The Book of Knowledge

by Doris Grumbach

  At dinner, Caleb and Kate sat beside her at the card table, the small square of space overcrowded by their plates and cups. At these moments they must have appeared to be bound together, he thought, united as they had been before his departure, into a claustrophobic family circle.

  The newspaper photograph of the Great War soldier no longer sat on the mantelpiece. Caleb wondered who had removed it, but he did not inquire. It was as if Private First Class Edmund Flowers had vanished from the house on Larch Street he had purchased for his family, and from the memory of his mammoth, now-silent wife. The myth that had first entertained him and Kate during their early years and then had been wiped out on the train ride home from Lester Schwartz’s funeral was never mentioned again.

  Kate had been determined to make Caleb’s return an occasion of celebration. She cooked his favorite food and, when Emma had gone up early to bed, she sat beside him on the sofa. Almost timidly, as if she had never done this before, she reached for his hand. He took it in his, but when she turned her delighted eyes upon him she saw he was looking at the mantel, not at her.

  After a moment, he took away his hand and reached into his breast pocket for a crumpled pack of Camels. To Kate the removal had the effect of a blow. She flushed and looked down at her hands, which she now folded decorously in her lap. Caleb did not notice. He thought he had succeeded in making his move a simple indication of his intention to smoke.

  ‘Do you know who I met at school? Lionel Schwartz. Remember him?’

  ‘Yes. I remember playing with him one summer. I remember we called him Lion. Then we went to his father’s funeral in the City.’

  ‘Well, he’s now a freshman in the Ag school. He’s … he’s very nice. We see a lot of each other.’

  ‘Does he look the same? I remember him as skinny and very blond. Odd for a Jew, Moth once said.’

  ‘Just the same. He’s quite handsome, and very bright. He wants to study architecture.’

  Kate was silent. She realized too late that she had revealed her animus against a friend of Caleb’s by her racial reference, but she could not help herself. Three years apart from her brother had failed to lower her fevered feelings for him. To the contrary, his absence had intensified her longing for his old, warm, promising presence in her life.

  In Kate’s most fervent fantasy, Caleb would come back to her, a wise and needy Odysseus. He would return to Far Rockaway to take his old place in her bed, sharing the games of imagination she had been forced to play alone as the faithful Penelope, the patient Griselda, and the famous brides of Christ, like Saint Theresa, who sought solitude in which to wait for their Bridegroom to claim them.

  Kate fantasized that she would no longer have to resort to lonely release. He would be there as of old, still feeling and looking so much like her that he seemed close to being her twin, a mirror-image lover. She knew that she was too old for such pretense, that Caleb had changed. His hair had darkened, he was far taller and broader than she, but there was always the rest … the imagined consummation of their love.

  Suddenly she thought to ask: ‘Do you have a girl up there?’

  ‘A girl? No.’

  ‘Not even one?’

  ‘Not even one. I don’t go in for that sort of thing. I have too much work.’

  ‘Don’t you ever go out to dinner, or to the movies in the evening, things like that?’

  ‘Well, yes I do. Often, with Lionel.’

  Kate was flooded with relief. There was no girl to separate him from her. He would return. She was afraid to inquire about his plans for the future. But she felt sure now that he would come back. She had only one more school semester to wait. Like Penelope, like Griselda, she would wait patiently.

  After spring recess, Lionel settled down to finishing his papers and lab reports. Caleb, his course work almost completed and his senior thesis, on Geoffrey Chaucer’s life in the customs house, delivered to a faculty reader, was forced by the approach of graduation to think about what he would do next. He had applied to stay on for another year at Telluride, citing his desire to go to graduate school in the English department, but he had not heard from the chancellor about it.

  In April they found an evening they could both spare from work. They met at the closest bar, the Chapter House, down Stewart Avenue and close to Williams Street, where they had roomed for a short time during the recess. It was a favorite rendezvous spot because few students were there in the late evenings, and the townspeople who frequented it paid no attention to them. They sat in a corner where there was almost no light and shared a bottle of ale.

  The pretense they had managed to maintain until now was that the future had no existence, no reality. It would not arrive, not for them. In their state of felicity with each other, the thought of an interruption to this condition was inconceivable. Caleb knew, although he did not say this to anyone, that his plan to stay on another year was based on his desire to prolong what he had found in Lionel: friendship, wonderful physical pleasure, and a conviction that he was capable of love apart and away from his boyhood tie to his sister.

  Lionel asked if he had heard anything about the English fellowship.

  ‘Not a word. But I only sent my application in to the master’s program last week. I asked about a scholarship, but I’m not too hopeful. Depends pretty much on who else is applying, especially from the outside. We’ll see. It might be a while before I hear. But I did hear that there’s a job I could get as a book runner in the library. That would pay some of my expenses in case nothing else comes through.’

  Lionel smiled. ‘If nothing else comes through, as you say, for the rest of my life but us, I will be content,’ he said in his high, soft voice that made his usual formal diction even more pleasant to Caleb.

  ‘Right. Oh so right,’ said Caleb, wanting to touch the light down on Lionel’s fine cheek but knowing he could not do it in this public place. Instead, he put some coins down under his napkin and stood up.

  ‘Time, gentlemen, please,’ he said to Lionel in his newly acquired English accent. ‘I’ve got an exam tomorrow.’

  They walked slowly up Stewart Avenue until they came to Boardman Hall. Then, as was their custom, they took a dirt path through the quadrangle to the steps of Goldwin Smith. In the safety of the shadows of the long, dark stone building they said good night, their arms around each other, their faces and lips pressed so close they could hardly breathe.

  It was then that they saw the light streaming from an upper window of the building. Caleb stepped out of the shadows to look up.

  ‘That’s Professor Lang’s office. Probably working late. It’s the only light on in the whole building.’

  ‘I’ll be on my way, love,’ said Lionel. ‘You don’t have to walk me home.’

  But of course, as always, Caleb did. On his way back, he saw that, glowing dimly now at this distance, a light was still lit in Goldwin Smith.

  The doors to Goldwin Smith were roped off when Caleb arrived the next morning a few minutes before eight o’clock, when he was due to take his final examination in Latin literature. Two campus policemen stood at the sawhorses and a group of his classmates formed a close semicircle around them. A police car and an ambulance were on the grass.

  ‘What’s going on?’ he asked a serious-looking red-haired fellow who was staring up at the second floor of the building. ‘Can’t we get in?’

  ‘No,’ said the boy, not looking at him.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘They’re bringing someone out. I saw them carry a stretcher in.’

  ‘Someone sick?’

  ‘I heard it’s someone dead.’

  ‘My God. Dead?’

  Because of the lateness of the hour, Professor Caplan, standing outside with his students, canceled the examination and rescheduled it for the following day. By the time Caleb arrived back at Telluride he had learned the name of the dead person and the cause of his death. Alexander Lang, assistant professor of French, had hanged himself early in the previous evening, and w
as found by the night watchman who had gone at midnight to check on the light showing from his office.

  By the end of the day, Caleb had heard, from graduate students and a resident instructor, the whole, terrible story. All afternoon the parlor of the house was filled with members coming and going, all talking about one subject: the morning’s tragedy. Caleb had not been able to bring himself to leave the room, although he said very little to anyone, and never mentioned that he had taken Lang’s courses. He listened to every rumor, to every suspicion that was aired, to every reasonable and wild supposition about why Lang had taken his life.

  In front of Willard Straight, the student union, where they had agreed the night before to meet for hamburgers, Caleb shook hands with Lionel, a long shake that represented their compromise with decorum.

  ‘I’ve heard, yes. It’s all over everywhere, even as far as the Ag campus,’ Lionel told Caleb as they went into the cafeteria.

  ‘Do you know that he hung himself?’

  ‘Yes. It must have happened about the time we saw the light.’

  ‘What have you heard about … why? Why he did it?’

  ‘Nothing except guesses and rumor. Someone in the lab said he was miserable here and wanted to get back to living in Paris. But I don’t see how that’s a reason for taking his life. He won’t get abroad any faster this way.’ Lionel laughed at this, and then stopped abruptly when he saw Caleb’s face.

  Caleb stared at Lionel and said nothing.

  ‘Do you know more details than I do?’ Lionel asked.

  ‘One other thing.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘I heard from someone that he left a letter to be sent to a friend in Paris. The police read it.’

  ‘They did!’

  ‘In order to establish for certain that there was no foul play, or some such thing.’

  ‘Did they say what it said?’

  ‘The story I’ve heard, from a guy at the house who is in his department, is that Lang was being blackmailed by a student who had been, well, he was referred to as … his friend. Lang could not stand the … the possibility of disgrace and dismissal. That’s what this student reported in the parlor. The fellow named in the letter as the blackmailer is a French major.’

  ‘Do you think that’s true? I mean, could this guy be making it up, you know, to get attention?’

  There was a long silence while Caleb considered the possibility of irresponsible rumor-mongering and Lionel, horrified, tried to absorb the possibility that what he had just heard was true.

  They finished their supper in silence. Then Caleb stood up and said he had to work on a paper. Lionel understood by this that he wished to be alone, so he said good night. For the first time they parted without making a plan to meet the next evening. An unaccustomed sense of threat seemed to have come into their alliance.

  A week later, when Lionel could stand the strange separation no longer, he walked to Telluride at nine in the evening and asked the student at the desk to see if Caleb Flowers was in his room. The student went up, two steps at a time, and then came down to report that Mr. Flowers would be down in a minute.

  Lionel felt cold. He had a premonition that something had gone badly wrong between them. A week without any communication was unheard of. His feeling of dread grew stronger when the message from Caleb was not that Lionel should come up but that Mr. Flowers was coming down. What unspoken thing, what inexplicable change, could have taken place without his being aware of it?

  Lionel was at the window looking out at the stretch of bright green stubs of new grass at the side of the house. It was a very late spring; patches of snow had disappeared only recently. He was not aware that Caleb had come into the room until he was standing beside him. Making a great effort not to look around at him, Lionel continued to stare at the new lawn. He felt that Caleb was doing the same thing.

  For a time that seemed interminable to Lionel, they continued to stand in these unnatural poses. Even when Caleb began his anguished monologue, Lionel could not turn to look at him. He felt as though he were being addressed from a great height or through a thick wall:

  ‘I’ve been having a horrible time. I would have been in touch before. But I needed time to understand what I was feeling, what I was thinking, I guess is what I mean. I’m not sure I understand all of it now, but I see I can’t put it off any longer. I’ve got to tell you, even if I’m not sure of it, and even if, tonight or tomorrow, I may change entirely and go back to my … our, I mean … old way of thinking. You see, Lionel, I know now I can’t go on with my life. Our life. I love you, but I don’t want to go on with our love any longer. I’m afraid. I can’t. The price is too great. I learned that from what happened to Professor Lang. Nobody out there understands what we are, what we do, what we want. They didn’t understand about him or why he died or why he felt he had to die. I’ve got to live the way everybody else does so I can do what I want. I want to teach and to get the degrees I need to do that and to get an appointment to a good college. I want to be able to go home without lying about myself and my life to my mother and my sister. Especially my sister, who thinks I’m some sort of god, and would never understand or forgive me if I told her about us. I need to have a family. Even if I see them seldom, I have to be able to say they’re there and to know they’re there. I need people to love me and think well of me. When I stood in the parlor and heard the things they were saying about Lang, I knew I could not bear it if such things were to be said about me. I haven’t the courage to live his life. It’s not possible for me. I am too much of a coward. I must do what is expected of me as a man—you know, earn a living, marry, have a family, become part of the world out there that tells everyone what kind of life to lead, what is acceptable. We can’t decide that. I’m afraid we never will be able to. I want to be successful, and there is only one way. I have to be like everyone else. I have to surrender to the majority rule, because I am not brave enough for rebellion or resistance. This is a very long speech, I know, but I want to say it all and be done with it. I can hear old Strunk telling me to ‘omit useless words,’ but I can’t do that. I need all the words I have and more to say these things to you. Please do not hate me. Or hate me if you have to, but try to understand why I’ve come to this point. Strunk would tell me to “avoid fancy words.” But I have to use a few, like, I love you, and, I believe I always will, and, this has been the best year of my life, and, there probably will never be a better one. Oh to hell with Strunk.’

  4

  Far Rockaway Revisited

  God setteth the solitary in families.

  —PSALMS 68:6

  KATE’S LETTERS TO CALEB, while he was still at Cornell working for his master’s degree, and later when he went to Yale, were pointed catalogues of the miseries of life in the old house where her mother lived her vegetable existence and Kate tended to her. In addition, Kate managed to suggest other subjects: her own loneliness and isolation, her sense of being her mother’s captive, her need for her brother and the old love they had shared, her despair at his absence.

  She wrote to him:

  My dearest Heathcliff,

  Moth has a very bad cold. It seems to have settled in her chest. I worry that her cough is a sign that her lungs have been affected. The doctor came yesterday and told me to watch her closely for fever and ‘extreme’ lassitude, as he put it. It’s hard to know about this last, because, as you have seen, even when she is better, she moves so little. I attribute that to her weight. But the doctor believes she has no desire to move, that she has given up on living. This may be so. The powders he left for her have made her irritable. She is cross with me in the few hours she is awake. But then she sleeps long and heavily.

  Tuesday morning I had trouble waking her. In her state of half-sleep, she said: ‘Daniel, I’m cold. Come in the bed and warm me.’

  I told her I was Kate and that I would get another blanket for her. She confuses names often. She must have meant Edmund, or Caleb.

  It was last
week, I think, that she said to me: ‘Caleb, would you be good enough to rub my feet?’ I did it, without telling her that you were not here and that I wasn’t Caleb but Kate. I don’t understand why all this is happening to her so early. She will be fifty-three next month (try not to forget to call on her birthday on the 12th, dear), which is old, I know, but not really that old, do you think? Her hearing is gone. I doubt she knows when I correct her or tell her you called.

  She speaks very seldom (the quiet in this house seems to have expanded in your absence and with Moth’s silence). But sometimes, in the midst of it she will say curious, almost poetic things. Yesterday she said, ‘Look at all the remarks hiding behind the people.’

  When I brought her breakfast this morning, she said, ‘Close the door. I don’t want to be responsible for it.’ Strange and meaningless, but I think about her sentences all day and finally, oddly enough, make some sort of sense of them, my own sense, I’m sure, but still, a little sense. Another day she said another strange thing: ‘After Epiphany I’ll go back to the convent. It’s warm there.’

  I don’t mind her thinking I am you. Do you remember, when we were alone together we used to notice how much alike we looked, how we were the same in so many ways, and often felt like the same person. But perhaps you do not still feel this way and would object if Moth were to call you Kate.

  I think of you all the time and wait eagerly for the day you will come home.

  My love,

  Catherine

  Kate’s letters continued to delineate in detail her mother’s decline. She wanted Caleb, even at a distance, to help with the burden of their mother’s state. Although there was little outward evidence of it, Kate believed Emma was suffering somewhere within the soundless envelope of her flesh. The physical burden of tending to her mother’s many needs in order to keep her alive was Kate’s alone. Her hope was to bring Caleb home out of love for his mother and, perhaps, for her. If she could make plain how oppressed she was, he might come back. She might then be able to win him away from the lure of college life and friendships she imagined he had succumbed to.