Kaaterskill Falls

by Allegra Goodman

  It is time for the reading. For Jerusalem, the city, alone and bereft. Her garments spoiled, her cheeks wet with tears. The Rav fixes his eyes above the sea, and slowly raises his hand to silence the murmur of men praying.

  “I will say some words about Eichah, the lament which we read last night,” he says in his unwavering accented voice. “For in the words of the prophet: Avar katzir, calah kaitz, v’anachnu lo noshanu. Harvest is past, summer finished, and we are not saved.” He pauses. “And we must ask ourselves, whose is this lament? It is ours. And which generation? It is ours. We have lived in confusion; we have suffered, our people lost in flame.”

  Strange, but again, as he speaks, the Rav can see himself talking, and he can see the men listening, and yet he knows that they are not listening to him. He sees now, quite clearly, their upturned faces, intent on his every word, and yet he feels that this clarity is itself illusory. For they are not listening to him. They are whispering and davening to themselves. Their voices murmur underneath his voice, like the murmur of lazy bees and distant lawn mowers, a murmur of sleep.

  “For us the lament is redoubled,” he says. His voice is neither angry nor sad, but cold. Chilling. “Once, in Germany, we remembered our nation, Israel, scattered. Now, in America, we remember our families in Germany who were slaughtered, burned to ash. We mourn our ancient land laid waste in injustice, as the prophet has said, and the people dispersed, as the prophet has written. But we have also seen the land of our dispersion laid waste; the just men slaughtered. We must remember both; we must remember each.”

  He clutches the railing, and he sees his hands clutching it, his fingers white. He senses it all. His sense is almost too keen. On one side his nephew Joseph, on the other, his son, Isaiah, poised next to him, weighing on him. The people below, anxious, waiting. He sees how young the young are; he can see it in the innocent beauty, the slight stupidity, of their faces. He sees them with their mouths open like birds about to swallow. They know, even less than he, why they were born to live instead of die. Their prayers fill their minds; they wash through the room in a tide of repetition, and the sounds double and double back again upon themselves. But, of course, the young know nothing. They remember nothing. There is no experience written onto their soft blank hearts. He is speaking to them, and yet he sees they are not listening. He is reciting, chanting the first kinah, the first words of grief and desolation. They are still murmuring. They are murmuring to themselves, following along blindly in their books, brushing the edge of each word with their lips. He senses it all as he sings: the red velvet on the lectern, his son and his nephew on either side, the gabbai, the president of the shul, the young Rabbi Lamkin. And it seems to him as he reads, his perspective is growing ever broader, the whole room turning about him, the bima gently floating, the memorial lights like white evening stars, the trees brushing against the vaulted windows, trailing their branches as if the glass were water.

  His words float into the hushed congregation, and in the women’s section Elizabeth follows, swaying in silent concentration. The pause is almost imperceptible, but then she hears a gasp from the men’s section and a shuffle. The plain, almost droning, music of the voice breaks off. “Get an ambulance,” someone shouts, and then there is a roar of voices.

  “What happened? What happened?”

  “Hold him up. I’m a doctor.”

  “So am I!”

  “I can’t believe it; please, please—”

  “Mommy, is he hurt?”

  Lifting the lace curtain Elizabeth can’t see the Rav, only a crowd of men on the bima. The women are pressing forward. They push to the entrance of the women’s section, holding back the children.

  “He’s hurt.”

  “It’s a stroke,” someone whispers.

  “God forbid!”

  “That’s what they said.”

  “Back up. Back up. Move back.”

  The ambulance siren sounds in the open doorway, and the town medics burst in with a white stretcher. The children are crying. Elizabeth is holding them, sitting with Brocha’s head in her lap. She can hardly breathe. The breath has been knocked out of her. No one ever thinks about the Rav falling, stricken down. No one imagines that. They take it for granted that he stands at the center, that he speaks and chastises and controls. They take for granted what he is and has been for almost fifty years: scholar, judge, historian, witness.

  In the knot of men near the bima the Rav breathes painfully, eyes shut. “You, Isaiah, continue,” he whispers.

  “I’m coming with you, Father.” Isaiah bends over him.

  “No, stay,” the Rav commands, and he feels Isaiah touching his hand, and the warmth, confusion, and trembling excitement of the touch, because he has suggested that soon Isaiah will succeed him. He feels it all, more than Isaiah means for him to feel. He feels them lifting him away. They are carrying him away outside. It annoys him to be touched this way, and annoys him more that Isaiah is coming with him, leaning over him. He would flick him off if he could. He feels the ingratiating warmth of Isaiah’s hand, and at the same time the cold intravenous fluid tracing a path through the veins up his arm. He feels his body caught in the moment of transformation, both animate and inanimate, warm to the touch, but cold within. They slide him into the back of the ambulance, one medic to watch the Rav, the other to drive down the mountain to Catskill Hospital. Isaiah climbs in and they speed away down Main Street.

  The ambulance careens down the mountain, siren shrieking and sobbing on the curving road. It rips through the shadowy forest and screams into the silence of the trees.

  Halfway down the mountain, however, Rav Kirshner opens his eyes. He looks up into the face of the Kaaterskill volunteer fireman, Stan Knowlton. “Where are we going?” he demands.

  “Lie still, sir,” says Knowlton, “we’re taking you to the hospital.”

  “Thank you, it is quite unnecessary. I am revived,” says the Rav. “These things”—he gestures to the IV bottle and tubes above him—“these have revived me.”

  “We have to take you to the hospital, Father,” Isaiah says.

  “This is very expensive; it is quite unnecessary.” The Rav purses his lips in disapproval. “It is time to go home.”

  Isaiah touches his father’s arm.

  “It is time to go home,” the Rav says again.

  “We can’t,” Isaiah murmurs.

  “How old are you?”

  “Thirty-nine,” Isaiah answers.

  “How old am I?”

  “Seventy-eight.”

  The Rav nods. “That is correct. You may please tell the driver to turn the vehicle around, and tell them to slow on the way up the mountain. I don’t like this speed, and it is very expensive. Go. Go and talk to the driver.”

  Isaiah hesitates. He cannot tell the driver to turn the ambulance around. Of course his father must go to the hospital, but to calm him he goes up front and sits next to the driver as if to consult with him. After several minutes of hushed debate the vehicle does indeed slow down, but it continues to the hospital in Catskill.

  From the stretcher the Rav stares at Stan Knowlton. “What is your name?” he asks mildly, as if to make conversation.

  “Stanley Knowlton,” Stan answers.

  “And you live in Kaaterskill?”

  “Yes.”

  “What do you do?”

  Stan looks uncomfortable, interrogated by the old man. “I work—I used to work for Michael King, fixing the bungalows, mainly.”

  “I see. You are married?”

  “Yes. I have a wife, Janet, and one daughter, Lark.”

  “Lark?” the Rav asks, puzzled. “Ah, yes,” he says, “I have read in the Times about these names after the animals and birds. Star, Fawn, Dawn, Sky.”

  “No, that wasn’t it,” Stan explains. “We named her from a line in a Shakespeare play.”

  The Rav is surprised. “Please quote,” he demands of Knowlton, just as he does of his disciples in Talmud shiur.

  “
Quote what?”

  “The verses with the name.”

  “‘I’ll say yon gray is not the morning’s eye,’” Knowlton recites. “‘Nor that is not the lark whose notes do beat / The vaulty heaven so high above our heads.’ It’s from Romeo and Juliet. We acted in it in high school.”

  The Rav smiles. “Ach! But it’s better in German,” he exclaims. “The Schiller translation. It is the most beautiful language. Schiller is the best of the German poets.”

  The ambulance sways and dips and Knowlton steadies himself. “I didn’t think you would read them—Germans,” Knowlton says.

  “But I am German,” the Rav answers softly.

  “Rabbi!” Stan calls out. The old man seems to be drifting off.

  “I was speaking on this subject, Germany, before you came for me,” the Rav says. “They were nodding their heads in the congregation, but do you think they understand me? I think not. You have seen my people when you fix the bungalows, have you, Mr. Knowlton?”

  “Oh, yeah, of course.”

  “They are good people,” the Rav muses. He speaks slowly and softly. “But they are very simple. I notice all the time. They are always working and they are learning. Today I asked myself: What are they thinking? Such a simple people. They are afraid of the Mind, and to read. They don’t read Schiller and the Shakespeare. How can I say it to you? They keep one thing, the religious, alive. It is the most important, but they have lost the other. They have forgotten the poetry. There is not one of them who is what we used to call an Educated Man. With Greek and Latin, student of the arts. That was what I had in Germany. They do not attend university. They have the one thing and not the other. How did this happen? In this country I think perhaps it is necessary. They make their way—accountants, lawyers; in the banks. Getting and spending, I am afraid. Working all the time. When do they think of the spiritual?” Stern and exhausted, but somehow wondering, he opens his eyes and looks up into Stan Knowlton’s face.

  “Well, at least they’ve got jobs,” Knowlton says. “In New York City there’s decent jobs to choose from.”

  The Rav doesn’t seem to hear this. He is still talking, his voice barely audible as he keeps talking to himself.

  THE Rav insisted he wouldn’t go into the hospital. He was furious when Stan took him out on the stretcher, but he was too weak to fight it. Knowlton thinks about this on the way back to Kaaterskill. He thinks about his strange conversation with the rabbi. All the old man’s questions. Stan had never met Rabbi Kirshner before. He hadn’t known he was such a talker.

  Knowlton and the driver take the ambulance back to the fire-house, and Stan walks over to Boyd’s garage. James Boyd, one of old Boyd’s nephews, works there as mechanic. James is the same age as Knowlton, twenty-eight, but much heavier around the middle. He was always stocky, and now he keeps his T-shirt tucked in over his belly. He has a ruddy face and big hands, sandy brown hair and green eyes. The Rubin kid is working there with him, and they’ve got the radio on and the fan blowing just as they always do in the summer. Ira Rubin’s father owns Rubin’s Hotel on Main Street, but the kid loves cars. At sixteen he is six feet, as tall as James, but half as wide. His hair is curly brown and his face seems as yet too small for his body. He wears glasses that sometimes slip down his short nose. Even when he was fourteen, Ira hung around the garage. He’s like a little brother to James.

  “Guess who I just took down to Catskill Hospital?” Stan says.

  “I don’t know, who?” James asks.

  “Guess. Three guesses.”

  “Michael King,” says James.

  “Yeah, that’d be a good one,” Stan says. “You guess.” He pokes his head into the Volkswagen bug where Ira is working.

  “I don’t know,” says Ira. He is cementing the square base of the rearview mirror onto the front window. As the rubber cement drips down the glass he scrapes it up with a razor blade.

  “Rabbi Kirshner,” Stan says.

  “Who’s he?” asks Ira.

  “You know who he is. The old guy on the hill.”

  “Which old guy?” James asks.

  “What do you mean, which?”

  “I mean there’s a hundred old rabbis in this town.”

  “I mean the Rabbi Kirshner.”

  “Does he wear fur? A fur hat?”

  “No, I’m telling you this is Kirshner, the one in charge.”

  “So why’d he have to go to Catskill?” James asks. “Is he dead, or what?”

  “He didn’t die,” Knowlton tells them. “He was just lying there on his back the whole time talking my ear off. Shakespeare, Germany, economics.”

  “Wouldn’t shut up, huh?” says James.

  “And you know, he said he’s only seventy-eight,” Stan muses. “He looks like he’s about a hundred.”

  “You look like an old man yourself,” James teases. “What d’you think, Ira? Stan here is twenty-eight.”

  “Old, I guess,” Ira says, grinning. He can see James and Stan are going to kick back and start talking. They love talking about the old days. Ira sits down on the pile of tires with the fan blowing and the greasy radio playing. James and Stan can talk on and on. They talk about when they were in high school and they played basketball, and fought, and got suspended. The times James used to liberate cars from his uncle Boyd’s shop, and they went driving around the mountain. The time they went skinny-dipping at Kaaterskill Falls. Ira sits there on the big tires and he takes it all in with his intent freckled face, his ears sticking out as if to listen harder to the stories, all the good times up to the very end—the day they never mention—when Stan, and James, John Curtis, and Billy Walker flew off the road and crashed in Devil’s Kitchen.

  IT WASN’T accurate, what he said in the ambulance. The Rav considers this in his hospital bed. It isn’t completely true that his people have forgotten the liberal arts. After all, his own son, Jeremy, did attend university. Columbia. And he did learn those rich and florid ancient languages. His son excelled, in fact indulged, in the arts, history, and poetry. Jeremy was a brilliant scholar, learned in both sacred and secular literature. From the beginning his learning and intellectual ability far surpassed Isaiah’s. The Rav thinks of this as he lies there in his foolish hospital gown with Isaiah at his side. He is tired. Tired of his younger son always present, always solicitous. Dutiful. Isaiah does exactly as he is told. The Rav expects no less. This is what he requires. He thinks he can see Isaiah, both his sons, objectively, for what they are. Each has what the other lacks. Isaiah is good. He has a pure and dedicated heart. He is ambitious, but his ambition is turned entirely toward the welfare of the Kehilla. He is pious; he is truly pious. But he is not interesting.

  “I would like to see Jeremy,” he says to Isaiah. “I would like to see your brother.”

  “Of course we already called him, Father,” Isaiah says.

  “And he is coming here?” the Rav asks. “Or to the house?”

  “We don’t know yet how long you will be here. The doctors have to decide.” Isaiah is sitting nervously at his bedside. He is surprised at his father’s insistence, and a little frightened. The Rav has never been so anxious to see Jeremy. His words seem portentous to Isaiah. Like a rebuke to him and his wife, as if they have done wrong; as if they have not done enough, so that now, in the hospital, he turns to the other son. “I’m sure he’ll come as soon as he can,” Isaiah says.

  “Then tell him I am waiting,” says the Rav. “And where is my Times?”

  That evening Jeremy arrives. Wearing his light sport coat and cream Panama hat, he walks into the Rav’s private hospital room. The Rav seems half his true size, a tiny old man swallowed up in the white bed. On one side Isaiah sits with the water pitcher and the reading glasses. On the other side of the bed sits Jeremy’s cousin, Joseph. The two of them with their suits coal-black against the white sheets; they seem like a pair of dark Puritan angels.

  “Jeremy.” The Rav stretches out his frail arms and smiles.

  The warmth of the
welcome shocks Jeremy. He is confused by that smiling face. It is unlike his father; it is as if his father were vanishing into a sort of frail pixilated benevolence. “Go, please,” the Rav says sharply to Isaiah and Joseph, and his sharp tone is somehow reassuring.

  “How are you, Father?” Jeremy asks when they are alone.

  “I am a patient,” the Rav says, “but I am not patient.” His deep-set eyes sparkle. He is enjoying his little joke. “They are holding me for observations, changing my medications, experimenting, and this causes me hallucinations.”

  “Really? Hallucinations?”

  “I see one, for example, right now,” the Rav says calmly. “Just”—he points to Jeremy’s left shoulder—“there. A figure, I can see, quite clearly.”

  Involuntarily, Jeremy turns and looks.

  “But I know it is a trick of the eye. She has no shadow. It is interesting, isn’t it? The eye plays tricks. There is a great difference between what we see and what we know. You have not sent me your essays,” he tells Jeremy.

  Jeremy studies his father’s face. The Rav has rarely shown any interest in Jeremy’s scholarly work. In his library in the city he has a bound copy of Jeremy’s dissertation, but Jeremy has no idea whether he has ever read it.

  “Here I have time to read,” the Rav says. “Because they do not like me to do my work. When I get home I will be behind with my correspondence.”

  “Are you going back to Kaaterskill or to the city?” Jeremy asks.

  “Of course, Kaaterskill,” says his father. Then he adds, “Your brother wants me to go back to the city.” As he speaks his tone is the same, his wording the same as always, only slower. “You remember when we first came up to Kaaterskill.”

  “Sure,” Jeremy says. He must have been ten or eleven at the time.

  “Your mother was the one who wanted to come up to the mountains.”

  “I know,” says Jeremy.

  “I had not wanted to buy the house in Kaaterskill. It did not interest me then to leave the city. We argued, and she said, it is not good to stay all year in Washington Heights. Not good to have only one thing and not another. The children need air to breathe and other sights to see, and you need it too. I said it was trouble to come to the mountains, to have two houses, and she said, it is not enough to live in one place if it is not beautiful. It is not sufficient.”