The Book of Knowledge

by Doris Grumbach

  Although Caleb never mentioned the name of a girl on his occasional trips home, Kate wondered if that meant there was indeed one that he was hiding from her in silence so that she would suspect nothing.

  She wrote:

  Dear Edward,

  I feel very far from you and from all you are doing and learning. How close to becoming a Master are you? Will they call you that when you get your new degree, instead of Bachelor which I suppose you are now known as?

  Here it is always the same, day after day. Sometimes it seems as if life everywhere has stopped because Moth’s has, almost. I find it hard to believe that somewhere out there are people my age who are dancing and drinking and laughing with each other. Or that you are having dinner in some interesting college place with Lionel—do you still see him? You didn’t mention him when you were here at Christmas.

  Last night I could not persuade Moth to go upstairs to bed. She sat rigidly in her chair, pulling bits of wool out of her blanket and holding them in her other hand. I asked her what she was holding. ‘A crab apple tree,’ she said.

  All night she slept in her chair and woke disoriented and angry. Most of the time I don’t know what she is thinking or feeling, because she speaks so little and often does not hear me when I question her. Her face becomes very red when she is angry, and her eyes seem to be more white than the blue we inherited from her. Then I worry that she will have a stroke. I think that the more immobile she becomes the more I am tied to her. There are times I feel she is lying on top of me, unable to move, and I am pinned down and smothering and cannot get out from under her.

  And the silence in this house—there is too much of it.

  I don’t think I’ve written to you about the Reverend Mr. Reston. He is the Methodist minister and heard about Moth from the boy who delivers our groceries and came calling a few weeks ago. I shouted at her to ask if she wanted to see him, and she must have heard, because she nodded yes.

  I waited on the veranda while they prayed together, or rather, I could hear him praying, and she, I think, must have just watched him as he knelt down and leaned against the sideboard. He was in that position when I came back in, his eyes closed, his mouth open. I thought he looked foolish.

  He asked if he could come back again and I said it was up to Mother. She nodded as if she had heard, and actually smiled, and he smiled, to me and then to her. He is the sort of person who seems always to be smiling, even when he is praying. Strange.

  I don’t understand her willingness to have him come here so often—I don’t remember her ever mentioning religion to us. I have no idea what religion she was, or we were, although I do remember she didn’t much care for Jews. Maybe she was a Catholic. Once she said—long ago, I remember—that as a girl she had thought being a nun was very romantic. And I told you that in her crazy talk she mentioned a convent.

  My theory is that she is willing to have Mr. Reston come again and again because, oddly enough, she wants the company of men. When he is here she is almost her old self, polite and agreeable. She appears to have forgotten the hurt our father dealt her. I have always believed that accounted for her silences and her removal of herself from us and the world outside. I believe she may even think that Edmund Flowers and you, of course, are somehow still here in this house. Perhaps Mr. Reston gives her the comforting sense of another male presence: I don’t know.

  Come home soon, dear—Wallis

  P.S.: I forgot. Yesterday I came upon her catching something in the air with both hands. She opened her hands to me and said, ‘Here’s some white bread getting uneasy.’

  Dearest John,

  The unexpected has happened: I have made a friend. Imagine that. Well, maybe he is not so much a friend as he is an adviser, or a patient listener. A young, black-haired priest in his Roman collar and cassock came to the door three weeks ago. I was startled because this happens so seldom. Mr. Reston, the grocery boy, the milkman, and the mailman have been the only visitors in a long time.

  The priest was taking what he called a parish census. He had a lovely smile, that white skin the Irish have, and very black eyes with long lashes. When I said we were not Catholics, he smiled all the more and said, ‘That’s all right, I’m sure you go to some good church.’ I said, ‘I have to admit I do not. But my mother prays with Mr. Reston, the Methodist minister. She’s not well.’ He said, ‘Well, if ever you would like to have someone to talk to or pray with I’m usually at St. Anne’s rectory on Elm Street. You’re always welcome.’ He told me his name, Father Mahoney. Peter Mahoney. I thought of Abelard and wanted to ask him if he was his namesake, but I couldn’t remember if Peter Abelard was in good standing with his church. So I said nothing.

  How could he have guessed how lonely I am and that I might go there? Perhaps I looked starved for company or something. Well, anyway, I did go. One afternoon I told Moth I was going to the store. But first I went to the house, the rectory, that is, in which Father Mahoney lives. We talked for a while sitting in his brown sort of parlor with no rug on the floor and very hard-backed chairs.

  He asked if I had any brothers or sisters. I told him about you, of course, not everything but enough so that he said, ‘I can tell you love your brother very much.’ Then he told me about his older sister, who became a Mother of the Sacred Heart (odd, isn’t it, a nun and a Mother who is also a sister?). He said he loved her, she had been a mother to him after their parents died in a train crash. ‘I was an orphan very young,’ he said. I said I understood that, with Moth the way she was and having never known my father I sometimes felt orphaned. He told me that we are all born to be orphans in a way. So our sisters and brothers, sometimes friends that we make, take the place of parents and we are loved and cared for by them. He said it was the human condition to be only the children of God, and He was our true Father and parent.

  Maybe this is so. I miss you so much. When you are gone and so far away I am truly an orphan.

  Yours always, Priscilla

  My dear Hansel,

  Sometimes I go to visit Father Mahoney twice in one week. He has given me a book by Saint Theresa about her life, which she calls ‘the little way.’ She believed God was present when one performed the simple acts of everyday life, like taking care of Moth, Father Mahoney said, cleaning up after she soils the chair, and spills her supper all over the rug. It seems to me to be a rather lowly way of thinking of someone as elevated as God, but it does make my life easier to accept when I try to think of it as she did. She thought loneliness was a holy state of being. I wish I could get to that point.

  No more for now. I hear Moth. She has a little bell she rings when she wants something. Often I get upstairs to find her dozing and wanting nothing. Last night, when I asked her what she wanted, she said, ‘I’ve been thinking about the grass. It bent over and smiled.’

  Your Gretel

  Kate wrote to Caleb, under the old playful guises he had devised for them in childhood, whenever the burden of her life grew so heavy that only moving a pen across paper and sinking into fantasy relieved it. But as her visits to the rectory of St. Anne’s Church grew more frequent, she relied less on letters to Caleb and more on Father Mahoney’s sympathetic ear.

  One Sunday she left Moth asleep in bed and, because Father Mahoney had been urging her, went to early Mass at St. Anne’s. Emma had been awake most of the night with pains in her legs and had only fallen asleep at dawn. It was Kate’s first visit to a church. Father Mahoney had told her there would be very few people there at five in the morning, and it was so. Five very old women, one old man, a hobo who slept across a pew at the back, two young men dressed entirely in black, and Kate made up the congregation.

  Kate found the proceedings incomprehensible. Mysterious acts with a cup and a plate were being performed by the priest and a little white-robed boy at the altar. The priest’s back was to the people, who, in turn, seemed to pay little attention to what was going on up there. The women held beads in their hands and whispered prayers to themselves. Everyone kn
elt and rose and knelt again as if they were being soundlessly instructed to do so by some authority from above.

  Kate had been up most of the night attempting to relieve her mother’s distress by rubbing ointment over her pulsing, swollen blue veins. The drone of voices, the dust that rose from the floor and the corners of the pews, the faint, sweet odor in the air, made her sleepy. She dozed off once and was awakened into a state of confusion by the sound of a bell rung by the boy on the altar. She thought her mother was ringing for her.

  At that moment she happened to look across at the kneeling young men in black. Their faces glowed in the half-dark church. Their eyes shone as if they had been lit from within. Kate wondered what they were seeing that illuminated them in this odd way. The others too had ceased their private devotions and were looking hard at the priest, who had turned to them and raised a cup over his head. Suddenly, all the disparate parts of the ceremony, the persons standing up and sitting down, the priest and server, the statues and candles, indeed, the entire church, seemed to be concentrated on what the priest was doing. She could not fathom what was happening but she sensed it was something she wanted to understand. She resolved to ask Father Mahoney to explain it all to her.

  Dear Siegmund,

  Yesterday, in a rare clear moment, Moth asked me to find a lawyer who would come to the house. She wanted to make a will. Father Mahoney gave me the name of someone he said was a good Catholic and a reliable attorney. Francis O’Malley came one evening last week. He is about the same age as Father Peter and looks almost like him, with that kind of Irish pug nose, broad face, and white skin. But his hair is red and he’s thinner. Moth whispered something to him. He asked me to leave the room. Will-making, he said, is a confidential affair. I did as I was told.

  I have no idea what she told him to do. For all I know she has decided to leave the house and the money we’ve all been living on from our father to the Ladies Garment Workers Union, which she once told me he hated more than anything. To spite him.

  So, Mr. O’Malley is coming back in a few days with the typedup will and bringing two people from his office to witness it. I am not allowed to be a witness because I’m family. Moth has gone back into her silence and says nothing to me about her will, so I have nothing to tell you. Maybe when you come home she will talk to you about it. She did say something curious after the lawyer left. She said, ‘I don’t believe angels have hot tears.’

  Will you be coming home soon? I want you to meet Father. But more than anything, I want so much to see you. It seems very long since those few days after Christmas. Moth asks for you every afternoon in her odd way. She says, ‘What does Caleb want for dinner?’ or ‘Did he say he would be late tonight?’ I say no, you won’t be coming, you are away at school, and she looks puzzled as if she is surprised to hear that. But she says nothing more and we eat alone together. Mashed potatoes, creamed spinach, a bit of cut-up well-done beefsteak, and always, silence.

  Come home soon. I want to be able to hug the new Master and congratulate him. And just once I want to be able to tell Moth you will be here for dinner.

  Yours, as ever, Sieglinde

  My dearest Lord Nelson,

  The other day, because I miss you so much, I had to talk to someone. So I went to see Father Peter. We talked for a while about God and his church and the sacraments. Then somehow we got on the subject of family, and I found myself telling him about how close we were, how we used to lie together on my bed and act our parts as lovers. I think he was surprised by that. He asked me questions about what we did. But I said, Oh, nothing, just make-believe sort of stuff.

  But I think he suspects there was more than that, because he said my deepest love should never be given to persons, especially persons related to me, but instead it should be saved for God, who will never fail me, never forsake me or be unfaithful, always return my love. He will lead me away from sin, not into it the way human beings do.

  Have I told you that sometimes I go to early-morning Mass during the week? Father Peter has explained to me the liturgy, as it’s called, and I’ve begun to learn the Baltimore catechism and study some books about Catholicism. Some of it is very difficult to understand, especially such things as resurrection, transubstantiation, the trinity, virgin birth, ascension, and such, but I expect that it will soon come plain to me if I go over it often enough. I visit Father in the rectory whenever I can get away, so my ‘instruction’ (he calls it that) is coming along pretty well. At home when I study the books he gives me I collect questions to ask him. He seems to know the answers to all of them.

  But, hard as I try, I cannot forget you. And us. And the lovely times we had together. Nothing in my life, not even the assurances of the Church and Father’s friendship and kindness to me, has ever mattered as much to me as that. As you.

  Your loving Emma

  To her beloved brother, whom she addressed in one of her final letters as Tristan, Kate (signing the letter as Isolde) wrote that their mother could no longer manage the stairs. So she (with the help of both Mr. Reston and Father Mahoney) had brought down her large four-poster bed to convert the living room into a bedroom. All the shades were pulled against the light that bothered her weak eyes. The front door was locked; tradesmen, men of the cloth, Mr. O’Malley, all used the back entrance.

  Thus ensconced, Emma’s vast downstairs presence turned the house into a selpulcher, airless and redolent of confined, lingering sickness. The parlor and dining room had become a dark cave reserved for Emma’s dying. It was also Kate’s prison. There she waited with admirable patience for her mother to die.

  ‘Dear Paolo,’ she wrote (at Father Mahoney’s suggestion, Kate had been reading a redaction of The Divine Comedy, so it was natural for her, as her now-assumed namesake, to feel she had been confined in the second circle of Hell as payment for her carnal sins):

  Last night I had the strangest dream. You were in bed beside me, but when I looked down I saw that we had been combined into one body with one neck, like Siamese twins. Our heads were attached to it, and I lay there looking into your eyes. In the black of your pupils (a strange word for the center of the eye, I’ve always thought), I could see myself. Then I saw that everything had changed. You were not you, but me. I had two heads. I had become myself and you were gone someplace else. What was all this about? I must have been crying in my dream, because when I woke up my face was wet. I would like to hear any explanation you might have, since my ignorance of psychology is very great. But I remember you took a course in it when you were an undergraduate, and you studied the interpretation of dreams.

  Your puzzled, loving Francesca

  The last letter to Caleb was written in the week before Emma died. Kate’s current reading was in Greek mythology, in a young people’s edition she had found in the library. It had introduced her to the story of the Aeneid. In her fantasy (for she continued to take pleasure in escaping into fictional roles, an actress playing all the tragic parts in plays), she saw herself in the role of the broken-hearted queen of Carthage who took her life when the Trojan hero deserted her. To Caleb she assigned the faithless consort’s part.

  She wrote:

  Dearest Aeneas,

  I think it would be good if you came home within the week. The doctor believes Moth will not come out of this coma, as she did from the last. She has had another bad stroke. Even if she does regain consciousness, he says there will be very little left of her real self. It may be your last chance to see her alive, if indeed you want to. I understand that your absences have to be longer, now that you are teaching, than they were when you were a student. But you can’t stay away forever. I’m sure that New Haven is an interesting place to be, and Far Rockaway never where you would be if you had your choice. But still, it is time now. …

  I enjoy thinking of you as a Doctor. Somehow it seems higher up than Bachelor or Master.

  Your faithful Dido

  But the fact is: Kate never sent these letters to Caleb. She saved them in a handkerchief case,
with a rubber band around them, and stowed the lacy packet in the bureau drawer under her neatly stacked camisoles. They were histories, or better, therapeutic exercises that she used to relieve herself of what she found hard to bear in the long days and nights of service and silence. She believed the letters had failed in her intention to communicate, except perhaps to herself.

  On the last evening of Emma’s life, when the doctor, who had never been quite certain of the exact nature of Emma’s illness (he was to write on the death certificate: ‘Senility, Obesity, Heart Failure,’ as though it were a multiple-choice diagnosis), told Kate the end was very near, she telephoned to Caleb at Yale. He said he would borrow a car. He added: ‘I’ll be there as soon as possible.’

  Then she went to sit beside her dying mother throughout the night, accompanied only by Father Mahoney.

  At the edge. I can feel it. On the rim of nothing. Another breath, one heartbeat more, and I’ll be gone. Oh I know. I can feel the cold that has moved through me. Almost all of me is gone into ice. From slow motion of blood, to feeling of lead in the fat, to stopping altogether. Almost over. My daughter sits near, I feel her here, her hand in mine. Perhaps my son is here too, come for the end. Can’t feel his hand. They listen to hear the last breath I hold back from them, making them impatient. Now. Please. Hurry up, they are thinking.

  No. None of my last little time for them. For me only. Gone where, all that time? Since that one time. Never to speak of it. But oh, the lies they are thinking, sitting there, in the porch swing, under the oak tree, beside my bed. Mistaken stories. In what I told them. The truth about Edmund they think struck me down. I know. Small inch of time I have. Dying of cold. Did I lose heart for life after the funeral? Pull back and in? Because of what I learned then? No. The mistake. A myth.

  Oh, God forgive. Help me now through this last time. That once. What time was that? Oh yes, I remember: the man from the lending library who came those evenings. Very young. Edmund away in the war. Babies upstairs for the night. Knowing nothing about it. Dan? Yes, Daniel was his name. Lonely, oh God, I was lonely. Wanted me and yes, wanted him. True. We loved. Made love. Which? Both. The heat, the spark, the joy, the flow. Warm sleep. Oh that moment. Said he loved. Wanted him again and again. More. Then more. I was older. He did not notice. Came back, again. Edmund still in the war, and gone, not here. Loved Dan. Sinned with Dan. Never cared.