Tears start in Jeremy’s eyes. It is hard for him to hear his father speak of her. They almost never speak of her.
The Rav pauses, and then he says, “She believed in beauty, its power and strength. She believed in beauty and nature and in art.”
“And she was right about the house,” Jeremy says lightly, just to say something, to deflect the moment because it is so strong.
“I had loved those things,” the Rav says. “But I did not believe in them as she did. Except perhaps when I was very young. Before the war when I was young.”
“Father.” It is Isaiah knocking on the open door of the hospital room.
The Rav looks up irritably.
“Father,” Isaiah says again, “Dr. Stein is here.”
“I am in the middle of a conversation,” the Rav says. Then he turns to Jeremy and confides, “I have no time for this.” He gestures to the hospital bed. “They would like to keep me here, but I have no time for it. My manuscript on Kohelet is still uncorrected. My correspondents will be waiting for answers to their letters. I have never delayed my replies before.”
The Rav looks at Jeremy with his dark impatient eyes, and Jeremy feels a rush of gratitude to be singled out this way. He meets his father’s gaze with wonder and with joy.
3
“OKAY,” Stephanie tells Renée, “so the deal is, we have to get you a job, or you go back to Rabbitville.” That’s what Stephanie calls Rabbi Lamkin’s camp. Stephanie has a way with words. She particularly likes vintage slang, which she’s picked up from the succession of baby-sitters she had as a child. She’s had baby-sitters from several eras, and she mixes together phrases from all of them. There was Mrs. Boyles, the old housekeeper with support hose who lived in until Stephanie was twelve and played Nanny to Stephanie’s Eloise, and there was, of course, Malaya with her women’s group and ashram. There was also a tight-lipped divorcee who had a cache of pills in her night table. She left one day, taking nothing but Mom’s jewelry. Stephanie remembers all of these women fondly and still drapes herself with their mismatched catchwords. “Say, Steve,” she’ll tell her cousin—the one with the license—as he drives, “you’d better slow down, there’s fuzz on this road.”
“Now, for a new job … Well, what can you do?” Stephanie asks, examining her friend.
“Nothing,” says Renée.
“Sh, I’m concentrating.”
Renée watches with anxious eyes as her friend strides out into the living room of the Fawesses’ lake house. Balancing like a surfer, Stephanie takes a slide across the polished hardwood floor on a huge white New Zealand sheepskin. She paces around the circular fire place, which King advertises to the winter renters, and kicks the polished driftwood coffee table contemplatively. Her parents don’t care what she does to the furniture; it’s not theirs, and they’re rarely home anyway. They haven’t bothered to buy and furnish a house in Kaaterskill because security is so difficult in the winter.
“What can you do?” Stephanie asks again. She wanders into the kitchen and sticks her head in the refrigerator. “Hmm. What are you good at? Parents. You’re good at parents.” Stephanie’s mother adores Renée, because she’s so polite and quiet. Nina’s training has left its mark. When Renée comes over she always says, ‘Hello, Mrs. Fawess, how are you?’ And she thanks Mrs. Fawess for having her over. “Parents. Adults,” Stephanie brainstorms. “Goody Two-shoes. Pain-in-the-ass … Libraries!” She shouts, triumphant. She slams shut the refrigerator door. “Kendall Falls Library,” she tells Renée. “They’ll love you. Come on, we have to get over there.”
“But what do I say?” Renée asks.
“Come on, come on. I’ll pick up the dogs and walk you.” Stephanie has started a dog-walking business. Three dollars an hour per client. She calls the dogs “clients.”
Renée and Stephanie set off for Kendall Falls. Renée walks her bike, and Stephanie walks her five clients: two terriers, her aunt’s hyperactive spaniel, Roberta—named after Redford—and King’s gray poodle. Deftly, the aspiring veterinarian untangles the leashes as she talks. “You go in,” she instructs Renée on the way. “You tell whatserface you heard she needed help cataloging or something.”
“But I didn’t hear that,” Renée says.
Stephanie glares at her. “Just tell the goddamn librarian you want a job,” she orders.
Renée groans. “She knows my mother. She’s known me since I was eight years old.”
“So obviously she’ll hire you,” Stephanie reasons. “Look, chick, nothing ventured, nothing gained. There comes a time when you decide: Am I going to be a shrinking violet, or am I going to achieve? Come on, woman, this is your life.”
“But I don’t know what to say,” says Renée as they approach the library.
“Buffalo biscuits,” Stephanie says. She leaves her friend in front of Kendall Falls Free Library, turns around with a flick of her hair, and walks off, dogs jumping all around her.
Renée stands alone on the sidewalk, and feels not so much afraid as sad and unimportant. She wants to be original like Stephanie, but she isn’t. She looks at the library with distaste. The library’s front yard is divided in half by a path from the gate to the front door. The flagstone walk is perfectly straight, like a compass-and-ruler construction. Petunias planted on each side. Two straight lines of purple-and-white pinwheel flowers. Renée trudges up the path. She opens the glass library door.
“Renée Melish,” says Ernestine Schermerhorn. Mrs. Schermerhorn’s voice carries. She exercises her librarian’s privilege not to whisper. “I haven’t seen you for quite some time.”
Renée smiles nervously. She doesn’t want to approach nimble-fingered, keen-eyed Mrs. Schermerhorn. She pretends to browse instead. But the library has grown very small, like Renée’s grandmother in Buenos Aires. It is just one room, like a one-room schoolhouse, tall bookcases and short, all facing the desk.
“Are you looking for something, Renée?” Mrs. Schermerhorn says.
Renée hesitates. Then she says, “I was looking for you.”
“Well, here I am,” says Mrs. Schermerhorn. She sits up, straight and tall behind her desk.
“I heard you need help cataloging or something,” says Renée.
“I don’t know where you could have heard that,” Mrs. Schermerhorn replies, and Renée can feel the library’s silence blossoming between them. “We’re part of the state cataloging plan now, and I have an assistant, you know, Mrs. Knowlton.”
“Oh,” Renée says.
“However,” Mrs. Schermerhorn says thoughtfully, “I could use help on the bookmobile.”
And so Renée is hired and saved from Rabbitville. She starts working on the bookmobile that afternoon. Renée and Mrs. Knowlton load the books into the van. Then Renée gets in, alongside Mrs. Schermerhorn.
Each afternoon they drive to a different town and park while the library customers browse the shelves. Then they make side trips to individual houses to deliver books on order, collect fines, pick up donations of used magazines. It’s a bit like the trick-or-treating Renée remembers from when they had the old house in Brooklyn and her mother still allowed the children to celebrate Halloween—that pagan holiday. Renée has to do the running in and out, carrying books and bringing back request slips, money for overdue fines. All of this saves Mrs. Schermerhorn’s back. The work is all running up to the door and ringing the bell while the librarian waits at the curb. Mrs. Schermerhorn sits behind the wheel of the big gray bookmobile and toots the horn when she thinks they’re getting behind schedule. The van is fitted out like a boat with safety rails on the bookshelves. There are red tulips painted on the windows, but the flowers are small, so that they won’t block the view.
“Well, Renée,” Mrs. Schermerhorn says as they drive up Mohican, “you came at an opportune time. I haven’t had anyone to help for the last eight or nine years. There was a girl at the beginning, but it ended very unfortunately.”
Renée looks up, startled.
“And she
had been a bright young girl,” Mrs. Schermerhorn murmurs as she steers the van. “She had been about your age. Candy Kendall. She’s Candy Walker now.”
The librarian steers the van into the private road off Mohican. “This is where I live,” she says with simplicity and pride as they pass the gatehouse. “We’ve lived here for twenty-five years. Here in the Mohican Road Community. Of course, my family have lived here much longer than that—before the American Revolution, before there were any Yankees here, before Kendall Falls existed. You know the mountains were Dutch.”
The van sails into the gated community, and up the private winding road. They have a covenant, Renée thinks, remembering Stephanie’s words. Renée never did get straight exactly what the secret Mohican Road covenant is, but she knows she wouldn’t be here inside the gate if she weren’t on the bookmobile. The road twists up the mountain, and behind the trees, the great houses reveal themselves, turreted like true castles. Renée has never seen them up close, only from far away, only in glimpses from the road below. She and Chani Shulman used to have names for them all when they were little; Renée had forgotten that. There was the Gray Tower for Rapunzel, and a pillared Sleeping Beauty’s palace, the White Castle, and Cinderella’s house. She and Chani planned to make a map just like the Fairy Tale map in the glass table at the library, but somehow they could never make their map as beautiful. Depending on the pens they used, some of the palaces stood out very dark and spotted, and some were just dry scratches from old used-up markers Chani wouldn’t throw away. Chani believed that Magic Markers last forever, and she said if you just didn’t use a marker for a while it regenerated in its cap. Now Renée is inside Fairyland, and when the van stops she can see the whole mountainside below, the forest and the lake and the little houses of Kaaterskill.
Mornings in the library, plucking selections for the bookmobile, Renée hears the verdict on every family passing through the door. Mrs. Schermerhorn makes the pronouncements for the benefit of Renée and Mrs. Knowlton, the assistant librarian. At her desk on Monday before the Bear Mountain run, Mrs. Schermerhorn scoffs at the improvements on Michael King’s house. “I’ve never seen anything so vulgar.” She unrolls a fresh-typed library card from her electric typewriter. She says to Mrs. Knowlton, “I can only imagine what it must be like for you and your husband, living across the street from that monstrosity. The Seventh Wonder of Maple Street.”
Mrs. Knowlton leans on the new arrival table. “Stan says someday Michael King is going to get too big for his britches. He’s trying to rent out a new house each year, and he still hasn’t finished repairing the roofs and gutters from when the bungalows got swamped last August.”
“Is Stan still working for him?” Mrs. Schermerhorn asks.
“Oh, no—not now,” Mrs. Knowlton says. “He’s restoring the Lamkin house.”
“Where is that?”
“Way back behind Spruce.”
Mrs. Schermerhorn knits her brow.
“The gray place,” Mrs. Knowlton says. “Two stories.”
“I can’t quite recall it,” Mrs. Schermerhorn tells her.
Mrs. Knowlton glances over to where Renée is pulling out biographies. “Where the Jewish day camp is,” she whispers at last.
“Oh, you mean the old Thorne place!” Mrs. Schermerhorn’s voice is muffled. “Oh, yes—”
“—little … coats …” is all Renée can make out of the reply. She strains to hear what Mrs. Schermerhorn has to say about Rabbi Lamkin and his wife, but Mrs. Schermerhorn is back to Mr. King’s improvements again.
“Last time I looked,” Mrs. Schermerhorn says, “King was having white columns delivered. Four for the front. To make the house colonial, I think was his idea. It looks like the Phoenicia Motel.”
“I wonder—” Mrs. Knowlton begins; but the library door jingles.
“Good morning, Candy,” says Mrs. Schermerhorn.
Instantly Renée looks up from her pile of biographies on the floor. This is Candy, Renée’s predecessor on the bookmobile. The girl with the unfortunate end. Renée stares and stares, and she wonders if the woman eats a lot of it—candy, that is. Candy looks like a great round Russian doll from the back. Long fine blond hair streaming down over round shoulders to where her round bottom begins, with hardly an indentation at the waist; the line of her belt looks instead like the place where the doll comes apart to reveal the next largest one inside. Renée used to have a set with ten nesting dolls, painted and lacquered.
“Just returning these?” Mrs. Knowlton asks Candy.
Candy does not reply. With an indifferent look she casts her eye over Mrs. Knowlton’s new-arrival table. Then she passes briefly through the children’s section. Like a lady browsing in a store, she picks up a few books, then puts them down. And after only a few minutes she turns and walks out, the door jingling behind her.
The library is silent. There are no other borrowers in the room.
“God has entered her life,” Mrs. Schermerhorn says of Candy.
“What do you mean?” asks Mrs. Knowlton.
“I’m simply telling you what she’s told me,” says Mrs. Schermerhorn. “She says she’s going to Kaaterskill Bible Church.”
“I don’t think she’s very happy,” Mrs. Knowlton says after a moment.
“I think she’s happy enough,” Mrs. Schermerhorn says. “For a girl with a history like hers. And she doesn’t have to work, you know. She’s pretty well set with her widow’s benefits. Wouldn’t I have been surprised to look into the future when she was working on the bookmobile.”
Renée pauses in her search for Mary Queen of Scots. Still as she can be, she kneels on the carpeted floor.
“But the crash …” Mrs. Knowlton says.
“Yes. Yes, she lost him. I don’t deny that. A tragedy. But as I say, she’s well set with her benefits from the service.”
“August nineteenth,” Mrs. Knowlton says in a hushed voice.
“It was August twentieth!” Mrs. Schermerhorn exclaims. “I’ll never forget it was August twentieth.”
“I’m sure it was the nineteenth,” says Mrs. Knowlton timidly.
“No,” Mrs. Schermerhorn declares. “I’ll never forget it, because August the twentieth, 1966, my mother came to visit. And you remember the storm. That was the record August rainfall for the last fifty years. I was just terrified to drive. And you remember there were two hikers lost in the mud down in Palenville. But even with the wind that night I could hear the car skidding. And there was a shatter of glass I remember distinctly. I have very keen ears. My dog, poor Caesar, went absolutely wild. I knew the crash was just off Mohican. The driver could have been a Mohican Estate resident for all I knew. I said, ‘Ralph, get out of bed; it’s an accident! Call the police!’”
“But the phone line was down,” Mrs. Knowlton murmurs tremulously.
“Yes, just come apart! And the power too. So Ralph took his big flashlight, and Mother and I crept up to the window with the old kerosene lantern. We couldn’t see anything but the trees thrashing against each other.”
“I know,” Mrs. Knowlton whispers. “I’d been waiting up for Stan to begin with—”
“It was a miracle your husband survived,” Mrs. Schermerhorn says severely.
Mrs. Knowlton looks up with her round eyes. “A miracle any of them did. Stan said they fell so fast—”
“Fifty feet skidding on the car roof. Ralph saw the wreck. That old car was absolutely wrapped around the tree. I can only imagine what poor Bill looked like in the driver’s seat.” Mrs. Schermerhorn shakes her head. “He and Candy only married a day—”
“I thought they hadn’t been married at all,” Mrs. Knowlton says. “When the storm hit they were driving home from Bill’s bachelor party.”
“No, no,” Mrs. Schermerhorn corrects.
Janet shakes her head, puzzled, but doesn’t argue further.
“Well, Judge Taylor took care of it, drew up the papers,” says Mrs. Schermerhorn.
“And they’d hardly any ti
me together,” Mrs. Knowlton whispers, thinking how she nearly lost her own husband.
“I wouldn’t say hardly” the librarian corrects. “Candy gave birth just six months later. And as I say, she’s well set with her benefits from the service.” Then Mrs. Schermerhorn calls to Renée, “Let’s get those books into the van, please, or we’ll be late.”
THE hilly Bear Mountain Road bumps and jolts the van. The forest seems thicker here, because there is less of a town. “I’ve noticed you don’t take out any books yourself, Renée,” says Mrs. Schermerhorn. “What do you do with your free time?”
Renée looks down at her cotton skirt. Her arms hurt from carrying stacks of books from the library to the van. She’s wearing down the rippled rubber soles of her Famolare sandals.
“I would like to recommend some titles,” the librarian tells her. “It’s a pity to let a summer go to waste.”
When it comes to reading, Mrs. Schermerhorn doesn’t approve of anyone’s taste in Kaaterskill or Bear Mountain—except for Mrs. Shulman, who always comes in to the library for fat old books and serious nonfiction. As for the bookmobile customers, deadpan Mrs. Schermerhorn announces the name and then the special request of each as she drives.
“Mrs. Juliet Lacy: Passion Flowers.”
“Mr. Richard Beckstein, MD: All the Right Moves: Meeting Your Mate.”
“Mr. William Curtis: Real Estate with Nothing Down.”
“Mrs. Jacqueline King: French Provincial: Ornaments and Accessories.”
In Bear Mountain Mrs. Schermerhorn pulls up in front of the post office and parks to open for business. Her first customer is already waiting on the curb. Mrs. Schermerhorn tisks as he boards the van and hands a stack of worn paperbacks to Renée. The torn covers are blue and black, covered with galaxies, spaceships, dragons rearing up under women in gold bras. Renée expects to hear one of the titles read out loud, but Mrs. Schermerhorn restrains herself. She lets Renée stamp them and hand them over to grubby, curly-haired Ira Rubin, whose glasses always seem about to slip off his short nose.
Kaaterskill Falls Page 13
