The Book of Knowledge (27 page)

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.

Oh god, it was good then. On and on. Until I heard Edmund was dead, killed. Said to Dan, he's dead now. I told it to, was it Dan? Yes, Dan. Never came back, he was afraid. I was free. Never wanted me free. Went to borrow books, Cain, Deeping, Morgan. He looked away. Hid behind his desk. Into the other room. Didn't come out. Never again to Larch Street. Children—hear me. Believe me. Love, all I had. Was with him. Before I knew about Edmund. The lady. In the black straw hat. Never mattered. Really. Never.

Colder. My ears and nose. Where are they? Gone already. Dan cut me away. Stopped up my flesh. Closed me off. Banked the fire. Had arson with him, not Edmund. Emma died first. Dan hiding in the stacks. Appearance is a lie. Love a surface, a deception. Don't believe it. Children never knew. Innocents. Caleb only man left. I loved him, boy-man. He loved Kate. Kate. Here? Have no one now. CalebKate. Who cared for me? This time? Caleb. Yes. It was Caleb.

Oh now, here it is. Where's my bell? Call Caleb. No, Dan. No. No one. Me. Alone. Gone to the past. Not here. Risen? Fallen? Into the leaves? Who took the oranges? Where is the ocean? alone. breathe out. last one, coldest. oh.

The will was read to ‘the children,' as Francis O'Malley called them, in his office. The house was left to ‘my beloved son, Caleb, in gratitude for his faithful care for me in my last years.' The money, such as it was (‘not very much now,' O'Malley said), was to be divided between her two children, after all her medical expenses and burial were taken care of. A few thousand will be all, O'Malley told them, enough to pay the taxes for this year and perhaps next. And his fee. After that …

They sat across from each other, rejecting without thought their old positions. Caleb took his mother's place in the porch rocker. Kate sat alone in the swing.

‘You can have the house, Kate. You live here. I have no use for it. I'm pretty sure of an appointment to the faculty at the university in Iowa City. It's almost certain.'

‘Thank you. That's generous of you. But no, I don't want to stay here. It's too big, for one thing. And it needs a lot of work. I've spent my entire life in it. I'm going away. You can sell it.'

‘Going away where?'

‘I'm not sure. I'll let you know.'

‘Will you have enough money to go very far?'

‘I won't need much. I'm not going far.'

Kate looked at her brother, willing him to look at her. Caleb watched the swaying, heavy hydrangea heads at the edge of the steps. He seemed determined to keep his distance and reserve.

Kate gave up her effort to make visual contact with him. Instead she asked: ‘Have you seen Lion lately?'

‘No, not for some time. He sent me a postcard from Fort Dix. He has his commission and will be shipped out to some other station soon.'

‘What about you? When will you be called up?

‘If I'm lucky, never.'

‘How come?'

‘Well, part of the teaching I will be doing, if I get the appointment, will be in the Navy preflight school—cadets, you know. In its wisdom, the Navy has decided they will need some acquaintance with the English language. Then, on the side, I've volunteered to edit training manuals at the college, that sort of thing.'

‘Will you feel all right about not going?'

‘Sure. I'm not the military type, you know.'

Kate resisted the temptation to say: ‘More the caretaking type, perhaps?' But she recognized the danger inherent in such unaccustomed sarcasm.

Instead she asked: ‘You are less the military type than Lion?'

‘Well no, I suppose not. But my draft number is pretty high. By the time they get around to me I'll probably be married, a family man, all that. …'

Kate looked at the shadows of the hydrangea heads on the porch floor. The sight of their cloudy swaying made her dizzy. She could think of nothing more to ask. Caleb seemed to her to have already assumed his carefully planned, safe life, halfway across the country. Then she thought of one thing. …

‘I shouldn't ask this, since you haven't mentioned it before. But … who are you planning to marry?'

Caleb laughed. ‘Oh, no one yet. But almost all the instructors I know are married. If you are trying for a permanent appointment it helps to have a wife and children. Makes you seem more settled, more serious, I suppose.'

Kate said nothing. She was stunned by the cold-bloodedness of Caleb's future plans.

He took her silence for agreement with the logic of his project. The air seemed to grow heavy with her unspoken doubts.

Then Caleb asked: ‘But you haven't said what you plan to do.'

‘I'm not sure. I'm still thinking about it. Send me your address, and I'll let you know when I've decided. But you'll have to do something about the house. I'm hoping to be out of it very soon.'

‘I'll put it into the hands of someone here to sell. We can divide the proceeds.'

‘Please don't do that. I won't need the money. Keep it for … for your wife and children. You'll need it.'

In this way, they disposed of their past. They put the house they had lived in all their lives on ‘the market,' as the realestate agent called it. Kate arranged to sell the furnishings, and donated their mother's clothing to the St. Vincent de Paul Society's thrift shop. Soon after all this was accomplished, Caleb settled in Iowa City, Second Lieutenant Lionel Schwartz was in England with his infantry company, and Kate, in the novitiate house in upstate New York, stood in the choir of the Sisters of the Order of the Virgin Mary, dressed in her novice's black jumper and head scarf, singing, with eighteen other young women, the morning's psalms, and awaiting the day when she would take her vows, as Sister Mary Christina, to the Order and the Church. She would become a Bride of Christ, saved at last, she believed, from all her old, unspeakable desires, from her past sins, from her unspoken resentment of Moth and Caleb, and from herself.

5

War and Peace

Life is what happens when you have other plans
.

—W
ALTER
H
AMADY

F
OR THE GENERATION
of men and women who survived it, World War Two was the high tor of their lives. Old enough to have felt and then remembered the impact on them of the Crash and then the Depression, they were now of an age to enter fully into the excitement of being ‘called up' or volunteering for what everyone seemed to agree was a noble national enterprise.

Young women, surprised at suddenly being admitted to hallowed male places, were exalted by their promotion and by the admiration granted them by the public for volunteering to serve. They were given free travel to unexpected places, they participated in the excitement of marching bands and patriotic ceremonies. They enjoyed the heady comradeship of those similarly committed, uniformed, and beribboned, and suffered without complaint in shared, close lodgings and through institutional meals. All of this provided them with an Everest, an unforgettable elevation, that gave never-to-be-equaled importance to their lives.

At twenty-six, very tall, her black hair cut into a severe bob, thin at the hips and almost concave of bosom, Roslyn looked handsome in her navy-blue ensign's uniform. Designed by Mainbocher to suit the androgynous American-girl figure in favor at the time, the uniform, with its cocky, antiquated seaman's stiff hat and gold-buttoned jacket, its severe dark blue skirt and white blouse (or light-blue or navy, according to the order for the uniform of the day), reduced all the usual varieties of feminine dress to a single, handsome, satisfying, undeviating constant.

Roslyn had arrived at this agreeable state of existence after a series of small civilian jobs. Working for a family of publications as an intern, she had been moved from one department to another until, with the shortage of men because of the draft, she was given a subeditorship on a magazine that customarily restricted women to jobs in the typing pool or, if they turned out to be exceptionally bright, in research.

After what she had considered her exile at Brooklyn College, Roslyn luxuriated in being in Manhattan, although she disliked her work. But the City was her happy playground, and she frolicked in it while the country prepared for its great civilian and military effort to win a second Great War. The very air in her corner of her beloved borough felt promising, lively, and patriotic. Behind her was all her professed radical past. Forgotten was her college recitation of the Oxford Pledge not to participate in any war, an oath she had taken surrounded by other student activists on the steps of the college's Main Building. She had moved beyond lip service to Marx and Trotsky into a pleasure-filled aestheticism that only New York City can generate.

Foreign sailors (the affectionate
pom-pom rouges
), German refugees, English expatriates who drank vermouth cassis in Third Avenue French bars, young men and their girls celebrated their liberty from family and academic restraints and waited, with very little show of impatience, for the calls to duty they knew would be coming.

Roslyn would walk home from work toward her one-room apartment on Second Avenue in the shadow of the Queens-borough Bridge, stopping to drink at the Provençal or Lucie's with her very recent acquaintances, sometimes bringing one home to share her bed for a few hours, more often going on alone to the delicatessen to buy borscht and corned-beef-on-rye sandwiches for her solitary dinner.

On occasion she would go out after supper to a late movie, joining the crowds of other young persons who, like her, could not bear to see the wondrously free nights end. It had been on one such evening, in the queue waiting to see
For Whom the Bell Tolls
in a Broadway theater, that she noticed Lionel Schwartz, sleek, blond, and shining in his new, well-pressed lieutenant's uniform. He stood four persons ahead of her in line.

She moved up to join him, letting those she passed assume she was his date. She hugged him, and he returned her embrace, transforming their old cordial, civilian handshakes into the sort of instant wartime display of affection common in these days. They had not met in three years. Their youthful friendship had fallen away, but now, as with so many other young acquaintances of their generation, the circumstances of war, the imminence of mortality, and separations all around them propelled them into this unaccustomed demonstration.

‘How great to see you again,' said Roslyn.

‘And you. Are you living nearby?'

‘Not far. A few avenues over. But I work for
Time
just down the street.'

They had reached the window of the box office. Lionel put down two dollar bills for two tickets. He handed one to Roslyn.

‘Oh no, let me pay for mine,' she said.

‘Not at all,' he said, making a gallant, sweeping, joking gesture with his cap. ‘I'm now a rich second lieutenant.'

After the long movie was over, they came out of the Loew's State Theater, dazed by Broadway lights ablaze at one o'clock in the morning. Lionel said he had to get back to his post. Otherwise, he said, he would be glad to accept her invitation to have coffee with her at the Automat. Roslyn offered to walk with him to Grand Central Station: ‘It's on my way,' she said.

They exchanged addresses and more news of their lives. Lionel asked Roslyn if she was still planning to be a writer.

‘Well, I suppose … someday,' she said, showing some impatience with his tenacious memory.

Lionel said his mother was not at all well, ‘beside herself was the way he put it, and that he was scheduled to go overseas soon. Roslyn said her father's health had deteriorated. His diabetes had affected his lost leg.

‘It's been very bad. The stump became gangrenous and had to be cut off, high up. Since then he uses a wheelchair most of the time, sits in it to take cash at the store, and uses it at home.'