Authors: Allegra Goodman
A shadow darkens the passenger side window. Andras climbs into the car and slams the door behind him.
“Where were you? I was trying to phone you,” Andras says.
Despite his fifty-seven years he has the challenging voice and arrogant black eyes of his youth.
“I got held up at the bakery.” Isaac is polite but unapologetic.
They had hoped to beat the rush-hour traffic, but at two o’clock they’re crawling over the silver George Washington Bridge. Isaac’s Mercury does not have air conditioning. Stuck in traffic, the car gets so hot, it hurts to breathe. As if to taunt them, the Hudson below glistens in the sun. Through the bars and cables of the bridge Isaac watches sailboats puff up with the river breeze.
“Why don’t you try the other lane?” Andras asks. He is a stickler for punctuality. Habitually, as if to hold it against Isaac, he times their commute.
“This lane is fine,” Isaac replies.
There is still a distance between them left over from the winter. In the city the men almost never see each other; they lead such different lives. Isaac’s gritty neighborhood is nothing like Andras’s on the Upper West Side. Isaac’s clerical job in the Department of Public Works is far from Andras’s position as head of his own import company. And, of course, Isaac’s upbringing and convictions are nothing like Andras’s. Young and fervent in his observance, Isaac was born into the separatist Kirshners in Washington Heights. But Andras is twenty years older, an immigrant from Budapest. He comes from an expansive, assimilated Jewish community that, like Andras’s belief in God, has scarcely existed since the war.
By the time the gray Thruway spreads out before them, and the station wagon picks up speed, Isaac is exhausted. His legs ache. He wishes away the two hours ahead. His wife will be waiting for him. He hasn’t seen Elizabeth all week. She will come out to the car and help him carry in the armfuls of fresh bread. The girls will be playing in the yard. Soccer, hopscotch, tetherball, jump rope. They will jump up to see him.
Through the open window, in the dry breeze, Andras watches trucks heaving past—eighteen-wheelers with smokestacks of their own. He’s brought in a new line of toy trucks at the warehouse. Tonka trucks, blue and white, logger trucks loaded with miniature pine logs, orange U-Hauls with detachable six-inch trailers. They’ve even got tiny
SPIRIT OF ‘76
bumper stickers for the Bicentennial.
What Andras really needs is a second car. His wife won’t hear of it, of course. It would be a waste of gas, she says. Nina’s conserving energy for the whole country, car-pooling.
Often Andras thinks that he wouldn’t mind spending a few weekends alone in the city. He could use the time to do his books. But his sisters, Eva and Maja, are waiting for him in their brick house in Kaaterskill. Even now, as he and Isaac are driving up, Andras’s older sisters are baking rugelach, prune cake, and mandelbrot. They still bake for him, just as they did when he was a boy.
“Our exit,” Andras says suddenly.
Isaac turns off, at the last minute, onto 23A.
“You didn’t see it, did you?” Andras asks.
Isaac smiles, a lightning-quick smile. “I was waiting for you to remind me.” He can tease Andras now that they are past the heavy traffic and making better time. They are closer to Kaaterskill. Everything is easier.
Even as they take the exit, the wind softens. The Thruway is now four lanes instead of eight. Billboards for Catskill Game Farm appear, ads for the petting zoo with pictures of goats and lambs blown up giant-size against the trees. The hills on either side are green, thick with oak and pine. Nothing but trees on either side, and the broad road slowly rising. The wind seems to comb the trees upright so that they stand thick and straight.
Turning onto Washington Irving Highway, they enter the forest. They exchange the sunny afternoon for shade, and the light breeze for damper, stiller air. The highway cuts around Cole Mountain, peeling away in a slow spiral from the trees. As the road rises, the lanes narrow, pressed together by the heavy woods. Transmission humming, the car climbs past shattered boulders, enormous shards of rock. Old oaks overhang the road, roots flung up from the ground, while younger birches shoot up toward the light in thin stalks, like grass. And yet there are houses here behind the trees. One on the right with peeling white paint, another freshly painted turquoise with a baby barn, and an enormous mailbox. This is Palenville. The mountain villages announce themselves with motels and signs:
WELCOME TO PHOENICIA
, and
ENTERING COOKSBURG
. Sudden flashes
of sun, Floyd’s Motel and Cooksburg’s main street radiate light as clearings in the shade.
Isaac’s car hugs the tightly coiled road. The low safety rail bolted to the road’s edge isn’t much to keep a car from tumbling down into the deep gorges, hundreds of feet below. Isaac drives above the gorge called Devil’s Kitchen, and the ravine called Devil’s Dam. There are car wrecks rusting down there under the leaves, and boulders bigger than the wrecked cars. And there is the sound of water, the rustling water, to Isaac’s ears, like a thousand men praying together, davening and turning pages. Little by little the rustling water gathers strength, the gathering of voices growing louder and louder, until, as the road turns toward Kaaterskill Falls, the water begins to roar.
The road is high, clinging to the mountain. The rapids rush white over the green rocks, then tumble down into pools far below. From the car Isaac and Andras can’t see the swimmers playing and diving in the rock pools. Only the falls pouring down over the upper face of the rock, a blasting of all the long spring’s rains and winter’s melted snow.
It’s darker and greener here than anywhere else. The gorges and ravines broaden into a deep valley, and across the valley, far away in the trees, are Victorian mansions, tiny in the distance. Fairyland, Isaac’s girls call the hillside, and the faraway houses do look like fairy palaces, delicate as chess pieces, exquisitely carved rooks.
Past Fairyland, past Kendall Falls and Bear Mountain, Isaac drives. Past the roadside spring bubbling into its mossy barrel, past granite boulders, past thousands upon thousands of trees standing together, the young and old in congregation, until, at last, he enters the town of Kaaterskill, bright with white houses set against dark trees.
Kaaterskill’s Main Street is five blocks long. The buildings are all clapboard with porches, except for the brick firehouse, just built to replace the old station that burned down a year ago. Rubin’s Hotel is the biggest building on Main Street. The line of rocking chairs on the hotel porch is positioned for a view of the whole town. Across the way the post office also has a porch, and is freshly painted Williams-burg-blue with cream trim. Then there is the Taylor Building, where the Taylor brothers practice law, and trade in real estate; Hamilton’s
shingled general store; King Real Estate; Boyd’s Garage, with its dusty, glassed-in office at the back; the Orpheum, showing
The Godfather Part II.
The Main Street buildings nestle together companion-ably, as they have for years. They match each other, with their shutters and twelve-paned windows, and their creaky front steps. Only near the end of the street does the old style give way to the new. Here, like the village dragon, the chrome-and-glass A & P sprawls in its black-paved parking lot.
Isaac turns off Main Street just before the A & P, and drives down Maple Street, gently sloping, broad, and gracious. The trees on Maple are gigantic, so old, they arc over the road in a canopy of leaves. Their shade extends to every house, from the big summer places like Andras’s with sweeping lawns in back, to the rental bungalows like Isaac’s, small and square. Under the trees Isaac parks the car, and he and Andras step out. The city is gone and the world is green. Green trees, and green grass, and green leaves all around.
As he does every Friday, Andras goes directly to see his sisters, but Isaac walks across the street. A crowd is gathering at the Curtis place. Will Curtis’s new house has finally arrived. It has come in two sections, preassembled, and mounted on an enormous flatbed truck. A white-sided rectangular shoe box of a house with a green front door and matching ornamental green shutters.
“Daddy!” Three-year-old Brocha runs toward Isaac. “Up!” He hoists up his youngest daughter onto his shoulders and they watch as the huge truck backs into the Curtis lot with half the house clamped on its back.
Isaac’s wife, Elizabeth, makes her way to him through the crowd. She doesn’t kiss him. Not in front of all these people. But Isaac stands so close to her that her skirt brushes against him. Elizabeth is wearing a long twill skirt and a pinstriped man-tailored shirt buttoned all the way up. In summer she is so covered up in her long sleeves, long skirts, and white stockings that only the backs of her hands are freckled, and her face. She wears small gold-rimmed glasses. Her cheek is curved in a smile, her hazel eyes green in the shade.
“Isn’t it marvelous?” Elizabeth says to Isaac. Her voice is distinctive. Her accent English. “Look, even the carpet is down in the
rooms already!” She watches the men maneuver the second half of the house into place.
“Well, it’s just a prefab, Elizabeth,” says Isaac, amused.
“Oh, I know that,” she says, eyes on the closing seam between the two halves. “But it’s marvelous. It’s like a doll’s house.”
Nearly the whole town has come to watch. The year-rounders and the summer people, who are mostly from the city, Kirshners from Washington Heights, families from Borough Park, Lubavichers from Crown Heights. They all stand together, chattering excitedly, watching the delivery of the new house. The old place is gone, burned to the ground, and now the insurance money’s come in. Everyone’s busy pointing and shouting out directions to the movers and the trucks. “A little more, a little more,” urges one of the teenagers from town.
“You’ve got a mile!” screams a Talmud scholar, up for a week’s vacation.
The trucks pull the two halves of the house in close, but there is still a gap between the walls. The crowd stirs, frustrated, surging forward to give advice—fair-haired children along with young men in black hats.
“Nu? What gives?” demands a silver-bearded man in a frock coat. And just then the seam vanishes and the house is finished. The whole town and the summer people break into applause.
“More. More,” protests Brocha from Isaac’s shoulders.
“It’s all done,” he tells her. “It’s time to go home.”
“Again!” she says, pointing to the house, but Elizabeth is already crossing the street, and Isaac follows with Brocha swaying on his shoulders. He puts her down on the porch.
“Go on,” Elizabeth tells him. “Go on inside.” And she calls the children to help her unload the car. “Ruchel? Sorah? Take the bags. Chani?” She looks over to the tire swing, where their oldest daughter stands, storklike, watching the trucks pull out across the street. “Chani, could you bring your sisters back? They’re still out with Pammy Curtis.”
Elizabeth’s English accent hasn’t rubbed off on her daughters, but they all have English names. No one ever uses them. To their friends they’re just the Shulman girls, five rattled off in a row: Chani, Malki,
Ruchel, Sorah, and Brocha. But Elizabeth gave them other names, and she repeats them to herself: Annette and Margot, Rowena, Sabrina, and Bernice. These are her daughters’ real names; the ones on their birth certificates; extraordinary and graceful—princesses and dancers. It’s true, of course, the nickname Malki by itself means “queen,” and Sorah means a “princess.” But those are words the children drag around the house. There must be twenty Sorahs at the Kirshner school. Elizabeth wanted something remarkable and elegant—beyond the usual expectations. She didn’t name her daughters to be rattled off. She named them to have imagination.
As a girl in Manchester, Elizabeth played tennis. When she was sixteen, she even got a job teaching it to younger children at her school. But the interschool matches in the district were all on Saturdays, and she couldn’t play on Shabbes. Hers was a small school built by the Kehilla of observant families. Her father taught Talmud in the upper division. Elizabeth had prepared to teach Hebrew herself, and took her certificate at Carmel College in Henley before she married. Then she settled down to raising children. None of this was unexpected. Meeting Isaac in New York was not arranged, but it was natural. Elizabeth was twenty, and her parents said she ought to move about and see things. Not exactly travel, but visit the family, her aunt’s family in New York. And there was Shayni’s wedding that summer anyway. Elizabeth would be their emissary.
She is unusual in her community, an Englishwoman among the Kirshners of Washington Heights. She reads Milton on her own. She’s spent her pregnancies with Austen and Tolstoy. With Brocha she was the most ambitious and tried to read all of Sandburg’s biography of Lincoln. She should get back to that one, she thinks, as she sets the table for their late dinner. They don’t have a separate dining room, of course. It’s a small bungalow. Just three bedrooms. The girls’ rooms are so narrow, there is barely any space between their beds. They don’t mind, though, because they spend their time outside. The living room is shadowy, with only one dim ceiling fixture and two windows. Elizabeth keeps the front door open to let in more light.
In the evening the trees rustle together. Not a single car passes by. Elizabeth prays, standing in the living room, with her tiny siddur, its pages thin as flaky pastry. She recites the Friday-night service to
herself, rapidly, under her breath. She is not tall, only five foot six, but she holds herself straight. In the way she holds herself, in the way she moves, she has a kind of athletic grace. She is slender, although she has five children. She grew up early, marrying young, having her first child at twenty-one. Still, at thirty-four, she is excitable, eager to speak, and quick to laugh. She is, more than anything, curious, delighted by paradoxes, odd characters, anything out of the ordinary. She looks forward every year to Kaaterskill and the people there: Andras Melish and his South American wife; Professor Cecil Birnbaum; the Curtises with their tomboy daughter, Pammy; the Landauer family, Lubavichers from Crown Heights. In the summers she can see these friends again, and they are both exotic and familiar, like distant relatives.