Kaaterskill Falls

by Allegra Goodman

  Impatiently, Nina begins clearing away the empty glasses of iced tea, and puts the dessert plates on a tray. “The children don’t know their history,” she says. “They know nothing about the war. Nothing. Who will teach them this in the public schools? I spoke to Regina about this. What do her children learn? They learn American history; they learn about Pearl Harbor. To them that’s what the war is. They don’t learn about their heritage. They don’t learn about Israel. It’s a shanda.”

  “All right, fine,” says Andras, “it’s a shanda.” He gets up and stretches.

  “Renée, do you want a glass of milk with that?” Nina asks.

  “No, thank you,” says Renée, and she pushes the glider with her feet as her mother bustles around, clearing the dishes. Of course Renée doesn’t mention that she and Stephanie have decided to go to North Lake tomorrow.

  THAT afternoon Andras walks up Mohican. The sky is growing cloudy, the light dim. On either side of the road the forest grows thick and lush. Secretive. Nina’s words echo in Andras’s mind. She believes in education. She thinks that finding the right school, insisting on the best teacher, will solve every problem. When the children learned about the Holocaust in school, Nina wanted Andras to talk to Renée’s class about how he got out of Budapest. He wouldn’t do it. He’s never talked about it, not even to Nina. There are people who lecture about that sort of thing, so it won’t be forgotten. Andras can’t do that. It’s not because it is too painful for him. That isn’t the reason at all. He wasn’t in the camps. It’s because there is no way for him to convey his experience. It lies within him, a separate place within his present life. He couldn’t begin to explain it to his children, really just born and unscratched, all of a piece; knowing just one world, one language.

  It’s disingenuous, he thinks, to teach that kind of thing, that tragic history. You can never fully tell another person what you know. You can’t imagine what you don’t know. There is no way to conceive, to picture, someone else’s life. There is no way to transfer memories. His own experience of the war is one of confusion, ignorance. When Andras was sixteen his parents said good-bye to him. They put him on a train and sent him to France. Andras had not wanted to go; his mother cried. But his father was adamant. He nearly pushed Andras away at the station. The urgency of the moment prevented any long good-byes. The train bearing down into the station; the heaviness of the time. In France, alone, Andras made his way from safe house to safe house. He hid alone for months, alone with his thoughts, awaiting and yet half dreading the release his parents had purchased for him, the passage to New York. In New York Andras found his sisters. They had to make their way on a different route. As for Andras’s parents, his aunts and uncles, his grandparents, his childhood sweetheart, none he left behind survived.

  Nina thinks he has a responsibility. She’s told Andras it’s his responsibility to record his suffering on tape, or write it down. Survivors are witnesses, and when they are gone there will be nothing left. This is one of her opinions, earnest and fierce and full of the phrases of articles in Jewish periodicals. Survivors have to tell their stories before it’s too late. But how can he describe a vacancy, an absence? That was his past life. He has no way to explain it to Nina, who thinks he has been shutting her out. Nina thinks the problem is the age difference between them. The seventeen years Andras lived before she was born: Andras’s childhood in Budapest, the years working in New York. Nina thinks those years account for the difficulty they have understanding each other. What she doesn’t understand is that, like hers, Andras’s knowledge of the war is full of gaps. He left before the end. It’s an emptiness within him, his escape.

  Andras walks down the cool road, no cars in sight. The forest towers over his head on both sides, thick with ragged branches, and soggy leaves. He is about a mile from Kendall Falls when a doe and her fawn step out from the trees ahead. Andras holds still, and the deer freeze a moment, too, their bodies taut, ears opening, slender legs poised, ready to fly. Andras hardly ever sees deer on the road, just the yellow signs warning motorists of deer crossings. Driving up once, he saw a buck, but it was far away and vanished quickly into the trees. These are close; Andras can even see their eyes, dark, passive, impressionable, he thinks—although the word couldn’t apply to them. They haven’t anything to learn. He hardly breathes; he doesn’t want to frighten them. But in the next instant they are gone. The deer slip into their own shadowy light, and leave him at the edge of the forest.

  He wishes he could see the deer again, if only for a moment. He wants, somehow, to come closer. He bends his tall frame under the branches at the edge of the road, and follows them into the trees. Cautiously, tentatively, Andras picks his way through the woods. He feels foolish, and awkward, out of his element, but he keeps walking. He keeps pushing away the branches in his path. He knows he won’t see the deer again, but he walks on, as if by walking far enough he’ll find them. He’ll stop in a minute, he thinks. He’ll turn back on Mohican Road for home. But in the meantime he steps farther in. The forest floor is soft under his feet, and damp, and all the rocks are velveted with moss. The place is wet under the trees, and its sounds surround him. Mosquitoes and distant water. He walks on in a kind of haze, absorbed with the place, the dark tree trunks and the thick carpet of dead leaves.

  The sight of a house stops him short. It is really just a shack, not much bigger than his own toolshed. The walls are weathered wood, and the roof covered with loose, sloppy shingles, growing lichen. In front, in a rough sort of clearing, two white goats are wandering loose. There is a musty smell about the place, the scent of cats and urine. A woodpile stacked up high stands at one side of the house. Leaves rustle; something moves. Out from behind the woodpile steps a tiny old woman. She is extremely small, her hair gray, pulled back in a bun; she wears a blue windbreaker over her dress. In the city she might be a bag lady; in the woods Andras isn’t sure what she is. She is holding white plastic cider jugs, two in each hand. She looks surprised to see someone on her property, but she puts her cider jugs on the ground and comes toward Andras, as if to show him she is unafraid.

  “Are you lost?” she asks.

  “I don’t think so,” Andras says.

  “Do you need help?” she asks.

  “I hope not,” Andras says.

  “Did you come for a reason?” she asks.

  “I was just walking,” Andras says.

  “Oh, all right, then. I’m pleased to meet you,” she tells him. “My name is Una Darmstadt-Cooper.”

  “Oh,” Andras says. He has heard of her from Cecil. She is a photographer and writer of children’s nature books. In fact Cecil once gave some of her books to Renée and Alex. “My name is Andras Melish,” he says.

  “Summer people,” she says.

  “Yes.” His eyes glance over her worn cabin. “Do you live here all year?”

  “Of course I do.” She seems amused by his reaction. “Are you thinking it’s strange?”

  “No, I was just thinking it must be difficult.”

  “Do you mean the winters? Oh, no. Winter is my favorite time. In the city the winters are all the same. Up here they are magnificent. Like the wrath of God.”

  “I suppose you get used to them,” Andras says. “Were you born here?”

  “No. Born and bred in New York City. But I left in 1938. I escaped with my life.”

  “Did you,” Andras says.

  Una explains, “There was the pollution, and the overpopulation. And then there was the war. I was against that. The artists were just starting to leave in those days. They had their colonies, and their little enclaves. But that was not for me. When I left, I left for good. I don’t go to the city, I don’t talk to the city.”

  “No telephone?”

  “Oh, not at all. If it’s for my books, my publishers, you know—they leave word for me at Kendall Falls Library.”

  She picks up her jugs of springwater and carries them to the door of her house.

  “May I help you get those i
nside?” Andras asks.

  “Oh, no, you’d better get back home,” Una says. “Better hurry. It’s going to rain.”

  Andras makes his way back to Mohican Road. The sky does look threatening, and he walks quickly. The old woman’s roof must leak when it rains. And the cabin must be miserable in the snow. How does she manage in the winter? She can’t depend on wood alone to heat the place.

  Raindrops pepper Mohican Road’s gray asphalt. Andras can’t imagine that Una is as independent as she seems. Someone must come by to care for her in winter. Some relative, perhaps, comes by with food or helps her with her heat. She must buy fuel in Kingston.

  A honking car startles Andras and he looks up to see Rabbi Lamkin’s battered station wagon. Pesach Lamkin and his wife, Beyla, are ferrying a load of their own children, and their children’s friends.

  “You want a ride home?” Pesach calls out.

  “It’s going to pour,” Beyla says, unrolling her window.

  Andras hesitates, but he knows that Beyla is right. He’ll get soaked if he keeps walking.

  He squeezes into the backseat, and just manages to shut the door. The children are packed in the car, two perched illegally in front between Pesach and Beyla, three in back, and at least three curled up in the very back of the wagon.

  Andras sits with his arms drawn in at his sides. Noisy with children’s voices, the crowded car is a shock after the still forest. The car is filled with crumbs and potato chips, stuffed with toys. Still, Andras is grateful that the Lamkins stopped. As soon as they are on their way the rain comes down, pounding, streaming over the windshield.

  “Slower, Pesach,” Beyla warns, and then to Andras, “I hope on the Fourth it doesn’t rain like this. You’re coming on the Fourth?”

  “What’s on the Fourth?” Andras asks.

  “Opening day.”

  “Oh, of course.” The Fourth of July is opening day for the Lamkins’ day camp.

  “We’re having a treasure hunt,” Beyla says, “and prizes. Food, great food from New York. Tug-of-war, Softball. Everyone’s coming. It’ll be nice. We’re doing it up by the falls. You know.”

  Andras nods. The camp is of huge importance to the Lamkins. Really a windfall for them. Last summer there were great debates about whether there should even be a summer camp. The shul owned property, the old Thorne estate that Cecil’s father had bought years ago when he was treasurer. Mr. Birnbaum had bought the land as an investment for the shul, and now it’s worth some money. At the shul board meeting last summer the Lamkins proposed that they lease the land for just a few dollars a year, so that they could get a summer camp off the ground. Of course, old Mr. Birnbaum was not alive to respond to the suggestion, but Cecil stood up in his father’s place and declared that the land should be sold or rented at market value, not for a pittance—and if it wasn’t, he was quitting the board. Some people said that if Cecil wanted to quit, fine. The shul should invest in the children above all, not in real estate. Others said that starting a day camp was too difficult, and the children should stay home.

  Meanwhile, all through this controversy the Lamkins were holding their Shabbes afternoon onegs for girls and boys. Rabbi Lamkin was telling his group of thirty boys that they would have a basketball court if a camp were organized, and shiurs at picnic tables outdoors. And Beyla Lamkin was subtly campaigning among the girls. She would pass out Stella D’oro cookies, juice, and nonpareils; then she would launch into her stories: the little shul all alone and abandoned in the forest, discovered by a hunter who heard it weeping; the poor man who spent his last pennies so he could buy a fish for Shabbes, and then, cutting open the fish, found a priceless diamond there; the rich man and the silvered mirrors he learned to give up, exchanging them for clear glass so that he could look out onto the suffering of the world; the little Jewish boy who was stolen away and became pope. And she told tales of selfless men. Men who gave tzedakah at the highest level. They didn’t merely give gold and silver; they helped the unfortunate help themselves. Not only that, but they gave in secret. Such was the modesty of these saints that their work was known only after they had died. So tenderhearted were they that they wept to see a Jew breaking Shabbes. Beyla dwelt on the importance of a generous heart over and above all practical considerations, and even told the children of a piece of land left to a city, and how the king debated what to do, until finally he decided he would give it to the children for them to play in.

  The Lamkins got up and spoke before a meeting of the Kaaterskill parents, and they explained why it was necessary to establish a summer camp. The camp would protect the children from the dangers of summer; it would keep them learning, even when the weather was nice, so that they wouldn’t run wild and forget everything from the school year. Hashem shouldn’t be in one ear and out the other, but all year round! Of course, Andras thought these arguments were absurd. He would have walked out of the meeting, if it hadn’t been for Nina. Andras has no patience for this kind of thing, this cringing from the world in little enclaves, this desire to keep the children from outside influences, the building of a European ghetto in America. He grimaces now to hear the Lamkins go on about the camp. He came from the Old Country himself, after all, and he chose the new.

  THE rain splashes Elizabeth and her daughters as they dash from their car into the Kendall Falls Library. They come every Sunday, because during the week they don’t have the car.

  Elizabeth opens the jingling glass door, and the girls walk past the box of sale books, twenty-five cents each. “Wipe your shoes, please,” the librarian, Ernestine Schermerhorn, tells the children. The girls are a little afraid of her. She is a proud librarian, watchful and keen, with short salt-and-pepper hair, a tall, straight back, and the elegant, slender arms of a trained dancer. Mrs. Schermerhorn often tells how in her youth she studied modern dance at Bennington College. Now she lives with her husband on Mohican Road. Not in the Mohican Road estates, but in the gatehouse. Her husband serves as guard for that exclusive community, and Mrs. Schermerhorn is proud of that. Her own family is old, pre-Revolutionary, she has told Elizabeth, descended from the earliest Dutch settlers on the mountain.

  Mrs. Schermerhorn’s assistant, Janet Knowlton, is young and fair and likes to read stories to the little girls, but Mrs. Schermerhorn just watches them from her desk. When the children come up to her to take out their books, Mrs. Schermerhorn examines each selection, and looks each girl in the eye as if to judge whether she is worthy.

  The walls of the library are decorated with posters depicting “Common Birds of the Northeast,” “Leaves of the Forest,” and “Woodland Flowers.” All the posters have a cameo picture of Smokey the Bear and his famous saying: “Only YOU can prevent forest fires.” The children’s books are on short bookcases. Also for children, there is a corner with a burnt-orange rug, pillows, small chairs, and a long coffee table covered with glass. Under the glass lies a map of Fairyland in ink and watercolor, an intricate, glowing map the color of sunsets, with fairies and sea monsters, Sleeping Beauty’s castle, Sinbad’s ship, the wicked witch’s gingerbread house sharing the dark forest with Robin Hood’s men. There is Cinderella’s coach on the way to the ball, the cottage of Snow White and Rose Red, the four winds blowing with squinting eyes and billowy, puffed cheeks.

  Chani wanders around while her mother helps Sorah and Ruchel find their books, large ones with their clear plastic library covers. B Is for Betsy—all the Betsy books; Ramona the Pest, Bread and Jam for Frances. There are tall boxes of records on one of the tables. Chani remembers once her mother took out some records of poetry, and they all went over to Cecil Birnbaum’s house to hear them, because Cecil had a record player. There were records of Robert Frost, and Dylan Thomas, and Edna St. Vincent Millay. Old voices that creaked and swung in rhythm, their long phrases like the screen door on the bungalow, closing slowly, partway, a little more, and then, with a long sigh, thumping shut.

  Elizabeth marshals the girls at Ernestine Schermerhorn’s desk, and deliberately, form
ally, but with a kind of humor the girls miss, the librarian calls each one before her.

  “Hannah.” Mrs. Schermerhorn hands Chani Nabby Adams’s Diary. “You have two weeks. Sarah”—she summons Sorah up to the desk. Mrs. Schermerhorn glances at the windows streaming with rain. “I’m surprised you came in this downpour,” she says.

  “I thought it would let up,” says Elizabeth.

  “It shows no sign of letting up,” Mrs. Schermerhorn says. “Sarah, you have two weeks. Rachel,” she calls to Ruchel. Mrs. Schermerhorn says to Elizabeth, “You must be extremely careful driving home in this. We’ve had some accidents on these roads, cars swerving, trucks losing control. As you know, it’s a straight drop down to Devil’s Kitchen.”

  “We’ve been hiking there,” Elizabeth says. She has always thought Devil’s Kitchen a lovely place, dark and green, its great boulders strewn in the cleft of the gorge.

  “You may have seen the wreck,” Mrs. Schermerhorn says.

  “No,” says Elizabeth.

  “Well, I suppose it’s grown over now. It’s been ten years. Has it been ten years, Janet?” she asks the assistant librarian. “Young people driving home in the rain. Flew right over the guardrail and down in the gorge. That was how we lost Billy Walker. He used to stand here just where you’re standing now. He would come in at all hours. His sweetheart worked here. Candy Kendall. And they were just married when he died. Married just a day.”

  The car is silent as Elizabeth drives home in the rain. Thoroughly subdued by Mrs. Schermerhorn, the girls clutch their books as Elizabeth eases the station wagon around the curving mountain road.

  The rain shakes down from the mountain like loose pine needles. It floods the sidewalks on Maple and collects in ponds under the bushes. Running up the path to the bungalow, the children brush between overgrown hydrangeas, and a waterfall drops down on their heads.