The Book of Knowledge (2 page)

Emma McDermott had great expectations. She accepted her isolated existence with the calm born of her fantasies. She agreed with the nuns who taught her that the best callings for a young woman of her unfortunate Methodist origins were marriage and motherhood. After graduating first in her high school class, she was offered a position (as she termed it) as secretary to the head of a company that specialized in the manufacture and selling of corsets for ladies of fleshy proportions. She herself was slender, so she found her eight-year-long employment at Figurine Emporium for Undergarments a source of income and some amusement.

In a few years her parents died, within weeks of each other, and she was then free to begin her hungry search for a husband who would be her companion, her friend, her support, and, if need be, her lover.

Emma's work in the garment district served her well. It was there that she met Edmund Flowers, seated beside her at a lunch counter where, by chance, they both ordered the same things—egg-salad sandwiches and Dr. Peppers—and then turned to smile at each other at the coincidence. By the time of their encounter Edmund had advanced to vice-president of Flowers and Sons.

Good-looking, ambitious, and more hardworking than any of his five brothers, by the time of his marriage Edmund was favored by his aging father to head the flourishing company. Edmund assured Emma that he made a very good salary and was regularly ‘putting a fair amount away' for the future. As a wedding present his father turned the company over to his industrious son and happily retired to weekends at Belmont Park racetrack, and late afternoons at Mulligan's Bar and Grill.

At the start, Emma considered her life with Edmund perfection itself. If his demands upon her at night, after the children were put to bed and their late dinner consumed, when she wished to sleep and he wished her to serve his nightly needs, were at first tiring, painful, and unrewarding, she tried to hide the fact from him and from herself. She submitted to his invasions, regarding these inconveniences as a small price for his provision of the good life she enjoyed.

But after a while, awakened slowly to the pleasures he provided, almost unwittingly, she began to enjoy lovemaking, and then to be eager for it, a contributor to it. In addition, she loved Edmund for their fine house, and for her long, satisfying, empty days in the porch swing or on the sofa while a lady from the village cleaned the house and prepared the meals. On warm afternoons in summer, she read the sentimental novels that she borrowed from the lending library and cared for the flowers that grew in beds in the back garden. She was especially fond of the hydrangeas growing around the house; at their base she planted and watered pansies and nasturtiums, hardy blooms that required little care.

All in all, her life was effortless, her husband generous and uncritical. To be sure, his absence from early morning to late evening was a contribution to her comfort, to her fondness for lazy inactivity. Of all this, of course, she said nothing to her children. She told them only that they had all lived in this same house since she and their father had married. Her account always ended with the same coda:

‘And then the Great War was coming. It was already on in Europe. And your father volunteered to be a soldier. …

‘You were just a baby, Caleb. And Kate came very soon after.'

She did not add that their father was twenty-four when he joined the Army, and she was almost thirty.

As the children were to remember their early years, until the summer before the Crash, they were without incident, serene and private, composed of sun-filled days, soft, late dusks, croquet games on the lawn with Moth, evenings on the veranda looking out at the lawn lit with fireflies, and hydrangea heads lazily awaiting the arrival of moonlight.

Always the children spent their evenings together. Although they were unconscious of their seclusion, they enjoyed it. They were shielded from interruption and close observation by their mother's deafness. Most of the time it shut her off from what she expected to be childish conversations in which she had no interest.

Occasionally it occurred to her that, even during the school year, they never brought friends home from school. Caleb said the boys in his class were interested in nothing but playing hockey, trading baseball cards, and building racing cars out of old wheels and fruit crates.

‘Aren't you interested in those things?' his mother asked, having no idea of what properly constituted a boy's recreation. Vaguely, she wanted Caleb to be like other boys. There must be a standard way of being a boy, she thought. But having no brothers, and having been educated by nuns throughout her school years; she had always found the male experience a mystery. It never occurred to her that Caleb was more like Kate in temperament and interests than the boys who skated or bicycled by their house on the way to the sandlot or the beach.

Occasionally she wondered about her children's absorption in each other. But their mutual contentment made life easier for her. So she put the question aside. There was no extra cooking to do for friends they might have invited. She never had to strain to hear the high, sharp voices of other children, and, in fact, since she had few friends of her own, there were no unaccustomed sounds to break the bland tenor of her days. Naturally reclusive and self-absorbed, she never inquired into the content of her children's lives. To do so, she thought, might disturb their comfortable familial peace.

In the evenings, to seem more companionable than she felt, Emma sat near her children in order to appear to be listening to their conversation. Rarely could she catch very much of it. The children would lie on their stomachs on the living-room rug, their heads in their cupped hands, their shoulders almost touching. Now and then their legs swept the air, and they murmured to each other, like actors rehearsing their parts. Emma noticed that their eyes often closed as they spoke as though they had entered another world and were imagining a foreign geography and encounters with unearthly people.

Caleb was an avid reader of the
New York Herald Tribune
, the newspaper his mother brought home every day from the village cigar store. The paper was always a day late, but she did not mind, and Caleb never noticed. He was indifferent to the news of the world or the nation or the City unless it pertained to particular persons, heroes and murderers, presidents and generals, titans of industry, starlets and movie moguls. What he read during the day he summarized for his sister and his mother at the dinner table. He excelled in combining stories so that details from one were cunningly inserted into another. This creative act transformed dull newspaper fact into lively personal fiction. Emma strained to hear his recountings, and Kate smiled with pleasure, accepting without question his résumés of human-interest stories, knowing that, later, they would serve as subject matter for their private games.

It was a warm evening in late June, just after the arrival of the summer children on Linden Street. Emma sat near her children reading
Sorrell and Son
, a novel she had obtained after a long wait from Stark's lending library. Warwick Deeping was her favorite writer; she had read all of his many novels at least twice. But this evening her attention to the book flagged. She concentrated on listening to her children's conversation.

Caleb asked Kate: ‘Were you flying the plane, Amelia?'

‘No, Charles. I was the passenger.'

‘But weren't you the first to fly over the ocean?'

‘No.
You
were. I was the first
woman
.'

‘Yes, of course, I forgot. The first woman.'

A long pause.

Then Caleb asked: ‘Was the weather bad the whole way?'

‘Oh yes, it was. Especially over Newfoundland. The weather is always terrible there. And then over the mighty Atlantic. I hated that part of the trip. Thirty-three and a half hours. And then we landed in Wales. It was very foggy and very wet. We could hardly see the landing field.'

‘Oh, I know. It was like that in Paris when I came down there two years ago.'

Silence. It was as if they had lost themselves in the high adventure of the past and did not know how to get back into the present. When they spoke again their voices were low: Emma surrendered to her deafness. As it was, she had not heard enough of their talk to understand its references. She opened
Sorrell and Son
at her place and began to read. Caleb's voice dropped to a whisper.

‘Don't you think famous aviators like us ought to be married to each other, Amelia?'

Kate smiled and reached over to put her hand on Caleb's shoulder. She whispered:

‘Yes, I do. I do. We would be the most famous flying couple in the whole world. But I think I'm married already.'

Caleb tried to remember what he had read about Amelia Earhart's life. Was she married? He had no idea. In his reconstructions from newspapers, details like this were often moved from one story to another to make the truth serve his inventions. He whispered:

‘You are not married. You are going to marry me. We'll fly two planes across the Atlantic, one after the other, but very close together. This time we'll go the other way, from Le Bourget to New York. Round trips, for both of us, when you add the two together.'

‘How long will that take?'

‘A day and a half, like the last time, if the weather and the winds are with us.'

‘Who will lead?'

‘I will. I know the way.'

Kate said nothing. Caleb took her silence for agreement. He went on:

‘There'll be a huge crowd waiting for us at Roosevelt Field. As it was two years ago in Paris. Only this time there'll be banners with our names on them.'

‘Both our names?'

‘Sure. They'll read, “Welcome Charles and Amelia Lindbergh.”

Kate sighed at the obliteration of her famous last name. But she decided to accept the inevitable demotion and dwell on the pleasures of the event.

‘It will be wonderful,' she said. ‘I can't wait.'

It is another warm evening. They sit on the veranda after supper. The bloated white faces of hydrangea bushes on each side of the steps shine up at them in the moonlight. Emma occupies the swing. Stretched out on the coarse hemp rug, the children are filled with unexpressed contentment. Once again they are renewing the ritual of their happy lives with their absorbed, silent mother.

Emma gets up.

‘I must do my needlepoint by a better light,' she says, and goes inside.

Relieved of her presence, although they always feel sure she hears very little of what they say to each other when she is near, Kate and Caleb move to the swing and take up their game.

Caleb creates their fictions. Kate listens, learns her assigned part, and feels pleased that her brother gives her a role. Often, persuaded by the bare facts of their mother's often-repeated history, they start their pretending by assuming they are happily married to each other.

Caleb begins: ‘Now about our daughter, the Samoan child …'

At dinner Emma had told them about a book review she had read in the
Tribune
. It was of a book by a lady who had lived among the Polynesians, a native people who wore almost no clothes.

Caleb's foot pushes on the floor to keep the swing moving. He asks Kate if she thinks their daughter—he calls her Polly—would consider covering herself with a blouse if they brought her from the South Seas to Far Rockaway. For some time, before the light dies away and Emma sends them upstairs, they debate the virtues and the dangers of permitting Polly to be partially unclothed in public. Would she lead a happy life playing croquet on Larch Street or walking down Main Street with them to get ice cream?

When Emma calls to them that it is bedtime, they make no protest. They kiss their mother and climb the stairs, Caleb leading the way. Taking advantage of the unlocked door between their bedrooms, they meet in Kate's room and lie side by side, fully clothed, on her bed. They continue the discussion of South Sea Island customs. But verbal invention does not satisfy them for very long. To illustrate the reality of their story, Caleb removes his blouse and undershirt and Kate her blouse and chemise. With pleasure, they inspect each other's similar flat chests. Caleb's small pink nipples are surrounded by golden hairs. Kate wets her finger and teases them into wayward patterns. Tickled, Caleb laughs and squirms but does not remove her hand.

Once Kate has replaced the little hairs, they begin to explore the intricacies of each other's ears. They play with their hands, admiring the elegance of their long fingers and pale, tapered nails. Entwining their legs, they raise their heads to examine their straight toes, their slender knees, the tender, inner curves of their ankles. Lying down again, they turn their attention to the little bunched fleshy knobs of their elbows and then the fine lines of their identical blond eyebrows.

Out of an unexpressed delicacy, the regions between their thighs remain untouched. They acknowledge a reticence about the single difference of which they are aware. It is that, but it is more. They do not wish to acknowledge any variation in their bodies that might distinguish them from each other. United by birth little more than a year apart, and by the circumstance of a single, uninvolved parent, into what seems to them a twinned sensibility, their love enables them to think of themselves as alike.

All this gentle, limited exploration, these excursions into the shallow declivities of their bodies, are accompanied by low, wordless sounds of pleasure. The two are amazed by the discovery of their physical similarities. The realization always delights Kate, who thinks it a wonderment that her body, inferior in strength to her brother's, should resemble his so closely in every other way. And Caleb: for him these nightly reminders of his sister's likeness to him are to become the foundation of his burgeoning sexuality. Those he will seek out and love as a young man will be like Kate in their slenderness, their small-boned elegance, their soft, blond hair and skin.