The Book of Knowledge (7 page)

‘What?' Caleb disliked having to return from the country of bloody punishments.

‘I've called the Talkies to order. We're going to play marbles with the acorns, the ones without their collars.'

‘All right,' Caleb said with some reluctance.

Kate and Lion were summoned from scavenging under trees farthest from the house. Their collecting had been indiscriminate, with none of the older children's concern for color, completeness, and perfection of shape. So their pails were full and heavy. Putting them down, they stood waiting to be instructed in the rules of Roslyn's new game.

She placed the largest acorn she could find, a prize picked up unaccountably by Lion, in the middle of a wide space in the dirt and drew a circle with a stick. Each child took up a position on the diameter and tried to hit the prime seed with smaller, less valuable ones. Whoever managed this was awarded the acorn in the center.

‘Be careful, Roslyn,' said Lion. ‘Don't throw so hard. I don't want my good one to get dented.'

‘That's what it's there for,' said Roslyn loftily. As hard as she could she threw her missile at Lion's prized acquisition, and hit it.

The new game, like Roslyn's other enterprises that summer, ended abruptly. Lion started to cry. Roslyn threw his center piece back at him, having to retrieve it from her pile. Caleb accused her of purposeful brutality. Lion started down the street, and Roslyn, angry at everyone, followed the weeping boy.

No farewells were exchanged among the four friends, nor did the Flowers children see the Schwartzes and the Hellmans on the morning after Labor Day when two black sedans carried them and their maids northwest on the Long Island roads. The De Soto and the La Salle (for Lester Schwartz had just acquired a new car) joined the long lines of vehicles leaving the seashore towns for the beloved City, as most of the summer vacationers thought of it. The two families had had enough of sun, fresh air, salt water, and empty evenings and, in fact, of all the ever-green outdoors that the short country exile had offered them. They were delighted to be returning to ‘civilization,' a word they used for the cement caverns of New York City.

The remainder of September was unusually warm. The Flowers children found it difficult to return to school, but they were resigned and went dutifully. They did not get home until well after three o'clock and then were sent immediately to their rooms to rest. Emma thought ceaselessly about the polio warnings. She was sure that contact with other children at school, as well as the enduring heat, threatened her son and daughter.

‘An hour of rest on your beds before supper,' she ordered from her chair in the corner of the parlor where she sat, fanning herself.

When they came down, they did their homework seated on each end of the cretonne-covered davenport. After dinner they listened to the humorous black talk of
Amos 'n Andy
on the radio, turned up very loud for their mother's comfort. Discouraged by the volume, they decided upon an early bedtime.

With Roslyn no longer there to make demands upon his allegiance, Caleb returned happily to Kate. Their love for each other expanded to fill all the space around them. Whenever they could arrange it, sometimes at odd times of the day, they plotted to be alone, their hungry hands journeying from one stopping place to another on their bodies. Prodding, stroking, exploring, caressing, imagining the pleasures of those they knew about from history and myth, they approached each other courteously, almost deferentially, disguising, or perhaps still not entirely aware of, the depth of their passion.

After the accident-ridden summer, and the catastrophic fall of 1929 that changed their lives, Roslyn and Lionel never returned to Far Rockaway. On the 24th of October, a cloudy Thursday in New York City, the stock market, in which their fathers had worked so profitably, plummeted a disastrous thirty points. Brokers and speculators alike were thrown into a state of confusion. In three days, despair and bankruptcy had spread to businessmen all over the country. Lester Schwartz and Max Hellman, investors like their clients, were wiped out the next day, unable to make full payments for their stocks held on margin. Small brokerage firms, like theirs, closed, ‘temporarily,' it was announced.

In December, Max Hellman began to look for employment. For the first time since the Great War his stump caused him much pain as he walked the unyielding sidewalks of the City in search of a job. Almost at the end of his endurance, he was saved by his brother-in-law, a prosperous Brooklyn butcher who had not been affected by the Crash because he had never believed in buying stocks and bonds.

The butcher worked Max hard. In whatever time he had left after he worked on the store's accounts, Max had to help with cleaning the floors covered with bloody sawdust after the store closed at seven in the evening. His misery at being deprived of the stimulating life on the Street was very great, and he was always aware of the butcher's pleasure, his barely concealed gloating, at his relative's downfall, and the unending recriminations of his wife.

He moved Rose and Roslyn from their apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan to a much smaller one down the street from Prospect Park in Brooklyn, ten long (for his bad leg) blocks from the kosher meat market where he worked. His walk to and from work was slow and painful; the De Soto Six had been the first of his assets to be sold.

Protesting tearfully, Rose settled into the cramped quarters. The softness and tenderness that prosperity had nurtured in her died under the stress of her now deprived life. She became a constant complainer, a fountain of weeping, a compendium of small illnesses. Roslyn was transferred to a public high school in Brooklyn, one with very few good students and athletes. Quickly she became the star of her classroom and the czarina of the playground.

Together with pride in her academic success, Roslyn began to develop a poorly disguised scorn of her neurasthenic mother. Of her father, she was openly contemptuous. At first he had seemed to her an unjustly deposed hero, of the same stature as a wounded soldier in the war. But as time passed and his spotted apron and straw hat in the butcher store where he scrubbed gory chopping blocks and swept up stained sawdust became his familiar garb, he lost her respect. In her lofty view, his blighted Wall Street career became the deserved sequel to his earlier dismemberment. But now it was the result of ineptitude and worthlessness: She thought of him as a hapless cripple.

Whatever pathos the fall of Max Hellman contained, the fate of Lester Schwartz was even less fortunate. Accustomed all his life to widespread admiration for his money-making prowess, Lester lost his self-esteem along with his holdings and his job when the market crashed. One morning in late November he kissed Sadie goodbye in his usual warm fashion, patted the top of Lionel's blond head as he sat eating his Post Toasties, and picked up his briefcase. He had not been able to bring himself to confess to his wife that he had not looked for employment since his brokerage office closed; his savings permitted him the deception that he still took his usual taxi down to Wall Street, where he did something, Sadie was not quite sure what.

Instead, one day, he took the subway to Forty-second Street, walked two blocks north on Broadway to the Loew's State Building, where, before the Crash, he had visited a client in the theater business. He took the elevator to the top floor, climbed a short set of iron steps, walked out onto the flat tarred roof, and took off his suit jacket, vest, tie, and fedora. He put an envelope addressed to
SADIE
on the roof beside his briefcase.

With what remained of his old, aggressive self-possession, he climbed over the parapet, pushed his hands against the ledge, and went down into the cold, descending air.

It may have been the cold that had seeped into the straw seats of the train. Or perhaps it was the strangeness of the Jewish service for Lester Schwartz she had sat through, unable to hear very much and understanding nothing of what was audible to her. Or it may have been that the funeral for the dead father brought to her mind Edmund Flowers' memorial service. Whatever the cause for her unexpected and extraordinary departure from myth, her excursion into the truth, Emma told her restless children the true story of their father's funeral.

‘It was held in a nondenominational chapel near Inwood, not far from where we live. Because he was a soldier it was a military affair, and very patriotic. Like a lot of his fallen comrades he was buried somewhere in France, I never knew where. Two corporals wearing new uniforms drove from a base on Long Island to bring his parcel of belongings to me, his shaving stuff, comb, fatigue cap, and such. The two corporals stood at attention on each side of the platform, and a minister in an officer's uniform read the service. It seemed very long to me. I didn't hear most of what he said, because I was worried about having left my babies—you two—back at the house with a neighbor's young daughter to look after you. I didn't know her well, so I worried. I never heard the chaplain call your father “Edward,” two or three times. An acquaintance told me about that, later. When the formalities were over, and I was leaving the chapel carrying your father's package, I was stopped by a lady, a stranger, who told me she had known Edmund Flowers in the City.

‘“Before the war,” she said. “I was a close friend.” She spoke in a low voice.

‘The lady, who told me her name but I did not catch it, wore a large black straw hat with many roses on the brim, a black dress which seemed to me to be tight on her, and a black sable cape. Her black gloves reached to her elbows. To me, her clothing seemed somewhat excessive for the occasion. She told me she had indulged in the extravagance of a Checker taxicab to come from her apartment in Chelsea to Inwood.

‘“Where is Chelsea?” I asked.

‘“Near the garment district in Manhattan,” she said.

‘I wished to be polite to someone who had traveled so far. So I invited her back to our house, where a few friends and neighbors were to gather for what I called a requiem supper.

‘There, after tea and sandwiches, sherry and Nabisco shortbreads, the flamboyant lady told me that your father had come to her apartment for his Friday nights in the City. With her red-lipped smile, she implied that he had often, urn, well, shared her bed—I cannot remember exactly how she suggested this. She made it clear to me that theirs was a most discreet affair, continuing when Edmund stopped in the City at the end of his furloughs on his way back to Fort Dix. It was a very warm friendship, she said, close enough for her to wonder, now that he had passed on, about the contents of his will. Before he left for France, he had suggested to her, she said, that she would not be forgotten.'

Having told this much of the story, to her amazement, Emma realized she had gone far beyond the bounds of propriety. The funeral must have unloosed her tongue, she thought. Never before had she said a word of this to anyone. How could she have told her innocent children the brutal truth about their father? She felt ashamed, and then, after a moment, a new thought relieved her: it was possible they would have understood very little of what she had said.

‘Was she, Moth?' asked Caleb.

‘Was she what?'

‘Was she included in father's will.'

‘No. Not a penny.'

Having said so much, Emma felt she could not retreat. She decided to finish, as writers of fables always do, with a moral they might understand.

‘But it was a lesson for me. Your father always appeared to be so … so devoted. He seemed to be … an honest man. From what that lady told me, I learned that none of this was so. I learned never to believe in appearances. Nothing is ever what it seems. The surface is always deceiving.'

Caleb and Kate pressed her hands in theirs, kissed her, and told her how sorry they were to learn of the faithlessness of their father. They said nothing about their own feelings, but they were quite sure of them. On the spot they had become disbelievers in their father's myth and absolute supporters of their brave mother. Their games of fictional romances had prepared them for such codas of disappointment and deception, an education their mother was not aware of when she felt she might have foolishly, prematurely disillusioned them.

As the train began to move at last, the three sat very close together on one seat, creating their customary tableau of familial affection. The train made its slow way through the heavy snow that obscured all the windows. The children pondered the cost of replacing the heroic saga of their father's life with the radically revised account. Caleb did not hesitate. He had begun to translate what he had heard into material for a new game:

‘Friday nights I will go to visit Kate, the lady in Chelsea who is wearing a black dress and roses on her hat. Although I am married, I will take off my derby and satin-collared overcoat, all my city clothes, and will come into bed with her …' Caleb smiled delightedly at his mother, relishing the prospect of a new fiction between him and Kate.

That night, in Kate's bedroom, the children discussed the lesson Moth said she had learned.

‘Do you suppose she loved him … after that?' Kate asked.

‘I couldn't tell, from what she said. I guess she didn't.'

Kate thought about the curious revelation. Then, with a daughter's characteristically rapid assimilation of her mother's wisdom, she said slyly:

‘
Seems
. But you never can be sure. It may only be appearances. She may be deceiving us.'

In these various ways, the four children lost their early, happy visions of their fathers.

2

Camp

One is not born a woman, one becomes one
.

—S
IMONE DE
B
EAUVOIR

I
N
J
UNE OF
1930, Rose Hellman began sewing name tapes on Roslyn's camp uniforms. Max had told his wife he wanted the summer for themselves. He felt they needed to be free of Roslyn's demands for transportation to the City and movies they could no longer afford. Rose agreed. She went further: secretly, she wished to be left to herself in the small, train-shaped apartment, where she could indulge her resentment against her husband and her intense dislike of Brooklyn. She believed that only the poor, the immigrant, and the Irish lived in that borough. Rarely did she leave the apartment during the day for fear she would be seen on the streets and taken to be one of the newly arrived Polish Jews.