Kaaterskill Falls (7 page)

“I know about this,” Nina says, refilling their glasses. “Believe me, I know. It goes very deep in Buenos Aires. The Saints days. Parades in the streets. It goes very deep. They talk about this pluralism in the
Jewish Post.
They should talk about Jewish education. Renée?” she calls to her daughter as she comes out of the house.

“I’m going into town,” Renée says.

“She practiced today,” Andras says.

“She practiced today fifteen minutes,” Nina corrects him.

But Renée is already running down the walk to the street, dragging her bike behind her, taking a running start.

“You could go see the Shulman girls and say hello,” Nina calls
after her daughter. Renée keeps pedaling. “I don’t know what’s wrong with her this summer,” Nina frets.

“She just wants to get out of the house,” says Andras. Even he does not realize how true this is.

R
ENÉE
pedals up the street as if her mother and her brother, and even her aunts with their iced tea, were chasing her. She used to love to come up in the summers and play with the Shulman girls across the street. Even last summer she didn’t mind them, but this year Renée is fifteen, and suddenly everything in Kaaterskill is too short and too small. All the wrong size. “You should use the time to practice,” her mother says. “You should read a book.” But Renée isn’t going to sit around reading books. School is over, after all.

Renée is a bit spoiled, although her mother never meant her to be. Nina is strict with her, but neither her father nor her aunts even try. Renée is too pretty. Her hair is shoulder length and copper brown. Her brown eyes are flecked with gold. She is small, and her skin is fair and lightly freckled. When she was a very little girl in curls and white dresses, no one could resist her. Her face is still pretty, but becoming more interesting, more self-aware. She still wears dresses because her mother makes her. The hems get tangled up in her bicycle, but she has to wear them all the same. Her mother doesn’t like girls to wear anything but skirts and dresses.

In town Renée walks her bike up Main Street. She watches the children from the city camp march by in double lines. She sits for a long time on the steps of the post office. Then she wanders on in a desultory way, cutting through the parking lot of the A & P, walking her bike up the street past the launderette to where Main Street becomes a bridge over Bramble Creek. She leans her bike against the railing and looks down into the streambed below, where the water bubbles in silty pools between the rocks. She is surprised to see that someone is down there in the creek.

A girl in rolled-up jeans is picking her way across the stream—slowly, as if looking for something. Renée scans the creek and spots an old straw hat near the bank. “Is that it?” she calls down.

The girl looks up, startled. Then she sees where Renée is pointing. She hops from rock to rock and picks up the hat. Renée can see
that the hat is a little wet, but the girl puts it on anyway and clambers up the bank and back around to the bridge where Renée is standing. “Thanks,” she says.

“You’re welcome.” Renée can’t help staring. The girl is tall, much taller than Renée. Her skin is tanned, her eyes dark brown. She has long straight hair, brown streaked blond.

The girl stares back at Renée. She asks, “Are you one of the summer people?”

“Yeah,” says Renée uncomfortably.

“I am too,” says the girl. “My name is Stephanie Fawess.” She rubs her hand off on her jeans and holds it out to Renée.

“Renée Melish,” says Renée. And she shakes Stephanie’s hand, although it seems an odd thing to do.

“Want to get a cheeseburger?” asks Stephanie.

“No, thanks.”

“Why not?”

“I can’t,” says Renée, embarrassed.

“Why? Diet or religion?”

“Religion,” says Renée.

Stephanie nods matter-of-factly. “You’re one of the Orthodox,” she says. “I have an aunt who’s Orthodox too.”

“She’s Jewish?” asks Renée.

“Greek,” Stephanie says. “She converted, and now she’s Greek Orthodox. My grandmother had a conniption cause we’re Maronite Catholics.”

“Oh,” says Renée. “You’re not Greek?”

“Syrian,” says Stephanie. “That’s my bike over there.” She points to a ten-speed bike tossed on its side on the other side of the bridge. “I’m going down to Lacy Farm to see the cows. Want to come?” Stephanie ties the straw hat under her chin. “It isn’t all that far.”

Renée hesitates a second. Then she begins to pedal behind this strange abrupt girl with straight hair spilling out from under the hat and down her back.

“Do only the men wear black?” Stephanie calls over as they ride.

“No,” Renée says. “Anyway, my parents—most people—just wear normal clothes. Where do you live?”

“Mohican Lake,” says Stephanie. “We have a boat too. My parents went fishing. That’s why I’m going to the farm. I want to be a veterinarian,” she adds. “Large animals.”

“What grade are you in—in the city?” asks Renée.

“Ninth. St. Ann’s.”

Stephanie’s father and her uncle are independent truckers, she explains. They truck between New York and Montreal. It’s a good business, since they’re independent; but they have to work summers too. They drive for days up and back from Canada, and Stephanie wants to go with them but she isn’t allowed. Stephanie’s uncle rents the other house on the lake, and he also comes up with his wife and daughters, Michelle and Monique. These cousins of hers—Stephanie is worried about their minds. She herself is a feminist and successfully accused her math teacher of intimidation and harassment over his use of sexist jokes in the classroom.

“You got him fired?” Renée is amazed.

“Yup,” says Stephanie. “Tape recorder in my desk. Turn right here on Mohican. They’re a bunch of racists in there, you know.” She waves her hand at the gatehouse off Mohican Road. A private road arcs upward into the leafy hillside. “The owners have a secret covenant.”

Renée doesn’t know what a covenant is, but she doesn’t ask.

“I’d love to infiltrate them,” says Stephanie. “If I don’t work with large animals, I want to expose social injustice. I think I’m going to become an activist. What do you want to do?”

“I don’t know,” says Renée, feeling eclipsed by the decisive and far-reaching plans of Stephanie.

Renée’s ideas seem unimportant next to Stephanie’s agenda. Stephanie talks about the news and the election, inflation, abortion, and nuclear proliferation. “I mean, one girl in my class asked me: ‘What’s the Cold War?’” she tells Renée. “This was a girl at a selective private school, for God’s sake! I just wanted to find a place where I could quietly commit suicide, you know?”

“Yeah,” says Renée, and she plans to find out what the Cold War is as soon as she can get her father alone.

Where the road flattens again, the houses are year-round places, ranches fixed up with American flags in front and white wagon
wheels. There are flower beds planted with petunias and vegetable patches sprouting tomato plants and giant pumpkin vines. At the turnoff onto the farm road, they find a vegetable stand with peaches, lettuce, watermelons, and barrels piled with fresh ears of corn.

The Lacy Farm visitors’ path leads up through pastures to a great red barn and two towering aluminum silos. Dressed in overalls and serious boots, the official Lacy Farm visitors’ guide is Bebe Lacy, an in-law of the family. Mrs. Lacy leads Renée and Stephanie into the cow barn thundering with the sound of hundreds of cows chewing, snorting, swatting flies, placidly rubbing flanks against the partitions between them. The girls watch the milk machines from the wooden walkway between the double rows of stalls. Above each cow hangs a white plaque painted with her name, weight, and pounds of milk output per day. “When you leave, you girls’ll have to sign our guest book,” Mrs. Lacy says. “We always have guests sign the register because we run out of names for the cows. This is Stephanie.” Mrs. Lacy pats the rump of a huge red cow. “She’s a good one. Good milker.” Stephanie the girl looks up, as if uncertain whether this is offensive. The cow swats off a fly.

“And what did you say your name was?” Mrs. Lacy asks Renée. She lights up when Renée tells her. “Terrific. We haven’t got a Renée. How do you spell that?”

“Do you feel honored?” Stephanie asks Renée as they bike home.

“What?” Renée breathes hard as she pedals to keep up with Stephanie.

“They’re planning to name a cow after you. Don’t you feel honored?”

Renée laughs. She feels hot and sweaty, and happy. It probably wasn’t a big deal for Stephanie, but it was an adventure for Renée to bike all the way out to the farm. She’s certainly done something not allowed. “I can think of lots of good names for the cows,” she says.

“Yeah, but they already have most girls’ names you can imagine,” says Stephanie.

“How about Esther?” Renée starts to giggle. “Or Eva, or Beyla?” Then she remembers the Shulman girls, “How about Chani, Malki, Sorah, Ruchel, and Brocha?”

“What is that—one name?” asks Stephanie.

“Five,” says Renée.

“You said them all together. Anyway, they’re too hard to pronounce. Do you want to go swimming?”

Renée thinks for a minute. “I should go home,” she says.

“So let’s go tomorrow. Let’s go to North Lake.”

“All the way up there? It’s far.”

“So we’ll take the bus,” Stephanie says. “What’s the matter with you, woman?”

Renée chokes up again with giggles.

“What’re you laughing about?” Stephanie asks, half joking.

“Just the way you talk,” says Renée.

“What do you mean?”

“Just—calling me a woman.”

“That’s what we are,” says Stephanie, and she looks over at Renée and her eyes sparkle, and her hair streams out like a banner behind her.

“Okay,” Renée says, “we are.”

R
ENÉE
’
S
aunts are gone, but her parents are sitting on the porch when she comes home. Nina smells manure instantly.

“Renée! Take off your shoes,” she says. “Where have you been? Don’t bring those shoes into the house!”

Renée does as she is told, and takes some cookies from the table on the porch. Tired out from biking, she settles down next to her father on the glider.

“You thought I was wrong about what I said?” her mother is asking.

“Well …” Andras hesitates.

“You agreed with them,” says Nina. She shakes her head. “I still say, a sense of identity is what young people need.”

“No, Nina, no one was arguing about that,” he says. “It’s just a question of how much a school can provide—that’s all Eva meant. There is only so much a school, even a private school, can do. And as for public schools, they have a certain mission to—”

Impatiently, Nina begins clearing away the empty glasses of iced tea, and puts the dessert plates on a tray. “The children don’t know
their history,” she says. “They know nothing about the war. Nothing. Who will teach them this in the public schools? I spoke to Regina about this. What do her children learn? They learn
American
history; they learn about Pearl Harbor. To them that’s what the war is. They don’t learn about their heritage. They don’t learn about Israel. It’s a shanda.”

“All right, fine,” says Andras, “it’s a shanda.” He gets up and stretches.

“Renée, do you want a glass of milk with that?” Nina asks.

“No, thank you,” says Renée, and she pushes the glider with her feet as her mother bustles around, clearing the dishes. Of course Renée doesn’t mention that she and Stephanie have decided to go to North Lake tomorrow.

T
HAT
afternoon Andras walks up Mohican. The sky is growing cloudy, the light dim. On either side of the road the forest grows thick and lush. Secretive. Nina’s words echo in Andras’s mind. She believes in education. She thinks that finding the right school, insisting on the best teacher, will solve every problem. When the children learned about the Holocaust in school, Nina wanted Andras to talk to Renée’s class about how he got out of Budapest. He wouldn’t do it. He’s never talked about it, not even to Nina. There are people who lecture about that sort of thing, so it won’t be forgotten. Andras can’t do that. It’s not because it is too painful for him. That isn’t the reason at all. He wasn’t in the camps. It’s because there is no way for him to convey his experience. It lies within him, a separate place within his present life. He couldn’t begin to explain it to his children, really just born and unscratched, all of a piece; knowing just one world, one language.

It’s disingenuous, he thinks, to teach that kind of thing, that tragic history. You can never fully tell another person what you know. You can’t imagine what you don’t know. There is no way to conceive, to picture, someone else’s life. There is no way to transfer memories. His own experience of the war is one of confusion, ignorance. When Andras was sixteen his parents said good-bye to him. They put him on a train and sent him to France. Andras had not wanted to go; his mother cried. But his father was adamant. He
nearly pushed Andras away at the station. The urgency of the moment prevented any long good-byes. The train bearing down into the station; the heaviness of the time. In France, alone, Andras made his way from safe house to safe house. He hid alone for months, alone with his thoughts, awaiting and yet half dreading the release his parents had purchased for him, the passage to New York. In New York Andras found his sisters. They had to make their way on a different route. As for Andras’s parents, his aunts and uncles, his grandparents, his childhood sweetheart, none he left behind survived.

Nina thinks he has a responsibility. She’s told Andras it’s his responsibility to record his suffering on tape, or write it down. Survivors are witnesses, and when they are gone there will be nothing left. This is one of her opinions, earnest and fierce and full of the phrases of articles in Jewish periodicals. Survivors have to tell their stories before it’s too late. But how can he describe a vacancy, an absence? That was his past life. He has no way to explain it to Nina, who thinks he has been shutting her out. Nina thinks the problem is the age difference between them. The seventeen years Andras lived before she was born: Andras’s childhood in Budapest, the years working in New York. Nina thinks those years account for the difficulty they have understanding each other. What she doesn’t understand is that, like hers, Andras’s knowledge of the war is full of gaps. He left before the end. It’s an emptiness within him, his escape.