The Book of Knowledge (12 page)

Thus, the good-natured head counselor became the reluctant recipient of steamy summer secrets. Nurse Jody saw who failed to fulfill her duty policing the line during rest hour and, most urgently now, what camper or counselor seemed a likely suspect for the rash of missing objects people had reported all summer: scarves, compacts, pocket knives, small sums of money. But her gossip rarely led to action by camp officials. Harmony and a peaceful surface of life were too highly prized.

By summer's end, Nurse Jody's avidity in her role of reporter of small thieveries led to a gauze of suspicion falling upon almost everyone. Mr. Ehrlich was immune: he was absent from the camp grounds most of the day. Dr. Amiel too was safe, by virtue of the elevated nature of his profession protected against evil reports and immune to denigration.

As usual, the doctor was the last to arrive at the meeting in the Amusement Hall, followed closely by the nurse. Mrs. Ehrlich called for order.

‘We need to talk about the search,' she said. ‘Before everything is packed away.'

Rae nodded. ‘I think it might be a good idea to allocate a few hours tomorrow just for packing. Then one of us can walk around and inspect trunks for the missing stuff.' Rae's solution to a problem always involved allocation of ‘space' on her schedule chart. Results were achieved, she thought, in blocks of time in the present, today, not be vague projections into an unscheduled future.

‘Good idea. Yes,' said Mrs. Ehrlich.

Everybody nodded in agreement.

‘Second thing,' said Mrs. Ehrlich. ‘The banquet. The awards. Have you thought about them?'

Fritzie said: ‘We've settled on a few, the mediate ones. Loo. Frannie. Vivian. The gilt medals.'

‘Gold, not gilt,' Mrs. Ehrlich said testily. ‘And of course, the bronze pins for everyone else. You haven't forgotten the names of all of those?' Fritzie grinned broadly but said nothing, suggesting that once again she was willing to overlook the foolishness of indiscriminate pinning.

Rae noticed and said quickly: ‘No indeed, we haven't. Although we haven't decided what we will give them
for
this year.'

‘Good sportsmanship,' said Muggs glumly.

‘That was two years ago,' said Rae. She had total recall of camp events as far back as her first summer fifteen years ago.

‘What about “participation”?' said Will, the stern, broad-shouldered young woman who was a no-nonsense authority on field sports. She had introduced the newly laid down rules for girls' softball to the camp, and she captained one of the warring counselor teams that gave exhibitions after services on Saturday. Her name was Millicent Williams: since grade school she had demanded that everyone call her by the abbreviation of her last name.

‘Very good,' said Mrs. Ehrlich. ‘I like that.'

Rae smiled at Will. ‘Leave it to you to think of that. All those team members and all those substitutes
did
participate.'

Will smiled back. Her smile was rare, although she always felt comfortable at camp, relaxing every summer into the precise daily routine because she helped Rae with the scheduling. It was a favorable spot for her, since she was firmly on the side of land games and felt no sympathy for water sports. She was deathly afraid of the water.

The usual scheduling argument began. Hozzle wanted extra periods today at the waterfront to complete junior lifesaving tests. Will made her customary protest against them, appealing on theoretical grounds.

‘Human beings were meant to walk on land,' she said in her low, flinty voice. ‘Not to move by thrashing around in water.'

‘Water was first, I believe,' said Hozzle happily. She had spent the warm, sunny summer in perfect contentment at the waterfront. Eight hours of the day she wore her yellow, belted tank bathing suit, her flat bare feet always wet, her short blond hair plastered behind her ears, her bloodshot eyes glued to the lake where pairs of little swimmers—‘buddies,' she called them—paddled about. She took swimming and diving very seriously. In her zeal, she wanted to convert everyone at the camp to exercising in aquatic ways.

‘Only for the lowest forms of life,' said Will. ‘The higher ones showed their superiority by crawling out of the muck, standing up, and entering civilization. They never went back.'

‘Nuts,' said Hozzle. It was her most daring public expletive.

Rae assumed her concilatory role. ‘Why don't we divide the time equally? That's what the juniors are going to do. And the seniors are off on their hike. And all the little kids can have free time to finish their lariats and belts.'

‘Oh let's.' Mrs. Ehrlich was always in favor of activities that called for safe, sedentary effort.

‘I do like “participation,” Will,' said Rae. She wrote the word on top of her schedule form. ‘It makes it sound like everyone has been included in everything, all summer.'

‘Wonderful,' said the directress.

Fritzie decided not to let the matter pass that easily. ‘Or it could mean we are rewarding everyone, even those who thought about participating but didn't. Or Roz, who probably should have a pin for steadfastly
not
thinking about it, and not participating.'

‘Of course, of course,' said Mrs. Ehrlich, who was, at season's end, quick to agree. Her flabby powers of comprehension continually rode piggyback on the definitions and distinctions others made, making her seem amiable by nature. In reality she could not distinguish between ideas, precise meanings escaped her entirely, and implication was too subtle for her ever to catch. Without Rae at her side, the loose material of her mind never hardened into understanding.

‘Now about the medical reports for parents …' Rae looked at Dr. Amiel, who was occupied in tying his overlong sneaker laces into triple knots. ‘We need a slip for each camper. General health, weight, that kind of thing. Can you get those ready quickly so I can hand them out at the depot when we deliver the little darlings to their eager folks?'

The doctor looked up, startled. For the first time all summer he had been awakened from his Eden of idleness.

‘Guess so. Send them to be weighed this afternoon and tomorrow. But
general health?
Wow. Do they all have to be different?'

‘I should hope so,' said Mrs. Ehrlich primly. ‘They're all separate persons, aren't they? We pride ourselves on developing their individuality.'

‘No, Doctor,' said Rae softly, over Mrs. Ehrlich's voice. ‘Just three categories.
Good. Excellent
. And
Improving
. That sort of thing.'

In a loud whisper, Fritzie said to the doctor: ‘How about a fourth?
Participating
in health?'

‘Okay,' said the doctor, and laughed. He stood up to indicate that his part of the meeting was over, afraid that someone would suggest another terminal activity that would occupy the time he was planning to spend with Dolly. Nurse Jody stood up.

‘Okay,' he said again. ‘I can do that.'

Rae said: ‘Fine. I'll schedule the girls to come to the Infirmary.'

Mrs. Ehrlich said to the doctor: ‘I'll go down the line with you. I want you to take a peek at Oscar's sty.'

‘Another one?'

‘Yes. This one looks very angry to me.'

Mrs. Ehrlich went down the steps, her tiny hand on Dr. Amiel's arm. Her feet looked inappropriately small under the vast, starched canopy of her white dress and her thick, tubular, white-stockinged legs.

The counselors pushed back their chairs.

Rae said, ‘And, oh yes, one other thing. About the trunk inspection. Who'll volunteer to do it?'

‘I will,' said Muggs.

Born Margaret Stewart, Muggs was the only wealthy counselor on the staff, a fact unknown to all the others. She had grown up in a brownstone house near Washington Square in New York City with her father, her mother having died at her birth. Peter Stewart was a corporation lawyer who, as a desirable bachelor, dined out a great deal. He attended a great many conventions and professional meetings and sat on a number of corporation boards which met in various parts of the country.

People told Margaret that her life history was somewhat comparable to that of the heroine in a famous Henry James novel. She made it a point not to look it up. An only child of a single parent, she wanted to feel the uniqueness of her lonely state, only dimly connected to a series of distant aunts, indifferent housekeepers, and cooks.

So she had relished the idea of going to a camp, a community in which her usual state of isolation and her solitary habits could be suspended for the summer. She had grown weary of walking the small, crooked streets of Greenwich Village and studying American Indian Arts at dingy nearby New York University. During her junior year in college, she answered a newspaper ad and was offered a job as arts and crafts counselor at Camp Clear Lake. She was pleased.

Once there she made no friends. It was her conviction that her appearance was her trouble. Her long, forbidding nose seemed to point far out into the space before her. Then her face fell away precipitously to her neck, her thin mouth having, it seemed to her, too little force to command a chin. This combination of too much nose and too little chin made her appear stupid and vulnerable.

She was, of course, neither. Her dearest wish was to convince others that she was worthy of their interest and affection, but she had never succeeded. For three years now, as a junior counselor who taught crafts, she was not able to acquire even a small following of admirers among the campers, unlike the other counselors. She mourned her inability to rise above the misfortune of her looks.

One thing about her physical self
was
interesting: she was the proud possessor of a distinguishing feature, the high arch of her feet. Fritzie once said to her, watching her pose her feet at the dock: ‘You ought to be a ballet dancer.' Muggs stretched again and waited for notice to be taken of her even, unmarked toes and the exalted span of her arches. But after the first admiring remarks, her feet came to be accepted as the normal, if curious, appendages to an unusually homely woman, an odd inclusion rather than an ameliorating fact.

Muggs had hoped to shed her ugly nickname. In a weak moment she once suggested to Fritzie that if she had to have a nickname, she be called Archie. Agreeably, Fritzie tried this moniker a number of times within earshot of campers. But it did not stick. Muggs she remained, homely bearer of what sounded to its victim like the name of a comic strip character.

At the arts and crafts bungalow a diverse gathering of campers—freshmen, juniors, and mediates—waited for Muggs to unlock the door. They were unaccustomed to her being late. Indeed, some of the younger freshmen thought the dour, funny-looking counselor lived in the A&C building: she seemed always to be there. The campers stamped around the front door, trying it again and again and finding it closed against them as if it were protecting their precious half-finished presents.

‘She's late,' whispered Muriel to the absent Ruth, the one person to whom she always spoke these days. Ruth's departure from camp had never stopped Muriel from communicating with her. She believed that she and Ruth were combining their efforts to finish the purse for their mother, having caught, skinned, tanned, and sewn the skin of a large garter snake. As the purse neared completion, it had become smaller and smaller, until now even coins as small as dimes might turn out to be too great a burden for it.

Nonetheless the twins (as Muriel thought of herself) were impatient to finish it. It was the first time they had ever made anything for their mother. Jean, standing beside Muriel, had left the hockey field early (she was her team's best right wing) so that she could complete the belt she was making, secretly, for her cousin, to whom she had become devoted. Away from her mother, Jean had turned into an agreeable, charming child, attractive to her friends, a good sport and a well-coordinated, natural athlete and swimmer. But she set little store by these virtues, regarding Roslyn, her dark,
smart
, glowering cousin, as the model of perfection.

‘Unlock the door! Let us in!' the campers shouted as Muggs approached the bungalow. She told them to step aside. The freshmen squirmed their way past her as she opened the door. The others followed, filling the long benches at the work tables. Quiet settled over the intent young workers in rawhide, birch bark, leather, and snakeskin.

Muggs walked around behind them, helping them with difficult corners and tying hard knots. She tried to hide her boredom with the awkward processes that produced the misshaped objects: too small, too short, too fragile to hold together. But, still, they were love offerings to be given to parents who would regard the worthless gifts with loudly expressed admiration. She foresaw the scene day after tomorrow at the Hoboken station:

‘Look, Mom, what I made. I did one for Dad too.
Look
.' The prophetic vision somehow managed to sour Muggs's disposition, underlining her already strong sense of exclusion from family and friends, from, indeed, the human race in general.

‘Not that side,' Muggs said to Jean's bunkie, Laurie, one of the few non-New Yorkers among the campers. She came from a coal-mining town in Pennsylvania and was the only daughter of the town's banking family.

‘That side stays open. So money can be put in it.'

Laurie blushed, realizing that she was sewing up the fourth side of her mother's coin purse. Muggs started to help her rip out the heavy leather lacing, and then thought better of it. She decided against altruism.

‘What the hell,' she said to herself. ‘Let the dopey kid struggle with it. Such is life.' She laughed to herself. ‘A purse with no opening might be just the thing for the spendthrift wife of a banker.'

Work proceeded in silence. The sense that they were nearing the end of this activity for the summer drove the young campers forward without their usual chatter. Only one girl, Cindy, from Brooklyn, worked noisily, whispering to the girl beside her, who did not reply. Cindy Maggio's geographic origins created much amusement among her Manhattan bunkmates, who told her they thought they would need to be vaccinated before they could come to visit her in the winter.