Kaaterskill Falls (6 page)

When his mother died, Jeremy was only twenty-five. Suddenly her advocacy and interest were gone. There was only awkwardness
between him and his brother, and with his father, an increasing tension, an icy cold that worsened every year as Jeremy still did not marry. His mother had always assumed he would marry, as she had assumed he would succeed his father, but it was just love; just the force of her love that made her assume these things. In all his studies and his travels, Jeremy has never had a teacher or a friend who has loved him as much as his mother. She lived to see him ordained as a rabbi, but she died before he received his doctorate. She had wanted him to achieve both, as his father had so many years before. She had wanted him to become the rabbi and the scholar that his father was, or might have been if not for the war. Jeremy’s mother spurred him on; she gave him language teachers, trips to Europe, books of poetry. She gave him a secular education rare anywhere and unheard of in the Washington Heights community. Even she did not fully understand the value of her gift. She educated her son to rise to the Rav’s position. She wanted to give Jeremy the key to his father’s kingdom. She gave it to him and set him free.

“R
EALLY
, it’s odd to see you here, out of school,” Beatrix tells Jeremy over coffee. “The scion of the famous rabbi. I had no idea.” They are sitting in the kitchen of Beatrix and Cecil’s house. A sunny spacious room with a black potbellied stove as well as a modern oven, a round table tucked into a bay window, a curvaceous 1930s refrigerator with a decal of strawberries. There is no dishwasher, and there are few counters, but there is a blue-and-white delft coffee grinder attached to the wall. “It’s like discovering someone has a fortune—someone you thought you knew quite well. But it’s more spectacular than that; a whole kingdom in the mountains …”

“Only in the summer, Bea,” says Cecil.

“Yes, yes, a summer retreat, like the Indian princes retreating during the monsoons.”

Jeremy raises an eyebrow. The comparison is odd. His father’s middle-class New Yorkers and the bejeweled mogul princes.

“So are you a courtier prince?” Beatrix presses. “Is that why you study all those little princely books? Everyone talks about Jeremy’s clothes,” she tells Cecil. “They say he finishes his lecture and puts on his coat, and it’s as if he were putting on his cape. Because he gives his
lectures in character.
You
can do that. I could never do it teaching my miserable freshmen calculus.”

“You could try,” says Cecil. “Haven’t you seen Richard Feynman lecturing? He says he just thinks—If I were an electron where would I be?”

“Sh. Sh,” Beatrix says, and then to Jeremy, “What’s it like to be in the line of succession, as it were?”

“Well, I’m not—”

“But you are in line, aren’t you? Just think—to be inheriting all those souls.”

Jeremy sips his coffee. He can’t begin to explain any of it to Beatrix. Not merely the politics of the community but those of his family as well.

“I think you’ve got it backward,” Cecil says to Beatrix. “In a situation like this you wouldn’t be inheriting souls at all; they would be inheriting you.”

“No one is going to be inheriting me, I’m afraid,” Jeremy says dryly.

“But suppose you grew a white beard and became all wrinkled and sagelike,” Beatrix proposes.

“Tell me about the wedding,” Jeremy says.

“You were supposed to be there,” Beatrix says.

“If I hadn’t been in Spain, I would have been,” says Jeremy.

“H
E’S
very strange,” Beatrix says to Cecil after Jeremy leaves.

“Of course you know he isn’t Kirshner’s scion at all,” Cecil says.

“Yes, I suppose he had to give it up when he started teaching on the outside. A profane university. All sorts of atheists. But then, can you ever give it up completely? Isn’t it bred in the bone?”

“I think he does what he wants,” says Cecil.

“Oh, a secret identity. Different rules for different places.”

“Different manners, in any case. He didn’t like all your questions.”

“No, I suppose not.”

“I liked them, though.”

“So you say he has all sorts of secrets.”

“Not secrets. Personas.”

Beatrix thinks for a moment. Then she grins. “Of course. He must. That way he can be Jack in the country and Ernest in town!”

E
LIZABETH
and the girls arrive that evening carrying their badminton racquets, and Elizabeth can see that Cecil’s wife is a true geometer. Beatrix has surveyed and chalked a real court over the levelest place on the hilly Birnbaum lawn. The lines are all measured out, the corners square, the net pins driven firmly into the ground.

“Are they
all
yours?” Beatrix asks, looking at the girls. “How very clever of you! A captive audience. What do you usually do with them during the day?”

Elizabeth herself used to wonder how to occupy her daughters. She’s found, though, that with a steady stream of projects, puzzles, and excursions she and the children survive quite well in the summers. She goes to flea markets and buys odd lots of yarn and fabric remnants. And so under the trees each girl works on handicrafts according to her age and skill. Chani embroiders, although she doesn’t much like it. Malki crochets. Ruchel is learning bargello. Sorah is learning to crochet, but she can only make chains. She plays with Brocha in the pine cones.

“Don’t you worry they’ll become overly domestic?” asks Beatrix. “Too—too little-womanish?”

Elizabeth shrugs and concentrates on her game. She does look Victorian in her long dirndl skirt and white blouse, kerchief over her hair, but running over the lawn she’s much faster and more fluid than Beatrix. Watching the two of them from the window in the pantry, Cecil calls out, “She really has you, Bea! You’re all over the court!” Elizabeth is hot, but she loves badminton, and she has so little opportunity for exercise. She’s always envied Isaac’s ability to sit and be content. Somehow she can’t savor quiet the way he does. She loves to run. She whips her badminton racquet and the birdie whooshes through the air.

“I’d like to play against you,” Cecil tells Elizabeth after she’s beaten Beatrix twice.

“Oh, good,” says Beatrix. “Now she’ll trounce you, my boy.” And she retires to watch in the shade.

Elizabeth’s daughters stare at Beatrix in her shorts and tank top. Her legs show, and her arms and shoulders.

“She’s got
you
all over the court now!” Beatrix calls out gleefully to her husband. And Cecil, breathing hard as he stretches for elliptical shots, looks at his neighbor with new respect.

Partly because Elizabeth has an insurmountable lead, Cecil pauses before his serve. “Listen,” he says.

They all look up, and they can hear faint music drifting in the trees.

“I think you’re stalling for time,” Elizabeth chides Cecil.

“It must be from the Sobels in back,” Cecil says. “The wedding reception for their niece. I remember they were going to have a trio up from Palenville.”

“Let’s dance!” Beatrix springs up from the grass.

“Absolutely not.” Cecil rejects her outstretched hands. “You know I never dance.”

“Oh, all right then.” Beatrix claps her hands on Elizabeth’s shoulders. Despite her protests that she doesn’t know how, Elizabeth finds herself twirling to the music with Beatrix, her skirt billowing between the mathematician’s bare legs.

“Oh, no, I can’t, I’ve never waltzed,” Elizabeth gasps as they waltz across the grass.

“I do think we’re corrupting her!” Beatrix calls out to Cecil.

Kerchief loosening, Elizabeth protests, “Oh no, it’s quite permissible for women to dance together.” And then, over Beatrix’s shoulder, she sees her children sitting under the tree, all looking at her. Five pairs of disapproving eyes.

N
OISE
fills Andras Melish’s house. Andras’s daughter, Renée, is practicing piano, banging away. His son, Alex, clatters up and down the stairs with the old fish tank he’s converted into a terrarium. Outside, the Curtis boy is mowing the lawn. Andras hides upstairs in the bedroom, reading about the Syrian invasion of Lebanon in the
Economist
, and hoping Nina won’t call him.

Often he avoids her. It makes him feel guilty, but he can’t help it. She is beautiful, his young wife. Her red hair, her Spanish accent—even her sharp temper—seem to him exotic, a remnant of her childhood in Buenos Aires. Andras still carries with him his first seventeen years in Budapest and the corresponding mystique of the tropical, the sun, the flaming colors, on the other side of the world. Nina is all that to his cool gray eyes. He likes to buy her clothes and jewelry. He bought her a square-cut emerald ring, and it sparkles as she gestures with her hands. You wouldn’t know she’s only five foot one, the way she moves, the way she lifts her chin to look you in the eye. She makes Andras smile, impresses him with her determined voice, her clear ideas about whom to see and how to educate the children. And he tells himself she’s sensible, insightful, about certain things. But always, after he tells himself, he comes to the fact no catalog of Nina’s virtues can change: he doesn’t take her seriously.

He’s known this for some time, and it disturbs him. He doesn’t really listen to her. She chatters and she sermonizes. She sounds so
pompous, coupling her pronouncements, for example, about large cars and safety with her insistence that Andras should save gas by driving up with Isaac. She speaks the same way about religious rituals, insisting on minutiae like fish forks that Andras really doesn’t care to know about. Over time Nina has become more and more tenacious in her observance, so that while the family used to eat in unsupervised restaurants when the children were small, now Nina mistrusts such places entirely. Andras would be perfectly happy to stay home and sleep through services on Shabbat, but Nina insists that he set a good example for the children, and so he goes. Strictly speaking, morally, Nina is right to insist. Andras’s parents taught him that if you are going to be religious, you have to do it all, observing every holiday and law. They believed that when it comes to God you can’t do things by halves—which was why they did nothing. Andras humors Nina, lets her have her kosher food and synagogue services. To his skeptical mind they don’t mean much. That’s the problem, as he sees it: he allows her all the trivial, superfluous decisions. He defers to her judgment about car pooling and the brand of cheese they buy. In appearance Andras lets Nina rule and dictate every least little thing. And in fact, the things Nina determines are least and little to him.

There are moments when Andras looks at his wife and remembers how he first felt about her. But the memories themselves are embarrassing to him now. Even his first love for her, he thinks, was middle aged. He used to prize everything Nina said to him, as if she were a child speaking each word for the first time. Later, when the words weren’t new, when her opinions no longer seemed like new creations, he let them sink back into the everyday sound of things.

As Nina has grown more observant, Andras has become distanced from her. Her religious fervor doesn’t interest him. Coming to tradition late, Nina has all the pedantry of an autodidact. Her strivings seem inauthentic to Andras, and not at all spiritual. Really nothing more than an expression of Nina’s ferocious domesticity. He isn’t involved with his wife. He knows it’s wrong. Even his gifts to Nina trouble him; he gives her rings instead of his own good opinion. He feels sometimes that he demeans her even with affection.

Sunday afternoon Andras and Nina sit with his sisters on the porch, and Nina pours iced tea.

“I’ve always felt,” Nina says, “that for the children a Jewish education must come first.”

Eva and Maja nod politely from the glider. They are always polite to Nina, although she amuses them privately. She seems to them more like a daughter-in-law than a sister-in-law. Nina is seventeen years younger than Andras, and more than twenty-five years younger than they are. Certainly, she is young enough to be their daughter. But Eva and Maja sit together in their print dresses, and they listen, as they always do, occasionally exchanging glances. A stranger would think the two were spinsters, they look so close, so complete, sitting next to each other. But, in fact, they are very much Mrs. Cohen and Mrs. Rubinstein. Very much matrons, although they married late, well after the war and their emigration. Those years still cling to them and make them a pair; long years when they subsisted on each other. Now, in their sixties, Eva and Maja together have a kind of burnished glow.

“I was talking to Regina about this,” Nina says. “She sends her children to the public schools in Beverly Hills. She doesn’t mind them studying among goyim. But I, for one, would never take the risk. If you’re with the others you forget who you are. Assimilation.” She pronounces the word slowly, as if she doesn’t want to set it off.

Eva steals a look at Maja. This red-haired girl from the ends of the earth, preaching to them about assimilation! Their little sister-in-law from South America telling them it’s dangerous to keep an open mind to different backgrounds.