“She wants to bring up food from the city to Kaaterskill,” Isaac says, “so the women can shop during the week, instead of waiting for us to come up on weekends with all the groceries in the car.”
The Rav nods with a pursed-lip smile. “We have who and what,” he says. “Now, how?”
Isaac explains about the back room in Hamilton’s store, and gives the names of the stores in Washington Heights from whom they will buy wholesale. The Rav gives his patent to no others.
By the end of this the Rav is leaning back in his leather desk chair. The explanations tire him, Elizabeth thinks. He was more interested in Isaac’s textual defense. He pauses now, and seems to forget them for a minute as they stand there, Isaac in front of the desk, Elizabeth nearer the door. Then in an instant he makes his decision.
“Isaiah, the typewriter.”
Wordlessly Isaiah rolls two sheets of the Rav’s letterhead and carbon paper into the gleaming black manual typewriter. Hammer-hard, Isaiah hits the silver keys as his father dictates a letter of permission:
I, the Reverend Doctor Elijah Kirshner, have examined the business proposals of Isaac Shulman and his family, to purvey kosher food from the city up to Kaaterskill, and to bring this food up to the mountain, packaged and unaltered in any way, and to be sold unchanged.
The proposal seems to me without any harm to the Kehilla.
Isaiah unrolls the letter and puts it on the desk in front of the Rav. “My pen,” the Rav says.
Isaiah opens a desk drawer and takes a pen out of its case. It is a black pen, glossy black trimmed with gold, but not, Elizabeth notices, a fountain pen like those on top of the desk. This is a fancy Waterman ballpoint.
The Rav puts on reading glasses and reads the letter. The paper quivers in his hands. With trembling fingers the Rav puts down the letter and signs his name. He writes firmly, almost too firmly, so that his signature is crabbed with his efforts to control it. Then he pushes the paper toward them. “That is all,” he says.
They stand there a moment looking at him. “Thank you,” Isaac says. “Thank you for seeing us.”
The Rav doesn’t answer; he just nods to Isaiah to see them out.
Isaiah opens the door for them. Only as they are walking out the door does the Rav’s voice drift after them. “Isaac Shulman.” Startled, Isaac and Elizabeth turn to where the Rav sits at the leather covered desk with his books all around him. The Rav is smiling faintly, almost imperceptibly. “Isaac Shulman.”
“Yes,” says Isaac from the doorway.
“I remember your father.”
4
THANKSGIVING day is cold and rainy. Andras and Nina have to step over mud puddles to get into the car. As they do every year, they are going with the children to Eva and Saul’s house for Thanksgiving dinner. Eva lives in a large brick house in Brooklyn. Each house in her neighborhood has a glassed-in porch and a high-peaked roof and a garden. All the houses were built in the 1930s, and they are almost alike. Inside, Eva has carpeted her house everywhere in pale green. The stairs, the living room, the dining room, and even the downstairs bathroom are all soft and padded with carpet. Eva’s Persian rugs lie on top of the wall-to-wall carpeting, in yet another layer, so that the house has a hushed feeling, even with company. The windows are covered with filmy white curtains. The furniture is dark wood, elaborately carved, and throughout the house, on side tables, and end tables, and even atop the dark piano, Eva has placed cut-crystal candy dishes filled sometimes with sour balls, sometimes with chocolate drops.
As soon as they arrive, Nina insists on helping in the kitchen. Maja is already at the stove with Eva, and the three women work together. Andras and Saul and Philip sit with the children in the living room and read the paper. The table is already set, and there is nothing for them to do.
Hours later they sit down at the great mahogany dining-room table with its clawed feet. Eva carves her turkey and serves it onto each china plate along with stuffing, cranberry sauce, sweet potato and carrot tzimmes, kasha varnishkas, and pickled red cabbage. With just a little help from Maja, Eva has done almost all the cooking, and she is tired. Her face is flushed, but her eyes are happy. “You’re going to play for us this afternoon?” she asks Renée.
Renée says nothing. She just sits in the Shabbes dress her mother made her wear, and she picks at her food. She knows how much her aunts like to hear her play their piano, but she hates to do it.
“Did she bring her music?” Eva asks Nina.
“Of course,” Nina says.
“We had the piano tuned,” says Eva.
Again, Renée doesn’t answer, but she feels her father looking at her. “Thank you,” she says. She had talked to Stephanie on the phone before coming. Renée’s mother doesn’t allow her to see Stephanie in the city, but surreptitiously Renée calls her on the phone.
“They’re going to make me play for them,” Renée said miserably. “And I just make mistakes all the time, and then my mother tells me I wouldn’t be making those mistakes if I practiced, and if I don’t practice all the money for my lessons will be wasted….”
“So don’t play this year,” said Stephanie. “Don’t play ball.”
“She’ll make me play,” said Renée.
“Not if you don’t let her,” said Stephanie.
Stephanie said that Renée should go on strike this Thanksgiving. She should use passive resistance, or, at the very least, forget her music at home. Renée tried to forget her music, but her mother remembered it for her.
“I have to drive back up to Kaaterskill tomorrow morning and check on the repairs,” Andras tells his sisters.
“You’ll have to leave early to get home for Shabbes,” Maja says.
“Of course,” says Andras. He would never tell his sisters the truth. That it doesn’t matter to him if he arrives home before sundown or not. He would say it to Nina, but not to Eva and Maja. His wife would flare up at him, but if he spoke to his sisters coldly like that, if he showed them that he didn’t care about Shabbes or their treasured holidays, then it would wound them. He would rather lie to them than make them sad. He would rather protect them, always speaking to them gently, hiding and withholding everything sharp and bitter. In this way Andras is more honest to Nina than he is to Eva and Maja. Nina doesn’t understand this, but it is true.
Eva has made three pies for dessert. Pumpkin, pecan, and cherry with a lattice crust. Nina brings them in and cuts them, placing thin slices on the dessert plates—Eva’s city china, cream and gold.
“I see for once you aren’t complaining about being served,” Saul teases Eva.
“I’m happy to be sitting down,” Eva says frankly, and she leans back in her chair.
“What about the piano, Renée?” Maja asks.
“Go ahead,” Nina tells her daughter.
“Mommy,” Renée mutters under her breath.
“What is it?” Nina asks.
“Mommy, I don’t want to,” she whispers.
“She used to love to play for us on Thanksgiving,” Maja says to Andras, half chiding, half surprised.
Renée sits where she is, on strike, tensing for a torrent of nagging and begging from her mother. She sits and ducks her head down, but no one speaks. Then she feels an iron grip on her shoulder.
“Come here for a minute,” her father says, and he ushers her into the kitchen and shuts the swinging kitchen door.
“Daddy. Ouch!”
Her father looks her in the eye and he speaks to her so quietly and so seriously that she can scarcely breathe. “You are going to sit down and do exactly what your aunts ask you to do.”
“But—”
“Sh.”
Renée is terrified by her father’s voice. In all her fifteen years her father has never spoken to her this way before.
“Daddy,” she whispers, “why do I have to play piano? I’m not even—”
“It has nothing to do with whether you’re good or not. Your aunts want to hear it. The reason is that they love you.
And so you are going to play. This is not something your mother is asking you to do. This is something I am telling you to do. And if you disobey me, I will punish you.”
Then Renée’s father holds open the swinging kitchen door, and wordlessly, Renée steps out and goes to the piano. She sits down and looks intently at her music, and with tears of confusion in her eyes, she begins to play.
ANDRAS makes good time on his trip the next day to Kaaterskill. He leaves the city at dawn, and takes care of all his business at the house in the morning. A month after his October visit there is some satisfaction in seeing the repairs finished at last. He examines the new dining-room window, and the new carpeting now in place.
Snowflakes dance on the windshield as Andras starts home. Just a light snow. It won’t last, the radio informs him. Andras turns on the windshield wipers and drives down Main Street, past the movie theater and the A & P. A delivery truck backs out of the supermarket’s parking lot, streaking mud in long tracks across the gravel. The first ice storm has already hit the mountain, leaving threadbare rattling trees. The older trees are withered and dry, and some of the young trees look damaged. Only the oak in front of the post office is holding on, tattered scarlet, filibustering against winter. The road is icy. It looks like it’s going to be a hard winter.
He drives down Mohican, cautious on the slippery road. Una will be digging in, he thinks. He wonders how she can face the cold every year. But she’s tough enough, and mean. She prides herself on her endurance. As he drives, Andras looks into the trees. He doesn’t want to meet her, not after the last encounter with the gun.
He can see her cabin easily without the thick summer foliage blocking the view: the clearing where she keeps the goats, the path lined with pieces of broken glass, the burial ground for her animal friends. He sees with some surprise that Una has left her ax out by the woodpile, and her toolbox as well. That isn’t like her, to leave her tools out in the snow. He looks at the cabin and realizes that although there is a small load of wood by the door, there is no smoke coming from her chimney. Then he sees that the goats are gone.
He parks on the shoulder of the road. Puzzled, he sits there with the engine running. At last he gets out of the car and starts walking. Brambles snap against his legs, and the cold bites through his thin shoes. He walks to Una’s door and knocks. Even when they were on good terms, Una never invited him inside. The door is partly open, and gives easily to his fingers.
For a long moment he stands there in the cold, in his double-breasted coat and his cashmere scarf, his leather driving gloves and absurd soft shoes. He has never walked into Una’s cabin. He doesn’t want to go in. He is afraid to see her. Afraid to look.
The place is freezing inside and dark. There is only the dim light coming through the window. There is the inky smell of the developing table, the books, the photographic paper, the big cameras hanging on hooks next to the door. Just one room, with a table and chair, and a bunk bed. Polaroids pinned up on the wood, several dimes and a few pennies stuck with Scotch tape there as well. The bunk beds, both top and bottom, are piled with blankets jumbled together. She left in a rush, he thinks, looking at the pile on the bottom bunk. Then he sees her lying underneath. Small, stiff, cold, her face buried in her pillow. Suddenly he doesn’t have enough air. He wants to run, but he can’t move.
“Una,” he calls to her, as if she were sleeping.
He should pull the pillow off. He should turn her over. Instead he rushes out and away, tripping over himself to the car. He drives with numb fingers to Kendall Falls. Rushes up the icy path to the library, snow covering its tall peaked roof. He runs in, the glass door swinging behind him. The librarian, Ernestine Schermerhorn, starts up from her desk. She doesn’t recognize him in the winter.
“It’s Una,” he says, “I found her.”
“Found her where?” asks the librarian.
“In her cabin.”
“But she came in two days ago. I asked her two days ago about the heat,” Ernestine says. “I’ll have to—I’ll have to—” She calls an ambulance, and Judge Taylor, and the police.
Andras stands in the library with its rusty orange carpet and tells the Kendall Falls police exactly what he saw. He watches them as they scribble in their small notebooks. He thinks how Una would have laughed at him, shivering there. Of course, she was right about him from the beginning. She sensed it immediately about him—that he is afraid, simply afraid, of death.
I am numb; I am numb, Andras thinks. The police are gone. He starts the engine in his car, and rubs his hands at the vent of the dry car heater. He feels like ice, alone there, warming up the car in the gravel parking lot of the library. In the summer there are bushes behind the lot, thick bushes and rabbits. There are the petunias marching up each side of the library path. He sits there with the engine running in the snow and thinks about Una, clear eyed, intent, photographing lichen on a rotting log. He thinks of how she spent her years watching, and how he’s spent his averting his eyes. How absurd she would have thought him, stock still in her house, bundled up and paralyzed with fear. He couldn’t touch her, couldn’t take a step closer to her. He, who has never seen the flies cover an animal in the forest and neatly suck away the flesh. He is the one, after all, who doesn’t go to memorial services. Not even those wordless ceremonies with the candles illuminating a collective darkness. Which candles would be assigned to them—the people of his childhood? His parents, grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins. He has never visited the places of their death. He’s never seen a body. They’d vanished, left nothing tangible. Did he really believe that? he wonders now. That they weren’t flesh and blood? Did he really think of it that way? As if their bodies didn’t break and burn. As if their souls left when he did, and had wings to fly from pain.
“Please,” he says aloud. His voice surprises him. He didn’t mean to speak, but the word escapes him anyway, almost a prayer.
Down the mountain Andras drives and drives, and the car’s heater blows hot dry air onto his knees, but he is tight with cold. Shivering. Outside the ashen trees fly by. He scarcely slows for turns as he takes the road down the mountain. He speeds, so he won’t have to think. He spins away onto the straight Thruway, with the car radio turned up loud. Only the heavy weekend traffic slows him down.
Andras takes a breath and turns off the radio. He tries to calm his shaking hands. In an hour he will be back in the city. He will drive up to his office and get some work done. Catch up on his order forms. The thought reassures him. Soon he will be back at work. He will be almost himself again. In a day, in a few days, he will walk around without thinking about her, without thinking about any of this. He tells himself this, but his throat is tight. He tries to blink away the sight of Una, but his eyes ache.
On the Thruway he passes cars with fir trees strapped onto their roofs. Christmas trees for apartments in the city. There are station wagons with long skis on top, locked into ski racks. A few cars on the road are loaded with deer trussed onto their roof racks. Each deer stiff on its side, back legs tied together, front legs tied together, brown eyes like glass.
The sides of the mountains were covered with trees, the banks of the brooks were diversified with flowers; every blast shook spices from the rocks, and every month dropped fruits upon the ground….
—SAMUEL JOHNSON
Rasselas
1
BEES cover the goldenrod, the air floats with pollen and barbecue smoke, and Hamilton’s store bell rings with Elizabeth’s customers. There are Kirshners buying food in bulk, the women wheeling strollers loaded down with bags. Customers come up the road from Phoenicia and Bear Mountain, the weekenders bursting out of their cars like circus families. A Yiddish translator and his wife saw the ad Elizabeth stapled up on the community bulletin board in Palenville. They pull away with three grocery bags of meat and requests from their daughters for chicken pot pies. The Spiegelman family reunion drives up in Volkswagen vans and buys out Elizabeth’s entire stock of Hebrew National fran
kfurters and ground beef. Elizabeth rings up the huge purchase in Hamilton’s back room, and she feels strange, a bit jumpy. Even now in midsummer, whenever customers arrive, Elizabeth’s heart pounds with excitement; the rhythm of her ambition within her.
In a leaf-green dress elderly Mrs. Sobel picks out her groceries from Elizabeth’s stock. The graceful wife of the Conservative rabbi and historian Cecil Birnbaum admires, Mrs. Sobel comes into town from her forested estate, and buys blocks of cheese and frozen rib eye roasts. Cutting in front of her, two boys plunge their hands into the cooler where Elizabeth keeps kosher Popsicles and ice cream sandwiches on ice. Sleek and hungry from swimming in the lake, they throw down their money on the counter, one of the quarters still spinning as they dive back through the door to the street.
Elizabeth knows Hamilton is watching her customers as they walk purposefully through his store. They find their way to the back, and make their purchases only from her, while Hamilton watches with a strange expression, partly annoyed, partly impressed.
“I’d like to put up a sign,” Elizabeth tells Hamilton one Friday afternoon, when she’s closing up. “A sign of my own.”
“I don’t want another sign,” says Hamilton.
“But it’s impossible for people walking by—”
“They seem to find you,” he says.
“Just a small sign,” she says. “Or something I can set up on the sidewalk. I’d take it down when the store is closed.”
Hamilton doesn’t answer. Thoughtfully, he walks out to the front of his little building. He opens the screen door and stands out on the steps, looking up at his own red-and-black sign: HAMILTON’S, in curlicues, 1890s style. He bought it from a mail order catalog two years ago.
“I don’t need another sign,” he says, stepping back inside.
“But I need one,” Elizabeth says.
Hamilton looks at her. “I may raise my rent next summer,” he says.