The Book of Knowledge (16 page)

‘I wish there were, but five others have asked to go.'

Muggs said nothing. The wings of her long, sad nose reddened. Rae's heart melted.

‘But if you don't mind driving, you can have my place. I've plenty to do here.'

‘No. No thank you. I really don't want to go that much. Besides, I don't drive.'

Rae felt sorry for her, but relieved. The Hewitt College group—Hozzle, Will, Rae, Tori (a motherly freshman counselor), and Fritzie, the one favored outsider—traditionally spent one of their last nights of camp together in the village, toasting the prospect of payday. Mr. Ehrlich would distribute the checks at the station, thus ensuring that everyone's contractual duty was fulfilled until the last moment. They would all drink to the end of eight weeks of arduous camper care, and to each other.

At the steps of her bungalow, Rae tried to think of some way to make up to Muggs for her exclusion. Nothing occurred to her.

‘See you later,' she said.

‘Yes,' said Muggs and walked on. She thought about the unjust rule against counselors bringing their own cars to camp. Her navy-blue Marmon roadster, old but still elegant and serviceable, had been stored in the New York City garage on Eighth Street all summer. The car had been her dearest companion ever since her father had taught her to drive it on her sixteenth birthday.

Having eaten an early supper in the Ehrlichs' kitchen, a meal of leftovers from lunch, Grete went to her room. Ib was not there. She went down the hall to Carmen's room. He was in his upper-deck bed reading the
Police Gazette
.

‘Did you see Ib?'

‘Not since morning. Why? Is the old goat missing?'

‘Not missing. But not in our room, where he usually goes to drink after the bakery.'

‘Any booze missing? Find it and you'll probably find him.'

Grete drew herself up. She resented other people's referring to Ib's drinking, regarding it as an insult, somehow, to her and to her union with him.

‘Not your business, dago.'

‘Then why ask
me
where he is?' Carmen went back to his paper.

Grete decided she would look no further. She went back to her room, thinking: ‘He is asleep somewhere, like always, whenever the ale comes over him. Let me hope, someday he falls asleep with his head in the big oven and I will be free.'

She settled into the chair to read her book,
Elements of Good Cooking
. Grete had decided to go to a cooking school this winter. A good occupation, she thought, in this country of big appetites and much money. She was studying a recipe for chicken fricassee when Mr. Ehrlich knocked on the door and then opened it.

‘I have your check.'

‘Very good.'

Mr. Ehrlich stood in the doorway and handed her a sealed envelope. Grete opened it, read the figures, and smiled at the director. After eight weeks she had earned two hundred and ninety dollars, more money than she had seen in one sum since last summer.

‘Thank you, sir. Very much.'

‘Don't spend it all in one place,' he said and laughed at the cleverness of his admonition. So inconceivable was the thought of doing such a thing that Grete stared at him, unable to understand what he was laughing at.

Mr. Ehrlich held out another envelope.

‘This is for Ib. Where can I find him?'

‘He is away a minute. I will give it to him.'

Mr. Ehrlich hesitated. Once he had overheard a nasty exchange between the two in the bakery. Embarrassed by what his reluctance might mean to Ib's wife, he handed her the envelope.

‘Be sure to remember to give it to him.'

Grete was indignant. ‘Of course, sir. Why would I not?'

He could think of no reason. He nodded vaguely.

‘Goodbye, Grete. If I don't see you tomorrow, thank you for all your good work. And thank Ib. I hope we will see you both next summer.'

‘Thank you, for these.' She waved the two envelopes and granted him one of her rare, tight smiles.

Mr. Ehrlich remained in the doorway. ‘Do you happen to know where Carmen is?'

‘In his room. There I saw him just now.'

‘Okay. Well, again, goodbye.'

‘
Also
.'

Left alone, Grete opened the second envelope and saw it was for the same amount as hers. She rolled the two checks into a tight ball, put them into the crease between her breasts, and buried the envelopes in the trash basket. She intended to forge his signature, and deposit them both in her account: Ib would only squander his. She would tell him Mr. Ehrlich was sending their checks in the mail to the City.

All summer long, Oscar's secret sport had been spying on the seniors. They were all about his age and seemed to him to be uniformly beautiful. In the late afternoon of this day he saw them returning from their hike, looking overheated, as his mother always said when he was flushed. Still angry at his rejection by Rae, he decided to follow them up the line for a last look at their wonderful bodies. He took his usual path through the grass behind the bungalows, where, he thought, he could not be seen by anyone.

He often looked into the rear windows to see the seniors in their baths. His penis stiffened and moved upward at the sight of their white bottoms and their black or gold triangles of hair in their crotches as they stooped to test the water and then stepped over the high side of the bathtub. He stood still, watching through the edge of the curtain until they came out, rosy from the heat of the water, their breasts like oranges, sometimes held in their hands, sometimes falling in lovely large circles on their chests.

Some mornings (if he got up in time) he spent a satisfying hour behind the bungalows, taking up his peeping post when the girls were using the toilet. He watched them seated, enjoying, he could tell, the pleasant sensations of defecation. Everything about the camp he had hated—sullen foreign help, officious counselors, the nasty, suspicious doctor and the nastier nurse who gossiped to his mother, campers who called him Fatto behind his back and even, sometimes, to his face, the heavy, constant presence in his life of his parents—was compensated for by the wonders of these visions, by his chance to spy on the mysteries of the female sex he so desired to understand.

Lying on her cot, staring out of the window behind her bed, Roslyn saw Oscar's fat shape disappear behind the back of the bungalow. She had seen him there before and had a pretty clear idea of what he was doing. Waiting her turn for a bath, she thought he might look in to watch her when it was her turn.

‘So what? The jerk. He can look. I'm nothing to see, anyhow,' she said to herself.

Everyone in camp had saved one clean middy blouse and one pair of relatively unsoiled bloomers for tomorrow night's banquet. Roslyn's last blouse was creased but unspotted. She put on her blouse and then lay back on her cot, feeling very good because, wonder of wonders, there had been hot water left for her bath even after that hog Loo had her turn. She thought about the City, the wonderful, crowded, smelly-with-bus-exhaust City … maybe she would get a ticket next week to see that play
Room Service
at the Cort Theater that got a good review in the
Times
. Her mother had sent her a roll of newspapers containing the theater and financial sections of the
Herald Tribune
. Here, even though it bored her, she read about the effect on consumer purchases of the recent and terrible stock market collapse.

‘Don't I know,' she said to herself. ‘Not even a decent tennis racket this year.'

But there was still the theater. ‘Maybe I'll get a standing-room ticket over Labor Day. Most New Yorkers will be in Connecticut or at Jones Beach. The theaters won't be crowded.' She had read that Gertrude Lawrence was opening in September in a Noel Coward play. Roslyn's need to be always the star of all the activities in her own life had fallen off inexplicably. Now she worshiped the stardom of others, especially people on the stage. Gertrude Lawrence! She had read that Noel Coward was acting in it too.

In the winter of the Crash, when her days had taken on a Brooklyn grayness, and when she had the requisite two nickels for round-trip fare, she would leave school at noon on Wednesday, matinee day, without permission, ride the subway to Times Square, and look about for a theater,
any
theater, with a large first-act crowd on the sidewalk under its marquee. Often she was able to get into the theater with patrons returning from their smokes. She stood at the rear of the orchestra behind the last seats, or found an empty seat as the lights went down, and watched the rest of the play.

School seemed far away, seven or eight days, she thought. Meanwhile there were a few good things to go home to: the wonderful, palatial movie houses that she loved, her bicycle, the Automat, WQXR on the radio, the public library, and the Capehart phonograph which had somehow survived the things her family had sold after the Crash (like the De Soto) and their awful exile to Brooklyn.

Her heart sank when she remembered the problem of having no place to keep her records, housed as they were in their ‘unsightly' brown albums (her mother's word for them), and the loss of Central Park and Riverside Drive to ride in. Now her beloved bicycle could take her only through Prospect Park, she thought, that flat, barren stretch of grass and trees not even near a river, and what was worse, full of lounging hobos.

But first she had to get through the next night's banquet in her wrinkled blouse, spotted green tie, and torn sneakers. Half awake, Roslyn foresaw it all, a fantasy re-created on what she remembered from two years ago:

‘We will get the best meal of the whole summer, so we can go home and tell our parents how great the food was and they will think it was that way the whole summer. Roast chicken, bread stuffing, homemade cranberry sauce, and Cookie's pie with ice cream on top,
à la mode
, whatever that means. Exactly what we had at the banquet the last time I went. My name will be called:
ROSLYN HELLMAN
. I will be handed another stupid tin pin. Rae calls it bronze. She says it is given to me for some dumb thing or other, character maybe, or enthusiasm, or maybe catching the most snakes and salamanders.

‘“Now for the Big Moment of the year,” Rae will say in her serious voice that sounds like she is announcing the Armistice. Mr. Ehrlich brings in the silver loving cup. I wonder, as I did last time, why it is called “loving.” Shaped like a heart, maybe? I remember I meant to look it up during the winter but I never did. I wonder if it is really silver or just fake like the pins. A cup made of silver paper or something like that. Mr. Ehrlich hands it to Rae. She holds it high up over her head, that silly smile on her face, and says:

‘“This year the cup goes to the Blue Team. It is the twenty-fourth”—I don't know how many, maybe more, maybe only five—“time in a row. Will Senior Captain Leona Swados come up to receive it? And will all the Blues stand up so we can applaud their great efforts.”

‘Then Leona will go to the main table and take the cup from Rae and hold it over
her
head, pretending to groan at how heavy it is. All the Blues, from little screaming freshmen to grinning juniors (Jean will be one of them), and my sports opponents among the mediates, and the snobby seniors will stand up. I will be sitting down, of course, with the other defeated Grays.

‘Some of the Blues will clap for themselves. Others will clasp their hands over their heads, and some will show how proud they are of themselves by putting their thumbs in their armpits and waving their free fingers in the air. It is all too awful. Then Leona hands the cup back to Rae. Of course, everyone knows it stays permanently in the Ehrlich bungalow. Next year it will be dragged out again and then it will have the captain's name and team and date printed on it. I hope I won't be here for
that
.

‘Then we will all troop out into the dark night, smelling of pine, and mist coming from the lake, and under the bowl of stars I won't see again because the sky in Brooklyn comes in little squares and rectangles between the roofs of buildings. We'll trudge back up the line to our bunks and take off our grungy green uniforms for the last time this summer. Tomorrow morning we'll put on our uncomfortable city clothes, which will probably look okay to us after all the middy blouses and bloomers every day.

‘Everyone around me will fall asleep very fast, worn out by the cheering, the food, the terribly long time it takes to give ninety-six campers an award for something or other, and those long, dull speeches by the directors. But I will lie here in bed, feeling very low, I know I will. I will have that black feeling of defeat I always get even though I didn't care about winning or getting a medal.

‘I will search around for my flashlight, whose batteries are dying, and scrunch down under the blanket to read the one section of the
Times
I always save, from last November. It is full of wonderful stories, each one told in a single, neat paragraph, one to a subject, about New York's hundred neediest cases. I have read them again and again since last November. I will try to turn each one into life. I think these pathetic cases will be the raw stuff from which my stories will be made.

‘I have a plan. I intend to memorize some of these neediest cases, taking characters and stories, plots, from them, so I can begin my novel this winter now that I am fourteen and old enough to start my career as a real writer, not just an imaginer like I used to be when I made up the lemming game last summer. … I will hear Rae calling me from the steps to put out my flashlight. She is one counselor who gives orders in a nice voice. I think she may understand she is dealing with a budding story writer, maybe a great artist. I will put out my light.

‘In the dark, I'll think of my love and wonder if she has read my letter yet. What grateful words will she say to me, or write back to me? I'm scared at the thought of how she will take my declaration of love and lifelong devotion. I feel hot under the covers when I think of her.'