Kaaterskill Falls by Allegra Goodman Page A

him, as if she were a child speaking each word for the first time. Later, when the words weren’t new, when her opinions no longer seemed like new creations, he let them sink back into the everyday sound of things.
    As Nina has grown more observant, Andras has become distanced from her. Her religious fervor doesn’t interest him. Coming to tradition late, Nina has all the pedantry of an autodidact. Her strivings seem inauthentic to Andras, and not at all spiritual. Really nothing more than an expression of Nina’s ferocious domesticity. He isn’t involved with his wife. He knows it’s wrong. Even his gifts to Nina trouble him; he gives her rings instead of his own good opinion. He feels sometimes that he demeans her even with affection.
    Sunday afternoon Andras and Nina sit with his sisters on the porch, and Nina pours iced tea.
    “I’ve always felt,” Nina says, “that for the children a Jewish education must come first.”
    Eva and Maja nod politely from the glider. They are always polite to Nina, although she amuses them privately. She seems to them more like a daughter-in-law than a sister-in-law. Nina is seventeen years younger than Andras, and more than twenty-five years younger than they are. Certainly, she is young enough to be their daughter. But Eva and Maja sit together in their print dresses, and they listen, as they always do, occasionally exchanging glances. A stranger would think the two were spinsters, they look so close, so complete, sitting next to each other. But, in fact, they are very much Mrs. Cohen and Mrs. Rubinstein. Very much matrons, although they married late, well after the war and their emigration. Those years still cling to them and make them a pair; long years when they subsisted on each other. Now, in their sixties, Eva and Maja together have a kind of burnished glow.
    “I was talking to Regina about this,” Nina says. “She sends her children to the public schools in Beverly Hills. She doesn’t mind them studying among goyim. But I, for one, would never take the risk. If you’re with the others you forget who you are. Assimilation.” She pronounces the word slowly, as if she doesn’t want to set it off.
    Eva steals a look at Maja. This red-haired girl from the ends of the earth, preaching to them about assimilation! Their little sister-in-law from South America telling them it’s dangerous to keep an open mind to different backgrounds.
    “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 callsafter 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