Kaaterskill Falls

by Allegra Goodman

  Then, “Hey!” she heard a man calling from the shore. “Hey, over there. This is a private beach. Are you a guest at Mohican Road?” After all her resolutions to get some exercise, the empty beach was private. She was not allowed.

  “You seem quiet,” Elizabeth says to Nina now.

  But before Nina gets a chance to speak, they enter the estate. Olana.

  Through ornate wrought-iron gates the long approach to the mansion is dark with forest, but the house itself rises up clear of the trees on a hill covered with wildflowers. Olana is a palace, vast and delicate, its bricks and roof tiles set in intricate geometric shapes. There are terraces and balconies, fluttering with striped awnings. The whole construction outlandish and Arabian, more fanciful than any of the Victorian spires Elizabeth has seen in the mountains.

  When they park the car and come inside the house, they pass through rooms of treasures; jeweled stained glass and Persian carpets the color of dusty rubies. Inlaid tables, and marquetry floors, and tapestry cushions, are all intricately patterned. There is nothing rustic here. Only when she looks at the paintings does Elizabeth remember the dark approach through the forest. These are outdoor paintings, trees and wild cliffs, huge sunsets. Elizabeth sits with Nina on a divan before a cluster of Bierstadts. Deep trees and cerebral winter skies.

  The museum is nearly empty this weekday morning. The elaborate gallery still. Elizabeth looks intently at the winter landscapes. And as she looks, she whispers to Nina, “It’s marvelous, just sitting here while the girls are at camp.”

  Nina looks at the floor. Renée is working as a junior counselor at the camp. It was Nina’s idea. She thought the job with the Lamkins would be good for her daughter, that it would teach her responsibility and how to care for children. But Renée made a fuss. Nina had to threaten and cajole and, in the end, force Renée to go. There were tears and threats up to the day she started. Even now, Renée is sulking about working there with the little children.

  “Renée doesn’t like the camp,” Nina says. “I think she’d rather waste her time wandering around, doing nothing, playing with that Arab girl. Andras doesn’t care. I hear the father owns a trucking business—he just drives trucks from New York to Montreal—” She breaks off, frustrated.

  “She’s a good child, really,” Elizabeth says.

  “But Andras spoils her,” says Nina. Then Elizabeth sees that Nina is really upset. There are tears in Nina’s eyes. It’s hard for her to speak. Elizabeth sees it, and doesn’t know what to do. They are close neighbors, but they are not intimate friends. Beautiful Nina in her crisp dress, downcast among all these paintings. “He’s very … indulgent of the children, both of them,” Nina says. “He used to take them to the warehouse and let them pick out any toys they liked.”

  “At least he’s not in the candy business,” Elizabeth says. “Toys won’t rot their teeth.”

  “He’s going to let Renée quit piano,” Nina says bitterly, utterly serious, “and she’ll regret it all her life.”

  Elizabeth tries to look sympathetic. She’s heard Renée play.

  “And now that Renée is working at the Lamkins’ camp, she wants to quit that too.”

  “He wouldn’t let her do that,” Elizabeth ventures.

  “I don’t know,” Nina says miserably, and Elizabeth looks over at her, and she wants to say, It can’t be so bad. It isn’t so awful. She can’t know what Nina really wants—that somehow Renée might be friends again with Chani, in fact, with all of Elizabeth’s own children, so sweet to Nina’s thinking, so pious, utterly sheltered from the outside world. So safe, they don’t even know it.

  “Let’s go over there.” Nina points to another group of paintings.

  “Oh, look.” Elizabeth points to the painting that has caught her eye. A luminous work on the east wall, unmistakable, even from a distance, Kaaterskill Falls. She rushes over to examine it, leaning forward, hands clasped behind her. FALLS OF THE KAATERSKILL, THOMAS COLE, reads the plaque on the wall. Cole must have set up his easel on the trail—just where she and the girls climbed down from the overhanging park, far down until they reached the stream, the wet hems of their skirts slapping against their legs, the water pouring down from above them over the cliff. She has stood there like Cole’s tiny painted Indians, barely visible on the rocks. She has looked out to those mountains and that sky. The place is much more dramatic on canvas, of course, the exuberant water flinging itself below—nothing dirty in this froth. Cole’s trees are straining upward toward the clouds, leaves just turning—burnt orange and gold mixed with green. Elizabeth would have dismissed the whole thing as overblown, clichéd, except that she’s been there so many times. She’s seen the falls streaming down and the enormous smoke-blue sky, the wild mountains. The unabashed, romantic colors are right. It’s worth the whole exhibit to see this painting. Knowing the site as she does, she realizes Cole’s integrity, and now, among the exhibit’s many paintings, this particular landscape seems to mark the truth in all the others.

  She moves about, forgetting Nina at her side, just looking at the painting from different angles. She knows so much about the place. The drive up past the waterfall every summer—the children sleeping by this time in the back. The curving footpath down from the road to the pools under the falls. She can see it drawn here by Cole. The sky, luminous above the trees, the crash of water. Piles and piles of yellow leaves pillowing the trail. Elizabeth slipped in them hiking once with Isaac and the children, and she fell right on her face, deep, deeper, falling gradually, losing her balance by degrees. She kept waiting to hit hard ground, expecting something sharp. But she never did hit. The leaves were so deep that she felt as though she were falling in a dream; falling farther and farther until she landed in her own bed. She just laughed; she couldn’t get her feet under her; she couldn’t stop laughing.

  She loves the place; she loves the painting by association. The painting is all associations. All familiar to her; reminding her, inspiring her. It brings back her own half-buried wish to capture and even recreate a place and time that beautiful. More than ever she wants to do something of her own. She has to make something; she has so much energy, she feels so strong. Fearless. She imagines for a moment she could learn to paint, except that she never could draw. She thinks perhaps she could write something. But she’s not that sort; she reads too seriously. She couldn’t separate her own words from the books humming in her head. She’s filled with other music, not her own. Elizabeth looks intently at the painting, that brilliant piece of the world, and gazing at the color and the light of it she feels the desire, as intense as prayer. I want—she thinks, and then it comes to her simply, with all the force of her pragmatic soul—I want to open a store.

  In my front yard grew the strawberry, blackberry, and life-everlasting, johnswort, and goldenrod, shrub oaks and sand cherry, blueberry and groundnut…. The sumach (Rhus glabra) grew luxuriantly about the house…. In August, the large masses of berries, which, when in flower, had attracted many wild bees, gradually assumed their bright velvety crimson hue….

  —HENRY DAVID THOREAU

  Walden

  1

  AT THE Lamkins’ camp Renée has charge of the three-year-old girls. Watching them in the sandbox, she sits on a swing and drags her feet in the dirt.

  “This is the most difficult job of all,” Beyla Lamkin told her. “This is the crucial age.” It may be true, for all Renée knows, but she spends all her time stopping fights and tying shoes.

  She is supposed to read the children midrashes, illustrated in picture books, but she never gets to that. She’s always marching them off to play in the wading pool the Lamkins have rigged up, and then trying to put the right clothes back on them afterward. The activities the Lamkins plan all happen at such a distance from Renée’s post at the sandbox that she can’t even see the watermelon hunt or the idiotic boccie games. Renée can’t go on the rebbetzin’s nature walks, because her girls are too little. One of them is bound to get lost. The girls are so small
, Renée can’t leave them for a minute, and so she doesn’t get a chance to talk to the other counselors when they get together and commiserate about how boring Pesach Lamkin’s shiurs are—descriptions of how a pure red heifer was used for purification in the days of the Temple, the rabbi droning on while everyone sits at a picnic table, watching a spider hanging from a tree.

  Renée glares at the girls playing in the sand. No one asked her if she wanted to take care of them. After two weeks she doesn’t think they’re sweet at all, and she doesn’t feel in the least bit motherly toward them. Watching the little campers dump sand on each other, she thinks dark thoughts. She wishes she had some other mother, not her own. Stephanie’s mother wouldn’t make her spend all day with three-year-olds. Mrs. Fawess lets Stephanie wander wherever she likes, bike to Lacy Farm, even go swimming alone all the way up at Coon Lake. Stephanie never has to follow rules, except be home by dark. Renée feels an overwhelming need to talk to Stephanie, to ride her bike with Stephanie far away.

  She doesn’t have a plan. She just hops down from the swing. Slowly, she walks over to the other counselors where they sit at a picnic table. She looks at them, the good teenagers, the responsible girls. “I have to go,” she whispers. She doesn’t explain. She just walks off.

  Away from the sandbox, away from the grassy field where the boys are playing flag football, Renée skirts the picnic tables and the grand old house with peeling paint, the old Thorne house, where the Lamkins now live. Head down, she walks out to the road and past the scores of small bicycles lying against the fence. The little girls’ bikes with their handles decorated with streamers and baskets adorned with plastic daisies. The little boys’ bikes, sleek and black with decals of rocket ships and fire. Renée extricates her own three-speed bicycle from the pile, and she pedals off quickly, almost afraid the Lamkins will notice and run after her. Of course, they are far too busy to realize she has gone. Her heart is pounding all the same.

  She has never done anything wrong before. Never done anything interesting, as Stephanie has pointed out. Renée has always been a dutiful sort of girl, campaigning for attention, and getting it mostly by being pretty. Now she’s run off.

  She rides her bike to Stephanie’s house.

  “Renée!” Stephanie says when she answers the door. “What are you doing here?”

  “I left,” Renée says.

  “You mean, you quit,” Stephanie says.

  “Yeah,” Renée admits.

  Stephanie’s eyes sparkle. “I’ll lend you a bathing suit! We’re going to Coon Lake.”

  Coon Lake is gray and green, the water cold. Stephanie makes a face, but she plunges in right away. Renée shudders and holds back, but Stephanie splashes her.

  “Now all you have to do is tell your parents,” Stephanie says, treading water.

  “I can’t,” Renée wails.

  “Got to,” Stephanie says in her blunt way. “What are you going to do, send them a copy of your resignation letter?”

  “I didn’t write a—”

  Stephanie looks at her.

  “Oh,” Renée says.

  Stephanie dives under the water and comes up with her long wet hair plastered down over her face. It looks as though she has her back to Renée, but she is still facing her. “Renée, Renée,” Stephanie says from behind her long thick hair. “No guts, no glory.”

  “I’M not going back,” Renée announces at Friday-night dinner in front of her entire family, including aunts and uncles. She says it just as her mother backs into the dining room from the kitchen with a platter of roast capon.

  “Going back where?” asks her aunt Maja, at which point little Alex knocks over a wineglass on the embroidered white tablecloth.

  “Alex, Alex,” chides Uncle Saul.

  “Sh, Saul, he’s coughing,” Maja says.

  “Blot, don’t wipe it,” Nina tells Andras.

  “Raise your hands over your head,” commands Aunt Eva, as poor Alex coughs, cheeks reddening.

  “Give him some water,” Maja says.

  “Give him a piece of bread,” Uncle Philip chimes in. “How about a piece of chain?”

  “Let him be!” Nina begs her elderly in-laws. “All right, there you are.” She pats Alex on the back and he stops coughing and Andras begins carving.

  “I’m not going back,” Renée repeats.

  “White meat, please,” requests Maja. “What did you say, dear?”

  “I’m not going to be a counselor. I hate it,” Renée says.

  Nina puts down her fork, appalled.

  “I never wanted to do it. I told you I didn’t like it. I just can’t go back. I’d rather sit and play piano all day,” Renée blurts out.

  “Well, you’ll have to go back,” Nina murmurs, deathly quiet.

  “I won’t,” Renée says.

  “We’ll discuss it later.” Nina’s face is flushed. Renée is humiliating her in front of Eva and Maja and their husbands.

  “I’m not going,” Renée says.

  Nina turns to Andras.

  “Renée,” Andras says, “are you contradicting your mother?”

  “I won’t go back,” Renée mutters to her plate.

  “Yes, you will, young lady,” Andras tells her. “It’s high time you learned the meaning of a day’s work.”

  “I will, I will. I’ll do anything else,” Renée says. “I’ll get a real job. I’ll work at the A & P,” she says, although even she can’t imagine that.

  “Absolutely not!” cries Nina.

  “Andras,” says Aunt Eva, “why should the children work when, thank God, they don’t have to? I never understood.”

  “That’s not the point,” explodes Nina. “This is not work. This is a camp.”

  “So, Alex, is this camp really such a terrible place?” Uncle Philip asks in a stage whisper to his little nephew.

  “‘S okay,” mumbles Alex, who has been eating steadily.

  “And are the Lamkins doing a good job?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “You like the other kids?” presses Philip.

  “Yeah.” Alex serves himself more kugel.

  “I’d rather get a real job,” Renée says again.

  Andras looks at his daughter skeptically. This is a novel proposition, that Renée could do something constructive. Counseling camp isn’t a real job. Not a job independent of Nina’s influence. He doubts anyone would actually employ Renée. But that could be a valuable lesson for her. He’s never known her to try for anything before. “All right, then,” he says. “I’ll make a deal with you. You find some other job, and you do it—no complaining—and you don’t have to go back to camp.”

  “Okay.” Renée nods, meek with surprise.

  But Nina shakes her head. “No,” she mouths to Andras. To see her daughter bagging groceries at the A & P! Impossible. She’s furious at Andras. To have her judgment so … preempted. How could he? How could he pretend to be a believer in the day camp for Renée and Alex, and then sabotage the whole thing later? Doesn’t he see she has some pride, some feelings? Or is it all a game between him and his sisters? In which Eva and Maja and Andras all know better than she how to raise the children.

  IN KAATERSKILL, Eva and Maja and their husbands share a house. There are no children, and the two couples form a permanent unit, a family of four. They live near each other in the city, where Saul and Philip work together in the diamond business. In Kaaterskill, Eva and Maja keep house together in a large brick edifice with green shutters and a porch in front. While they were not brought up in a traditional home, the sisters are now religious. They have turned to their synagogue in Brooklyn and to the shul in Kaaterskill as to a second family. It is they who draw Andras up to Kaaterskill each summer; they who encouraged, indeed expected, him to buy his summer house. Eva and Maja have a serenity their younger brother lacks. They have a gracious calm and even joy in life, as if somehow in themselves, in their own generosity, they find some comfort for all they lost in the war, some recompense.

&n
bsp; The two are legendary for their hospitality. Each of them has a gift for creating an occasion. They nourish their friends and their friends’ children with pastries, or honey cake. The sisters have made sociability their life’s work. Eva, especially, brightens every gathering with her hot tea and lemon and her fresh berry pies, and above all with her intense interest in her friends’ lives. Always she is inviting people in; always baking, whether for bereaved families or new parents. She shares her friends’ sadness, and their joy.

  Their house is on the way back from shul, and the sisters have a tradition every Shabbes. They invite all their neighbors on Maple to stop in on their way home from services for an oneg. For the children there is a table on the porch with homemade rugelach. Inside, Eva and Maja serve schnapps to Andras and Nina, Elizabeth, Isaac, Cecil and Beatrix, the Ergmans, and the Landauers. A curtain of green leaves frames the children’s party. Curtains of lace spun into roses and leaves frame the grown-ups’.

  At the Oneg Shabbat this week, Elizabeth sits on the gold sofa, talking about her idea. She tells everyone about the store, her imagined store. It will be a grocery store, the first kosher grocery in Kaaterskill. Everyone complains about the lines in Washington Heights, the men trying to shop on Friday afternoons and the bakery running out every week, and Auerbach’s—impossible to get in after eleven-thirty. And of course, there is no other choice. No one from Washington Heights can buy from shops unsanctioned by Rav Kirshner. But Elizabeth will bring meat up from Auerbach’s, and challahs from Edelman’s, and stock a little store herself, small scale, of course. With a store in Kaaterskill there needn’t be any last-minute rush on Friday afternoons. She’ll have food in the mountains all during the week.

  She’s already been making phone calls for wholesale prices on the goods from the city, and she’s made a list of all the Kirshner families who would come. Large families. She knows how much money they spend. Then, of course, the other Orthodox people would probably come in to buy, although they haven’t got the same restrictions on their shopping, the same need as the Kirshners. And there are also the Kirshner yeshiva bochurs sent up from the city to counsel camp. Elizabeth has filled a steno pad with notes. She’ll have a freezer and stock chicken. She’ll have shelves of canned goods with cookies and potato chips, bouillon cubes, supervised jam.