must be yet another description of the cursed affliction. It was all so stupid, really. Because, her plan locked firmly into place, she would never have any part in the whole mess.

  Grete made beds and scrubbed the bathrooms and kitchen while Mrs. Ehrlich in her fresh white dress sat at her dressing table and applied powder and rouge to her cheeks.

  ‘Nothing like a Swede for cleanliness,’ she had told Amiel Hoffer, the camp doctor, at the start of the summer. He agreed, wanting to stand in well with the directors and so not correcting her about Grete’s place of origin. To Mrs. Ehrlich all persons from Scandinavia were Swedish, and surely the doctor must respect that nation’s reputation for hygiene.

  Dr. Amiel, as Mrs.
Ehrlich called him, had come to the camp this summer as a result of chance. A June graduate of Bellevue Medical School, he had filled in at the last moment for the regular doctor, whose skill at treating poliomyelitis through the winter would keep him busy in the City during the threatened epidemic summer, sadly depriving him of his usual Cats-kill vacation. So relieved were the Ehrlichs to be able to fill this essential position that they did not inquire into the inexperienced young graduate’s credentials. (For what parents would permit their child to be away from them for any length of time without the firm promise of on-the-grounds medical attention?) And Fate had been kind to Dr. Amiel: no difficult-to-diagnose ailments had developed during the eight weeks of camp. The most serious was Oscar’s gastritis, caused, the doctor was quick to see, by the boy’s overeating.

  ‘But he eats like a bird,’ his mother protested.

  ‘Then why is he so fat?’

  ‘It’s all glands. It runs in the family.’

  Dr. Amiel, who possessed common sense, even if his medical experience was limited, repressed his disbelief. Oscar’s first stomach ache had occurred on the fourth day of camp. Even then the doctor had suspected him of being a secret eater. But he knew he had the rest of the summer to get through peaceably, so he made no comment on this diagnosis. Oscar continued to have spells of constipation, pain, and nausea all summer. The doctor prescribed diet, exercise, and milk of magnesia. Oscar refused to change his diet and avoided all physical effort. But he did allow himself to be dosed periodically, in this way garnering his mother’s loving sympathy and care.

  To the doctor’s immense relief, no one had ever had to remain overnight in the Infirmary. Complaints expressed at morning sick call were limited to shin bruises from hockey sticks, splinters, and headaches caused by the arrival of ‘my period.’ There were a few cases of tennis elbow and a number of occurrences of baseball fingers and bee stings, scraped knees and toes. But nothing happened that could not be treated with Midol, aspirin, Band-Aids, Ace bandages, and tongue-depressor finger splints.