In the Catskills: A Century of Jewish Experience in "The Mountains" (48 page)

The insignificant change was pregnant with momentous results.

It was lunch-time when I alighted from the train, amid a hubbub of gay voices. Women and children were greeting their husbands and fathers who had come from the city to join them for the week-end. I had never been to the mountains before, nor practically ever taken a day’s vacation. It was so full of ozone, so full of health-giving balm, it was almost overpowering. I was inhaling it in deep, intoxicating gulps. It gave me a pleasure so keen it seemed to verge on pain. It was so unlike the air I had left in the sweltering city that the place seemed to belong to another planet.

I stopped at the Rigi Kulm House. There were several other hotels or boarding-houses in the village, and all of them except one were occupied by our people, the Rigi Kulm being the largest and most expensive hostelry in the neighborhood. It was crowded, and I had to content myself with sleeping-accommodations in one of the near-by cottages, in which the hotel-keeper hired rooms for his overflow business, taking my meals in the hotel.

The Rigi Kulm stood at the end of the village and my cottage was across the main country road from it. Both were on high ground. Viewed from the veranda of the hotel, the village lay to the right and the open country—a fascinating landscape of meadowland, timbered hills, and a brook that lost itself in a grove—to the left. The mountains rose in two ranges, one in front of the hotel and one in the rear.

The bulk of the boarders at the Rigi Kulm was made up of families of cloak-manufacturers, shirt-manufacturers, ladies’-waist-manufacturers, cigar-manufacturers, clothiers, furriers, jewelers, leather-goods men, real-estate men, physicians, dentists, lawyers—in most cases people who had blossomed out into nabobs in the course of the last few years. The crowd was ablaze with diamonds, painted cheeks, and bright-colored silks. It was a babel of blatant self-consciousness, a miniature of the parvenu smugness that had spread like wildfire over the country after a period of need and low spirits.

In addition to families who were there for the whole season—that is, from the Fourth of July to the first Monday in October—the hotel contained a considerable number of single young people, of both sexes—salesmen, stenographers, bookkeepers, librarians—who came for a fortnight’s vacation. These were known as “two-weekers.” They occupied tiny rooms, usually two girls or two men in a room. Each of these girls had a large supply of dresses and shirt-waists of the latest style, and altogether the two weeks’ vacation ate up, in many cases, the savings of months.

To be sure, the “two-weekers” of the gentle sex were not the only marriageable young women in the place. They had a number of heiresses to compete with.

I was too conspicuous a figure in the needle industries for my name to be unknown to the guests of a hotel like the Rigi Kulm House. Moreover, several of the people I found there were my personal acquaintances. One of these was Nodelman’s cousin, Mrs. Kalch, or Auntie Yetta, the gaunt, childless woman of the solemn countenance and the gay disposition, of the huge gold teeth, and the fingers heavily laden with diamonds. I had not seen her for months. As the lessee of the hotel marched me into his great dining-room she rushed out to me, her teeth aglitter with hospitality, and made me take a seat at a table which she shared with her husband, the moving-van man, and two middle-aged women. I could see that she had not heard of my engagement, and to avoid awkward interrogations concerning the whereabouts of my fiancée I omitted to announce it.

“I know what you have come here for,” she said, archly. “You can’t fool Auntie Yetta. But you have come to the right place. I can tell you that a larger assortment of beautiful young ladies you never saw, Mr. Levinsky. And they’re educated, too. If you don’t find your predestined one here you’ll never find her. What do you say, Mr. Rivesman?” she addressed the proprietor of the hotel, who stood by and whom I had known for many years.

“I agree with you thoroughly, Mrs. Kalch,” he answered, smilingly. “But Mr. Levinsky tells me he can stay only one day with us.”

“Plenty of time for a smart man to pick a girl in a place like this. Besides, you just tell him that you have a lot of fine, educated young ladies, Mr. Rivesman. He is an educated gentleman, Mr. Levinsky is, and if he knows the kind of boarders you have he’ll stay longer.”

“I know Mr. Levinsky is an educated man,” Rivesman answered. “As for our boarders, they’re all fine—superfine.”

“So you’ve got to find your predestined one here,” she resumed, turning to me again. “Otherwise you can’t leave this place. See?”

“But suppose I have found her already—elsewhere?”

“You had no business to. Anyhow, if she doesn’t know enough to hold you tight and you are here to spend a weekend with other girls, she does not deserve to have you.”

“But I am not spending it with other girls.”

“What else did you come here for?” And she screwed up one-half of her face into a wink so grotesque that I could not help bursting into laughter.

About an hour after lunch I sat in a rocking-chair on the front porch, gazing at the landscape. The sky was a blue so subtle and so noble that it seemed as though I had never seen such a sky before. “This is just the kind of place for God to live in,” I mused. Whereupon I decided that this was what was meant by the word heaven, whereas the blue overhanging the city was a “mere sky.” The village was full of blinding, scorching sunshine, yet the air was entrancingly refreshing. The veranda was almost deserted, most of the women being in their rooms, gossiping or dressing for the arrival of their husbands, fathers, sweethearts, or possible sweethearts. Birds were embroidering the silence of the hour with a silvery whisper that spoke of rest and good-will. The slender brook to the left of me was droning like a bee. Everything was charged with peace and soothing mystery. A feeling of lassitude descended upon me. I was too lazy even to think, but the landscape was continually forcing images on my mind. A hollow in the slope of one of the mountains in front of me looked for all the world like a huge spoon. Half of it was dark, while the other half was full of golden light. It seemed as though it was the sun’s favorite spot. “The enchanted spot,” I named it. I tried to imagine that oval-shaped hollow at night. I visioned a company of ghosts tiptoeing their way to it and stealing a night’s lodging in the “spoon,” and later, at the approach of dawn, behold! the ghosts were fleeing to the woods near by.

Rising behind that mountain was the timbered peak of another one. It looked like the fur cap of a monster, and I wondered what that monster was thinking of.

When I gazed at the mountain directly opposite the hotel I had a feeling of disappointment. I knew that it was very high, that it took hours to climb it, but I failed to realize it. It was seemingly quite low and commonplace. Darkling at the foot of it was what looked like a moat choked with underbrush and weeds. The spot was about a mile and a half from the hotel, yet it seemed to be only a minute’s walk from me. But then a bird that was flying over that moat at the moment, winging its way straight across it, was apparently making no progress. Was this region exempt from the laws of space and distance? The bewitching azure of the sky and the divine taste of the air seemed to bear out a feeling that it was exempt from any law of nature with which I was familiar. The mountain-peak directly opposite the hotel looked weird now. Was it peopled with Lilliputians?

Another bird made itself heard somewhere in the underbrush flanking the brook. It was saying something in querulous accents. I knew nothing of birds, and the song or call of this one sounded so queer to me that I was almost frightened. All of which tended to enhance the uncanny majesty of the whole landscape.

Presently I heard Mrs. Kalch calling to me. She was coming along the veranda, resplendent in a purple dress, a huge diamond breastpin, and huge diamond earrings.

“All alone? All alone?” she exclaimed, as she paused, interlocking her bedia-monded fingers in a posture of mock amazement. “All alone? Aren’t you ashamed of yourself to sit moping out here, when there are so many pretty young ladies around? Come along; I’ll find you one or two as sweet as sugar,” kissing the tips of her fingers.

“Thank you, Mrs. Kalch, but I like it here.”

“Mrs. Kalch! Auntie Yetta, you mean.” And the lumps of gold in her mouth glinted good-naturedly.

“Very well. Auntie Yetta.”

“That’s better. Wait! Wait’ll I come back.”

She vanished. Presently she returned and, grabbing me by an arm, stood me up and convoyed me half-way around the hotel to a secluded spot on the rear porch where four girls were chatting quietly.

“Perhaps you’ll find your predestined one among these,” she said.

“But I have found her already,” I protested, with ill-concealed annoyance.

She took no heed of my words. After introducing me to two of the girls and causing them to introduce me to the other two, she said:

“And now go for him, young ladies! You know who Mr. Levinsky is, don’t you? It isn’t some kike. It’s David Levinsky, the cloak-manufacturer. Don’t miss your chance. Try to catch him.”

“I’m ready,” said Miss Lazar, a pretty brunette in white.

“She’s all right,” declared Auntie Yetta. “Her tongue cuts like a knife that has just been sharpened, but she’s as good as gold.”

“Am I? I ain’t so sure about it. You had better look out, Mr. Levinsky,” the brunette in white warned me.

“Why, that just makes it interesting,” I returned. “Danger is tempting, you know. How are you going to catch me—with a net or a trap?”

Auntie Yetta interrupted us. “I’m off,” she said, rising to go. “I can safely leave you in their hands, Mr. Levinsky. They’ll take care of you,” she said, with a wink, as she departed.

“You haven’t answered my question,” I said to Miss Lazar.

“What was it?”

“She has a poor memory, don’t you know,” laughed a girl in a yellow shirtwaist. She was not pretty, but she had winning blue eyes and her yellow waist became her. “Mr. Levinsky wants to know if you’re going to catch him with a net or with a trap.”

“And how about yourself?” I demanded. “What sort of tools have you?”

“Oh, I don’t think I have a chance with a big fish like yourself,” she replied.

Her companions laughed.

“Well, that’s only her way of fishing,” said Miss Lazar. “She tells every fellow she has no chance with him. That’s her way of getting started. You’d better look out, Mr. Levinsky.”

“And her way is to put on airs and look as if she could have anybody she wanted,” retorted the one of the blue eyes.

“Stop, girls,” said a third, who was also interesting. “If we are going to give away one another’s secrets there’ll be no chance for any of us.”

I could see that their thrusts contained more fact than fiction and more venom than gaiety, but it was all laughed off and everybody seemed to be on the best of terms with everybody else. I looked at this bevy of girls, each attractive in her way, and I became aware of the fact that I was not in the least tempted to flirt with them. “I am a well-behaved, sedate man now, and all because I am engaged,” I congratulated myself. “There is only one woman in the world for me, and that is Fanny, my Fanny, the girl that is going to be my wife in a few weeks from to-day.”

Directly in front of us and only a few yards off was a tennis-court. It was unoccupied at first, but presently there appeared two girls with rackets and balls and they started to play. One of these arrested my attention violently, as it were. I thought her strikingly interesting and pretty. I could not help gazing at her in spite of the eyes that were watching me, and she was growing on me rapidly. It seemed as though absolutely everything about her made a strong appeal to me. She was tall and stately, with a fine pink complexion and an effective mass of chestnut hair. I found that her face attested intellectual dignity and a kindly disposition. I liked her white, strong teeth. I liked the way she closed her lips and I liked the way she opened them into a smile; the way she ran to meet the ball and the way she betrayed disappointment when she missed it. I still seemed to be congratulating myself upon my indifference to women other than the one who was soon to bear my name, when I became conscious of a mighty interest in this girl. I said to myself that she looked refined from head to foot and that her movements had a peculiar rhythm that was irresistible.

Physically her cast of features was scarcely prettier than Fanny’s, for my betrothed was really a good-looking girl, but spiritually there was a world of difference between their faces, the difference between a Greek statue and one of those lay figures that one used to see in front of cigar-stores.