Red Hook Road

by Ayelet Waldman

  Relieved, he nodded. “I think so. Let’s light one and see.”

  She handed him a yellow plastic lighter. There were two fireworks left: a Roman candle and a small cake, less than a quarter the size of the one that John had used as his finale. Matt chose the Roman candle, set it up, and, after checking that Ruthie was standing far enough away, lit the fuse at the bottom of the paper tube and backed up a step. The fuse burned to the end and the stars began shooting from the Roman candle one at a time.

  “So beautiful,” Ruthie breathed as the last star dissipated into the navy-blue sky. “Can I light the last one?”

  “Okay. Just be careful.”

  Tentatively, she knelt down next to the cake. The first few times the lighter sputtered and sparked but did not catch. Matt was about to take it back from her when she finally managed to light it. She touched the small flame to the fuse. Instead of rising and stepping immediately back she stayed where she was, bent over the cake, until he grabbed her arm. She allowed him to lead her away, all the while craning her neck to follow the stars and spirals as they took off from the dock and flew high into the sky. Lifting her head to watch the bursts of light, Ruthie lost her balance and stumbled backward. Matt caught her as she fell, steadied her, but did not let her go. Her shoulders were pressed against his chest and her head was tucked beneath his chin. He felt her ribs with his long fingers, his thumbs on either side of her spine. He slipped his arms around her waist and held her, her hair soft against his skin, her weight heavy against him.

  He inhaled deeply, smelling the musk of her hair, the faint fruity scent of her skin. He squeezed his arms more tightly around her and matched his inhalations and exhalations to hers as they watched the last of the fireworks flicker and fade away.

  THE SECOND SUMMER

  I

  A typical June day in Maine: rain all morning, then a partial clearing that left the air damp and chilly and the sky tinged with just enough blue to give a tantalizing hint of a summer afternoon. Periodically a gust of wind would shake the tree branches and water would pour down on the small group in the cemetery, dampening their hair and trickling into the gaps between their necks and collars.

  Iris, Daniel, Ruthie, Mr. Kimmelbrod, and the rabbi from Bangor made their way slowly on foot down the dirt road to Becca’s and John’s graves, having left the car parked by the stone gates so that it would not get stuck in the mud. Over the winter Mr. Kimmelbrod had been obliged to take up the use of a walker. Iris held her breath as she watched the pains he took to find purchase in the muddy grass, as if struggling with the fingering of a difficult sequence of notes. When they were about halfway to the waterside, Mr. Kimmelbrod stumbled and seemed about to lose his footing. Iris gasped and lunged toward him, but Daniel reached him first, steadying the walker and making sure he was secure on his feet. As Daniel turned back to the road he tripped over a root, and in the end it was he who fell, landing on his hands and knees in the muddy grass.

  “Daniel!” Iris said. She’d meant to sound sympathetic, and yet even to her own ears it came out as a reproach. To compensate, she extended her hand to help him up.

  He shrugged it away, got to his feet, and assessed the damage. His knees were filthy and one pant leg was torn.

  “Shit,” he said, and then, “Sorry, Rabbi.”

  “No offense taken,” the rabbi said.

  Daniel swiped ineffectually at the stains.

  “Here,” Iris said.

  “I’m fine,” he said, ignoring the tissue she offered him, and instead wiped his grubby hands on the front of his pants.

  At the far end of the graveyard Becca’s stone lay beneath a white sheet, awaiting its traditional unveiling on the lunar anniversary of her death. Iris had found herself anticipating this day with an unexpected eagerness, not because the ceremony marked the traditional end of the period of mourning but rather because she longed for some fixed point on the calendar of sorrow to give focus to their diffuse and measureless misery. Their grief was so intense and yet so lonely; each of them drifted in his or her private bubble of mourning, sealed off not only from the rest of the world but from one another. Iris felt, or hoped, that what they needed was a kind of official sanction of their mourning—that this ceremony might unite them in recognizing it, naming it, making it holy.

  “You have got to be kidding,” Iris said, when she saw the marker Jane and the Tetherlys had erected over John’s grave.

  The stone was dark-gray granite, bearing his name and the dates of his birth and death in large roman capitals. A carving of a schooner in full sail ornamented the bottom, beneath the text, a bud vase was attached to the side, and preserved under shatter-proof glass in the top right-hand corner of the stone was a five-by-seven color photograph of John. The picture had been taken on the porch of his mother’s house. He was sitting on the top step, his long legs extending halfway down to the bottom and crossed at the ankle. Something about the photograph’s angle or perspective made his bare feet look larger even than they were. His face was partly shaded by his beat-up old Red Sox hat, but you could still see his wide, loopy grin.

  Ruthie said, “You didn’t put a picture on Becca’s, did you?”

  “God, no,” Iris said. “Sorry, Rabbi.”

  “No offense taken.”

  The rabbi pulled from his pocket a small prayer book with a faded leather cover and a handful of smaller booklets, which he handed out to them. He cleared his throat and began reading in Hebrew. His voice was mellifluous and Iris was reminded of how beautifully he had sung the Mourner’s Kaddish last year.

  “‘A thousand years,’” the rabbi continued, in English, “‘in the sight of our eternal and merciful Father, are but a day; the years of our life but a passing hour. He grants us life and life he has taken away; praised be his name.’”

  He paused and glanced at them.

  Mr. Kimmelbrod recited, “Amen.”

  Daniel and Ruthie quickly followed suit, but the word stuck in Iris’s mouth. If the years of a normal life were but a passing hour, then the years of Becca’s life were no more than fifteen or twenty minutes. Not enough.

  The rabbi continued, “Rebecca has been taken from our midst. We are pained by the gap in our lives. Yet love is as strong as death; the bonds love creates are eternal. And ours is the blessing of memory, through which the lives of our departed continue to be with us.”

  He paused again. Ruthie opened her mouth to repeat, “Amen,” but the rabbi shook his head.

  Was love as strong as death, Iris wondered. What lasted longer? What took a greater toll?

  The rabbi leaned down and peeled the sheet away from the gravestone.

  Iris had chosen a marker carved from the same stone as John’s—she hadn’t really liked the glossy granite, but she had wanted them to match. Instead of calling Jane for the information, she had asked the stone cutter—the only memorial maker in Newmarket—to check his records and use John’s gravestone as a template for Becca’s. The shape of the stone and the lettering were the same as John’s, but Iris had forgone the optional photograph holder and bud vase, and, of course, there was no sailboat carving. She had wondered what kind of symbol she might have chosen for Becca—a violin case, abandoned in a corner? The stone was engraved with the dates of Becca’s birth and death, and her name in English and Hebrew.

  REBECCA FELICE COPAKEN

  Iris had ordered the marker, had in effect designed it—its appearance ought not to have surprised her. But somehow she had managed through the process never truly to visualize it. Now the mass of it, the shining granite fact of it, made her feel light in the head.

  “They wrote the wrong name!” Ruthie said, in a tone of dull surprise, squatting down in the wet grass and pointing at the marker without touching it. “It says Copaken. It should be Tetherly.”

  The rabbi turned to Iris and Daniel and raised his eyebrows. “There’s a mistake?”

  “No,” Iris said. “It’s right.” She wished she could sit down, but other than the gra
vestone itself there was nothing but dirt and wet grass.

  Not long before the wedding, Becca had announced her intention to take John’s name. Iris could recall every word of this argument, as indeed she found now that she could recall every disagreement she had ever had with her elder daughter. It was as if her memory consisted of a series of blurry photographs. The only ones that were focused and sharp showed Becca and Iris arguing. This selective amnesia was hardly a shock; it was in Iris’s nature to confront, if not to revel in, the awful truth. And yet her memories of her disagreements with Becca were no more fundamentally true or honest than her fuzzy memories of their other, positive interactions. Why, then, she wondered, did her mind persist in playing and replaying only scenes of unpleasantness?

  On that afternoon two days before the wedding, Becca had been making a list of the guests’ names, checking them against the names that Iris read aloud from the RSVP cards.

  “Is that all?” Becca had asked, once they’d double-checked the spelling of Zaidenshnur.

  “Yes, except John’s parents. And us, of course.”

  Becca wrote John’s mother’s name, his father’s, and his father’s girlfriend’s. Then she wrote her parents’ names, her sister’s, and her grandfather’s. Finally, smiling, she wrote her own.

  Iris glanced down at the page. In neat letters Becca had written, “John and Rebecca Tetherly.”

  “Blech,” Iris said.

  Becca smiled—pleasant yet firm. She had obviously decided to refuse to allow herself to be goaded into an argument. “Whatever do you mean? It’s lovely, don’t you think? Rebecca Tetherly. It’s musical.”

  “Oh, it is not musical,” Iris snapped. “Becca. You’re not changing your name.”

  Becca capped the pen with a firm snap. “Yes, Mom, I am. And it is musical. It scans well. Far better than Rebecca Copaken.” She said the name flatly, drawing out the A. “Now, that’s blech.”

  “Copaken is a good, solid name. I find it much more musical than Tetherly. And at any rate, that’s not the point.”

  “Exactly,” Becca said breezily. “The point is that my husband’s name is Tetherly, and my name will be, too.”

  Iris tried to work some cool into her voice, hoping that it did not come out sounding, as it usually did when she tried to hold back, too Clint Eastwood. “Nowadays,” she said, “most women don’t change their names.”

  “You live in such a rarefied world, Mom,” Becca said, laughing. “Maybe most feminist scholars keep their names, but every woman I know in Red Hook took her husband’s name when she got married.”

  Because she so regretted having changed her own name when she married Daniel, Iris had assumed that her daughters would keep the name Copaken. She had married before women began keeping their own names, and as soon as younger women began doing it, Iris considered reverting to her maiden name. It seemed foolish to have taken Daniel’s name when her ancestral connections mattered far more to her than his did to him. The name Kimmelbrod dated at least as far back as the seventeenth century, and she and her father were the last of their particular branch. On the other hand, the family to which Iris felt most connected was her mother’s, and so by that logic she ought to take her mother’s maiden name, or, better still, her grandmother’s. Yet if she were to choose a last name based on affinity alone, were she to adopt Godwin, her mother’s maiden name, or Hewins, that might have seemed as if she were rejecting the Jewish half of her heritage, rejecting her father, rejecting the family stolen by the Nazis. Moreover, she was a scholar of the Holocaust: it would have been harder for someone named Iris Hewins to be taken seriously in that particular field. In the end she’d decided that she was too well-established to change her name. It was as Iris Copaken that she’d earned her graduate degrees, as Iris Copaken that she’d published her first articles and books. Still, she had assumed that her daughters would never make the same mistake. She should have realized that this, like so many of the assumptions she made about how her oldest daughter would live her life in the wake of feminism and its battles, was doomed to be contradicted. The women of Becca’s generation accepted that their lives were without limits and promptly figured out ways to constrict them.

  “What women do in Red Hook,” Iris had told Becca that day, “is hardly a reflection of the world.”

  “It’s no less the world than New York is. And anyway, I bet if you checked you’d see that most women in New York take their husbands’ names, too.”

  Iris said, “I think you should take some time to think about this. You don’t want to do something you’ll regret.”

  “I have thought about it,” Becca said. Reaching over her shoulder she grabbed her ponytail and twisted it into a firm knot at the base of her skull. She never stopped sounding pleasant, but her will, like her mother’s, was iron. “I’ve thought about it a lot. It’s important to me that I have the same name as my husband and my children. I know your argument: my name is my own, I belong to myself, not my husband. I know all that, Mom. And I know you’re disappointed, but I’ve made up my mind.”

  “You have spent twenty-six years as Rebecca Copaken. Both personally and professionally. No conductor or musician is going to know who Rebecca Tetherly is.”

  Becca laughed. “No musician knows who Rebecca Copaken is.”

  “And what if you get divorced? What then? You’ll either end up saddled with a name you don’t want or you’ll have to go through all the rigmarole of getting your own back.”

  “Nice, Mom,” Becca had said, not without affection. “Two days until my wedding, and you already have me getting divorced.”

  Iris had not resigned herself to Becca’s decision. She kept hoping right up to the day of the wedding—the day Becca died—that when Becca was finally confronted with the reality of the words Rebecca Tetherly on a check or a loan application, she would reconsider, back down, see the light. And then, for a time, death had seemed to put an end to all such questions of Becca and the choices she was going to make. But when the time had come to choose the wording for the grave marker, Iris was torn.

  On the one hand, there was her argument with Becca—there was always, it seemed, an argument with Becca. But even assuming Becca’s intransigence (which was not, Iris thought, a given), the girl had only been a Tetherly, if at all, for one hour. And legally she had never been anyone but Rebecca Copaken; that was the name on her driver’s license, on her lapsed passport, on her bank account and Social Security card. That was the name on her death certificate. Furthermore, Iris had argued to herself, or to the memory of Becca, cemeteries and monuments exist to comfort the living, to consecrate a place dedicated not so much to the mourned but to the act of mourning itself. The dead never saw the memorials erected in their honor. Iris and her family were the only people likely to visit Becca’s grave. The marker was there for them. If it had John’s name on it, it would always feel wrong to them. It would seem like someone else was lying beneath the stone.

  In making the case to her dead daughter for the decision that she had already made, Iris had allowed herself to imagine—contradicting her last point—that no one would notice, and that anyway, if they did, they would understand that she had made the right choice.

  “We have to change it,” Ruthie said. Her nose was pink, either with cold or with tears, and her chin trembled.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Iris said.

  “It does matter!” Ruthie snapped. “It’s the wrong name.”

  Daniel pulled Ruthie close and stroked her hair. “It’s done, Ruthie,” he murmured.

  The rabbi cleared his throat. “There is no rule that prevents you from changing it. But there’s no need to decide now. Or even a year from now. This marker is for you. For your family. You can do anything with it that you like.” He looked over at John’s gravestone. “Although I would counsel against schooners in full sail.”

  Iris, initially annoyed that he had seemed to give credence to Ruthie’s objection, now gave him a grateful smile.

  �
��Perhaps we’ll continue now with the Eil Malei Rachamim?” he said.

  The prayer was a dirge, slow and mournful, and Iris felt the music reverberate in her chest.

  The rabbi closed his book, slipped it back into his capacious pocket, and said, “Now I would like to suggest that in conclusion we take a few moments of silence.”

  “Wait!” Ruthie said, springing out of her father’s embrace. “Is that all?”

  “Yes,” the rabbi said.

  “What about the Mourner’s Kaddish?”

  The rabbi shook his head. “We cannot say Kaddish.”

  “Why not?” Ruthie asked, her voice shrill. “It’s the prayer for the dead! It’s the most important part.”

  “We have no minyan,” the rabbi said. “We are only five people. And we are not permitted to recite the Kaddish without ten.”

  Ruthie turned to her mother and said angrily, “Why didn’t you make sure we had enough people?”

  “I didn’t know,” Iris said.

  The rabbi said, “There is no requirement that the Kaddish be said at the unveiling. In fact, the ceremony itself is tradition, not biblically prescribed. You can recite the Kaddish at any synagogue.”

  “We did this all wrong,” Ruthie cried. “Everything about this is all wrong.”

  “It’s all right, sweetie,” Iris said, trying to take Ruthie’s arm. “It doesn’t matter that there’s no Kaddish. This isn’t even a Jewish cemetery.”

  Ruthie flung her mother’s hand away. “And that was your decision, too, wasn’t it!”

  Iris caught Daniel’s eye and raised her eyebrows, but Daniel shrugged and turned away.

  Ruthie hunched her shoulders against the drizzle that had begun to fall. Raindrops merged her tears. “We should have had a real unveiling, with enough people to do it the way it’s supposed to be done.”

  “I’m sorry, Ruthie,” Iris said. “I tried to make this special. It means as much to me as it does to you, and a private ceremony seemed like the right way to do it.”