Kaaterskill Falls (34 page)

He walks and thinks about his children. He does very little with them. He does not join them in their games, or take them to summer camp, or scold them when they come inside. When they were younger he never put them to bed at night or sat there with them in the dark. He buys the children presents because he doesn’t know what else to do. Nina nags, and his sisters worry. They sense the truth; that there is something lacking in him. If he could be like Eva, that would be something. If he could be one of those radiant people in the world who seem to warm the ones around them like little suns. If he could be like that. But he cannot generate the heat.

Andras looks at himself with a mixture of self-pity and disdain as he walks there alone in Kaaterskill. He is alone, even here in this small place, even under these trees, not entering into his neighbors’ religious belief, not holding God in common with them. His neighbors sing together like birds in morning, afternoon, and evening. They are a thousand voices enlivening the air and calling to each other. There is nothing Andras can contribute to that, nothing he can add, although he lives there with them and watches them. His own soul is silent, his experience and ideas hard and dry, having to do with business and money, with economic rather than spiritual transactions.

Just before dawn he hears the birds. He hears doors closing, the trees rustling in the cool air. An old car starting. Then the men begin walking up the street. They are carrying their blue velvet tallis bags and walking up the hill to shul for morning minyan.

“You’re up early, Andras,” Joe Landauer calls over to him.

“Coming with us?” someone else asks.

“No.” He has to clear his throat. “Just out for a walk.” He is hoarse from the night air. He watches them as they hurry on toward Main Street and the shul. Joe Landauer is taking three of his sons with him, and they jostle along behind him, thin versions of their father.
Andras watches as they disappear up the hill. The sun is rising. He is going to be late.

As always on Monday mornings, Andras rides with Isaac down the mountain. As usual they listen to the news. But when they reach Cooksburg, Isaac turns off the radio. In silence Isaac drives the sleeping Andras to the city.

A
LL
afternoon Isaiah and Rachel sit in the library of the Rav’s white Kaaterskill house. They are sorting papers together at the desk, and they are exhausted, overwhelmed by the Rav’s unfinished business, months of correspondence with halachic questions from members of the community, stacks of notes, drafts of essays, bills. They are tired from the events of the past weeks; they are overwrought. The Rav never sorted out his papers, or allowed anyone to look at them when he was alive. He was never interested in writing explanatory notes or putting his manuscripts in order for future executors. His work simply lies where he left it on his desk.

“What are these, the new letters?” Rachel asks.

“Yes,” says Isaiah.

“These have to be answered.”

“I know,” Isaiah tells her. “But I have to look through these too.”

“What’s this?” she says. “Isaac and Elizabeth Shulman. A request to reopen their store next summer. And these”—she sifts through another pile of paper—“his manuscript on”—she looks closely at the handwritten pages—
“Kohelet.”
All the Rav’s manuscripts are written out by hand in blue-blue ink. But the Rav’s handwriting deteriorated in his last year. Even Rachel can barely make out the words he has penned on
Ecclesiastes.
“Under the sun there can be nothing lasting, and there can be nothing new. The fixed, the eternal, and the original
lies in the Holy One….” Rachel unfolds a cardboard manuscript box, places the papers in it gently, and writes out a label in her own dark, compact script. She and Isaiah work together in the library like a pair of archaeologists among the towers of books. Dust motes float before them in the late afternoon sun and settle on the overloaded shelves. The work is slow and still, and yet they are pressed for time. In just three weeks they must return to the city, where the other library, in the Rav’s apartment, awaits them.

“You need to have your cousin start sorting the papers in the city,” Rachel tells Isaiah now. “The letters there can’t wait until we come back.”

“I don’t want Joseph in the apartment,” Isaiah replies.

“But you can’t do all of it alone.”

“I think I may have to,” he says.

Rachel turns on him. “You are a scholar,” she tells him. “You are the Rav. You are not a secretary anymore. You are not an assistant. This is not your job.” She gestures to the cluttered desk. “You have a job, and that is to lead and to teach. Not to spend your time filing. Not to be editing, or—transcribing his manuscripts, his notes.”

“We are not going to leave all of this lying here,” Isaiah says.

“I’m telling you”—Rachel’s voice is urgent and soft, although there is no one else to hear—“We cannot do this alone.”

Isaiah doesn’t answer. Silently they continue working on the correspondence, arranging the letters by date.

“What are you going to do about this business of the store?” she asks him, again holding up the Shulmans’ letter.

He takes the letter and reads it. “The store was useful this summer,” he says. “Next summer it might be a good thing.”

Rachel looks over his shoulder and reads the letter with her small intent face. Her eyes are dark and fierce.

“They act as if they are asking to renew a library book,” she says. “No. No,” she tells Isaiah. “This is not your job. This is not your responsibility. The Kehillah doesn’t need to have stores here and stores there, and you managing it all. Let them buy in the city like everyone else. Your father,
olav hashalom
, spread himself thin. Of course he did. He had you to work for him. You are going to have to set your own standards. If he did something or made you do some
thing, that does not mean that necessarily it continues. No. They heard you when you spoke at the service. That is how you should be. You are not a bureaucrat. You are not a slave.”

“Rachel,” Isaiah chides her.

“What?”

“I’ll consider the case on its merits.”

“Exactly,” she says. “You’ll need to speak to them. Do they want permission to bring up food from the Heights, or are they also planning to bring up from other places? I heard that they catered a party.”

Isaiah knits his brow. “The Rav didn’t give them permission to cater parties.”

“Where is the copy of his letter of permission?” Rachel asks him.

“It should be there,” he says, pointing to one of his father’s old filing cabinets.

“There was no mention of catering as I recall,” Rachel says as she looks for it. “He didn’t give permission for anything but the store.” She pulls out the carbon copy and puts it on the desk. “And he had very little interest in that. I really think he gave them the letter to make work for you.”

Isaiah holds up his hands to stop this talk. “I don’t think that’s true.”

“What does it matter now?” Rachel says, “Now it has to be taken care of. Now you are the one who has to straighten it out.”

E
LIZABETH
stays late on Monday afternoon to balance the books. Hamilton is puttering in front, seeing to his stock, straightening the shelves, and Elizabeth works in the back room with her pencil and her ledger. She is tired, but she finishes up anyway. She forces herself. When she is done, she checks her delivery days on the wall calendar,
Compliments of Auerbach Butcher.
She has the calendar from Auerbach’s and a set of refrigerator magnets from Miller’s cheese. Hamilton has a whole clock from Budweiser with a holographic-style picture of a team of Clydesdales drawing the Budweiser Wagon through a stream, and a moving waterfall in the background, splashing white behind the clock dial.

“Till tomorrow, then,” Elizabeth tells Hamilton.

“Mm,” he answers.

The afternoon is warm and quiet as she walks home, the breeze drifting with the hum of lawn mowers. In the cooler shade of Maple, little children are scampering over the sidewalk, carefully skipping over the cracks left by long-forgotten ice. Stan Knowlton is working on his car in front of his red bungalow; Cecil is raking up under his apple tree at the side of the house.

Inside Elizabeth’s bungalow the scanty mail still lies on the doormat. The girls never bother to pick it up. A two-for-one ice-cream offer from Smiley’s, a phone bill. There is a third envelope from the Rav’s office.

“Mommy!” Brocha hurtles across the room. “What’s for dinner, Mommy?”

“Just a minute,” Elizabeth says, and she opens the envelope as she walks into the bedroom.

The Rav’s letter is only one line long:
Dear Mr. and Mrs. Shulman: We would like to discuss your request for next summer with you.
The words are typed in clear round pica, the sharp carbon letters of an electric typewriter. Nothing like the Rav’s 1938 manual machine.
Please call and make an appointment. Rav Isaiah Kirshner.
The letter could have been generated by the bank, or by the credit bureau. The message seems so bland and mechanical. But what does it mean?

“I’m hungry, Mommy,” she hears Brocha from the living room.

“Chani, could you get her an apple?” Elizabeth calls back from the bedroom. She sits there on the bed with the letter. The Rav and rebbetzin must have heard about her deliveries for Eva and Maja’s party. They must be calling her in to ask about it. She didn’t have permission. Isaac had warned her about that, but she had gone ahead anyway. Now she frets about it. Not about whether it was wrong, but about whether the Rav might think it was. She has never felt this way before, uncomfortable about the Rav’s opinion. Elizabeth has never had occasion, simply living in the Kehillah and running her household. Well, there are going to be questions with something like this. Her business is a new enterprise. And yet she does not want to go in to see the Rav and answer to him. The store is hers alone. Her creation, or so she’d fancied it.

Before she’d received permission, the Rav’s decision had loomed large in her mind, but afterward, once she had the letter, she took it for granted. It was like securing a loan. Taking the money and forgetting the debt.

How gratified she’d been at Eva and Maja’s party when everyone complimented her, told her it was wonderful the way she’d brought up all the food herself. She was flattered by that. She’d not fully considered that they were thinking that she’d done well, despite the limitations she was working with. They were impressed she’d managed to pull off the party and the store. But it wasn’t her, it was her position that they marveled at. Elizabeth holds the Rav’s letter in her hands, the pure white typing paper with its two neat creases. The envelope, ripped open, has fallen to the floor. What a contortionist she must seem to her Kaaterskill neighbors, making a business in Hamilton’s back room. What a marvelous object she is to them. A ship in a bottle. How did she get in there? How could she get out?

With nervous hands she picks up the phone and calls the Rav’s office. The rebbetzin answers the phone.

“This is Elizabeth Shulman,” Elizabeth says. “I—my husband and I received a letter from the Rav. We need to set up an appointment.”

“Let me look at the calendar.” The rebbetzin’s voice is thin and distant. “Thursday?”

“Would it be possible to do it Sunday?” Elizabeth asks. “My husband is in the city during the week.”

“The Rav doesn’t have hours on Sunday,” Rachel Kirshner says.

Her tone pricks at Elizabeth. She is so cold, as if Elizabeth were asking some presumptuous question. And then Elizabeth realizes something. She must not get Isaac involved in this. She mustn’t get him tangled in her mistake. It would be unfair and cowardly for her to bring him all the way up to Kaaterskill for this meeting, as if he should somehow defend her for decisions she made independently—indeed, against his advice. “I suppose I can come Thursday,” she says, “but I’ll have to come alone. My husband will be in the city then, because he works there, and I don’t want to ask him to lose a day because—because it’s mine really,” she says. “It’s not his store at all. It’s mine, so it isn’t necessary for him to be there.”