Kaaterskill Falls (14 page)

Away from the sandbox, away from the grassy field where the boys are playing flag football, Renée skirts the picnic tables and the grand old house with peeling paint, the old Thorne house, where the Lamkins now live. Head down, she walks out to the road and past the scores of small bicycles lying against the fence. The little girls’ bikes with their handles decorated with streamers and baskets adorned with plastic daisies. The little boys’ bikes, sleek and black with decals of rocket ships and fire. Renée extricates her own three-speed bicycle from the pile, and she pedals off quickly, almost afraid the Lamkins will notice and run after her. Of course, they are far too busy to realize she has gone. Her heart is pounding all the same.

She has never done anything wrong before. Never done anything interesting, as Stephanie has pointed out. Renée has always been a dutiful sort of girl, campaigning for attention, and getting it mostly by being pretty. Now she’s run off.

She rides her bike to Stephanie’s house.

“Renée!” Stephanie says when she answers the door. “What are you doing here?”

“I left,” Renée says.

“You mean, you quit,” Stephanie says.

“Yeah,” Renée admits.

Stephanie’s eyes sparkle. “I’ll lend you a bathing suit! We’re going to Coon Lake.”

Coon Lake is gray and green, the water cold. Stephanie makes a face, but she plunges in right away. Renée shudders and holds back, but Stephanie splashes her.

“Now all you have to do is tell your parents,” Stephanie says, treading water.

“I can’t,” Renée wails.

“Got to,” Stephanie says in her blunt way. “What are you going to do, send them a copy of your resignation letter?”

“I didn’t write a—”

Stephanie looks at her.

“Oh,” Renée says.

Stephanie dives under the water and comes up with her long wet hair plastered down over her face. It looks as though she has her back to Renée, but she is still facing her. “Renée, Renée,” Stephanie says from behind her long thick hair. “No guts, no glory.”

“I’
M
not going back,” Renée announces at Friday-night dinner in front of her entire family, including aunts and uncles. She says it just as her mother backs into the dining room from the kitchen with a platter of roast capon.

“Going back where?” asks her aunt Maja, at which point little Alex knocks over a wineglass on the embroidered white tablecloth.

“Alex, Alex,” chides Uncle Saul.

“Sh, Saul, he’s coughing,” Maja says.

“Blot, don’t wipe it,” Nina tells Andras.

“Raise your hands over your head,” commands Aunt Eva, as poor Alex coughs, cheeks reddening.

“Give him some water,” Maja says.

“Give him a piece of bread,” Uncle Philip chimes in. “How about a piece of chain?”

“Let him be!” Nina begs her elderly in-laws. “All right, there you are.” She pats Alex on the back and he stops coughing and Andras begins carving.

“I’m not going back,” Renée repeats.

“White meat, please,” requests Maja. “What did you say, dear?”

“I’m not going to be a counselor. I hate it,” Renée says.

Nina puts down her fork, appalled.

“I never wanted to do it. I
told
you I didn’t like it. I just can’t go back. I’d rather sit and play piano all day,” Renée blurts out.

“Well, you’ll have to go back,” Nina murmurs, deathly quiet.

“I won’t,” Renée says.

“We’ll discuss it later.” Nina’s face is flushed. Renée is humiliating her in front of Eva and Maja and their husbands.

“I’m not going,” Renée says.

Nina turns to Andras.

“Renée,” Andras says, “are you contradicting your mother?”

“I won’t go back,” Renée mutters to her plate.

“Yes, you will, young lady,” Andras tells her. “It’s high time you learned the meaning of a day’s work.”

“I will, I will. I’ll do anything else,” Renée says. “I’ll get a real job. I’ll work at the A & P,” she says, although even she can’t imagine that.

“Absolutely not!” cries Nina.

“Andras,” says Aunt Eva, “why should the children work when, thank God, they don’t have to? I never understood.”

“That’s not the point,” explodes Nina. “This is not work. This is a camp.”

“So, Alex, is this camp really such a terrible place?” Uncle Philip asks in a stage whisper to his little nephew.

“‘S okay,” mumbles Alex, who has been eating steadily.

“And are the Lamkins doing a good job?”

“Uh-huh.”

“You like the other kids?” presses Philip.

“Yeah.” Alex serves himself more kugel.

“I’d rather get a real job,” Renée says again.

Andras looks at his daughter skeptically. This is a novel proposition, that Renée could do something constructive. Counseling camp isn’t a real job. Not a job independent of Nina’s influence. He doubts anyone would actually employ Renée. But that could be a valuable lesson for her. He’s never known her to try for anything before. “All right, then,” he says. “I’ll make a deal with you. You find some other job, and you do it—no complaining—and you don’t have to go back to camp.”

“Okay.” Renée nods, meek with surprise.

But Nina shakes her head. “No,” she mouths to Andras. To see her daughter bagging groceries at the A & P! Impossible. She’s furious at Andras. To have her judgment so … preempted. How could he? How could he pretend to be a believer in the day camp for Renée and Alex, and then sabotage the whole thing later? Doesn’t he see she has some pride, some feelings? Or is it all a game between him and his sisters? In which Eva and Maja and Andras all know better than she how to raise the children.

I
N
K
AATERSKILL
, Eva and Maja and their husbands share a house. There are no children, and the two couples form a permanent unit, a family of four. They live near each other in the city, where Saul and Philip work together in the diamond business. In Kaaterskill, Eva and Maja keep house together in a large brick edifice with green shutters and a porch in front. While they were not brought up in a traditional home, the sisters are now religious. They have turned to their synagogue in Brooklyn and to the shul in Kaaterskill as to a second family. It is they who draw Andras up to Kaaterskill each summer; they who encouraged, indeed expected, him to buy his summer house. Eva and Maja have a serenity their younger brother lacks. They have a gracious calm and even joy in life, as if somehow in themselves, in their own generosity, they find some comfort for all they lost in the war, some recompense.

The two are legendary for their hospitality. Each of them has a gift for creating an occasion. They nourish their friends and their friends’ children with pastries, or honey cake. The sisters have made sociability their life’s work. Eva, especially, brightens every gathering with her hot tea and lemon and her fresh berry pies, and above all with her intense interest in her friends’ lives. Always she is inviting people in; always baking, whether for bereaved families or new parents. She shares her friends’ sadness, and their joy.

Their house is on the way back from shul, and the sisters have a tradition every Shabbes. They invite all their neighbors on Maple to stop in on their way home from services for an oneg. For the children
there is a table on the porch with homemade rugelach. Inside, Eva and Maja serve schnapps to Andras and Nina, Elizabeth, Isaac, Cecil and Beatrix, the Ergmans, and the Landauers. A curtain of green leaves frames the children’s party. Curtains of lace spun into roses and leaves frame the grown-ups’.

At the Oneg Shabbat this week, Elizabeth sits on the gold sofa, talking about her idea. She tells everyone about the store, her imagined store. It will be a grocery store, the first kosher grocery in Kaaterskill. Everyone complains about the lines in Washington Heights, the men trying to shop on Friday afternoons and the bakery running out every week, and Auerbach’s—impossible to get in after eleven-thirty. And of course, there is no other choice. No one from Washington Heights can buy from shops unsanctioned by Rav Kirshner. But Elizabeth will bring meat up from Auerbach’s, and challahs from Edelman’s, and stock a little store herself, small scale, of course. With a store in Kaaterskill there needn’t be any last-minute rush on Friday afternoons. She’ll have food in the mountains all during the week.

She’s already been making phone calls for wholesale prices on the goods from the city, and she’s made a list of all the Kirshner families who would come. Large families. She knows how much money they spend. Then, of course, the other Orthodox people would probably come in to buy, although they haven’t got the same restrictions on their shopping, the same need as the Kirshners. And there are also the Kirshner yeshiva bochurs sent up from the city to counsel camp. Elizabeth has filled a steno pad with notes. She’ll have a freezer and stock chicken. She’ll have shelves of canned goods with cookies and potato chips, bouillon cubes, supervised jam.

“It’s a wonderful idea,” Eva says.

“But a lot of work,” says Maja.

“A lot of work,” Eva echoes. “Yes, but it’s a splendid idea.”

“A kosher store would save so much time,” says Nina. “You have to do it. Don’t you think she has to do it?” she asks Andras.

Andras sips his drink in the wing chair and he says nothing. What can he say? Elizabeth has never had any experience with a business. She doesn’t know anything about inventory; hasn’t considered how to transport food from the city or what kind of markup she’ll need.
With the transportation expenses, rented space, or at least rented equipment, she won’t break even, let alone make money. But there she is, radiant, planning on the sofa. Andras has never seen her so enthusiastic. It’s like hearing she gambles secretly. Elizabeth Shulman, mother of five! He’s always seen Elizabeth as a certain type. Practical, capable, and warm. Calm and fair with children, a sociable neighbor, and, of course, a pious Jew. That comes last somehow. In religion, Andras assumes, she just follows Isaac’s lead. He has always assumed she would behave true to form. And now, suddenly, she seems very eager, very young. He realizes, sitting there, that Elizabeth is probably only thirty-three or thirty-four, and yet he’s always thought of her as older, because of all the children. There are people like Nina who always seem young, impulsive, passionate. And then people like Elizabeth, who always seem mature.

Eva and Maja serve strudel to their guests, apple and cherry. They have two sets of good china just for Kaaterskill, and two sets of sterling. They serve on dessert plates painted with acorns and curling brown oak leaves. Eva’s hands tremble as she cuts the flaky pastry. “Let me,” Nina says. “You sit. I’ll do it.”

“Who’s the guest?
You
sit,” Eva tells her young sister-in-law.

“But I’m not a guest,” Nina protests.

“In this house. In this house,” Eva murmurs, and Nina sits down.

“And where would you put this store?” Maja asks Elizabeth.

Elizabeth hesitates. Isaac looks uncomfortable. She sees he doesn’t want her to go on about it. “I was thinking of renting out the back room in Hamilton’s.”

“Really?”

“I was just thinking about it.”

Actually, Elizabeth has gone and talked to Hamilton already. She’s gone to see him in his little shingled store, free standing on Main Street between the Taylor building and King Real Estate. Hamilton’s was the town grocery on Main Street before the A & P arrived and took all the business. Now Mr. Hamilton sells tourist souvenirs that he brings up from Catskill—postcards, necklaces with Indian bead dolls on the end; trail guides, fishing gear, maple-sugar Liberty Bells.

Hamilton has white hair, and a short white beard, and ruddy skin
weathered from the sun. His eyes are bright clear blue. He is a prickly fellow, and he’s grown worse since the death of his wife, but Elizabeth is not afraid of him. Just yesterday she walked right into his old storeroom, unused now. It was small and windowless with its Dutch door opening into the main part of the store. She looked inside. And then she came up to Hamilton at the register and she said, “I’ve been thinking about selling some kosher food, and I was wondering about renting your back storeroom.”

Hamilton said nothing.

“It seems to me that you only use the big storeroom, and you’ve got nothing much in the little one. So if I paid you rent and arranged for deliveries on my own, you’d have a clear profit, and the risk would be all mine.” She told him all about her idea and how much she’d pay in rent.

“I don’t need it,” Hamilton said.

“Of course, I’m talking about next summer,” Elizabeth told him.

He just shrugged, but Elizabeth wasn’t put off. She knows she can convince him; all she needs is time.

“That little room in the back?” Cecil asks Elizabeth now. “You know, that used to be the liquor department. Years ago. It’s true. Mrs. Hamilton used to sit there, presiding. At night she locked up the place with three bolts. Not one, not two.”

“He doesn’t use it now,” Elizabeth says.

“He lost his liquor license ten years ago. Some kids got killed driving drunk up Mohican.”

Elizabeth nods.

“It was before your time,” says Cecil.

“Ernestine Schermerhorn told me about it at the library. The rainstorm,” she says. “But now Hamilton’s room is empty….” She does not finish the sentence. She feels suddenly that she has said too much about the store.