Kaaterskill Falls Read Free Page A

out directions to the movers and the trucks. “A little more, a little more,” urges one of the teenagers from town.
    “You’ve got a mile!” screams a Talmud scholar, up for a week’s vacation.
    The trucks pull the two halves of the house in close, but there is still a gap between the walls. The crowd stirs, frustrated, surging forward to give advice—fair-haired children along with young men in black hats.
    “Nu? What gives?” demands a silver-bearded man in a frock coat. And just then the seam vanishes and the house is finished. The whole town and the summer people break into applause.
    “More. More,” protests Brocha from Isaac’s shoulders.
    “It’s all done,” he tells her. “It’s time to go home.”
    “Again!” she says, pointing to the house, but Elizabeth is already crossing the street, and Isaac follows with Brocha swaying on his shoulders. He puts her down on the porch.
    “Go on,” Elizabeth tells him. “Go on inside.” And she calls the children to help her unload the car. “Ruchel? Sorah? Take the bags. Chani?” She looks over to the tire swing, where their oldest daughter stands, storklike, watching the trucks pull out across the street. “Chani, could you bring your sisters back? They’re still out with Pammy Curtis.”
    Elizabeth’s English accent hasn’t rubbed off on her daughters, but they all have English names. No one ever uses them. To their friends they’re just the Shulman girls, five rattled off in a row: Chani, Malki,Ruchel, Sorah, and Brocha. But Elizabeth gave them other names, and she repeats them to herself: Annette and Margot, Rowena, Sabrina, and Bernice. These are her daughters’ real names; the ones on their birth certificates; extraordinary and graceful—princesses and dancers. It’s true, of course, the nickname Malki by itself means “queen,” and Sorah means a “princess.” But those are words the children drag around the house. There must be twenty Sorahs at the Kirshner school. Elizabeth wanted something remarkable and elegant—beyond the usual expectations. She didn’t name her daughters to be rattled off. She named them to have imagination.
    As a girl in Manchester, Elizabeth played tennis. When she was sixteen, she even got a job teaching it to younger children at her school. But the interschool matches in the district were all on Saturdays, and she couldn’t play on Shabbes. Hers was a small school built by the Kehilla of observant families. Her father taught Talmud in the upper division. Elizabeth had prepared to teach Hebrew herself, and took her certificate at Carmel College in Henley before she married. Then she settled down to raising children. None of this was unexpected. Meeting Isaac in New York was not arranged, but it was natural. Elizabeth was twenty, and her parents said she ought to move about and see things. Not exactly travel, but visit the family, her aunt’s family in New York. And there was Shayni’s wedding that summer anyway. Elizabeth would be their emissary.
    She is unusual in her community, an Englishwoman among the Kirshners of Washington Heights. She reads Milton on her own. She’s spent her pregnancies with Austen and Tolstoy. With Brocha she was the most ambitious and tried to read all of Sandburg’s biography of Lincoln. She should get back to that one, she thinks, as she sets the table for their late dinner. They don’t have a separate dining room, of course. It’s a small bungalow. Just three bedrooms. The girls’ rooms are so narrow, there is barely any space between their beds. They don’t mind, though, because they spend their time outside. The living room is shadowy, with only one dim ceiling fixture and two windows. Elizabeth keeps the front door open to let in more light.
    In the evening the trees rustle together. Not a single car passes by. Elizabeth prays, standing in the living room, with her tiny siddur, its pages thin as flaky pastry. She recites the Friday-night service toherself, rapidly,