Kaaterskill Falls by Allegra Goodman Read Free Book Online Page A

Jeremy had been different, and she fostered that difference, nursed it tenderly, insisting that his father hire a French teacher at the fledgling Kirshner yeshiva, a history instructor, even an English teacher with a doctorate, a former professor at Brooklyn College. She changed the faculty and the entire curriculum of the school for Jeremy, because, as she put it, she wanted him to have opportunities. Of course, she wanted him to be a rabbi. It was her deepest wish that he succeed his father, and yet succeed to the position with an extraordinary range of skills. Not merely ordination, but with degrees from secular universities as well. Always, she was his champion and advocate, constantly spurring Jeremy on, constantly pushing the Rav to recognize his accomplishments. And yet, even then, his father was turning away.
    When his mother died, Jeremy was only twenty-five. Suddenly her advocacy and interest were gone. There was only awkwardnessbetween him and his brother, and with his father, an increasing tension, an icy cold that worsened every year as Jeremy still did not marry. His mother had always assumed he would marry, as she had assumed he would succeed his father, but it was just love; just the force of her love that made her assume these things. In all his studies and his travels, Jeremy has never had a teacher or a friend who has loved him as much as his mother. She lived to see him ordained as a rabbi, but she died before he received his doctorate. She had wanted him to achieve both, as his father had so many years before. She had wanted him to become the rabbi and the scholar that his father was, or might have been if not for the war. Jeremy’s mother spurred him on; she gave him language teachers, trips to Europe, books of poetry. She gave him a secular education rare anywhere and unheard of in the Washington Heights community. Even she did not fully understand the value of her gift. She educated her son to rise to the Rav’s position. She wanted to give Jeremy the key to his father’s kingdom. She gave it to him and set him free.
    “R EALLY , it’s odd to see you here, out of school,” Beatrix tells Jeremy over coffee. “The scion of the famous rabbi. I had no idea.” They are sitting in the kitchen of Beatrix and Cecil’s house. A sunny spacious room with a black potbellied stove as well as a modern oven, a round table tucked into a bay window, a curvaceous 1930s refrigerator with a decal of strawberries. There is no dishwasher, and there are few counters, but there is a blue-and-white delft coffee grinder attached to the wall. “It’s like discovering someone has a fortune—someone you thought you knew quite well. But it’s more spectacular than that; a whole kingdom in the mountains …”
    “Only in the summer, Bea,” says Cecil.
    “Yes, yes, a summer retreat, like the Indian princes retreating during the monsoons.”
    Jeremy raises an eyebrow. The comparison is odd. His father’s middle-class New Yorkers and the bejeweled mogul princes.
    “So are you a courtier prince?” Beatrix presses. “Is that why you study all those little princely books? Everyone talks about Jeremy’s clothes,” she tells Cecil. “They say he finishes his lecture and puts on his coat, and it’s as if he were putting on his cape. Because he gives hislectures in character.
You
can do that. I could never do it teaching my miserable freshmen calculus.”
    “You could try,” says Cecil. “Haven’t you seen Richard Feynman lecturing? He says he just thinks—If I were an electron where would I be?”
    “Sh. Sh,” Beatrix says, and then to Jeremy, “What’s it like to be in the line of succession, as it were?”
    “Well, I’m not—”
    “But you are in line, aren’t you? Just think—to be inheriting all those souls.”
    Jeremy sips his coffee. He can’t begin to explain any of it to Beatrix. Not merely the politics of the community but those of his family as well.
    “I think you’ve got it backward,”