Kaaterskill Falls

  “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.

  4

  NOISE 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.

  “I know about this,” Nina says, refilling their glasses. “Believe me, I know. It goes very deep in Buenos Aires. The Saints days. Parades in the streets. It goes very deep. They talk about this pluralism in the Jewish Post. They should talk about Jewish education. Renée?” she calls to her daughter as she comes out of the house.

  “I’m going into town,” Renée says.

  “She practiced today,” Andras says.

  “She practiced today fifteen minutes,” Nina corrects him.

  But Renée is already running down the walk to the street, dragging her bike behind her, taking a running start.

  “You could go see the Shulman girls and say hello,” Nina calls after her daughter. Renée keeps pedaling. “I don’t know what’s wrong with her this summer,” Nina frets.

  “She just wants to get out of the house,” says Andras. Even he does not realize how true this is.

  RENÉE pedals up the street as if her mother and her brother, and even her aunts with their iced tea, were chasing her. She used to love to come up in the summers and play with the
Shulman girls across the street. Even last summer she didn’t mind them, but this year Renée is fifteen, and suddenly everything in Kaaterskill is too short and too small. All the wrong size. “You should use the time to practice,” her mother says. “You should read a book.” But Renée isn’t going to sit around reading books. School is over, after all.

  Renée is a bit spoiled, although her mother never meant her to be. Nina is strict with her, but neither her father nor her aunts even try. Renée is too pretty. Her hair is shoulder length and copper brown. Her brown eyes are flecked with gold. She is small, and her skin is fair and lightly freckled. When she was a very little girl in curls and white dresses, no one could resist her. Her face is still pretty, but becoming more interesting, more self-aware. She still wears dresses because her mother makes her. The hems get tangled up in her bicycle, but she has to wear them all the same. Her mother doesn’t like girls to wear anything but skirts and dresses.

  In town Renée walks her bike up Main Street. She watches the children from the city camp march by in double lines. She sits for a long time on the steps of the post office. Then she wanders on in a desultory way, cutting through the parking lot of the A & P, walking her bike up the street past the launderette to where Main Street becomes a bridge over Bramble Creek. She leans her bike against the railing and looks down into the streambed below, where the water bubbles in silty pools between the rocks. She is surprised to see that someone is down there in the creek.

  A girl in rolled-up jeans is picking her way across the stream—slowly, as if looking for something. Renée scans the creek and spots an old straw hat near the bank. “Is that it?” she calls down.

  The girl looks up, startled. Then she sees where Renée is pointing. She hops from rock to rock and picks up the hat. Renée can see that the hat is a little wet, but the girl puts it on anyway and clambers up the bank and back around to the bridge where Renée is standing. “Thanks,” she says.

  “You’re welcome.” Renée can’t help staring. The girl is tall, much taller than Renée. Her skin is tanned, her eyes dark brown. She has long straight hair, brown streaked blond.

  The girl stares back at Renée. She asks, “Are you one of the summer people?”

  “Yeah,” says Renée uncomfortably.

  “I am too,” says the girl. “My name is Stephanie Fawess.” She rubs her hand off on her jeans and holds it out to Renée.

  “Renée Melish,” says Renée. And she shakes Stephanie’s hand, although it seems an odd thing to do.

  “Want to get a cheeseburger?” asks Stephanie.

  “No, thanks.”

  “Why not?”

  “I can’t,” says Renée, embarrassed.

  “Why? Diet or religion?”

  “Religion,” says Renée.

  Stephanie nods matter-of-factly. “You’re one of the Orthodox,” she says. “I have an aunt who’s Orthodox too.”

  “She’s Jewish?” asks Renée.

  “Greek,” Stephanie says. “She converted, and now she’s Greek Orthodox. My grandmother had a conniption cause we’re Maronite Catholics.”

  “Oh,” says Renée. “You’re not Greek?”

  “Syrian,” says Stephanie. “That’s my bike over there.” She points to a ten-speed bike tossed on its side on the other side of the bridge. “I’m going down to Lacy Farm to see the cows. Want to come?” Stephanie ties the straw hat under her chin. “It isn’t all that far.”

  Renée hesitates a second. Then she begins to pedal behind this strange abrupt girl with straight hair spilling out from under the hat and down her back.

  “Do only the men wear black?” Stephanie calls over as they ride.

  “No,” Renée says. “Anyway, my parents—most people—just wear normal clothes. Where do you live?”

  “Mohican Lake,” says Stephanie. “We have a boat too. My parents went fishing. That’s why I’m going to the farm. I want to be a veterinarian,” she adds. “Large animals.”

  “What grade are you in—in the city?” asks Renée.

  “Ninth. St. Ann’s.”

  Stephanie’s father and her uncle are independent truckers, she explains. They truck between New York and Montreal. It’s a good business, since they’re independent; but they have to work summers too. They drive for days up and back from Canada, and Stephanie wants to go with them but she isn’t allowed. Stephanie’s uncle rents the other house on the lake, and he also comes up with his wife and daughters, Michelle and Monique. These cousins of hers—Stephanie is worried about their minds. She herself is a feminist and successfully accused her math teacher of intimidation and harassment over his use of sexist jokes in the classroom.

  “You got him fired?” Renée is amazed.

  “Yup,” says Stephanie. “Tape recorder in my desk. Turn right here on Mohican. They’re a bunch of racists in there, you know.” She waves her hand at the gatehouse off Mohican Road. A private road arcs upward into the leafy hillside. “The owners have a secret covenant.”

  Renée doesn’t know what a covenant is, but she doesn’t ask.

  “I’d love to infiltrate them,” says Stephanie. “If I don’t work with large animals, I want to expose social injustice. I think I’m going to become an activist. What do you want to do?”

  “I don’t know,” says Renée, feeling eclipsed by the decisive and far-reaching plans of Stephanie.

  Renée’s ideas seem unimportant next to Stephanie’s agenda. Stephanie talks about the news and the election, inflation, abortion, and nuclear proliferation. “I mean, one girl in my class asked me: ‘What’s the Cold War?’” she tells Renée. “This was a girl at a selective private school, for God’s sake! I just wanted to find a place where I could quietly commit suicide, you know?”

  “Yeah,” says Renée, and she plans to find out what the Cold War is as soon as she can get her father alone.

  Where the road flattens again, the houses are year-round places, ranches fixed up with American flags in front and white wagon wheels. There are flower beds planted with petunias and vegetable patches sprouting tomato plants and giant pumpkin vines. At the turnoff onto the farm road, they find a vegetable stand with peaches, lettuce, watermelons, and barrels piled with fresh ears of corn.

  The Lacy Farm visitors’ path leads up through pastures to a great red barn and two towering aluminum silos. Dressed in overalls and serious boots, the official Lacy Farm visitors’ guide is Bebe Lacy, an in-law of the family. Mrs. Lacy leads Renée and Stephanie into the cow barn thundering with the sound of hundreds of cows chewing, snorting, swatting flies, placidly rubbing flanks against the partitions between them. The girls watch the milk machines from the wooden walkway between the double rows of stalls. Above each cow hangs a white plaque painted with her name, weight, and pounds of milk output per day. “When you leave, you girls’ll have to sign our guest book,” Mrs. Lacy says. “We always have guests sign the register because we run out of names for the cows. This is Stephanie.” Mrs. Lacy pats the rump of a huge red cow. “She’s a good one. Good milker.” Stephanie the girl looks up, as if uncertain whether this is offensive. The cow swats off a fly.

  “And what did you say your name was?” Mrs. Lacy asks Renée. She lights up when Renée tells her. “Terrific. We haven’t got a Renée. How do you spell that?”

  “Do you feel honored?” Stephanie asks Renée as they bike home.

  “What?” Renée breathes hard as she pedals to keep up with Stephanie.

  “They’re planning to name a cow after you. Don’t you feel honored?”

  Renée laughs. She feels hot and sweaty, and happy. It probably wasn’t a big deal for Stephanie, but it was an adventure for Renée to bike all the way out to the farm. She’s certainly done something not allowed. “I can think of lots of good names for the cows,” she says.

  “Yeah, but they already have most girls’ names you can imagine,” says Stephanie.

  “How about Esther?” Renée starts to giggle. “Or Eva, or Beyla?” Then she remembers the Shulman girls, ?
??How about Chani, Malki, Sorah, Ruchel, and Brocha?”

  “What is that—one name?” asks Stephanie.

  “Five,” says Renée.

  “You said them all together. Anyway, they’re too hard to pronounce. Do you want to go swimming?”

  Renée thinks for a minute. “I should go home,” she says.

  “So let’s go tomorrow. Let’s go to North Lake.”

  “All the way up there? It’s far.”

  “So we’ll take the bus,” Stephanie says. “What’s the matter with you, woman?”

  Renée chokes up again with giggles.

  “What’re you laughing about?” Stephanie asks, half joking.

  “Just the way you talk,” says Renée.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Just—calling me a woman.”

  “That’s what we are,” says Stephanie, and she looks over at Renée and her eyes sparkle, and her hair streams out like a banner behind her.

  “Okay,” Renée says, “we are.”

  RENÉE’S aunts are gone, but her parents are sitting on the porch when she comes home. Nina smells manure instantly.

  “Renée! Take off your shoes,” she says. “Where have you been? Don’t bring those shoes into the house!”

  Renée does as she is told, and takes some cookies from the table on the porch. Tired out from biking, she settles down next to her father on the glider.

  “You thought I was wrong about what I said?” her mother is asking.

  “Well …” Andras hesitates.

  “You agreed with them,” says Nina. She shakes her head. “I still say, a sense of identity is what young people need.”

  “No, Nina, no one was arguing about that,” he says. “It’s just a question of how much a school can provide—that’s all Eva meant. There is only so much a school, even a private school, can do. And as for public schools, they have a certain mission to—”