Kaaterskill Falls (45 page)

I
N
J
UNE
, the longest Shabbes of the summer, Andras and Nina sit at the dining table with Eva and Saul, Maja and Philip. Nina has cleared away the lunch dishes and the wineglasses, and she brings out cups of tea and more rugelach.

“Have another,” she urges her sisters-in-law.

“I can’t,” Maja says.

“I’ve had too many already,” says Saul.

Eva tastes one more. “My last,” she says, smiling. And she turns to Nina. “I never knew what a fine baker you were. Andras, I didn’t know we had such a baker in the family.”

Nina says modestly, “It’s because I didn’t often have a chance. You did so much and so well.”

Eva accepts the compliment in silence. She just sips her tea.

“Andras, I don’t know why you complain, the garden looks green,” Maja says, looking out the window.

“The grass is too long,” Andras says. “I’m actually quite aggravated about it. I didn’t like the job the Curtis boy was doing and I went out to mow it myself yesterday.”

“I told him to wait,” Nina says.

“Your allergies,” Maja says, concerned.

“It doesn’t matter now,” Andras tells them, “I’ve managed to break the tractor mower.”

“Look, we’ll get someone else to take care of it,” Nina says in her
quick way. “There are services, yard services. You don’t need to go out there exhausted and do yet another thing. You shouldn’t take that big mower out yourself.”

“I can handle a lawn mower.”

“A tractor!” she says. “This is a dangerous machine. You could have had an accident. You were lucky no one was hurt.”

“Would you like to see the roses in back?” Andras asks Eva.

Eva looks at Saul. “Another day,” she says. “I’m a little tired. I need to rest.”

“They’re lovely,” Nina says.

“I really should go home,” Eva tells them.

“We’ll go too,” says Maja. It does not occur to any of them to go out to the garden without Eva.

“Thank you for the delicious lunch.” Saul rises from his chair.

“Thank you, thank you,” Eva and Maja call back as they walk down the porch steps.

“They really were good, the rugelach,” Nina tells Andras as they walk back inside.

“They were perfect,” says Andras.

Nina looks at him, surprised and pleased.

“They were. It was a perfect lunch.”

“I didn’t think it would be,” Nina says. “I was worried the kugel would be too crisp in that pan—”

“But it was perfect,” he says again. He doesn’t just mean the food. Sitting down together at the table, and having Eva with them, is the purest joy he has ever known.

Nina washes the dishes in the kitchen. She rinses out her crystal goblets, while Andras sits on the porch with his
Commentary.
After a bit he puts the magazine down and walks along Maple. There is the Curtis place, the long, narrow prefabricated house, adorned with window boxes now. Next to it the Birnbaums’ house stands, white and quiet without Cecil and Beatrix. It is rented for the summer to the Landauers and their five sons. Cecil is going to sell the place, but he is waiting for the right offer, and a strong dollar. Across the street he sees some of the Shulman girls in their small and leafy yard. Still wearing their Shabbes dresses, they are running in and out of the yellow bungalow with old soccer balls, swinging on the tire swing.
There is Knowlton’s red bungalow with its chimney still unfinished, where Stan ran out of flagstones. Kaaterskill is all the same. Andras does not take the road all the way up Mohican. He loops back toward home.

He walks back into his garden through the long grass. There are leaves scattered over the back lawn. Even some weeds. He’ll pull them up tomorrow. If he did it now, it would scandalize Nina and the neighbors. Working in the garden is forbidden on Shabbes.

He walks out to his arbor of lilacs and looks at the strawberry plants that grow underneath. Firm green strawberries cover the vines. The fruit is beginning to ripen, and a few are red. Andras plucks one and eats it. The strawberry is small and tart. In a bowl with sugar, that’s the way his sisters serve them to the children. His tongue loves strawberries with sugar, the sweetness crunching and then melting away. Eva would be delighted by these plants. If she were still baking, she would buy rhubarb and mix together a strawberry rhubarb filling. “This will be a good pie,” she would say if she were well, and she would make pies and load up the sideboard with them. She would serve them in the evenings in the garden. Pies and mandelbrot and prune cake.

In her kitchen Eva offered him rugelach filling on her spoon. Andras had laughed at her then, his older sister offering him the raspberry-and-walnut filling as if it had powers to change or cure. Now, to his surprise, he tastes what she means. Only that it is sweet to grow strawberries, and to eat them when they are just ripe. That it is good to rest in gardens and to sit in lawn chairs, the Sabbath lasting late as the long summer day. That it is good to serve and to eat, to sit and to receive the work of the baker’s hands.

Andras walks through the garden and looks at the cascading lilacs growing over their trellis. He looks at the Japanese maple and the dogwood trees. At last he walks into the house. Quietly he walks into his bedroom to change his clothes. He is startled by the shape on the bed. Nina lying there asleep. He had assumed she was still in the kitchen or on the front porch. She almost never sleeps during the day. She tired herself out from all the cooking, from entertaining his sisters. Of course, they are not the easiest women to bake for. Polite, but critical. Quick to judge. Nina must have exhausted herself yesterday
preparing everything, trying to meet, even to exceed, his sisters’ standards.

Andras stands and looks at Nina lying there on the bed. She is curled up with her face against the pillow and her red hair flaming out around her. He looks at her and feels how beautiful she is. He has walked and walked, trying to outwalk the impulse to join himself to his wife, young and necessarily ignorant, unknowing, and, of course, confused by his history. It is his fault, choosing and then blaming her. He has blamed her and accused her in his mind, blamed her for being young. He kneels down next to her sleeping there. He wants to speak to her. He wants to ask her forgiveness, except that it would wake her. She would wake up, and she wouldn’t understand.

He only dares to watch her sleep as he kneels next to her. He only speaks to her in his mind. And because he cannot wake her, asking her to forgive him, silently he forgives her: for being well in body and in mind, for remembering without pain, for living and dreaming apart from him, in her own time.

“Y
OU
would not believe what these people are bringing in,” James Boyd tells Ira in the garage late that afternoon. “It’s a lawn-mower epidemic.” He strides through the garage, swatting a whole line of the driver-mowers with his oily rag. “Come on, let’s close up.”

“Why’d they all break at once?” Ira asks.

James shrugs. “Summer people mowing over crab apples.” He kicks Andras’s lawn mower. “What are they trying to do? Make apple sauce? They all want them fixed immediately. They aren’t getting done today, though. Monday we’ll do Melish. First come, first served. Then King. He’ll be Tuesday the soonest.”

“He wanted it for tomorrow.”

“So sue me. Sunday we’re closed. Always have been, always will be. Hi, Stan,” he says, as Stan Knowlton walks in.

“Thought you might join me and Curtis for some refreshment,” says Stan.

“Love to,” says James. “Ira, let’s get a move on. Time to lock up.” He looks over at Ira, who is leaning against King’s tractor
mower. The boy takes one of the blue wipes for windshields and cleans his glasses.

“You know, you’ve got to get out and do something, kid. When I was your age, fine weather like this … we waited all year for nights like this.”

“You got a girlfriend?” Stan asks him.

“No,” says Ira.

“You should work on that,” says Stan.

“That’s what I tell him,” says James.

“You got anybody worth going after?” Stan asks.

Ira says nothing, and they both laugh at him.

“What’s her name?” James teases.

“Oh, what’s in a name,” says Stan.

“Come on, who is she?” James asks Ira. “Who’s the lucky gal?” But he won’t tell.

C
HANI
and her sisters watch the lilac sky for the three stars that mean the end of Shabbes. They sit on the grass in back of the Birnbaum house, and Renée sits near them, but a little apart. She spreads her dress around her, feeling the air ruffling the blades of grass. Tomorrow is Sunday, but Stephanie won’t be there waiting with her bike. There won’t be anyone to swim with or to check up on the cows at Lacy Farm. She is filled with loneliness for Stephanie, for her funny slang and her conspiracies. Renée can’t make up any of that by herself. She can only sit on the grass all alone, the summer stretching out before her with no one waiting for her or telling her to hurry up. She does not know that there is someone waiting for her. From the Birnbaums’ backyard she cannot see Ira Rubin, pedaling the slight hill on Maple. He rides, faster and faster, until he whooshes past at breakneck speed, only to turn, pedal up the hill and down again, wind in his ears, sky rippling over him. Renée does not know it yet. Over and over, every time he speeds by, he is hurrying to see her.

The Landauer boys are running races in the garden, their white shirts flapping, their black jackets in a pile on the ground. As Cecil had hoped, the garden next to Michael King is filled with small boys
in peyyes. There are loud games of flag football and crashing through hedges. More than once King has found stray soccer balls on his property. He has complained to Joe Landauer, and even demanded Cecil’s telephone number in England. King says he would move if Jackie were not so attached to the house. Of course, there are a lot of things you can do if you are willing to move and start over. If you don’t have roots in a place, as he and Jackie have in Kaaterskill.

They are all outside waiting for havdalah, the Landauers, Andras and Nina, Elizabeth, Isaac, Eva, Maja and their husbands, and Regina, Cecil’s sister. She has come back from Los Angeles to get some of her things before Cecil ships the furniture to England. They are all sitting there on the rose-patterned chaise longues, even Mrs. Sobel and her husband—the old Conservative rabbi, frail under a plaid carriage blanket.

“I guess that was the last time,” Regina is saying, “the wedding reception we had for Cecil and Beatrix. Two years ago. That was the last time I came up here.”

“No. Has it been that long?” Eva asks.

“And now this is my last look at the house,” Regina says. “I spent every summer of my life here until I got my Ph.D. Can you believe that?”

Nina shakes her head. “And it’s the most beautiful on the street.” She looks back at the sweep of the lawn all the way down to Bramble Creek. The rise of the white house before them on the hill, its porches and carved posts, the gambrel roof and bright windows.

“Is Cecil really going to sell it?” Eva asks.

“It’s his to sell,” Regina says, and her voice is sad.

“You must miss the seasons,” Maja says.

Regina shakes her head. “We have seasons in Los Angeles. No, I’m going to miss the house.”

“I think you might find a new one,” Elizabeth says cautiously, but Regina doesn’t answer.

“Elizabeth has taken over a store in the city,” Andras tell Regina.

“Oh, no. Not at all. I’ve been doing the books,” Elizabeth says. Working for Grimaldi is nothing like having her own store. She does not feel as she did then, when she carried that idea inside of her—exuberant, unstoppable, on the wind of her imagination. Still, she is
pleased to hear Andras speak of it. Taking over a store! She is tickled by the exaggeration. “I just fell into it, working there,” she tells Andras. Then she says, “That’s not true. I thought of something you said to me.”

“Something I said?”

“I’m sure you don’t remember. At the naming of Cecil’s baby you said, ‘Elizabeth, this is the United States of America.’”

He looks at her, puzzled.

“‘And you can do whatever you please.’”