Kaaterskill Falls Read Free

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’sshingled 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 therooms 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