The Book of Knowledge (15 page)

With her foot she pushed over the barrel Fatto had moved. A cascade of belts, compacts, lariats, purses, pocket knives, whistles, scarves, and dollar bills poured onto the packed leaves. Roslyn sat still, stunned. Her sacred grove had turned into a terrible cache of crime. Purloined objects had invaded the moral purity of a place that before had been polluted only by smoke. Her plan for a final, mystical rite, a requiem and a benediction, was wrecked, her peace of mind gone. And what was worse: she knew that if she reported her discovery the last hours of camp would be even noisier, full of accusatory voices, vengeful tones, blubbering confession.

‘Jeepers,' she thought. ‘I won't say anything to anybody. What do I care?
I
didn't lose anything. And all this is junk. What does that dumb fat boy want it for?'

She stuffed Fatto's loot back under the barrel, replaced his leafy camouflage, and walked back along the path, Natty Bumppo style, to her bungalow to wait for her turn in the bathtub.

But it was hot, too hot to hang around in the bungalow. Roslyn went down to the lake and stood on the dock. She heard Hozzle tell her assistant, Ellie, to give surface-diving tests to two campers who were trying, for the third time, she said, to earn their junior lifesaving badges. Roslyn understood their difficulty, because she had the same problem; clearly, they both disliked holding their breath underwater. But there was another thing, she noticed. They were girls with big hips, so it was hard to pull themselves down with their weak arms. And then, with all that fat, how could they ever hoist those weights up from the bottom of the lake?

Hozzle looked as if she had given up on them. But Ellie seemed patient, more patient than she would have been in July, Roslyn surmised, when she'd overheard Fritzie say Ellie was waiting to hear if she had been moved off the waiting list and accepted into the freshman class at Sweet Briar College. Yesterday Roslyn had heard Ellie yelling all over the place:

‘I'm in! I'm accepted!'

Roslyn envisioned Ellie going home, celebrating with her parents, and then going hog-wild at Peck & Peck buying cashmere sweater sets and tweed skirts.

Roslyn saw Ellie wave the dopey girls out of her way. She surface-dived to move the window-sash weight, a white towel tied around it, closer to the shore.

‘Eight feet,' she said.

One girl dove down, pulled hard, and came up, red-faced, gasping, and empty-handed. The other tried, with no success. Ellie moved the weight again.

‘Seven feet.' She told them to try again.

Ellie watched them closely as if she expected them to drown. To Roslyn they looked more frightened than determined.

She looked away to see Hozzle standing at the edge of the ‘crib,' a floored area where beginners could put their feet down. The swimming counselor seemed to be surveying the lake as if she really loved its clear green water, the surrounding hills, the oversized blue bowl of sky. Roslyn knew that Hozzle taught water sports and lifesaving in a pool at her college. She wondered if she had ever felt smothered there by the enclosed, wet, chlorinated heat.

Hozzle stood unmoving at the edge of the crib as if she were in command of the almost round lake—the one imperfection the small cove at the end, like a blowout place on an inner tube. Standing as still, Roslyn watched someone far away paddle out toward the cove. Birds, whose names she did not know, flew low over the water. She saw the two surface divers disappear again, only to come up too fast to have reached the bottom.

Hozzle looked disgusted. ‘Jesus, they feed kids too much these days. They're bottom-heavy. They probably have too much air in their buttocks,' she said to herself.

She walked over to where Ellie and the two girls were drying off.

‘Who's out there canoeing? I thought all the boats were in.'

‘No idea,' Ellie said, anxious to be away from the waterfront. ‘What'll I do about these two blimps?'

‘Pass 'em,' Hozzle said. ‘What the heck. God forbid they should ever have to save anyone's life.'

Muggs stopped a junior counselor who was patrolling the line to make sure every camper was lying down on her bed.

‘Any of the bunks started packing yet?'

‘Yes. Number Four. You know those freshman counselors. They had their kids packing last week, I think. They can't wait to get home.'

‘Okay. I'll take a look in there while they're resting.'

The A&C bungalow was locked when Cindy came back after rest period.

‘That bitch,' she said aloud to no one. She tried to kick the door in, but it did not move. Jean came up behind her. Cindy was peering in the window.

‘Anybody there?'

Cindy turned around. ‘Who're
you?
'

‘Jean.'

‘Well, Jean, no one's in there. And I'll tell you what. No one'll
be
in there today and I'll lose my goddam belt again and that bitch Muggs is so rotten she'll never open the damn place again.
Ever
.'

Jean stood open-mouthed, amazed at this outpouring of forbidden words. She decided this must be the girl from Brooklyn, the one Roslyn had told her about,

‘The one who swears,' she had said.

Jean said to Cindy: ‘She said tomorrow morning. I just thought I'd try to see if it was open. Maybe we'd better come back tomorrow.'

‘Shit.'

‘
What?
'

‘I said shit.'

Jean was frightened. She thought a moment and then she said:

‘I'll come back tomorrow. I've got to get started on my trunk. Then I have to finish my test at the lake.'

Cindy waited until Jean was out of sight. Then, taking careful aim, she spat on the middle windowpane, and moved her finger through the saliva. She wrote:

MUGGS THE BITCH

The afternoon moved slowly. Tired, sweaty seniors returned from their hike, mosquito-bitten and thirsty. The water in their canteens had been used up in the second hour of their hike. They lined up at the water cooler on the porch of the Amusement Hall. After they had drunk their fill, they poured water over their heads.

The juniors swam, celebrating their luck at having a cool, wet double period at the lake, all except a few wearers of red beginner's caps who were still confined to the crib. Their feet were planted nervously on the wooden floor, water to their waists and their terrified hearts pounding in their chests when they lowered themselves into the water to try the dead man's float.

Jean swam toward the middle of the lake with her friend Sally, both wearing their newly earned white caps. When Hozzle blew the whistle to check on the whereabouts of the swimmers, the two clasped hands and raised them ostentatiously into the air to demonstrate their obedience to the buddy system and their proud distance from the shore.

Will sat in the high chair at the tennis net refereeing the final match between a Blue and a Gray mediate. Both girls were grimly determined to win. Will, distracted from the furious play by thoughts of Rae, made two miscalls in a row. There were loud protests from the players. Will realized her mistakes almost at once. Her eyes filled with tears, affecting her vision and her judgment. She knew well she had been wrong, but she refused to change the calls. She ordered the girls to get on with the game.

Rae crossed
PERIOD
3-4 and
PERIOD
5-6 from her schedule sheet. Her heart ached, an unusual pain for her. She was one of the few persons who was not glad that camp was ending. Summer had always been a long, sun-filled, orderly idyll. She was happy when the campers seemed content, the counselors relaxed, Mrs. Ehrlich pleased, and all minor crises, if they had to arise, resolved quickly. This summer one small difficulty still remained, she reminded herself, but Muggs, usually a reliable problem-solver, had been assigned to locate the missing stuff, so all would be well.

‘Then why do I feel so rotten?' she asked herself, and then she remembered. Willie. …

And Roslyn: unaware of the currents of emotion, the wounded sensibilities, small passions, and large indignations, raging among some of the campers and counselors, she sat on the edge of her cot, bent over at an angle, thinking about her pain. Her stomach hurt, as it always did when she felt life was going badly for her. She was exhausted by the handball game, by her large lunch and long nap, by her distaste for the prospective awards banquet. She was in despair about
everything
, she told herself: going home to Brooklyn, school in two weeks, leaving Fritzie.

She decided to write her beloved a letter to leave on Fritzie's bed, a final declaration of love, proving her undying fidelity and illustrating her new, elaborate, grown-up prose style. Everyone else had left the bungalow for a swim. Blessed quiet filled the room, even the empty space under the rafters. She found her Linen Weave Writing Pad under her cot, put the lined blotting sheet under the first sheet, and wrote:

DEAR FRITZIE
—

Not quite right, she thought.

She crossed it out neatly and wrote under it:

DEAREST FRITZIE
.

The progress from the positive to the superlative seemed an important step to her. Perhaps Fritzie would notice it.

In her complex and involuted new style, she put down what she most admired about her counselor: her cheerfulness, her fairness, the way she seemed to like everyone (she did not write that, privately, she would have preferred less equality and a stronger affection for
her
). She listed her virtues, avoiding the true reasons for her love: her bright, charming face, her smooth womanly voice, her lavish grin, the tight curl of her black hair at her neck and around her perfect ears, her black-as-night eyes that shone like polished coal. Most of all, the way her starched middy blouse pulled across her lavish bosom.

Now that she thought about it, it was Fritzie's person that she loved, not her character. But she could not bring herself to write that. She ended the list with ‘your lovely personality.' It occurred to her she might use the popular idiom for ‘sexy.' She would tell her she had ‘it,' but she refrained for fear it would sound too, well, forward.

Then, wishing to appear literary and learned, Roslyn thought of complimenting her on not having ‘a superiority complex' like some others she was prepared to name. It was a phrase she had heard applied to Aggie, only in reverse: ‘Aggie has an inferiority complex,' someone had said. Roslyn had only a dim idea of what that meant. It was clearly an affliction as widespread as influenza and polio. She decided the whole thing was too uncertain, so she omitted its opposite in her catalogue of Fritzie's assets. She signed the letter with three X's to signify kisses and then wrote, “Your bunkie, Roslyn Hellman.”

She looked under her bed. Finding no envelopes in the dust, she folded the letter in thirds, clipped it shut with a rusty bobby pin, and laid it on Fritzie's pillow.

On every field and court, games came to an end. By five o'clock, Will and the other referees had assembled in Rae's bungalow to report the results. Hozzle brought her list of names of those who had passed their lifesaving tests. Points were awarded for this feat and added to the team scores. Muggs told Rae she had inspected trunks in seven of the sixteen bungalows and found nothing.

‘Oh my. Well, keep looking,' she said. Everyone filed out to prepare for supper. Rae totaled the last points. Once again the Blue team had won.

‘Five times in five years,' she told herself cheerlessly. ‘Hurrah for the Union Army.' Thinking that Mrs. Ehrlich would not approve of this inequity, she went into the bathroom to run a bath.

Wearing a clean blouse and her somewhat worn blazer with its tarnished CCL insignia on the pocket, Rae walked to the directors' bungalow. She wanted to ask about borrowing a camp car to go to Liberty tomorrow evening after the banquet.

The Ehrlichs were having their early-evening Scotch and sodas in their living room. Oscar was drinking a milk shake. The Ehrlichs did not offer her a drink.

‘Of course you'll all wait until lights out before you take off?'

Rae felt her carefully maintained patience with Mrs. Ehrlich wearing thin. Never in all her years at the camp had she left the camp, or allowed any other counselor to leave, before she was certain every camper was in bed and the under-cover readers had been warned to put out their flashlights.

She stared at Mrs. Ehrlich, who sensed danger in Rae's silence and said quickly:

‘Of course I know you won't. That goes without saying.'

Oscar met Rae at the door. ‘Can I come with you? I've never been to Liberty at night.'

‘I wish you could. But there are five others I've promised already, so the car is full.'

In her soft, consoling voice, Mrs. Ehrlich said: ‘Anyway, dear, they stay out until midnight. That's too late for you.'

Oscar glared at his mother and left the room. Rae watched him leave, noting his large behind and thinking that he could not squeeze into the backseat even if Mrs. Ehrlich had insisted they take him. Rae took the key from Mr. Ehrlich and thanked them both. She closed the screen door quietly behind her.

Halfway up the line she met Muggs. Rae sighed and stopped to listen as Muggs complained about Cindy Maggio's vulgarity in vivid detail, and about the defiled windowpane.

‘Oh my,' said Rae.

‘What will you do? That girl ought to be spanked and have her mouth washed out with soap.'

‘We'll let her parents do that when she gets home.'

‘Oh, sure. I can just see that. Where do you think she gets it from?'

‘No idea. From them, do you mean? Well, maybe. Yes. Well, how is the search going?'

‘Found nothing.'

‘Lordy lord.'

‘I'll keep looking.'

‘Good. Thank you.'

Muggs saw the keys in Rae's hand.

‘Going to Liberty tomorrow night?'

‘I think we might, yes.'

‘Would there be room for me?'