Kaaterskill Falls (10 page)

King has changed. He has grown from a nuisance discussed at the Town Meeting to becoming a selectman on the Three Town Council. Grown from a “bragging, bullying menace that has to stop” into a landlord with contractors and workers in all three towns and strict standards for his men as well. He runs a lean, high-profit office, and he punishes dishonesty, waste, and graft. He has actually become a Rotarian.

King walks up Main Street into the Taylor building, announces himself to Judge Taylor’s secretary, and takes a seat in one of the hard-backed chairs in the reception room.

Taylor keeps him waiting. It’s always a ten-minute wait for King in Taylor’s reception room with the ancient
Yankee
magazines.

When Taylor’s secretary finally ushers King into the judge’s inner office, Taylor looks up and asks briskly, “Well, Michael, what can I do for you?” He does not offer King a seat.

King sits down in the chair in front of Taylor’s oak desk anyway.

“I want to swear out a complaint against Stan Knowlton,” King says. “He’s been stealing from me for months and I’ve had it. I’ve had enough.”

The judge raises his eyebrows. Taylor knew King’s father, Herb Klein, and he’s known Michael since he was just a boy. Taylor caught him setting off smoke bombs fifteen years ago Fourth of July. It doesn’t matter how much of Kaaterskill King tries to buy; to Taylor he will always be one of the summer people. The rich, loud, fast-driving, deer-scaring kind. The kind teeming in the woods like ticks, shooting in the bird sanctuary, plowing the fishing places with motor boats. King is a landlord now, but he’ll always be one of them. He hardly keeps up the bungalows he rents out. He’s a landlord as sloppy as the skiers who invade Bear Mountain in winter, tramping in the snow and drinking, pocking the hardwood floors with their ski poles.

Miles Taylor is an orderly man with an ordered mind. He has a clear ethic that he uses every day. Not a dusty emotional morality examined only in church, but a practical system. His ethical accounts have columns for credits and debits: what is done for him and what he does for others. And his goal, it must be said, is not an equilibrium of favors done and favors rendered. Not that Taylor is crassly manipulative, or merely self-aggrandizing. He seeks an advantage for himself, but he identifies himself with his family—his brother and his nephews—and further, with his town. On a more ethereal level Taylor has a kindly feeling for those he doesn’t deal with directly: his country, his world, his God. He believes in the fellowship of man and the immortal soul. He has loved deeply, although his wife has been dead fifteen years. He has principles and a heart. But the summer people do not inspire his sympathy, generosity, or fellow feeling. And looking at the Klein boy, self-styled King, Miles Taylor feels only anger to hear he’s fired poor Knowlton, who has never had anything except for Janet Kendall, his childhood sweetheart, now his wife. A pretty girl, and a good family, too, except that the Kendalls haven’t any money. There are too many of them these days in Kendall Falls.

“Why should I bother with a few flagstones?” Taylor asks now.

“He took over a hundred,” snaps King. “Aren’t you going to prosecute a thief?”

“Oh, he’s not a thief,” says Taylor.

“What would you call him, then?” asks King.

“He’s just a young man, who made a mistake.”

“You’re going to sit by and—”

“You made some mistakes when you were young, as I recall.”

King doesn’t answer.

“Well,” says Taylor, “if you want me to publicize Knowlton’s peccadilloes, hadn’t you better start with your own?”

“This is ridiculous,” King says.

“Why?” asks the judge.

“Are you threatening to blackmail me over a pile of flagstones?”

“It does sound trivial when you put it that way,” says Taylor. “Not worth a fuss, eh? Big smoke, no fire.”

King gets up. “I’m going to hire a lawyer,” he says.

“You do that,” Taylor says, as King walks out the door.

The judge opens his desk drawer and takes out his lunch, a cheese sandwich and two apples. He eats the first apple and he frowns. In the past five years he has watched King snap up properties all through Kaaterskill, tear down fine old houses on Spruce and Maple, and subdivide the lots within inches of the zoning laws. Taylor’s family real estate company has kept to certain standards about quality and price control. He and his nephews know the history of the place, and what the town could be. King just puts up bungalows and rents to Orthodox Jews, one family after another. He gives no thought to the effect the Jews make when they come up for the summer, Russian kerchiefs over the women’s hair. Cultish attendance at the synagogue. There has been a small cohort of them in town since the fifties, but King is attracting more and more, with his cheap house-building and low-rent cottages. The worst of it is the way King has got poor townspeople like Knowlton to sell out their property and take bungalows themselves. They need the money, and they haven’t anything else to sell, so King buys them out. Like Jacob the usurper, he approaches them to buy up their inheritance.

Now King is expanding into virgin territory. Buying up at Mohican Lake like a slash-and-burn farmer, planning to expand into Coon Lake, too, on speculation. Methodically Taylor eats a second apple, all the way around, and then the top and bottom ends. He eats every bit except the stem and seeds.

In Plattville a visitor can find a little country charm, the church with its steeple, a New England village green. But Kaaterskill has nothing left of that. There is the forest, and the falls, but the town has
been trampled and badly run down. The year-round residents are demoralized. Few are house proud. What can they do, living among the subdivisions? The town looks nondescript, Main Street nearly empty. The only real reputation Kaaterskill has is as a summer home for the ultrareligious Jews. And with their modest incomes, big families, parochial tastes, these Orthodox don’t nurture boutiques and restaurants, parks, or college scholarships for the town children. There was a time when these people had their own resorts outside of town, self-contained hotels. But one by one the hotels closed, and emptied out like Trojan horses into the countryside. The Jewish summer people settled on the little towns themselves.

The Mohican Road community could have saved things, if they’d invested in Kaaterskill; but the residents have retreated farther into their wooded estates, and there is no prying them loose now to help remedy the sorry state of things in town at the foot of their private mountain peak. Those rich introverts have no interest in the real people who live in Kaaterskill. As for the religious introverts in the town itself—they have their synagogue and their own day camp, and every summer they send up flags to attract more like them. It’s distressing. But it isn’t right or even useful to resent groups of people. The one Taylor blames is the Klein boy, Michael King.

E
LIZABETH
and Isaac and the girls watch the Fourth of July parade from Cecil’s porch. It’s a short parade, but a loud one. Every year the volunteer fire department polishes up the engines, two red, two canary yellow, and they set off, sirens blaring. Up and down Main Street they fly. Down Maple and around up Spruce Street in a loop back to the fire station.

Cecil has his portable radio set up on the porch so they all can hear about the big parades for the Bicentennial in the city. “Thousands of people are thronging the bridge! The coast guard estimates thirty thousand yachts and small craft cover the river,” cries the announcer on Cecil’s tinny receiver.

“Well, we don’t have throngs,” says Cecil. “But I think King’s dog puts on a good show.” The fire engines scream down the street, and King’s gray poodle chases after the last one, barking ferociously.

“And the ships are beautiful!” screams the announcer. “The cruiser
Wainwright
leads a flotilla of warships from twenty-two nations. Each one covered with pennants, and rigged as they would have been two hundred years ago today!” The receiver begins to crackle.

“Don’t you wish you were down there in the city?” Elizabeth asks as Cecil fiddles with the dial.

“God, no,” Beatrix says. “It’s not my holiday. Nor yours either,” she points out to Elizabeth.

The radio comes to life. “This just in,” says the announcer. “We have confirmation that in the small hours of the morning Israelis executed a daring rescue mission at Entebbe Airport, Uganda. One hundred five hostages of the Air France hijacking have been freed. We have unconfirmed reports that an unknown number of airborne Israeli commandos swept down on the airport in a predawn raid.”

“Commandos!” Beatrix exclaims.

“What happened?” asks Ruchel.

“Sh.”

“What was that?”

“Allegedly they overwhelmed the pro-PLO hijackers who last week took over the Air France flight from Athens to Paris. There are no details on casualties.”

“What happened, Daddy?” Chani asks.

“I can’t hear,” says Cecil.

They end up walking over to the Melishes to see if Andras is getting better reception. Chani, Malki, and Ruchel pedal in front on their bikes, and their parents and the Birnbaums trail after them with the little girls. They listen to the news on the Melishes’ stereo, and later, on the Melishes’ porch, they pore over Andras’s
Times
, even though it is already out of date. They spread it over the glider, drinking lemonade. The articles about the raid are sketchy, padded by interviews with foreign ministers, and speculations about the events of the night.

“If they really pulled it off, it’s incredible,” says Andras.

“Extraordinary,” Elizabeth says.

“When you think of all the things that could have gone wrong,” Andras says.

“But they had split-second timing,” says Cecil.

“And luck,” says Andras. “There were so many variables. They all could have been killed.”

“It was a n
es min hashamayim”
—a miracle from heaven, Chani says suddenly from where she’s sitting on the porch rail.

There is a startled silence. Everyone looks up. “Yes, it was,” Elizabeth says at last.

“And do you think Israel is a miracle too?” Cecil asks, grinning.
Chani doesn’t respond, but Cecil folds his arms. “I think we have a Zionist in the family,” he says impishly.

Elizabeth’s cheeks burn. It may be a joke to Cecil, but this is not something they talk about. There are no Zionists in their community.

The Kirshners are waiting for the perfect Israel, as the Rav puts it. They won’t settle for less. No Israeli jets for them, no modern Hebrew newspapers. Hebrew is a holy language. The Kirshners are anti-Zionist. They are not militant. They don’t campaign for an end to Israel like that tiny community near Jerusalem that actually allies itself with the PLO. The Rav would never countenance such actions against fellow Jews. Nevertheless, his people stand apart from Israel with its atheist socialists. They haven’t softened, like the Lubavichers. The Rav’s yeshiva remains in New York. He rarely speaks of Zionists, and when he does, he merely remarks that they are a troubled lot. Elizabeth actually had a cousin who left England and went to Israel; that was a terrible thing, a scandal, and a great heartache for her grandmother.

Sitting in his chair on the porch, Andras watches the unease settle on his neighbors in the wake of Cecil’s remark. Much as he disagrees with, and even disparages, the Orthodox in his mind, Andras hates to see them provoked. It seems unfair, unmanly. Like hitting a girl. He looks at Isaac and Elizabeth and feels protective of them, almost proprietary of their narrow experience and messianic politics. He feels concerned, somehow, for the integrity of their quaint closed worldview. Smooth, small, delicate, useless as a robin’s egg.

Nervously Nina flits from one person to another, offering more lemonade, more ice. “Well, Cecil,” says Andras, “it’s about time for us to go to the Lamkin Camp’s opening day.”

“You’re going to that?” Cecil asks quickly.

“Of course,” says Andras. He knows it angers Cecil even to hear the camp mentioned. As Cecil says, his father had bought the land as an investment for the synagogue and not as a free gift to a third-rate rabbi. He puts it that way, as if the camp were just poor financial judgment. But Andras knows Cecil’s true feelings: that leasing the land to the Lamkins for their camp is an insult to his father’s memory. “You’re going, I take it,” Andras says to Elizabeth and Isaac.

Cecil reddens to the edges of his ears.

Andras just sips his lemonade and says coolly, “Of course, it’s easier to boycott a summer camp when you don’t have children.”

For once Cecil doesn’t know what to say. For a long moment he is silent.

They are all surprised at Andras. He is usually so controlled. Even Elizabeth and Isaac don’t fully understand his motivation: his irritation at Cecil for provoking them about Zionism. His motive was too complex. And here is the mystery of Andras’s character: he is cold, but deep, too deep, within him, his heart is chivalrous.

T
HERE
are so many people at the camp opening that Elizabeth and Isaac are lucky to squeeze in at a picnic table. A crowd of sixty, maybe even seventy, fills the park above the falls. A mixed group, some Kirshners, some not. At one table, clustered together in dark trousers and white shirts, sit the five teachers Rabbi Lamkin has brought up from the city to instruct the children. They look pale and a little worried in the gold summer light. All this commotion bothers them. They bob back and forth respectfully, trying to hear Rabbi Lamkin’s speech.