Kaaterskill Falls (29 page)

“You mean Billy Walker, Jr.?” Ira asks.

“That’s the one. That was the baby,” says James. “Named in memory of his dad. So now, where was I? Oh, yeah. So Bill was saying how he was trying to do the right thing.

“‘Do the right thing?’ Candy screams back—she’s still standing there in the bedspread. ‘I thought you loved me.’

“So now King’s just about breaking loose, screaming something about prosecuting us. ‘Yeah, from Canada?’ I ask him. We all figured with his money he’d go up there so he wouldn’t be drafted.

“The motel security rolls over and crawls out to call the cops, and Candy is just earsplitting. ‘Then you can take back your ring, Bill, I don’t want it anymore.’

“King was kicking, and Stan calls out, ‘Bill could you move your butt and give us a
hand
here?’

“Bill comes over and grabs King’s legs while Candy makes a big show pulling off the engagement ring. ‘If you don’t trust me, Bill …’ But I guess she couldn’t get it off her finger. It was on too tight. When she saw no one was listening to her she picked up her clothes and locked herself in the bathroom, so she was in the shower by the time the police came.”

“What was she doing in there?” Ira asks, fascinated.

“Washing her hair,” says James. “That’s what she told the judge the next morning after they hauled us all in. But you should have seen when the cops came, the sirens and the ambulance, King on the stretcher—all he had was a broken nose and a few bruises. And then Candy makes her grand entrance out the bathroom door in a cloud of steam in her little halter dress with her hair down her back all golden and squeaky clean, and this look on her face, so reproachful, all hurt and innocent like we’d put her through all this trouble, instead of her being the cause of it! So they dragged us down to the station, and King to Catskill Hospital for his nose, but Candy they drove home. That’s how it’s always been for her.”

“Why is that?” asks Ira.

“Because she had the looks. And she knew how to use them,” James declares.

“She just looks … kind of fat now,” says Ira.

“That’s neither here nor there,” James says philosophically as they drive through Kendall Falls.

“But then what happened?” Ira asks.

“Well,” James says, with relish, “they got us to the county holding block and filed all the paperwork—it was practically Sunday morning. We slept a few hours, and then Judge Taylor came and spoke to us. Crack of dawn he came down to give me and Bill and
Stan our lecture. And you better believe he milked it for all it was worth. It was like being in church. He said we had certain rights and certain responsibilities. We had liberty and we had licenses and either we were going to choose between them, or he was taking one of them away. Knowlton’s sweating now, since it was his truck and he was driving, so he figured his license was on the line, but Taylor carries on. It’s not just one, but all, who bear the brunt, being an unruly mob, attacking people, disturbing the peace, despite what we thought was the cause. And anger was a sin, and so was violence, and we’d indulged in both, and not taken proper channels for any resentment we might have, and whether there was just cause for Bill Walker—since it was his fiancée there with King—was not up to a lynch mob to decide, but through reasoned action and educated choices, not tomfoolery like this. And he said, we might live up to our family’s hopes, and the town’s aspirations, becoming young men of probity instead of laughingstocks. Gentlemen, not clowns. And if we would think and watch, using our natural faculties for good, we wouldn’t get into this kind of mess. And if we didn’t, well then there wouldn’t be any hope whatsoever.

“And he looked at us one by one. I’ll never forget it now, how he looked at all of us. Like he could see the future. Who would live and who would die.” James pauses for a moment. “But at the time I was so tired and so hungry, I didn’t care. All I could think about was breakfast, my stomach was growling so much. Taylor just went on and on, and I thought I was going to be sick just from hunger. It was like the judge decided to starve us into submission. But the gist of it was we all got fines and we had to pay damages to Floyd’s for dry-cleaning that bedspread.

“‘But, Your Honor,’ I says, ‘we never touched that thing.’

“‘Quiet,’ Taylor says. ‘Bring in the rest.’

“So in comes King to the station house with his nose in a bandage and behind him old man Kendall with his hunting rifle and Candy with that innocent look like her face froze that way. So Taylor looks around at all of us like the detective who solved the crime, but before he could open his mouth Bill turns to Candy’s dad and says, ‘Mr. Kendall, we’ve broken it off, Candy and I.’

“But Kendall says, ‘Like hell you have. We’ve got a wedding half
paid for here already, and we’re going through with it. As for you’—he points to King with his long gun—’if you lay hands on my daughter again I’ll blow off the rest of your horny nose or any other part of your anatomy. That’s all I have to say, Your Honor.’ And he stomps off.”

“Old man Kendall?” says Ira wonderingly.

“That’s history for you,” says James as they drive into Kaaterskill. “Gotta see it to believe it.”

And they back into the dirt lot behind Hamilton’s store, and James hops out to start unloading. But Ira sits a minute in the truck, and he tries to picture in his mind those long-ago days of which James speaks. Stan Knowlton and James a couple of wild kids, and Candy Walker beautiful like Renée.

E
LIZABETH
is waiting for James and Ira. When she hears the truck pulling in, crunching gravel behind Hamilton’s, she hurries out back.

“Let me check the fish,” Elizabeth says.

“It’s behind these boxes,” James tells her. “Let’s get this stuff off first.” James and Ira start carrying down the boxes of challahs, and the heavier crates of frozen meat.

“And the cake?” Elizabeth asks anxiously. “It’s not crushed back there?”

“Not to worry.” James lifts out the coolers where the whitefish is packed on ice. “Come on, Ira, carry these in.”

Inside Hamilton’s store Elizabeth opens one of the red-and-white coolers and examines the white paper parcels within. They are for Eva and Maja’s party, as are the boxes of cookies and miniature Danish, the miniature loaves of rye bread, and the cake in its tall pink box. “Put the cake over here,” she tells Ira Rubin. “Gently. Thank you.”

Elizabeth cuts the string and opens the cake box. Ira’s eyes widen. There in pink icing the cake says
Happy 16th Birthday Renée.
The cake for Renée. He hadn’t realized it when they made the pickup in the city. Everything was packed in boxes marked
Shulman.
But it is for Renée, and she is sixteen, a year younger than Ira.

The cake is in perfect condition. With its basket-weave icing and
exquisite bouquet of flowers and butterflies, it is more elaborate than Elizabeth’s own wedding cake had been. Excited and nervous, a little feverish, a little jittery, Elizabeth is standing there with this bounty around her, writing a check to Boyd, collecting receipts, doing something completely new. In two weeks she’s organized the party for Renée Melish’s sixteenth birthday; in a morning she’s brought up the food from the city. She sneezes and blows her nose. Then, despite herself, she glances up at the Rav’s letter hanging on the wall. The cake and pastries, and the fish, come from Eva and Maja’s bakery in Brooklyn, and their special deli in Flatbush, all outside the Rav’s supervision. Of course, the Rav did not forbid her to bring up food from outside Washington Heights, but he did not give her permission either.

When Maja comes to pick up the food, she stands with Elizabeth and gazes at the cake. “It’s beautiful,” she says. “You did a wonderful job.”

“Well, I didn’t make it,” Elizabeth says.

“But you deserve some credit for bringing it. For the long-distance catering. We can just put it in the backseat of the car,” Maja says. Eva doesn’t drive, but Maja keeps a car in Kaaterskill.

“Let me help you with those,” Elizabeth says. She helps Maja carry boxes out.

“You sound like you’re coming down with something,” Maja tells her.

“I’ve had it for weeks. It’s my sinuses,” Elizabeth says. “I think it must be hay fever, but I’ve never had it before this summer.”

“Allergies are like that, you know,” says Maja. “You grow into them and you grow out of them. Eva had a terrible allergy to certain flowers when she was a child. Gardenias was one. Now they don’t have any effect on her at all. And Andras used to have an allergy to grass, the cuttings, and now …”

“Now it’s gone?” Elizabeth asks.

“No, now it’s even worse.”

It must be some kind of flu, Elizabeth thinks after Eva and Maja are gone. Standing at the cash register, she is not only congested, but light-headed and exhausted. Her muscles ache, and as the day passes,
she feels as though she is watching herself hurrying along. She would enjoy this work, she would savor this day, if she had the chance to catch her breath.

By the time she gets home, she has a throbbing headache. “Chani,” Elizabeth calls out.

“What?” Chani calls back from the yard.

“Would you come here?”

“What, Mommy?” Chani runs over.

“I’m going to need your help. I don’t feel good. I’m coming down with something. Could you put up the chicken? And there’s fresh corn, just boil the water.”

Chani is a good cook, and a good baby-sitter too. She gets Sorah and Brocha to husk the corn. Elizabeth takes a shower and stands in the steaming water until her head clears. Soon Isaac will be up from the city, and he’ll help her. She would go to the doctor, but she doesn’t want to leave Chani with everything just before Shabbes. When Isaac comes home with the car, there won’t be time to get to the doctor and back before sundown. She rifles through the medicine cabinet and takes a decongestant.

“You need to get some rest,” Isaac tells her when he gets home. Right after candle lighting he and the girls bundle Elizabeth into bed.

“Here, Mommy,” Brocha says and she gives Elizabeth her stuffed animals. “You can sleep with Three Bears, because I know they’re your favorite.”

W
HEN
Elizabeth wakes up the next morning, she is still tired, but her head has cleared. The house is silent. Isaac has taken the girls to shul. The shades are down and the room is shadowy. It is so quiet, so good to be alone. The time she spent alone in past summers is now spent at the store. She is caught up in the business, the customers and the money, the constant talking. This morning none of that exists. The store has stopped for Shabbes.

“You’re making yourself sick,” Isaac tells her that afternoon. They lie together on the bed while the children play outside.

“It isn’t the store,” she says. “Isaac, I’ve been tired for a few weeks, and I’m starting to worry that—”

“I wish you hadn’t gotten started with Renée’s birthday party,” he says.

“I didn’t realize how much extra work it would be,” she tells him.

“I don’t mean that.”

She doesn’t answer. Then she says, “I know what you mean.”

“Well, I don’t think it’s right,” he tells her. “You’re playing with the Rav’s permission.”

“This is just the food for their party,” she tells him as she has before. “It isn’t food in the store.”

“But you wouldn’t eat it,” Isaac says. “How can you sell food you would never eat?” The Rav does not sanction Eva and Maja’s Brooklyn bakery. He does not certify their stores.

“Is it so terrible to recognize that there are other rabbinical authorities?” she asks him.

“Elizabeth!”

“Just because you follow the Rav—you don’t expect all the others to join you. Other communities have strict standards too. They exist; why pretend otherwise?”

He looks at her unhappily. “You could open yourself up, Elizabeth, to—to problems. The standards aren’t the same, and you know it. They hold differently in so many cases—”

“Isaac,” she interrupts, “then do my parents in Manchester eat treife meat just because they don’t eat food sanctioned by your Rav?”

Isaac can’t answer that.

Admittedly, hers is an ad hominem argument, but it encapsulates what she has come to believe. Elizabeth looks at the question differently now that she has a business. She has taken one opportunity and she can’t help taking others. There are other families up for the summer, not just Kirshners. All those other families come up for the summer with an equal need, equal potential to be customers. She can serve them as well. And many of them will come back next summer, when this sudden gathering for the Rav’s sake disperses. Of course, Isaac questions this kind of thinking. And there are questions underneath his questions. Isn’t she doing this just for profit? Why should she corrupt her original idea to serve the Kirshners with food from
Washington Heights? What about her original principles? Isaac doesn’t ask that directly, but she can see it in his face; she sees it in his eyes.

She doesn’t know a way to resolve this argument of theirs. They disagree; neither will retreat. Isaac is a purist, but she pushes against the rules. They have always had this difference. “You think I’m doing something wrong,” she says.