Kaaterskill Falls

by Allegra Goodman

  “What about the house?” Nina Melish is asking Cecil. “What about the house in Kaaterskill?”

  “Well, of course I’ll have to sell it,” Cecil says.

  “Are you going to give it to Regina?” Nina asks.

  “This I can promise,” says Cecil. “I will never sell the place to Michael King. Never. If I stood to lose all the money I’ve put into it over the years, I would never sell to him.”

  “I think we’ll have to rent it at first,” says Beatrix.

  “Preferably to a large family.” Cecil is still thinking of avenging himself on King. “With noisy children so they can run around in back. Boys with peyyes, screaming and playing baseball with their tallit katan hanging out.”

  As Cecil is speaking, Jeremy catches a glimpse of Cecil’s sister, Regina, bringing out some cake, and he sees her face, half averted but soft with disappointment. Ah, he thinks, but the parents didn’t give the house to Regina, and Cecil won’t give it to her either. The house will never be hers. Jeremy is an expert on such matters, and he knows. Regina will never live in that house again. That is the truth about inheritances. That they have nothing to do with continuity, the maintenance of property. The power of legacies is all in separation, in the conflict between the older and the younger, the alienation of the living from the dead. What a marvelous fiction, he thinks, that places and things, or even ideas, can be transmitted over time, that property can be kept in families, or that the families themselves will remain intact. That Cecil would continue to come up to Kaaterskill every summer, and Regina with him, brother and sister in their old rooms with their storybooks and toys. Why not? their parents wonder from their black-and-white photographs on the bookcases. Why shouldn’t everything continue as it was, in perpetuity? Why should Regina be married and living in Los Angeles? Why should the house be sold, when it is Cecil’s? The white porch is there waiting for him, the tulip and iris bulbs in the cellar. Cecil’s bicycle and Regina’s, waiting in the garden shed.

  Avoiding the crowd at the buffet table, Elizabeth sits in an armchair next to the sofa. Above her head, heavy drapes are pulled back to reveal windows gray with the dirt of the city. She is tired. Her own baby is due in two weeks. Everyone asks her how she is feeling, and she says, Thank God, I’m fine. They ask her if she thinks it will be a boy or a girl, and she says it will be a girl—that she can’t imagine having anything else. Someone backs onto the couch carefully with a plate of food. Andras.

  “Oh. How are you?” he says to her. He hadn’t seen her there in the corner.

  “I’m fine,” Elizabeth says automatically. She looks at Andras. There is something about him. He looks subdued and suddenly much older. His face is gaunt. There is something tired in his eyes. How different people look in the city.

  “How is Eva?” Elizabeth asks him.

  “Somewhat better,” he tells her.

  “Thank God,” Elizabeth says.

  “And how about you?” Andras asks. “Are you looking at new business opportunities?”

  “Oh, no,” she says. “There will be the baby, for one thing. I suppose I’ve lost enough money playing store. I won’t do it again.”

  “Why not?” he asks. “You did well last summer.”

  She doesn’t answer. Then she says, “I was rather disappointed.”

  He considers this. “I thought you were doing remarkably well,” he says gently.

  She just shrugs, a little defensive.

  “The way it ended was unfortunate, but you should try again.”

  “No—I don’t think so,” Elizabeth tells him.

  “But you enjoyed it.”

  “It was very hard work,” she says lightly.

  “Of course. But you seemed to like it.”

  “Well, I did enjoy it. Briefly,” she says.

  The party buzzes around them. Brocha comes and asks if she can have some candy.

  “Just one? One? Not even one?” Brocha asks tragically.

  “You could do something new,” Andras says. Elizabeth shakes her head.

  “Why not?”

  “Well, I suppose I don’t really have the time, or the energy. In another life,” Elizabeth says, wryly, “perhaps I’d be a great retailer—or a playwright or an aviator. A farmer. Who knows what? As it is—”

  “Elizabeth—”

  She looks at Andras. She is surprised, somehow, to hear him call her by her name. Andras leans over, speaking conspiratorially. “Elizabeth,” he says, “this is the United States of America. You can do whatever you damn well please.”

  She stares at him. She has not heard words like these spoken to her before. No one has ever put it to her this way. As if she could act without questions and considerations. Without permission. As if she could really do what she wanted and weren’t connected to anybody, the Kehilla or the children.

  She bursts out laughing. All around her the party is humming and the children are dashing in and out. The coatrack is melting away under its load of coats. Beatrix is having a heated argument with one of her colleagues. Elizabeth just laughs. It is delightful; it is funny. Not so much the truth of what Andras has said, but the novelty of hearing it.

  2

  MILES Taylor is a great walker in all weather. At seventy-three he is a little bent, but wiry. He was a sprinter in high school, and he used to run outside in summer, racing the deer, in his younger days. He walks now. Walking gives him time to think. This is one of the secrets of his composure. On newly shoveled sidewalks and on hard-packed snow, he walks up to Coon Lake. Small and serene, it is not as big as Mohican Lake, but to his eye it is more beautiful even in winter, the surface frozen and pure white, marred only by the orange traffic cones warning of thin ice. At one time the better part of the lakefront belonged to the Taylors. Taylor’s whole childhood, the place was in the family. Years ago the judge’s uncle sold it to old Mr. Rubin. Rubin took half for himself and then subdivided again. The land changed hands several times, but the biggest parcel went intact to old Rabbi Kirshner and his wife.

  Taylor looks across the ice to where the lake curves. Great trees, bare and black, have grown up to the frozen water’s edge. When he was just a small boy he found arrowheads here, and fox. When he was older he camped there, and one summer when he and his father fought, he hid out at Coon Lake for three days, until at last he decided to come home. His mother came to him in tears and forgave him everything, and his father beat him for making his mother cry.

  He walks on with his gloved hands in his pockets, his breath pluming out in front of him, his step sure on the ice. He walks to Kendall Falls, to a small house. Just a converted summer bungalow, really. Nothing much. There is a little snow pit of a yard, a picket fence that’s down in places, revealing chicken wire. Taylor opens the low gate. “Hello, Billy,” he calls to the little boy in the yard. Billy is working on some snowmen, a snow family, rather short and stocky, with ski hats and prunes for eyes. “How are you?” Taylor asks.

  “Good,” says Billy.

  “Is your mother home?”

  “Yeah, she’s here,” says Billy, looking up, round faced, round eyed. He’s been chubby all his ten years.

  Taylor raps on the door, and it opens to reveal Candy Walker, her long hair spread out over her purple sweater like spun gold.

  “Hello, Judge,” she says. “Come in!” He follows her into the living room and she turns off the television.

  “I hope I’m not intruding,” he says. “Stopping by like this.”

  “No. It’s good to see you,” says Candy. “Come in. What can I bring you? Cocoa? Would you like a drink?”

  “Why, thank you,” he says. “Cocoa would be fine.”

  Candy heats up the kettle and Taylor sits still on the rust plaid sofa.

  “What brings you out here. To Kendall Falls?” she asks.

  “Well, I thought I’d come by,” Taylor says. “To talk to you, to see how you are. And Bill junior. He’s a fine boy.”

  Candy nods. “Thank you.”

 
“And what grade is he in now at school?”

  “Fifth,” she says.

  Taylor shakes his head. “How fast,” he says, “how fast they grow. I don’t suppose you’ve heard about Coon Lake,” he says.

  She shakes her head.

  “I’m afraid he’s going after it.”

  “Who?” she asks, and then answers her own question in a hushed voice. “King.”

  “He seems bound and determined to ruin what’s left of Kaaterskill,” says Taylor, “and ruin it quick. He rented half Mohican Lake to the Arabs, and now that they’re gone, he turns around like that”—Taylor snaps his fingers—“and sells it to the Jews. Now he wants to build up Coon Lake. You know, I grew up on that lake.”

  Candy nods.

  “I had a little boat when I was, hmm, about the age of Billy junior there. You know what I christened her? Yes, we christened her with a cider bottle, and she was called the Mayfly. Peter Wycherly used to take her out. She was a most unseaworthy wreck. We capsized regularly. But we used to take her out fishing. We thought we were real fishermen. And astronomers …” He trails off, remembering. He and Peter had a telescope in those days, and they built radios and tried to invent things, some more and some less useful gadgets.

  The kettle is boiling. Candy fills two mugs.

  “Well,” Taylor says, “I’ve got an idea to keep Coon Lake from King.”

  Candy hands the judge his cocoa. She is looking at him intently.

  “I’ve come,” he says, “to ask you for your help to do it.”

  She looks a little nervous. “I said before. I said at the beginning I would speak against him.”

  “I’m hoping you won’t have to,” says Taylor.

  “You don’t have to worry about me.”

  “Oh, I hope it won’t come to that,” Taylor says again. Then he asks after Candy’s family. Her father and her cousins. He does not want to pursue the subject of the lake and Michael King.

  But Candy thinks about it all after the judge walks off, declining to impose for dinner. She runs over Taylor’s words in her mind. Of course, she’ll help him. She doesn’t question that. She owes everything to Judge Taylor. After the crash, when she lost Bill just one night before their wedding, the judge fixed things for her. Bill had joined the Marines already, and he was due to ship out just after the wedding. Judge Taylor drew up a wedding certificate for Candy and dated it one day early, so that she would be eligible for the service’s widow’s benefits. He drew up the wedding and the death certificates together.

  Candy couldn’t have raised Billy without that help from Taylor. She never could have had her own place. She’d be living at home even now. Still, it worries her, getting up in front of people and talking. She imagines that’s what she would have to do—get up and tell everything.

  She calls Billy in for dinner, and they bow their heads and say grace. They eat meat loaf, peas, and Tater Tots. Then Candy’s homemade cheesecake for dessert, tall and creamy, topped with crushed pineapple. After she puts Billy to bed, Candy sits on the sofa in her narrow living room and curls up under her afghan of neon-bright acrylic yarn, no two squares alike. She is afraid of what it might do to Billy, hearing some of the things his mother did in her younger days, one thing in particular. Of course, she was a sinner then. She has told him that. But she’s avoided telling him the details.

  She takes out her Bible and opens it at random, and her eye falls on the opening of the book of Joel. And it is amazing to her. Now and always the words are like fire, bright and changeable. They are a mystery and prophecy to her: “That which the palmer worme hath left hath the locust eaten; and that which the locust hath left, hath the canker-worme eaten; and that which the canker-worme hath left, hath the caterpillar eaten. Awake ye drunkards, and weepe, and howle all yee drinkers of wine…. Lament like a virgine girded with sackecloth for the husband of her youth.” She comes to this line and she gasps. For she, Candy, is the one mentioned in these lines, a widow in her youth, and really, like the virgin on the page, a widow before she was even married—although technically she was no virgin. She highlights the lines with her fluorescent pink marker. She repeats them underneath the afghan, the locust and the canker-worm and the caterpillar, the virgin lamenting for the husband of her youth. It is a sign to her. She is meant to speak out. It is a mission upon her. She will stand up and tell the truth about Michael King, and she will stand up and speak about Christ. How she came to Him and was reborn, washed, in his mercy, clean of her young fast life.

  She will have to stand before the town and tell the truth. She will have to get up and speak about Michael King.

  Her mother used to say, “Candy just grew up dramatic.” That’s the way people still think of her. For years now she’s lived by herself with Bill junior, but they haven’t forgotten what she was as a girl. She’s a celebrity in Kendall Falls. Candy sees them watching her—what she does, the way she walks. She just had her tenth reunion at the high school, and she came with Bill junior. Everyone was there. They looked at her with curiosity, but also, Candy thought, a kind of respect. Even her cousin Janet Knowlton, who had always hated her. It is because she is independent; because she is her own woman. Because now she is a Christian.

  FRIDAY afternoon in Washington Heights, Elizabeth picks her way through the slush still covering the sidewalk. It doesn’t feel like April. She is walking home from the bakery with challahs for Shabbes.

  She was due last week, and she is tired all the time. She tries to rest while the children are in school. As always at the end, her lower back is hurting. Only walking helps. She tries to get out every day, even though it’s so cold. Every day she goes out in her boots and her long down coat. The sights are not inspiring; the brick buildings, the steep flights of cement stairs.

  Rivka, Elizabeth’s neighbor from upstairs, comes along with her double stroller, and they walk back to their building together.

  “A week late!” Rivka says when they get inside. She laughs. “You’ll be having a bris on Pesach!”

  “It will be a girl,” Elizabeth says.

  “How do you know?”

  “I’m sure.”

  “Does it feel the way it did with the others?”

  “Exactly the same,” says Elizabeth.

  “You never know,” says Rivka, who has two of each.

  Slowly, Elizabeth climbs the stairs. She unlocks her door and puts her purse and the bags of challah on the dining-room table. Any minute the children will be home from school, Isaac home from work. They don’t talk much about the baby. What is there to say? It will be. As for names, they haven’t picked a girl’s name. If it is a boy there is the same boy’s name they’ve had from the beginning. Chaim, for Isaac’s father.

  She and Isaac will have to bring up the crib from the basement and squeeze it into their bedroom. Once the baby is sleeping through the night, they’ll rearrange the girls’ rooms. Ruchel will move in with Chani and Malki, and the baby will sleep in the little girls’ room. The desk Chani and Malki share will have to go in the living room. In the corner by the window.

  Elizabeth straightens up the bookshelves, sorting the piles of papers, and the folded bills that collect there. Her glossy Olana catalog shines white among Isaac’s dark books. She pulls it out and leafs through it, flipping through the Hudson River School pictures. There is the picture “Falls of the Kaaterskill,” with the flaming trees and the rushing waterfall. There are notes next to the picture about its history and composition, but she looks at the color plate. Of course, it’s only a picture of a picture. The plate can’t do justice to the real painting, let alone the original experience.

  She should vacuum, but her back is still hurting. The carpet needs to be replaced. It’s all stained. She paces around. The apartment seems cluttered. There are no real paintings on the walls. There is only a mizrach, and a large family portrait, a photograph of all of them sitting in their best clothes, the children big eyed and serious.

  Elizabeth sets the table for Friday-
night dinner. Seven place settings. Six with the gold-rimmed china, and the seventh for Brocha with the good Wedgwood Peter Rabbit bowl and plate. She straightens the bookcase and sets the table, but this is not what she wants to do. She wants to stop feeling defeated. She wants her confidence back.

  ON SUNDAY, after Isaac comes home from morning minyan, he takes Sorah and Brocha grocery shopping in the car. Chani, Malki, and Ruchel carry the laundry down to the basement as they do every week, load after load, whites, colors, delicates separated. In the kitchen Elizabeth puts up a lentil soup on the stove. An enormous soup, with flanken, lentils, black-eyed beans, carrots, celery, potatoes. She makes halishkas for the week as well, rolling ground beef mixed with rice into the steamed wet cabbage leaves. None of it seems particularly appetizing to her, but she keeps cooking. They’ll eat some and freeze some. She is starting to feel now that she should make the most of the time. Her backache is getting worse.

  “Elizabeth, sit down,” Isaac says, when he and the younger girls return.

  “I would rather move around,” she says.

  “You need to save your strength,” he tells her.

  She shrugs. “You know, it just hurts more when I sit,” she says.

  Isaac looks at her carefully. Of course they have been through this many times before, but it seems suddenly that they have skipped ahead in the conversation. “How much does it hurt?” he asks.

  “Just the way it always does,” Elizabeth says.

  “But I mean, are you having contractions?” he whispers. He doesn’t want the children getting all excited.

  “No, just a backache,” she says. “I think if I could walk around …”

  “It’s cold outside,” he tells her.

  “We could go somewhere after these finish cooking.” She gestures to the halishkas in the slow cooker. “We could go to a museum, maybe.” Isaac picks up the phone on the kitchen wall. “Who are you calling?”

  “I’m calling my sister. You always want to go to museums before you go into labor.”

  “That’s not true,” she says.