Kaaterskill Falls

by Allegra Goodman

“Did you see him?” Elizabeth asks Isaac as he joins her.

  “I couldn’t tell who it was,” says Isaac.

  “Oh, that was Jeremy Kirshner,” Cecil says. “Why?”

  “Nothing—just, he never comes up here,” says Elizabeth.

  “But he came to see me,” Cecil says with a flourish.

  “I didn’t know you were friends,” says Elizabeth. It astonishes her.

  “Yes, we are friends,” says Cecil, “despite the fact that I’m a commoner.”

  THE old Birnbaum house stands alone, set back from the street. Years ago, when Cecil’s parents bought the place, they planted the rosebushes on the side of the house, and dogwood trees that now overhang the front walk. Taller than the tall house stands the silver spruce tree, planted when Cecil’s sister Regina was born.

  “Welcome, come in,” calls Regina to Elizabeth and Isaac and their daughters. The girls hang back on the porch, but Elizabeth and Isaac enter the shadowy living room. They see that they are the first to arrive at the party. “This is Beatrix,” Regina says, “—from England, like you, Elizabeth.”

  Beatrix is a thin woman in a sleeveless dress. A mass of coarse black hair falls stiffly around her shoulders. “Hello, very pleased to meet you.” Beatrix innocently puts out her hand to Isaac, who draws back. “Don’t you shake hands?” she asks.

  Quickly Elizabeth shakes her hand instead. She and Isaac sit on the couch, careful not to brush the bunch of wildflowers lying on the coffee table.

  “I picked these this morning.” Beatrix lifts up the bunch of goldenrod. “I’m going to put them here. What do you think?”

  She props the flowers in the twin vases standing on the piano and pours in water from a long-spouted watering can.

  “Beatrix,” Elizabeth ventures after a moment, “I think it’s coming out the bottom.”

  “What is?” Beatrix lifts one of the vases to check, and a stream of water along with the flowers courses out onto the Steinway.

  “They’re ornamental vases!” Regina calls, rushing from the kitchen with a dish towel. “Cecil. Could you bring me another rag for the piano?”

  “Not on Shabbat,” he answers precisely. “I never touch the piano on Shabbat.”

  “You see, they’re ornamental,” Regina tells her sister-in-law again as she sponges up the water. “They’re from the thirties. They don’t have bottoms.”

  “Oh,” Beatrix says. Then she laughs. “How frightfully bourgeois!”

  WHEN the other guests arrive and Regina begins to serve, Elizabeth wishes Isaac trusted Cecil’s kitchen. “How about some meringues?” Regina offers. “They’re just eggs and sugar.” Elizabeth hesitates, but then declines.

  More than fifty of Cecil’s neighbors fill the house. Jeremy Kirshner, however, is absent. Elizabeth looks at the dining-room table set out with Linzer tortes, rugelach, and cheesecakes, an apricot jelly roll, and miniature Danish. There are lattice-crust pies on the sideboard under the freshly dusted painting of a ship tossed in a violent blue-green sea.

  “I cleaned this week, of course,” Regina tells Elizabeth. Regina has a wry way of talking, although she is much gentler than her brother. She wears glasses as he does, but hers have stylish tortoiseshell frames; her skin is fair and her hair curly and almost red. She doesn’t cover it. She is the only person Elizabeth knows who actually lives in California. Regina tells Elizabeth, “I decided the house couldn’t wait for Cecil and Beatrix to pass into a domestic stage.”

  “No, Cecil is more interested in gardening,” says Elizabeth. “But you do the house justice.” She has never seen it like this—silver polished, Persian carpets vacuumed.

  “Well, you didn’t know my mother,” says Regina. “She really kept at things, and she decorated. She had the eye for it. She had a gardener who painted these flowers up here.” She points to the plaster flowers that serve as upper moldings for the walls. “And she picked out the green and gold colors for the dining room.”

  “That’s right,” says old Esther Ergman, who knew Regina and Cecil’s parents. “And you, Regina. You have to come up and take care of it.”

  “Not now,” Regina says, with a funny little grimace. “They left it to Cecil, not to me. I can’t come up and pick up after him. Believe me, it’s exhausting. One of these days he’ll have to struggle along with his own vacuum cleaner.”

  Esther asks Elizabeth, “Do you know what Regina said about her brother when she was a child? She said, ‘Cecil, you are a monstrosity.’ I remember when she said that. She was just a little girl wheeling her doll’s carriage in front of my porch, and she wore a little leather purse on her arm—the sweetest thing. And what she said was absolutely true. He was a little imp, Cecil. And if you ask me, he still is.”

  Elizabeth has noticed this about Cecil and Regina: Though they are in their thirties, both professors at universities, when they return to Kaaterskill, they carry the reputations they had as children. It doesn’t matter that Cecil is a learned scholar, expert on modernism and Shaw. Nor does it matter that in his way he is strictly observant. He’s still a little mazik to the old people. They haven’t forgotten when he lost control of his bicycle and crushed old Friedman’s flower bed. And in just the same way Cecil’s sister, the research oncologist at UCLA, will always live in the old-timers’ memories as the girl with red curly hair and the wicker doll carriage.

  “No one since her mother,” Esther tells Elizabeth, “—no one else makes rugelach like this.”

  “I’d like to have the recipe,” Elizabeth says.

  “Oh, it’s very simple,” says Regina on her way to the kitchen. “But I’ve got to go back to L.A. tomorrow. You should watch it being done. And there’s a secret,” she calls over her shoulder.

  “Really?” Elizabeth asks.

  Regina disappears behind the swinging kitchen door, and her voice floats out. “Don’t overwork the dough.”

  Elizabeth moves back to the living room, where Cecil and Beatrix stand at the center of a large group of people, Isaac among them. “There is no sign on the synagogue,” Beatrix says. “Doesn’t it have a name?”

  “Of course. But not as good a name as the old one,” Cecil says.

  “What old one?” asks Joe Landauer, the father of all the Landauer boys in their miniature black suits and hats.

  “Ah,” says Cecil. “You betray your fleeting residence on the mountain. The original shul, which was Reform, was built by old man Rubin in the 1880s on Bear Mountain, to serve both Bear Mountain and Kaaterskill. And it was called Anshei Sharon.”

  “Why People of Sharon?” asks Cecil’s wife. “How very odd.”

  She knows Hebrew, Elizabeth thinks. How is that?

  “Well, the founders got confused. They thought sharon meant ‘mountain.’ They tried to change it later, but the incorporation papers were filed already, and Judge Taylor refused to bother with them. No, it wasn’t our Judge Taylor. It was his great-uncle. But he was a Taylor, so he wouldn’t change the papers. Now in due time the shul founder, Rubin, fought with the people in Bear Mountain and moved to Kaaterskill. And he took his shul with him. He put it on rollers and shlepped it down the mountain on a sledge with his team of oxen.”

  “Cecil, how do you know these things?” asks Joe.

  “Anyone a resident for over thirty years knows this,” Cecil replies airily. “When Rubin deposited the shul in Kaaterskill, naturally he renamed it—and the Bear Mountain shul got a new name too.”

  “And?” asks Beatrix.

  “Well, that’s the end,” Cecil teases.

  “But what were their names?” his wife demands.

  “Oh, that should be obvious,” he says. “What are all breakaway synagogues called? Rodef Sholom—because they’re seeking peace. And what are all the parent shuls renamed? Sharei Tzedek!”

  “Gates of Righteousness,” Beatrix cuts in. “Because they were right! Of course.”

  Elizabeth whispers to Isaac, “He’s really in love. I’ve never seen him let someone run away with hi
s punch line before.”

  THE children are feasting on the porch where the grown-ups have left their hostess gifts of Barton’s candies. There is a huge selection piled on the green wicker sofa and chairs. Chocolate truffles, cherry creams, bitter mints. The Landauer boys are plastering caramel over their front teeth. The girls move to the other side of the porch in protest.

  “Let’s go look for snakes,” Chani says. She jumps off the porch rail, and her sisters and Esther Ergman’s two granddaughters run after her. They run down the little hill at the side of the house and into the acre-deep back garden. Small green apples squeak and mush underfoot as they race over slippery pine needles. They skid around the spruce tree. Hot and out of breath, in their fancy dresses, they run all the way to the unmown grass at the ragged edge of the garden. The girls are wearing scuffed white patent leather shoes, dresses printed with bouquets of flowers, lockets and big sashes, white pique collars.

  Overgrown blackberry bushes separate the Birnbaum and the King lots. White currant bushes and red. Scraggly old raspberry canes. There are no snakes, but the blackberries cluster in the brambles, shining dark and heavy as carpenter bees. Ruchel and Sorah stand in the Birnbaums’ blowsy garden with its tall grass and old-fashioned lilac arbor, and they stare at Mr. King’s new swimming pool, surrounded by cement and striped lounging chairs. Just yesterday Mr. King yelled at them and Pammy Curtis for eating his blackberries. Admittedly they ate a few. The girls want to go play somewhere else, but they can’t stop looking next door. Mr. King’s pool is dazzling, an unearthly aqua blue.

  Then the girls hear raised voices coming from Mr. King’s painted aluminum utility shed. Two men come out arguing onto the terrace. The girls can see them clearly above the bushes. Mr. King, broad and tall, and red in the face. And Mr. Knowlton, a much smaller man, Lark’s father from across the street.

  “You are never working for me again,” says Mr. King.

  “Why?” demands Mr. Knowlton, “because I took some extra flagstones?”

  “Extras! Knowlton, I hired you to lay down my deck, not your chimney! I’m going to prosecute this.”

  “You’re paranoid,” Mr. Knowlton says. “Curtis badmouths me, and you believe it.”

  “Paranoid? I don’t have to listen to Curtis when I can see across the street that you’ve been building your chimney with my flagstones.”

  “Who said—”

  “I don’t want to hear it,” King snaps. “You can tell Taylor in court.” Then he turns and sees the bunch of girls staring at him. He doesn’t say a word, because they don’t give him a chance. Instinctively, like rabbits, the girls run away, back through the tall grass, past the spruce tree, and up the slippery apple-littered hill.

  IN the house Elizabeth is asking Beatrix, “How is it you know Hebrew?”

  “Oh, I learned it one summer in Israel.”

  “You must be clever with languages,” Elizabeth says. “What sort of mathematics do you practice?”

  “Differential topology and things.”

  “It does sound interesting,” Elizabeth says.

  “I shouldn’t think so,” Beatrix demurs. “Not for most people. Who’s at the door? Oh, Jeremy!”

  The front door opens and Jeremy Kirshner walks in. “Mazel tov, mazel tov,” he says to Cecil and Beatrix. “And my apologies for being late.” He wears a straw hat with a jaunty air, as if he were going to a garden party in a Renoir painting. He is perhaps forty.

  “Good to see you, Jeremy,” says Beatrix, “Are you staying all weekend?”

  “No, no, I’m leaving tomorrow, early in the morning,” he says. “I have to go back for the Summer Institute.”

  “We should introduce everyone,” says Regina, intervening as hostess. “Andras and Nina Melish. Saul and Eva Rubinstein. Philip and Maja Cohen. Esther Ergman, Elizabeth and Isaac Shulman, Joe and Leah Landauer,” she goes around the room. “Jeremy was at Columbia with Cecil,” she explains.

  “But he’s my colleague now,” Beatrix says lightly. “So you should really say, he is at Queens College with Beatrix.” Then she tells Jeremy, “You shouldn’t do institutes in the city. You should do them here. It’s so much prettier. Much cooler.”

  “But no one wants to come up here,” says Jeremy.

  “No, it’s just that you don’t want to,” Beatrix says, and all the satellite conversations in the room dip down a little. They seem to dim. Cecil grins; he loves this kind of thing, creating a frisson, a slight static in the air, a storm warning. Cecil loves watching Beatrix in Kaaterskill, sharp and intellectual, asking questions with all her pointed, worldly innocence.

  Jeremy stiffens, surrounded in the living room by his father’s followers and their friends. On the couches and on the chairs they sit dressed in their plain clothes, their straightlaced finery. Jeremy Kirshner looks at them with his dark eyes and clever, intent face. He has a young face for his age. He wouldn’t look forty, except that his watchfulness gives him away. There is something concentrated and even a little hard about him. He affects a kind of nonchalance in the way he sits and speaks, but he does not carry it off completely. He is self-assured, but he is also studied. He is a specialist in Castiglione and in Renaissance courtly handbooks.

  “Well, I’m going to have lots of mathematicians up,” Beatrix says, “and we’re going to do research under the trees. I’m going to hold a Kaaterskill mathematical institute. Right here.”

  Jeremy says nothing to this. Regina offers him coffee and a plate of rugelach. He takes one. His father’s people are pretending not to look at him, eating food made outside the community, pastry from Regina’s alien hands. They are pretending not to watch him taste the crushed nuts and cinnamon, and he is pretending not to notice them watching.

  “Dr. Kirshner,” Elizabeth says, “if you do come up again, do you think you might be interested in speaking—”

  “Speaking?”

  “Yes, giving a drash for our ladies’ shiur,” Elizabeth says.

  “Well, if I were here,” Jeremy says. He speaks as if from a great distance. “If I had something to say.”

  Elizabeth blinks. It is as if he were asking her, And who are you? Of course, she is no professor. There is a feeling with Cecil, and even more with Beatrix, of a kind of brisk and academic egalitarianism, as if in their house anyone can say anything. Elizabeth forgot for a moment that it is only they who really can say anything. Cecil is very strange. And his wife, too, with her strange sleeveless tunic of a dress, her loose hair, her Oxford ways. Knowing Hebrew without going to shul. Cecil and Beatrix cast a kind of spell. All the rules are different with them. It strikes Elizabeth that Beatrix and Cecil are so different from the Kirshners she lives with that she doesn’t even disapprove of them. Ironic that last summer she was appalled along with all the other Kirshners that a woman from shul was seen in trousers in the park. But if Cecil’s wife drove her car down Main Street on Shabbat, Elizabeth wouldn’t be shocked at all. It really would be quite natural for Beatrix; it wouldn’t be offensive in the same way.

  “But what do people do here?” Beatrix asks again. “What is there to do? Besides eat rugelach, of course.” She flashes a smile at Regina, who looks stoic.

  “Go hiking,” Cecil says.

  “Play badminton,” Elizabeth suggests.

  “Oh, badminton, I love it!” Beatrix cries with real enthusiasm. “I’m appalling now, but I used to play at home. It was my only game at school, and I used to practice madly, to show I was proficient in something physical, because I was hopeless for their ghastly hockey teams. I’ve found a net, you know, in the cellar, and we could set it up in back. It’s still light out. We could chalk the ground. I could do it this afternoon while you’re up there praying.”

  “You could wait till Sunday. Then I’ll help you,” Elizabeth says, alarmed at the thought of causing Beatrix to transgress.

  “Not at all,” Beatrix says. “Division of labor. Leave it to me. Leave it to the secular arm.” And she stretches out a sinewy bare arm.
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br />   WHEN the long day ends and the evening settles over the trees, the men walk back to the synagogue for services. The women sit in their glider rockers and their porch swings and they look into the fading light and talk. They talk about their children and their husbands and the traffic from the city. They talk about berry picking, the blackberries now in season and the blueberries to come. Then they lower their voices so the children will not hear. They speak of Israel and the hijacking of the Air France flight. The hostages in Uganda. The talk of politics mixes with the scent of roses.

  Elizabeth sits with Regina on Cecil’s porch. “Can’t you stay a little longer?” she asks.

  “No,” Regina says, “I have to get back to the lab.”

  “Tell me about California,” Elizabeth says.

  Regina smiles. “Why don’t you come out and see for yourself?”

  “Oh, I don’t think I’ll ever have a chance to go to Los Angeles,” Elizabeth says. “Tell me what it’s like to live there.”

  “What do you want to know?”

  “What’s the Jewish community like?” Elizabeth asks. Her question sounds parochial, but it isn’t meant that way. She asks out of intense curiosity. She wants to know what it is really like to live there, and so she tries to imagine herself in that place, a part of that community.

  “We live in the Pico Robertson area,” Regina says. “On a beautiful flat street with palm trees.”

  “All lined with palm trees?” Elizabeth asks.

  “Yes,” says Regina, and she looks out at the great trees on Maple, and the tiny jagged pieces of sky cut out between the leaves.

  “And where do you daven?” Elizabeth asks.

  “In a synagogue that used to be a movie theater.”

  “No!”

  “Really. It’s a grand old movie palace with the lights and the curtains and everything. And the women sit in the balcony. The name of the shul is outside on the marquee. And believe me, there isn’t any coatroom like there is here.”

  “No one wears coats?” Elizabeth asks.

  “Maybe light jackets in the winter—or a sweater.”