Red Hook Road

by Ayelet Waldman

  Jane knotted her fingers in her lap and stared down at them. As the silence stretched between them, Iris found herself beginning to get angry. Was Jane really so cold-hearted that she could so easily and for so little reason reject Iris’s entreaties on behalf of her daughter? Was Iris’s company really so intolerable that Jane could not manage a single evening of it?

  Just as Iris was about to allow herself to lose her temper, to let Jane know exactly what she thought of her selfishness, Jane said, “So she’s pretty bad off.”

  Ruthie was bad off. There was no denying it. She had never been particularly resilient, and although Iris had tried, that was simply something you could not teach a child. You were born with it, or you weren’t. Whatever measure of resiliency it was Iris’s to bequeath had gone to Becca. What a terrible irony that it was the one who could least cope who was left to do so.

  “Yes,” Iris said. “She’s bad off.”

  “Same with Matt.”

  “Matt’s not doing well?”

  “He dropped out of college.”

  “Oh, no.” Iris had never seen Jane look so obviously worried. In fact, in all the years she’d known the woman, there was only one other time that Iris could remember seeing an expression other than impassivity on Jane’s face—when she had broken down at the scene of the accident. Now, if Iris hadn’t known her, she might have described her as distraught.

  Jane said, “First person in the family to go to college. Either side. And he’s a smart boy. He never would have dropped out if this hadn’t happened.”

  The truth was that Jane had always felt a certain amount of ambivalence about her son’s pursuit of a college degree, or at least about his pursuing it at Amherst. The University of Maine was a fine institution, and she had been supporting it with her tax dollars since she had first drawn a paycheck. She disapproved of his choice to go farther afield for school, to the kind of place where the children of the summer visitors went. It had seemed like striving to her, like trying to turn himself into something he wasn’t. But now that he had dropped out she found that she was disappointed. Worried, too. She could not figure out what was going on in the boy’s head.

  Iris said, “I’m so sorry, Jane. Maybe he just needs more time.”

  “Well, he’s going to get all the time he wants pretty soon. They won’t hold his scholarship forever, and I don’t know how he thinks he’ll pay his tuition without that.”

  After a protracted process of dueling insurance companies, the threat of a trial, and an out-of-court settlement, the Copaken and the Tetherly families had each received $100,000 from the limousine driver’s automobile insurance policy. Iris and Daniel had donated their portion of the money to a variety of Red Hook charities, including Usherman Center’s scholarship fund, the library, and the food pantry, which fed a surprising number of local families at the end of every winter. Jane, who could not afford the luxury of philanthropy, divided the sum between Matt, Maureen, Frank, and herself. It gave her a nest egg for the first time in her life, but even if she gave Matt her own portion, what was left of the two combined would not be enough for more than a single year of college.

  “I’m sure they understand what he’s going through. I know the financial aid process can be confusing, but the decisions are made by compassionate people.”

  “I suppose,” Jane said dubiously. “I don’t really talk to them much. Matt takes care of all that himself.”

  “It’s so hard when kids won’t do what you know is best for them.”

  Jane sighed. “Now, isn’t that the truth.”

  “And you can’t even tell them that they’re making a mistake, because then they’ll act just to spite you.” As she said this Iris was thinking not about Ruthie, who, despite the evidence of this celebration, generally avoided at all costs making her parents unhappy, but about Becca. Becca, who had always cheerfully brushed off her mother’s advice and done exactly what she wanted, up to and including marrying this woman’s son.

  “Yes, they will,” Jane said. She blew air out of her mouth with a noisy huff. “Will your father be there? At this ‘celebration’?”

  “My father? Yes. Yes, of course.”

  “Samantha, my niece? She kind of took to him. I guess you know they met up at the Bag.”

  “No,” Iris said. “I didn’t know. At the Bait Bag?”

  “He had his classical music playing on the radio, and I guess she likes that kind of thing.”

  “She likes classical music?”

  “She’s been playing that trout song ever since she heard it.”

  “The trout song? You mean the Trout Quintet?”

  “She picks it out on her electric piano.”

  “My goodness. Well, I’m sure my father would be happy to play her some music. I mean, play it on the stereo. He can’t really play the violin anymore, because of the Parkinson’s.”

  “Samantha checked one of his records out of the library. She’s been listening to it pretty much nonstop.”

  “Did she? That’s so sweet. If I’d known I would have brought a few CDs over for her. If you come to the celebration I can have him sign them to her.”

  “Samantha would like that,” Jane said.

  Conscious that this chink in Jane’s armor might not last, Iris said, “Will you come, Jane?”

  Jane sighed. “What time did you say it was?”

  “Six,” Iris said.

  Jane frowned. Then she reached out a finger and swiped it around the edge of Iris’s cake plate, scooping up a little lime glaze. She licked her finger and nodded. “That is yummy,” she said.

  “It’s my best recipe,” Iris said.

  “Maybe we should have just a small slice,” Jane said. She bustled around the kitchen, taking plates out of a cupboard, and a knife and two forks out of a drawer. She cut two hefty pieces of cake and slid one across the table to Iris.

  “I can’t promise anything,” Jane said. “But if we’re not working, I guess we can make it.”

  Iris’s shoulders sagged with relief. “Thank you so much, Jane. This means a tremendous amount to Ruthie.” Then she took a big forkful of cake. The bottom was a tad soggy, and the lime might have been grated a bit more finely. But it was good. It would do.

  V

  Other than the widow’s walk on top of the turret, Iris and Daniel’s airy bedroom had the best view in the house of the small East Red Hook cove and the sea beyond. Iris kept the windows bare of curtains so that on clear mornings they were awakened by the sun reflecting off the water. The large room had once been two, but they had taken out the dividing wall and put in a bathroom at one end. Iris had refinished her grandmother’s bedroom suite—the tall highboy and the matching double-wide chiffonier. Two bright rag rugs on either side of the bed protected their bare feet from the cold floor in the mornings.

  On the bedroom walls hung photographs of the girls and of Iris’s various and sundry Maine ancestors, and one of Iris and Daniel, taken on their wedding day down on the beach below the Red Hook Unitarian Church. The only photograph from Daniel’s side of the family was of his parents, a stiff, posed black-and-white shot of them wearing evening clothes and smiling uncomfortably into the camera. On the bottom of the picture, in flourishing script, was inscribed “Cunard RMS Galicia.” The photograph commemorated the single vacation Saul and Irene Copaken had ever taken, a cruise from Miami through the Caribbean, the highlight of which had been a stop in Havana during which Daniel’s mother, not normally a gambler, had won seventy-two dollars at baccarat.

  Iris stood in front of the closet, discarding one outfit after the other. She yanked a white linen skirt off its hanger, examined its frayed waistband, and tossed it aside. She rejected a flowered cotton skirt because it pulled across the top of her thighs. The confetti-colored sundress made her arms look big. She found a white blouse draped crookedly over a hanger. She held the shirt out in front of her with a lump in her throat. She’d last worn this to the rehearsal dinner the night before the wedding. A year a
go today. There was a yellowish grease mark on the placket and now she remembered having spilled butter down her chin while she was eating her lobster. She should have blotted the stain with cornmeal then soaked the blouse in shampoo, one of the household hints her grandmother had collected in a small scrapbook that hung from a nail in the laundry room. Iris relied on this book, had even updated it with hints of her own—hair spray gets out acrylic paint, vinegar and egg whites loosen chewing gum—but last year she’d failed to follow its prescription for a butter stain. She hadn’t, in fact, done any laundry after the accident. Within a few days, a neighbor they didn’t know well, one who hadn’t even been invited to the wedding, showed up and went quickly through the house emptying hampers, stripping beds, and taking the towels from the bathrooms. That same afternoon a fragrant and folded pile of laundry appeared in a basket just inside the back door. The neighbor had returned a few more times over the summer, ignoring both Iris’s perfunctory objections and her grateful tears. Later on Iris found out that the woman had lost her husband in the battle of Khe San, in Vietnam. She knew all too well what the bereaved were likely to forget to do for themselves.

  Iris crumpled the blouse in her hands and tossed it in the trash. Then she thought better of it and took it out. She’d tear the blouse up and use it for rags. The soft cotton would be perfect for polishing silver.

  Why was she worrying about her clothes, of all things? She knew very well that there was nothing in her closet that didn’t make her look like a fifty-one-year-old, menopausal proto-crone. She and Daniel had reached that awful age where a man looks youthful and distinguished and a woman like his elderly aunt. She flicked rapidly through the shirts hanging in the closet. She found a white tank top and went through the closet again, looking for the silvery-blue tunic that she usually wore over it, trying to remember the last time she had it on. Last year, on Memorial Day, to a party at the yacht club. And then Becca had found the tunic hanging on the clothesline and pilfered it; she’d worn it out a few times, and the last time Iris had seen it, the girl was wearing it on the beach as a cover-up. She’d given Becca a piece of her mind, but now couldn’t remember if she’d ever gotten the tunic back.

  Iris considered going upstairs to look for the tunic in Becca’s room, but so far this summer she had managed to avoid even climbing the stairs to the third floor. Anyway, she knew the tunic wasn’t there. It hadn’t been there last August when she and Daniel had packed up Becca’s things.

  They’d put off the chore until the last minute. If she’d let him, Daniel would never have done it at all. But he had caved in to her logic that this was not something they’d want hanging over their heads next summer.

  “Best just to get it over with,” Iris had said, piling his arms with empty cardboard boxes and leading him upstairs.

  They’d hesitated in the open doorway. Iris tried but could not remember the first night Becca had slept in this room. When they’d taken possession of the house, the third floor hadn’t been used in decades. Iris supposed that when her grandmother was a child there must have been a domestic or two living in the rooms under the eaves. But no one had inhabited those rooms since then. They’d turned one third-floor room into Daniel’s office and left the other vacant.

  The summer Becca was eleven years old she’d petitioned her parents to be allowed her own room, and over Ruthie’s near-hysterical objections, they’d agreed that she could move up to the bedroom next to Daniel’s office. Becca had at first made do with a folding cot and a few milk crates, but over the course of the summer, she and Iris had furnished the room, going to yard sales and junk stores as far away as Bangor. Iris recalled the day they’d found the little iron bedstead. It hadn’t fit in the Volvo, so they’d left it hanging out the back and driven it home with the hatch open. Becca had to lean over the front seat and clutch the top rail to keep the bed from flying out of the car, Iris’s free hand clamped to her ankle, as if that would have kept her from sailing out through the rear door right after the bed. At the time they had found it all terribly funny, and by the time they arrived home they were laughing so hard they were crying and they both needed to pee. But now, after the accident, Iris couldn’t bear to think of the careless abandon with which she had driven her children along the winding back roads of Maine.

  Nothing in Becca’s third-story room matched—the bed was iron, the little desk was walnut, the dresser was painted lemon yellow and decorated with pinkish strawberries. During Becca’s childhood the room had been almost spartan, decorated with nothing more than her summertime memorabilia—sailing trophies, pretty shells, shards of beach glass. But when she had left the Conservatory she had brought with her to Maine the contents not just of her dorm room but of her Riverside Drive bedroom as well. The room was packed with clothes, books, jewelry boxes, photographs. And because the kids had been living here the year before they died—during the winter they lived in and took care of the house, and they had decided not to move out until after the wedding—it was full of all of John’s things, too. His hockey stick, his jumble of boat-sized sneakers and hiking boots, his clothes, his ball caps, and his dop kit, crowded with a hopeless abandon among Becca’s things.

  Standing in the doorway of Becca’s room that August afternoon a month or so after her death, Daniel had said, “I don’t think I can face this.” He’d dropped the boxes in the doorway and turned to leave.

  Iris grabbed the sleeve of his shirt. “I can’t do it by myself.”

  “Let’s just leave it.”

  But Iris was determined that they take care of it then, before they left. “It’s never going to get any easier,” she said, and stepped across the threshold, giving him little choice but to follow.

  Daniel looked about him with what had seemed to Iris to be a kind of murderous rage. She was sure that if she had not stopped him he would have punched a hole in the wall, or worse. She gave in, told him to leave, and did it herself. She first packed up everything of John’s, a task complicated by the fact that she kept breaking down in tears. The poignancy of John’s white briefs with their stretched-out leg holes and frayed elastic, of his jeans hanging over the back of a chair, the shape of his body still visible in the creases behind the knees and the white line worn into the brown leather belt looped around the waist. It was almost too much to bear.

  But by the time she finished with John’s things she had exhausted all her tears. Dry-eyed, she packed up Becca’s belongings, packed them all up, except for a few things—Becca’s sheet music, a sailing trophy, some old letters, Baby Flame, the little red beanbag horse that had been Becca’s lovey when she was a baby. Some of the clothes Iris set aside for Ruthie, figuring that even if she could not bring herself to wear them now, so soon after Becca’s death, someday she would be glad to have something of Becca’s to wear. Everything else Iris put in boxes and garbage bags. The next day she went to the Salvation Army, where she donated what was usable. On the way home she stopped at the county dump and threw away what the thrift store would not deign to accept.

  In any case, her silvery-blue tunic had not been in Becca’s bedroom last summer, Iris was sure of that. So where was it? She went downstairs and ransacked the laundry room, going through the cupboards and pulling out the hamper bins. When it was clear that the tunic was not there, she stood with her arms akimbo, considering the various rooms of her house for a place a shirt might hide. On her way to search the hall closets, Iris passed through the mudroom. She looked at the dozens of L.L. Bean totes in various sizes hanging from hooks on the wall. There were the oversized ones she took to the farmers’ market, the beach bags, the ones they used in lieu of picnic baskets. There were the little totes she used as summer purses, and the ones she’d picked up at the factory outlet, monogrammed with other people’s initials. Hanging amid all the others, like it was expecting at any minute to be thrown over a shoulder and taken out for a sail, was Becca’s old, pink-strapped canvas tote.

  Iris pulled the bag down from the hook. The cloth was worn, c
overed in what appeared to be grease stains. When she opened it up the first thing she saw was a pale-green towel with a pattern of seashells and sea horses, one of a set of beach towels she had picked up a few years back for next to nothing at Reny’s. The towel was damp and stank. When she unrolled it she found the red racer-back one-piece bathing suit Becca liked to wear sailing, when she knew she would be working hard and not just sunning herself on deck. The bathing suit was stained with mildew; grayish spots fanned from the crotch all the way up the front. The fabric of the seat was pilled, and the leg holes furred with tiny elastic threads. The suit smelled as wretched as the towel, but still Iris placed it against her cheek and closed her eyes.

  Iris had imparted to Becca, through example or nature, a love of the water, of swimming out in the cold and open sea. She’d been a remarkable child. How many seven-year-olds could practice violin for two hours and then jump into a rowboat and take first prize in the harbor pea pod race? How many girls managed to look at home and at ease both on a concert hall stage and up to their knees in bilge water? How many young women looked as beautiful in a stretched-out old bathing suit as they did in performance formal wear? Over the course of her life Iris had met hundreds of musical children, but none had ever been as cheerfully normal as Becca. She had certainly not been an intellectual, but then she hadn’t had to be. Becca had embodied the best of all of them: her grandfather’s musicality, her father’s athleticism, her mother’s bustling competence.