The Sabbathday River

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The Sabbathday River Page 1

by Jean Hanff Korelitz




  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Part I - The First Baby

  Chapter 1 - Eye Contact

  Chapter 2 - The Famine Child

  Chapter 3 - What We Don’t Know We Know

  Chapter 4 - The Sabbathday Affair

  Chapter 5 - Pad of the Evidence

  Chapter 6 - Lilith in the Garden

  Chapter 7 - Our Bodies, Ourselves

  Chapter 8 - The Gene for Faith

  Part 2 - Heather

  Chapter 9 - The City on a Hill

  Chapter 10 - A Speck of Dust

  Chapter 11 - The Logging Road

  Chapter 12 - A Coincidence

  Chapter 13 - An H Like an A

  Chapter 14 - A Circle of Women

  Chapter 15 - The Country of Childbirth

  Chapter 16 - Gifts

  Chapter 17 - The Marketplace

  Chapter 18 - Polly Catches Cold

  Part 3 - The Second Baby

  Chapter 19 - A WorJ with Heather

  Chapter 20 - The Pound and River

  Chapter 21 - The World Overhead

  Chapter 22 - Somebody in Her Corner

  Chapter 23 - The Language of Mothers

  Chapter 24 - All of the Worst Things

  Chapter 25 - Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate

  Chapter 26 - A Woman to Blame

  Chapter 27 - Over the Edge

  Part 4 - Mud Season

  Chapter 28 - The Farthest Edge of the Diaspora

  Chapter 29 - Theme and Variation

  Chapter 30 - So Help Her God

  Chapter 31 - Friends like These

  Chapter 32 - Some Kind of Paragon

  Chapter 33 - friends Can Quarrel

  Chapter 34 - There Is No Group Here

  Chapter 35 - Witness for the Prosecution

  Chapter 36 - Dost Thou Know Thy Mother Now, Child?’

  Chapter 37 - Horses and Zebras

  Chapter 38 - Medical Oddities

  Chapter 39 - Just Like the Sixties

  Chapter 40 - Some Lives Won’t Blend

  Chapter 41 - The Chosen People

  Chapter 42 - Daniel in the Lions’ Den

  Chapter 43 - Human Error

  Chapter 44 - Confessions

  Chapter 45 - “I Am Christopher Flynn.”

  Part 5 - Pharaoh’s Daughter

  Chapter 46 - The Pond

  Chapter 47 - The River

  Also by Jean Hanff Korelitz

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  Copyright Page

  For Dorothy Aoife

  Part I

  The First Baby

  I place my hope on the water

  in this little boat

  of the language, the way a body might put

  an infant

  in a basket of intertwined

  iris leaves,

  its underside proofed

  with bitumen and pitch,

  then set the whole thing down amidst

  the sedge

  and bulrushes by the edge

  of a river

  only to have it borne hither and thither,

  not knowing where it might end up;

  in the lap, perhaps,

  of some Pharaoh’s daughter.

  —Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, “The Language

  Issue” (translated from the Irish by

  Paul Muldoon)

  Chapter 1

  Eye Contact

  THE FIRST BABY WAS FOUND EARLY ON A WEEKEND morning in September, 1985, as the whole broad length of the Upper Valley braced for its annual riptide of strangers, and as the first maples on the banks of the Sabbathday River prepared to burst, obligingly, into flame. Naomi Roth found the baby. It rocked in an eddy, bordered by stones, and lay so white and, facedown, so still, that she first registered the object as a child’s doll, seamless and albino plastic and tragically—to that child, at least—left behind here. Eyeing it, she could conjure that child’s keening over its loss, over the uniqueness of this particular doll—set so decisively apart from its hundreds of thousands of sexless twins, born from the maternity of their Chinese or Thai assembly line. But then again, this was not the place for children, precisely. Children played downstream at Nate’s Landing, where the Sabbathday widened slightly and merged with the Goddard River in its headlong careen south and west toward Vermont. There was a picnic area there, and the Rotary had put in swings a few years back, and a perennially overgrown sandbox where the mothers clustered and their kids occupied themselves. The water, kept safely away by a low picket fence, made its rumble downstream.

  But the riverbank where Naomi found the baby was a good mile upstream from that place. Here, its curve through maples and leaning birches was fairly undistinguished, and though the path Naomi sometimes used for jogging did pass here, there was nothing remarkable about this particular stretch. The nearest landmark—and it was a pitifully local landmark at that—was the protrusion of boulders around the bend she had just passed, known familiarly as the Drumlins for the little hills of glassy water they made. Pretty, but lethal, since under that glassy water were rocks sharp as real glass. Who would let a child young enough to cherish that doll climb and wade around here?

  Naomi stopped then. Grasping her knees, she put her head down and felt the blood rush to her forehead. She was not a very devoted runner. The temptation to stop was always with her, like a blackfly worrying the flank of a horse. The rasp of her breath overwhelmed the rustle of leaves. She felt the heat in her face begin to throb. Naomi glared at the doll, holding it responsible.

  Or not this doll, exactly, but the one it was prodding her to fixate on—a specific childhood trauma, happily undisturbed in its thirty-year slumber but now assailing her with disconcerting immediacy. Stop this, she thought, but she had already slipped away from herself and the doll was upon her, and how much she had desired it, and how much, for how brief a time, she had adored it. She saw, freshly, the two blond little girls in smocked dresses on the television commercial; she could hear the happy jingle extolling the doll’s mind-bending ability to wet. And her name: Sallie Smiles! (The exclamation mark thoughtfully provided by the manufacturer.) Naomi Roth’s parents—they of the Little Red School House and Pete Seeger persuasion—had been horrified, naturally enough, but she must have had her fill of ant farms and nonsexist creative discovery objects. The small blond pixies on the television were the company she kept in her fantasy of the parallel childhood she was not leading. She coveted the doll.

  When it disappeared, less than a week after her birthday, she had waited before panicking. Then she approached her parents, whose unmistakable relief over her carelessness—the carelessness they assumed, despite her denials—was clear. Naomi’s older brother declined to shed light on the situation, but months afterward it was from his window that she saw her doll again, grimy in city filth on the roof of the apartment building next door. It lay on its stomach against the asphalt, its bright face obscured, its fleshy pink hue bleached to stark white, and the legs between which it had wet so endearingly splayed to the extent of its somewhat limited hip sockets. At that moment, long before mortality and years before sex would enter her ken, she experienced a primitive understanding of the terrifying and the obscene. This tiny, blanched, and helpless body: a distilled drop of pure horror, fallen from the sky to splatter within view of her childhood home as a warning of what adulthood held in store.

  Naomi Roth shook her head. The thing in the river was some child’s missing toy, after all, not a Proustian moment dropped from the clouds. It had probably been lost hold of upstream and then drifted down here, she thought, taking a tentative first step onto one of the boulders: an accident and a force of nature working in hardly malevo
lent partnership, and not an invitation to moan about unresolved childhood trauma. At some point, a banana just had to be a banana again, and a doll just a doll, otherwise what’s the point?

  Farther out, the rocks were slippery with moss. She picked her way on all fours, inching ahead as in a game of Twister, with the silvery and frigid water hissing and sputtering at her heels. Drawing nearer to the white gleam of the doll, caught in its eddy between dark stones, she touched the green sludge of the rock near its smooth white leg and felt a preemptive chill. Cold, Naomi thought. She felt her lips move and realized she’d spoken aloud. But why? “Cold,” she said again, this time making a joke of it. But it was, wasn’t it? Suddenly cold? She should look up, really, see if clouds had gathered, if it looked like rain, here, in the middle of her morning run, with only her shorts and a thin T-shirt on and a good two miles to go before the path gave out onto the road where she had left her car. But looking up would mean taking her eyes off the doll, and Naomi could not seem to take her eyes off the doll.

  The leg of the doll. A strand of vegetation wedged into the crease behind its knee and fluttering in the glassy water. That joint was stiff, perhaps, but not unyielding, ultimately, since she could see that it gave just slightly in the current, and at its side the brief fingers seemed to feather the water. Realistic, Naomi thought, by now aware of the hysteria edging nearer, the strain of pushing it back. And in the barely perceptible sway of the doll’s lower back, where its spindly midsection suddenly widened into a cherubic bottom, a vortex of three dark hairs fluttered below the surface. The doll’s shoulder blades uneven, one ridge more sharp than the other, as if the mold had been made deliberately lopsided, the doll’s wisps of unglamorous dark hair riding the surface of the water, the doll’s eyes …

  Open, Naomi knew, though she could not see its face, wedged against its crown of river stones. Open eyes, baffled at whatever great force would summon it here only to show it this frigid and unchanging vision. Only this! She touched its shoulder and felt its newness, even in death. She was gripped now. Something had her about the lungs; some cold thing had infested her, making her grope for the tiny, splayed, and forsaken body in the river. Naomi reached for one alabaster limb and, touching it, felt the burn of a frozen thing. She turned it over then, setting her jaw against its flash of white. The word “bloodless” was forming in her throat. The flesh was smoothly pristine but for a single puckered interruption where something had bored, leaving the same kind of queer, unembellished wound you saw in medieval paintings of Christ —one dainty drop of precious blood spilled from a Roman gash. A girl. Naomi’s cheek scratched a granite boulder as she lost her balance. Her own hand finding her belly, her belly heaving onto the surface. Her eyes closing now, then opening, but underwater, too, as if she had only wanted to see what the baby had seen in its long ebb here, with its granite-gray eyes that hadn’t had a chance to turn, and she wondered, vaguely, what color they might have become, had they always looked out with such hope as they did now, fixing the awful affront of this radiant sky with a stare Naomi could not bring herself to meet.

  Chapter 2

  The Famine Child

  OH, OF COURSE SHE KNEW—SHE KNEW, SOMEWHERE back there in the part of her brain where she kept all rational thought, all sense, everything but this inscrutable fact of the baby in the river—that she was not supposed to touch the body. Every mystery she had ever read, every bad Hollywood thriller she had endured, had featured some gruff policeman who growled at you not to disturb a single blade of grass or shred of clothing, but Naomi hadn’t been able to help herself. Her arms had followed a command so deeply etched as to feel nearly genetic, the ingrained rhythm of scooping an infant into the crook of the elbow, and once she held the child a rush of pity—of almost love—had come over her, weakening her and obliterating everything else. The infant was grotesque, but even with her wound bled out and the unreal whiteness that remained, there was a gut-clenching sweetness to her unmarked face. Naomi crouched in the icy water for what seemed a long time, cradling the tiny body as if the child were hers, the toes and fingers hers to count and the slate-gray eyes hers to speculate about. She held the child so long that, in the end, it was not the child at all that brought her back but the awareness that she could no longer quite feel her own calves and feet. You can’t step in the same river twice, she thought then, recalling and perhaps mangling the meaning of some shard of philosophic wisdom. But couldn’t you step in it once and never get out again? It was time to get out now.

  Shifting the body to her shoulder, where it barely registered weight, Naomi picked a path back across the boulders to the riverbank, made her way out to the road and her car in a kind of blank daze, and drove into Goddard. There, everything was the same—an immaculate town, suspended in the not-knowing of what she knew, and this suddenly enraged her. She despised the nonchalance of those women on the Laundromat stoop, waiting as their loads churned inside, those lingering summer people or early leaf-peepers perched on the steps at Tom and Whit’s with takeout coffee and The Boston Globe, the trio of classically solemn Greek Revival buildings: Meeting House, First Methodist Church, town office. The bank was closing up its Saturday hours, and there was a half-full parking lot at the sports center. The normality of it seemed to hover before her car with its load of tragedy, then part around her as she drove by, then close behind her again: everything would change now. Goddard, intent on hoisting itself out of the forest to hail the tourists up from the lake region and west from the Old Man of the Mountains, would hardly be pleased by this jolt of change, but it was in Naomi’s arms and out of her hands. She shook her head and swung into the parking lot of the cement-bunker police station, then looked again at her tiny, ruined passenger. Shock and repulsion assaulted her with a devastating clarity, and the nausea that had sent her reeling into the river when she had first turned the baby’s body gripped her again. She could not bring her in this way, Naomi thought. She had a compulsion to swaddle the infant, but there was nothing to wrap her in, no receiving blanket to receive a corpse, only one stiff and blackened chamois cloth for wiping the windshield. She scanned the back seat and saw only Heather’s most recent order there: an alphabet sampler stitched on old linen. Naomi had picked it up mid-week, but for some reason it was still there, not yet processed and sent on. Uncharacteristically inefficient, she thought, pausing even in crisis to scold herself. She snatched the cloth from the back seat and wrapped the baby, besting her instinct to frame its face and instead enfolding it completely. Like the children of the Ethiopian famine, she thought, flashed around the world to the accompaniment of that summer’s global rock concert-wrapped for burial in gauze, tumbling into the mass graves as if they were little chrysalises. The cloth was pale yellow and covered with spidery thread in lush crimson, and the lettering was more ornate than Heather was wont to favor, a wildly swirling mesh of letters that covered half the baby’s chest and disappeared behind its shoulder—the client must have provided a picture of what she wanted. She could not send it now, Naomi thought, letting this bit of irrelevance lead her again away from the horror, however briefly. She could not send her customer a sampler that had been used to wrap a dead baby, and wasn’t it a shame that Heather, who’d obviously given the assignment her customary attention and extravagant skill, would only have to do it again, and soon, before the customer had a fit. As you know, she imagined writing to the aggrieved party, “Handmade in New England” is not only our slogan but a commitment to a traditional way of life. By eschewing machinery to provide the quality work we offer our customers, we must rely instead upon far less reliable human beings. In this particular case, the arrival of a new baby resulted in the delay of your order.

  A new baby. Naomi felt herself shake. The car began to fill with sound, something really strange that she couldn’t exactly place, but terribly insistent, and so awful that her only thought was to aid the person or animal in such agony. Either rain had come down from the bright clear midday sky to blur the windshield or Naomi
was crying. She clawed for the door and ran for the station, moving only to the staccato of her own noises.

  “Where’s Nelson?” she choked out to the deputy behind the receptionist’s desk. In response, he frowned at her. Naomi swiped the back of her hand across her face. “Where’s Nelson?” she tried again, feeling the edge of hysteria in her throat, pushing her. “Nelson, I need …”

  “You need help?” he said, somewhat bafflingly.

  “Please.” She thought she might faint. She thought the cloth in her arms might suddenly unfurl like a carpet at the deputy’s feet, tumbling the infant onto his scuffed black shoes. She didn’t know the deputy. Suddenly that seemed terribly significant.

  “Ma’am”—he cleared his throat—“now …”

  “Oh fuck this,” Naomi cried, hearing the intonation of her childhood—her mother on Central Park West, every other mother of every other child in the Ethical Culture school system. The deputy winced.

  “Ma’am.”

  She plunged past him. She had never been inside the police station before, but the geography wasn’t hard to figure out. Along the narrow corridor were arrayed a small room with an unwieldy Xerox, a conference area, and a supply closet. The walls were charmless cement block painted beige, plastered with posters. The dropped ceiling muffled the slap of Naomi’s feet so that she could barely make out the sound of her own motion. Nelson’s office was at the end of the hall, its door ajar, its occupant on the phone.

  She stopped in the doorway, feet apart, her bundle before her. In the small mirror behind his desk she caught sight of herself: wild woman, her hair in damp waves about her face, her face with its central ridge: a nose her mother had termed “strong” and everyone else merely “large.” She noted the desperation in her own face with extraordinary detachment, even letting the image of a long-remembered painting flash before her, dredged from freshman art history like a fistful of mud from the water: Victorian, unfinished, the portrait of a crazed woman extending a swaddled infant to its reluctant sire, its title a sneer—Take Your Son, Sir.

 

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