The Book of Knowledge (6 page)

‘There goes the Talkies Tournament,' she whispered glumly to Caleb, who stood beside her, his arm around his sister. The three watched as Lester carried Lionel across the driveway and Rose fanned Sadie, who regained consciousness almost as quickly as she had lost it.

Rose and Caleb helped Sadie to her feet. They all went in the direction of the Schwartzes' car, Sadie leaning heavily on Rose's arm. Max stood at the rear, holding open the door.

As for Kate: the spectacle of blood on her friend's white face, a pallid mother lying on the grass, colored balls and silver wickets knocked every which way on the usually orderly course, frightened her. She was unused to the mixture of adults and children, two naturally disjoined orders of persons hitherto kept happily separate in her mind. She tugged at Caleb's arm.

‘I think we should go home. Moth will be wondering where we are. It's getting dark.'

Caleb agreed.

They reported to Emma that Lion was all right now but had been, as Kate told her, foolishly, ‘almost dead.' Emma blanched, her arm around Kate. She pulled her close, recalling the the seaside incident.

‘No more croquet,' she said. ‘I think it's a dangerous game for children.'

‘He was okay when we left,' Caleb said.

‘But you said they were taking him to the hospital.'

‘For checking,' Caleb said in his most adult voice. ‘Only for checking. He was awake before they got to the car.'

‘Thank the Lord.'

Emma gathered Caleb to her with her free arm. Positioned in this way, an onlooker might have regarded the family as models for a portrait of devotion. It would have been an accurate view of the reality. The children believed in the universality of their family life.
All
children, they thought, lived with a comfortably distant but devoted mother. All children loved one another. They never questioned that maternity, beyond any doubt, granted to every child the same affection and exclusive tenderness manifested to them by their mother.

But Emma's motherhood was complex, far more than her children knew. She was proud of their beauty, thinking of herself as the sole source of it and ignoring the existence of Edmund. She saw herself in them, and, as she grew older, she saw her young, pure self as she remembered it in their double image. Her children became the objects, the unaware recipients, of her quiescent sexual passion. Her ardent heart, her unused body, yearned for occasions of physical pleasure. Finding none, she spent her fire on love for her children. They were her possessions, her occasions for fantasy, her touchstones that she was alive.

And Caleb: he had no idea that his love for his sister, who looked and felt so much like him, was a form of
amour propre
. He considered it the usual and natural affection for a sibling. To explore her body was to search himself, to learn, through his intimate investigations, some of the pleasurable secrets of his own anatomy.

And Kate: denied by her happy childhood any self-knowledge whatsoever (for children are most apt to discover their inner selves in moments of misery), she unhesitatingly offered her loving little heart to her adored brother, her revered mother, her unknown, sainted father.

After croquet was proscribed, the Flowers children, with little regret, returned to their cocoon of exclusivity. Their pretenses grew in variety and daring, extending to other times in the day, while their mother was shopping or visiting the lending library. So engrossed did they now become in their dramatic fictions that they found it difficult to suspend them, as of course they knew they must, during meals with Moth and their occasional trips to the beach with Roslyn and Lion.

In mid-August, long after Emma had returned the book, Caleb finally gave up trying to use the children in
A High Wind in Jamaica
as roles for their game. The book was difficult for him to understand. It struck him as unbelievable that the children, captured by pirates, came to such curious ends. The oldest boy, John, whose part he had intended to take, died very early by breaking his neck in a fall, and nobody, except his mother at the end, ever thought about him again. He just disappeared from his younger sister Emily's mind. Emily too was strange, lying as she did to everyone, and murdering the Dutch captain without a thought or any backward glance of conscience. To him, both roles reeked of the kind of unacceptable reality his romantic soul denied. He was glad to return the book to the library. It represented his only imaginative failure in that happy summer.

After his rejection of this subject matter, Caleb went up into the attic for his annual survey of the vast, dusty area before his mother began her fall cleaning and the storage of their summer clothes. As he always did, he reviewed the contents of his father's trunk. He inspected the now outmoded City suits, the almost new straw hat, the high, brown derby with a stiff brim, the yellowing flannel trousers, the ties wrapped in celluloid, and three pairs of pearl-gray gloves that matched the elegant spats, all encased in clear, cracking tissue paper. Everything seemed to be arranged in this careful way, protected against dust and decay, as though awaiting the owner's eventual return.

Near the trunk, wrapped in what Moth called a garment bag, was his father's black winter overcoat, with its sumptuous velvet collar. Caleb pictured himself as having attained the age and size of Edmund Flowers and being dressed in this fine haberdashery. He was planning to grow very quickly into the entire outfit so he could wear it proudly into the street. To practice, he put on the coat, the derby, a pair of gloves. Thus clad, he felt he had become his father. He was preparing to call on Emma McDermott during the early days of their courtship.

Caleb went downstairs to find Kate. She was reading a new library book about a boy named Christopher Robin and his teddy bear, a childish story that her brother had scorned when she told him the story.

‘Robin! Pooh! What can we do with that silly stuff?'

Now he suggested they pretend being their parents, an old favorite game they had played many times before, with variations. He took her hand:

‘Miss McDermott, would you care to come upstairs and be my wife?'

Still wearing his father's clothes, he took Kate's hand and led her upstairs to Kate's room. He took off the hat, the big coat, and the gloves and lay down beside her. He had thought of a new way of being married. He opened the buttons of his trousers, pulled down her silk underpants, and placed his penis gently along her small, damp seam.

For some time they lay there, facing each other and staring into each other's eyes. An unaccustomed warmth suffused Caleb's chest, his throat, his loins. His penis grew larger, causing Kate's small crevice to widen.

It was a revelation to them. Caleb thought of his independent-seeming organ as something apart from himself, a separate object that came to life without his willing it, an extension of some active agency within him over which he had no control. Kate too thought of the moving thing between them as a third party, a new character in their game.

Then, having been assigned no active role in the drama, the member subsided. They were uncertain how to proceed, holding each other tightly in the clasp of confused children. Caleb wet his lips at the thought of the wondrous pleasures Edmund Flowers might soon receive from Emma McDermott, using what he now knew to be his own capable weapon. Kate, having no capacity for such a vision, believed they had gone as far as would ever be necessary to effect a true marriage.

Caleb returned to the attic carrying his father's clothes. Startled by the sound of something stirring, he dropped them on the top of the trunk and walked cautiously toward the noise. Two brown bats rushed past him, their winged arms extended from their furry bodies, their round eyes glittering with astonishment (Caleb thought) at being disturbed in a place they must consider their own. They settled into the rafters, hanging by their webbed forearms, their little heads down, seeming not to see him, not to be watching the intruder. As they hung, their slender bodies touched, their soft coats (it seemed to Caleb) rubbed reassuringly against each other. He put the clothes he had worn into the trunk and sat down on its cover to watch the two bats, who seemed now to be watching him.

He was fired by a new idea: he and Kate could enact the lives of these two warmly connubial creatures.

On Kate's bed that night they played at being bats, according to the new scenario Caleb had devised in the attic.

‘We are to wear no clothes at all,' he told Kate.

She lay face down, her arms outspread, her toes pointed down over the edge of the bed, trying to imitate the flattenedout hind limbs of the bat as Caleb had described them. He smoothed himself on top of her, his thin arms and legs stretched along hers. He straightened his toes, like a dancer's on point, so he could align himself to Kate's body. Placing his head sideways on hers, he was able to cup her small ear in his. It was in this way that he envisioned the soft, webbed creatures in the attic coupling. So strong was his vision that he could sense the gauzes connecting his arms to his body and then to Kate.

‘Like tissue paper,' he whispered. ‘Now open your eyes and stare straight ahead, as they do.'

Caleb lay relaxed upon his sister. His cock—he enjoyed thinking of the new term he had learned from Roslyn—swelled downward, becoming hard and straight between Kate's buttocks. Wishing to recreate the private pleasure he had long ago discovered he could obtain by rubbing this part, he began to move gently from side to side.

Kate, obedient to his instructions, did not move. She concentrated on staring ahead as she had been told to do. She thought his movements were in emulation of the bats he had observed. Unsurprised, she continued to lie still. Then, after a time, he began to weigh heavily on her. She pushed up against him as hard as she could and felt a warm jet of liquid between her legs, in the area from which she peed. Not wanting to disturb the bat trance she thought he was in, she said nothing.

Nor did he. There was a fine satisfaction, a strange novelty, in using Kate's lovely tight buttocks and soft thighs for the pleasure he had hitherto given himself. It was as if she were joined in some magical way to his marvelous release. He heard her sigh and realized that his weight was oppressing her. Moving onto his side, he looked into her eyes. They both smiled, a long, knowing, identical, loving smile.

‘Is that what you saw the bats in the attic do?'

Caleb said nothing. Kate waited and then she asked:

‘Do you think we will have babies?'

‘Bats, I've read, have only one. Sometimes, but very rarely, twins.'

‘Well, then, one baby?'

‘No, I don't think so.'

‘Too bad. I think it would be fun, don't you?'

‘No. Not yet.'

Tired from the strain of looking at each other, they closed their eyes and lay still, pressed close, wet, weary, and very comfortable. Caleb was filled with a contentment he had never felt before. He wanted never to leave Kate's bed.

He whispered: ‘I love you, Kate. I want to marry you.'

Holding her underpants against the wet that covered her upper legs, she said: ‘I accept.'

At summer's end, as if to anticipate the approaching separation, the Flowers children drew even further apart from their friends. There were no more croquet games and very few excursions to the beach, which by now had lost much of its allure. The air and sand, even the ocean, having cooled a little, none of them went racing down over hot sand to be refreshed in the surf.

The summer parents talked vaguely about a farewell party to be held the day before they returned to the City. Their children looked forward to ice cream from Huyler's and cake baked by the Hellmans' maid. But somehow, like so many adult plans for children, in the press of packing and eagerness to get back to the City, it never came to pass.

In early September, before Labor Day and the last time the children would be together in the country, Roslyn and Lion went to Larch Street. Roslyn wanted to collect acorns from the bare spaces under their oak trees to take home as souvenirs.

Caleb and Kate came down from their veranda to join them, bringing wooden pails they always used for the collection of what Caleb called specimens. The four crawled about, gathering only prime acorns, the best examples of green and brown, polished-looking seeds, each one set upright in a woody, stiff, brown collar.

During the collection process, Caleb and Roslyn became competitive, trying to outdo each other in locating the biggest, most splendid specimens, pushing against each other when they thought they had spotted them. At one point, Roslyn held up a true beauty, perfect except for the absence of its cupped holder.

‘It looks like my father's thumbnail,' she said, and then returned to her search for other superlative examples. Caleb was irritated by what seemed to him to be a foolish boast. Roslyn's unconditional admiration of her father extended, he thought, to the tips of his fingers, to his carved leg, to his status, she often said, as the City's most successful broker.

Caleb had never noticed any similarity between acorns and Mr. Hellman's fingertips. But now that Roslyn had pointed it out, he began to imagine that all the scattered acorns he saw were disconnected nails, removed from the poor man's thumbs at the same time as his leg had been taken. He stopped collecting, sat back on his heels, and began to compose a scenario:

Terrible corporeal punishment had been inflicted on a tribe of conquered giants. Now, minus the ends of their fingers, they roamed the dark outer shore of the Rockaway peninsula. Globules of blood fell from their useless hands. Who had committed these atrocities? Retributive animals whose only food was the succulent nails of goliaths? No. Tribal enemies who punished their captives by biting off the ends of the giants' fingers with their sharp teeth, and consumed them as an essential part of their diets.

‘Caleb.
Listen
to me,' said Roslyn.