Kaaterskill Falls

  Renée, of course, knows better. She complains all the time about her Jewish school, where she has two friends and hates everyone else. Nearly everyone spends the day backbiting and acting vicious. And she’s tried to explain why the Shulman girls are so dull. All they want to do when they grow up is marry rabbis and then support their families by teaching Hebrew. In the Kirshner school, of course. And as soon as they’re married they’ll all cut their hair and wear shekels just like their mother. No one Renée knows in the city does that. But Nina still can’t see why her daughter suddenly doesn’t like Chani Shulman anymore.

  At the piano Renée fiddles with the metronome for a while and then looks at the clock.

  “I don’t hear it,” Nina calls from upstairs.

  Renée crashes down on the first page of Chopin’s Fantaisie-Impromptu. She is advanced enough to play difficult music, but not to play it well. She skips a few notes on the first runs and starts again, banging down even more violently. “Like a feather,” her piano teacher told her at her last lesson before she left for Kaaterskill. “Think of the Chopin like feather dusters on the keys.” She smashes some more chords and then sees her father come in, about to go up the stairs. She runs up to him.

  “I have to go to the party,” she says. “I can’t practice on the Bicentennial!”

  “Oh, all right,” he says absently, and walks on up the stairs.

  “Renée?” Nina calls out again from the upstairs bedroom.

  “I let her go out,” says Andras from the doorway.

  Nina turns on him. “I told her one hour piano.” In the light of the window she looks as if she could catch fire. Her red hair flames in the sun. “How can I control her if you undermine everything I do?” She tilts back her head to accuse her tall husband.

  “I wasn’t thinking,” Andras says.

  “You’re never thinking about the children.”

  Why is she so shrill? he asks himself. The afternoon sun pours into the upstairs room, and Andras retreats into the dark closet to change his shirt for a fresh one. He hates the heat. Even in the mountains he can feel the afternoon glare.

  Nina pulls the closet door open into the sun. “Andras, listen to me! Renée isn’t practicing, and you just let her get away with it.”

  “All right, she can practice tomorrow,” he says.

  “She isn’t practicing at all,” Nina tells him. As always when she is angry, her Spanish accent flares. “She isn’t making any progress.”

  “Well, she doesn’t have any talent,” Andras says matter-of-factly.

  His wife throws up her hands. “All right,” she cries. “Fine, all right. We stop the lessons!”

  “Good,” he says.

  “No!” she rages. “It’s a waste! Ten years of lessons and she wants to stop. That’s what I’m trying to tell you!”

  “Nina.” He takes her hand. “Why do you care?”

  THE Fawesses’ mailbox is decorated with balloons, the deck railing hung with red, white, and blue streamers, the front yard full of cars. Enormous cars. Navy-blue Lincolns and black stretch limousines. Renée hadn’t realized the party was so big.

  “It’s a family reunion,” Stephanie explains.

  “Are all these people your relatives?” Renée asks. There must be sixty people milling around the grand modern house by Mohican Lake. The house itself is strange. The side facing the lake is almost all glass; and, unlike the painted old-fashioned summer places in town, this house is just stained wood.

  Stephanie’s father and uncles are firing up the barbecue. “They’re mostly my relatives,” says Stephanie. “Some of them I’m not quite sure how we’re related, though.”

  They watch the musicians unloading their instruments from a van. Drums and steel-stringed lutes, strange pipes that look like recorders. The musicians set up on the deck, and gradually the tuning and experimental thumping builds into a real melody carried by pipers and twanging lutes, music flung far out into the lake with long, singing drumbeats.

  At the grill one of the chauffeurs is roasting chicken pieces over the fire. Stephanie’s mother brings out platters of raw lamb and rice. Mrs. Fawess is heavy, and short of breath from bringing out the food. Her face is round and earnest, her hair threaded with gray and pinned up out of the way. Her body looks tired.

  “My mom loves cooking. It’s her solace,” Stephanie tells Renée. Stephanie seems to enjoy that word. Solace. “That’s why we don’t have a cook. And you know what else she does? She gambles. Just for like ten dollars at a time.”

  The men are dancing near the band. Mr. Fawess dances at the center, lifting his arms above his head. He seems much younger than his wife. Slender, dark, smiling, far more relaxed, as if he were the one spending his weeks in the country. He is handsome, Renée thinks. Almost like a movie star. He has a mustache and dark shining eyes.

  Stephanie and Renée help bring out more food, more meat for the grill, more rice. They carry platters of tiny cookies shaped in wreaths, a pistachio nut at the center of each one, like a little button. They keep bringing out the food and nibbling as they go, especially the tiny cookies. At last, when all the food is out, and everyone is eating, Stephanie’s mother sits at a picnic table with four other women. She shuffles a deck of cards so that they melt together, dissolving and then melting back into the pack.

  “See,” Stephanie says. The women put in five-and ten-dollar bills, while the girls stand and watch Mrs. Fawess shuffle. Her fingers move like a magician’s, so that the deck becomes an accordion, a book, a fluttering bird’s wing.

  “You stand it,” Mrs. Fawess is telling her friends. “After twenty years you stand it.” She cuts the deck and deals out around the table.

  Stephanie whispers to Renée, “Come on, they’re going to be there for hours. Hey, I have a great idea….”

  Renée looks up warily. All Stephanie’s ideas are great. And strenuous. Stephanie doesn’t take walks, she goes on all-day hikes. She doesn’t just swim, she sails and water-skis. Renée follows along cautiously on these excursions, hurrying after Stephanie up the Escarpment Trail, shuddering in the wind while her friend navigates the sailboat. It’s new for Renée to be a follower. Renée’s friends at school never do anything adventurous enough to demand one leader. With Stephanie, Renée is for the first time the squire.

  “Come on, come on.” Stephanie drags Renée away to where the limos are parked. “Let’s take one of Dad’s cars and go dancing.”

  Renée laughs.

  “Oh, come on,” Stephanie says.

  “Can you even drive?” Renée asks.

  “Sure I can. Mom lets me drive all the time.”

  “You have a license?”

  Stephanie sighs long-sufferingly and takes out a folded paper. “Temporary license,” she says. “I got it from my cousin, Stephen, when they sent him his card. See, I added the ie onto his name. And I drive better than he does. We can go to Bear Mountain. There’s a place there where my father knows the owner. They’ll let us in.”

  “I can’t,” says Renée.

  “Why?”

  “Because my mother would die,” Renée says.

  Stephanie puts her hands on her hips. “You’re fifteen years old! How can she be so overprotective?”

  “I don’t know,” says Renée, but secretly she is glad to have the excuse of an overprotective mother. She is a little frightened at the thought of driving on the mountain road with Stephanie. And she has never been dancing. She wouldn’t even know how. She just tells Stephanie, “I think my mother used to be better when she was young, but she got religious and decided everything was immoral. Wouldn’t your mother be upset?”

  “Oh, she’s used to me,” Stephanie says. “I’ve trained her. I started by using horrible language when I was twelve. I had this babysitter, Malaya, while my parents were in Europe, and she taught me all about the women’s movement and stuff. That’s when I became a feminist. My baby-sitter was amazing because she just took me with her wherever she went. My parents are really
paranoid, so the one thing while they were gone was Malaya couldn’t leave me alone in the apartment. So she took me to her women’s group. She taught me to draw. She used to have all these pads of drawing paper and she would fill them up drawing imaginary faces. She never drew the whole face, though. Only half a face. I forget why she did that, but she had a really cool reason. She also had a guru; she carried his picture in her wallet. And she belonged to an ashram on Central Park West. Basically you sat on the floor in this dark living room and you chanted. They passed out the chants on these photocopied sheets, and they lit candles. There were some little bells too. Once I got to play the bells. I was so annoyed when my parents came back and they kicked her out. She was kind of strange, but she was a very …” Stephanie stops, searching for the word, and then she gets distracted. “Do you ever feel like just standing on your head?” she asks Renée.

  “No,” says Renée.

  “Watch,” says Stephanie, and right there on the grass she does a perfect handstand, with legs together and pointed toes. “Do you want me to teach you?” she asks Renée.

  “Well, I’m wearing a dress,” Renée points out.

  “Let’s go inside and change you!” Stephanie says.

  THE party is still in full swing when Andras comes to pick up Renée. He looks for her uncertainly among the chairs and picnic tables.

  “Welcome! Welcome!” Michael Fawess runs up and clasps Andras on the shoulders. “You are Renée’s father? Have some food. Have a drink. They are over there.” He points to the yard, and Andras sees that Renée is wearing blue jeans like Stephanie. Nina doesn’t let Renée wear jeans. She believes religious girls should not dress immodestly like that.

  “Have a cigar,” Fawess urges Andras.

  “I don’t smoke,” Andras says.

  Fawess looks surprised. “A cigar on a beautiful afternoon? A beautiful evening like this? This is not smoking.”

  “I gave it up,” Andras says. But he does take a plate of grilled lamb and rice. The cookies are delicious. Renée waves at him, and he sits in a deck chair while she and Stephanie cartwheel around the yard.

  “These girls are good friends,” Fawess says. “It’s a good thing for Stephanie. A good thing for both of them, is it not?”

  “It is,” says Andras. He leans back and listens to the music, the thrumming melody. He has a beer. Nina would not approve of this. The food is not kosher, the music loud. These people are Syrian. They are Syrian Christians, and they are truckers—prosperous ones, from the looks of this house on the lake.

  The evening is settling over the water, and as it gets dark, a string of lights rigged up in the trees blinks on. Renée and Stephanie are flitting around, fooling with a pair of flashlights. Andras knows he should tell Renée it’s time to go. It is getting late, and he will bring her home late. Nina will be waiting for them, sitting on the porch and worrying. She will ask what took them so long.

  Sometimes Andras laughs and teases Nina about her worrying. He can play a certain role, the sardonic older husband, the provider with a sense of irony. He can joke with his sisters about his wife. “And how is Nina?” they ask him.

  “Oh, Nina,” he says. “She insists the vacuum cleaner isn’t big enough. She wants an indoor-outdoor Hoover.”

  “That’s a tank, Andras!” They find the stories about his wife entertaining. Eva calls her General Nina. Sometimes, even, Nina from Argentina.

  Andras sits back at the party. The men are dancing, and the women gambling. The lights quivering over the twilight blue of the lake. The dark limousines shimmer on the grass, moored there like boats. Renée and Stephanie flash by. He should tell Renée it’s time to go, but she won’t want to leave. He doesn’t want to go home either.

  THERE are times Nina wants to strike Andras like a flint and make him burn. And there are times when she is patient and steels herself with more strength than he knows. But mostly Nina is lonely. She manages everything during the week—the bills, the shopping, the children—and then when Andras comes up, he spends hours walking, or visiting his sisters, sitting in their kitchen with a glass of ice coffee.

  Often, Nina looks across the street at the yellow bungalow where the Shulman girls jump rope, or spin on the tire swing Elizabeth has rigged up. Nina admires Elizabeth. Her life is so organized. So neat and disciplined, precise, like her English enunciation. Above all Nina admires Elizabeth’s religious observance, natural to her as breathing. Nina always gets to shul before Elizabeth, davens rapidly, fervently, always in the right place in the siddur. She has to try harder, because she didn’t grow up with the kind of background Elizabeth had. She’ll never have Elizabeth’s assurance. It seems to Nina that Elizabeth fits perfectly into her community; she never has to worry about belonging. Nina loves to imagine that, the shelter Elizabeth enjoys, the consistency, the little bungalow where Elizabeth doesn’t have to insist, as Nina does, that the family say the blessing when they wash their hands. None of this extra effort is necessary for Elizabeth. She keeps the laws with such élan.

  Monday morning when the children are all at day camp, Nina walks over to see Elizabeth, and raps on the frame of the screen door.

  “Hello,” Elizabeth says, answering the door with her book in her hand. Abraham Lincoln: The War Years.

  “I wondered if you would like to come to Olana with me,” Nina says.

  “And what is that?” asks Elizabeth.

  Nina is surprised. “You’ve never been?”

  “No,” says Elizabeth.

  “Oh, it’s a magnificent house,” says Nina, “Built by Frederick Church. It’s a museum now, for Hudson River School paintings. There is a traveling exhibition there—”

  “We could take the children,” Elizabeth says immediately. “Do you think we could fit all of mine and yours in the car? Is it open this afternoon?”

  Nina doesn’t want to offend Elizabeth, but hesitantly she suggests, “I thought you might like to come without the children.”

  Elizabeth looks startled for a moment. Then she says, “Even better!” and she laughs, as she runs in to look for her purse, and she calls back to Nina, “I’d forgotten we could go without them.”

  The hum of Nina’s Buick is wonderful to Elizabeth. Zooming out of Main Street onto the open road, Elizabeth feels like she’s flying.

  Wind and sun ruffle through Nina’s hair. Like red gold, Elizabeth thinks. Like the first letter in an illuminated manuscript. She’s always looked at her neighbor with some awe, because she is so beautiful. She admires Nina’s clothes—the cut and colors. In a pressed linen dress Nina sits straight and slim behind the wheel. Her Catholic school emphasized ironing, Nina told Elizabeth once.

  They pass Kaaterskill High, a brick fortress of a school built in the 1930s, to last centuries. “Look at the apple trees,” Elizabeth tells Nina. There is a whole orchard on one side of the school. The high school seems somehow manorial, the school on the hill, like Pen-shurst made over for America. Or perhaps the trees were planted for the students as some lesson in economy. Were pupils expected to learn the tending of these orchards? “Lovely,” she says to Nina, “to build a school and set it out with apple trees.”

  As Elizabeth speaks, the words remind her of a snatch of Kipling: “the great gray-green greasy Limpopo River all set about with fever trees.” That isn’t the idea at all, but the rhythm is right, and the words hum inside of her. Her mother used to read those Just So Stories at bedtime, and especially the long captions Kipling wrote for his illustrations. All Kipling’s explanations of the details in his drawings, and his descriptions of the colors he would have used if the printers hadn’t restricted him to black and white. As they drive, it seems to Elizabeth that every sight sparks in her some memory or odd new thought. They speed by, and the wind licks the hills. The mountains beyond Kaaterskill are fresh to her eyes.

  Now that the children are in camp, Elizabeth is having her first summer to herself. She doesn’t have a baby at home. No one in diapers, or waking up at night. All the chi
ldren can walk now. There is no one to carry or push along in the stroller. For years she’s waited for this. Now that it’s happened, it feels strange. It’s as if a fog has lifted. At thirty-four, after thirteen years of pregnancies and babies, the constant responsibility, the wide-open eyes and curling fingers, the rocking to sleep, the wiping of noses, she has at last passed into a new stage of life. It’s like waking from a dream—an exhausting, beautiful dream. But on waking Elizabeth doesn’t feel relieved or peaceful. She is ravenously hungry. She needs something to do.

  She’d had all kinds of plans for these hours with the girls at camp, but baking and reading are far less tantalizing with so much time to get them done. In past summers she read her books in snatches, and they were always new. She had only stolen hours to spend with the characters in novels, and so when she could hear about their lives, about Pierre or Emma, Milly Theale or Lydgate, when she picked them up from where they slept beside her bed, she read with emotion and anticipation. Reading was like visiting distant friends. Gibbon held a charm when Elizabeth hadn’t time to read. The Decline and Fall spread out before her like a great unfinished afghan. But now, with whole mornings on her hands, she finds herself dissatisfied.

  Time or no time, Elizabeth wants to do something. She feels pangs of impatience, and at night after the long sunsets, she can’t sleep. She lies in bed with her pile of books, words floating around her, the pollen of other people’s dreams. She’d resolved to go swimming every morning, but even that didn’t work out.

  Two days ago she ventured out to swim in Mohican Lake. It was lovely there. Not a soul on the pebbled beach. She left her dress and towel on a flat gray rock and swam out to the middle of the lake. Carefully she swam, head above the water in a kind of breaststroke. That was all she had learned from her brief lessons at school in England. But even swimming slowly was invigorating. The water rippled cold between her legs, although just skimming the surface with her arms, she could feel a warmer layer on top. She would have liked to float on her back and look up at the sky, but the lake was so quiet and deep, she was afraid. She paddled out slowly and watched the pine trees on the encircling bank.