The Book of Knowledge (3 page)

So it was in late June of 1929 that the Flowers children made their new friends from the City. School had provided them with few congenial companions, and the neighbors on their street were elderly, or childless couples or spinsters and bachelors. Emma thought perhaps Kate and Caleb's preference for each other had discouraged children from approaching them.

Their new friends, Lionel Schwartz, whom they called Lion despite the unsuitability of the nickname to his gentle nature and small, unassertive frame, and Roslyn Hellman, were vacationing a street away. The four children discovered each other almost at once, the way children do, by means of an uncanny, generational sense that made them move toward one another.

No such attraction operated among the adults. They made no efforts to become acquainted. Emma thought:

‘Summer renters. From the sound of their names they must be Jewish. I have no reason to get to know them.'

But she was pleased for her children. This summer, she decided, it would be good for them to have playmates other than themselves. Comfortable as she found their contented exclusivity, occasionally she wondered about it. Then she dismissed her moment of concern as foolish. She knew she preferred having them always at home with her and with each other. Their quiet mutuality suited her own fondness for quiet and order. But still …

Roslyn Hellman was a little older than Caleb. She was taller and more solidly built. Her straight black hair reached down her back to her waist, her eyes were large and black, her nose was high-bridged and prominent, giving her an air of natural superiority. She had spent the summer before at a girls' camp in the Catskills, where she had acquired a taste for playing the main part in the Saturday-night plays and an active dislike of all sports on land and in the water if she was not selected as captain.

Almost from her first day in Far Rockaway, Roslyn became the leader of the children in their games, the self-appointed president of their club. Indeed, it had been her idea to form a club, which she named ‘the Talkies,' a word she came upon in the
New York Times
to describe a new kind of motion picture. When they were all together, in midmorning, and seated cross-legged in a circle on the Hellmans' grass, she would call the Talkies to order and announce the game for the day. This strict scheduling she had learned from the head counselor at her camp. She found that coming to the circle with a plan awed the others. She would allow no challenge to her choice of entertainment. Only Caleb occasionally got up his courage to question her authority. But in the long run her firm posture of certainty defeated him.

Lionel, the youngest of the four, was shy. His hair, eyebrows, and lashes were white, as if even slight coloration would appear to be too assertive. If he had not been so young he would have been taken for an albino or regarded as a child struck a great blow by the sun. He was almost a head shorter than Roslyn. Perhaps because of this disparity, or it may have been her manner of superiority, she was the object of his unquestioning admiration. The two had been friends in the City. They lived in the same apartment house on West Eighty-sixth Street and played stoopball against the facade of their building. In the late spring they squatted in the little square of earth that surrounded the plane tree to the side of their doorway and aimed their immies against a root in hopes that they would rebound and strike another marble out of the square. It was Roslyn, with her natural sense of the ironic, who had nicknamed him Lion. She relished his willingness to be her obedient follower.

Their fathers both worked ‘in the market' in the City, Roslyn informed the Flowers children. Lion phrased it differently:

‘My father works on the Street,' he told them.

Kate had no idea what sort of work was done in these places. She wondered whether there could be different names for the same place. Perhaps Roslyn's father sold cod and haddock and mackerel; the fish market on Central Avenue owned by Mr. Elderly was the only kind of market she had ever seen. She pictured Mr. Hellman wrapping a flounder in damp newspapers for a customer to take home and keep fresh in the cold water of the bathtub. This, of course, was what Moth always did. She kept it captive there all day until it was time to decapitate it, remove the scales and tail, and bake it in the oven. Kate told Caleb she wondered if the bathtubs in Roslyn's house were filled with fish.

Caleb knew better. He had read about the stock market in the business section of the
Tribune
and he knew that men traded there with each other, although he was not sure what changed hands on Wall Street. Kate thought his explanation of the words most unlikely. She had already conjured up a vision of Mr. Schwartz's street work: he must empty trash-filled gutters with a large dustpan and broom into a tin garbage container on wheels that he pushed ahead of him through the fish markets. Caleb said both surmises were foolish. Men who dressed every morning in black suits and brown fedoras and drove to their work in a touring car did not sell fish or clean streets. Of course, he said, they could be gangsters who went from street to street, and market to market, forcing merchants at gunpoint to pay for protection. He had read about Al Capone in Chicago, whose gang had ‘rubbed out' seven members of the Moran gang in a dispute over just such matters: ‘turf warfare' it was called.

Whatever it was the fathers did, they left together every weekday morning and returned, saying they felt dusty and weary, and needing a rest and a bath, in the late afternoon. Then Caleb and Kate knew it was time for them to leave the broad lawns that stretched across the two houses on Linden Street and walk under darkening oak branches and colorless sky around the corner to their own house. There they waited in the swing until dinnertime, holding hands, relieved to be alone together, absorbed in themselves and each other.

At dinner they told their mother that Mr. Schwartz had brought Lion a tennis racket from the City. Emma was silent. Then she said she regretted they did not have a father to come home to them bearing presents. The children left their chairs to come around the table. They hugged her from either side and assured her it did not matter in the least to them. She was a good father as well as a good mother, Caleb told her. Emma was pleased by the tribute. She hugged them and called them ‘my angels.'

Soon after their arrival on Linden Street that summer, Roslyn and Lionel invented a private means of communication between their houses. Across a narrow strip of grass, their bedroom windows faced each other. They strung picture wire through the bottoms of round Mothers Oats containers. By means of these cardboard receivers they conversed for a while after their bedtimes.

Lionel's shy voice, ordinarily very light and segueing to a whisper at the end of his sentences, became strong while speaking on their wire, much as adult users of the early telephone shouted because they did not understand the operation of sound waves and wire. Roslyn and Lionel spoke very loudly despite their belief that their system worked well. So they heard each other clearly over the distance, permitting them to confide secrets they would not have shared under ordinary conditions, unaware that their parents, enjoying the cool air on their porches, listened to the innocent revelations of their children, smiling at their charming confidences.

After a week of playing together, Roslyn and Lionel spent an afternoon on the veranda of the Flowerses' house reading books from Caleb's collection. Their telephone call that evening centered on their curiosity about their new friends.

‘They don't have a father, do they?'

‘I don't know,' said Roslyn. ‘I've never seen one.'

‘Are they orphans?' Lionel had always considered orphans to be both fortunate and very romantic.

‘I suppose. My cousin Jean's father is dead and my mother always calls her
that poor orphaned child
.'

‘Their mother is very queer, isn't she? All that time out there in the sun on the porch and it was
hot
and she never asked us in, only kept bringing out that sour lemonade and cookies and then going in herself.'

Roslyn said yes, she was very queer. ‘I said “How do you do” when Caleb introduced us, but she never said anything. Or even after that. Do you suppose she's deaf and dumb?'

‘
I
don't know. Maybe. Caleb kept going up to his room to get his books. I wanted to see his room and his other books. I didn't bring many books from home, did you?'

‘Not too many. There wasn't room in the car.'

Roslyn had struck a sympathetic note. Lionel was quick to agree:

‘There never is, for my stuff.'

They were silent for a minute, and then Roslyn said: ‘I like Caleb a lot, don't you?'

‘Oh yes. But I like Kate too.' Lionel thought a moment and then, aware that his declaration might hurt his older friend's feelings, he raised his voice: ‘But I like you best of all.'

Roslyn smiled, decided this was a satisfactory time to end the call, said: ‘Night, Lion,' and removed the Mothers Oats carton from her ear. It had been a nice day, she thought; she was ready, at last, to go to bed.

The Talkies Club spent some warm afternoons at the beach under Emma's care. She could not rest easy at home if Roslyn were left in charge, as Mrs. Hellman had suggested to her daughter. All the children played too close to the water, she believed, and ventured too far out into the surf. Mrs. Schwartz and Mrs. Hellman disliked the noisy, uninteresting ocean and the dangerous sun. They were satisfied to trust their children to an adult, even so odd a one as Mrs. Flowers, from the reports of their children, seemed to be.

‘Behave yourselves,' they told Roslyn and Lionel. Then they went back into the cool parlor of one house or another to talk about their relatives, their husbands, their prospective fall wardrobes that they hoped to find at Russek's or Franklin Simon's, and the pleasures of the City in the season to come. In the comfortable release of a few hours away from their children they drank sugared hot tea from tall glasses, believing that such drinks in summer were cooling. Mrs. Schwartz was much preoccupied with considering the merits of a caracul coat versus a beaver one. Her husband had promised her a new fur for her birthday.

At a short distance from the sea, Emma sat in a low wood-slatted chair. The children played at the edge. To shield her skin from the sun she held a broad black umbrella that had belonged to her husband. Her black silk bathing dress was covered, from wrist to ankle, by a full black blouse and long skirt. She took no chances of revealing her body to a passing glance or her face to the ruinous sun. Her hand was posed on her forehead to shade her eyes from the glare. The children were in her sight.

Caleb and Roslyn played in the surf, leaping over small waves and splashing through the water, pretending to be the heroic rescuers of the hapless victims of waterfalls, storms, and floods. They quickly tired of the weightlessness of their nonexistent sufferers and took the parts themselves, Caleb the drowning boy, Roslyn the brave lifeguard. This game entertained them for some time, until Caleb complained that his head ached from being dragged up on the beach by his hair.

Lionel disliked violent activities like drowning and forcible saving. He spent his time constructing houses in the wet sand while Kate crouched down to watch him.

‘Why don't you build castles?' she asked him.

‘I like domestic architecture,' he said loftily. ‘This is a single-story beach house, ranch style. It'll have many porches and fireplaces in every room.'

Roslyn and Caleb had come over to watch. They were irritated by the horizontal character of Lionel's structure and the absence of dripped-sand towers. So they noted with pleasure the arrival of the tide that wiped out the sand veranda facing the sea. Then they turned back to the ocean.

Standing in the water to her ankles, Roslyn called the Talkies over to her side. She announced that she had decided they now were all to pretend they were lemmings. She would be their queen.

‘What is a lemming?' asked Kate.

Roslyn said she knew all about lemmings; she had been reading about them in
The Book of Knowledge
.

‘They're little rodents, like mice, and brown-colored. They live in Norway and Sweden. When there are too many of them, for some reason no one knows why, they start moving across the land, eating everything in their way. Some of them are eaten along the way by other animals. But some survive and go on until they arrive …'

Roslyn raised her arms dramatically toward the horizon.

‘… at the sea!'

‘Can they swim?' asked Lionel.

‘I think so. In shallow water, I guess. But even if they can't, they're so brave they plunge into the water as if they were still walking on land. They go out so far that they all drown. Not a single one is left.'

‘Do they know they are going to drown when they go into the water?' asked Caleb.

‘How would I know that?'

The three children stood looking at Roslyn, trying not to believe in the truth of her tragic story.

Caleb said: ‘How do you know they have a queen?'

Roslyn had invented the part about the ruler of the lemmings. But her quick wits saved her. ‘Well, they're like bees in that way.
They
have a queen, don't they?'

‘Why should you be the queen?'

‘Because I want to lead you all into the ocean to see if you will drown.'

‘Not me,' said Caleb. ‘I can swim.'

Lionel said: ‘I can't. I haven't learned yet.'

Kate said nothing. She was afraid to play the game. But she knew if Caleb followed Roslyn into the ocean she would go in too. Nothing would part her from him, not for a moment. She thought her courage would keep her afloat, or perhaps maintain her at a depth just above her head, or she would be instantly granted the swimming skill she wanted so badly. And if not, Caleb would not let her drown. Of that she was certain.