Kaaterskill Falls

by Allegra Goodman

  “And the cake?” Elizabeth asks anxiously. “It’s not crushed back there?”

  “Not to worry.” James lifts out the coolers where the whitefish is packed on ice. “Come on, Ira, carry these in.”

  Inside Hamilton’s store Elizabeth opens one of the red-and-white coolers and examines the white paper parcels within. They are for Eva and Maja’s party, as are the boxes of cookies and miniature Danish, the miniature loaves of rye bread, and the cake in its tall pink box. “Put the cake over here,” she tells Ira Rubin. “Gently. Thank you.”

  Elizabeth cuts the string and opens the cake box. Ira’s eyes widen. There in pink icing the cake says Happy 16th Birthday Renée. The cake for Renée. He hadn’t realized it when they made the pickup in the city. Everything was packed in boxes marked Shulman. But it is for Renée, and she is sixteen, a year younger than Ira.

  The cake is in perfect condition. With its basket-weave icing and exquisite bouquet of flowers and butterflies, it is more elaborate than Elizabeth’s own wedding cake had been. Excited and nervous, a little feverish, a little jittery, Elizabeth is standing there with this bounty around her, writing a check to Boyd, collecting receipts, doing something completely new. In two weeks she’s organized the party for Renée Melish’s sixteenth birthday; in a morning she’s brought up the food from the city. She sneezes and blows her nose. Then, despite herself, she glances up at the Rav’s letter hanging on the wall. The cake and pastries, and the fish, come from Eva and Maja’s bakery in Brooklyn, and their special deli in Flatbush, all outside the Rav’s supervision. Of course, the Rav did not forbid her to bring up food from outside Washington Heights, but he did not give her permission either.

  When Maja comes to pick up the food, she stands with Elizabeth and gazes at the cake. “It’s beautiful,” she says. “You did a wonderful job.”

  “Well, I didn’t make it,” Elizabeth says.

  “But you deserve some credit for bringing it. For the long-distance catering. We can just put it in the backseat of the car,” Maja says. Eva doesn’t drive, but Maja keeps a car in Kaaterskill.

  “Let me help you with those,” Elizabeth says. She helps Maja carry boxes out.

  “You sound like you’re coming down with something,” Maja tells her.

  “I’ve had it for weeks. It’s my sinuses,” Elizabeth says. “I think it must be hay fever, but I’ve never had it before this summer.”

  “Allergies are like that, you know,” says Maja. “You grow into them and you grow out of them. Eva had a terrible allergy to certain flowers when she was a child. Gardenias was one. Now they don’t have any effect on her at all. And Andras used to have an allergy to grass, the cuttings, and now …”

  “Now it’s gone?” Elizabeth asks.

  “No, now it’s even worse.”

  It must be some kind of flu, Elizabeth thinks after Eva and Maja are gone. Standing at the cash register, she is not only congested, but light-headed and exhausted. Her muscles ache, and as the day passes, she feels as though she is watching herself hurrying along. She would enjoy this work, she would savor this day, if she had the chance to catch her breath.

  By the time she gets home, she has a throbbing headache. “Chani,” Elizabeth calls out.

  “What?” Chani calls back from the yard.

  “Would you come here?”

  “What, Mommy?” Chani runs over.

  “I’m going to need your help. I don’t feel good. I’m coming down with something. Could you put up the chicken? And there’s fresh corn, just boil the water.”

  Chani is a good cook, and a good baby-sitter too. She gets Sorah and Brocha to husk the corn. Elizabeth takes a shower and stands in the steaming water until her head clears. Soon Isaac will be up from the city, and he’ll help her. She would go to the doctor, but she doesn’t want to leave Chani with everything just before Shabbes. When Isaac comes home with the car, there won’t be time to get to the doctor and back before sundown. She rifles through the medicine cabinet and takes a decongestant.

  “You need to get some rest,” Isaac tells her when he gets home. Right after candle lighting he and the girls bundle Elizabeth into bed.

  “Here, Mommy,” Brocha says and she gives Elizabeth her stuffed animals. “You can sleep with Three Bears, because I know they’re your favorite.”

  WHEN Elizabeth wakes up the next morning, she is still tired, but her head has cleared. The house is silent. Isaac has taken the girls to shul. The shades are down and the room is shadowy. It is so quiet, so good to be alone. The time she spent alone in past summers is now spent at the store. She is caught up in the business, the customers and the money, the constant talking. This morning none of that exists. The store has stopped for Shabbes.

  “You’re making yourself sick,” Isaac tells her that afternoon. They lie together on the bed while the children play outside.

  “It isn’t the store,” she says. “Isaac, I’ve been tired for a few weeks, and I’m starting to worry that—”

  “I wish you hadn’t gotten started with Renée’s birthday party,” he says.

  “I didn’t realize how much extra work it would be,” she tells him.

  “I don’t mean that.”

  She doesn’t answer. Then she says, “I know what you mean.”

  “Well, I don’t think it’s right,” he tells her. “You’re playing with the Rav’s permission.”

  “This is just the food for their party,” she tells him as she has before. “It isn’t food in the store.”

  “But you wouldn’t eat it,” Isaac says. “How can you sell food you would never eat?” The Rav does not sanction Eva and Maja’s Brooklyn bakery. He does not certify their stores.

  “Is it so terrible to recognize that there are other rabbinical authorities?” she asks him.

  “Elizabeth!”

  “Just because you follow the Rav—you don’t expect all the others to join you. Other communities have strict standards too. They exist; why pretend otherwise?”

  He looks at her unhappily. “You could open yourself up, Elizabeth, to—to problems. The standards aren’t the same, and you know it. They hold differently in so many cases—”

  “Isaac,” she interrupts, “then do my parents in Manchester eat treife meat just because they don’t eat food sanctioned by your Rav?”

  Isaac can’t answer that.

  Admittedly, hers is an ad hominem argument, but it encapsulates what she has come to believe. Elizabeth looks at the question differently now that she has a business. She has taken one opportunity and she can’t help taking others. There are other families up for the summer, not just Kirshners. All those other families come up for the summer with an equal need, equal potential to be customers. She can serve them as well. And many of them will come back next summer, when this sudden gathering for the Rav’s sake disperses. Of course, Isaac questions this kind of thinking. And there are questions underneath his questions. Isn’t she doing this just for profit? Why should she corrupt her original idea to serve the Kirshners with food from Washington Heights? What about her original principles? Isaac doesn’t ask that directly, but she can see it in his face; she sees it in his eyes.

  She doesn’t know a way to resolve this argument of theirs. They disagree; neither will retreat. Isaac is a purist, but she pushes against the rules. They have always had this difference. “You think I’m doing something wrong,” she says.

  “Look,” he tells her, “it’s something I disagree with; it’s something I wouldn’t do.” He can’t call it wrong. The word is too difficult, too divisive. But he is troubled that he hasn’t somehow prevented her from taking this action, from expanding her business in this way. This kind of entrepreneurship, increasingly assertive, offends his pure sense of how to act in the community, his sense of the order of things. He has lived in this particular hierarchy all his life, moved within it as through water, slowly, but without a feeling of constraint. Neighbors, teachers, rabbinic authorities, rippling around him in smooth concentric circl
es. “I just worry about it, this business of yours,” he tells her.

  “But do you want me to succeed?” she asks him.

  He hesitates. “Yes,” he says.

  They lie on the bed with their differences between them, the seam exposed where they are joined together.

  THERE are long tables set out in Eva and Maja’s garden. Platters of lox and whitefish garnished with sliced lemon, capers, olives, sweet purple onions. There are small slices of rye bread fanned out on plates, bagels, onion rolls, miniature Danish. Trays arranged with cookies from the city. Nothing ordinary. Only small and delicate cookies. Madeleines, ladyfingers stuck together with raspberry jam and dipped in chocolate, cookies like flowers and cookies like leaves, cookies dusted with crushed walnuts. There is punch and lemonade in Eva’s heavy cut-crystal bowls. Elizabeth watches the cookies disappear, the punch ladled out floating with sherbet, the children swarming the dessert table. In past summers Eva and Maja prepared everything themselves for Renée’s birthday. They had their husbands bring up some of the food from the city, but they did most of the baking. This year, however, Eva has been tired. She’s had dizzy spells and has been seeing doctors in the city. She and Maja have not told Elizabeth what the problem is.

  “Elizabeth!” Beatrix calls out from across the lawn. “We never see you. You’re always minding the store.”

  “You can come and see me there,” Elizabeth says, and she smiles, because Cecil is standing with his arm around Beatrix’s shoulders, just as he had a year ago when they were newlyweds. He is uxorious, Elizabeth thinks. Terribly proud, exceedingly in love with his mathematician wife.

  “But what about our badminton?” Beatrix asks her.

  “I thought you’d given up playing badminton with me,” says Elizabeth.

  “Listen to her,” Beatrix says to Cecil. “Listen to this arrogance.”

  “When I’m over this flu, I’ll come play again,” Elizabeth promises.

  “You said that last week,” Beatrix says.

  “It’s been a rather long flu,” Elizabeth admits. “But come see me at the store.”

  “And who is minding the children while you’re there?” Beatrix asks.

  “I’m open while they’re in camp, and on Thursday afternoons Chani watches them for me.”

  “Oh, Chani. How very clever of you to have a teenager,” says Beatrix.

  “Chani’s my big girl,” Elizabeth murmurs, looking over to where Chani sits on the grass with a bowl of ice cream.

  “Well, I don’t know how you do it all,” Beatrix says, throwing her long rough black hair over her shoulder. And Elizabeth realizes with a rush of pleasure that Beatrix is not teasing her. She is really speaking in admiration.

  “I hear that you’re going to start a franchise, you’ve been so successful,” Andras says to Elizabeth as he comes over with Nina.

  “Oh, no.” Elizabeth laughs. “No franchises yet.”

  “I have to admit,” Andras says, “when Isaac called me last winter I said it wouldn’t work out.”

  “Oh—I didn’t know Isaac called you,” Elizabeth says, startled.

  “Well, it doesn’t matter. You have every right to be proud.” “But I don’t feel that way,” Elizabeth confesses to him. “I’m too busy.”

  “And what is it like having a business?” Nina asks.

  “It’s all come about so strangely,” Elizabeth says. “So many people coming up because of the Rav’s illness. Unfortunately this isn’t an ordinary summer. And the work is different from what I expected. It isn’t more difficult, but it’s more uncertain. I thought I would feel somehow more”—she pauses to think of the word—“triumphant. But I’m too busy. Too tired! I thought success would be sweeter, somehow.”

  “Well, success is an acquired taste,” says Andras. “But here we are already in July. You should be planning for next year.”

  “I have records of all my sales, and I was going to study them to plan for next summer, but this year is so unusual. Everyone is here.”

  “This summer doesn’t have to be unusual,” says Andras. “You should be compiling a customer list with phone numbers in the city. Then over the winter you can work out orders for next year. You can give discounts for ordering ahead.”

  “How much of a discount would you give?” Elizabeth asks him.

  “Talking shop at the party,” Nina admonishes them as she goes to greet the Sobels. But Andras is already considering the question.

  They talk for a long time, Elizabeth and Andras. They discuss Elizabeth’s profits and expenses; they talk of the possibilities for next summer. And Elizabeth forgets her cold. Her voice is full of energy. Somehow it returns to her—the sense that this is her project, that she has created something of her own, even within the tight weave of associations in Kaaterskill—the family, the Kehilla, the neighborhood. She has knit from this mesh something entirely new.

  The long cool evening settles over the party. The guests drift home. The children quiet down. Renée is opening her presents on the grass, Nina trying to keep the cards with the gifts. Elizabeth walks home with Isaac and the girls. She steps lightly, looks everywhere. She watches the maple leaves shifting in the sky. After speaking to Andras, her mind is filled with plans and new ideas. She is bright with anticipation.

  Then, as they are walking back to their bungalow, they meet the Steins, their Kirshner neighbors in the city. “Good evening,” Isaac calls out to them.

  “Hello, hello,” they answer. “Where were you? Estie was looking for someone to play with. You were all away.”

  “We were at Eva and Maja’s party,” Elizabeth says. Lightly, recklessly, she adds, “I catered it.”

  They stare at her, shocked to hear her say this.

  Then Elizabeth stands there with Isaac and the children and she wishes she could take back her words. Her cheeks burn. She should have kept quiet. But her confidence spilled over, her joy in her accomplishment. The words escaped her at the wrong time to the wrong people. They belonged to a different conversation.

  “I didn’t know you were a caterer too,” says Leah Stein.

  And Elizabeth can’t speak. She feels the reproach in her neighbor’s words. The sarcasm and the disapproval. She feels it just as if a bee had stung her careless hand. First the soft body of the bee, and then the surprising flicker, and then the pain.

  EARLY the next day as the new week begins, Elizabeth’s head aches, and she buries her face in the pillow when Isaac gets up to leave. With difficulty Elizabeth struggles out of bed and packs five lunches for the children to eat at camp. She stands at the counter and spreads strawberry jam and peanut butter on five slices of bread. As always she spreads the jam first, and then the peanut butter directly on top. She got into the habit years ago in order to prevent the children from just licking off the jam. Into five brown bags goes each finished sandwich, along with an apple, a can of juice, a bag of pretzels, and two oatmeal cookies. She starts closing up the peanut butter and sways back dizzily. She will have to put up a note at the store. She has to go to the doctor.

  After the older girls set out on their bikes, and after Nina drives up and takes the little girls to camp along with Alex, Elizabeth hurries across the street, where Beatrix is working, pacing on the porch, back and forth, back and forth, thinking about her mathematics.

  “Beatrix,” Elizabeth says, “I’ve got to get some antibiotics. Do you think I could borrow the car?”

  “What, the Minx?” Beatrix asks, looking over at the tiny cream-colored Hillman Minx that she and Cecil drive. “Do you know how?”

  “Oh, yes,” Elizabeth says. “I learned on a manual. I just have to get to our doctor in Kendall Falls.”

  “Right,” Beatrix says, and she sticks her head inside the screen door. “Cecil? Throw me the keys.”

  DR. PETERSON, short, heavy, and sandy haired, has an office in one half of a long ranch house set back from the road. Elizabeth always goes to her when the girls are ill, and once she came when she sprained her an
kle. She’d returned home with a brochure about sprains, and the children had enjoyed learning what color her ankle was going to turn next.

  “Well,” Dr. Peterson says, after she has examined Elizabeth, “you certainly have a sinus infection, and we can give you something for that, but all this seems to have gone on for quite a while along with your other symptoms—exhaustion, indigestion, queasiness. Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”

  “I hope not,” Elizabeth says. She and Dr. Peterson have always been frank with each other.

  “Well …” says Dr. Peterson.

  “It just doesn’t make sense,” Elizabeth says.

  “All right,” Dr. Peterson says. “Well, we’ll see. Let’s give you a quick mono test as well.”

  Elizabeth drives back to Kaaterskill and hurries to the store. She takes her antibiotics and feels out of kilter. A bit numb. People come and go, and she talks to them from deep within her head cold. Everyone seems very far away.

  That night Elizabeth and the girls call Isaac in the city. As always he talks to each of them. “We made tambourines,” Brocha tells him. “Brown. I used all the colors, and so it was brown, and there was glitter on top, and then we put on bells.”

  “I didn’t finish.” Sorah tries to grab the phone. “Mommy, I didn’t finish my turn.”

  “You can have a turn after Brocha,” Elizabeth says.

  “How come she gets two turns?” Chani asks.

  “She’s just going to finish her turn because she got interrupted,” says Elizabeth wearily.

  “I got interrupted too,” says Ruchel. “And I forgot to say something. Mommy, I really need the phone. Mommy, I really—”

  “Stop it!” Elizabeth tells all of them, and finally she takes the phone away. “I got the antibiotics,” she says to Isaac. “Ten days … Yes, a sinus infection.”

  She has a hard time getting the children to bed. At nine it’s still light outside, and they want to go outside and play, but finally, at ten-thirty, they are all asleep. Chani’s book has slipped down from her bed to the floor. Brocha has stopped calling for a cup of water, and a cup of water with ice, and a toy for her bed—a soft toy—and a blanket for Three Bears, and she lies limp on top of the covers in her nightgown, with her arms around Three Bears’ blanket.