Kaaterskill Falls (37 page)

“These are very good,” Jeremy says. “Delicious. No, thank you,
this is enough. Look, as I said earlier, on the phone, I want to talk about the books.”

“We had an idea about them,” Isaiah says. “We wanted—we thought the best would be to give them to the yeshiva library and to keep them together with the others for the students.”

“No, I don’t want to do that,” Jeremy says.

His blunt dismissal startles them. Isaiah looks up, surprised and pained. “I don’t understand,” he says.

“What don’t you understand?” Jeremy asks.

“We thought,” says Isaiah, “there are so many. They are so specialized—”

“I think I’m capable of reading them,” Jeremy says.

“Yes, of course, but you don’t, you don’t learn from them—and they are part of the whole collection, the family collection.”

“But father didn’t leave them to the family,” Jeremy says. “He left them to me.”

“But, you know … well, what use would you have for them?” Isaiah asks.

“It’s not a question of the use,” says Jeremy. “They belong to me.”

Rachel looks at Jeremy sharply. “But what would you do with them?”

“What do you care?” he asks. His voice is light, but his words are cold.

They just look at him, their eyes confused and full of grief.

“But I don’t understand,” Isaiah says again.

“This is my inheritance, and I’m planning to take it,” says Jeremy. “You got the houses, the property at Coon Lake, free and clear. I don’t suppose you need the books as well.”

“It’s not for us. None of it is for us,” Isaiah says.

“Well, I’m going to take them,” Jeremy says. “I’m hiring movers to pack them. I need to bring them in downstairs to make an estimate. And in Kaaterskill.”

“I think you should reconsider,” Isaiah says.

“I’m not going to reconsider.” Jeremy is impatient. “I was left one thing by our father, and I don’t need to reconsider. You’ve taken everything else.”

“We didn’t take,” Rachel says. “We gave constantly. And the houses aren’t free and clear. We’ve had to mortgage both of them. Do you think we got the money to care for the Rav out of thin air? We had twenty-four-hour nursing. Do you think that was free? How dare you say we took. We gave constantly, and the money was the least of it.”

“I need to get in with the movers to make an estimate,” Jeremy says again.

“But what are you going to do with them?” Isaiah asks. “Where are you going to put them all?”

“I don’t know. I might sell them.” Jeremy sees them flinch at this, their eyes widen.

“You will,” Rachel says slowly. “You will sell them, won’t you?”

Jeremy’s brown eyes are lively. He watches his brother and his brother’s wife. After a moment he says, “I’ll sell them to you.”

“Sell them to us!” Rachel exclaims.

“How much would you want?” Isaiah asks slowly.

“I don’t know. It’s hard to put a price—I’d give them to you for fifty.”

“Fifty …” Isaiah’s voice drifts off.

“Fifty—thousand dollars?” Rachel echoes.

Jeremy has shocked them. They sit there on the sofa helpless and miserable like a pair of children whose parents have gone away. They are good at that, acting childlike. Obedient. They have served and they have given. Of course, it is more complicated than mere filial love. Isaiah and Rachel depended on the Rav. They depend on him now. They would like to make Jeremy obedient to the Rav’s memory, but he did not cling to his father, and he will not obey.

W
HEN
Jeremy has gone, Isaiah and Rachel don’t speak. Rachel clears away the teacups and puts away the uneaten mandelbrot. Isaiah goes into his study, a smaller room than the Rav’s library downstairs. He works at his desk, preparing for the shiur he will teach that afternoon, and he shakes his head as he reads. He doesn’t understand. Even if Jeremy doesn’t want to keep the books in the family, he doesn’t see why he would deny them to the students, to all the young men at the yeshiva and the Kollel, the young minds desiring only to learn.

Isaiah goes to the kollel to teach his shiur. No one calls him the Rav. He is too new. He has been Rav Isaiah for too long, and now, in his forties, he is still to some extent thought of as the Rav’s son, an aging but wholly conscientious Prince of Wales. He walks up the street to the yeshiva, where his class is waiting for him. They are young men dressed in dark trousers and white shirts, black hats and flyaway black jackets. They are nineteen and twenty years old, newly married; the first of them beginning their families in small apartments near the school. They have bright and eager eyes; they are anxious to please him.

Rav Isaiah opens his books and they open theirs. They are learning Talmud, and they are working their way through the teachings about contracts. For two hours Rav Isaiah guides them through the texts on the table. He explains the intricacies and nuances of language that binds and language that divides. Isaiah tests his young students, pressing them to look more carefully at the meaning of each word. But the conversation with Jeremy still rings in Isaiah’s ears. It is the motivation Isaiah cannot fathom, the emotion underlying his father’s bequest and Jeremy’s flippant response. These trusts, these contracts, these things are freighted with feeling. This is the mystery; that these things can cause such pain.

At home Rachel is thinking about Jeremy too. She sits at the piano and as she plays, she thinks that she understands him very well. Her eyes are on the music, Bach. Her fingers pluck the notes from the keyboard, a thousand dark ripe berries; and as she plays she shakes her head because she knows Jeremy, and this is what she should have expected from him. It is a shanda. He is a disgrace. Rachel opens the piano bench and puts her music inside. Then she takes the extra set of keys she keeps there and she walks downstairs.

Gently, Rachel lets herself in to the Rav’s large first-floor apartment. Softly, she walks through the living room and dining room with its long polished table and twelve chairs. The Rav’s rooms are cool and perfectly quiet. Although the Rav has only just passed away, the apartment feels eerily still, as though no one has lived here for years. Rachel stands at the doorway to the Rav’s library and looks at the books lying there on the shelves. They are dark, and their bindings smooth. They fill the shelves and cover the walls up to the
ceiling. There is something eerie about the books, something sad, but she does not know what it is. Rachel looks at them and thinks simply that it would be tragic if they were sold. Isaiah must not give them up.

I
N KAATERSKILL
, the first week of November, snow falls thick on the houses and banks up high on the piles of dead leaves. The trees drift in sudden white. The gardens where the summer people played at badminton and growing vegetables are now white and still. Laden with snow, the branches of the Birnbaums’ fir tree swoop down to the ground. And the town belongs again to the year-rounders. Old Hamilton stands on the porch of his store and looks out at the street.

It’s coming down fast. Hamilton measures his cane against the rising snowbank. He can compare the accumulation to that of other winters, this storm to other early storms. He remembers as far back as the blizzard of ’39. He remembers more about this place than any of the summer people ever could. The way in fall the mountain turns all at once as if it were catching fire. The way the winter comes down—an avalanche of ice.

Michael King is walking home from his office. This winter is like a fresh white page after his disastrous summer. After his renters’ disappearance King spent days on phone calls and interviews with the police. But despite the best efforts of the police, neither Michael Fawess and his brother and their families, nor any of their money, could be traced. Fawess’s deposit check did not clear at the bank, and King was left with the two huge empty houses built on speculation.

But now, in winter, as the snow comes down, King’s eyes are bright, for he’s found a buyer for the two lake properties. He can already feel that huge mortgage lifting from him, and his cash-flow problems easing up. He’ll have the money now to bid on some new land. He’ll have the money to start again.

As soon as he gets in the door, he sits down in the den and calls his father, Herb Klein. “Great news, Dad,” he tells his father in Miami. “I’ve got a buyer.”

“You’re kidding,” Herb says. Michael can hear how surprised his father is, and how glad.

Herb and Michael are close. There were times when Michael sorely tried Herb’s patience. Not least of these, when Michael changed his last name from Klein to King. Herb tried to talk his only son out of the name change, to no avail, and when Michael went ahead anyway, Herb burst out in aggravation, “I just want to ask you one thing: Tell me, please, just what are you going to be King
of?
Windsor Castle? What are you going to name my grandchildren? Louis Quatorze? Catherine the Great? Was Klein so bad?” Nevertheless, despite the name change, and Michael’s non-Jewish wife, Jackie—despite everything—even the money burned in the old potbelly stove—Herb is proud of his son. He invests in King’s Real Estate enterprises; about half his savings. He is his son’s confidant and tax advisor and—as he himself admits—his son’s greatest fan.

“A buyer. Wonderful,” Herb says.

“And they paid cash,” says Michael.

His father doesn’t speak for a moment. Then he says, “What kind of money is this cash?”

“What do you mean what kind of money?”

“I mean, where has this money been?”

“No trucking. No drugs,” Michael says. “A Hasidic family. Five kids and the grandparents.”

“A Hasidic family.
Veyismere”
says Herb. “With the white beards? The black hats?”

“Yeah. Cash on the table.”

“And they approached you like this? In the black coats?”

“The father came, the lawyer came. They’re in diamonds.”

“Michael, you’re going to sell to these people?”

“What are you so worried about, Dad?”

“I don’t trust them.”

“You don’t think their money’s good?”

“I didn’t say that. I’ve never trusted them, the Hasidim. They’re a crazy group of people. They have a crazy way of looking at the world. Michael, this is why I stopped coming to Kaaterskill in the first place. These people started coming up. They were walking up and down
the streets. It’s like a funeral, all dressed in black, the black suits. I’ve always been proud of being what I am, a Jew first and last, but—”

“Dad, I thought you swore by cash. Remember?” Playfully, Michael recites his father’s mantra: “‘Cash was my philosophy since
dental
school. Cash payment before I even looked at them. Before they even opened their
mouths.’”

“All right, all right. I’m not going to tell you what to do,” his father says. “I’m just saying that—”

“Listen, listen, I’ve got my eye on a new property,” Michael interrupts.

“What, you’re spending already? You get out of the hole and you want to spend?”

“This is the best property in the three towns.” “You said that last time.”

“Listen, it’s huge. Half a mile on Coon Lake. There’s room for five, six cabins there. Belonged to the old Kirshner rabbi, but he just sat on it. Now the son is selling.”

“Kirshner owned all that? Who would have thought,” Herb muses. “Who’s listing it?”

“Schermerhorn,” says King.

“Victoria Schermerhorn? An anti-Semite.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Do I have to spell it out?”

“She’s like any other listing agent—”

“Michael, be careful—”

“She just wants the best price like anyone else. And I’ve heard the rabbi and his wife are motivated. They want to close out the deal fast.”

“Ha,” says Herb. “Buyer beware.”

“Dad,” says Michael.

“Listen to me,” Herb says. “I’m going to tell you about Schermerhorn. You see those Hasidim coming up, the ones from Borough Park, the ones from Washington Heights? The way they look to you. That’s how you look to her.”

“Oh, come on—”

“Just you listen. Don’t do any business with that woman Schermerhorn.”

“Dad, she’s the listing agent,” Michael protests. He can’t help laughing at his father’s voice.

After dinner Michael and his wife and their little girl, Heather, sit by the fire. The poodle, Duchess, curls up at Michael’s feet. “You see, Jackie,” Michael tells his wife, “I told you it would work out.” For it seems to him that the past few days have erased all of the summer’s difficulties. He is full of hope again; his wife, proud and happy. The future expands before them as generously now as when they married, and Jackie, just graduated Sarah Lawrence, said she couldn’t wait to leave the city, with all the crime and vandalism. They pour champagne and give Heather a sip. They play Monopoly and let Heather win.

As for the conversation with his dad, Michael doesn’t give it a second thought. He isn’t afraid of Victoria Schermerhorn, or even Judge Taylor. And all the dark predictions would be more convincing if his father had enjoyed them less.

Pale, where the winter like a stone has been lifted away, we emerge like yellow grass.

Be for a moment quiet, buffet us not, have pity upon us,

Till the green come back into the vein, till the giddiness pass.

—E
DNA
S
T
. V
INCENT
M
ILLAY
Northern April