The Sabbathday River

by Jean Hanff Korelitz

  “I know you’re going to teach at Dartmouth,” Naomi told Joel apologetically. “But I don’t know what you’re going to teach.”

  “Biology. Well, it’s all very confusing. Genetics, specifically. And I’m technically at the medical school,” he said. “I mean, my appointment’s there, but my lab’s in the science complex, attached to the biology department.”

  “And he doesn’t actually teach anybody,” Judith said dryly. “Sometimes I wonder why they bother admitting students to these places at all.”

  “Oh now.” He smiled. “Students are fine, but I’m not a very gifted teacher. I just like to get on with things in the lab. And Dartmouth offered me less teaching for more money and a better lab.” He shrugged. “So sue me.”

  “Genetics,” Naomi mused. “Watson and Crick. Those fine gentlemen who shoved Rosalind Franklin out of the way in their noble—or should I say Nobel?—pursuit of the double helix.”

  He put up his hands. “Hey, no argument from me there!”

  “I read somewhere that one day they’ll be able to look at our DNA and tell us what kind of cancer we’re going to get.”

  “Oh, not just cancer,” Joel said eagerly, a scientist taking the bit. “Everything’s there. Well, we can’t prove it yet, but we’re going to be able to see a whole life in a single cell. One little bit of a baby’s skin and we’ll be able to tell if he’s going to have blue eyes, or a stroke, or a good sense of balance, or cancer, or genius …”

  “Or bad breath,” Judith said tersely. “But do we want to know? We’ve blundered along for a few thousand years without knowing how we’re going to die. Why would we want to change that now?”

  “Because, in the case of disease we want to treat it early, and in the case of genius we want to nurture it.”

  “Sounds very Brave New World,” Naomi said affably. “I don’t think I’d want to know if my child—”

  “No, you would,” Joel said. “I mean, if you thought about it, you probably would.”

  Naomi, abruptly quiet, understood that they had arrived on some hazardous ground. But she did not like the silence, so she went on as if there were no silence to break.

  “Well, I’m glad you’re here.” She looked at Judith. “It’s great news for me.”

  Joel, too, looked at his wife. He smiled. “She didn’t want to come, but I threw her over my shoulder. After all, I’m the man, right?”

  “Please.” Judith rolled her eyes.

  “And I don’t see bringing up kids in New York.”

  “You have kids?” Naomi looked at them both. They were looking at each other. An entire conversation, inaudible to her, passed between them. At last Judith turned to her.

  “Not yet,” she said. “Maybe soon.” She listlessly moved a carrot around her plate with the tip of her fork. “My mother came from Germany after the war. She was the only one in her family to make it out. She had a very specific interpretation of procreation, which she thoughtfully passed on to my sister and me. Basically, she told us that if we didn’t have children it would mean Hitler had won.”

  Something in Naomi’s stomach clenched. “That’s pretty heavy for a little kid.”

  Judith, unaccountably, smiled. “Oh, I don’t think she meant it to burden us. She just wanted us to see the world the way she saw it.”

  “She was a character.” Joel shook his head. “Some people coming out of the camps were like that, you know. Almost hedonists. They were determined to have joy every day. Of course she hated almost everyone.”

  “Except her daughters,” Judith reassured Naomi.

  “Right. The two of you, she completely adored. You were the reason she was saved. I mean”—he smiled fondly—“to have you.”

  “Yeah.” Judith held her glass for Naomi to fill again. “That was the whole point to life. Life was a bunch of threads, and the threads were families, and they were dangling down through the centuries, all the way back to the beginning of time. Or Abraham and Isaac, anyway. And then someone came along and tried to cut through the threads with these big cosmic scissors, and of course he did this very efficiently, but not quite efficiently enough to finish the job, so some little threads were missed. And so now the ones he missed have to make up for the ones he cut.” She shrugged. “Anyway, that’s how my sister and I inherited the responsibility of repopulating the world. My sister says it’s why she became a midwife.”

  “A midwife!” Naomi was impressed.

  Judith nodded. “Rachel went and studied with those women on the commune in Tennessee. They’re the ones who wrote that Spiritual Midwifery book that tells you how labor pains are supposed to be psychedelic and holy.”

  Naomi laughed. “And so, has your sister fulfilled her responsibilities? I mean, does she have kids of her own?”

  Judith seemed to consider. “Well, yes,” she said. Her voice was surprisingly soft. “She has two. A boy and a girl.”

  “That’s nice. One of each.” Naomi’s voice was bright. It seemed awkwardly bright suddenly.

  “Yes,” said Judith. She looked past Naomi, her gaze fixed. Naomi fought an urge to turn around and see what was so completely interesting. But then she spoke. “So what do you think. Would a kid raised in New Hampshire just automatically grow up to be Pat Buchanan or Phyllis Schlafly?”

  Naomi smiled at her. “Well, no. But you’d have your work cut out for you. I mean, I’ve been here nine years and I’ve never had a real woman friend.” Until now, she was too shy to add.

  “Well, the sixties did get to most places, in the end,” Judith said. “I mean, some places it didn’t turn up till the seventies, but still.”

  “Nope.” Naomi shook her head. “They headed it off at the Connecticut River. They painted over the road signs so people kept driving till they hit Maine.” She speared a carrot out of the gravy. “It just never really happened here.”

  “But how can that be true?” Joel said. “I mean, there’s no difference between New Hampshire and Vermont, is there?”

  “Actually,” Naomi said, “there is a difference. They don’t even look alike, really, if you think about it. Vermont has rolling hills and green valleys; you tend not to get them on this side of the river. A geologist I met once told me that, geologically, they’re quite distinct from each other. They actually belong to different plates or something, he said. The back-to-the-land types found this particular land very inhospitable for their purposes, while the land across the Connecticut River was a bit more forgiving. There were something like a hundred communes over there. You know”—she tore a piece of brown bread and spread it with apple butter—“Vermont had about a 10 percent population hike in the sixties.”

  “That’s a lot of hippies,” Judith observed.

  “Not just hippies,” Naomi said. “The other reason was skiing.”

  “Skiing.” Joel laughed. “What does skiing have to do with it?”

  “Oh, skiing was terribly important in the sixties. It was new, for one thing. I mean, it had been around for decades, but now there were big centers with lifts and snowmaking, and there were the new interstates to bring people up from Boston or New York for the weekend and still get them home in time for work on Monday. A lot of folks came and got hooked, and they looked around at what was happening in society and just decided to chuck their work and do what they liked. So you had a whole state full of college graduates running snowplows and tending bar. And after a few years, when they’d gotten it out of their systems, they dusted off the old degrees and started up businesses or began selling real estate, or they hung out their shingles, and voilà: a state full of professionals with residual political commitments. And of course, people go where there are already people doing what they want to be doing. People like to be with their own kind. They want to live among like-minded souls. Unlike me, of course,” she said with acrid self-deprecation. Then she smiled at Judith. “You said it yourself, you wished you’d moved to Putney.”

  Husband and wife exchanged a loaded look. “I would have l
oved to move to Putney,” Judith said.

  “Lots of great people in Putney,” Naomi prompted. “They have a food co-op …”

  “Yeah, yeah.” Then Judith smiled. “I knew this woman. She was a weaver in Putney. About five years ago she decided to move to Israel. She wanted to try living on a kibbutz. So she’s out in the field there, picking lemons or whatever, within shouting distance of the Lebanese border, and a guy comes up to her, says, ‘Don’t I know you? Aren’t you in the Putney co-op?’”

  Naomi grinned. “Still, I’m glad you came here. Seven more of us and we’ll have a minyan.”

  “That’s supposed to be all men,” Joel said, tearing off another piece of bread.

  Judith leaned conspiratorially toward Naomi. “Got him away from New York just in time. There’s a religious revival going on. This charismatic rabbi near Lincoln Center’s pulling ’em back into the fold like a Venus flytrap.”

  “Ouch,” Naomi said.

  “Absolutely. It’s invasion of the body snatchers, the Goldberg variation. People who toasted the death of God with LSD are studying Talmud with their kids. A woman I worked with started trading cases with me so she could get home before sundown on Fridays.”

  “But you’re a scientist,” said Naomi to Joel. “How could you possibly reconcile genetics with God? You can’t believe in both.”

  He had evidently considered this problem before. “I don’t know. I think you believe what you believe. You let the details sort themselves out later.”

  Judith rolled her eyes. “God’s a pretty big detail, sweetie.”

  “Well, I’m perfectly comfortable with the fact that there is no God.” Naomi shrugged. Joel, pursing his lips, said nothing. “I used to say ‘agnostic,’” she went on. “Then one day it occurred to me: who am I kidding? I’m not agnostic. Saying you’re agnostic implies that you’re engaged in the active, ongoing pursuit of an understanding of God, and truthfully, I hung up my pursuit years ago. It would be like saying you’re training for a marathon when you’re not even jogging around the block—it’s misleading and even a little dangerous.”

  “Dangerous?” Joel looked at her.

  “Yeah, you get to thinking you’re not going to drop dead from a heart attack because you’ve been doing all that imaginary training. I mean,” Naomi said, “you get complacent about an afterlife because you can’t admit to yourself that you really just don’t believe. Like the God you don’t acknowledge is going to give you points for not admitting your disavowal outright.”

  “But how can you be sure?” Joel leaned forward.

  She smiled at him. “I must lack the gene for faith.”

  To her amusement, he seemed to take this seriously. “Perhaps you do. Perhaps it comes down to that, after all.”

  “You have to forgive him.” Judith leaned in. “It’s his version of a midlife crisis. This is what a midlife crisis looks like in a man who’s basically happy with his life. Like I said, I got him out of New York just in time. In another year, I might have had two sinks, two refrigerators, two dishwashers …”

  “But you said you wanted two refrigerators in the new house.” Joel frowned.

  “Yeah, sure. But not to keep kosher. It’s to keep sane. I’m going to have to freeze all the stuff I haul up from Zabar’s. And as you ought to remember, my dear husband, when I’m working, it’s dinner on ice. You may have transported me to the land of Live Free or Die, but once I start in Peytonville, you’re going to have to get used to defrost and reheat again.” She shook a silver-ringed index finger at him. “Much as I love you, you know the cow thieves come first.”

  “I know.” Joel smiled.

  Naomi offered coffee and got up to make it.

  “It’s kind of funny,” she said to Judith, who had followed her into the kitchen, “when my ex-husband and I first came here, I was just charmed by that. ‘Live Free or Die’ on every license plate. I was thinking: ‘Born Free.’ Lions in Africa. I was thinking, you know, out in the wilderness, the feeling of freedom and exhilaration. Like: go out and really live your life, don’t just sit around and let it happen to you. Be free! You know? Then one day I was sitting on the porch at Tom and Whit’s, watching these two guys stock up their car to go out hunting. They’ve got a Stars and Stripes tied to the CB antenna and this bumper sticker that says America: Love it or go back to wherever you came from. And I look at these guys driving away with their guns on the top of their car, and it suddenly hits me: ‘Live Free or Die’ doesn’t have anything to do with being free—like, up on the mountaintops looking at the view. It means ‘Better dead than red.’ That’s all it means.” She smirked at Judith. “Isn’t that pathetic?”

  “The slogan?” she asked. “Or the fact that it took you so long to figure it out?”

  Naomi laughed. “Both, I guess.”

  “But you’re still here. I mean, if you felt that way, why did you stay?”

  Naomi’s smile faded. “I like it here,” she said. It wasn’t true, but it should have been true, so she said it and Judith appeared satisfied. After all, what wasn’t to like? Goddard was the town people who lived in cities longed for, the one made of classically austere New England houses and surrounded by unbearably beautiful wilderness. The people here had made room for her, in their chill and unloving way. They had let her build a business for them without burdening her with their gratitude. Judith went out to the table. Naomi turned on the faucet.

  She had stayed because of the business, though it was clear to Naomi that Flourish could easily survive her departure, or that she could have found some way to run it from another location. Or perhaps she had stayed because of what she and Daniel had begun together, since she, at least, was still committed to everything they had planned; she was stronger than that small spasm of selfish disappointment that had so easily borne him away. But that, too, had been transformed the moment she reached into the river water and touched the baby, when she saw that the truth was far more simple.

  She remembered, years before, how Daniel had called out to the God he didn’t believe in as that young girl fired shots from the Sabbathday riverbank: through his panic, a glimpse of something so deeply buried neither of them had even suspected it was there. Now it seemed that the baby might be like that, for her—a buried thing surfacing, a bottle with a message for Naomi alone. And when she deciphered the message, she would know what her life was to be about. She had stayed behind for this, in other words.

  “I wish they were just cow thieves,” she said when Judith returned to the kitchen.

  “Pardon?” She set down the dirty plates.

  “Oh, thanks. What you said before about the cow thieves? I wish they were just cow thieves. I’m afraid you’ll find it’s just as nasty up here as it was in Manhattan.” She pressed the button on her coffee grinder, and its whining churn filled the room. Judith waited until it was over.

  “I doubt that,” she said. “You have no idea how bad it’s gotten. We’re seeing gang stuff, like in L.A., and the drugs are out of control. Everything is just breaking down. The kids are the worst. They just don’t care anymore. The boys’ll shoot somebody and feel nothing at all, and the girls drop their babies down the garbage chute. It’s beyond sad, really. It just unspeakable. I got to the point where I started to think it might be better to live somewhere—”

  “We had a baby.” Naomi cut her off.

  “I … what?”

  Naomi got milk from the refrigerator. “We had a baby here like that.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like dead,” Naomi said, a touch impatiently. “Somebody found a baby in the river last weekend. Dead.” Ashamed of herself, she swallowed. “Actually, I was the one who found it. Her.” She stopped. Judith was looking at the floor. “I’m sorry to be the one to tell you, though it’s all over town. I’m surprised nobody’s felt the need to disillusion you about our bucolic little hamlet before me. Actually”—she eyed Judith —“I’m a little sorry I did.”

  “No, no,” Judith said,
her voice soft. “I’m glad you did.” She shook her head. Her tight black curls caught the kitchen light.

  “They have a suspect.” She shut her eyes tightly, as if to render the image of Heather invisible. “But they’re so wrong. I don’t know what—”

  “What do you mean they’re wrong?” Judith said, her voice tense. “Do you know something? Do you know they’re wrong about their suspect?”

  Naomi reached for the handle of her kettle, and it vibrated at her touch as the water readied itself to boil. “I know the girl. She’s in my collective. She had a … well, I guess, a connection with somebody. Somebody married, of course. So she lives in Goddard Falls with her daughter. She takes care of the baby, does samplers for Flourish. She doesn’t bother anybody.” Naomi looked up at Judith and set her jaw, incensed, but more and more she understood that it was herself she was most angry at—at her own lingering hesitation to take Heather’s part. Surely she could spare the gesture of—wasn’t this the whole point?—sisterhood for this one girl, lost to the fold. Perhaps Heather Pratt was only waiting for that gesture, that offer of community, to blossom into —what? A fully self-actualized human being? An earth mother? A warrior woman? Of course it was a faintly comical notion, but why did she keep wanting to believe it was possible? “And now they’ve apparently decided that she was pregnant and she had this baby and stabbed it, and I just—” “Stabbed,” Judith nearly shouted. “What do you mean, stabbed?” Naomi bit her lip against remembering it. “The baby was … she’d been … You know.” She stopped. “I’m sorry, I just don’t want to think about it. It was so …” She gave up. “That poor little baby.” Something in her throat condensed.

  “I shouldn’t have asked.” She heard Judith’s voice. “It must have been terrible for you.”

  Wordless, she nodded. The kettle sang and she switched off the gas.

  “They’ve got to be wrong, that’s all,” Naomi said. “It’s some kind of primitive dynamic, like from an anthropology text. A calamity hits the village, like a plague or a flood or something, and the people turn on their local recluse or outcast and string ’em up. It’s disgusting.” She closed her eyes, preemptively weary. “I just wish I knew how to stop it.”