The Book of Knowledge

by Doris Grumbach

  ‘We will get the best meal of the whole summer, so we can go home and tell our parents how great the food was and they will think it was that way the whole summer. Roast chicken, bread stuffing, homemade cranberry sauce, and Cookie’s pie with ice cream on top, à la mode, whatever that means. Exactly what we had at the banquet the last time I went. My name will be called: ROSLYN HELLMAN. I will be handed another stupid tin pin. Rae calls it bronze. She says it is given to me for some dumb thing or other, character maybe, or enthusiasm, or maybe catching the most snakes and salamanders.

  ‘“Now for the Big Moment of the year,” Rae will say in her serious voice that sounds like she is announcing the Armistice. Mr. Ehrlich brings in the silver loving cup. I wonder, as I did last time, why it is called “loving.” Shaped like a heart, maybe? I remember I meant to look it up during the winter but I never did. I wonder if it is really silver or just fake like the pins. A cup made of silver paper or something like that. Mr. Ehrlich hands it to Rae. She holds it high up over her head, that silly smile on her face, and says:

  ‘“This year the cup goes to the Blue Team. It is the twenty-fourth”—I don’t know how many, maybe more, maybe only five—“time in a row. Will Senior Captain Leona Swados come up to receive it? And will all the Blues stand up so we can applaud their great efforts.”

  ‘Then Leona will go to the main table and take the cup from Rae and hold it over her head, pretending to groan at how heavy it is. All the Blues, from little screaming freshmen to grinning juniors (Jean will be one of them), and my sports opponents among the mediates, and the snobby seniors will stand up. I will be sitting down, of course, with the other defeated Grays.

  ‘Some of the Blues will clap for themselves. Others will clasp their hands over their heads, and some will show how proud they are of themselves by putting their thumbs in their armpits and waving their free fingers in the air. It is all too awful. Then Leona hands the cup back to Rae. Of course, everyone knows it stays permanently in the Ehrlich bungalow. Next year it will be dragged out again and then it will have the captain’s name and team and date printed on it. I hope I won’t be here for that.

  ‘Then we will all troop out into the dark night, smelling of pine, and mist coming from the lake, and under the bowl of stars I won’t see again because the sky in Brooklyn comes in little squares and rectangles between the roofs of buildings. We’ll trudge back up the line to our bunks and take off our grungy green uniforms for the last time this summer. Tomorrow morning we’ll put on our uncomfortable city clothes, which will probably look okay to us after all the middy blouses and bloomers every day.

  ‘Everyone around me will fall asleep very fast, worn out by the cheering, the food, the terribly long time it takes to give ninety-six campers an award for something or other, and those long, dull speeches by the directors. But I will lie here in bed, feeling very low, I know I will. I will have that black feeling of defeat I always get even though I didn’t care about winning or getting a medal.

  ‘I will search around for my flashlight, whose batteries are dying, and scrunch down under the blanket to read the one section of the Times I always save, from last November. It is full of wonderful stories, each one told in a single, neat paragraph, one to a subject, about New York’s hundred neediest cases. I have read them again and again since last November. I will try to turn each one into life. I think these pathetic cases will be the raw stuff from which my stories will be made.

  ‘I have a plan. I intend to memorize some of these neediest cases, taking characters and stories, plots, from them, so I can begin my novel this winter now that I am fourteen and old enough to start my career as a real writer, not just an imaginer like I used to be when I made up the lemming game last summer. … I will hear Rae calling me from the steps to put out my flashlight. She is one counselor who gives orders in a nice voice. I think she may understand she is dealing with a budding story writer, maybe a great artist. I will put out my light.

  ‘In the dark, I’ll think of my love and wonder if she has read my letter yet. What grateful words will she say to me, or write back to me? I’m scared at the thought of how she will take my declaration of love and lifelong devotion. I feel hot under the covers when I think of her.’

  Roslyn is overcome by the unusual warmth that accompanies heated reverie. Easily, she slides into cool, obliterating sleep.

  Everyone in Bungalow Eight was asleep except Laurie, whose birthday it had been, and Jean, who had been kept awake by the ugly bathroom sounds of Laurie ‘upchucking,’ the juniors’ current term for vomiting. Ib’s cake had been large, chocolate inside and out, with a white inscription and, because he had some heavy cream to use up, interlarding of whipped cream. The birthday girl, as Ellie, her counselor, called her, consumed three pieces.

  Jean waited for her to come out of the bathroom and then went over to her bed.

  ‘Feel better now?’

  ‘Yes, I think so. Some better.’

  ‘Great. Well, good night. Don’t let the bedbugs bite. We’re going home soon.’

  ‘Thanks.’ Laurie turned over, thinking how much she missed her mother. She vowed never to eat anything again.

  Jean stretched out on the top of her blanket, cradling her beloved new tennis racket in her arm. ‘Another long winter to wait,’ she thought. ‘All that school to get through. Ten months, and then I can come back. Jeepers creepers, alone with my mother all that time. And no swimming, either.’

  As she closed her eyes, she smiled, remembering the game she played in the winter with her best friend from school who sometimes came over to spend the night. Chinese checkers. With all her athletic and water triumphs behind her, she decided that now there would be more: ‘I’m good enough to beat her at anything.’

  Consoled by the prospect of more victories, she fell asleep.

  Roslyn woke from a violent dream. Balls were being thrown at her. Her head was the object of a game in a sideshow. Around her face a sheet was spread and held upright. She shook the balls away by waving her arms, and sat up. Her legs were caught in her sheet, but she was relieved that there were no softballs in the bed. What time could it be?

  It was rare for her to wake up from the time she put out her under-the-covers flashlight until seven o’clock when reveille sounded. She had no way of judging the time. It was still dark: it could be six-thirty for all she knew.

  Wide awake, she saw, in the light glow of a lamp, that Fritzie’s door was ajar. That meant she wasn’t in bed yet, so it couldn’t be six-thirty. Midnight maybe? Roslyn found her flashlight under her bed. As quietly as she could she walked through the row of cots toward Fritzie’s room. She passed Jo, curled into a C and snoring because, she had told them, her tonsils and adenoids needed to be taken out in the winter.

  Fritzie’s bed was flat. Her Westclox said fifteen minutes after twelve o’clock. Roslyn went back, passing Rita’s empty bed. Mildred was asleep, lying in a long, straight line, her arms at her sides as Roslyn imagined a dead person would have them. Loo’s uncovered feet hung over the end of her cot. They looked as though they were not connected to her. Roslyn did not bother to inspect Aggie.

  Roslyn sat on her cot, feeling disoriented and, for no reason she could think of, afraid. Her stomach still ached, she realized, and she was tempted to lie down to relieve it.

  Where could Fritzie be? The question put all thoughts of her physical discomfort out of her mind. She decided to go look for her.

  Never before had she been on the line after lights out. It was cold outside; she had forgotten to put on her bathrobe. She started to go back for it and then remembered: it was packed. She decided she was cold because she was alone in the dark and because her stomach ached. It really wasn’t that cold, it was August, for gosh sakes. Her flashlight’s batteries were worn and weak, and the lamps intended to light the path were almost as dim as the one she held in her hand. The woods, the bungalows, the path made one dark country, until she saw a circle of light through the trees, down near the lake, almost a
t the bottom of the line.

  ‘Maybe someone is swimming. Maybe Fritzie and the others are down there skinny-dipping. The seniors say the counselors sometimes do that.’

  She shuddered at the thought of what it would be like to be without her bathing suit in an infinity of black night water, with no light to show her the shore, surrounded by one great expanse of scary nothingness.

  ‘I would hate it.’

  Roslyn walked until she came close to where the odd light was. It was made by the headlights of two cars. In them she saw that every counselor seemed to be there. They stood in clumps, talking to each other in voices so low she could not hear anything they were saying. No one took any notice of her there on the edge of the glow.

  She saw the Ehrlichs in the center of one circle. Mrs. Ehrlich looked ghostly. She wore a white nightgown and over it a white lacy robe. Mr. Ehrlich was in his pajamas. In the weird brightness of flashlights and some candles the Ehrlichs looked to Roslyn like a pair of twin dwarfs, bobbing up and down as if they were wound up. Fat Oscar, the thief, Roslyn thought, stood close to his mother, shivering. He had on white shorts and a cardigan sweater. One of his eyes was swollen shut.

  She saw Rae go over to where Muggs was standing and say something to her. Then Muggs looked grim. She turned toward the bungalows, to patrol the line, Roslyn thought, because all the other counselors were here. For a moment she thought Muggs had spotted her on the edge of the darkness, but no, she kept on walking, grumbling about something, but Roslyn could not make out what she was saying.

  What was happening? Was this some final ceremony, something that took place at midnight at the end of every summer? Had she slept through it when she was here before? No. She realized it was not some silly farewell rite. One lighted car had pulled up close to the footpath to the lake. She saw SHERIFF painted on its white door. Two tall men wearing caps and uniforms got out, looked around them, and then went over to the Ehrlichs, whom they seemed to know. Roslyn moved in closer to the crowd of counselors and crouched on the damp grass under a clump of birches, lit by the funny light that made the others look very strange. Now she could hear.

  ‘… she went down to look for him. She saw his … he was caught under a canoe,’ Rae said to one of the sheriffs.

  ‘Carmen and the doctor helped her lift him out,’ someone else said.

  She heard Mrs. Ehrlich’s high voice: ‘Our doctor says he’s been dead … drowned … for about five hours. Maybe more.’

  Dead. It was a word Roslyn knew, but a concept she could not hold for long. Always before it had struck at a distance. When it happened to John D. Rockefeller she had read about it, and also when the workers in Chicago at the steel plant who went out on strike were shot dead by the police last Memorial Day. Killed. Dead. Words with no specific meaning unless a face or body known to her, like Lionel’s father, was attached. Like the people in the hundred neediest cases who ‘lost’ a father or a child. Lost, another word for the vague, distant, mysterious dead.

  Roslyn saw some people moving very slowly up the incline from the lake carrying among them what looked like a sagging, rolled-up rug, like the one in their apartment that was taken away to be cleaned every spring, ‘to spare the Oriental,’ her mother said. The truck driver, the doctor, Will, and two other broad-shouldered counselors Roslyn did not recognize carried the long bundle. They moved very slowly.

  The procession came closer to the circles of light. Roslyn saw they were not carrying a rug but a bundle of wet clothes from which, at one end, two legs and feet without shoes stuck out. From the other end a man’s head hung down. She thought it might drop off at any minute and come away from the clothes, because it swung about like a lamp in a wind. The face was almost black; it looked like ink had been injected into it. The eyes were wide open, and all she could see was white where colored eyeballs should have been. Who was it? Somehow the man looked surprised, or maybe scared. But he was dead. Dead. She felt as if she were about to explode with fright. Her stomach ached unbearably. Her heart burned. She thought her chest might be on fire.

  At the end of the little procession walked the woman who worked for the Ehrlichs. Her face looked powdered.

  ‘Poor Grete,’ she heard Mrs. Ehrlich say. She went over and put her arm around her waist. The woman stopped and stood still, like stone, like an upright board, Roslyn thought. Then she knew who the dead man was: the husband of Grete. This waterlogged man was the baker who made sweet buns for breakfast, birthday cakes, great desserts.

  The sheriff said to the bearers: ‘Put him down.’

  He bent over the dead man for a few moments. The other sheriff poked at the body with a fat finger, and then closed his eyes. A few counselors moved closer to see better, Roslyn supposed. But she crawled backwards over the wet moss, having seen too much, and then stood up, feeling sodden like the dead man. She believed she had suddenly been made into a new thing, a girl who had come close to a dead man and now felt bloated with inky water. No longer was she composed of healthy bones, firm flesh, and whole skin. She was terrified by the awful sight of midnight death, ten feet away from her. The vision of the baker had invaded her safe life, the absolute health of all these camp weeks, the protected days of her summer. Only once before had she been in the presence of death. But Lion’s father had been enclosed in a wooden box so that the reality of a dead person had been no challenge to her belief in her own immortality.

  How could anyone die in a camp where everyone was young? How did the baker dare to bring death into this safe place? How could such suddenness wipe out her certainty that she would always be alive? She wanted to go back to bed, to wipe out the unthinkable sight. She decided she would not let herself believe in its reality.

  But the continuation of the procession toward the broad path down the line halted her retreat. She went on watching. She knew, in one sudden stroke of insight that made her headache and stomach ache worse, and her eyes tear, that it was all true, that the baker had drowned, died, in Clear Lake. She felt she had suffered an instant education. The surface of all her days and nights to come, all the places she loved in Manhattan, even the impregnable marble balconies of movie palaces could be invaded by this unthinkable thing: being dead. ‘The young and strong, like me, just have longer to wait to find ourselves dead,’ she thought. ‘We are on our way towards it. It could happen to me on the train home, or next week in the City, or while I am asleep tonight. I wouldn’t even know.’

  All at once she knew that for her (for was she not always the star of her own play? the main character of the drama?), someday, or maybe soon, she would not be. Ever again not to be. Eternity suddenly stretched out before her like the black lake, overwhelming her with terror for the one short moment she could bear to think about it.

  ‘How can this happen?’ she asked herself, talking aloud as if she were debating or arguing. At the sound of her own voice, her anguish increased. Why had no one told her this one awesome truth about living, that she would not always be alive? If her every breath was now going to be loaded down with threat, how could she go on breathing?

  Again she turned to leave, furious, feeling already half dead with the new knowledge that lay heavily on her chest. Behind her she heard Hozzle say:

  ‘He did not have permission. He never asked me. All the boats were in and stacked up for the year.’

  Rae said: ‘But did you see anyone out there? In the cove?’

  Roslyn heard someone on the path behind her. Fritzie put a hand on her shoulder.

  ‘What are you doing here? You know you’re not allowed to leave your bungalow after lights out. You should have been asleep hours ago.’

  ‘I couldn’t sleep. I came looking for you. I wanted to find out …’

  Roslyn babbled her excuses as Fritzie moved her up the path, paying no attention to what Roslyn was saying.

  It may have been the violent stab of mortality she had just received that made Roslyn rebel. She stopped walking so abruptly that Fritzie almost fell into her.

&
nbsp; ‘Why didn’t you answer my letter?’

  ‘Come on, keep walking. I was going to thank you for it tomorrow.’

  ‘Thank me?’

  ‘For all the nice things you wrote about me. I appreciate it.’

  Roslyn’s heart sank. It felt as though it was pressing down against her stomach.

  ‘But I said I loved you. Didn’t you read that?’ she said with what seemed to her an extraordinary burst of courage.

  ‘Roz, don’t be silly. You don’t really love me. You’re a silly kid with a crush. Everybody gets them sometime or other. Pretty soon you’ll meet some nice boy and then you’ll know what real love is. Like I do now.’

  ‘You couldn’t ever love me back?’

  ‘Of course not, silly. I like you, but I love a guy named Joe Lyons. A man. Girls don’t love girls. Come on now, keep walking.’

  The presence of death, first, and then denial of the reality of her love: lights seemed to have gone out in her life. ‘To her I’m silly,’ she thought. ‘She doesn’t even like me, let alone love me. She doesn’t believe in what I feel. She doesn’t understand anything about me.’

  They arrived at the bungalow. ‘Get back to bed. Tomorrow’s a very long day. Then, soon, you’ll be home with your parents and forget all about this … nonsense.’

  ‘But Fritzie,’ she said, unable to think of anything to counter her rejection. She wanted to make one last effort on her own behalf, to take one chance at persuading her of her love. Fritzie pushed her up the steps.

  ‘Don’t fret. See you in the morning.’

  ‘Aren’t you coming … to tuck me in?’

  ‘No. Don’t be silly. Go to bed. Good night.’

  Roslyn could not bring herself to say good night, to say anything. She hated Fritzie for her denial of her suffering, for her indifference to real love, for her easy dismissal of her declaration. Yet she knew, as she sat on her cot in the dark, that she herself did not understand what it was she was feeling. She thought she wanted what Fritzie said she did not really want, what she could not have, what she could never have. She should not want it, and someday, would not.