“Well. We are what we read,” Mrs. Schermerhorn remarks as they pull away from the curb.
“THE rock face was brutal, studded with metallic waste,” Ira Rubin reads when he gets home, “but we kept on, clawing, crawling our way up, first Buck, then me, then Xanda. I looked up at the sonar range finder strapped to Buck’s pack. Forty feet up, and a higher rock face ahead. No, she was right, there is no moral instinct, I thought. Just the will to survive, keep crawling up to the top. What then? You don’t think a lot about the future when you’re scaling a decoy crater on the planet Rhea.”
“Ira?” he hears faintly from upstairs.
“What?” he calls back.
“I said come here,” his mother calls.
“Why?”
“Now,” his mother hollers from the top of the stairs.
He follows her up into his room. “Clean it,” she says.
“Oh, yeah,” he says, peering into his cavelike room. He was supposed to clean it. It’s hard to see the mess. Ira keeps the shades down. There are paperbacks, and his school texts left over from eighth grade—the ones the teachers didn’t even want back at the end of the year, they looked so bad. Catcher in the Rye, and Ancient Civilizations, free weights, newspapers strewn across the floor—he uses the old papers to line the cage of his pet rat, Bester.
“Clean it now,” his mother says.
“Okay.” Ira thumps back down the wooden stairs with his book and takes it back out to the porch, where the birches rattle with the white summer wind. He finishes a book in an afternoon, racing through it and forgetting it all as soon as he’s done. Then sometimes he rips through another one at night, reading in bed until the pages hurt his eyes.
His father, Mark, thinks he should do something better with his time than read sci-fi books and sit in Boyd’s Garage. After all, if he wants a summer job, he could work at the family’s hotel in Kaaterskill. If he wants to fool around he could play soccer and get some exercise outside. His mother, Felice, is worried about Ira’s eyes. He’s straining them, reading those trashy novels with his rat at his side. That huge, lumpy rodent, over a foot long, with its thick tail, tiny red eyes, the most repulsive thing Felice has ever seen—she’ll admit it, she’s afraid of it, lying there indolently on Ira’s shoulder, its sensitive nose nudging Ira’s ear. They’d let him buy it when their dog died, their German shepherd, Lady, which Felice now associates with Ira’s former happy nature. This nocturnal rat—it could be rabid, it could escape!—seems to her a sign of what Ira has become. His parents don’t know about Renée.
Ira knows that’s her name because he’s heard Mrs. Schermerhorn calling to her, “Renée, let’s go! Get the door, please.” He doesn’t know much else about her. He never says anything to her beyond hi and thank-you. He looks at her, mainly. Renée’s hair looks brown in the shade and deep red in the sun, and when her brown eyes fill with light they turn gold. She has freckles all over her arms. Once she asked him, “Do you ever do anything but read?” He was suddenly happy. She’d stopped and asked him a question.
Every time the bookmobile comes to Bear Mountain, Ira climbs aboard to browse for books and see Renée. Sometimes she’s frowning; she looks annoyed and tired. Occasionally she looks happy; she glances at her watch. She must be thinking about what she’s going to do afterward. He’s seen her a couple of times on the weekends in Kaaterskill. Once she was walking with another girl and a bunch of dogs. He watched them cross Main Street and disappear down Maple.
No one knows Ira likes Renée. James Boyd would laugh at him, liking one of the summer people. What’s the use? She’ll only go back to the city. Then Ira won’t see her all year, all through the long winter.
4
“LISTEN to me,” Stephanie tells Renée on the phone. “Do you realize what you’ve done? You’ve infiltrated the Mohican Road Community! Why didn’t I think of that? You can get in on the bookmobile. You know what we should do? We should put leaflets denouncing racism into all the library books you deliver.”
“Stephanie, no!” Renée says.
“Oh, come on,” says Stephanie, “don’t you care about discrimination? These people are illegally keeping out minorities.”
“They are? How do you know?”
Stephanie chomps on something crunchy on the other end of the line. “Because my father tried to buy up there. Seriously, it would be so fun if we could shake them up. We could type up something really small like a bookmark and stick it in all the books.”
“I’d just get in trouble again,” Renée says.
“God, you are so boring!” says Stephanie. “Haven’t you ever heard of Rosa Parks, or Gandhi, or Martin Luther King? Don’t you have to take American History?”
“I’m taking it next year,” Renée tells her, offended.
Stephanie hangs up.
Renée calls back after dinner. “Why are you angry?” she asks.
“We have to do something to the Mohicans,” Stephanie says. “Renée, you have an opportunity here. We can’t let it go to waste.”
All week Renée worries over her conversation with Stephanie. She’s begun to think her friend is disappointed in her. She feels as if Stephanie is waiting, daring her to defy Mrs. Schermerhorn. But Renée never lives up to Stephanie’s expectations. She isn’t interesting enough. What has she ever done, after all? She’s just a good student in the ninth grade. A plain good student with eighties and nineties in all her subjects and no special interest in any of them. Renée does only what’s asked and no more. She finishes her homework in study hall and then forgets about it. She is boring, she thinks. Maybe Stephanie is right. Weighted with the problem, she goes at last to her father for advice. “Daddy,” she asks on Friday night, “what do you think of agitation?”
Andras puts his copy of Commentary on the table next to the sofa. “What are you talking about?”
“Agitation against what you think is wrong,” Renée says. “Like racists.”
“What racists?”
“On Mohican Road.”
Andras throws back his head and laughs. “Sweetheart,” he says, “who’s going to agitate them? They’re just a bunch of rich old WASPs.”
“They have a covenant,” Renée tells him, “and Stephanie thinks I should do something to them, because I get to go in every week on the bookmobile.”
Andras knits his brow. “Well, she can do something herself if she’s so offended. If Stephanie wants to go looking for trouble, she doesn’t have to use you for that. You can just tell her to mind her own business.”
“But she’s my friend,” says Renée.
“Your friend! Well, there are limits,” Andras says. For this is Andras’s general feeling these days.
He is drawn to the woods because of the quiet, and the distance from the house. He needs to get away from Nina and her worrying and planning, and the children with their bicycles and friends, Renée and her sulky piano-banging. He needs to get out and walk away under the trees. Most Sundays he walks up Mohican Road. Often he stops at Una Darmstadt-Cooper’s cabin.
Una respects silence. She goes about her work, photographing animals and trees and stones. She has a propane tank in back of her shed for fuel in winter, but she also has a woodstove, and Andras brings his mallet and helps her split logs. He splits wood while Una takes care of her animals, her goats and stray cats. Sometimes she just sits with her camera in her lap. She can sit for hours, perfectly still, looking at a piece of lichen. But when she’s in the mood she loves to talk.
“What kind of toys do you sell?” she asked him last week.
“Dolls,” he told her. “And stuffed animals.”
“Do you think that’s right?” she asked.
“What do you mean?” Andras looked at her puzzled from where he stood at the woodpile.
“I mean the minds of the little children,” she said. “How will they know what real bears look like? Or rabbits?”
“Well, if they’ve never seen the animals, maybe the toys are better than nothin
g,” Andras said.
Thoughtfully Una walked through her yard and fed the goats. A few minutes later she came back. “I say you teach children to treat animals like pieces of fluff. So they drool on them when they’re little and then they shoot them down out here when they get big.”
“Well …” Andras demurred.
“Aha!” Una said, “I see you feel guilty.”
He couldn’t help laughing at her joy in finding him so.
Una has removed herself from the company of other people; she chooses animals and trees as her companions. True, she is eccentric, but Andras respects her for her independent old age, and her valiant isolationism. Isolationist politics are something else, of course. Andras opposed the withdrawal from Vietnam, as a waste of the lives lost in the war. He saw there and in Korea echoes of the tragedy in Munich, in Prague, and in his own country in 1956. He believes in aid to democratic nations, monetary support of Israel, an active military presence in Western Europe. And he believes in comprehensive welfare programs, government spending on social services, famine relief, federal funding for environmental preservation. Politically, he advocates engagement, and he takes as moral duties the responsibility to vote, pay taxes, and supply charity. But personally, Andras takes comfort in solitude. He understands Una’s impatience with the stuffy houses in town, her disgust with the dirty crawling pace of the city. There is something in him that won’t give and won’t take part.
“There are limits,” Andras tells his daughter when she asks him about Stephanie. But he speaks more of his own experience than in answer to Renée’s questions.
Renée looks at him, confused. Andras sees she doesn’t understand, and yet he doesn’t know how he can explain himself to her. She is too young, and too hungry for friendship, to see how it could possibly be an imposition.
5
ON THE hill behind the shul Elizabeth and Isaac pick blueberries. Small berries, pale dusty blue, and big dark ones, sleek and nearly black, exploding from their tight skins. The girls are strung out down the hill filling all the containers Elizabeth found in the house. Plastic sand buckets from excursions to Mohican Lake, a big colander, the double boiler.
“If the Rav is seeing people, then I think we should see him,” Elizabeth tells Isaac.
“I don’t think he’s really seeing people,” Isaac says.
“But how do you know? You could find out.”
“Elizabeth, stop,” he says. “Stop nudzhing me.”
“Ruchel,” Elizabeth calls out, “give that back to your sister. You have your own.” The August afternoon is hot. The girls’ hair is damp on their foreheads.
“But I want to try,” Elizabeth tells Isaac.
They continue picking in silence, stripping blueberries from the tangled bushes. Elizabeth can’t stop thinking about her idea for the store, and yet she can do nothing about it. It is late, the summer almost over. Without permission from the Rav Elizabeth cannot begin to make plans for next year. Since the episode on Tisha b’Av, the Rav has been in delicate condition. Back from the hospital, but home in bed, he is attended by his nephew, Joseph, and his son, Isaiah. He is surrounded by a cloud of rumors. There is the rumor, for example, that the Rav is going to ask Isaiah to take his place. However, he has not made any positive sign. The morning minyan has moved to his house and meets in the Rav’s living room. Each morning the Rav comes downstairs to pray, always exactly on time, fully dressed as usual, but he does not speak to the men, and his son Isaiah does not report on his condition. It is unclear when, or even if, the Rav will again teach his weekly Wednesday shiur, and grant audiences to answer halachic questions, as he did before his illness. Of course Isaac is relieved that it’s impossible to broach the subject of a store with the Rav, but for Elizabeth it is agony to wait and wait and not pursue the question. Quickly, she piles berries into her big salad bowl. Her fingers stain purple. The late afternoon sun is beating down. Soon the little ones will be too tired to stay out any longer.
Laden with berries, they stop at the Birnbaums’ house on the way home. Cecil and Beatrix are lounging on their porch with two mathematician friends up for the weekend, and the elderly Kaaterskill couple, the Heiligmans. Beatrix is having one of her mathematical arguments.
“My God,” Beatrix exclaims, “if I’d wanted to be so absolutely grungy, I would have been a physicist. Once you do a thing just because it’s useful, you aren’t doing math—well, that’s just shit work, isn’t it? … Hello, Shulpeople! Oh, blueberries, Elizabeth. Marvelous.”
Beatrix introduces them to her colleagues from Queens College and Courant, and Cecil waves from the wicker sofa, where he sits with old Emil Heiligman and Emil’s solicitous second wife, Frieda.
“How Bacchanalian,” says Cecil, surveying Elizabeth’s little girls, with their blueberry-stained mouths and their overflowing plastic buckets. “Brocha and Sorah would work quite well on each side of the porch. What do you think, Isaac? I’ve been looking for something suitable to rival King’s plaster lions. Would you believe he had the gall to say I was planting bushes on his land? Three currant bushes. He’s having surveyors. He’s staking out his property. And he’s been complaining that Beatrix and I have loud gatherings at night. Loud! A couple of algebrists, and a cryptographer with his dog.”
There is a roar of laughter from Beatrix’s corner. Something about the dog and King’s swimming pool. But Emil Heiligman just looks at Elizabeth’s daughters, shaking his head.
“Like a picture,” he murmurs in his husky, sad voice, indelibly sad, as it is indelibly accented, German. “Like a picture.” He leans over to smile at Brocha.
The little girl backs away, shying from Mr. Heiligman’s heavy face, his watery eyes. Elizabeth herself feels a pang of sadness as she tries to draw Brocha toward him.
“Who just had a birthday?” Cecil asks the girls.
“Me,” says Chani, who has just turned thirteen.
“Very good, I’ve got a present for you.”
“Oh, Cecil, no,” Beatrix calls out. “It’s mildewed.”
“Nothing of the kind,” Cecil replies. “Three silverfish do not a mildew make.”
“You can’t. Really …”
Cecil dismisses this protest with a wave of the hand. “Now, listen to me, Chani,” Cecil says. “How would you like to have a complete set of the Eleventh Edition Encyclopaedia Britannica?. Come around here to the basement and I’ll bring it out.” His voice floats back as he and Chani walk around the side of the house. “I was working in the basement this morning when I discovered them behind my roofing slate. Now, this is the famous edition, you know. Twenty-nine volumes. Nineteen ten. Dedication to George V and President Taft. This is the essential Britannica. The rest is commentary.”
He and Chani make more than one trip to the basement. They come back huffing, carrying ancient encyclopedia volumes stacked all the way to their chins. The red leather bindings of the books flake with yellowed tape.
“Here we are,” says Cecil. “You hold on to these, Chani, and you can buy a husband with them someday.”
“Cecil,” Beatrix says. “They’re completely worthless.”
“Nonsense.” Cecil turns to Elizabeth and Isaac. “I ask you—what better gift for a young girl? Here the century is ever young. No world wars, no Russian Revolution. No television.” He smiles wickedly. “No Zionist state.”
No one replies to this, but Chani looks up from the porch steps, surprised. It had not occurred to her before that Israel did not exist in 1910. In the Kirshner school Chani has learned Biblical rather than modern Jewish history. She was unconscious of Israel altogether until the Fourth of July and the Entebbe raid. Then Israel became a place for her. A country with guns and aircraft. A nation of rescuers swooping down in the night to pluck up hostages from inside enemy walls. When Chani heard about Entebbe, the words of the prophets took human form, and angels from heaven flew fighter planes. She does not know when or how modern Israel first came about. But this summer the state of Israel was foun
ded in Chani’s imagination.
The August light softens. There won’t be many more evenings like this. Elizabeth and Isaac, and Cecil and Beatrix, and even Beatrix’s colleagues, who should start driving back to the city, forget the time. The children play with Cecil’s old red wagon under the apple tree. On the street some boys are bicycling, up and back on Maple, circling like birds. Andras and Nina walk over, slight Nina and her tall husband like a shadow. They come and sit with the others.
No one knows when it starts. Only subtly, as the light changes, the conversation drifts to the war and the families lost. Old Emil leans forward on the wicker couch with new animation. “My name, Heiligman, isn’t a Jewish name,” he says. “It came into the family three hundred years ago when my ancestor was converted by force.”
“Converted to what?” Beatrix asks. She hasn’t heard the story before.
“To the clergy,” Emil answers sternly. “He was a famous clergyman; der Heiliger Heiligmann. Only later it came out he was Jewish. The name stayed in the family, and for that, Hitler didn’t take us in the first sweep. In the second time that was a different story. He sent us on the trains. Then in Dachau, when we were starving, he beat us, he kicked us, he sent us in the lines to die. After the liberation when I came to New York I was security on Governor’s Island in the POW camps. Then who do you think I saw behind the fence? My guard from Dachau. The same one who kicked me when I was lying on the ground. I recognized his face. So when I saw him, I raised my security gun and I shot him once—and he was dead.”
Emil nods tremblingly. The others are silent.
“I told the other guards he’d tried to run away,” Emil says.
When the general conversation begins again, everyone is subdued. The mathematicians are quiet. No longer joking, they pace softly around the porch. They trail propositions like fishing lines in the evening air. Andras and Nina turn for home, and Elizabeth hunts for the children in the garden. She tells them it’s time to go, and they drag the red wagon up the hill at the side of the house. Metal wagon wheels thump over small apples in the grass. Only Chani is still sitting as she was on the porch steps, with the volumes of the old encyclopedia stacked around her.
Kaaterskill Falls Page 14