Read Online The Book of Knowledge by Doris Grumbach - Free Book Online

sure that contact with other children at school, as well as the enduring heat, threatened her son and daughter.
    â€˜An hour of rest on your beds before supper,’ she ordered from her chair in the corner of the parlor where she sat, fanning herself.
    When they came down, they did their homework seated on each end of the cretonne-covered davenport. After dinner they listened to the humorous black talk of Amos ’n Andy on the radio, turned up very loud for their mother’s comfort. Discouraged by the volume, they decided upon an early bedtime.
    With Roslyn no longer there to make demands upon his allegiance, Caleb returned happily to Kate. Their love for each other expanded to fill all the space around them. Whenever they could arrange it, sometimes at odd times of the day, they plotted to be alone, their hungry hands journeying from one stopping place to another on their bodies. Prodding, stroking, exploring, caressing, imagining the pleasures of those they knew about from history and myth, they approached each other courteously, almost deferentially, disguising, or perhaps still not entirely aware of, the depth of their passion.
    After the accident-ridden summer, and the catastrophic fall of 1929 that changed their lives, Roslyn and Lionel never returned to Far Rockaway. On the 24th of October, a cloudy Thursday in New York City, the stock market, in which their fathers had worked so profitably, plummeted a disastrous thirty points. Brokers and speculators alike were thrown into a state of confusion. In three days, despair and bankruptcy had spread to businessmen all over the country. Lester Schwartz and Max Hellman, investors like their clients, were wiped out the next day, unable to make full payments for their stocks held on margin. Small brokerage firms, like theirs, closed, ‘temporarily,’ it was announced.
    In December, Max Hellman began to look for employment. For the first time since the Great War his stump caused him much pain as he walked the unyielding sidewalks of the City in search of a job. Almost at the end of his endurance, he was saved by his brother-in-law, a prosperous Brooklyn butcher who had not been affected by the Crash because he had never believed in buying stocks and bonds.
    The butcher worked Max hard. In whatever time he had left after he worked on the store’s accounts, Max had to help with cleaning the floors covered with bloody sawdust after the store closed at seven in the evening. His misery at being deprived of the stimulating life on the Street was very great, and he was always aware of the butcher’s pleasure, his barely concealed gloating, at his relative’s downfall, and the unending recriminations of his wife.
    He moved Rose and Roslyn from their apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan to a much smaller one down the street from Prospect Park in Brooklyn, ten long (for his bad leg) blocks from the kosher meat market where he worked. His walk to and from work was slow and painful; the De Soto Six had been the first of his assets to be sold.
    Protesting tearfully, Rose settled into the cramped quarters. The softness and tenderness that prosperity had nurtured in her died under the stress of her now deprived life. She became a constant complainer, a fountain of weeping, a compendium of small illnesses. Roslyn was transferred to a public high school in Brooklyn, one with very few good students and athletes. Quickly she became the star of her classroom and the czarina of the playground.
    Together with pride in her academic success, Roslyn began to develop a poorly disguised scorn of her neurasthenic mother. Of her father, she was openly contemptuous. At first he had seemed to her an unjustly deposed hero, of the same stature as a wounded soldier in the war. But as time passed and his spotted apron and straw hat in the butcher store where he scrubbed gory chopping blocks and swept up stained sawdust became his familiar garb, he lost her respect. In her