Kaaterskill Falls (13 page)

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 children 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.

Then, “Hey!” she heard a man calling from the shore. “Hey, over there. This is a private beach. Are you a guest at Mohican Road?” After all her resolutions to get some exercise, the empty beach was private. She was not allowed.

“You seem quiet,” Elizabeth says to Nina now.

But before Nina gets a chance to speak, they enter the estate. Olana.

Through ornate wrought-iron gates the long approach to the mansion is dark with forest, but the house itself rises up clear of the trees on a hill covered with wildflowers. Olana is a palace, vast and delicate, its bricks and roof tiles set in intricate geometric shapes. There are terraces and balconies, fluttering with striped awnings. The whole construction outlandish and Arabian, more fanciful than any of the Victorian spires Elizabeth has seen in the mountains.

When they park the car and come inside the house, they pass through rooms of treasures; jeweled stained glass and Persian carpets the color of dusty rubies. Inlaid tables, and marquetry floors, and tapestry cushions, are all intricately patterned. There is nothing rustic
here. Only when she looks at the paintings does Elizabeth remember the dark approach through the forest. These are outdoor paintings, trees and wild cliffs, huge sunsets. Elizabeth sits with Nina on a divan before a cluster of Bierstadts. Deep trees and cerebral winter skies.

The museum is nearly empty this weekday morning. The elaborate gallery still. Elizabeth looks intently at the winter landscapes. And as she looks, she whispers to Nina, “It’s marvelous, just sitting here while the girls are at camp.”

Nina looks at the floor. Renée is working as a junior counselor at the camp. It was Nina’s idea. She thought the job with the Lamkins would be good for her daughter, that it would teach her responsibility and how to care for children. But Renée made a fuss. Nina had to threaten and cajole and, in the end, force Renée to go. There were tears and threats up to the day she started. Even now, Renée is sulking about working there with the little children.

“Renée doesn’t like the camp,” Nina says. “I think she’d rather waste her time wandering around, doing nothing, playing with that Arab girl. Andras doesn’t care. I hear the father owns a trucking business—he just drives trucks from New York to Montreal—” She breaks off, frustrated.

“She’s a good child, really,” Elizabeth says.

“But Andras spoils her,” says Nina. Then Elizabeth sees that Nina is really upset. There are tears in Nina’s eyes. It’s hard for her to speak. Elizabeth sees it, and doesn’t know what to do. They are close neighbors, but they are not intimate friends. Beautiful Nina in her crisp dress, downcast among all these paintings. “He’s very … indulgent of the children, both of them,” Nina says. “He used to take them to the warehouse and let them pick out any toys they liked.”

“At least he’s not in the candy business,” Elizabeth says. “Toys won’t rot their teeth.”

“He’s going to let Renée quit piano,” Nina says bitterly, utterly serious, “and she’ll regret it all her life.”

Elizabeth tries to look sympathetic. She’s heard Renée play.

“And now that Renée is working at the Lamkins’ camp, she wants to quit that too.”

“He wouldn’t let her do that,” Elizabeth ventures.

“I don’t know,” Nina says miserably, and Elizabeth looks over at
her, and she wants to say, It can’t be so bad. It isn’t so awful. She can’t know what Nina really wants—that somehow Renée might be friends again with Chani, in fact, with all of Elizabeth’s own children, so sweet to Nina’s thinking, so pious, utterly sheltered from the outside world. So safe, they don’t even know it.

“Let’s go over there.” Nina points to another group of paintings.

“Oh, look.” Elizabeth points to the painting that has caught her eye. A luminous work on the east wall, unmistakable, even from a distance, Kaaterskill Falls. She rushes over to examine it, leaning forward, hands clasped behind her.
FALLS OF THE KAATERSKILL, THOMAS COLE
, reads the plaque on the wall. Cole must have set up his easel on the trail—just where she and the girls climbed down from the overhanging park, far down until they reached the stream, the wet hems of their skirts slapping against their legs, the water pouring down from above them over the cliff. She has stood there like Cole’s tiny painted Indians, barely visible on the rocks. She has looked out to those mountains and that sky. The place is much more dramatic on canvas, of course, the exuberant water flinging itself below—nothing dirty in this froth. Cole’s trees are straining upward toward the clouds, leaves just turning—burnt orange and gold mixed with green. Elizabeth would have dismissed the whole thing as overblown, clichéd, except that she’s been there so many times. She’s seen the falls streaming down and the enormous smoke-blue sky, the wild mountains. The unabashed, romantic colors are right. It’s worth the whole exhibit to see this painting. Knowing the site as she does, she realizes Cole’s integrity, and now, among the exhibit’s many paintings, this particular landscape seems to mark the truth in all the others.

She moves about, forgetting Nina at her side, just looking at the painting from different angles. She knows so much about the place. The drive up past the waterfall every summer—the children sleeping by this time in the back. The curving footpath down from the road to the pools under the falls. She can see it drawn here by Cole. The sky, luminous above the trees, the crash of water. Piles and piles of yellow leaves pillowing the trail. Elizabeth slipped in them hiking once with Isaac and the children, and she fell right on her face, deep, deeper, falling gradually, losing her balance by degrees. She kept waiting to hit hard ground, expecting something sharp. But she never did hit.
The leaves were so deep that she felt as though she were falling in a dream; falling farther and farther until she landed in her own bed. She just laughed; she couldn’t get her feet under her; she couldn’t stop laughing.

She loves the place; she loves the painting by association. The painting is all associations. All familiar to her; reminding her, inspiring her. It brings back her own half-buried wish to capture and even recreate a place and time that beautiful. More than ever she wants to do something of her own. She has to make something; she has so much energy, she feels so strong. Fearless. She imagines for a moment she could learn to paint, except that she never could draw. She thinks perhaps she could write something. But she’s not that sort; she reads too seriously. She couldn’t separate her own words from the books humming in her head. She’s filled with other music, not her own. Elizabeth looks intently at the painting, that brilliant piece of the world, and gazing at the color and the light of it she feels the desire, as intense as prayer. I want—she thinks, and then it comes to her simply, with all the force of her pragmatic soul—I want to open a store.

In my front yard grew the strawberry, blackberry, and life-everlasting, johnswort, and goldenrod, shrub oaks and sand cherry, blueberry and groundnut…. The sumach (Rhus glabra) grew luxuriantly about the house…. In August, the large masses of berries, which, when in flower, had attracted many wild bees, gradually assumed their bright velvety crimson hue….

—H
ENRY
D
AVID
T
HOREAU
Walden

A
T THE
Lamkins’ camp Renée has charge of the three-year-old girls. Watching them in the sandbox, she sits on a swing and drags her feet in the dirt.

“This is the most difficult job of all,” Beyla Lamkin told her. “This is the crucial age.” It may be true, for all Renée knows, but she spends all her time stopping fights and tying shoes.

She is supposed to read the children midrashes, illustrated in picture books, but she never gets to that. She’s always marching them off to play in the wading pool the Lamkins have rigged up, and then trying to put the right clothes back on them afterward. The activities the Lamkins plan all happen at such a distance from Renée’s post at the sandbox that she can’t even see the watermelon hunt or the idiotic boccie games. Renée can’t go on the rebbetzin’s nature walks, because her girls are too little. One of them is bound to get lost. The girls are so small, Renée can’t leave them for a minute, and so she doesn’t get a chance to talk to the other counselors when they get together and commiserate about how boring Pesach Lamkin’s shiurs are—descriptions of how a pure red heifer was used for purification in the days of the Temple, the rabbi droning on while everyone sits at a picnic table, watching a spider hanging from a tree.

Renée glares at the girls playing in the sand. No one asked her if she wanted to take care of them. After two weeks she doesn’t think they’re sweet at all, and she doesn’t feel in the least bit motherly
toward them. Watching the little campers dump sand on each other, she thinks dark thoughts. She wishes she had some other mother, not her own. Stephanie’s mother wouldn’t make her spend all day with three-year-olds. Mrs. Fawess lets Stephanie wander wherever she likes, bike to Lacy Farm, even go swimming alone all the way up at Coon Lake. Stephanie never has to follow rules, except be home by dark. Renée feels an overwhelming need to talk to Stephanie, to ride her bike with Stephanie far away.

She doesn’t have a plan. She just hops down from the swing. Slowly, she walks over to the other counselors where they sit at a picnic table. She looks at them, the good teenagers, the responsible girls. “I have to go,” she whispers. She doesn’t explain. She just walks off.