The Book of Knowledge (24 page)

To underline her sacrificial approach to life, she told him that a neighbor in the apartment house, a widower named Ben Janowitz whom she had met seated in the sun on the Broadway benches, had suggested to her that they might marry. But it was impossible, she had told him. In deference to her concerns for Lionel and to the memory of her beloved Lester, she had turned him down.

Lionel sighed, and made no response to this blighted prospect for his freedom.

On Saturday (he had been home three days) he could bear her constant presence no longer. He telephoned Roslyn Hellman and asked her if she would like to see a play with him in New York.

They had not met in more than a year. In front of the Maxine Elliott Theater they embraced and then stood back to inspect each other. Lionel was chagrined to see that Roslyn seemed to be taller than he; Roslyn noticed only Lionel's fair hair and skin, and wondered if he yet was able to grow a beard.

On line to get standing-room tickets—
The Children's Hour
was a successful play with no seats to be had on Saturday night, especially the fifty-five-cent ones they could afford—the two old friends brought each other up to date on their lives. Roslyn was full of stories about the inadequacies of her parents. She had no good words for Brooklyn College, which was still struggling to become established. Some of the buildings were still without heat in this terribly cold winter.

‘I hate living at home,' she told him. ‘But I have no choice, what with so little money and all. Even so, I had to wait more than a year to enter. Butchers aren't paid the way brokers were, you know. But my parents are thinking of moving to Miami Beach next year, where my aunt and uncle have a winter house. It's cheap there, no heating bills to worry about, no winter clothes, all that sort of thing. My father thinks he might find some sort of part-time work down there. I think they'll be able to manage. Some of their friends have started to vacation down there in winter.'

‘That's wonderful,' said Lionel, inching closer to the box office. ‘Then you'll be free.'

‘Well, yes, free, but pretty poor. I'll have to get a job while I finish college. I'll have to find a cheap place to live, in Brooklyn yet,' she added, in a tone that suggested she would then be condemned to Siberian exile.

They were lucky: they got the last two standing-room tickets and found themselves in the second row of standees with a good view of the stage. The play, set in a girls' boarding school, started slowly. Standing close, the two friends shifted about, trying to get into comfortable positions. But when it became clear that the evil pupil had thought up a vengeful accusation against two of the women teachers, their attention was fastened to the stage. They hardly moved again.

After the climactic second act, they went into the lobby, hoping to spot some departees whose seats they might claim for the last act.

‘It's an interesting play, isn't it?' said Lionel, his eyes on the crowd.

‘Yes, very. And surprising, shocking in a way, for Broadway. Do you think the two women, well, you know, really love each other?'

‘I think the one does. The one who wants to marry, I suppose, does not.'

Roslyn was silent. She had a sudden vision of herself walking beside Fritzie years ago, through the black night woods of the camp, waiting to hear her counselor's response to her passionate letter.

‘Don't you agree?' Lionel saw himself sitting on the parapet over Cascadilla Falls waiting for Caleb to come to take him to dinner, worrying that he would arrive emptied, suddenly, inexplicably, of the measure of love he had expressed the day before.

‘I do, of course I do. But how do you think it will end?'

‘As plays like this usually do, I suppose. The one will marry that guy, and the other will look around for someone else. Most of these plays end happily, or they wouldn't be hits on Broadway.'

Lights flickered, signaling the start of the third act. They went back in, to stand in the newly opened spaces in the front row of the back of the orchestra. Vicariously, painfully, they entered into the ruined life of the woman on the stage who was unable to bear any longer the truth about herself.

The suicide of the homosexual teacher that brought Lillian Hellman's play to its conclusion stunned them. They walked to the corner of Forty-fourth Street and went into Child's on Broadway to have coffee before Roslyn took the subway home.

At first they said nothing, stirring cream and sugar into their full cups, mopping up the overflow with napkins, and trying to ignore conversation. They were still captives of the emotions the play had aroused in them.

Lionel broke the silence with the only noncommittal question he could think of: ‘Are you by any chance a relative of the playwright's?'

Roslyn laughed, relieved that the spell of introspection had been broken. ‘Not that I know of,' she said. ‘It would be nice, though. She's very good, don't you think?'

Lionel did not reply. In his mind, he had moved far away, into the bedroom in Telluride that first evening when he and Caleb had lain together on Caleb's bed. In the silence that followed, they both felt a desire to relate their histories to the other. Roslyn wanted to say that she had once had a crush on a camp counselor. Lionel wanted to say, ‘I am gloriously, madly in love with Caleb Flowers.'

But neither of them said anything, perhaps because they were unaccustomed to the luxury of baring their souls. Or it may be that they feared the burden of confession, the bestowing of any part of themselves on the other to carry away from this evening.

The surface of Caleb's return to his family was pleasant. His mother seemed to be in good spirits. Her deafness had increased to the point that communication was difficult, but still, she smiled whenever her eyes rested on him and reached out to touch him whenever he came close to her. He felt wanted, he sank back into the old security of being the beloved son.

Emma was now obese and had lost her mobility. Stationary in her overstuffed living-room chair from early morning, her swollen feet elevated on a stool, her now rarely opened library book on the table beside her, she seemed to Caleb to be Buddhalike in her apparent contentment. Her eyes were always on him, waiting for him to sit beside her and tell her tales of life at college. At other times, she appeared to be waiting impatiently for Kate to serve her meals on the card table pulled up to her chair in front of the fireplace.

It seemed to him that his mother had buried the history of her early life in layers of fat. Nothing could be sensed of her inner being. He saw only the constant, inappropriate smile she never allowed to vary. Her thoughts, if indeed she entertained any, were invisible, protected from expression by her overabundant flesh and the tight harness of deafness.

At dinner, Caleb and Kate sat beside her at the card table, the small square of space overcrowded by their plates and cups. At these moments they must have appeared to be bound together, he thought, united as they had been before his departure, into a claustrophobic family circle.

The newspaper photograph of the Great War soldier no longer sat on the mantelpiece. Caleb wondered who had removed it, but he did not inquire. It was as if Private First Class Edmund Flowers had vanished from the house on Larch Street he had purchased for his family, and from the memory of his mammoth, now-silent wife. The myth that had first entertained him and Kate during their early years and then had been wiped out on the train ride home from Lester Schwartz's funeral was never mentioned again.

Kate had been determined to make Caleb's return an occasion of celebration. She cooked his favorite food and, when Emma had gone up early to bed, she sat beside him on the sofa. Almost timidly, as if she had never done this before, she reached for his hand. He took it in his, but when she turned her delighted eyes upon him she saw he was looking at the mantel, not at her.

After a moment, he took away his hand and reached into his breast pocket for a crumpled pack of Camels. To Kate the removal had the effect of a blow. She flushed and looked down at her hands, which she now folded decorously in her lap. Caleb did not notice. He thought he had succeeded in making his move a simple indication of his intention to smoke.

‘Do you know who I met at school? Lionel Schwartz. Remember him?'

‘Yes. I remember playing with him one summer. I remember we called him Lion. Then we went to his father's funeral in the City.'

‘Well, he's now a freshman in the Ag school. He's … he's very nice. We see a lot of each other.'

‘Does he look the same? I remember him as skinny and very blond. Odd for a Jew, Moth once said.'

‘Just the same. He's quite handsome, and very bright. He wants to study architecture.'

Kate was silent. She realized too late that she had revealed her animus against a friend of Caleb's by her racial reference, but she could not help herself. Three years apart from her brother had failed to lower her fevered feelings for him. To the contrary, his absence had intensified her longing for his old, warm, promising presence in her life.

In Kate's most fervent fantasy, Caleb would come back to her, a wise and needy Odysseus. He would return to Far Rockaway to take his old place in her bed, sharing the games of imagination she had been forced to play alone as the faithful Penelope, the patient Griselda, and the famous brides of Christ, like Saint Theresa, who sought solitude in which to wait for their Bridegroom to claim them.

Kate fantasized that she would no longer have to resort to lonely release. He would be there as of old, still feeling and looking so much like her that he seemed close to being her twin, a mirror-image lover. She knew that she was too old for such pretense, that Caleb had changed. His hair had darkened, he was far taller and broader than she, but there was always the rest … the imagined consummation of their love.

Suddenly she thought to ask: ‘Do you have a girl up there?'

‘A girl? No.'

‘Not even one?'

‘Not even one. I don't go in for that sort of thing. I have too much work.'

‘Don't you ever go out to dinner, or to the movies in the evening, things like that?'

‘Well, yes I do. Often, with Lionel.'

Kate was flooded with relief. There was no girl to separate him from her. He would return. She was afraid to inquire about his plans for the future. But she felt sure now that he would come back. She had only one more school semester to wait. Like Penelope, like Griselda, she would wait patiently.

After spring recess, Lionel settled down to finishing his papers and lab reports. Caleb, his course work almost completed and his senior thesis, on Geoffrey Chaucer's life in the customs house, delivered to a faculty reader, was forced by the approach of graduation to think about what he would do next. He had applied to stay on for another year at Telluride, citing his desire to go to graduate school in the English department, but he had not heard from the chancellor about it.

In April they found an evening they could both spare from work. They met at the closest bar, the Chapter House, down Stewart Avenue and close to Williams Street, where they had roomed for a short time during the recess. It was a favorite rendezvous spot because few students were there in the late evenings, and the townspeople who frequented it paid no attention to them. They sat in a corner where there was almost no light and shared a bottle of ale.

The pretense they had managed to maintain until now was that the future had no existence, no reality. It would not arrive, not for them. In their state of felicity with each other, the thought of an interruption to this condition was inconceivable. Caleb knew, although he did not say this to anyone, that his plan to stay on another year was based on his desire to prolong what he had found in Lionel: friendship, wonderful physical pleasure, and a conviction that he was capable of love apart and away from his boyhood tie to his sister.

Lionel asked if he had heard anything about the English fellowship.

‘Not a word. But I only sent my application in to the master's program last week. I asked about a scholarship, but I'm not too hopeful. Depends pretty much on who else is applying, especially from the outside. We'll see. It might be a while before I hear. But I did hear that there's a job I could get as a book runner in the library. That would pay some of my expenses in case nothing else comes through.'

Lionel smiled. ‘If nothing else comes through, as you say, for the rest of my life but us, I will be content,' he said in his high, soft voice that made his usual formal diction even more pleasant to Caleb.

‘Right. Oh so right,' said Caleb, wanting to touch the light down on Lionel's fine cheek but knowing he could not do it in this public place. Instead, he put some coins down under his napkin and stood up.

‘Time, gentlemen, please,' he said to Lionel in his newly acquired English accent. ‘I've got an exam tomorrow.'

They walked slowly up Stewart Avenue until they came to Boardman Hall. Then, as was their custom, they took a dirt path through the quadrangle to the steps of Goldwin Smith. In the safety of the shadows of the long, dark stone building they said good night, their arms around each other, their faces and lips pressed so close they could hardly breathe.

It was then that they saw the light streaming from an upper window of the building. Caleb stepped out of the shadows to look up.

‘That's Professor Lang's office. Probably working late. It's the only light on in the whole building.'

‘I'll be on my way, love,' said Lionel. ‘You don't have to walk me home.'

But of course, as always, Caleb did. On his way back, he saw that, glowing dimly now at this distance, a light was still lit in Goldwin Smith.

The doors to Goldwin Smith were roped off when Caleb arrived the next morning a few minutes before eight o'clock, when he was due to take his final examination in Latin literature. Two campus policemen stood at the sawhorses and a group of his classmates formed a close semicircle around them. A police car and an ambulance were on the grass.