The Book of Knowledge (29 page)

Mrs. DeMarco was standing waiting at the elevator, sobbing into her handkerchief, when Roslyn felt able to move from behind her desk and walk toward her. When she reached the elevator, Mrs. DeMarco was gone. Judy Bowes came from her desk and put her arm around Roslyn.

‘Pay her no mind, dearie. You're not to blame. It's the war. It's not your fault.'

Roslyn shook her head and said: ‘Thank you. Yes, I know that. Of course.'

But all day (and for years to come) she thought about the lieutenant she had unseated and sent, without her being aware of it, to his grave at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. She thought she saw an ironic connection between him and her friend who had died in Spain during the Civil War fighting with the Loyalists, shot through the head by a drunken American comrade. She now thought of Lieutenant DeMarco as her victim, dead of friendly fire from her WAVES orders.

For years she was to keep in her small, gray lock box, together with her discharge papers, a communication from James V. Forrestal, Secretary of the Navy, commending her for service to her country. He went on to inform her: ‘The WAVES have released enough men for duty afloat to man completely a major task force.' Clipped to it was a newspaper summary she had saved, about women's contribution to the war. It was a testimonial to the bitterness about the war she was never to lose. According to the article, by releasing enlisted men and male officers for active duty, women had made possible the crewing of ten battleships, ten aircraft carriers, fifty destroyers, and twenty-eight cruisers.

‘Especially the
Helena,
' she used to say to herself when she came upon the papers. ‘Especially Lieutenant senior grade Lewis DeMarco. Released to die by Ensign Roslyn Hellman.'

6

Futurity

Why do we remember the past and not the future?

—S
TEPHEN
H
AWKING

I
T IS TRUE
of all human beings that they are dualities, two persons: who they are in the red marrow of their bones and in the tiny convolutions of gray and white matter of the cerebrum, and in the unlocalized site of what is often called the soul; and what they appear to be to the world which has told them who they are. The lifelong conflict between the two persons, the struggle for the interior self to triumph over the exterior, given self: herein lies all the bloody warfare in the person, to be who we are and not what we have been made to be.

For everyone, the future is similarly divided, into what the Flowerses and Hellmans, the Schwartzes and DeMarcos envisioned it would be and, when unalterable reality settled down heavily upon them after their great expectations, the actuality, the inevitable truths that comprised their lives. Often, it takes a decade or more to solidify this duality. For the persons in this narrative it happened at the end of an extraordinary fifteen years in which the nadir of financial ruin and depression reached the zenith of war and prosperity. The present bifurcated into the future,
et eo ipso
, brought their histories to a close.

It is the last day of the war. Soon a huge military parade will start up Broadway, a victorious commanding general waving with both arms from an open car in a storm of ticker tape. At this moment, recently discharged Lieutenant Roslyn Hellman is sitting on a camp stool in an almost empty two-room apartment she has just rented in the East Village, drinking cold coffee from a paper cup, having returned once again to her beloved City after her long banishment in San Francisco.

She sits idly, projecting herself into futurity. Taking what she has learned about publishing during her years of apprenticeship before the war, she envisions the next years. She will acquire her own Vandercook press and place it centrally in this room. Aides working nearby will make paper and sew bindings by hand. She will print elegant limited editions of excellent poetry and her own prose. In this way she will avoid all the ego-breaking hassles of the publishing world, in much the same way as Walt Whitman and Mark Twain did, on occasion. She will enter the literary scene by the back door of her own imprint.

Then she will teach her craft to a young assistant, who will, in gratitude and affection, live with her in an apartment above the studio. They will spend their weekends in a small country house not too far from the City—somewhere in Westchester County?—and their vacations abroad—Scotland, Tuscany, the Greek islands, of course—but always they will return to the place central to her life and work, the City, the only City, New York.

Her press's name will be
In the House of Sappho
, the logo for which she will design herself. It will suit the flourishing enterprise. Because everyone involved with it, the poets and prose writers she will publish, the press operators and typographers, paper makers, binders, and, of course, her apprentice-companion and herself, everyone in the house, will be female … so Roslyn forsaw her future.

Did she also envision
the reality
of the future? Did she see that, on the other hand, desperate for company, money, and legitimacy in a new, changed, postwar City, she would marry a recently widowed osteopath whom she had met in a coffee shop on University Place? His practice was in Indianapolis. He was spending two weeks in the City taking his children to Radio City and the circus, to the top of the Empire State Building, for rides on the Staten Island Ferry, and to climb the Statue of Liberty.

In a suburb of the sprawling Midwestern city, Roslyn Hellman Cooke settled into the calm, matronly, unexceptional existence of a doctor's wife and the mother of two young stepsons. She wrote the monthly bulletin of the PTA, and served as recording secretary of the Garden Club. She cultivated roses and azaleas, she went to dinner parties and gave them for her husband's colleagues and their wives. She lived out her uneventful life in Indiana by choice, because she could not bear to revisit the City she had loved so much in her youth.

Every ten years or so she refurnished her large, comfortable, many-bedroomed ranch house, surrounded by other ranch houses of the same design. She moved without audible complaint through her long life, a tamed spirit who had buried her dreams of glory in her prize beds of tulips and cosmos. Occasionally, in a rare sleepless hour of early morning as she grew old, she wondered why it was that it had happened this way.

On the same day that Roslyn sat on the stool in the East Village planning her press, Dr. Caleb Flowers, assistant professor of medieval literature, was at his desk in the English department office of his college in Kansas City, reading, with no strong desire to learn from it, a recently published volume on the language of
The Canterbury Tales
. As he turned the pages, he fantasized about his future, seeing in his mind's eye an endless series of nights in which Lionel Schwartz would lie beside him as they both delighted in all the juvenescent pleasures of their arcane sex.

They will walk along the green banks of the Missouri River in early summer, their white, graceful hands barely touching. Their days will be rich with the soprano sounds from Lily Pons records, the lovely speech and sonorous sentences of French novels, many prints of Impressionist paintings decorating their walls. And, best of all, entirely free of onerous familial responsibility.

For the rest of their long lives, they will be, quietly, lovers, entirely acceptable bachelors in a gracious academic society, companions of the flesh and, when they grow older, of the mind, lying together in their secret, comforting bed. Then, pensioned and secure, they will go to live in Paris, in a community of their drinking, smoking, wildly conversing and sexually compatible fellows, the descendants of the aging, expatriate persons that Professor Alexander Lang must have known before his death ten years ago.

At that moment was Caleb able to see reality as clearly as the dream? For his fears and ambitions caused him to marry Meta Holmes, the daughter of the provost of his college, a plain-faced, pale, very thin, but most pleasant woman who bore him three sturdy, intelligent children. Working very hard while fighting a tendency to periodic depression, he was still able to publish two well-received books on medieval rhetoric. Every Christmas he traveled to whatever city the Modern Language Association happened to be meeting in, always accompanied by Meta, who enjoyed the society of other academic wives.

In middle age he bought the secondhand but very well maintained Cadillac he had yearned for all his adult life, and he serviced it himself until, many years later, he lost interest in it. He became chairman of his department, and then dean of the college before he retired at seventy. Almost at once, as if he had been waiting for his freedom from schedules and academic semesters, he sank into a long depression from which numerous psychotherapists were unable to rouse him. He lived on, indifferent to automobiles, friends, his wife's kindnesses to him, and the genuine concern of his grown children. It should be said that, since the night he said farewell to Lionel Schwartz in the parlor at Telluride, Caleb Flowers lived unhappily ever after.

In the evening of that same day at the end of the war, the novice Kate Flowers kneels with her sisters in Christ for compline prayers. Her life has reached a crossroad, but, curiously, the two parts consist of present reality and dreams of the past. Scrupulously avoiding any thought of the future, she entrusts all such concerns to her Mother Superior, her confessor, and God Himself. As Sister Mary Christina, still some years away from taking her final vows, she is content to lead the orderly, prayerful, antiseptic, obedient, and almost pure life she has chosen. She is aware of no desire for any other.

But in her long, faithful life to come, she was never able to expel Caleb from her thoughts. Her guilt at their love could not be erased by prayer or self-denial. Even her general confession, made just before she was finally accepted into the Order, did not succeed in wiping out the memories that continued for a long time to warm her body on frigid nights in her narrow bed.

Every time she heard Deuteronomy read in chapel—‘A curse upon him who lies with his sister'—she felt that heavy sentence upon her own head. To atone, she gave up writing to Caleb at Christmas, although she longed for a letter from him which never came. She prayed for him, without knowing what had become of his life. In her missal was a slip of paper on which she had printed a sentence from Paul's letter to the Romans. She read it often, with some anguish, without acknowledging to herself its private meaning: ‘For just as in a single human body there are many limbs and organs, all with different functions, so all of us, united in Christ, form one body, serving individually as limbs and organs to one another.'

As time went on, Kate Flowers' life before the convent became the real world to her. By a firm exercise of her errant will, she found she could often live in it. Disbelieving in the appearance of things, as her mother had taught her to do long ago, she continued to cling to the only love she could remember, the only reality she thought she had known for certain. The past served her as both future and present while, on the surface and to her sisters, she was known for her goodness, her piety and charity, her fidelity to her vows.

Gentle reader, do not despair. There was to be one life that never descended into compromise or denial or unhappiness:

Captain Lionel Schwartz had been in the Army for more than four years. He had been awarded two Purple Hearts for his wounds and a Silver Star for bravery in the European theater. After V-E Day he was shipped out to the Far East, where he died of severe shrapnel wounds during the invasion of Okinawa.

For him there would be no long future, only an abruptly terminated present. Assigned in his young adulthood to play in a lethal, martial game with the black mallet, like the croquet one of his childhood, he was, at a stroke, dispossessed of his past and denied a future. But he went on living, in the confused memory of his institutionalized mother, driven mad by the news of his death, and in the elderly, depressed fantasies of Professor Emeritus Caleb Flowers.

About the Author

Doris Grumbach, author of many novels and memoirs including
Fifty Days of Solitude
,
Life in a Day, The Ladies
, and
Chamber Music
, has been literary editor of the
New Republic
, a nonfiction columnist for the
New York Times Book Review
, a book reviewer for National Public Radio, and a bookseller in Washington, DC, and Maine. She lives in Philadelphia.

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 1995 by Doris Grumbach

Cover design by Tracey Dunham

ISBN: 978-1-4976-7668-8

This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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New York, NY 10014

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