Kaaterskill Falls (28 page)

She should get up and start walking, but her legs are tired. When she gets home, the children will be waiting for her. They will be home from camp, tired and hungry, and still restless, wanting to go out on their bikes. She’ll find them outside, jumping rope, Ruchel and Sorah chanting together, counting out beats for the girl who hopes to jump in: “One a-dibble, two a-dibble, three a-dibble, four.” And always in back, Chani and Malki playing tetherball. She’ll find them there when she gets home, pounding the yellow ball between them. She wishes they had more space, now that the girls are older. Chani fourteen, and Malki thirteen. The bungalow seems smaller every year, with two in one room and three in the other. Perhaps someday she and Isaac will have a big summer place like Cecil’s or Andras and Nina’s. Elizabeth imagines idly that maybe if the store does well they could afford it. That’s what it’s like when you get a wish. It breeds others. She’s heard the girls playing outside: “If you have one wish, what would you wish for?” The ready answer: “Three more wishes.” Always wanting things. Even the children. Even in summer with their long jump-ropes in front of the bungalow, twanging in the dirt—the bald spot where the grass never gets started.

“Good afternoon, Mrs. Shulman.” Elizabeth looks up from the steps. It’s Judge Taylor, in his suit as usual, neat and trim. “I see you’ve opened up for business.”

“Yes, I have,” Elizabeth replies, a little flustered at the way the judge knows absolutely everyone by sight.

Boyishly, Miles Taylor brushes back the shock of white hair from his forehead. He looks at her with his clever blue eyes. “I hope you aren’t planning to leave your sign on the sidewalk like that.”

“Well, I—Hamilton said—”

“We have an ordinance about sidewalk signs,” the judge tells her. “Two summers ago Edith Wycherly fell and broke her hip just a little farther up the road. She just tripped over a sandwich board propped up on the ground.”

“Oh, I didn’t know,” says Elizabeth. “I hope she’s all right now.”

“She is not the same,” Taylor informs her. “She has never been the same. That’s why we established the ordinance.”

“But Hamilton doesn’t want my sign up in his window.”

“Perhaps you could work something out with him,” Taylor says. “Or perhaps you don’t need a sign at all.”

“No sign? But I need advertising,” Elizabeth says.

“Do you really? It seems to me word of mouth is always the best way in small communities, don’t you think? Your customers all know about you. And those who aren’t your customers …”

Those who aren’t your customers don’t want a sign on Main Street, Elizabeth completes the thought silently. She looks at Judge Taylor standing there next to the big blue-and-white sign, a symbol of the ubiquitous Jewish clan of summer people. “I see,” she says.

“Good,” says Judge Taylor, and he walks on.

Elizabeth folds up her sign. Slowly, she drags it off the sidewalk and up onto Hamilton’s porch. Like the Rav, Judge Taylor is a man to be reckoned with, the guardian and advocate of his community. The Rav has his sacred law and his Kehilla of families. The judge, his ordinances and his Kaaterskill. They are men who rule. With their word they command. But Elizabeth isn’t used to obeying Judge Taylor. She resents it.

C
HANI
isn’t supposed to bike to the library by herself. She knows that, but she pedals hard anyway along the curving road all the way to Kendall Falls. She is going to take out a book. It’s true that Chani has been reading books about Israel. She has a book at home, the one Malki saw her reading. She bought it from the sale box near the glass door,
A Pilgrim’s Guide to Palestine
, published in 1924 by the Ladies Guild of Holy Cross Church in Cleveland, Ohio. It was a bargain, for a quarter, and it’s full of maps and photographic plates of the tombs and monuments. Where Rachel is buried. The excavations in Jerusalem. The gates of the city. The Temple Mount. Maps fold out and show the places where the Romans breached the city walls of Jerusalem. There are black-and-white pictures of the desert, all shadow and sun, profiles of hills with herds of goats.

While the Entebbe rescue first brought Israel into Chani’s mind, the
Pilgrim’s Guide to Palestine
fills her with a desire to see the land. Kirshners rarely visit Israel, she knows, and they will not move there until the Meshiach comes. Just the same, Chani dreams of seeing the hills of Jerusalem with their gnarled olive trees. She imagines climbing on the walls of the Old City and hiking in the desert, all black and white, as pictured in her book’s photographic plates. Black rippling shadows on hot white sand.

Chani has two real talents: memorizing Tanach and hiking. She has a prodigious memory for scripture, although the memorization does not come easily to her. She picks through the text doggedly, inching her way through hard passages. Like her father she learns slowly and meticulously. And once she has learned a passage, though it might take weeks, she knows it unshakably. She’s won the elementary girls’ Bible contest three times. At home in the city she has three pairs of candlesticks on the bookcase in her room, her trophies. Chani is even better at hiking. Fast and surefooted. Cecil says she’s an intuitive hiker and a first-rate rock hound. She’s found samples of nearly every kind of quartz: rose quartz, smoky quartz, white, brown, pale lavender. When she was nine, she made it to the top of Cole Mountain. Only she and Cecil and her father made it up that far.

Those are her favorite things—memorizing scripture and hiking on Cole Mountain. Each has its season: the Bible contest in January with the radiators hissing in the classroom, the hiking in the summer
on leafy trails, ribbon trail markers tagging the trees. But it seems to Chani, when she thinks about Israel, that it is all scripture and hiking, with no separation between the two. She pedals her bike up to Kendall Falls and she pictures Israel, where all the trees are markers, and the genealogies themselves are trails. Covenants are places; mountains stand as quotations from the prophets.

When she gets to the library Chani has to stand outside a moment to catch her breath. Tentatively she comes in, uncertain without her little sisters pulling on her arms. She walks around the room, just herself, and it is as though she has forgotten something. The usual posters are hanging there on the walls. Smokey the Bear. Birds of the Northeast. On the children’s side are the low bookcases and the reading corner with cushions. There is the long, low table with the map of Fairyland under glass. Chani goes instead to the gray metal bookcases on the grown-up side. She looks at the titles slowly, glad to stand behind the tall shelves. In the front, at her great desk, sits Mrs. Schermerhorn stamping books, and at the smaller desk next to her, Mrs. Knowlton.

“What can I do for you, Hannah?” Mrs. Schermerhorn asks, and she looks straight at Chani through the shelves.

Chani comes out with the heavy book she’s found. She comes to Mrs. Schermerhorn’s desk and surrenders it. The book is
Exodus
, by Leon Uris.

The librarian takes a long look at Chani. “Hannah Shulman,” she says. “How old are you?”

“Fourteen,” Chani answers, confused.

“Are you aware,” Mrs. Schermerhorn says, “that this book contains adult material?”

Chani’s heart jumps. Mrs. Schermerhorn has read it. She knows it has material about Zionism.

“What does your mother say?” the librarian asks.

“She always says … read and find out,” Chani stammers.

Mrs. Schermerhorn looks at Chani thoughtfully. “If your mother doesn’t object,” she concludes at last, “then I shall feel no qualms.”

She rocks her date stamp on the purple ink pad and stamps the card in the pocket at the back of the book. “Two weeks from today,” Mrs. Schermerhorn says. “There you are.”

E
VERY
Thursday, James Boyd and Ira Rubin make the trip to the city for Elizabeth Shulman’s kosher provisions. They drive back with warm challahs, and coffee cakes, dozens of rugelach, bags of cookies, meat wrapped in plastic and packed in ice, briskets, rib eye roasts, ground beef, corned beef, and roast beef from the deli in Washington Heights. And then the kosher cheese. Blocks of Swiss and creamy Muenster, round Gouda in red wax, crumbly cubes of feta, balls of mozzarella packed with water in white plastic. There are the cartons of ice cream sandwiches, and Popsicles striped cherry, lemon, blueberry—red, white, and blue. And there are special deliveries this week. Smoked fish wrapped in white paper, dozens of miniature Danish, an enormous cake in a pink bakery box tied with string.

They take Washington Irving Highway up the mountain in James’s truck. Cheerful, glad they’re almost home, James is talkative. But Ira looks out the window at the dark trees, and he thinks about Renée. He has waited and waited for summer and for Renée to come back. Now she has finally come. He sees her sometimes in Kaaterskill on Saturdays walking to services with her parents. And he sees her once a week on the bookmobile. He climbs aboard and he takes out books, and Renée is close enough to touch, but he is afraid to speak to her.

Windows open to the breeze, the truck skims past Phoenicia and
Palenville. They pass Floyd’s Georgian-style brick motel, and James grins.

“Let me tell you, right in this spot,” James is saying.

“What?” Ira is startled from his reverie.

“Ten years ago, some of us thought we’d take a little drive.”

“Oh, was that the time you crashed?” Ira asks, and he is embarrassed that his voice sounds so eager. He has always wanted to hear about the crash, but it’s the one story James won’t tell.

“The crash was just three weeks later. I’m talking about when me, Stan Knowlton, and Bill Walker were just taking a leisurely little drive. Stan and I’d been out of school awhile, but Bill was just graduated and he was getting married to Candy Kendall. Then he was going into the Marines, to Vietnam.

“We were all sitting around on a summer’s night and there wasn’t much to do. My girlfriend and Stan’s wife were out with Ladies’ Bowling League. Candy was working late in Catskill. We had Knowlton’s truck, his dad’s truck, and we went driving along right along here, and we see this little Corvette in front of us.” Boyd leans forward now, as if he sees the car again on the road. “Stan says, ‘That’s King’s Corvette!’—Michael King, you know—‘and there’s someone in there with him!’

“So we start yelling, ‘Chase him down. Chase him down! Run him off the road.’ He was one of these summer people then, you know. Just one of these kids with a rich dad. So we start following him.

“‘He’s going to Floyd’s, I’ll bet you fifty,’” Stan says. We all knew King took girls there. So Stan decides to follow him. First he slows down. He’s a very subtle guy, you know what I’m saying? We slow down really casual, like we’d lost interest, and we turn off the road like we were really on our way down to Catskill. Maybe the double feature at the Odeon. So we let him loose just outside Palenville. Then we circle back toward Floyd’s and park off at the Little Red Hen, so the truck isn’t visible. We all get out, and we come at Floyd’s through the trees; you know, the swimming-pool side?”

“Yeah,” says Ira, although he’s never been.

“Well, the doors are all in front facing the road, and pretty much
you park in front of your door, so we came around the sides of the motel, me and Bill Walker on the left, Stan on the right. Like a pincer movement. And right there in front of number seven is King’s black Corvette. Bill was doubled over laughing.”

“So then what?” Ira asks.

James shifts into low gear and starts up Mohican Road. “Well, we rush in on number seven. Door was dead-bolted. We were thinking about chipping in to pay for the window, but Bill had his wedding coming up and he couldn’t afford it. Then Stan thought of trying to
open
the window. We talk it over in the parking lot and then we rush in on it to try. The window slides right open. But they heard us inside and the lights went on. By that time we’d got Bill in, though, and I was right behind him.

“There was a scream you wouldn’t believe. I jump down into the room, and Stan scrambles down, and there before our eyes is Michael King with
Candy!
Bill is in shock. There’s his fiancée, running for the bathroom with nothing on her but the motel bedspread.

“‘Candy!’ Bill shouts, and she stops in her tracks.

“When Candy saw him, her mouth just drops open. ‘Oh, Bill!’ Just like that. ‘Thank God you’re here!’ She starts crying how King had offered her a ride and they ended up in this place.

“So she and Bill start screaming at each other, but the rest of us didn’t waste time. We pinned King to the bed and tore into him. But, naturally, with all the noise, we’d barely started when the manager came running with the skeleton key and tried prying us off his clientele on the bed. So I guess we all got a little carried away and someone knocked this guy unconscious.

“Candy starts shrieking, ‘You killed him, you killed him.’

“‘Shut up, slut,’ says Bill. ‘Here I am planning the wedding. Here I am making payments for furniture.’ See, he and Candy were going to have a baby, due in January.”