The Book of Knowledge (10 page)

This was the summer when prices on the stock market, after a short rise, plunged to a new low, unemployment reached four million, and the country and the world began a decade of severe depression. It was the summer that
The Lone Ranger
took over the airways and Greta Garbo appeared in
Anna Christie
. A musical comedy,
Strike Up the Band
, made the hit lists on the radio with a song called ‘I've Got a Crush on You.' Max Schmeling, fouled by Jack Sharkey, won the heavyweight title (Max Hellman was there, in Madison Square Garden with his friend the Commissioner) and became an instant hero to Adolf Hitler. Sliced bread first appeared that summer, and the first supermarket opened in Jamaica, Long Island.

In the newspapers sent to her by her mother, Roslyn immersed herself in such calamities, coincidences, and victories. In this way she was able to escape the mundane details of camp life and enter into the real world of New York City, where she wanted to be.

Throughout July and well into August she went down to the lake twice a day for the mediates' scheduled swim. Never once did she step on the diving board. She had heard from Loo, who was very poor at water sports and so swam with the juniors, that Jean was now a good diver. So Roslyn occasionally went to the lake to watch her cousin practice her half gainer. She was impressed but not moved to try diving herself. She said she thought there was something simpleminded about shocking one's intelligence by hitting the water with one's head from a great height.

July went by without the promised visit from her parents. They wrote that money was short, that Max was needed at his new business, as he called the butcher store, and that Aunt Sophie could not spare her car. Rose sent a birthday present, a box that turned out to contain three used books: an illustrated edition of
Barnaby Rudge
, a battered copy of
Ben Hur
, and an equally worn book called
What Every Young Girl Should Know
. Roslyn stored the box in the dust under her cot and resolved not to open it again.

The eight weeks of the summer seemed to pass very slowly for Roslyn. Stoically she endured it all—the standard, polite letters she had to write home every other day as the price of admission into the mess hall at lunchtime, the games she was made to play when she was too slow to have invented excuses, the prattle (as she thought of it) of her bunkmates, her nagging uncertainty about the retarded functioning of her reproductive system.

She could not wait for August to end, for her exile in woods and meadows to be terminated by the familiar hospitality of paved streets and romantic movie theaters. From her early start as self-confident leader of the little tribe of displaced New Yorkers, she had gradually lost her following, and, what was worse, her confidence in her persuasive powers. Her bunkmates had deserted her, seduced by the more promising rewards, at the end, of medals for being improved campers and good sports.

In the last few days of the camp year, beginning on the 27th of August, Roslyn, the admirer of a counselor unromantically nicknamed Fritzie, was deprived of what remained of her innocence about herself and, more, about those who lived in her world.

Her losses were immediately apparent to her, unlike the hazy recollections that inhabit adult memories when, looking back, it is hard to locate the effects of crucial events in one's early history. During the last days of camp, she felt herself aging. When the inspection of trunks was concluded, when the ambulance had pulled away from the lake road, guided to the gate by lucifer matches and flashlights, when her faith in true love shriveled up under the assault of brutal truth like a pin-struck balloon, and when her body failed her, she knew she had grown up, even grown old.

She had always suspected that very few people were really happy. When, all at once, this proved painfully true, she thought that nothing would ever seem the same to her again. Compared to her end-of-summer-gained knowledge, her father's descent from affluence to near poverty (as it seemed to her) last October was a minor fall. At a stroke, she thought, she had changed, grown ugly and disconsolate, like the mythic hero swept by a wave of a wand into the skin of a hideous frog. Now she was certain of what she had earlier suspected, that life was composed of a series of disillusioning revelations and disappointments.

Most affected was her idea of love. She had thought she knew what it was, but in those last days she discovered its true nature. It was a well-camouflaged phantom, an avid, contemptuous, sneaky mob member, a guerrilla fighter prepared to destroy the natural peace of her heart, always secretly at war with her contentment. More terrible still, when her body betrayed her, she was taught that it was a wild child, capable of tantrums and tempers, furious deeds and appetites, and never
never
obedient to her will.

It happened in this way.

On what was to be a drama-laden day near the end of camp, Grete, fully dressed, woke Ib at six in the morning. A suggestion of light showed over the far side of the lake. In the help's house it was still cool, as if fall had come, unexpectedly, to the summer place. Ib got up at once, accustomed to early rising because sweet buns and soft rolls had to be ready to be served in the mess hall at eight-thirty.

He indulged in his ritual grumbling, followed by his soft, ropy cough.

‘From the flour,
not
the tobacco,' he told Grete when she complained about it.

The room the couple occupied in the house smelled of his midnight quart of ale and his badly decayed teeth. Grete reminded him of the birthday cake he had to bake for dinner and the extra loaves for the senior hike.

‘I know, I know. What do you think?'

Grete made her escape into the warm, perfumed air of the Ehrlich's cottage. This morning she found the kitchen marred by the remains in the sink of a late meal Oscar must have required two or three hours after his dinner. For the moment she ignored the mess and proceeded to make her own thick, black coffee in the Scandinavian way, and then a small pot of American coffee for Mrs. Ehrlich's breakfast. Mr. Ehrlich had long since gone to Liberty to fetch the mail and provisions.

Grete walked over to the bakery to obtain the fresh rolls from Ib's tray. They said nothing to each other. She carried the little package back to the bungalow.

Grete knocked and then pushed open Mrs. Ehrlich's door with her firm, uniformed body, holding the tray against her midriff. Mrs. Ehrlich was asleep, curled into the center of her bed like a giant snail. The air around her was sweet and heavy with the effusions of her flesh, perfumed with Chanel No. 5 before going to bed.

Grete pulled the blinds. Mrs. Ehrlich stirred, stretched, and sat up as the aroma of coffee and hot rolls reached her. Into the warm morning sunshine that reached her bed she smiled beneficently, luxuriating in the thought that the administrative tasks of the long summer were almost behind her. Was not the lovely sunshine of their place in Winter Haven about to descend on her? She had always moved contentedly through life, proceeding from one situation of physical comfort to the next—the bed, the sofa, the porch swing, the padded chair at the dining table, the soft armchair reserved for her at all camp events in the Amusement Hall—waited upon and cosseted by Mr. Ehrlich, regarded fondly but lazily by her son, and always certain that the present, demanding as it might be, would turn into easeful release in the near future.

Her sole worry was for Grandmother Ehrlich, who had lived with them since the death of her husband. The details of her care during the summer in the cottage were left to her, Mr. Ehrlich, and a succession of helpers who came in from the village by the day. In winter, Mrs. Ehrlich was entirely free of these concerns. She was able to relax while she enjoyed her eight months in Florida. Grandmother Ehrlich was left behind in New York with a full-time caretaker.

Only the cold February visit to New York to sign up campers for the following summer marred Mrs. Ehrlich's long, hot, slothful holiday, which ended, sadly, in June when they had to return to oversee the refurbishment of the camp. Both directors agreed that it was necessary for them to be on the grounds when the effect of winter storms on the manicured appearance of fields and bungalows, docks and roadways was erased. They knew how important all this was to visiting parents.

Grete poured Mrs. Ehrlich's coffee and buttered her roll.

‘Bugle on time today. Campers and teachers are in Mess Hall. Flag is up like always,' Grete said in the pleasant voice she always used to the directors. She felt it necessary to make this morning report to Mrs. Ehrlich as she lay in bed, knowing she was always pleased to hear that all was going well, as usual. Mrs. Ehrlich was the picture of contentment, stretching her short, fat legs under the sheet. Grete considered it important to ingratiate herself, because Ib's drinking threatened their security. Summer jobs were essential to them.

It was not that Grete loved Ib, not in the least, not ever. When he had too much to drink, he enjoyed using his belt on her buttocks and twisting her long hair so tightly it threatened to pull away from her head. Or he would extend her earlobes so painfully during his (never their) lovemaking as a show of force, accompanied by rough assaults on her breasts and thighs.

Every night during the summer, full of drink, he demanded that she lie down under him; every night she wished him dead. After he fell into a heavy sleep, she planned the escapes she might make if cirrhotic death or lung disease did not claim him soon. To her, their union (he was Danish, she Norwegian) was an example of mistaken intermarriage. She had agreed to it because he was about to become an American citizen and she wished to realize the promises of the golden land of America she had come to: high salaries, new automobiles, fur coats, and modern kitchens.

Ib's motives for entering into marriage were equally crass. He had failed to find a woman in Copenhagen willing to submit for any length of time to his distinctive ways of achieving his pleasure, the same attacks he enjoyed inflicting on small animals, and upon men smaller and weaker than he. This uncontained violence, necessary to fire his arid soul and his lax sexual organ, had sent him to jail in Odensee, where he had gone to take a job as an apprentice baker and to find a willing female for his blows and pinches, yanks and drubbings.

His incarceration there had been brief. He had been found guilty of drunkenness and assault upon a prostitute, both very minor offenses. He passed his days in jail baking for the prisoners and his nights methodically, pleasurably battering himself. Freed in a few months, and sick of Denmark, he obtained a berth as a baker on a steamship and sailed to New York. Immediately he applied for his papers.

Almost as quickly he found a job with the Horn and Hardart Company, so easily were American employers persuaded that European-trained bakers must be superior to Americans. In time, he was promoted to supervising the mass production of chocolate-, vanilla-, and strawberry-frosted cupcakes, desserts then much favored in the Automats in New York City. Baked at three in the morning, the cakes were moved upstairs to be placed behind the little glass doors. They were readily available to thousands of thrifty citizens by the insertion of a nickel into a slot.

In the basement kitchen he met Grete. She worked in the vegetable department. ‘I do cream spinach, butter carrots, and succotash,' she told him at their first encounter. The next year she agreed to marry him, his impulses and needs having been well hidden from her until the night after they signed a license before a magistrate of the City of New York. Similarly, he was unaware of her avarice, which became apparent later, after an argument about her savings and his nightly ale.

‘You are a cold woman,' he told her when she refused to part with her Central Savings Bank passbook so he could buy his necessary drink.

‘You are a goat, a pig,' she replied.

Name-calling became their unvarying form of communication. Once, while Grete lay in bed engaged in her customary fantasy of getting free of her life with Ib, he stole her passbook and presented it at the glassed-in teller's window together with a withdrawal slip. He was told he could not use it: her name, her
maiden
name, Grete Olssen, was on the account.

After that, they endured each other in furious silence, broken only by expletives and business communication. They were united in their unspoken resolutions to avenge each other's unbearable behavior. On the morning of the 27th of August, while Mrs. Ehrlich was dressing slowly with Grete's help, Ib was taking his first bottle of ale from the bakery icebox. Now that all the boats had been lifted out of the water and heaped one upon the other in neat piles, he thought he might escape Grete's witness of his drinking, take his bottle, lift down the top canoe, and go out for a peaceful, solitary late afternoon on the water. He might float around in the little hidden cove, the only break in the otherwise perfectly oval lake. There, unobserved from the shore and dock, he could drink his pale fire, dozing if he wished after its analgesic effects had dulled his senses. This would be his last chance for inebriated solitude, he thought. During these last days when camp was winding down, the help could ask permission to enjoy the pleasures of the lake.

‘Not at all have I been on the lake, not once all this summer,' he thought, filled with resentment against his job, the owners, the counselors, the campers, even Grete, although he could not have said why.

He gathered up ten long loaves of bread and took them out to the truck that was to follow the seniors on their hike. As he lifted them into the back of the truck, one loaf escaped his grasp and fell into the dust.

‘
Jeg er nerves,
' he muttered. Carmen, the driver, free of his usual chores of lawn mowing and garbage collecting, laughed as he picked up the bread, blew on it, and put it with the others.

‘Pretty early in the day to be blotto,' he said to Ib.

‘Horse. Turkey. Bastar.'

Carmen laughed again. ‘Go put your head in the oven, Pop,' the driver said.