The Book of Knowledge (22 page)

Emma, always oblivious to the small dramas being played out in her presence, now noticed very little of Kate's retreat from Caleb or of Caleb's forced cheerfulness. With few demands upon her attention, she aged fast and became almost totally deaf. She seemed to have retired into the envelope of her self: her appetite and her pleasure at Caleb's occasional presence her only visible responses beyond the tray placed before her to hold her meals.

Silent as falling snow, she sank into somnolence and weight.

Late one evening, at the start of his senior year in Telluride, Caleb was called to the telephone. Expecting it to be Kate, he was startled by the masculine voice.

‘Remember me? Lionel Schwartz? From that summer at the beach before the Crash?

‘Of course. Where are you?'

‘I'm in Baker Tower. I've just got here. I called your home, and your sister told me where to find you.'

‘Wonderful. It'll be great to see you again. Let's have dinner together. How about tomorrow? Are you free? Can you come here?'

‘Where is here?'

‘Telluride House. On West Avenue. Not far from you. Where are your classes? Mostly in Goldwin Smith?'

‘No. Down the way. I'm in the College of Agriculture.'

There was a pause.

‘Oh. Yes,' said Caleb. ‘Well, if you're coming from a class on the Ag campus, take Tower Road back to the library, where the clock tower is. I'll meet you there on the steps. Five-thirty okay?'

‘Fine. I'll be there.'

‘Oh, and wear a tie and jacket. We're required to dress for dinner.'

‘Okay.'

‘See you then.'

Caleb and Lionel shook hands awkwardly on the library steps. Saying very little, they sat for a few moments on a stone bench to recover from their feelings of strangeness. Caleb recalled the Lion of old, the shy boy who had built residential structures in the sand. Lionel remembered the big handsome boy who had pulled his sister out of the surf when they all played lemmings. They began to talk of those summer days, contributing their most baneful memories of every event. Caleb was sure that Roslyn Hellman had been the curse of their existence. Lionel remembered Kate as Caleb's devoted and intrepid follower.

‘Shall I call you Lionel, or Lion, as we used to?'

‘Lionel. I've always rather liked Lion. But my mother hated it. She said it didn't suit me. Perhaps she was right.'

Lionel was still very slight. His bones seemed to be lighter and more flexible, his skin thinner and more blond than Caleb remembered. His hair, eyebrows, and lashes were still almost the color of his skin, his lips slender and very red, shaped like an equals sign, Caleb thought. His shapely head seemed not to have changed; he had the same small, flat ears that looked as if they had been drawn on his head, and the same fine, narrow, straight nose. Caleb could not prevent himself from staring at him. It was astonishing: he looked very much like Kate.

‘How is your sister?' Lionel asked, as if he had read Caleb's mind.

‘Kate's fine.'

‘Where is she going to college?'

‘She didn't go. She's at home with Mother.'

‘Working in Far Rockaway?'

‘Um, no. Not really. My mother hasn't been well. Kate does a great deal for her.'

‘Oh, I'm sorry. I remember your mother clearly. She was very nice to us that summer.'

There was a long pause. Caleb thought briefly about Kate, that yearning look in her eyes, cooking, doing the laundry, bathing and dressing Moth, walking to the store. Lionel thought about Emma giving them lemonade on the veranda on Larch Street.

Caleb looked at his watch. ‘We'd better start over to dinner.'

After dinner, which was served by student waiters to the well-dressed, mannerly residents, Caleb took Lionel into the sitting room, where many of the diners had moved into the heavy leather chairs. They were drinking coffee, smoking cigarettes, and listening to a senior geology student describe the stratification of rock at Cascadilla Falls.

A little way into the talk, Caleb and Lionel looked at each other, displaying a silent, shared boredom with the subject. But they stayed in their seats until the discussion period began.

‘Like to see my room?' Caleb whispered. Lionel had been listening intently to the questions. Everyone in the room but him seemed engrossed in some arcane detail of the talk.

On the way upstairs, he asked: ‘Are they all geology students?'

‘Oh, no. William is the only one. We all have to give a talk now and then about what we're studying. But we do find ourselves getting interested in each other's work. That's why they're asking all those questions.'

‘That's something. In Willard Straight, where I had dinner last night, all I heard talked about was how St. Louis would probably end up playing Detroit in the World Series. And a lot about the local football team. They call it the Red Tide. Or some such thing. All very boring to me.'

‘What are you interested in?'

‘Architecture. I've always been. I'm in Ag because it costs very little and I can get some electives over here. But I've got to take a lot of other stuff—physics, botany, economics, food and nutrition, that kind of thing—in order to stay in the college. And you?

‘Classical and medieval literature. There's a great man here, Lane Cooper. I've been lucky to have two courses with him.'

‘What will you do with that, as my mother would say?'

‘Nothing, I suppose, unless I go on.'

‘Will you?'

‘Who knows? I'd like to. But it's not easy to get fellowships now. People are fighting for them.'

‘Are you in ROTC?'

‘God, no. Are you?'

‘Well, yes, I've enrolled in it. We're required to take Military Science and Tactics. So it made sense to take that too. It's good exercise if nothing else.'

‘Do you have to take a language?'

‘No, I don't think so.'

‘Too bad.

‘Do you?'

‘I've had French all along, three years of it. Last year it was French poetry with a fellow named Lang. Alexander Lang. Have you heard of him?'

‘No, I haven't.'

‘Well, he's awfully good, a wonderful teacher, in fact. Speaks such perfect French that it's hard to believe he was born here, in Scranton, Pennsylvania, he told us when someone asked what part of France he was from. He's been at Cornell for three or four years, but he goes to France every summer, the day after school closes, I've heard.'

‘I may have seen him in Straight. What does he look like?'

‘He's funny-looking, tall and sort of very thin with quite long, yellow hair and a little pointed brown beard.'

‘Oh yes, does he wear a flower in his buttonhole? I think I have seen him.'

In this desultory way they talked on about college matters, Caleb sitting on his bed with a pillow propped up on the wall behind him, Lionel sunk down in the leather seat of the crate-like wooden chair.

‘Frank Lloyd Wright comfort,' Lionel said. ‘But it looks very nice.'

‘Who is that?'

‘An architect in the Middle West who designs all the furniture in his houses to match the design of the house. Sometimes he builds it all into the house itself.'

Under the surface of their rambling conversation there moved a subterranean current of wonder. Lionel had discovered a curious, unexplainable attraction to Caleb's rugged, sun-browned face and solid, almost square-appearing body. He wanted to touch him, to stroke his straight brown hair back from his forehead. And Caleb: to his amazement he found himself watching Lionel's every move, more aware of the easy, graceful motions of his head and hands than he was of his talk. Was he thinking of Kate? he wondered. Or was he now transferring his boyhood regard for her to this boy, no, man, who looked so much like her?

At ten o'clock, Caleb suggested that he walk Lionel halfway back to his dorm. Downstairs the rooms were deserted, and outside on West Avenue only the shadows made by the lamps standing high and parallel to the great oak trees crossed their path. At the doorway to McFadden Hall, Lionel turned to Caleb.

‘This is about halfway. You don't need to come any farther. It's been great. Thank you so much for asking me.'

Lionel reached out to take Caleb's hand. Impetuously, almost without a thought (afterwards, on his way home alone, he was to question himself about how it happened, how he came to do it, what had prompted his injudicious move), Caleb ignored Lionel's outstretched hand and put his arm around him, pulling him awkwardly off balance and close to him. Startled, Lionel put his arms up to return the gesture. In the dark night, beyond the reach of the dim West Avenue streetlight, they hugged each other and, by a kind of extraordinary mutual agreement, stayed in each other's arms longer than the occasion called for or the parting justified.

There are times in every life when a gesture goes beyond thought, when two persons reach instinctively into the future at once without giving thought to the present and with no reference to the past, indeed, to anything that has gone before. At such a time the actors are not prepared for what they have done, are not aware, until it has happened, that they will do it. And yet, so significant is the movement that it turns lives against their expected direction, away from the purposes they had intended to serve, and toward an unforeseen, even dangerous future.

Such was the nature of the embrace that Lionel and Caleb exchanged. Embarrassed and frightened, they separated, nodded formally to each other, and walked away in opposite directions, making no plans to meet again, saying nothing beyond an abrupt good night. It was as if they had been caught in a riptide of feeling that had come upon them with no warning. There was nothing for them to do but to struggle against its hold without trying to understand its cause, and, most of all, its effects.

Lionel found it hard to sleep that night. He finished reading the assignment in his botany text, turned out the bed light, and lay for a long time without closing his eyes. On the blank wall of his room he thought he could see the outline of Caleb's body. The warmth he had felt coming from the hug of their parting made him shiver now in his bed. He could not bring himself to advance beyond feeling into sense.

‘I don't know what to make of this,' he thought.

He decided he could not deal with it in his tired, confused state.

‘Tomorrow,' he said to himself. ‘Tomorrow I'll go back over it and see what I did. What he did. What we did. What it all meant.'

Caleb's excitement was so great that he could not go back to his room. He turned off West Avenue onto the New Road and walked down Central Avenue to Cascadilla Creek. At the bridge over the falls, he stopped and leaned against the railing. The place was congenial to his mood, for the rush of water under his feet matched the maelstrom in his head. The cool air of the September night, mingled with the cold mist that rose from the falls, dried the perspiration that had formed on his face and neck. Looking down made him feel sick, so he turned and braced himself up onto the stone wall, sitting with his back to the fierce white water below.

Caleb's surprise at the embrace was not as great as Lionel's. He was aware that it was at his instigation it had happened. He might be called the perpetrator, he thought, the leader, the officer who ordered the action, and Lionel merely the foot soldier, the enlisted man. Now that he considered it, at a safe, cold distance from Lionel, in this vertiginous no man's land removed from the heat of the moment, he saw that it had all begun when first they met on the library steps and he had been struck by how much Lionel looked like Kate, how his soft-appearing blond skin and bright blue eyes, even his fragile-seeming body, were echoes of hers. So much did he resemble her that, most startling of all, he seemed to be of her sex.

This confusion of images, superimposing the picture of his once so beloved sister upon the presence of the boyish Lionel, left Caleb without the resources to sort out what he was feeling, what he had felt all evening as he sat across from Lionel at dinner, and in his room, and then walked with him toward the dorm and, in that one moment of unfathomable impulse, reached out and took him into his arms.

He knew what it was, not a hug, not a simple, comradely embrace, but the response to a need to hold Lionel close, a desire he could not remember feeling before, except perhaps from a distance, for other men. Never before had it struck him so immediately, so keenly, as tonight. He thought of lying in his sister's bed impelled toward her by the strangeness of his desire and her innocent but willing presence. First his sister. Now Lionel …

‘What is it with me?' he said to himself. ‘Why am I so … odd? How in God's name will I end up?'

After a week, during which he had studied hard and spent more time than usual running around the Schoelkopf track, racing against the times he had set for himself, Caleb could no longer put off his need to see Lionel again. He called the number in Baker Tower but could not manage to get through; the lines were always busy. When he finally reached someone, an anonymous voice took the message that Caleb Flowers had called and wanted Lionel Schwartz to call back, preferably at dinnertime.

He waited five days, coming to dinner early and staying long at the table in conversation with anyone willing to linger, in order to wait out the time a return call might possibly be made. But it did not come. Disheartened, he gave up and decided to walk to Lionel's dorm to see if he could meet him coming in or going out, or even find him in his room at the end of the day.

Miraculously, Lionel was there, and he came down after a floormate went to tell him of Caleb's presence downstairs in the common room.

To Caleb he looked wonderful. His cheeks and lips were very red and his damp hair darker than usual: he had just showered and shaved. His starched white shirt was open at the neck, and he wore freshly pressed brown wool trousers. His brown-tipped shoes gleamed in the light from the chandelier.