“It’s a wonderful idea,” Eva says.
“But a lot of work,” says Maja.
“A lot of work,” Eva echoes. “Yes, but it’s a splendid idea.”
“A kosher store would save so much time,” says Nina. “You have to do it. Don’t you think she has to do it?” she asks Andras.
Andras sips his drink in the wing chair and he says nothing. What can he say? Elizabeth has never had any experience with a business. She doesn’t know anything about inventory; hasn’t considered how to transport food from the city or what kind of markup she’ll need. With the transportation expenses, rented space, or at least rented equipment, she won’t break even, let alone make money. But there she is, radiant, planning on the sofa. Andras has never seen her so enthusiastic. It’s like hearing she gambles secretly. Elizabeth Shulman, mother of five! He’s always seen Elizabeth as a certain type. Practical, capable, and warm. Calm and fair with children, a sociable neighbor, and, of course, a pious Jew. That comes last somehow. In religion, Andras assumes, she just follows Isaac’s lead. He has always assumed she would behave true to form. And now, suddenly, she seems very eager, very young. He realizes, sitting there, that Elizabeth is probably only thirty-three or thirty-four, and yet he’s always thought of her as older, because of all the children. There are people like Nina who always seem young, impulsive, passionate. And then people like Elizabeth, who always seem mature.
Eva and Maja serve strudel to their guests, apple and cherry. They have two sets of good china just for Kaaterskill, and two sets of sterling. They serve on dessert plates painted with acorns and curling brown oak leaves. Eva’s hands tremble as she cuts the flaky pastry. “Let me,” Nina says. “You sit. I’ll do it.”
“Who’s the guest? You sit,” Eva tells her young sister-in-law.
“But I’m not a guest,” Nina protests.
“In this house. In this house,” Eva murmurs, and Nina sits down.
“And where would you put this store?” Maja asks Elizabeth.
Elizabeth hesitates. Isaac looks uncomfortable. She sees he doesn’t want her to go on about it. “I was thinking of renting out the back room in Hamilton’s.”
“Really?”
“I was just thinking about it.”
Actually, Elizabeth has gone and talked to Hamilton already. She’s gone to see him in his little shingled store, free standing on Main Street between the Taylor building and King Real Estate. Hamilton’s was the town grocery on Main Street before the A & P arrived and took all the business. Now Mr. Hamilton sells tourist souvenirs that he brings up from Catskill—postcards, necklaces with Indian bead dolls on the end; trail guides, fishing gear, maple-sugar Liberty Bells.
Hamilton has white hair, and a short white beard, and ruddy skin weathered from the sun. His eyes are bright clear blue. He is a prickly fellow, and he’s grown worse since the death of his wife, but Elizabeth is not afraid of him. Just yesterday she walked right into his old storeroom, unused now. It was small and windowless with its Dutch door opening into the main part of the store. She looked inside. And then she came up to Hamilton at the register and she said, “I’ve been thinking about selling some kosher food, and I was wondering about renting your back storeroom.”
Hamilton said nothing.
“It seems to me that you only use the big storeroom, and you’ve got nothing much in the little one. So if I paid you rent and arranged for deliveries on my own, you’d have a clear profit, and the risk would be all mine.” She told him all about her idea and how much she’d pay in rent.
“I don’t need it,” Hamilton said.
“Of course, I’m talking about next summer,” Elizabeth told him.
He just shrugged, but Elizabeth wasn’t put off. She knows she can convince him; all she needs is time.
“That little room in the back?” Cecil asks Elizabeth now. “You know, that used to be the liquor department. Years ago. It’s true. Mrs. Hamilton used to sit there, presiding. At night she locked up the place with three bolts. Not one, not two.”
“He doesn’t use it now,” Elizabeth says.
“He lost his liquor license ten years ago. Some kids got killed driving drunk up Mohican.”
Elizabeth nods.
“It was before your time,” says Cecil.
“Ernestine Schermerhorn told me about it at the library. The rainstorm,” she says. “But now Hamilton’s room is empty….” She does not finish the sentence. She feels suddenly that she has said too much about the store.
“Did you know they’re doing Iolanthe at Saratoga?” Beatrix says. “It’s the D’Oyly Carte, so we all have to go. You have to go, especially,” she says to Elizabeth, “since you’re English.”
“Oh, I can’t,” she says.
“Why?”
“The Three Weeks,” Elizabeth says. There are no plays, movies, or concerts permitted during the Three Weeks. There are no weddings. Every summer on the days the Three Weeks fall out, there must be mourning for the siege of Jerusalem that led to the destruction of the Second Temple.
“Oh, the Three Weeks,” Beatrix mutters. “I don’t suppose it matters that we’ve got Jerusalem back, and the state of Israel and all that?”
“The Temple hasn’t been restored,” Isaac points out.
“Well, you can’t have everything,” Beatrix says.
AFTER the oneg Elizabeth and Isaac walk into the bungalow, the children buzzing around them, in and out, up and down the porch steps. She and Isaac go to their bedroom and shut the door. Quiet and perfect shade. The children know that on Shabbes afternoon they can’t come in. Elizabeth sits on the side of the bed and takes off her stockings, but Isaac takes his book and starts out the door. “Where are you going?” she asks him.
“To read,” he says from the doorway.
“Are you angry at me?” Elizabeth asks.
He doesn’t answer.
“I just wanted to try out my idea. You didn’t think I should?”
He says, “I just didn’t think you should talk about it to everyone.”
“But it’s just an idea.”
“Because it’s only an idea.”
“What’s wrong with mentioning it?” she asks him. “But we haven’t even discussed it. We’ve barely discussed it ourselves.”
“Well, why didn’t you say anything, then? Why were you just sitting there?”
“Because I can’t sit next to you with everyone there and contradict you,” Isaac bursts out. “You don’t think about the position you put me in.”
She thinks a moment. Then she says, “It’s just that you don’t want me to do it.”
“Elizabeth,” he says, “there are questions. You aren’t thinking about all the questions. The money—”
“I have the money,” she interrupts. She has a little money from her grandparents.
“The permission from the Rav.”
Of course, she’s thought of that. This is the most important question of all. Any business involving food requires permission from the Rav. “You could help me get it,” she says. “You could help me if you wanted to.”
“It’s not an easy thing. It’s not such an easy thing for you to suddenly decide.”
She sits there on the bed and holds her pillow on her lap, punching her fists deep into it. “Of course it isn’t easy. Why should it be easy?”
“A store is risky,” Isaac says, swaying slightly back on his heels, holding his book in his arms.
“I know.”
“I don’t think you do.”
“Does that mean I should never try anything or spend my own money?”
“I just don’t understand why you’re suddenly convinced you want to do this. Why all of a sudden now.”
“Because I want to do something.”
“But of all the things you could do.”
What things? she thinks. What are all the things? All the opportunities to create something of her own. What are all the opportunities for someone who has only been a mother? Not merely a moth
er, as if it were unimportant, but only a mother. All consumingly. Only a cherisher and a teacher, a feeder of souls, hungry and mysterious, and always becoming more like themselves. What she wants is the chance to shape something that cannot become anything else, only hers. To truly create something, material, definable, self-limited.
Isaac sits down next to her. He puts his book on the bed and Elizabeth stares at the oversized volume of Talmud with the title printed gold on the leatherette cover. The edges of the pages are marbleized a blurry pink and purple. They don’t have much money. Of course she knows that. They certainly don’t have money to throw away. “Just let me look into it,” she says. “At least let me try to find out about it.”
“Elizabeth,” Isaac says slowly, “this is something—I really think this is something that would be a mistake.”
“You wouldn’t help me?”
He looks at her in frustration.
“Why don’t you just say that you won’t let me try.”
“I don’t think you’re being fair,” he says.
“No, you aren’t being fair,” she says.
He picks up his book.
“Isaac,” she says, “I can do this myself.” She says the words in anger, knowing they are untrue. She couldn’t go on if he refused. She couldn’t oppose him in that way. And, of course, the Rav would never give permission for her alone to open a store. He wouldn’t even see her if she came to him alone. The Rav doesn’t really speak to women. Not women outside his family. Not women with business propositions.
2
FROM the window the Rav can see his people walking up the hill to shul. Before morning services he often stands at the window on the second floor of his house and looks at them; little children running ahead, young parents, older men with canes. He wonders what they are thinking; how they view the world. There are fewer now from Germany in the Kehilla. Fewer every year who once lived in Frankfurt with its great flowing river and the towering, even-spaced trees, the grand stone-fronted houses. The Rav’s people are more and more American born. They know only Washington Heights. A jumble of apartments. A hodgepodge. They are not rich as they were in Germany. Their Sabbaths have none of that grandeur, none of that ease. They do not cover their tables with silver and curling candelabra. Their tables gleam with small candlesticks. In America everything is smaller and more private. Missing, and impossible to reclaim, is the old confidence about the world. A holocaust of blood has washed away his congregants’ pretensions to a natural place, a decorative culture, a luxuriant liberal education. The inner confidence remains.
Rav Kirshner is unlike the Hasidic rebbes of Borough Park, Crown Heights, and Williamsburg. He is a different sort of rabbi altogether. He is not one to speak often to his followers, stirring them up in crowded halls, demanding and inspiring, imploring. He does not wear a long black frock coat or a shtreimel on Shabbes like those rabbis who dress in the garb of eighteenth-century Polish nobles. His is the modern dress of the nineteenth-century man of business, a suit with a vest and watch pocket, a large gold watch on a chain. He has no flowing beard. In the style of all the Frankfurt rabbis he is clean shaven. He speaks in a clear, direct fashion, without parables or fairy tales, with no reference to Gematria, that cipher of mystic numbers coded in the sacred texts. There are Hasidic rebbes who tie their handkerchiefs to their fingers as they speak of certain things—thus to keep their ascending spirits tied to the ground. Rav Kirshner’s handkerchief remains folded in his pocket, starched and ironed. He is no mystic. He is a rationalist, interested in law, not myth. People do not flock to him with supplications, or for blessings on their enterprises. He is not the sort of Rav to whom men pour out their hearts, pleading for words of wisdom and glimpses of hope. As far as he is concerned, their way is laid out before them; they must seek guidance by learning halachah, by living the life prescribed to them. He makes rulings on legal questions, dictates the standards of the community, but he is no counselor or magician to his people. It is not for him to greet them all, accepting petitions like a king on a throne. It is not for him to pull happiness out of a hat, exorcise evil, or divine misfortune in the misshapen letter of a mezuzah. He hates that kind of superstition, and has even written that he prefers doubt and skepticism to that kind of belief. For the skeptic’s questions may provide a ground for learning, but the ignorant believer cannot reason. He has written this, and yet he hates both skepticism and ignorant superstition.
The families are quiet as they walk up the hill to the synagogue. Even the children are subdued, because it is Tisha b’Av, the day set aside for prayer and fasting to mourn the fall of Jerusalem, the destruction of the Temple, the dispersion of the Jews. The sun is shining through the trees, illuminating the leaves, but the day is tragic.
Isaiah is knocking on the door, and the Rav checks his watch to make sure it is time. He will not enter the synagogue early or late. His son takes his arm on the stairs and looks at him anxiously. The Rav is under doctor’s orders not to fast, but, of course, he is fasting anyway, and no one has dared to offer him breakfast. Together, he and Isaiah leave the house and enter the white synagogue next door.
The Rav cannot see for several minutes when he comes out of the sun into the shadowy sanctuary. He feels, rather than sees, the men parting in front of him, the soft mass of their suit jackets, the hundred curves of their hats. Opening the siddur in front of him, turning the smooth white pages, the Rav waits for the letters to stop dancing. They are floating and jumping over the page, but this does not frighten him. Gradually his eyes adjust to the dark. The letters settle into their proper places, moving into their correct and eternal order. Only after they have settled down does he begin to pray. He davens standing, reading silently, moving his lips. He does not shuckl, swaying from side to side or up and back on his heels, because he does not go in for theatrics. He simply davens. He feels no hunger or thirst. He has always fasted well.
FROM the women’s section Elizabeth glimpses the Rav standing. For just a moment she sees his small dark figure between the white curtain and the glass of the mechitzah. The shul is packed. All the men are up because it’s Sunday. Tisha b’Av fell on a Saturday this year, and so the fast was put off until the next day. Mourning is forbidden on the Sabbath; it would be wrong to read lamentations on such a joyous day.
Elizabeth leans back. She sits with the girls and her familiar headache, the emptiness of getting up early and skipping breakfast. She got up at six to feed the three little ones. They are too young to go without food the whole day, and so Elizabeth gave them breakfast. She lay down for a few minutes while Isaac helped the girls lace up their tennis shoes. They are all wearing white canvas tennis shoes instead of leather, as a sign of mourning.
Beyla Lamkin is tapping Elizabeth on the shoulder. “Is that seat empty?”
Elizabeth shakes her head. “Chani’s coming back.”
“I don’t know where to sit,” Beyla whispers. “It’s so warm. Do you feel warm?”
“Sh,” Esther Ergman hisses.
“Sit, sit, I don’t know where Chani is,” says Elizabeth, although she doesn’t want to sit next to Beyla with her squirming baby.
“Sh.” Esther Ergman is glaring at her. Elizabeth does know where Chani is. She is outside running around, up and down the hill; she’ll come in scratched up from the blackberry bushes behind the shul. Chani hates sitting all this time.
Beatrix isn’t in shul, having announced that Tisha b’Av is unnecessary; but everyone else is here. Nina Melish at the window looking pale, her sisters-in-law Eva and Maja next to her, as serene as ever, matching, their straw hats trimmed with clusters of dried flowers. And all the other summer people. The pregnant women in their voluminous dresses and big sheitels, their hair looking too big for their heads. Young Rabbi Shavitz’s wife with Chaya and Tova, four and two, in matching dresses, big white collars appliquéd with flowers, Chaya, taller and with longer hair, wearing a hearing aid. The young girls are there, with long legs; the little ones with headbands
; the very old ladies with their old-fashioned rings, white gold and diamond clusters. A bride, married a month or two ago, a little zaftig, wearing a tailored suit. The babies with dark curly hair, white dresses, pink sashes. The toddlers squirming on laps in their lace-trimmed socks. The Conservative Rabbi Sobel’s wife with her eyes on her book. Leah Landauer sitting alone, because she has no daughters. All her sons sit in the men’s section with Joe.
The Rav does not see any of this, of course. It is impossible to see the women even from where he stands on the raised bima. Isaiah supports him at his side, but the Rav holds the carved railing of the bima and nods to his son to let him go. What he sees from the raised dais is the hundreds of men, a shifting ocean of black. Lifted by the day and by the fast, he stands holding the railing like a man at the prow of a ship, all the faces below him floating on a sea of black suit jackets. He sees them floating, and yet he feels the wood railing beneath his fingers. He watches their faces blur and drift, surreal, and yet he stands still, firm on his feet. He can observe to himself that his eyes are playing tricks on him. It is strange to be making that observation, to see himself standing there on his feet and to know that there is no ocean beneath him, that the ground is still, that in truth all the men’s faces sit squarely on the correct bodies. For, of course, if he had eaten and taken his medication it would all be clear. Without it he realizes that his perception is faulty. The experience is interesting to him. When he sits down he sees well, but when he stands up, he watches his eyes play tricks. Standing up, he stands outside of himself—a rational ecstasy.
Kaaterskill Falls Page 11
