The Book of Knowledge

by Doris Grumbach

  Nonetheless the twins (as Muriel thought of herself) were impatient to finish it. It was the first time they had ever made anything for their mother. Jean, standing beside Muriel, had left the hockey field early (she was her team’s best right wing) so that she could complete the belt she was making, secretly, for her cousin, to whom she had become devoted. Away from her mother, Jean had turned into an agreeable, charming child, attractive to her friends, a good sport and a well-coordinated, natural athlete and swimmer. But she set little store by these virtues, regarding Roslyn, her dark, smart, glowering cousin, as the model of perfection.

  ‘Unlock the door! Let us in!’ the campers shouted as Muggs approached the bungalow. She told them to step aside. The freshmen squirmed their way past her as she opened the door. The others followed, filling the long benches at the work tables. Quiet settled over the intent young workers in rawhide, birch bark, leather, and snakeskin.

  Muggs walked around behind them, helping them with difficult corners and tying hard knots. She tried to hide her boredom with the awkward processes that produced the misshaped objects: too small, too short, too fragile to hold together. But, still, they were love offerings to be given to parents who would regard the worthless gifts with loudly expressed admiration. She foresaw the scene day after tomorrow at the Hoboken station:

  ‘Look, Mom, what I made. I did one for Dad too. Look.’ The prophetic vision somehow managed to sour Muggs’s disposition, underlining her already strong sense of exclusion from family and friends, from, indeed, the human race in general.

  ‘Not that side,’ Muggs said to Jean’s bunkie, Laurie, one of the few non-New Yorkers among the campers. She came from a coal-mining town in Pennsylvania and was the only daughter of the town’s banking family.

  ‘That side stays open. So money can be put in it.’

  Laurie blushed, realizing that she was sewing up the fourth side of her mother’s coin purse. Muggs started to help her rip out the heavy leather lacing, and then thought better of it. She decided against altruism.

  ‘What the hell,’ she said to herself. ‘Let the dopey kid struggle with it. Such is life.’ She laughed to herself. ‘A purse with no opening might be just the thing for the spendthrift wife of a banker.’

  Work proceeded in silence. The sense that they were nearing the end of this activity for the summer drove the young campers forward without their usual chatter. Only one girl, Cindy, from Brooklyn, worked noisily, whispering to the girl beside her, who did not reply. Cindy Maggio’s geographic origins created much amusement among her Manhattan bunkmates, who told her they thought they would need to be vaccinated before they could come to visit her in the winter.

  Cindy was tooling a second belt for her portly father, whose occupation as an influential member of a vast smuggling and bootlegging ‘family’ her parent believed had been carefully kept from his daughter. The girls at her private school and at camp asked her what her father ‘did.’ At first, she did not say, but later, to ward off suspicion at her apparent ignorance, she told them he was a stockbroker, an occupation her mother, daughter of another gangster family, had always spoken of with respect. Cindy knew that periodically her mother turned over her husband’s lavish gifts of pearls and gold jewelry to her broker for what she called ‘liquidation,’ thus allowing her to invest secretly in blue-chip stocks.

  Cindy’s grandfather, Joseph Durante, had met with a tragic, sanguinary death, a violent end that had deeply affected his daughter. So her transactions with her broker acted as a hedge against a time when her husband might suffer a similar fate. Even the broker himself was an investment of a sort, Cindy suspected, since he was very close, ‘personally,’ as her mother said, and useful, should catastrophe strike her father.

  Cindy was well versed in the tangled, precarious lives of her parents, and knew all about the fate of her grandfather. But she said nothing about any of it to her bunkmates. She was a heavyset, hot-tempered girl with a deeply suspicious nature. Recently she had found good reason to vent her indignation. Her red leather belt, completed in July, had been displayed on the wall of the A&C bungalow as evidence of her skill and her admirably early completion of a craft work. It had disappeared.

  ‘Stolen,’ she had reported to Muggs.

  The counselor showed very little interest in locating the belt.

  ‘You must have misplaced it,’ she told Cindy.

  ‘No, I didn’t. I left it where you said to hang it.’

  ‘Maybe someone borrowed it and forgot to return it.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘I don’t know. Ask around.’

  Cindy told Liz, her bunk counselor, about her loss. Liz offered her condolences but was too busy making scenery for The Pirates of Penzance to pay much attention. Not one to abandon a grievance, Cindy went to Rae. The head counselor listened sympathetically, adding the belt to her list of things already reported missing.

  Muggs told Cindy she could start another belt if she wished and gave her the necessary materials. She did want to, and she worked feverishly at the new belt, and Muggs reported the cost of the replacement to Mr. Ehrlich, who kept the camp accounts. He added it to the Maggio’s bill. Now Cindy was close to completing a more elaborate belt in two tones of red. She intended to stay in the A&C bungalow until she finished it.

  At eleven-thirty, Muggs began to clear off the work tables, sending the freshmen campers back up the line to wash for lunch.

  ‘You’ve got tomorrow morning to finish. Come back then.’

  Heartened by the prospect of food—Cookie’s lunch was always good, and the baker, called by the campers Cookie Too, usually provided fruit tarts or chocolate cookies—everyone left, except Cindy, who was determined not to move from her task.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I want to finish now. It’s a half hour at least till Mess Hall, isn’t it?’ True daughter of a man renowned for his tenacity to assignments, she was not going to be told by ugly old Muggs to desert her filial belt.

  ‘Come on, Cindy. It’s time. Now.’

  ‘No,’ Cindy said. Muggs sat down on the bench beside her as if to stir her bodily. She was angry, but impotent against the girl’s arrogant will.

  ‘All right. Fifteen minutes. After that, I’m going to lock up whether you’re here or not.’

  Cindy glared at the counselor’s big gray nose.

  ‘Bitch,’ she said clearly, spitting out the consonants.

  Muggs stood up. She could not believe what she had heard. In her whole time at camp no one had used such language in her presence. Cindy, on the other hand, was accustomed to it. Her father always talked to her mother in this way, using vulgar language edged with what sounded to Cindy like genuine affection.

  ‘Bitch,’ he would say, ‘get the hell out of my closet.’

  Her mother would reply, not unpleasantly, in the clear-edged tones of calm retribution:

  ‘You lousy bastard. I’m collecting all the snotty handkerchiefs you drop on the floor after you’ve wiped your filthy schnozzle.’

  May Durante Maggio was a distant relative of the famed comic. She took advantage of this connection to use an occasional word from the revered Jimmy’s familiar vocabulary, thus giving her insults a humorous tone. Cindy was used to exchanges of this nature at home. So her chatter with her bunkies was filled with expletives taken from standard Maggio conversations. After the first shock, the campers grew to admire and then emulate her vulgarity.

  Cindy was usually careful of her speech before counselors. Last February, when the Ehrlichs made their enlistment rounds, they were horrified to learn that Cindy’s bunkies had incorporated the juicier and more graphic words into their homecoming narratives. Because her parents paid so promptly, and tipped the staff so generously, they decided to give the child one last chance, having asked her parents, in a kindly way, if they could please tell Cindy … But of course, the mild reproof had little effect.

  Muggs shook her keys. ‘It’s time,’ she said grimly.

  ‘But I’m not finished.
’

  ‘Tomorrow. Nothing else is scheduled that I know of.’

  Cindy made a rude fish face at Muggs, crossing her eyes and drawing in her lips into a Cupid’s bow. ‘I think you take ugly pills,’ she muttered. Then she got up and left.

  Muggs put Cindy’s well-made, two-thirds-braided belt on a shelf, locked the door, and went to the Mess Hall, where the campers had lined up, through habit, in mail lines. Of course, no mail was required today, it being so close to going home. Monday, Wednesday, and Friday had been letter-home days. The price for going in to lunch on those days was a stamped letter addressed to Mr. and Mrs. Whoever, containing (Mrs. Ehrlich hoped) exciting news about athletic triumphs, gourmet meals, counselor tender care, and close medical attention. Campers were required to leave their letters open. Mrs. Ehrlich sealed them after she made note of complaints and resentments expressed to parents, and unreported (to the Infirmary) cases of diarrhea or constipation.

  Roslyn, late to arrive, said in a loud voice to those near her:

  ‘No lines, stupid. We’re going home before letters can get there.’

  Freed from the customary retraint, everyone broke out of line and milled around the flagpole where each morning the bugle was blown and the Stars and Stripes slowly drawn up the pole. Left hands over their hearts, the campers would recite the Pledge of Allegiance, their eyes fixed patriotically on the rising flag. An honor guard of the ‘best’ campers for that week was entrusted with the ropes.

  In two years Roslyn had never been asked to raise or lower the flag. She attributed the omission to her rebellious spirit, her ‘attitude,’ as Muggs had called it. Roslyn thought her exclusion might be due to her oft-expressed devotion to Leon Trotsky, although it didn’t seem that anyone at the camp knew who the great man was. Roslyn herself knew only that Trotsky represented brave rebellion in the political life of the Soviet Union. That seemed to her an excellent thing.

  What did she care about being denied the honor of flag-raising? At first she had, especially two years ago, when she was stricken with her crush. If she had been chosen, Fritzie might have noticed her. This year she had come to think of it as a sign of her superiority to the jingoistic masses who swore allegiance to the flag of a nation too stupid to recognize the genius of Karl Marx.

  The cook came out on the porch and rang the bell for lunch. Everyone rushed to the doors, everyone, that is, except for the seditious Roslyn, who put her hastily written postcard to Lionel, the first she had written all summer, into the counselors’ mailbox and was the last one into the Mess Hall.

  At the Infirmary, Dr. Amiel and Nurse Jody ignored the noon bell. They had been invited to a farewell lunch at one, with the Ehrlichs in their bungalow. It was Jody’s first such invitation all summer. She felt it elevated her, belatedly, into the camp’s upper class. The doctor, of course, had been a constant guest. Today he hoped the meal would be over quickly so he could join Dolly in their usual trysting place, the costume room behind the Amusement Hall, for a final roll in the hay, as he put it to himself.

  At the moment, the medical personnel were engaged in packing up most of the contents of the Infirmary’s glass cabinets: rolls of adhesive bandages, gauze, bottles of aspirin and milk of magnesia, tubes of cold cream and other palliatives, analgesics, and placebos. It was done quickly. Little remained on the shelves but personal prescription bottles for asthma, coughs, and indigestion.

  Dr. Amiel said: ‘Do we return these to the kids tomorrow?’

  ‘Oh, no. They’d just lose them. Mrs. E. says we’re to stick close to the counselors at the station when they turn over the kids. Then we deliver the bottles to parents. It’s a good time for presents, even cash, because they’re all relieved to see their daughters in one piece.’

  ‘Not that we’ve had much to do with that.’

  ‘No, I guess not. God was on our side, and Mrs. E., of course, who agreed to send the one really sick kid home. I think she might have had influenza. I wonder how she is.’

  ‘No idea. Strange we never heard. Maybe the Ehrlichs did and didn’t say.’

  Lunch at the cottage was creamed chipped beef on toast, salad, hot rolls, tarts, and excellent coffee. Grete had brought the rolls from the bakery, where Ib was seated, holding a bottle of ale against his sweating forehead.

  ‘Drink less, sweat less,’ she had told him. He said nothing, covered the tray of fruit tarts and rolls with a napkin, and thrust it at her.

  Mr. Ehrlich had returned from Liberty with the final grocery order, the mail, and the New York Times. He sat down beside Oscar.

  ‘Paper here says there’s a group been formed called the March of Dimes. It’s to raise money for polio victims. Head of it is Basil O’Connor. Remember him?’ he asked Mrs. Ehrlich.

  ‘No,’ she said in a tone suggesting such information was beneath her. She took a roll, buttered it thickly, and put it, whole, into her mouth.

  ‘Franklin Roosevelt’s law partner.’

  ‘Any other news?’

  ‘Well, yes, Andrew Mellon died yesterday.’

  ‘I thought he was dead,’ said Nurse Jody.

  ‘It always seems that old people are already dead,’ said Dr. Amiel sagely. ‘When John D. Rockefeller died last May, I thought he was dead.’

  ‘How old was Mellon?’ Mrs. Ehrlich took another roll, her hand reaching into the basket at the same time as Oscar’s. He took two.

  ‘Eighty-six.’

  ‘Wow,’ said Oscar, his mouth so full of food he found the exclamation hard to get out.

  ‘And Rockefeller?’

  The doctor tried to remember. ‘I’m not sure. Almost a hundred, I think. Something like ninety-seven or eight.’

  ‘Wow,’ said Oscar, and swallowed hard. ‘That old. And rich too. Like Grammer.’

  Everyone looked reverently toward the door behind which Grandmother Ehrlich was resting, her lunch having been brought in to her by Grete. To the campers the old lady was something of a legend. Rarely was she seen in public, from the time she was helped from the camp sedan to the bungalow until tomorrow when she would be moved into the car by the combined efforts of the doctor, Mr. Ehrlich, and the driver, Carmen.

  Now and then the campers would catch sight of her white head through the bungalow window. Some thought she was a ghost, others decided she was a witch. The doctor had always called on her in early evening to administer her nightly high colonic enema, because the nurse was thought by Mrs. Ehrlich to be incapable of such a complex procedure.

  Dr. Amiel suspected the old lady was very close to the end of her life. Sometimes she knew him, often she did not seem to. He guessed she was over eighty, old enough for her many afflictions: diabetes, rheumatism, heart trouble, and that common sign of extreme old age, a greedy appetite.

  Occasionally a peculiar light would pierce the gray fog that inhabited Grandmother Ehrlich’s mind. Once, as he was administering her enema, he heard her speak. She enunciated each word clearly, as though she were delivering a sermon:

  ‘Birth, constipation, and old age are mortal diseases,’ she said.

  ‘What?’ he asked, not believing that a full sentence had come from the old lady. But already her light blue eyes had clouded. She was gone, returned to a place where the present did not exist, he imagined, a past intelligence where philosophic observations could be formulated and then forgotten.

  She spoke to him one other time. He had arrived early at her bedroom because he’d promised to drive Dolly to Liberty for crepe paper and wanted to get the enema over quickly. He found the old lady seated at her window wrapped in a quilt despite the heat, watching the campers line up for dinner. Her eyes were angry.

  ‘I know about those children,’ she said. He nodded, and waited.

  ‘They come from the devil. Most of them. Only a few children came from God. None of mine came from Him.’

  Obliged by loyalty to his employer, Dr. Amiel said: ‘Oh, come now. I think Mr. Ehrlich is very good to you. How many children do you have?’

  She m
ade no reply. Perhaps she hadn’t heard.

  Then she said: ‘We are all very sick of ourselves.’

  Those were the last words he was to hear her say.

  Of course he knew he would not be there, but he found himself imagining the scene at her deathbed. She would mumble something, perhaps something profound, but no one would understand. The Ehrlichs would be eager to have the departure of the aged woman over with (for he had noticed their impatience at the care she required). They would not be at her bedside. Her end might come while they were in Florida, or perhaps recruiting in New York in February. They would miss her last lucid moment. She would escape into senseless darkness, sick unto death and, as she had said to him, mortally sick of herself.

  In early afternoon, no one was out on the line. It was rest hour, a time regarded at the camp as essential, ever since medical experts had said that tired children were more likely to contract polio. The adults at the camp took advantage of this mandated siesta. Mr. Ehrlich was lying down in his room, Mrs. Ehrlich in hers, both of them sleeping off the effects of lunch. Oscar was in the bathroom looking into the mirror in order to pick away the crusted pus that had formed on his eyelid. Muggs was in the A&C bungalow, the door locked behind her, advancing the braiding of Cindy Maggio’s belt.

  ‘She’ll never know. It’ll be done sooner and then I’ll be rid of the brat,’ she told herself.

  Fritzie was in the counselor’s room at the rear of her bungalow checking the chart (‘Thank God this will be the last time,’ she thought) on which her bunkies were required to mark their successful bowel movements every day. That chore finished, she wrote a postcard to her friend, Joe Lyons, to assure him that she was looking forward to their reunion in his fraternity house in a few weeks. The omnipresence of female society all summer had somehow increased her once tepid affection for Joe. Now she accepted much about him that she had hitherto disliked: his male overassertiveness, his unquestioning belief in himself and his natural, God-given masculine rights, his conviction (had his mother provided him with this?) that he was unrivaled among men.