Kaaterskill Falls

by Allegra Goodman

  But Elizabeth hears the Rav differently from where she sits. She has come late with the girls, and there are not enough seats for all of them in the women’s section. There are beads of sweat on her face as she sits with Brocha on her lap. She feels the heat in the shul; and, within her, the familiar waves of nausea. The Rav’s drash goes on and on. His voice is bright and strident, shrill, and he repeats himself often. Again and yet again he underlines his point. There is no room for compromise, there is no sustenance outside the community.

  “Our strength comes from within, from our own convictions, our own families, and our own institutions. There are those who argue for leniency, for making exceptions. There are those who maintain dealings and friendships with Jews who do not observe Shabbes, or who intermarry or eat treife. What, then, is the message that they send to their children? That these people are still good; that they are still worthy of attention and uncritical friendship. This is what our children learn: that we will tolerate this kind of behavior. Is this the lesson we want to teach them? How then should we explain it? That it is wrong for us, but right for other people? Or that it is wrong for anyone, but that people who do wrong are still worthy of our respect, and of our friendship? Is this what we want to teach? Only consistency will sustain us. Only consistent thoughts and actions will keep Judaism alive.”

  Of course, Elizabeth has heard all this before. This is Rav Isaiah’s first major drash, but the message is familiar. She is used to these formulations, and although she listens to them, she does not believe them. She has never seen the Kehilla as a fortress. Now, more than ever, the outside fascinates her: the people there, the way everyone moves about, the complexity of a world with such loose days and weeks, the time never delineated between work and Shabbes, the food never separated, the men and women mixed together as well; so many decisions made rather than received. Where to live, what kind of work to do. She sees it now; it was never the poetry she was after, never the secular books, the paintings, or the plays; it was the diversity of choices. The quick and subtle negotiations of the outside world. Elizabeth listens to the Rav, but she hears him from a distance. Deep within her she knows that she has scaled those bulwarks of which he speaks. She has scaled the Kehilla’s wall and softly lowered herself down to the other side.

  When Rav Isaiah finishes, a surge of voices rises from the men surrounding him. They push forward to shake his hand and follow him out of the synagogue, a mob of black, hundreds and hundreds of men. The people are relieved. They leave the synagogue with a fierce joy, the women streaming out in their dark dresses, the children dancing into the sunshine. Isaiah has drawn them to him. He has proven himself his father’s son.

  Elizabeth hurries out with Brocha and scans the crowd for Isaac and the other girls. Nausea rides up the back of her throat, but she pushes forward anyway.

  “Elizabeth,” Isaac calls out as she reaches him, “are you all right?”

  “Tired,” she says. “A bit queasy.”

  “Let’s go home. There’s Chani. Chani, get your sisters.”

  “Mommy, what does queasy mean?” Brocha asks.

  “A little sick. Not very. Really nothing,” Elizabeth answers.

  “He spoke well,” Isaac says as they walk home. “Didn’t you think so?”

  “I suppose so,” Elizabeth says. “I was so uncomfortable for most of it.”

  “Could you hear?”

  “I heard him,” she says.

  NINA bursts in from the memorial service, the metal screen door snapping shut behind her. She is dressed in a dark green suit, tailored and crisp, and she wears a hat with a matching green band. “He gave a brilliant drash,” she says to Andras, who is sitting in the living room. “He spoke for an hour and it felt like a few minutes. It was a—a brilliant thing. Such an experience. Rav Yaakov Guttman was there, the rebbetzin’s brother—”

  Andras looks up from his paper at Nina, and she sees suddenly that something is wrong.

  “What is it?” she asks him. “What is it? Eva? What did the doctor say?”

  “She has cancer,” Andras tells her.

  “Andras!” Nina rushes to his side. She wants to know if Eva and Saul are going back to the city early, and whether Maja and Philip are going with them. She wants to know if they should all go back early, if Eva needs help. Andras tells her what he knows, but Nina keeps darting around and around with her questions. Will she have surgery? When will it be?

  In the evening Alex comes in from outside with his hands dirty, and Nina makes him wash with soap. And then Renée comes in, clean and wistful, as if there is nothing to do in the summer without Stephanie. They sit down to dinner, and Nina serves them. All the time she is talking, asking Andras what will be and whether there is a second opinion yet. She is worrying, she is concerned, but her chattering grates on Andras. He leaves the table as soon as he can.

  When the children are asleep Nina comes to Andras in the living room and says, “I think we should talk about it.”

  “I’m sorry,” he tells her. “I don’t want to talk about it. Not now.”

  “Not ever,” she says. “Not with me. Not ever.”

  “I’m just not … talkative,” he says with a weak smile.

  “You are with her,” she tells him, “and with Maja. You talk to them every day. You talk to them for hours.”

  There is nothing to say to this. It’s true. With his sisters Andras feels free. They are like him, part of him. They have been parents, friends, and teachers to him. To lose them … he cannot imagine living without either of them.

  That night Andras drifts in and out of sleep, and restless in the bed, he begins to dream. He walks in the forest in the evening, wading through piles of leaves. He hears a woman calling him. Faintly he hears someone calling his name. He recognizes Eva’s voice and hurries on, past lichen-covered boulders and the dry, empty beds of streams. He hurries toward the voice, and finally he sees Eva crouching down, hurt. He sees her familiar plump figure, her reddish-brown hair, her reading glasses fallen at her side, and he struggles to lift her in his arms. Only then does her face reveal itself. It is not Eva at all, but Una, her face a mask of white with slits for eyes.

  Andras wakes with a start. His breath comes quickly, but the dream does not leave him. He is afraid, but he can’t stop looking at it. Una’s face, the white face, the object that is death.

  He lies for a long time, stricken. Next to him Nina is sleeping, oblivious, her face buried in her pillow. How trivial their life is. How insignificant. It is all put on. Tomorrow the week will begin. He will go down to the city and mind his business. He will work the days away, and the days will be light and inconsequential. They will slip through his fingers. They will mean as little to him as a handful of loose change. Now it is the nightmare that is real. The fantasy that is fact.

  Two o’clock. Two-thirteen. Two twenty-seven. Andras gets up and puts on some clothes. He walks down the hall and down the stairs, treading carefully on the edges, where they won’t creak. He steps outside and begins walking along the silent street. He walks up and down Maple. All the way up, and all the way down. Rhythmically, he walks and walks. He looks at the houses under the trees. The Birnbaums’, the Curtises’, the Landauers’, the Erlichs’, the Shulmans’, the Knowltons’, the Kings’. How small the houses are in the darkness. Up and down the street all the lights are off. He can only just make out the shape of a bike lying on the grass at Joe Landauer’s place. There is the tire swing, hanging in front of Isaac’s house. Andras cannot see but he knows there is a clothesline tied farther up on Isaac’s tree, the Shulmans’ metaphoric wall marking off the property so that the children can play ball in the yard on Shabbes.

  What would it be like to live like that? To mark off the yard for the Sabbath? To speak to God morning, noon, and night. To believe in God—and not only to believe in him, but to believe that he listens to prayers. What would it be like to have that reassurance? That God would take an interest, and approve or disapprove one’s life. How
comforting to believe that one’s life is significant in that way. That it is guided by God’s will, and not left to chance. Andras has none of this reassurance. He has only the conviction that there is nothing in heaven but cold space and stars, and that if there is a God, he scatters his creation and lets lives fall where they may, seeding good and barren places alike.

  He walks and thinks about his children. He does very little with them. He does not join them in their games, or take them to summer camp, or scold them when they come inside. When they were younger he never put them to bed at night or sat there with them in the dark. He buys the children presents because he doesn’t know what else to do. Nina nags, and his sisters worry. They sense the truth; that there is something lacking in him. If he could be like Eva, that would be something. If he could be one of those radiant people in the world who seem to warm the ones around them like little suns. If he could be like that. But he cannot generate the heat.

  Andras looks at himself with a mixture of self-pity and disdain as he walks there alone in Kaaterskill. He is alone, even here in this small place, even under these trees, not entering into his neighbors’ religious belief, not holding God in common with them. His neighbors sing together like birds in morning, afternoon, and evening. They are a thousand voices enlivening the air and calling to each other. There is nothing Andras can contribute to that, nothing he can add, although he lives there with them and watches them. His own soul is silent, his experience and ideas hard and dry, having to do with business and money, with economic rather than spiritual transactions.

  Just before dawn he hears the birds. He hears doors closing, the trees rustling in the cool air. An old car starting. Then the men begin walking up the street. They are carrying their blue velvet tallis bags and walking up the hill to shul for morning minyan.

  “You’re up early, Andras,” Joe Landauer calls over to him.

  “Coming with us?” someone else asks.

  “No.” He has to clear his throat. “Just out for a walk.” He is hoarse from the night air. He watches them as they hurry on toward Main Street and the shul. Joe Landauer is taking three of his sons with him, and they jostle along behind him, thin versions of their father. Andras watches as they disappear up the hill. The sun is rising. He is going to be late.

  As always on Monday mornings, Andras rides with Isaac down the mountain. As usual they listen to the news. But when they reach Cooksburg, Isaac turns off the radio. In silence Isaac drives the sleeping Andras to the city.

  6

  ALL afternoon Isaiah and Rachel sit in the library of the Rav’s white Kaaterskill house. They are sorting papers together at the desk, and they are exhausted, overwhelmed by the Rav’s unfinished business, months of correspondence with halachic questions from members of the community, stacks of notes, drafts of essays, bills. They are tired from the events of the past weeks; they are overwrought. The Rav never sorted out his papers, or allowed anyone to look at them when he was alive. He was never interested in writing explanatory notes or putting his manuscripts in order for future executors. His work simply lies where he left it on his desk.

  “What are these, the new letters?” Rachel asks.

  “Yes,” says Isaiah.

  “These have to be answered.”

  “I know,” Isaiah tells her. “But I have to look through these too.”

  “What’s this?” she says. “Isaac and Elizabeth Shulman. A request to reopen their store next summer. And these”—she sifts through another pile of paper—“his manuscript on”—she looks closely at the handwritten pages—“Kohelet.” All the Rav’s manuscripts are written out by hand in blue-blue ink. But the Rav’s handwriting deteriorated in his last year. Even Rachel can barely make out the words he has penned on Ecclesiastes. “Under the sun there can be nothing lasting, and there can be nothing new. The fixed, the eternal, and the original lies in the Holy One….” Rachel unfolds a cardboard manuscript box, places the papers in it gently, and writes out a label in her own dark, compact script. She and Isaiah work together in the library like a pair of archaeologists among the towers of books. Dust motes float before them in the late afternoon sun and settle on the overloaded shelves. The work is slow and still, and yet they are pressed for time. In just three weeks they must return to the city, where the other library, in the Rav’s apartment, awaits them.

  “You need to have your cousin start sorting the papers in the city,” Rachel tells Isaiah now. “The letters there can’t wait until we come back.”

  “I don’t want Joseph in the apartment,” Isaiah replies.

  “But you can’t do all of it alone.”

  “I think I may have to,” he says.

  Rachel turns on him. “You are a scholar,” she tells him. “You are the Rav. You are not a secretary anymore. You are not an assistant. This is not your job.” She gestures to the cluttered desk. “You have a job, and that is to lead and to teach. Not to spend your time filing. Not to be editing, or—transcribing his manuscripts, his notes.”

  “We are not going to leave all of this lying here,” Isaiah says.

  “I’m telling you”—Rachel’s voice is urgent and soft, although there is no one else to hear—“We cannot do this alone.”

  Isaiah doesn’t answer. Silently they continue working on the correspondence, arranging the letters by date.

  “What are you going to do about this business of the store?” she asks him, again holding up the Shulmans’ letter.

  He takes the letter and reads it. “The store was useful this summer,” he says. “Next summer it might be a good thing.”

  Rachel looks over his shoulder and reads the letter with her small intent face. Her eyes are dark and fierce.

  “They act as if they are asking to renew a library book,” she says. “No. No,” she tells Isaiah. “This is not your job. This is not your responsibility. The Kehillah doesn’t need to have stores here and stores there, and you managing it all. Let them buy in the city like everyone else. Your father, olav hashalom, spread himself thin. Of course he did. He had you to work for him. You are going to have to set your own standards. If he did something or made you do some thing, that does not mean that necessarily it continues. No. They heard you when you spoke at the service. That is how you should be. You are not a bureaucrat. You are not a slave.”

  “Rachel,” Isaiah chides her.

  “What?”

  “I’ll consider the case on its merits.”

  “Exactly,” she says. “You’ll need to speak to them. Do they want permission to bring up food from the Heights, or are they also planning to bring up from other places? I heard that they catered a party.”

  Isaiah knits his brow. “The Rav didn’t give them permission to cater parties.”

  “Where is the copy of his letter of permission?” Rachel asks him.

  “It should be there,” he says, pointing to one of his father’s old filing cabinets.

  “There was no mention of catering as I recall,” Rachel says as she looks for it. “He didn’t give permission for anything but the store.” She pulls out the carbon copy and puts it on the desk. “And he had very little interest in that. I really think he gave them the letter to make work for you.”

  Isaiah holds up his hands to stop this talk. “I don’t think that’s true.”

  “What does it matter now?” Rachel says, “Now it has to be taken care of. Now you are the one who has to straighten it out.”

  ELIZABETH stays late on Monday afternoon to balance the books. Hamilton is puttering in front, seeing to his stock, straightening the shelves, and Elizabeth works in the back room with her pencil and her ledger. She is tired, but she finishes up anyway. She forces herself. When she is done, she checks her delivery days on the wall calendar, Compliments of Auerbach Butcher. She has the calendar from Auerbach’s and a set of refrigerator magnets from Miller’s cheese. Hamilton has a whole clock from Budweiser with a holographic-style picture of a team of Clydesdales drawing the Budweiser Wagon through a stream, and
a moving waterfall in the background, splashing white behind the clock dial.

  “Till tomorrow, then,” Elizabeth tells Hamilton.

  “Mm,” he answers.

  The afternoon is warm and quiet as she walks home, the breeze drifting with the hum of lawn mowers. In the cooler shade of Maple, little children are scampering over the sidewalk, carefully skipping over the cracks left by long-forgotten ice. Stan Knowlton is working on his car in front of his red bungalow; Cecil is raking up under his apple tree at the side of the house.

  Inside Elizabeth’s bungalow the scanty mail still lies on the doormat. The girls never bother to pick it up. A two-for-one ice-cream offer from Smiley’s, a phone bill. There is a third envelope from the Rav’s office.

  “Mommy!” Brocha hurtles across the room. “What’s for dinner, Mommy?”

  “Just a minute,” Elizabeth says, and she opens the envelope as she walks into the bedroom.

  The Rav’s letter is only one line long: Dear Mr. and Mrs. Shulman: We would like to discuss your request for next summer with you. The words are typed in clear round pica, the sharp carbon letters of an electric typewriter. Nothing like the Rav’s 1938 manual machine. Please call and make an appointment. Rav Isaiah Kirshner. The letter could have been generated by the bank, or by the credit bureau. The message seems so bland and mechanical. But what does it mean?

  “I’m hungry, Mommy,” she hears Brocha from the living room.

  “Chani, could you get her an apple?” Elizabeth calls back from the bedroom. She sits there on the bed with the letter. The Rav and rebbetzin must have heard about her deliveries for Eva and Maja’s party. They must be calling her in to ask about it. She didn’t have permission. Isaac had warned her about that, but she had gone ahead anyway. Now she frets about it. Not about whether it was wrong, but about whether the Rav might think it was. She has never felt this way before, uncomfortable about the Rav’s opinion. Elizabeth has never had occasion, simply living in the Kehillah and running her household. Well, there are going to be questions with something like this. Her business is a new enterprise. And yet she does not want to go in to see the Rav and answer to him. The store is hers alone. Her creation, or so she’d fancied it.