Kaaterskill Falls (36 page)

“It is winter,” said the swallow, “and the chill snow will soon be here. In Egypt the sun is warm on the green palm-trees, and the crocodiles lie in the mud and look lazily about them. My companions are building a nest in the temple of Baalbec, and the pink and white doves are watching them, and cooing to each other.”

—O
SCAR
W
ILDE
The Happy Prince

W
HEN
the High Holidays come again, Elizabeth goes with Isaac and the children to the Kirshner synagogue in the city, and they walk inside with the other families, dressed up in their best fall clothes. She sits with the girls in the balcony, and the other women nod to her, or touch the children as they walk by. The women who speak to Elizabeth ask when the new baby is due. The others just look at her. They know something about the store. Elizabeth senses their curiosity and turns away.

She sits among them, but she feels perfectly alone. She hears the voices of the congregation; she sees the letters in the book in front of her, and her lips move, but she is muffled by her own thoughts. She knows she has lost something. She does not belong to them in the same way anymore.

Elizabeth read one summer in Henry Adams about the monastery on Mont-Saint-Michel, which is surrounded by water on three sides at low tide. The tide came in each day and transformed the place into an island, sometimes trapping tourists overnight. Elizabeth has been that kind of tourist, taking day trips, and staying longer each time, until, at last, entranced, she forgot about the time. But she was a tourist in the other direction, traveling off the island to tour the mainland, leaving her small and perfect world. The water rushed in behind her.

She shouldn’t be thinking these things in shul. Feeling sorry for
herself on this day. What is she, if she can’t sit among her neighbors without knowing she has their approval? What was she thinking all those years? Was all her time in shul really only about other people, so that now, isolated, she cannot pray? Disappointing, unflattering, but perhaps it’s true. Perhaps a certain sociability and desire to please are all she ever had for God.

Despair and confusion wash over her. She has to steady herself, steel herself to sit there during the long morning Rosh Hashanah service. She finds the pages for Sorah and Brocha. She listens to Rav Isaiah when he talks about tshuvah, return, repentance, and redemption.

“Have we been the people we should have been?” Isaiah asks, far below in the sanctuary. “Are we now the people we should be? Every act we do should be
al kiddush hashem
—for the glory of God. Every deed to make his name holy. In our homes, in our streets, in our work. Our lives should be lived with one purpose. There should be no division. We must never think: Here, I am a good pious Jew, but there, in the office, something else. We should be the same in every place, at every time. We should be conscious of His presence. All the days of our lives.”

Rav Isaiah’s voice floats up through the hushed building to the balcony, and Elizabeth can just make out his small dark figure. She knows that what he says is true, and yet the message is distasteful to her; she cannot separate the words from the speaker. She cannot forget her audience with him in Kaaterskill. The Rav spoke to her then; and, when she tried to reply, he dismissed her and her ideas, he ordered her to give up her project. He crushed her utterly.

They troop back to the apartment, Elizabeth and Isaac and the children along with their guests, the Krackowers, an English couple with their son. The girls set the table for ten: the heavy white cloth, with a pale, almost imperceptible, wine stain, the palest pink, where Sorah once knocked over a glass, the white dishes and crystal, the silver challah plate and the silver knife; two round challahs, covered with the embroidered challah cover, garlands of embroidered flowers, and looping silver fringe. Elizabeth looks over at the table from the kitchen, and it is ready. Every spoon and decorative leaf. She is pouring honey from her big jar into the silver honey bowl with its long
silver spoon. At the last minute, after they make motzi and eat the challah, she will cut the apples, because the girls won’t eat them when they’re brown. She will dribble the apples with honey for a sweet new year. Brocha will complain she didn’t get enough, but the honey will be sweet and smooth on her tongue. And Elizabeth will be sad. She feels her sadness growing within her. Weeks have passed, and her sadness is starting to show, as the baby shows now. As always, she carries round and low.

She is angry with herself for always thinking about her loss. She calls everyone to the table and Isaac says kiddush. She serves the food—salad with gefilte fish, chicken soup with kreplach, roast turkey and stuffing, tsimmes, orange and gold with sweet potatoes and carrots, two kugels. She serves from one end of the table, and Isaac carves the turkey at the other. The apartment is warm, because they have left the oven on low to reheat the food for the two-day holiday. Isaac talks to the Krackowers’ teenaged son about what he is learning at the yeshiva.

After dessert and the grace after meals, after the Krackowers are gone, the girls go to their rooms to play. They play for a long time quietly by themselves. Elizabeth only hears a murmur from the two bedrooms.

“You should lie down,” Isaac tells her as he puts away the benschers.

“All right,” she says.

“Elizabeth. You seem so tired.”

“I am tired,” she says.

“You’ve been working too hard,” he tells her. “Cooking all this, and cleaning.”

She brushes crumbs off the tablecloth. “That’s what it is,” she says.

“What did you say?”

“That’s the strange thing. The holidays feel like work, suddenly. I suppose they were work before, but they never felt that way. It never used to be so hard.”

“You know why it’s hard,” Isaac says. He assumes she means the pregnancy, but he misunderstands her.

This year cooking and cleaning and even the praying are hard,
because Elizabeth is divided from what she used to be, and the tide is in, and she didn’t get back in time. She is standing on the shore; she is clearing the table, shaking out the tablecloth over the water. Preparing the house for Rosh Hashanah was sweet before. It was sweet to begin the new year by listening to the Rav. Elizabeth had listened to him with the others and rededicated her life each year. Today, when she heard the new Rav’s words, she believed that they were true, and when she watched him speak, she knew that she would follow him, but following is work. She admits to herself the conflict between her own desires and his decisions; she admits the disjunction between her ideas and his plan for the Kehillah. The disjunction was always there, but it was inside of her. Private, familiar. The Rav broke it open, wounding her, making her confess it.

She walks down the hall and passes the little girls’ cramped bedroom. Sorah, Ruchel, and Brocha are playing there, still dressed up in their pretty dresses, still wearing their lockets. They are playing hospital, with their dolls as patients on the beds. The hospital is full of sick dolls and teddy bears tucked under white guest-towel sheets. Medicine is distributed, shots given, the sash of Sorah’s purple dress serves as a Band-Aid, wrapped several times around the head of Brocha’s bear.

“I’m going to take his blood pressure,” Ruchel says.

“No, me!” says Sorah.

Of course, all the girls are playing they are nurses.

T
HAT
autumn the leaves turn late in the little parks. Red edges brighten the slight elms that line the streets. The tree in front of the Rav’s building is small and protected by a black wrought-iron enclosure, but when the sapling turns, its scant leaves are transformed into a shower of gold. Inside their apartment Isaiah and Rachel hardly have time to notice. They are still grappling with the mountain of paperwork in the library, the bills and taxes, the Rav’s will.

Many years ago the Kehillah bought the Washington Heights apartment for the late Rav. The deed was written out for him, in his name, Rav Elijah Kirshner, and there was no mortgage. The Rav owned the apartment free and clear. The house in Kaaterskill, however, was not paid for by the congregation. The rebbetzin Sarah bought the place in 1948 with reparation money sent her as the sole survivor of her family. She went up to Kaaterskill that summer and found the white house near to the synagogue. She chose it for its placement on the hill and for the large front porch, the beech tree at the side, and the large sloping garden. After picking out the house, Sarah wrote a check for the entire cost, ten thousand dollars. For five thousand more she could have purchased the two lots behind it on the hillside. The rebbetzin had the money, but the extra expense seemed extravagant to her then. The two lots were later subdivided, and Sarah regretted her decision. After her death Michael King
bought the lots and subdivided them again. That was something Sarah Kirshner had never envisioned. She could not have imagined that—the land chopped up that way. But, of course, there were many things she had not dreamed of—that her porch would be glassed in, and her beech tree cut down. She had not realized then that her Schumacher curtains would fill with dust, or that her garden would be overgrown with blackberry bushes, or that her son Jeremy, her treasure, would turn his back on the family. How could she have imagined any of it? Even when she was dying, Sarah could not picture the future without her guiding hand.

Regretting her mistake passing up the lots behind her house, Sarah Kirshner bought another property in Kaaterskill. Few people in the Kehilla know of this. She bought land fronting Coon Lake, a beautiful arched piece of land, covered with trees and wildflowers, stretching in a curve into the soft muddy sand, sucked by the water. The Rav never went there after Sarah died. For twenty years the lake property stood untouched and unvisited, but the Rav did not forget it in his will. He wrote, “The apartment in Washington Heights and the house in Kaaterskill, as well as the property at Coon Lake purchased by my wife Sarah, of blessed memory, I leave to my son Isaiah.”

Short and tersely written, the will’s major section is devoted to Isaiah’s inheritance. A few paragraphs spell out the Rav’s provision for the Kirshner yeshiva; the gift of a certain set of books, the Rav’s volumes of Talmud, his tomes of Mishnah and the works of the Jewish sages. These books were given to the school long ago and form the core of the yeshiva library. All this is in order. Years ago the Rav told Isaiah and Rachel of his wishes, and they have already made their own plans. They will sell the Coon Lake property to raise money in the Rav’s memory for the Kollel of advanced and needy Talmud students.

When the Rav’s attorney opens the will in the Rav’s library, Isaiah and Rachel just glance at it together. They know what the will contains. They scarcely have to read the document. Then one sentence stops them short. Just a few words at the bottom of the page, but Isaiah catches his breath when he reads them. Angry tears start in Rachel’s eyes. In disbelief they read the words twice, and then three
times. “All the books that are not part of the gift to the yeshiva, my entire personal library in the city and in Kaaterskill, I leave to my son Jeremy.” The words are typed neatly, dated March 1977, the last year of the Rav’s life. Initialed by the Rav,
E.K.

Isaiah and Rachel, and the Rav’s nephews, can scarcely believe it; they don’t want to believe it, and yet there it is, the gift to Jeremy of the Rav’s entire library, his thousands of precious volumes. His rare commentaries and philosophic treatises, theological works in rare German editions, interleaved with notes in the Rav’s own hand, the hundreds of volumes of German literature and poetry. The collection is magnificent in scope, an irreplaceable record of the Rav’s intellectual development. And the Rav has left the treasure to Jeremy. A sudden and spectacular inheritance.

For months no one in the family speaks of the will. There is the funeral, and then the tremendous work of the transition, shouldered by Isaiah and Rachel. Knowing of the bequest, Jeremy, too, is silent. He goes away to Italy for the High Holidays, as he had often done in the past. On the library shelves and on tables throughout the Rav’s locked apartment, the books wait, their spines hooped with gold, their gilt-edged pages shining in the dusty light. They are uncataloged, many unread for years, many touched only by the Rav’s own hands.

However, in November, the holidays are over, and Jeremy has returned. It is time to speak of these things. Jeremy comes to his brother’s door, and walks into the apartment above the Rav’s locked and silent home. Isaiah and Rachel usher him in and take his coat. Their apartment is the same. They are still living as they were above the Rav’s rooms, working like bees next to the sealed honeycomb.

“How are you?” Jeremy asks his brother.

“Thank God. And how was your trip?” Isaiah asks.

“It went well. I gave a paper in Milan.”

“Come, sit down,” says Rachel, and they sit, the three of them, in the living room. Isaiah and Rachel take the long old-fashioned sofa, and Jeremy the high-backed chair opposite. On the coffee table between them Rachel pours tea. She offers mandelbrot, her mother’s recipe.