Kaaterskill Falls

by Allegra Goodman

  “What about with Sorah?” he reminds her.

  “That was one time.”

  Isaac tells Pearl on the phone that they might need her to come, that it’s a possibility.

  Elizabeth walks up and down in the hot kitchen. She makes a couple of kugels, goes through the refrigerator, and throws out some moldy fruit. The little girls go upstairs to Rivka’s apartment to play and Elizabeth has Isaac rearrange the freezer. She is having mild contractions. She sips some water and lies down in the bedroom. “They’re going away,” she tells Isaac. “When I lie down they go away.” She lies down and she sleeps.

  Pearl comes at dinnertime, and Elizabeth calls the doctor. “They said I should come in and get checked,” Elizabeth admits to Isaac.

  “All right, so let’s go,” he says.

  “Just let me get the dinner warm.”

  “Pearl can do that,” Isaac says. He is starting to get nervous.

  “Just let me get the dinner on the table,” she says. “Mommy, I can do that,” says Chani.

  “Mommy, you should go to the hospital, you really should,” Malki tells her.

  “We’re going now,” says Isaac, and he gets his car keys, his siddur, his tefillin, in case he’ll need to be there in the morning.

  “You can give them the halishkas,” Elizabeth tells Pearl, “and the potato kugel. You can heat up these frozen vegetables.” Isaac is pushing her out the door.

  IT IS just a dull pain, bad only intermittently. There are long intervals when she is fine. And as they drive to the hospital Elizabeth feels better than she has in weeks. Driving away is a bit like getting on a plane and lifting off into the sky with all one’s bags checked. There is nothing that can be done for the next few hours. They sit together in the yellow Mercury wagon and feel how strange it is to be driving without the girls in the back. How quiet the night is, the white-and-gray slush spinning up in front of the wheels. They do not speak. They are both feeling the strange pleasure of being alone in the car, driving somewhere alone together—even if it is to the hospital. Elizabeth keeps thinking how peaceful the drive is, the thought constantly breaking off, interrupted by each contraction, and then returning.

  If she could have slept longer in the afternoon, the pain might have gone away altogether. If they had kept on driving, Elizabeth almost believes the contractions would have washed over her. But when she is admitted to the hospital everything comes apart. Her water breaks. The familiar pangs rip into real agony. She cannot think or feel anything else. The doctor is asking her, “Why did you wait so long?” but she cannot answer. They are wheeling her into the delivery room. They are asking Isaac, “Aren’t you going to stay?”

  She is gasping for air. She needs to slow down but she cannot. “You’re almost there,” the nurse tells her, but the crushing on her back won’t stop.

  The doctor is putting on her clear plastic jacket and her gloves; she is standing as if in a rainstorm to catch the baby. She is crouching down, prepared, but Elizabeth is not ready; she has not had time to think about it. She should have been excited; she should have been grateful, but she is not. In her unreadiness and her confusion the baby will be—the baby is—born.

  It is more than she deserves. The baby is already born. They bring Elizabeth the screaming infant, perfect and wet, and they say, as she knew they would, “It’s a little girl.”

  They change the sheets and her hospital gown, wash and weigh the baby, and give her to Elizabeth to hold. The nurses leave, and Isaac comes in.

  “Do you know what we have?” Elizabeth asks.

  He nods. He doesn’t trust himself to speak. He sits down next to her and they look at their sixth daughter. She is curled up, tightly wrapped in a receiving blanket with a tiny white hat on her head. She opens one eye and looks at them balefully. She looks like Malki. Her face is solemn, one eye open, and the other shut.

  “Half awake,” Isaac says.

  Elizabeth touches the baby’s chin. It is as small as her fingertip. As she touches it, the chin retracts, drawing back into a point. Then even the point disappears. “Isaac,” she says anxiously, “we forgot the camera.”

  “That’s all right,” he says.

  “But we need it.”

  “I’ll bring it tomorrow.”

  “Could you get it now?”

  “Do you want me to?”

  “Could you?” she asks. She feels suddenly that they must have the camera and take pictures. For they did not think about this baby; they did not pray for it, and still, by itself, the baby grew, developing without any help or any anticipation. They need to take a roll of film. They must do something. They can no longer neglect their child.

  “All right, I’ll get it,” Isaac says. “I’ll bring it up to your room.”

  HE DRIVES home and trudges up the stairs. As soon as his key turns in the lock, he hears them running to the door. There is a scuffle, and finally his sister opens it. She stands in the doorway with the children pushing behind her.

  “Nu?” Pearl asks.

  “What’d we get?” asks Chani. Their eyes are lit with expectation.

  “A sister,” Isaac says.

  The children are hushed.

  “Mazel tov,” Pearl tells him.

  “Why do we only get sisters?” Ruchel mutters.

  “And Elizabeth is all right?” Pearl asks.

  “She’s fine and the baby is fine. Seven pounds ten ounces. Do you need to get back?”

  “No, Moshe’s home with the kids. I thought I’d be spending the night.”

  “If you’d wait just a little while, I need to bring the camera to the hospital. She said she wanted it.”

  “It’ll be too late,” Pearl says. “It’s almost ten. They won’t let you up.”

  THE next morning Isaac takes the girls to visit Elizabeth and the baby. They bring her food from home, drawings of rainbows, and smiling flowers, balloons. Brocha brings the baby a bag of toys. The newborn lies on her side in her hospital bassinet. Her five sisters fill the hospital room, all talking at once; but the baby sleeps through the whole thing.

  “Isaac,” Elizabeth says, “you have to get the bassinet back from Pearl.”

  “We already did, Mommy,” Chani informs her importantly.

  “And there is the box in the basement.”

  “We got it out,” says Isaac.

  “The zero-to-six-months box?”

  “Yes,” he says. “Don’t touch that button,” he tells Sorah, prying her away from the nurse’s call button on the bed.

  “Is someone knocking?” Chani asks.

  “Hello, I’m the registrar,” a small young woman tells them. “Congratulations. Are you ready to name the baby?”

  “We can’t name her yet,” Isaac tells the registrar. They never record a baby’s name until she is named and blessed in shul.

  “You have thirty days,” the registrar tells them. She reminds Chani of Mrs. Schermerhorn at the library. “You need to come back to the registrar’s office on the fifth floor within thirty days to register the name on the birth certificate.”

  “All right,” says Isaac. “Could you take our picture? Girls, come over here around the bed.”

  “Oh, you brought the camera,” Elizabeth says, relieved.

  She stays in the hospital one more night. Her tiny private room is high up on the tenth floor. Elizabeth lies in bed and looks out the window at the squat brick buildings below. In the bassinet at her side the exhausted baby sleeps, bundled up in her blanket, her little eyes closed.

  Isaac will never admit he is disappointed. They will never speak of it, but Elizabeth knows. Isaac has wanted a son for such a long time. He has so wanted a son to sit next to him and daven with him at shul, to learn with him. A son who might be a scholar or even a rabbi and lead his own shiurim. A brilliant son of his own.

  Elizabeth is disappointed too. She feels it more than she used to, the difficulty with girls, the confining of expectations. The difficulty that they are expected to be careful always
and responsible, practical, nothing more. You don’t magically become something else when you are responsible for six children. You don’t magically create something when you have to ask permission just to try. There is always money to think about, and time, and then the rabbinic permission. The Kehilla is a tight little world, and a tighter one for women. A narrow place. Always safe and always binding.

  Elizabeth looks at the infant lying there. She is sound asleep, even though her parents do not have a girl’s name. Of course, the baby does not care that she has no name. She sleeps there with all her life before her. And yet so much has already been decided. Elizabeth feels that now.

  On other nights like this she felt differently. What futures she had imagined for her daughters. What careers. They seem in retrospect like wild fantasies. She gave her girls English names, grand, she thought, sophisticated. Annette, and Margot, Rowena, Sabrina, and Bernice. It seems quixotic now, the way she used to sit with the children in the dark. On the edges of their beds she used to dream about her daughters; she used to spin lives for them out of books. As if the girls could be part one thing and part another; take flight from the rooftops of the brick apartment buildings and soar through the night sky—journalists, travelers, philosophers—and then somehow return home, floating down as in fairy tales, gliding down over the Heights, television aerials barely touching their feet.

  3

  VICTORIA Schermerhorn is nothing like her older sister. Ernestine was the artistic one in the family, studying dance and choreography, traveling to France and Spain. Since childhood Ernestine planned to be a dancer, and only after injury and illness and a failed first marriage did she return to the mountains and become the Kendall Falls librarian. Victoria also had artistic impulses, but she never left home to pursue them. She decided early, and partly from observing Ernestine, that she would become a businesswoman and that she would never marry; that she would earn enough to support her aged parents and to live as she pleased.

  She sits at her desk at Victoria Schermerhorn Realty and she fills out paperwork, printing neatly in black ink. The radiator hums, and her assistant types in the outer office, and Victoria just works her way down the legal-sized forms in front of her, the purchase-and-sale agreement for the shore property on Coon Lake. She does not mind paperwork. In fact she likes it. She enjoys writing in the numbers and the names and terms. She looks up a moment. “Catherine,” she says to her assistant, “who’s there? I heard a car.”

  She comes out in time to see Catherine open the door for the black-clad couple from the city.

  “Why, hello, Rabbi, hello, Mrs. Kirshner,” says Victoria Schermerhorn. “I didn’t expect you quite so soon. I’m writing up the P and S right now. I’m still drafting it, you see. May I get you some thing? Won’t you come in and sit down? You must have got up early, would you like some coffee?”

  “No, thank you,” Isaiah says.

  “All right, then,” says Victoria, and she looks at Isaiah and Rachel with kind but appraising hazel eyes.

  “We thought we might take care of the signatures this morning,” Rachel says.

  “That would be fine,” says Victoria. “Although, to tell the truth, I wouldn’t mind waiting another day or two. There is still a chance Taylor will raise his bid—he’s fond of Coon Lake, you know. Then King, you see, will have to up the ante.”

  “No,” says Rachel urgently, “we need to take care of this before—Isaiah’s brother is coming up tomorrow, and we need to finish the business before then, set the closing date.”

  Victoria knits her brow at this. She wonders what the rabbi’s brother has to do with the sale of the land, but she doesn’t pry. “We’ve got everything ready to go with the sale to King. But, if you could hold out a few more days. I can only advise, but I know these characters, both of them, and we would be in a good position if we just”—she says the words slowly—“eased up, and played for time. I’m just the broker, I know that. It’s your deal, but if it were my land I’d play it nice and slow. I’d take care, you see, not to sell myself short.”

  “We are quite anxious about this,” says Isaiah. “About setting the closing date with King.”

  “We have to go back in the morning,” Rachel says.

  Victoria Schermerhorn looks at the two of them across her desk. She knits her fingers together and rocks back and forth ever so slightly in her chair. She speaks softly, as if thinking aloud. “It’s quite a property you have; it’s quite a plum there on the lake. I just don’t like to see it go for less than fifty. Now, Taylor has the money, but he’s tight with it. He’ll take a position and he’ll stick to it. He said forty, and he meant forty. But he could raise it to King’s forty-five. He could go higher. I’ve known Miles Taylor for thirty-five years, and I know that when he wants something nothing keeps him from it. I’m wondering what he’s planning with his poker face.”

  “But we’re only here until tomorrow morning,” Isaiah says. “We have commitments at home.”

  “But it’s all a question of how we play it,” Victoria continues. “You know, my old dad used to say to me when I was a young girl, don’t fix on the first young man who comes your way, not the first one in your sights. You have to look at the competition. He used to say, Victoria, you’ve got to play the field.”

  Isaiah and Rachel sit there across her desk with their tired, anxious faces. The pair of them, worrying in their sober clothes. They want to take care of the purchase-and-sale agreement. They want to set the closing date. Rachel’s broad gold wedding ring shines on her slender hand. Her parents never gave her this kind of advice. She has not, nor has Isaiah, ever felt the slightest inclination to play the field.

  Meanwhile, in his Kaaterskill office, Judge Taylor is fielding calls. Sometimes he tells his secretary to put them through and sometimes he does not. Victoria Schermerhorn has already called several times threatening that this is his last chance. If he would raise his bid five thousand, to forty-five, then he wouldn’t lose the lake. If he would do that, she can promise he will still be in the running. Taylor listens to her go on and says as little as possible. He is not interested in a bidding war. He shrugs off Victoria’s attempts to keep the fire of competition alive. At last she calls him and says, “Look, the sellers are in my office now. They want to sign with King and I’m going to let them. We’re going to sign the purchase-and-sale agreement right now.”

  “You go right ahead,” Judge Taylor tells Victoria in his quiet voice. His voice is thin and colorless, dry and mean as a martini. He puts down the phone carefully and then at last he gets up from his desk. He asks the young woman in the waiting room to come with him down the street and they walk together to Michael King’s office. The young woman is Candy Walker.

  “Now, don’t worry about a thing,” Taylor tells Candy.

  “I’m not worried,” she says.

  Taylor holds the door open for her as they enter King’s offices.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. King is in conference right now,” the receptionist tells them, but they walk on in.

  Michael King looks up from his desk. He is speechless for a moment. Then he gets up and closes the door. “What are you trying to pull?” he asks Taylor. “What is she doing here?”

  “Well, it’s like this,” Taylor says. “I would like to buy the lakefront property Victoria Schermerhorn’s got listed, and I thought, as you would like to buy it, too, I would speak to you about it directly.”

  “I’m not interested in speaking to you about anything,” King says.

  “I was hoping you would be,” Taylor says, “because the sale of the thing is dragging on. I have great respect for Victoria, but I thought perhaps she was doing a little more than necessary trying to auction off the place. I’ve never been one for bidding or bargaining, I guess you know that, and I’ve always been open in my dealings. So I’ve come to put my cards on the table, as it were, and say, I would like very much to buy the lakefront, as it belonged to my family for many years. You know I used to go fishing there when
I was a boy.”

  “But my bid was accepted,” King says, trying to keep cool.

  “Yes, I suppose it was,” says Taylor. “But I thought I’d stop in to see if I could persuade you to change your mind.”

  King looks at Candy Walker. She stands next to Judge Taylor in a corduroy skirt and blouse, and above all shines her long fine hair, gold, brushed over her shoulders. She opens her round mouth and her voice is round too, and sweet, with the slightest quaver in it, like caramel.

  “Michael King, so help me, if you take away the judge’s land I am going to stand up personally at the town meeting in April and I’m going to say that you, nobody else but you, are the father of my son Billy Walker, Junior. I’m going to get up to that microphone and say it, loud and clear.”

  “No, you won’t,” King says.

  Candy flushes. She comes closer to him, and leans in, and she says it emphatically, in short breaths, “I—most—certainly—will”

  “You won’t,” King says, “because it’s not true. Your child could have had ten different fathers.”

  She raises her hand as if to slap him, but she doesn’t. She says instead, “Billy Walker, Junior, had one father, and it was you.” She pauses a moment and then says quickly, “And when I get up there I’m going up with my Bible and I’m going to swear on it, and they will believe me. What’ll you swear on? Who in this whole town is going to believe you? I’m going to go up there, and I—”

  “But I hope it never comes to that,” says Judge Taylor. “I don’t want it, I know you don’t want it, Michael.”

  “You’re threatening me with this if I don’t withdraw my offer,” King says.

  “I’m not threatening you with anything,” says Taylor.

  “Go to hell,” King says to the judge.

  “I hope you’ll think about this,” says Taylor.

  King does think about it. He can’t help it. His visitors gone, he sits alone in the office. He has two black Rolodexes on his desk, and he begins spinning them, first one and then the other, so that the cards whiz by alphabetically. The cards whiz around and around, too fast to read. Of course, he can defy Taylor. He can go ahead with the purchase and sale. But he knows Taylor well enough to see there will be damage. King feels anger welling up inside of him. For a moment he is so angry that he doesn’t care. He will get a lawyer. He will sue Taylor and Candy both for trying to blackmail him, planning to libel him. But he knows that the problem remains. The damage will be done.