Kaaterskill Falls (11 page)

Elizabeth can’t hear Lamkin well either. He’s standing up on a rock, talking excitedly, although few are paying attention. He wanders between topics, and quotes profusely from the Torah and the prophets, but without much art in the quotation, so that instead of embroidering his drash he seems to bury it. The feeling is there, the knowledge is there, but he seems unsure of his direction. He just flits from one idea to the next, weaving like a drunken bee; mixing up the events of thousands of years of history, tangling up texts and commentaries. At first Elizabeth thinks he’s talking about youth, “bonayich, your builders,” but, suddenly, he is speaking about the destruction of the Temple and the dispersion of Israel. He takes a turn back in time to speak about the encampments of Israel in the desert, only to jump forward to the Maccabees in their rebellion against Antiochus. He skids back again to Biblical times, and at last he settles, heavy with quotations, on the blessings of the prophet Balaam, “who
was at first unwilling to bless the people of Israel. But Balaam saw, finally, after three times he was warned, that he had no choice but to say:
‘Mah tovu ohalecha Yaakov, mishkenosechah Yisroel’
”—how beautiful are your tents, O Jacob, your dwelling places, Israel.

Lamkin looks out at the picnic gathering. “And the question is—was Balaam seeing the tents of Israel in the valley, the camp of Israel? So we know that was not what he saw. This vision”—he pauses, drawing the words out—“this vision was not about the physical tents. It was at the deepest level the Torah that was meant. That’s what the tents were. We know that the tents were Torah, and the camps in the desert were places of Torah. For forty years in the desert, as the midrash says, the children of Israel were learning Torah and mitzvos. Was it any wonder they didn’t want to give this up—this life of learning—to enter the land promised to them? These were the years they were learning
intensively
, having unbelievable insights and understanding. All the books of Mishnah and Talmud and all the commentaries were spread out before them. This was a yeshiva of spectacular learning in the desert that was going on for forty years. That was what the camps of Israel were. Now, when we look at
our
camp”—Pesach glances at his wife, but quickly turns back to his speech, anxious not to lose his point—“we look at our camp, now, and hopefully what we are going to see is what Balaam saw, a whole yeshiva of learning outdoors. A whole wonderland of Torah. Which is for us lofty like the wild ox, strong like the lion….”

“Like the wild
ox?
That’s the wrong verse. That’s not very apt,” Elizabeth whispers to Isaac, at the picnic table.

“I didn’t hear,” Isaac says. “It’s all right.”

Elizabeth just shakes her head. Lamkin’s words seem to her hopelessly muddled.

When Rabbi Lamkin is finished, Beyla’s promised feast begins. There are platters of cold cuts, plastic tubs of potato salad and coleslaw, attracting wasps; pickles, potato chips, and scores of hot dogs curling up on the Lamkins’ brand-new grill.

The parents are gathering together to talk. The children are screaming under the trees, clambering over rocks, skinning their knees, dripping ketchup onto the grass. And above all the waterfall roars, rushing down into the gorge below them. In this din Elizabeth
feels a little sad. It occurs to her that she doesn’t particularly like Rabbi Lamkin, and she isn’t happy about his running the summer camp. He isn’t the sort of rabbi she respects. She and Isaac are different this way. Isaac knows very well that Lamkin isn’t well spoken or intelligent or practical; but he believes the young man has a good heart, and so he won’t think ill of him. Elizabeth often thinks ill of people. She is critical; she resents them, and she can’t help it. She accuses herself sometimes of being a snob, or even slightly mean-spirited. She hates incompetence. On Yom Kippur in the city, for example, there is one old codger who always leads musaf, and he sings out of the side of his mouth in such a harsh and tuneless way that Elizabeth burns with indignation. On Yom Kippur of all days! But she can’t help herself. She stands there fasting and exhausted, and when she hears this man sing she actually wants to do him harm. Isaac, who davens beautifully and has a lovely voice, never leads the services on Yom Kippur. He is not a big macher in the community by any means. In fact there is not a single great rabbi in his family.

The problem isn’t that people show Lamkin undue reverence. No one accords him great respect; and yet, for that very reason, it seems wrong to entrust him with the summer camp. It seems a kind of mutual exploitation. Community baby-sitting in exchange for rabbinical power.

“What’s wrong?” Isaac asks her as he comes up with a plate of food. “You’re not enjoying it?”

“Lamkin jumbled everything together,” Elizabeth says.

“He was nervous.” Isaac makes allowances, as he always does. “It’s going to be a good camp. And you’ll have some time to yourself.”

“All right! All right!” Beyla Lamkin is announcing. “All children come here to get ready for the treasure hunt. One, two, one, two—if you’re a one, you’re on team one; if you’re a two, you’re on team two. One, two, one, two …” She taps each child lightly on the head. The Lamkins’ new campers mill around for the treasure hunt. “Pinchas! Stop that!” Beyla calls to her youngest son.

Elizabeth remembers the summer three years ago when Brocha was just a newborn. Brocha and Pinchas had the same birthday, and Beyla joked about making a shidduch between them. Pinchas is three
now, a little monkey running around with his shirt untucked, and the fringes of his tallis katan flying. With his long, pale face and wispy black hair, he looks just like his father. Elizabeth would not be happy to see her daughters marrying Lamkins. Although, of course, they are good people; they are a pious family.

When Elizabeth thinks about her daughters, she thinks of them living extraordinary lives. She can’t speak of it aloud—all that she wants for them. She doesn’t have one simple idea, only a fervent, unarticulated wish. The girls’ future is just something Elizabeth imagines, nothing whatever to do with reality. They’re very good children. They expect to marry scholars and then support them while they learn. But Elizabeth imagines someday her daughters could be scholars themselves—not of Talmud, of course, but perhaps Tanach. Or at other times she thinks one of them could become a writer, or an artist. Perhaps a journalist. It would have to be a Jewish newspaper, so that she could keep Shabbes. Naturally, becoming a mother, keeping a Jewish home, is the most important thing. But somehow she can’t see it as the only thing for her girls. There must be, there ought to be, something else as well, a second purpose. Perhaps Elizabeth’s dreams for the girls are really only what she desires for herself. She is by nature discontented, she thinks; by nature the opposite of Isaac. For he never had money, never had a great family name, and he seems happy anyway.

“Mommy, can we go down to the water?” Chani asks her.

“And can I come?” Ruchel asks.

“I’ll come down with you,” Elizabeth says.

Carefully, she and the girls climb down the long dirt path into the gorge. They climb all the way down from the park to where the falls pour louder and louder into great pools of rippling water, green and brown. The rock pools are cool under the waterfall. Elizabeth and Chani and Ruchel take off their shoes and socks and stand in the shallowest water, smooth mossy pebbles stroking the soles of their bare feet. The wet hems of their skirts slap against their legs. In the distance they hear the cries from the treasure hunt, a confused yelling about team one and team two, and then Elizabeth hears Isaac as he comes down the path to the falls. He waves at them, and laughing, calls out the line from the Book of Isaiah:
“Kol tzameh l’chu lamayim.”
Let all who thirst come for water. The water of Torah, the thirst-quenching truth of God’s law.

“I
SAAC
,” Elizabeth asks that night in bed, “how are you so content? I try, but …”

He smiles at her in the dark. She can make out the shape of his quick smile, the curve of his cheek, the parting of lips. “How are you so patient?” she asks. “Tell me.”

“Just habit,” he whispers. “It’s only habit.”

“Tell me how,” she says. “So I won’t want things.”

“I couldn’t teach you that,” he tells her.

He has had his disappointments. Because he wasn’t a particular favorite of the Rav, and had no distinguished relatives, he didn’t get a stipend from the yeshiva to continue his studies. No one wanted him to leave, but his family didn’t have the money to support him for so long. And yet, for all of this, Elizabeth can see that his private learning outside the yeshiva sustains him. He doesn’t want a second purpose. His life is all one. His books are part of him. Truly, his books quench his thirst; he is more than satisfied, while Elizabeth’s reading only whets her appetite, fills her with confused longings for change and new experiences. She sighs. Too often reading makes her feel incomplete, impatient.

“Here’s the trick.” He kisses her. “You have to want what you have.”

She props herself up on one elbow. “Really, Isaac, are you such a fatalist?”

“No,” he says, and already, as he touches her, his hands erase her words. How can there be room for questions? He is her whole landscape, his body next to hers, his arms around her. She lies in the valley of his arms.

T
HE
picnic over, Renée sits at the piano under protest. She’s been ordered to practice an hour before she can go to the Fourth of July barbecue at Stephanie’s. Her mother hadn’t wanted her to go at all. She’s seen Stephanie, and the girl looks wild. Nina doesn’t know much about the Fawess family, but they aren’t Jewish, she knows that. They don’t belong to Nina’s circle of acquaintances, and it hurts her that with all the Jewish children to choose from, Renée runs around with this Arab one. Nina isn’t racist exactly; it’s just that she remembers such isolation as a child. She had so few Jewish friends. Her own parents in Buenos Aires sent her to a Catholic school. Even then, she hated sitting alone, different from the others though she wore the uniform. She begged to go to the Jewish school, but it was far away, and her parents wouldn’t let her board. They hired a Hebrew tutor for her instead and pretended they were like their neighbors, living in the suburbs with servants and big gardens.

The world is very big, very dangerous. Full of enemies of Israel and of Jews. There are people who make crime and hate their business. These terrorists, these hijackers. Naturally, Nina wants her daughter to be safe, and to be sheltered by the kind of community she herself had longed for as a child: the Jewish school in which Renée can know her whole class, the summer place where she can play with the neighbors.

Renée, of course, knows better. She complains all the time about
her Jewish school, where she has two friends and hates everyone else. Nearly everyone spends the day backbiting and acting vicious. And she’s tried to explain why the Shulman girls are so dull. All they want to do when they grow up is marry rabbis and then support their families by teaching Hebrew. In the Kirshner school, of course. And as soon as they’re married they’ll all cut their hair and wear shekels just like their mother. No one Renée knows in the city does that. But Nina still can’t see why her daughter suddenly doesn’t like Chani Shulman anymore.

At the piano Renée fiddles with the metronome for a while and then looks at the clock.

“I don’t hear it,” Nina calls from upstairs.

Renée crashes down on the first page of Chopin’s
Fantaisie-Impromptu.
She is advanced enough to play difficult music, but not to play it well. She skips a few notes on the first runs and starts again, banging down even more violently. “Like a feather,” her piano teacher told her at her last lesson before she left for Kaaterskill. “Think of the Chopin like feather dusters on the keys.” She smashes some more chords and then sees her father come in, about to go up the stairs. She runs up to him.

“I have to go to the party,” she says. “I can’t practice on the Bicentennial!”

“Oh, all right,” he says absently, and walks on up the stairs.

“Renée?” Nina calls out again from the upstairs bedroom.

“I let her go out,” says Andras from the doorway.

Nina turns on him. “I told her one hour piano.” In the light of the window she looks as if she could catch fire. Her red hair flames in the sun. “How can I control her if you undermine everything I do?” She tilts back her head to accuse her tall husband.

“I wasn’t thinking,” Andras says.

“You’re never thinking about the children.”

Why is she so shrill? he asks himself. The afternoon sun pours into the upstairs room, and Andras retreats into the dark closet to change his shirt for a fresh one. He hates the heat. Even in the mountains he can feel the afternoon glare.

Nina pulls the closet door open into the sun. “Andras, listen to me! Renée isn’t practicing, and you just let her get away with it.”

“All right, she can practice tomorrow,” he says.

“She isn’t practicing at all,” Nina tells him. As always when she is angry, her Spanish accent flares. “She isn’t making any progress.”