The Book of Knowledge (25 page)

‘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 was 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
.

—P
SALMS
68:6

K
ATE
'
S LETTERS TO
C
ALEB
, 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.

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
.