Kaaterskill Falls (17 page)

I
T WASN
’
T
accurate, what he said in the ambulance. The Rav considers this in his hospital bed. It isn’t completely true that his people have forgotten the liberal arts. After all, his own son, Jeremy, did attend university. Columbia. And he did learn those rich and florid ancient languages. His son excelled, in fact indulged, in the arts, history, and poetry. Jeremy was a brilliant scholar, learned in both sacred and secular literature. From the beginning his learning and intellectual ability far surpassed Isaiah’s. The Rav thinks of this as he lies there in his foolish hospital gown with Isaiah at his side. He is tired. Tired of his younger son always present, always solicitous.
Dutiful. Isaiah does exactly as he is told. The Rav expects no less. This is what he requires. He thinks he can see Isaiah, both his sons, objectively, for what they are. Each has what the other lacks. Isaiah is good. He has a pure and dedicated heart. He is ambitious, but his ambition is turned entirely toward the welfare of the Kehilla. He is pious; he is truly pious. But he is not interesting.

“I would like to see Jeremy,” he says to Isaiah. “I would like to see your brother.”

“Of course we already called him, Father,” Isaiah says.

“And he is coming here?” the Rav asks. “Or to the house?”

“We don’t know yet how long you will be here. The doctors have to decide.” Isaiah is sitting nervously at his bedside. He is surprised at his father’s insistence, and a little frightened. The Rav has never been so anxious to see Jeremy. His words seem portentous to Isaiah. Like a rebuke to him and his wife, as if they have done wrong; as if they have not done enough, so that now, in the hospital, he turns to the other son. “I’m sure he’ll come as soon as he can,” Isaiah says.

“Then tell him I am waiting,” says the Rav. “And where is my
Times?”

That evening Jeremy arrives. Wearing his light sport coat and cream Panama hat, he walks into the Rav’s private hospital room. The Rav seems half his true size, a tiny old man swallowed up in the white bed. On one side Isaiah sits with the water pitcher and the reading glasses. On the other side of the bed sits Jeremy’s cousin, Joseph. The two of them with their suits coal-black against the white sheets; they seem like a pair of dark Puritan angels.

“Jeremy.” The Rav stretches out his frail arms and smiles.

The warmth of the welcome shocks Jeremy. He is confused by that smiling face. It is unlike his father; it is as if his father were vanishing into a sort of frail pixilated benevolence. “Go, please,” the Rav says sharply to Isaiah and Joseph, and his sharp tone is somehow reassuring.

“How are you, Father?” Jeremy asks when they are alone.

“I am a patient,” the Rav says, “but I am not patient.” His deep-set eyes sparkle. He is enjoying his little joke. “They are holding me for observations, changing my medications, experimenting, and this causes me hallucinations.”

“Really? Hallucinations?”

“I see one, for example, right now,” the Rav says calmly. “Just”—he points to Jeremy’s left shoulder—“there. A figure, I can see, quite clearly.”

Involuntarily, Jeremy turns and looks.

“But I know it is a trick of the eye. She has no shadow. It is interesting, isn’t it? The eye plays tricks. There is a great difference between what we see and what we know. You have not sent me your essays,” he tells Jeremy.

Jeremy studies his father’s face. The Rav has rarely shown any interest in Jeremy’s scholarly work. In his library in the city he has a bound copy of Jeremy’s dissertation, but Jeremy has no idea whether he has ever read it.

“Here I have time to read,” the Rav says. “Because they do not like me to do my work. When I get home I will be behind with my correspondence.”

“Are you going back to Kaaterskill or to the city?” Jeremy asks.

“Of course, Kaaterskill,” says his father. Then he adds, “Your brother wants me to go back to the city.” As he speaks his tone is the same, his wording the same as always, only slower. “You remember when we first came up to Kaaterskill.”

“Sure,” Jeremy says. He must have been ten or eleven at the time.

“Your mother was the one who wanted to come up to the mountains.”

“I know,” says Jeremy.

“I had not wanted to buy the house in Kaaterskill. It did not interest me then to leave the city. We argued, and she said, it is not good to stay all year in Washington Heights. Not good to have only one thing and not another. The children need air to breathe and other sights to see, and you need it too. I said it was trouble to come to the mountains, to have two houses, and she said, it is not enough to live in one place if it is not beautiful. It is not sufficient.”

Tears start in Jeremy’s eyes. It is hard for him to hear his father speak of her. They almost never speak of her.

The Rav pauses, and then he says, “She believed in beauty, its power and strength. She believed in beauty and nature and in art.”

“And she was right about the house,” Jeremy says lightly, just to say something, to deflect the moment because it is so strong.

“I had loved those things,” the Rav says. “But I did not believe in them as she did. Except perhaps when I was very young. Before the war when I was young.”

“Father.” It is Isaiah knocking on the open door of the hospital room.

The Rav looks up irritably.

“Father,” Isaiah says again, “Dr. Stein is here.”

“I am in the middle of a conversation,” the Rav says. Then he turns to Jeremy and confides, “I have no time for this.” He gestures to the hospital bed. “They would like to keep me here, but I have no time for it. My manuscript on
Kohelet
is still uncorrected. My correspondents will be waiting for answers to their letters. I have never delayed my replies before.”

The Rav looks at Jeremy with his dark impatient eyes, and Jeremy feels a rush of gratitude to be singled out this way. He meets his father’s gaze with wonder and with joy.

“O
KAY
,” Stephanie tells Renée, “so the deal is, we have to get you a job, or you go back to Rabbitville.” That’s what Stephanie calls Rabbi Lamkin’s camp. Stephanie has a way with words. She particularly likes vintage slang, which she’s picked up from the succession of baby-sitters she had as a child. She’s had baby-sitters from several eras, and she mixes together phrases from all of them. There was Mrs. Boyles, the old housekeeper with support hose who lived in until Stephanie was twelve and played Nanny to Stephanie’s Eloise, and there was, of course, Malaya with her women’s group and ashram. There was also a tight-lipped divorcee who had a cache of pills in her night table. She left one day, taking nothing but Mom’s jewelry. Stephanie remembers all of these women fondly and still drapes herself with their mismatched catchwords. “Say, Steve,” she’ll tell her cousin—the one with the license—as he drives, “you’d better slow down, there’s fuzz on this road.”

“Now, for a new job … Well, what can you do?” Stephanie asks, examining her friend.

“Nothing,” says Renée.

“Sh, I’m concentrating.”

Renée watches with anxious eyes as her friend strides out into the living room of the Fawesses’ lake house. Balancing like a surfer, Stephanie takes a slide across the polished hardwood floor on a huge white New Zealand sheepskin. She paces around the circular fire
place, which King advertises to the winter renters, and kicks the polished driftwood coffee table contemplatively. Her parents don’t care what she does to the furniture; it’s not theirs, and they’re rarely home anyway. They haven’t bothered to buy and furnish a house in Kaaterskill because security is so difficult in the winter.

“What can you do?” Stephanie asks again. She wanders into the kitchen and sticks her head in the refrigerator. “Hmm. What are you good at? Parents. You’re good at parents.” Stephanie’s mother adores Renée, because she’s so polite and quiet. Nina’s training has left its mark. When Renée comes over she always says, ‘Hello, Mrs. Fawess, how are you?’ And she thanks Mrs. Fawess for having her over. “Parents. Adults,” Stephanie brainstorms. “Goody Two-shoes. Pain-in-the-ass … Libraries!” She shouts, triumphant. She slams shut the refrigerator door. “Kendall Falls Library,” she tells Renée. “They’ll love you. Come on, we have to get over there.”

“But what do I say?” Renée asks.

“Come on, come on. I’ll pick up the dogs and walk you.” Stephanie has started a dog-walking business. Three dollars an hour per client. She calls the dogs “clients.”

Renée and Stephanie set off for Kendall Falls. Renée walks her bike, and Stephanie walks her five clients: two terriers, her aunt’s hyperactive spaniel, Roberta—named after Redford—and King’s gray poodle. Deftly, the aspiring veterinarian untangles the leashes as she talks. “You go in,” she instructs Renée on the way. “You tell whatserface you heard she needed help cataloging or something.”

“But I didn’t hear that,” Renée says.

Stephanie glares at her. “Just tell the goddamn librarian you want a job,” she orders.

Renée groans. “She knows my mother. She’s known me since I was eight years old.”

“So obviously she’ll hire you,” Stephanie reasons. “Look, chick, nothing ventured, nothing gained. There comes a time when you decide: Am I going to be a shrinking violet, or am I going to achieve? Come on, woman, this is your life.”

“But I don’t know what to say,” says Renée as they approach the library.

“Buffalo biscuits,” Stephanie says. She leaves her friend in front
of Kendall Falls Free Library, turns around with a flick of her hair, and walks off, dogs jumping all around her.

Renée stands alone on the sidewalk, and feels not so much afraid as sad and unimportant. She wants to be original like Stephanie, but she isn’t. She looks at the library with distaste. The library’s front yard is divided in half by a path from the gate to the front door. The flagstone walk is perfectly straight, like a compass-and-ruler construction. Petunias planted on each side. Two straight lines of purple-and-white pinwheel flowers. Renée trudges up the path. She opens the glass library door.

“Renée Melish,” says Ernestine Schermerhorn. Mrs. Schermerhorn’s voice carries. She exercises her librarian’s privilege not to whisper. “I haven’t seen you for quite some time.”

Renée smiles nervously. She doesn’t want to approach nimble-fingered, keen-eyed Mrs. Schermerhorn. She pretends to browse instead. But the library has grown very small, like Renée’s grandmother in Buenos Aires. It is just one room, like a one-room schoolhouse, tall bookcases and short, all facing the desk.

“Are you looking for something, Renée?” Mrs. Schermerhorn says.

Renée hesitates. Then she says, “I was looking for you.”

“Well, here I am,” says Mrs. Schermerhorn. She sits up, straight and tall behind her desk.

“I heard you need help cataloging or something,” says Renée.

“I don’t know where you could have heard that,” Mrs. Schermerhorn replies, and Renée can feel the library’s silence blossoming between them. “We’re part of the state cataloging plan now, and I have an assistant, you know, Mrs. Knowlton.”

“Oh,” Renée says.

“However,” Mrs. Schermerhorn says thoughtfully, “I could use help on the bookmobile.”

And so Renée is hired and saved from Rabbitville. She starts working on the bookmobile that afternoon. Renée and Mrs. Knowlton load the books into the van. Then Renée gets in, alongside Mrs. Schermerhorn.

Each afternoon they drive to a different town and park while the library customers browse the shelves. Then they make side trips to
individual houses to deliver books on order, collect fines, pick up donations of used magazines. It’s a bit like the trick-or-treating Renée remembers from when they had the old house in Brooklyn and her mother still allowed the children to celebrate Halloween—that pagan holiday. Renée has to do the running in and out, carrying books and bringing back request slips, money for overdue fines. All of this saves Mrs. Schermerhorn’s back. The work is all running up to the door and ringing the bell while the librarian waits at the curb. Mrs. Schermerhorn sits behind the wheel of the big gray bookmobile and toots the horn when she thinks they’re getting behind schedule. The van is fitted out like a boat with safety rails on the bookshelves. There are red tulips painted on the windows, but the flowers are small, so that they won’t block the view.

“Well, Renée,” Mrs. Schermerhorn says as they drive up Mohican, “you came at an opportune time. I haven’t had anyone to help for the last eight or nine years. There was a girl at the beginning, but it ended very unfortunately.”

Renée looks up, startled.

“And she had been a bright young girl,” Mrs. Schermerhorn murmurs as she steers the van. “She had been about your age. Candy Kendall. She’s Candy Walker now.”

The librarian steers the van into the private road off Mohican. “This is where I live,” she says with simplicity and pride as they pass the gatehouse. “We’ve lived here for twenty-five years. Here in the Mohican Road Community. Of course, my family have lived here much longer than that—before the American Revolution, before there were any Yankees here, before Kendall Falls existed. You know the mountains were Dutch.”