Kaaterskill Falls

by Allegra Goodman

  The short service over, the men pay their respects to the Rav and to Isaiah, and begin walking down the hill, joining the other men emerging from the synagogue. Jeremy has still not come. The family sits down at the table, the Rav, Rachel and Isaiah, and the Rav’s grandson, Nachum. They make kiddush and drink the wine. They wash their hands and say the blessing. Silently, Nachum brings in a pitcher and bowl from the kitchen and pours the water over the Rav’s hands. They make motzi and eat the challah. Rachel brings out the soup from the kitchen and they begin eating, but no one speaks. What is there to say? They can only sit expecting Jeremy, dreading his arrival after candle lighting. He will walk in the door late, and it will be like having some filthy thing in the house. They sit in anticipation. Rachel clears away the soup bowls quickly but carefully, as if afraid of breaking them.

  AT nine-twenty the sky is inky blue. The stars have begun to gather, tiny, pure, and white. Jeremy takes his overnight bag out and closes the door of his car. He breathes deeply in the fresh air, and tries to steel himself. He had not allowed enough time and got caught in traffic. There had been a terrible truck accident, the truck upended on the road and two cars smashed. The Thruway was backed up for miles. Jeremy had inched along in the traffic, looked at his watch, and even thought about turning back to the city. Now, just outside his father’s door, he wishes that he had. He was not ready to come up so quickly after his conference and vacation in Milan. He was jet lagged, his internal clock was off, and he had miscalculated the shift between his professional world and his father’s timetable. None of this will matter to the Rav. Jeremy puts his hand on the doorknob. His heart is pounding.

  He stands in the doorway, his suit bag on his shoulder. He stands on the threshold of the house, warm and fragrant with Shabbes dinner. And from the dining room the family sees him at the door. For a long moment they look at him, standing in the entryway. They do not speak; they sit frozen at the table, their hands paralyzed, forks in midair. And in the lamplight Jeremy burns with shame. He feels his brother and his sister-in-law, and especially his father, looking deep into him. They see what is obvious, but what nobody has ever stated. That Jeremy, with all his learning, has become someone else, a stranger to them. That he, their own flesh and blood, is alien. The anger is not only because of what he is, but because he has made them look.

  Slowly, the strap of Jeremy’s bag slides down to the floor. Cautiously, he approaches them and takes his seat at the table where his bowl and plate stand empty. Rachel gets up and serves him, and they eat in silence, without appetite.

  The family does not sing the grace after meals. Each of them at the table says the blessings silently. Then the nurses come and carry the Rav up to bed.

  “Maybe I should go,” Jeremy says after his father has gone.

  Rachel darts a look at him as she clears the table. But Isaiah shakes his head. “No,” Isaiah says, “don’t go.”

  Of course they don’t want him to go because that would mean more traveling on Shabbat.

  JEREMY lies awake in the bed that had been his as a boy. As a child he had loved the feel of the cotton sheets against his skin. They were cool and smooth, worn smooth with washings. Now he lies awake, and the sheets are cool against him and soft. But the softness against his skin is a reproach to him. He blames himself for being cavalier about the time and coming late. He blames himself for angering his father. He should have turned back on the road and returned to the city. His father would have been far less disappointed to hear that the traffic was too heavy and that Jeremy would have to come up the next weekend. Why did he keep driving up? Why did he do it? In the past year the Rav approached him and tried to talk to him on his own terms. They had begun to speak again, and now Jeremy has ruined those conversations.

  He considers that perhaps somewhere within himself he had wanted to come late. He’d forgotten about the hour on purpose in order to show them … to show them what? That like an adolescent he would continue to provoke them, breaking the rules, waltzing in late to take his place at the table. He is a grown man, a middle-aged man. Why did he do it, when an hour would have made the difference? All his father wanted was to see him. And all he, Jeremy, has done in return is take the opportunity to strike back.

  Small and narrow, Jeremy’s old room is at the top of the house. There is one window and a closet that extends far under the eaves. There are boxes of papers back there, school assignments, college notes. There are old clothes, toys. Even the teddy bear he slept with as a child. The window is covered with aluminum blinds full of dust. Rachel does not clean here. No one comes here. There is a hurricane lamp on the dresser and, on the wall, one of his mother’s small water-color paintings. It is too dark to see it, but he sees it in his mind’s eye, a painting of wildflowers, bachelor’s buttons. When Jeremy was quite small he had told his mother to hang that painting in his room. “I want the bachelor’s buttons,” he said, “because I’m going to be a bachelor.”

  He lies there and thinks about his mother. He is glad she is not alive. He could not have borne her disapproval. If she had been sitting there with them at the table he could not have entered the house. Bitterly he tells himself that the rest of the family is of no consequence to him. Their rules and ceaseless blessings, their anxieties and damning looks, can’t follow him back to the city. They sting here. Here they matter. The old patterns play and replay themselves. Jeremy provokes them and they buzz angrily. He provoked his mother, too, but only because she let him. He teased her as a boy and, as a young man, mocked her desire that he marry. Fifteen years ago, when his mother died, Jeremy began in earnest to withdraw from the family and its expectations; he began to withhold himself.

  By the time his mother became ill, Jeremy and his father scarcely spoke to each other. After her death Jeremy left Washington Heights and moved to Queens. He stopped going to his father’s synagogue. In fact, he stopped going to synagogue altogether. He began to travel for months at a time, to Israel and Europe. And, above all, he refused to allow the family to make a match for him. The door was already closing, but he shut it with finality—with pleasure. He enjoyed the irony, because he had every accomplishment necessary to succeed his father: a deep knowledge of halacha, a vast talmudic repertoire, fluency in legal conventions and midrashic language. He had everything except a respect for the spirit of the law, and a belief in it as more than ancient text and arcane ritual. He would not live the life. He held himself apart. He would not marry.

  But tonight Jeremy is not in the city or traveling. He is not doing something else, and he feels it all. Anger and shame. The aftertaste of his own cruelty, like blood in his mouth.

  SHABBES passes long and silent. The Rav does not speak to Jeremy or even look at him. The men arrive for morning services, and Jeremy stands with them in the living room and listens to his brother read the Torah. He wears his cream-colored suit and a look of indifference. But he does not feel indifferent; he feels broken. He has not simply lost his father’s good opinion. He has lost the Rav’s interest. Become again a stranger to his father. Breaking the Sabbath by arriving late, Jeremy has become insignificant, his opinions without weight. In his father’s community he is not a member in good standing, in his father’s eyes he is not a man.

  After the service ends and the men have gone, Jeremy sits with the family at the table while Rachel serves her elaborate Shabbes lunch. He will wait it out, the long, bitter day, and he will leave as soon as it is dark. At the table he asks Nachum some questions about what he is learning, and Nachum answers, looking down. The Rav is carried up to his room to rest, and he calls out irritably to the attendants on the stairs to watch where they are going.

  Jeremy sits in the living room. He gets up and glances at the volumes on the bookcases. For the most part the books are in German. The Rav has always kept his German books in Kaaterskill. Books of theology and poetry, philosophical treatises by Jeremiah Solomon Hecht and the Frankfurt Kirshner rabbis. Jeremy looks at them on the shelves, but does not take them ou
t to read them. Rachel’s piano sits mute, the top down, the lid locked, as always on Shabbes. No music is allowed. Jeremy had brought his father a book from Italy, a large coffee-table book with pictures from the Uffizi. He had thought the Rav would enjoy looking at it, but of course, he cannot take it out now.

  Through the screen door Jeremy sees Isaiah and Rachel sitting together on the enclosed porch. He sees that they are arguing, but he cannot hear what they are saying, they oppose each other so softly.

  “HE HAS no right,” Rachel says. “I don’t want him in my house.”

  “He has a right,” Isaiah says. “Father asked him.”

  “He didn’t ask for this. He’s been … berating us about getting Jeremy to come and now—”

  “Rachel, enough,” says Isaiah.

  “I think now your father might possibly stop using him as a weapon against you,” Rachel says in her fierce whisper.

  “I don’t want to hear you speak like that,” Isaiah replies.

  His anger startles Rachel. “I’m sorry,” she says, after a moment, “but—”

  “Don’t say but” Isaiah tells her.

  Isaiah has said nothing to the Rav or to Jeremy about the night before; but in the dark he, too, lay sleepless, thinking. His father has spoken often to him about his brother in the past year. He has said that he regrets the years he spent without talking to Jeremy, the time apart. He has said that it was foolish. They live in the same city and have seen so little of each other. He told Isaiah that he had forgotten how much he’d enjoyed discussions with Jeremy. “Your brother is a brilliant man,” the Rav said. “Knowledgeable, but what is more, he is creative. In that respect he is exceptional.” When Rachel hears the Rav talk like this, she is angry on Isaiah’s behalf, but Isaiah remembers more than she does.

  Of course he knows his older brother is brilliant. Jeremy’s brillance was the central fact of Isaiah’s childhood. From the time Isaiah can remember, Jeremy was striding ahead, quicker, better. Held up to him as an example. It was not simply that Jeremy was older. When they were young men, from the time they were thirteen, they learned with their father, and they were dealt an equal share of knowledge. But even in those early years it was clear that Jeremy was superior. Isaiah would read and read; he would sift through a text repeatedly. Jeremy would shake it once and discover gold. He would pluck out a word or phrase and suddenly illuminate the discussion. Rachel has never seen Jeremy in shiur. Where Isaiah hesitated, unsure what to do, Jeremy could look at a passage and all the commentaries, and say something completely new. Learning was easy for Jeremy; his stunning exegesis an inborn talent. The Rav, and Isaiah, too, would sit back and marvel at Jeremy, for he read like a magician. The Rav’s eyes would shine when he heard him; his whole face would brighten, even while he only said one word: “Good.”

  Jeremy’s example and Jeremy’s absence have been the central axes of Isaiah’s life. Rachel cannot understand it, but Isaiah has always admired his brother’s genius, even loved him with an unrequited love. Rachel is frustrated by her husband’s hesitation, his self-effacing humility. The humility is real. Isaiah is committed to his father and to the Kehilla, he has dedicated his life to learning and practicing halacha, but he does not have Jeremy’s intellectual ability. Isaiah is too fair minded to deny it, too self-doubting to be jealous. He labors to deserve the position Jeremy has thrown away.

  “I HEARD they’re worried about whether he’s strong enough to be moved back down at the end of the summer,” Mrs. Schloss says to Mrs. Fraenkel as they wait at Elizabeth’s counter. “Braised beef is there, right there.” She points to the place on the shelf and Elizabeth whirls around with two cans in her hands.

  “Two tins braised beef, three packages soup bouillon, two pounds ground beef, four chicken quarters, two large challahs, one corn rye,” Elizabeth totals. A small crowd of women cluster around the Dutch door.

  “But he wouldn’t stay here in Kaaterskill for the holidays—I can’t believe that,” says someone else.

  “If they can’t move him—”

  “They’ll move him. If he came up, he’ll go down.”

  “I saw your husband,” Mrs. Schloss says to one of the younger women, Batya Erlich. “How long is he up for?”

  “He has two weeks’ vacation.”

  “Does he accumulate?”

  “That’s accumulated! Two pumpernickel, one chicken parts. Is that corned beef the lean? I can’t see the marking.”

  “Yes, that’s lean,” says Elizabeth, “sixty cents more per pound.”

  “How lean is the lean? Really leaner than regular?”

  “All the beef is lean,” Elizabeth says. “Lean is extra lean.”

  “Well, I’ll take it, then, and two challahs.”

  “Let me slice the meat for you first.” Elizabeth is doing a land-office business. She thinks of the expression as she sells the meat wrapped in white paper, pounds and pounds of it. And she imagines those land offices selling claims in the West; uncharted prairie over run with game. She had dreamed of a store like this. A flood of customers. The bookkeeping alone keeps her up late at night. The plans for new orders; the lists for her driver, James Boyd; phone calls about prices to New York. The Rav is drawing people to Kaaterskill. People from New York who have never come up before. His condition is worse. He does not go out of the house, and now everyone wants to come to Kaaterskill, to be near him. As the Rav’s orbit contracts, the Kirshners are drawing closer. They are driving up and spending their vacation time, even extending their vacations. They need to be near him, even if they can’t see him. Even if they only catch a glimpse. The Rav’s letter of permission hangs outside Elizabeth’s door on the wall. She has it framed there for everyone to see, the signature in blue-black ink. Strange the way his permission and then his illness have given her this opportunity. She was busy in June, but now the demand is escalating. The orders are enormous.

  Hamilton fusses in the cellar storeroom, then comes up and stares at the long line of Kirshner customers snaking through his store. He must think this is an invasion. He must be wishing he’d charged Elizabeth more for her little kosher concession stand. Elizabeth just keeps pounding on the ancient cash register, emptying out the shelves. Only when she turns her back on them, her crowds of customers, does the worry creep in, the question, What will be next summer? They won’t all be here then, these reinforcements from New York. Their husbands won’t be up through the whole week. Of course, the Rav could recover. He could come up again next summer. It’s possible. And perhaps the habit will be formed. People will be used to buying from her instead of carting up all their food on their own from the city.

  “A bottle of dills, a bottle of bread-and-butter pickles.”

  “I’m out of those,” Elizabeth says. “I’ve got sweet gherkins.”

  “Can you order?”

  “Write it down. Over here. And anything else we haven’t got—put it down too.”

  She feels light-headed. At five o’clock, after she closes for the day, she sits down for a minute on Hamilton’s steps facing Main Street. She looks at the sign she has set up on the sidewalk. A plywood sign painted blue and white: KOSHER PROVISIONS. The store fills her days and her nights. It has grown from an idea she could open and close like a book into a living, breathing being, a giant of her creation, a golem with the Rav’s magic letter on its forehead. Suddenly she has no time to read or think, she is so busy with the business. Far from possessing what she has made, Elizabeth feels that the store possesses her, and the things she used to do, the little projects with the children, the afternoons on the porch, Shakespeare in the barn in Lexington, have all fallen away. She is thinking about how to keep this pace next summer—even expand. She has an offer from Eva and Maja to cater Renée’s birthday party this year, and she is seriously considering taking the job. She has seized on the Rav’s permission, taken her opportunity, the sudden surge in Kirshner vacationers on the mountain. Managing the business now is like flying on an untamed horse’s back.
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  She should get up and start walking, but her legs are tired. When she gets home, the children will be waiting for her. They will be home from camp, tired and hungry, and still restless, wanting to go out on their bikes. She’ll find them outside, jumping rope, Ruchel and Sorah chanting together, counting out beats for the girl who hopes to jump in: “One a-dibble, two a-dibble, three a-dibble, four.” And always in back, Chani and Malki playing tetherball. She’ll find them there when she gets home, pounding the yellow ball between them. She wishes they had more space, now that the girls are older. Chani fourteen, and Malki thirteen. The bungalow seems smaller every year, with two in one room and three in the other. Perhaps someday she and Isaac will have a big summer place like Cecil’s or Andras and Nina’s. Elizabeth imagines idly that maybe if the store does well they could afford it. That’s what it’s like when you get a wish. It breeds others. She’s heard the girls playing outside: “If you have one wish, what would you wish for?” The ready answer: “Three more wishes.” Always wanting things. Even the children. Even in summer with their long jump-ropes in front of the bungalow, twanging in the dirt—the bald spot where the grass never gets started.