Kaaterskill Falls (18 page)

The van sails into the gated community, and up the private winding road. They have a covenant, Renée thinks, remembering Stephanie’s words. Renée never did get straight exactly what the secret Mohican Road covenant is, but she knows she wouldn’t be here inside the gate if she weren’t on the bookmobile. The road twists up the mountain, and behind the trees, the great houses reveal themselves, turreted like true castles. Renée has never seen them up close, only from far away, only in glimpses from the road below. She and Chani Shulman used to have names for them all when they were
little; Renée had forgotten that. There was the Gray Tower for Rapunzel, and a pillared Sleeping Beauty’s palace, the White Castle, and Cinderella’s house. She and Chani planned to make a map just like the Fairy Tale map in the glass table at the library, but somehow they could never make their map as beautiful. Depending on the pens they used, some of the palaces stood out very dark and spotted, and some were just dry scratches from old used-up markers Chani wouldn’t throw away. Chani believed that Magic Markers last forever, and she said if you just didn’t use a marker for a while it regenerated in its cap. Now Renée is inside Fairyland, and when the van stops she can see the whole mountainside below, the forest and the lake and the little houses of Kaaterskill.

Mornings in the library, plucking selections for the bookmobile, Renée hears the verdict on every family passing through the door. Mrs. Schermerhorn makes the pronouncements for the benefit of Renée and Mrs. Knowlton, the assistant librarian. At her desk on Monday before the Bear Mountain run, Mrs. Schermerhorn scoffs at the improvements on Michael King’s house. “I’ve never seen anything so vulgar.” She unrolls a fresh-typed library card from her electric typewriter. She says to Mrs. Knowlton, “I can only imagine what it must be like for you and your husband, living across the street from that monstrosity. The Seventh Wonder of Maple Street.”

Mrs. Knowlton leans on the new arrival table. “Stan says someday Michael King is going to get too big for his britches. He’s trying to rent out a new house each year, and he still hasn’t finished repairing the roofs and gutters from when the bungalows got swamped last August.”

“Is Stan still working for him?” Mrs. Schermerhorn asks.

“Oh, no—not now,” Mrs. Knowlton says. “He’s restoring the Lamkin house.”

“Where is that?”

“Way back behind Spruce.”

Mrs. Schermerhorn knits her brow.

“The gray place,” Mrs. Knowlton says. “Two stories.”

“I can’t quite recall it,” Mrs. Schermerhorn tells her.

Mrs. Knowlton glances over to where Renée is pulling out biographies. “Where the Jewish day camp is,” she whispers at last.

“Oh, you mean the old Thorne place!” Mrs. Schermerhorn’s voice is muffled. “Oh, yes—”

“—little … coats …” is all Renée can make out of the reply. She strains to hear what Mrs. Schermerhorn has to say about Rabbi Lamkin and his wife, but Mrs. Schermerhorn is back to Mr. King’s improvements again.

“Last time I looked,” Mrs. Schermerhorn says, “King was having white columns delivered. Four for the front. To make the house colonial, I think was his idea. It looks like the Phoenicia Motel.”

“I wonder—” Mrs. Knowlton begins; but the library door jingles.

“Good morning, Candy,” says Mrs. Schermerhorn.

Instantly Renée looks up from her pile of biographies on the floor. This is Candy, Renée’s predecessor on the bookmobile. The girl with the unfortunate end. Renée stares and stares, and she wonders if the woman eats a lot of it—candy, that is. Candy looks like a great round Russian doll from the back. Long fine blond hair streaming down over round shoulders to where her round bottom begins, with hardly an indentation at the waist; the line of her belt looks instead like the place where the doll comes apart to reveal the next largest one inside. Renée used to have a set with ten nesting dolls, painted and lacquered.

“Just returning these?” Mrs. Knowlton asks Candy.

Candy does not reply. With an indifferent look she casts her eye over Mrs. Knowlton’s new-arrival table. Then she passes briefly through the children’s section. Like a lady browsing in a store, she picks up a few books, then puts them down. And after only a few minutes she turns and walks out, the door jingling behind her.

The library is silent. There are no other borrowers in the room.

“God has entered her life,” Mrs. Schermerhorn says of Candy.

“What do you mean?” asks Mrs. Knowlton.

“I’m simply telling you what she’s told me,” says Mrs. Schermerhorn. “She says she’s going to Kaaterskill Bible Church.”

“I don’t think she’s very happy,” Mrs. Knowlton says after a moment.

“I think she’s happy enough,” Mrs. Schermerhorn says. “For a girl with a history like hers. And she doesn’t have to work, you know.
She’s pretty well set with her widow’s benefits. Wouldn’t I have been surprised to look into the future when she was working on the bookmobile.”

Renée pauses in her search for
Mary Queen of Scots.
Still as she can be, she kneels on the carpeted floor.

“But the crash …” Mrs. Knowlton says.

“Yes. Yes, she lost him. I don’t deny that. A tragedy. But as I say, she’s well set with her benefits from the service.”

“August nineteenth,” Mrs. Knowlton says in a hushed voice.

“It was August twentieth!” Mrs. Schermerhorn exclaims. “I’ll never forget it was August twentieth.”

“I’m sure it was the nineteenth,” says Mrs. Knowlton timidly.

“No,” Mrs. Schermerhorn declares. “I’ll never forget it, because August the twentieth, 1966, my mother came to visit. And you remember the storm. That was the record August rainfall for the last fifty years. I was just terrified to drive. And you remember there were two hikers lost in the mud down in Palenville. But even with the wind that night I could hear the car skidding. And there was a shatter of glass I remember distinctly. I have very keen ears. My dog, poor Caesar, went absolutely wild. I knew the crash was just off Mohican. The driver could have been a Mohican Estate resident for all I knew. I said, ‘Ralph, get out of bed; it’s an accident! Call the police!’”

“But the phone line was down,” Mrs. Knowlton murmurs tremulously.

“Yes, just come apart! And the power too. So Ralph took his big flashlight, and Mother and I crept up to the window with the old kerosene lantern. We couldn’t see anything but the trees thrashing against each other.”

“I know,” Mrs. Knowlton whispers. “I’d been waiting up for Stan to begin with—”

“It was a miracle your husband survived,” Mrs. Schermerhorn says severely.

Mrs. Knowlton looks up with her round eyes. “A miracle any of them did. Stan said they fell so fast—”

“Fifty feet skidding on the car roof. Ralph saw the wreck. That old car was absolutely wrapped around the tree. I can only imagine
what poor Bill looked like in the driver’s seat.” Mrs. Schermerhorn shakes her head. “He and Candy only married a day—”

“I thought they hadn’t been married at all,” Mrs. Knowlton says. “When the storm hit they were driving home from Bill’s bachelor party.”

“No, no,” Mrs. Schermerhorn corrects.

Janet shakes her head, puzzled, but doesn’t argue further.

“Well, Judge Taylor took care of it, drew up the papers,” says Mrs. Schermerhorn.

“And they’d hardly any time together,” Mrs. Knowlton whispers, thinking how she nearly lost her own husband.

“I wouldn’t say
hardly”
the librarian corrects. “Candy gave birth just six months later. And as I say, she’s well set with her benefits from the service.” Then Mrs. Schermerhorn calls to Renée, “Let’s get those books into the van, please, or we’ll be late.”

T
HE
hilly Bear Mountain Road bumps and jolts the van. The forest seems thicker here, because there is less of a town. “I’ve noticed you don’t take out any books yourself, Renée,” says Mrs. Schermerhorn. “What do you do with your free time?”

Renée looks down at her cotton skirt. Her arms hurt from carrying stacks of books from the library to the van. She’s wearing down the rippled rubber soles of her Famolare sandals.

“I would like to recommend some titles,” the librarian tells her. “It’s a pity to let a summer go to waste.”

When it comes to reading, Mrs. Schermerhorn doesn’t approve of anyone’s taste in Kaaterskill or Bear Mountain—except for Mrs. Shulman, who always comes in to the library for fat old books and serious nonfiction. As for the bookmobile customers, deadpan Mrs. Schermerhorn announces the name and then the special request of each as she drives.

“Mrs. Juliet Lacy:
Passion Flowers.”

“Mr. Richard Beckstein, MD:
All the Right Moves: Meeting Your Mate.”

“Mr. William Curtis:
Real Estate with Nothing Down.”

“Mrs. Jacqueline King:
French Provincial: Ornaments and Accessories.”

In Bear Mountain Mrs. Schermerhorn pulls up in front of the post office and parks to open for business. Her first customer is already waiting on the curb. Mrs. Schermerhorn tisks as he boards the van and hands a stack of worn paperbacks to Renée. The torn covers are blue and black, covered with galaxies, spaceships, dragons rearing up under women in gold bras. Renée expects to hear one of the titles read out loud, but Mrs. Schermerhorn restrains herself. She lets Renée stamp them and hand them over to grubby, curly-haired Ira Rubin, whose glasses always seem about to slip off his short nose.

“Well. We are what we read,” Mrs. Schermerhorn remarks as they pull away from the curb.

“T
HE
rock face was brutal, studded with metallic waste,”
Ira Rubin reads when he gets home, “
but we kept on, clawing, crawling our way up, first Buck, then me, then Xanda. I looked up at the sonar range finder strapped to Buck’s pack. Forty feet up, and a higher rock face ahead. No, she was right, there is no moral instinct, I thought. Just the will to survive, keep crawling up to the top. What then? You don’t think a lot about the future when you’re scaling a decoy crater on the planet Rhea.”

“Ira?” he hears faintly from upstairs.

“What?” he calls back.

“I said come here,” his mother calls.

“Why?”

“Now,” his mother hollers from the top of the stairs.

He follows her up into his room. “Clean it,” she says.

“Oh, yeah,” he says, peering into his cavelike room. He was supposed to clean it. It’s hard to see the mess. Ira keeps the shades down. There are paperbacks, and his school texts left over from eighth grade—the ones the teachers didn’t even want back at the end of the year, they looked so bad.
Catcher in the Rye
, and
Ancient Civilizations
, free weights, newspapers strewn across the floor—he uses the old papers to line the cage of his pet rat, Bester.

“Clean it now,” his mother says.

“Okay.” Ira thumps back down the wooden stairs with his book
and takes it back out to the porch, where the birches rattle with the white summer wind. He finishes a book in an afternoon, racing through it and forgetting it all as soon as he’s done. Then sometimes he rips through another one at night, reading in bed until the pages hurt his eyes.

His father, Mark, thinks he should do something better with his time than read sci-fi books and sit in Boyd’s Garage. After all, if he wants a summer job, he could work at the family’s hotel in Kaaterskill. If he wants to fool around he could play soccer and get some exercise outside. His mother, Felice, is worried about Ira’s eyes. He’s straining them, reading those trashy novels with his rat at his side. That huge, lumpy rodent, over a foot long, with its thick tail, tiny red eyes, the most repulsive thing Felice has ever seen—she’ll admit it, she’s afraid of it, lying there indolently on Ira’s shoulder, its sensitive nose nudging Ira’s ear. They’d let him buy it when their dog died, their German shepherd, Lady, which Felice now associates with Ira’s former happy nature. This nocturnal rat—it could be rabid, it could escape!—seems to her a sign of what Ira has become. His parents don’t know about Renée.

Ira knows that’s her name because he’s heard Mrs. Schermerhorn calling to her, “Renée, let’s go! Get the door, please.” He doesn’t know much else about her. He never says anything to her beyond hi and thank-you. He looks at her, mainly. Renée’s hair looks brown in the shade and deep red in the sun, and when her brown eyes fill with light they turn gold. She has freckles all over her arms. Once she asked him, “Do you ever do anything but read?” He was suddenly happy. She’d stopped and asked him a question.

Every time the bookmobile comes to Bear Mountain, Ira climbs aboard to browse for books and see Renée. Sometimes she’s frowning; she looks annoyed and tired. Occasionally she looks happy; she glances at her watch. She must be thinking about what she’s going to do afterward. He’s seen her a couple of times on the weekends in Kaaterskill. Once she was walking with another girl and a bunch of dogs. He watched them cross Main Street and disappear down Maple.

No one knows Ira likes Renée. James Boyd would laugh at him, liking one of the summer people. What’s the use? She’ll only go back to the city. Then Ira won’t see her all year, all through the long winter.