The Book of Knowledge
Page 23
As time went on, Kate Flowers’ life before the convent became the real world to her. By a firm exercise of her errant will, she found she could often live in it. Disbelieving in the appearance of things, as her mother had taught her to do long ago, she continued to cling to the only love she could remember, the only reality she thought she had known for certain. The past served her as both future and present while, on the surface and to her sisters, she was known for her goodness, her piety and charity, her fidelity to her vows.
Gentle reader, do not despair. There was to be one life that never descended into compromise or denial or unhappiness:
Captain Lionel Schwartz had been in the Army for more than four years. He had been awarded two Purple Hearts for his wounds and a Silver Star for bravery in the European theater. After V-E Day he was shipped out to the Far East, where he died of severe shrapnel wounds during the invasion of Okinawa.
For him there would be no long future, only an abruptly terminated present. Assigned in his young adulthood to play in a lethal, martial game with the black mallet, like the croquet one of his childhood, he was, at a stroke, dispossessed of his past and denied a future. But he went on living, in the confused memory of his institutionalized mother, driven mad by the news of his death, and in the elderly, depressed fantasies of Professor Emeritus Caleb Flowers.
About the Author
Doris Grumbach, author of many novels and memoirs including Fifty Days of Solitude, Life in a Day, The Ladies, and Chamber Music, has been literary editor of the New Republic, a nonfiction columnist for the New York Times Book Review, a book reviewer for National Public Radio, and a bookseller in Washington, DC, and Maine. She lives in Philadelphia.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1995 by Doris Grumbach
Cover design by Tracey Dunham
ISBN: 978-1-4976-7668-8
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