Kaaterskill Falls

by Allegra Goodman

  Inside, the older girls go off to read on their beds; but Brocha doesn’t know how to read yet, and she cries, because no one will play with her. “Be quiet and I’ll read you a story,” Elizabeth promises.

  “No! No!” Brocha wails. “I will tell it.”

  “All right,” Elizabeth says, sitting the three-year-old down in a chair.

  “Three bears,” Brocha says.

  “All right.” Elizabeth waits.

  “You tell it,” Brocha says.

  Outside, the trees shake with thunder; the bungalow rattles. Elizabeth tells Brocha “The Three Bears” and “The Three Little Pigs.”

  “Different story,” Brocha says.

  Elizabeth gets out one of the new library books, Rip van Winkle. “This is a good story. Look, Rip van Winkle is watching the elves make the thunder.” She holds up the picture for Brocha to see. The elves are dancing up and down in the mountains in their peaked hats and pointed shoes. They are playing ninepins with the mountain boulders.

  “Three bears,” Brocha says.

  “Once upon a time in the great big forest there were three bears,” Elizabeth begins, looking out at the rain.

  The rain is still falling after dinner that night. Elizabeth and Isaac sit on the couch and listen to it thumping on the roof, and Elizabeth thinks how quickly the weekend slips away. Tomorrow is Monday, and Isaac will have to get up before six to drive back to the city.

  There was going to be a sort of theater party tonight. Beatrix and Cecil, Leah Landauer and Elizabeth, were planning to see A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but it’s playing all the way down in Lexington, and in this storm it isn’t safe to drive there. Beatrix wants to try again during the week, but Isaac will be in the city and won’t be able to watch the children. Elizabeth is a bit disappointed. She hasn’t been to a play in years. Isaac doesn’t go to them. Plays aren’t exactly forbidden, but they aren’t encouraged. The behavior onstage is so often violent, improper, everything painted in garish colors. Plays are vulgar entertainment.

  “I was hoping it would clear up, so I could go to Lexington,” Elizabeth says.

  Isaac doesn’t answer.

  “You think it’s silly—to go?” she asks him.

  “Well …” he begins. He doesn’t have to say it; she knows what he is thinking. It just isn’t something that they do. They never go to plays in the city. And is it because of Beatrix? he is wondering.

  “I wouldn’t go to plays—in general,” she tells him. “But this is different—because it’s Shakespeare.”

  Elizabeth has a romantic streak. But hers is romanticism of an unusual kind. Unlike many of her neighbors Elizabeth does not romanticize religion. God and the scriptures, worship and ritual, are all simple, practical things for her. She never sheds a tear during Yom Kippur, and she doesn’t sit in her car and look heavenward, thanking God after near accidents. She isn’t a skeptic like Andras, or a gadfly like Cecil. For her religion is such a habit, ritual so commonplace, that she takes it for granted. She worships God three times a day in her room, and while she would never say she felt a familiarity with her Creator, the prayers are familiar, and she’s used to approaching him. The sacred isn’t mysterious to her, and so she romanticizes the secular. Poetry, universities, and paintings fill her with awe. Museums, opera houses—although she has never been inside one. It might come from being English. Her family in Manchester was strictly observant, but her mother, who spoke Yiddish, was a collector of China teacups and an avid royal-watcher who wept to hear the king’s abdication address on the radio and later shamelessly named her daughter after the princess Elizabeth. When Elizabeth was a child, her family all sat together and watched the queen’s coronation on television, the grand procession in the vaulted abbey, the crosses, robes, and crowns, dazzling even in black and white and shades of fuzzy gray.

  “What are you thinking?” Isaac asks.

  “I wonder if Esther Ergman’s niece could watch the children,” Elizabeth says. “If I go during the week.”

  THURSDAY night is clear, the weekend storm long gone. Elizabeth puts up a meat loaf for Chani to serve the little ones. She shows Amy Ergman where the nightgowns are, and the puzzles, and then Cecil and Beatrix zoom up, honking their funny Hillman Minx, and they’re off to the play with Leah Landauer and her oldest boy, Chaim.

  The theater is a red barn in Lexington with lights hung from the rafters. There is no curtain, just a sudden blackout before the play begins. Then the barn is like a planetarium. Instinctively, Elizabeth looks up for the stars. Titania and Oberon appear instead, their flesh rippling in the speckled light. They seem constantly to be shedding skins, half dancing, half copulating, on the stage. Elizabeth has read, but never seen, the play. On the page A Midsummer Night’s Dream was lovely but elaborate, like old embroidery. Onstage the fairy-spirits leap like cats.

  “This is good,” Beatrix says during intermission, and she sounds surprised.

  “Their enunciation is excellent,” Cecil says.

  Elizabeth sees that the Landauer boy looks truly ashen. She feels sorry for him in his gray hat, dragged along by his more cosmopolitan mother. But she can also see him through Beatrix’s eyes, and it occurs to her that in some strange way he probably feels obligated to look ashen—that he finds his downcast look and embarrassment are requirements of his social situation.

  “Do you like it?” Beatrix asks Elizabeth.

  They are all looking at her, and so she smiles. “I hadn’t imagined that the poetry was so athletic,” she says. “It’s very modern. But I think all the dancing makes it otherworldly—and that’s what Shakespeare must have intended.”

  “Now, that’s telling,” Cecil says, rattling his program with a gleam in his eye. “That you talk about Shakespeare’s intentions—as if he intended something.”

  “Well, didn’t he?”

  “He could have—but it’s wonderfully archaic of you, talking about authors’ intending things and carrying them out. You betray your archaic theology,” Cecil says. “Talking about texts as the products of authors, and authors meaning what they say. I suppose you’ll say next that God sat and wrote down the Torah and all the commentaries, all seeing and all intending, of course—”

  “He’s just baiting you, Elizabeth.” Beatrix rolls up her program and whacks her husband on the knee. “Pay no attention to that man in the corner.”

  “I don’t really see the connection—between God and Shakespeare,” Elizabeth says.

  “Bardolatry,” Beatrix tells Cecil repovingly. “Traitor,” he shoots back.

  Beatrix confides to Elizabeth, “Cecil’s a literary critic, so he can’t believe people simply have ideas and write them down. He has to make it more complicated so he’ll have something to do.”

  “Now, that isn’t fair,” says Cecil. “And I wasn’t asking you. I was asking Elizabeth, do you think Shakespeare might have imagined this sort of … slithery production?”

  “Well …”

  “Absolutely not. This was a—”

  “Sh. They’re starting,” says Beatrix. Elizabeth leans back and watches the rest of the play, through Puck’s last monologue, delivered with a final pelvic thrust.

  By the time Elizabeth gets home, everyone is sleeping, even the baby-sitter. She wakes up Amy Ergman and pays her, and Amy walks off to her aunt’s across the street. Then Elizabeth puts on her nightgown. It’s too late to phone Isaac in the city.

  She wasn’t sure exactly what Cecil meant by bringing up theology at intermission. Theology and Shakespeare have nothing to do with each other. She supposes he was just trying to tease her. It didn’t surprise her when he said she was archaic; he thinks all the Rav’s followers are old fashioned. He’s told her before that he doesn’t see why people should revere one man’s authority, or one family. She imagines Cecil thinks reverence is confining. Of course it isn’t, when you grow up with it. Her family had always followed their Rav in Manchester; and when she married Isaac and moved to America, Elizabeth simply took up his c
ommunity and his Rav. It was simple, almost nothing, like taking Isaac’s last name. There are slight differences in the Kirshner traditions, different niggunim, and minhagim, but the standards aren’t much different from those in Manchester. In any case, the things she does and doesn’t do, the things she eats, even the words she utters, are all external for her. Not superficial, but fixed and homely. They don’t really control what she is on the inside; they don’t have anything to do with what she thinks or what she wants.

  Elizabeth partly recognizes her romance of worldly things, art and theaters, exotic people. Regina from Los Angeles, where the shuls are movie palaces. Or Beatrix, who is from the very citadel of poetry and numbers, Oxford, with its gargoyles and museum-churches, its gardens kept for scholars and their robed processions. This love of the outside world is a kind of voyeurism for Elizabeth, and realizing that, she is dissatisfied. If she could do more than watch; if she could participate—do something or create something in the shimmering, spinning secular world. If she could move outside the fixed and constant realm in which she lives. But, of course, without giving it up, without exchanging it. Her religious life is not something she can cast off; it’s part of her. Its rituals are not rituals to her; not objects, but instincts. She lives inside them and can’t hold them up to look at. That is the beauty of the secular world—she can examine it. And yet she’d like to hold it more closely; really touch it. That’s what makes her restless.

  5

  MICHAEL King walks up Maple, glancing at his bungalows, all rented, all summer. He owns eighteen of these in Kaaterskill, including Elizabeth and Isaac’s, and three chalets in Bear Mountain. He has built up his real estate business gradually over the years, buying up lots, tearing down old houses, making subdivisions. He started out as one of the summer people, and then, when his father moved permanently to Florida, he went into business renting out the family summer house and buying another. Nearly all the outside real estate deals in Kaaterskill, Bear Mountain, and Kendall Falls pass through King’s office—the loose stuff, that is—everything not sucked up by Victoria Schermerhorn’s agency or by Judge Taylor and his nephews. He is a shrewd investor, King, a tight landlord. He always has his eye on new property, new investment openings. He’s developed part of the lakefront on Mohican Lake, built the two luxury houses there that the Fawesses rent each summer, big two-story lodges with terraces for the lake view and a pier for sailing. And now he has his eye on the nonconservation land just above Kaaterskill on Coon Lake. Lakefront houses bring in as much as three bungalows together. This is the kind of development King wants to move into. He sees Kaaterskill as more than just a bungalow town. After all, up behind Mohican Road are mansions worth one, two million each. Why shouldn’t King rent places on that scale? He’s getting top dollar for the houses on Mohican Lake. Coon Lake could be even better.

  King had some wild summers up in Kaaterskill when he was a kid. He didn’t care much about development in those days, or where his future came from. He liked to drink. He liked to fight. He used to smoke with a bunch of kids in the back lot behind the synagogue. That was before the telephone company bought that little corner piece and put in the unmanned switching system, taking Kaaterskill off the four-digit exchange. King didn’t have an eye for old houses in those days—he speculated on the Kaaterskill girls instead. Later the girls grew heavy; they married and had children. He watches them now wheeling strollers. King is heavier himself, at thirty-six, but he’s tall; he carries it. He stands out in Kaaterskill with his western clothes. He wears boots and red plaid shirts. The hunters stare at him and his open-necked shirts—no buttons, metal snaps instead, covered with mother of pearl. But King is a permanent resident now in Kaaterskill. He and his wife, Jackie, spend their weekends shopping at auctions in the antique barns outside Phoenicia and the converted mill in Palenville. A quiet life for a young man who was once threatened by old man Kendall brandishing a rifle.

  King has changed. He has grown from a nuisance discussed at the Town Meeting to becoming a selectman on the Three Town Council. Grown from a “bragging, bullying menace that has to stop” into a landlord with contractors and workers in all three towns and strict standards for his men as well. He runs a lean, high-profit office, and he punishes dishonesty, waste, and graft. He has actually become a Rotarian.

  King walks up Main Street into the Taylor building, announces himself to Judge Taylor’s secretary, and takes a seat in one of the hard-backed chairs in the reception room.

  Taylor keeps him waiting. It’s always a ten-minute wait for King in Taylor’s reception room with the ancient Yankee magazines.

  When Taylor’s secretary finally ushers King into the judge’s inner office, Taylor looks up and asks briskly, “Well, Michael, what can I do for you?” He does not offer King a seat.

  King sits down in the chair in front of Taylor’s oak desk anyway.

  “I want to swear out a complaint against Stan Knowlton,” King says. “He’s been stealing from me for months and I’ve had it. I’ve had enough.”

  The judge raises his eyebrows. Taylor knew King’s father, Herb Klein, and he’s known Michael since he was just a boy. Taylor caught him setting off smoke bombs fifteen years ago Fourth of July. It doesn’t matter how much of Kaaterskill King tries to buy; to Taylor he will always be one of the summer people. The rich, loud, fast-driving, deer-scaring kind. The kind teeming in the woods like ticks, shooting in the bird sanctuary, plowing the fishing places with motor boats. King is a landlord now, but he’ll always be one of them. He hardly keeps up the bungalows he rents out. He’s a landlord as sloppy as the skiers who invade Bear Mountain in winter, tramping in the snow and drinking, pocking the hardwood floors with their ski poles.

  Miles Taylor is an orderly man with an ordered mind. He has a clear ethic that he uses every day. Not a dusty emotional morality examined only in church, but a practical system. His ethical accounts have columns for credits and debits: what is done for him and what he does for others. And his goal, it must be said, is not an equilibrium of favors done and favors rendered. Not that Taylor is crassly manipulative, or merely self-aggrandizing. He seeks an advantage for himself, but he identifies himself with his family—his brother and his nephews—and further, with his town. On a more ethereal level Taylor has a kindly feeling for those he doesn’t deal with directly: his country, his world, his God. He believes in the fellowship of man and the immortal soul. He has loved deeply, although his wife has been dead fifteen years. He has principles and a heart. But the summer people do not inspire his sympathy, generosity, or fellow feeling. And looking at the Klein boy, self-styled King, Miles Taylor feels only anger to hear he’s fired poor Knowlton, who has never had anything except for Janet Kendall, his childhood sweetheart, now his wife. A pretty girl, and a good family, too, except that the Kendalls haven’t any money. There are too many of them these days in Kendall Falls.

  “Why should I bother with a few flagstones?” Taylor asks now.

  “He took over a hundred,” snaps King. “Aren’t you going to prosecute a thief?”

  “Oh, he’s not a thief,” says Taylor.

  “What would you call him, then?” asks King.

  “He’s just a young man, who made a mistake.”

  “You’re going to sit by and—”

  “You made some mistakes when you were young, as I recall.”

  King doesn’t answer.

  “Well,” says Taylor, “if you want me to publicize Knowlton’s peccadilloes, hadn’t you better start with your own?”

  “This is ridiculous,” King says.

  “Why?” asks the judge.

  “Are you threatening to blackmail me over a pile of flagstones?”

  “It does sound trivial when you put it that way,” says Taylor. “Not worth a fuss, eh? Big smoke, no fire.”

  King gets up. “I’m going to hire a lawyer,” he says.

  “You do that,” Taylor says, as King walks out the door.

  The judge opens his desk drawer an
d takes out his lunch, a cheese sandwich and two apples. He eats the first apple and he frowns. In the past five years he has watched King snap up properties all through Kaaterskill, tear down fine old houses on Spruce and Maple, and subdivide the lots within inches of the zoning laws. Taylor’s family real estate company has kept to certain standards about quality and price control. He and his nephews know the history of the place, and what the town could be. King just puts up bungalows and rents to Orthodox Jews, one family after another. He gives no thought to the effect the Jews make when they come up for the summer, Russian kerchiefs over the women’s hair. Cultish attendance at the synagogue. There has been a small cohort of them in town since the fifties, but King is attracting more and more, with his cheap house-building and low-rent cottages. The worst of it is the way King has got poor townspeople like Knowlton to sell out their property and take bungalows themselves. They need the money, and they haven’t anything else to sell, so King buys them out. Like Jacob the usurper, he approaches them to buy up their inheritance.

  Now King is expanding into virgin territory. Buying up at Mohican Lake like a slash-and-burn farmer, planning to expand into Coon Lake, too, on speculation. Methodically Taylor eats a second apple, all the way around, and then the top and bottom ends. He eats every bit except the stem and seeds.

  In Plattville a visitor can find a little country charm, the church with its steeple, a New England village green. But Kaaterskill has nothing left of that. There is the forest, and the falls, but the town has been trampled and badly run down. The year-round residents are demoralized. Few are house proud. What can they do, living among the subdivisions? The town looks nondescript, Main Street nearly empty. The only real reputation Kaaterskill has is as a summer home for the ultrareligious Jews. And with their modest incomes, big families, parochial tastes, these Orthodox don’t nurture boutiques and restaurants, parks, or college scholarships for the town children. There was a time when these people had their own resorts outside of town, self-contained hotels. But one by one the hotels closed, and emptied out like Trojan horses into the countryside. The Jewish summer people settled on the little towns themselves.