Free The Book of Knowledge by Doris Grumbach

themselves. He felt they needed to be free of Roslyn’s demands for transportation to the City and movies they could no longer afford. Rose agreed. She went further: secretly, she wished to be left to herself in the small, train-shaped apartment, where she could indulge her resentment against her husband and her intense dislike of Brooklyn. She believed that only the poor, the immigrant, and the Irish lived in that borough. Rarely did she leave the apartment during the day for fear she would be seen on the streets and taken to be one of the newly arrived Polish Jews.
    But Max, now away from the competitive demands of Wall Street, found some benefits to his new state. In his prosperous days he had been a lover of spectator sports and had shared a pair of tickets to many events with his client Fire Commissioner John J. Geoghegan. Whenever Max could extricate himself from the demands and the omnipresence of Rose and his daughter, they went to boxing matches at Madison Square Garden and to the baseball games at the Polo Grounds.
    After the Crash, the Commissioner was kind to his former broker, with whom he shared an affliction. As a young man, Geoghegan had lost a leg in a warehouse fire in Manhattan. The two cripples liked to joke that side by side, they composed one whole man. Joined by their common disability and by a genuine affection for each other, they continued to attend sporting events, the Commissioner paying for both tickets.
    â€˜For the time being,’ Max reminded him.
    The Commissioner enjoyed his new posture as source of the tickets. He had let it be known among his department’s contractors that he was amenable to granting contracts for rubber suits and boots, in return for box-office favors. This summer promised some extraordinary events: the Giants and the Yankees were expected to win pennants in their respective leagues. Max was hoping to be free of his obligations to the despondent Rose and the scornful Roslyn so he could spend his Saturdays at one stadium or another with the Commissioner on their complimentary tickets.
    When Aunt Sophie, her mother’s sister, offered to send Roslyn to camp again and her parents gratefully accepted, Roslyn understood she was considered an impediment to her parents’ private plans for the summer. Aunt Sophie was a widow who had been left ‘comfortable,’ as Rose put it, when her husband died of a heart attack at the age of forty-two. She had a daughter, Jean, a pretty but somewhat shy girl two years younger than Roslyn who had been sent to camp to her delight since she was eight. Aunt Sophie thought that Roslyn provided her daughter with a useful model of greater self-assurance.
    In the nine months since her father’s fall, as she thought of it, Roslyn had become an avid, almost obsessed movie-loving adolescent, addicted to the entertainment pages of the newspapers. Without an adequate allowance, she had developed a trick of standing by the back door of the movie theater near her, waiting for the door to open from the inside when a patron left, and slipping in just as the door was shutting. Most Saturdays she succeeded in this free entry. She stayed for hours, sometimes seeing the two features over again. When she left, dazed by the glamorous sets, the lovely clothes, and the suggestive love scenes, she felt herself unfit for ordinary existence and depressed by the fact that, at the moment, she had no way of avoiding it.
    Roslyn shuddered at the thought of being sent back to the camp in the Catskill Mountains where the Sunday-night movie was three years old and divided into reels so she had to endure delays while they were changed. Even worse was the realization that she would see few newspapers for two months. For at the same time that her love of movies grew, she had learned to attract the attention of her high school classmates by telling them she was a ‘radical.’ From the editorial page of the Daily Mirror she discovered it was a