Red Hook Road

by Ayelet Waldman

  Without speaking they ran into the water, battling the waves to take the little boat deep enough, then scrambled in over the sides. Iris attached the outboard motor, which, blessedly, roared to life. They took off, jumping the waves in the rubber tender as they raced across the water toward the sailboat.

  As they neared the Rebecca they saw her begin to tilt precariously starboard. Matt flung his body port side as if his negligible weight could right her. The waves kept coming, each one pushing the trim craft closer to the jagged granite cliff. Matt leaped about the boat, one moment struggling to reel in the torn sail, the next ducking as the boom swung toward him, his exertions no more effective than a fly buzzing on the back of a bull. Just as they were nearing the boat, Iris saw a gigantic wave heading her way. She spun the tender around, desperately trying to keep from ending up like the Rebecca on the rocks. When she turned back she saw the wave lift the Rebecca as though it were nothing more than a twig floating in the water. With a splintering crash, it drove her onto the granite cliff. The wave pulled back, carrying the boat with it, but almost immediately a gust of wind flung Matt across the deck. Jane screamed, clutching her hand to her mouth. He grabbed hold of the mast.

  There was a lull between the waves and Iris cupped her hands around her mouth and shouted, “Jump!”

  Matt ducked his head and, scrambling hand over hand, made his way to the cabin door. For a moment he disappeared from view, but then he reappeared, one arm wrapped around Ruthie’s waist.

  Iris sobbed, and Jane realized that she must have thought her daughter had been washed overboard.

  Ruthie was wearing a bright-orange life vest. Matt pulled her along beside him to the starboard side of the Rebecca, where Jane and Iris bobbed in their small boat, fighting the waves and wind. Suddenly, he slipped and began toppling overboard. Ruthie hauled him upright, took his hand, and together they leaped into the water, as close to the rubber tender as they dared. Jane leaned out of the dinghy and grabbed the loop of Ruthie’s life vest with both hands. With a grunt she heaved the girl up and over the side of the boat. At the same time, Iris helped Matt scramble aboard.

  “Go!” Jane said, and Iris turned them away from the reeling sailboat. The tender rode low in the water, straining to carry their weight.

  “Oh my God,” Ruthie shouted. They turned back, following her gaze. The waves were tumbling the Rebecca into the side of the cliff. They watched her mast splinter and collapse. They saw a huge rock tear open the hull. And then they looked away. None of them could bear it anymore.

  When they reached the shallows they jumped out and dragged the rubber boat ashore. Only once it was hauled up on the beach did Ruthie fall into her mother’s arms. Matt stood hunched, sobbing out loud, until his mother grabbed him, too, and hugged him hard against her. Despite his size and the scratch of his beard against her cheek, Jane felt as though she were holding the small boy Matt had been, the vulnerable child who had once fit so comfortably in her lap. She pressed her lips against his bristly chin.

  With four of them to do the portage, the little rubber boat was no burden at all, and within a few moments they had her back in the shed. Matt did his best to jam the door closed.

  Only then did Jane ask Iris, “How did you know there was a rubber ducky in here?”

  “I didn’t,” Iris said. “I just figured, what else would you store in a shed by the beach?”

  Jane stared at her, open-mouthed, and then gave a short bark of laughter. “Let’s get out of here,” she said.

  VIII

  A few minutes after Iris had left the hospital room and driven off to East Red Hook and the storm, Mr. Kimmelbrod opened his eyes.

  “Hello,” Samantha said.

  He blinked and licked his lips with a grayish, cracked tongue.

  “Are you thirsty?”

  He nodded.

  There was a pink plastic cup and straw on the table next to the bed. Samantha held it to his mouth and he took a sip. A drop of water dribbled from the corner of his mouth and Samantha wiped it away with the tip of her finger. She swallowed hard, trying to keep herself from crying. The first time she had visited Mr. Kimmelbrod she had burst into tears, earning from him a reproving frown. Since then she had not allowed herself to cry. When the seriousness of his fall became apparent, she had felt a tide of panic, fear at being bereft of him. She was unable to imagine herself as a musician except in the context of his teaching her to be one. His faith in her kept her on course, propelled her forward. How would she go on without his wise hand on her tiller? She had come day after day, hoping that her presence would inspire him to rally, as he inspired her.

  “Thank you,” Mr. Kimmelbrod said. His voice, although little more than a whisper, was unmistakably his own: his faint accent, the precision with which he pronounced each word, the click of his k distinct from the pursed-lipped y.

  “Iris will be back soon,” Samantha said. “She just went home for an hour or so.”

  Mr. Kimmelbrod closed his eyes again. While he slept Samantha continued studying the score of the Chaconne. The next time she looked up Mr. Kimmelbrod was awake. One of his eyelids drifted close, the iris beneath it drifting slightly inward, toward his nose. His other eye, however, peered at her, sharp and focused. He lifted his chin slightly in the direction of the bound score on her lap.

  “This?” Samantha said.

  His nod was so small, no more than a twitch of his chin.

  “It’s the Chaconne,” Samantha said. “I brought it for you.”

  Mr. Kimmelbrod whispered something, but she couldn’t hear him. She leaned closer, putting her ear to his mouth. He puffed a bit of air into her ear. She could see his whole body involved in the effort of speaking. His neck tensed, his chest rose.

  “Play,” he croaked.

  She took the Dembovski from its case and began softly to tune it, so as not to attract the attention of the nurses. When she was satisfied, she pulled the table that swung on an arm over Mr. Kimmelbrod’s bed closer to her, and propped the music up on it.

  “I’ve only been working on this for a few days. I’m warning you, it is not going to sound very good.”

  The ends of his mouth curled up in a small smile.

  Samantha studied the music, rereading the first four measures. “Okay, so we start with this downward stepwise four-note line. You always say that the downward line is the answer in the conversation. So I’m starting with the answer here, right?”

  He lifted his chin slightly.

  She played the first four notes. Then she paused. “I’m going to take this very slowly,” she said. She played the first four measures of the piece and then paused again. This phrase—the subject of the piece—would be transformed every four measures, thirty times and then thirty more. She had to play it perfectly before she felt comfortable moving on. She looked at Mr. Kimmelbrod. His eyes were still open. She thought he was smiling, but it was difficult to tell. She returned to the score, studying it. She lifted the violin to her chin and played the first four measures again. Then a third time. Then she continued. As the subject reappeared she greeted it with increasing confidence. She played slowly, far too slowly, she knew, but she wanted to be sure she understood how each variation treated the subject, and she wanted to miss as few notes as possible.

  Mr. Kimmelbrod closed his eyes and listened. Samantha was a smooth player, even with a piece she barely knew. She played now as always with such confidence, a maturity far beyond her years. She gave the Chaconne a familiar melancholy longing. Without ever having heard him play the piece live, she played it as he had always done. No, he realized suddenly, she played it as he wished he could have, with none of the brittle contrivance he sometimes used to hear in his own interpretation. Even as she made her halting way through the music, she played it the way he had always heard it in his mind, deep in his body, beyond his ears. With the one eye out of which he could still see, Mr. Kimmelbrod watched Samantha play. She stared at the music, her lips parted. Her long fingers glided over the
strings. Her whole body seemed to be vibrating with the strings of her violin. All this passion, all this longing, rising from such a gentle, comforting girl. He felt as though he were listening to the familiar slow triple-meter saraband rhythm with his entire body.

  In Samantha’s gifted hands Mr. Kimmelbrod became the music. He became the Chaconne’s relentless melodic bass line. It teased out of the theme and variations of his own life. Back again and again, every four measures. And the chromatically descending soprano Samantha was playing now? His wife, Alice Marie, the other side of the conversation of his life. The implied counterpoint to his solo violin. He felt Alice now, felt her in his body, felt her in the music. His longing for her was a variation he could feel, even though he was not playing it. Samantha played it for him; she played Alice, and his grief for Alice. He closed his eyes and in the music saw Alice’s face, not as it had been when she died, gaunt and agonized, but as it had been before, the soft features blurred by age, the eyes at once bright and warm. In the music he saw Alice smile. In the music he saw her lips purse in a gentle kiss.

  Every variation, every one of Bach’s thematic transformations, brought someone else to him, more voices in the music. He lay in the bed, his body motionless but filled with the people of his life. This transposition was his mercurial mother, her moods shifting from key to key; that inversion was his father, a man who wrapped himself in a carapace of sobriety, but whose core, whose root, held a surprising lightness and optimism. This diminution was his sister and her tiny daughter, as like her as a fawn is to a doe; that interpolation was his brother, a scholar of Greek who spent his Sundays at the horse races in Velká Chuchle. Samantha played his longing for them, she played his anguish at their disappearance, their erasure from the world. And finally, when he thought he could not hear any more, could not feel any more, she played Becca. Becca, fragmented and displaced, a variation cut short.

  Mr. Kimmelbrod’s body was too desiccated to produce more than a few tears, but still they were the first and only tears he had shed for his beloved grandchild, who had played for him this same piece of music, this Chaconne, the piece he had himself performed at his very first American recital at Town Hall in 1936, decades before he had even imagined the possibility of either his granddaughter’s or Samantha’s existence, when Cambodia was a kingdom ruled by France and he had not even heard of a state called Maine. Samantha played Becca, and she played his grief for Becca, and finally he felt it, with him, inside him. The music of her life, the music of her death.

  It took Samantha twenty-nine minutes to struggle through the piece, more than twice as long as she would require years later, after she’d graduated from Juilliard, when Bach’s Partita no. 2 in D Minor became a staple of her own repertoire, and the basis of her first solo recording. When she finally put down her violin she was sweating and exhausted, her head aching from the strain of reading the music in the dim light. She twisted her neck back and forth and rubbed the sore spot under her chin.

  “I have a lot of work to do on that,” she said to Mr. Kimmelbrod.

  But he was no longer there to differ or agree with this judgment.

  IX

  By the time they made their way up the fire road and back to the bridge to East Red Hook, the rain had stopped, the wind died down, and the tide turned. The bridge was passable, though one of the steel railings had torn loose and dangled, swaying, like a snapped violin string. The black clouds had dissipated and the darkness was only the fading light of day. In the balmy, heavy air there lingered a trace of the storm’s menace. Hundreds of torn-up trees littered the meadows of the village, and crashed and ruined boats bobbed in the small cove.

  An unfamiliar car sat in the driveway, an obvious rental, white and shaped like a throat lozenge. When Iris, Ruthie, Jane, and Matt walked into the house they found Daniel on the porch. He wore a grin of nails tucked between his sealed lips, and he was hammering at the frame of a wooden screen that had been torn loose by the wind. He was working by candlelight. As they came out onto the porch, he spat the nails into his hand and stood up.

  “Jesus Christ,” he said. “What happened?”

  The four of them were dripping wet. Iris and Jane were shoeless, and a muddy, blood-streaked bandage clung in tatters to Jane’s left foot.

  “It’s a long story,” Iris said.

  “Are you all right?” Daniel asked.

  The four of them exchanged a glance, and then Matt said, “We’re fine. But there’s not going to be anything left of the Rebecca but matchsticks.”

  This assessment turned out to be fairly accurate. The next day Bill Paige would borrow a Maine Marine launch and take Jane out to tour the wreckage. They would crisscross the bay, steering among and poking at the shattered bits of the Alden, looking for something that could be saved. After two hours of searching, Bill would fish out one of the blue hand towels embroidered with the boat’s name, a memento that, having been rejected by Matt, Jane would tuck into the back of her linen cupboard. Over the years that followed, when she would come upon the towel, she would take it out, and look at it, taking an odd comfort in remembering not the loss of the boat that Matt had worked so hard to restore, but John and Becca, and the hopes and dreams they had invested in the Rebecca.

  “I’m so sorry,” Daniel said, going to him and putting a hand on his shoulder.

  “It’s only a boat,” Matt said.

  And here was the crazy thing: he meant it. As he had sat in the little rubber boat watching the larger of the Rebecca’s painstakingly restored masts splinter against the rocks, he had felt something so odd that it took him a moment to recognize it. For three years he had been dragging the boat behind him like a bag of rocks, hauling her along, stumbling and sweating and making far slower progress than seemed possible. At her launch, when she hit the water and floated, seaworthy and solid, he had waited in vain for the burden of her to float away, too. But only when the wind tore the boat to shreds did he finally feel it: relief. He was no longer tethered to her. He could go anywhere he wanted.

  Iris said, “Ruthie and Matt, you two go upstairs and take a hot shower. You’re both still shivering.”

  Ruthie started up the stairs. She paused on the third step and turned back to her mother. “Mom?” she said.

  “What, sweetheart?”

  “Thank you.”

  “Ruthie …” There was so much Iris wanted to say. Not more than half an hour ago she had thought Ruthie had drowned, and amid her terror had been a thread of rage, fury with herself, that once again she was going to lose a daughter without ever having said the things she’d meant to. As they’d bobbed through the waves to the sinking schooner she had sworn that if—no, when—she and Jane saved their children, she would tell Ruthie everything. She would tell her how much she loved her. That she’d never loved Becca more, just more thoughtlessly. She would apologize for having been careless with the feelings of the people she loved, too wrapped up in her own expectations to see them for who they were. She would say she was sorry for having imposed her will on Ruthie, and proud of Ruthie for refusing, in the end, to bend to her. She would tell Ruthie that she should follow her own heart and be and do what she loved, and not worry, for even a moment, about what anyone else expected from her.

  Ruthie stood trembling on the steps, sagging against the wall, exhausted. There would be time, later, for everything Iris wanted to say.

  “Nothing. Just … I love you.”

  Ruthie climbed the stairs, Matt following, and Iris directed Jane to Mr. Kimmelbrod’s bathroom, giving her one of Daniel’s sweatshirts and a pair of sweatpants to change into. When Iris came back out onto the porch, Daniel stood holding one of her grandmother’s crocheted afghans. He opened it to her, and she walked into its outspread wings. He enfolded her in it and pulled her close.

  “What happened?” he said, his voice at her ear warm and muffled by her hair.

  “The kids tried to get the Rebecca away from the other boats by taking her across to the other side of the b
ay. She ended up on the rocks.”

  “And you went after them?”

  “Jane and I did.”

  Iris leaned against his chest, as she would lean against him again, at the hospital, after the phones finally started working, and the call about Mr. Kimmelbrod came through.

  “Oh,” she said, wiping her eyes, not sure what was bringing her to tears. “Poor Matt.” That was not sufficient to explain the strange mixture of sorrow and gratitude that she felt, sheltering in her husband’s strong arms. But it would have to do.

  “Poor Matt,” Daniel agreed. “But, like he said, it’s only a boat.”

  That was true, Iris would sometimes think, about marriage: it was only a boat, too. A wooden boat, difficult to build, even more difficult to maintain, whose beauty derived at least in part from its unlikelihood. Long ago the pragmatic justifications for both marriage and wooden-boat building had been lost or superseded. Why invest countless hours, years, and dollars in planing and carving, gluing and fastening, caulking and fairing, when a fiberglass boat can be had at a fraction of the cost? Why struggle to maintain love and commitment over decades when there were far easier ways to live, ones that required no effort or attention to prevent corrosion and rot? Why continue to pour your heart into these obsolete arts? Because their beauty, the way they connect you to your history and to the living world, justifies your efforts. A long marriage, like a classic wooden boat, could be a thing of grace, but only if great effort was devoted to its maintenance. At first your notions of your life with another were no more substantial than a pattern laid down in plywood. Then year by year you constructed the frame around the form, and began layering memories, griefs, and small triumphs like strips of veneer planking bent around the hull of everyday routine. You sanded down the rough edges, patched the misunderstandings, faired the petty betrayals. Sometimes you sprung a leak. You fell apart in rough weather or were smashed on devouring rocks. But then, as now, in the teeth of a storm, when it seemed like all was lost, the timber swelled, the leak sealed up, and you found that your craft was, after all, sea-kindly.