Kaaterskill Falls (22 page)

T
HE
Rav has been seeing a great deal of Jeremy. He has been asking Jeremy to visit, and even to spend Shabbat. He feels a new interest in his older son, a desire to talk to him about books and articles, even about Jeremy’s scholarship. But even as he draws Jeremy to his side, the Rav seems consciously to exclude Isaiah, speaking less to him, suspending their private Talmud sessions. He doesn’t treat Isaiah the way he used to, doesn’t confide in him, and in fact, looks up at him warily from his white pillows, almost, it seems to Isaiah, as if he were just another doctor. This avoidance hurts Isaiah deeply, and yet he says nothing. He can’t speak of it.

Only Rachel, Isaiah’s wife, speaks of it. “It isn’t right,” she tells Isaiah. “He’s determined to humiliate you. He’s purposely turning against you after all the work you’ve done for him, after devoting yourself to him.” Isaiah feels even more miserable when Rachel talks like this, because she articulates his own feelings so well. She is a fiercely devoted wife, and she makes his cause her own. She wants Isaiah to confront his father and admonish the Rav for treating him this way. She bursts with indignation on Isaiah’s behalf. Whenever they speak, she not only reflects but magnifies Isaiah’s own sense of injustice. She turns his worries and his fears back at him with such intensity that they cut like accusations. He isn’t getting credit; he isn’t being treated as he deserves. And what is he doing about it? Why is he allowing this to happen? When she berates him like this, it’s easy
to forget that she is on his side. They argue in low voices in their apartment directly above the Rav’s.

“You have to speak to him,” Rachel says.

“What could I say?” Isaiah retorts. “Is he going to listen to me?”

“That’s not the point,” she says.

“Then what is the point?”

“The point is that you make yourself heard. You have to be—”

“Rachel, stop it.”

“More assertive.”

“Stop.”

Rachel purses her lips. She knows that pressing Isaiah will not change the situation, but she can’t help herself.

Their marriage was arranged by their parents when Rachel was twenty-two, and Isaiah a year younger. They had been introduced in the living room of her parents’ house and left alone to talk. Rachel was then about to graduate from Barnard with her degree in music. She did not go out. She knew few people at the college because she lived at home. Of course, this was what her parents intended. The Rav and Rachel’s father, Rabbi Guttman, knew and respected one another, and they had planned the meeting of their children for some time.

Isaiah and Rachel met in the Guttmans’ brick Brooklyn house, the living room decorated in green. Rachel sat on the stiff green silk sofa, and Isaiah sat in the armchair facing her, so that he stared at the framed embroidered birds on the wall above her head. Chinese birds with fanciful tails embroidered on white silk in satin stitch. Rachel’s mother had left coffee for them on the table, and a plate of her small dry mandelbrot. Rachel and Isaiah sat with their hands at their sides. They did not touch the mandelbrot. Rachel thought that Isaiah was a good-looking young man. His eyes were a warm brown. She asked the questions. What are you learning? What do you want to do later on? She was trying to gauge his character. Isaiah told her what he was learning, that he learned every day with his father. He said he wanted to be a rabbi. He looked at her as he answered, but his voice was extremely quiet. Rachel said, “What did they tell you about me?”

“You play the piano,” he answered.

“Do you like music?” she asked.

“I don’t know much—anything about music,” Isaiah said. There was a pause and then he added, “But I like to listen.”

She liked that answer. He was honest. There wasn’t anything put on. She felt somehow that Isaiah would listen to her.

A full five years after their wedding, Rachel became pregnant with their only child. It had been difficult for her to conceive, and the pregnancy was fraught with complications. During labor she bled excessively, and almost died. She was hospitalized for several weeks after Nachum’s birth.

Nothing in life comes easily to Rachel. Nor is she an easy person. She is too quick, understands too well the selfishness, competitiveness, the cruelty, in people. She does not let bad behavior pass. She struggles against it. She struggles with herself. Even when she sits down at the piano, the music isn’t relaxation for her. She practices relentlessly, and with a kind of existential pessimism, believing that despite her skill she will never really capture the soul of the music, and that for her, music will always be a discipline and not a gift. She believes this although she plays beautifully. Rachel seems to other people to play with great feeling, although she is convinced that the inspiration is missing. She has never considered the possibility that in a performance it might not matter whether the feeling is authentic or merely projected. She believes that there is such a thing as a divine musical gift, a spiritual essence that she lacks.

But Rachel’s doubts are centered on herself; she has none about her husband. Her ambition for Isaiah is uncompromised. He is her profession, and his future is her life’s work. “It doesn’t matter,” she fumes to Isaiah. “You should ask him why he treats you like this. Is he angry at you all of a sudden? Is he suddenly upset at something that you’ve done?”

“Asking won’t help,” Isaiah says. “You know that.” He knows she isn’t really suggesting he confront his father. She is just wringing the situation over and over in her mind.

J
EREMY
has wondered about his father as well. He is baffled by his father’s sudden interest in him. After the holidays he and the Rav sit together in the Rav’s library on a couch moved in from the living room, and they talk about Jewish and classical philosophy. Aristotle
and Rambam, Plotinus, Halevi, Philo. They speak about Jeremy’s travels in Italy and the clear simplicity of the Fra Angelico murals in Florence. They speak of the poetry of Petrarch, of Machiavelli’s anatomy of the art of war, and Jeremy’s work on the frame narrative in Castiglione. They discuss Jeremy’s paper on the courtier prince as an emblem of Plato’s unity of virtues. The Rav trembles more now; he speaks haltingly, and his face seems creased with shadows. Only his dark eyes are unaffected. They burn with intelligence, black and quick.

Sometimes Jeremy thinks of those people near death who suddenly turn to religion as if afraid of the hereafter and penitent for their former lives. He thinks wryly that his father is doing this in reverse, turning to his prodigal son with a sudden nostalgia for secular learning, for the memory of his wife and his own youth. Jeremy tries to objectify the attention in this way, and yet he can’t really think about it objectively. He enjoys it too much.

One October afternoon Jeremy sits in the library on his father’s couch and his father says, “I like this very much, the problem of the virtues. They are different and yet they are one. We used to study it in school. Where is my
Protagoras?”

“I don’t know, Father,” says Jeremy, glancing around the book-lined room. In 1946 the Rav bought the apartment behind his own, and workers came and broke through the dividing walls. The Rav’s library is a double room, made from two parlors back to back, with an arch carved from the wall between them. The front parlor is dark and wintry, with deep leather chairs and brown velvet curtains. The bookcases rise up to the ceiling, and books fill every inch of space on the walls. In the back parlor even more volumes line the walls. Thousands of them rising up and crammed together on the shelves. Low tables are stacked with books. Even the leather ottoman in front of the Rav’s reading chair is weighted down with volumes. The Rav probably hasn’t looked at Plato in thirty years, and his copy must be buried deep behind the tall volumes in Hebrew and Aramaic.

“I remember Socrates’ question,” the Rav says. “If the virtues are all aspects of the whole, how can we distinguish them from each other? Are they merely different names for the same thing? Or are they truly separate? If they are separate, then is it possible to have one
without the other? Can we have temperance without wisdom? Or justice without holiness? No, of course not. And so we are left with the paradox.” He looks at Jeremy with his sharp eyes and says, “And what did Socrates prove?”

“Well, of course—” Jeremy begins.

“He argued that they are united as parts of knowledge, did he not?” The Rav pauses. Then he says slowly, “I think about it differently now from when I first studied it. I think perhaps the virtues are all distinct, that some may be taught and some not. They are all good, all valuable, but separate.”

Jeremy is surprised. “But what about their interdependence? How can you have justice without wisdom? and wisdom without holiness?”

“I think,” the Rav says heavily, almost sadly, “that in each person they may be developed to a different degree. Goodness is not all in the teaching. Some virtues are born in the soul, and some not. I think this must be. The collection of virtues depends on the individual, on his traits within him.”

“But how can you separate wisdom, temperance—”

The Rav smiles and murmurs,
“Baruch atah adoshem, hamavdil bein kodish l’kodish”
Blessed art thou, our God, who separates holiness from holiness. “I am going to teach my shiur next week,” he says.

“That’s what I heard,” says Jeremy.

“And I am going to hold my office hours again. Did you hear that?”

“No,” Jeremy says.

“They don’t want me to do it,” he says, and casts his eyes ever so slightly upward to the ceiling, to Isaiah and Rachel’s apartment. “But I will do it anyway.”

“H
E SEEMS
stronger,” Jeremy says to Isaiah and Rachel, on his way out.

“Forgive me, you don’t know,” Rachel tells him. “You have no idea. It’s impossible for him to teach. He’s pretending nothing has happened, and he can go back to all the things he did before.”

“Why shouldn’t he?” Jeremy asks.

“It will exhaust him,” Isaiah says.

“I think it will keep him going,” says Jeremy.

Rachel shakes her head. “He won’t admit that he’s ill, but in his condition—the Parkinson’s and now the heart—he can’t drive himself on and on. He’ll have some kind of episode….”

Jeremy looks at his sister-in-law, intense, severe, and, as always, worried. “What are you so afraid of?” he asks her.

“I’m not afraid, I’m speaking from experience,” she says, bristling. “Because I care for him. Both of us do. We don’t come in and out. We organize our lives around his minyan, his shiur, his meals, his medication. And if he’s ill or if he suddenly …
we
are responsible.”

“I feel just as responsible as you do,” Jeremy says.

“Feel,” Rachel says, and the word seems to carry the weight of her accusation. Jeremy might feel, but she and Isaiah are there day and night.

“You chose, you chose to take care of him,” Jeremy says coolly, “and for him to care for you. I’m not going to feel guilty about your life. I’m sorry you resent mine.”

“I resent it that you suddenly come in and start passing judgment.” Rachel ignores Isaiah’s pressure on her arm.

“He asks me to come. Is this difficult for you?” Jeremy knows he is wounding them and he’s glad. “Is it difficult for you that we have things to talk about?”

I
N THE
library the Rav feels suddenly exhausted. When Jeremy is with him he feels stronger. His speech is clearer when he speaks to his son. Even his body seems to draw itself together, alert and straight and trembling less. But after Jeremy leaves, the Rav is tired, and his illness descends on him again.

The Rav should lie down, but he won’t let himself. When he lies down, his head becomes heavy. He has strange dreams; his muscles stiffen and it is difficult for him to get up again. Instead, he heaves himself up from his desk and inches along carefully, guiding himself along the bookcases. Then he eases himself into his reading chair with his large gemara. He wills himself through the dense thicket of text on the page, and hacks with irritation at the little paradoxes and conundrums in his path. His new medication makes him impatient,
and agitated. He would rather not take the pills, but without them he cannot move. Stiffly, he sits in his brown leather library chair, and tries to bring the words before him into focus. His head hurts with frustration and with disappointment because Jeremy has gone.

“Do you need a drink?” Rachel asks him. “Do you need a drink of water?” She appears with a glass of water and a straw. The Rav drinks more easily from a straw.

“No, no,” the Rav says. “Tell Isaiah we must sort through the correspondence.”

“He already has,” Rachel says.

“I did not ask him to,” the Rav says sharply. “Bring him here.”

Then Rachel brings Isaiah and stands silent as the Rav berates her husband for looking at the letters that have come in that day and for organizing the papers on his desk, for touching his manuscripts and looking into his affairs. Rachel burns with indignation to hear Isaiah mistreated in this way and ordered like a schoolboy never to pry into his father’s things again. Suddenly this winter, the Rav will not let Isaiah do the secretarial jobs he has done faithfully for fifteen years. He will not let Isaiah assist him with his correspondence or substitute for him in his shiur, or answer halachic questions or lead services. He berates Isaiah instead, and spends his waking hours with Jeremy.

Quickly, angrily, Rachel prepares dinner in her father-in-law’s shadowy kitchen at the back of the apartment. The winter light from the one small window is gray. The sky looks strained and overwrought, about to snow. When Isaiah passes the kitchen door, she gestures him inside.

“I don’t understand him,” she tells Isaiah. “Why is he punishing you?”

“He isn’t punishing me.”

“He’s taken everything away from you. Now of all times, when he can do the least for himself!”

She opens the oven and checks on her lemon tarragon chicken. She pricks a chicken breast with a fork. “Does he ask your opinion? Does he talk to you about your place in the community? He treats you like a stranger.” She slides the oven rack back fiercely and shuts the oven door.