Red Hook Road (25 page)

“It’s like waiting for Havdalah,” Mary Lou Curran said. She was sitting on a kitchen chair balanced somewhat precariously in the grass.

“Hmm?” Daniel said, looking up at her.

“
You
know, dear. Waiting for the stars.”

“The stars?”

“When you can see three stars in the sky, then Shabbat is over.”

“Mary Lou Curran,” Daniel said, laughing. “You never cease to amaze me. How in the world do you know about Shabbat and Havdalah?”

“My second husband was Jewish, didn’t you know? We weren’t married
long—we met at a bicentennial picnic and he was dead before 1980. But that was long enough for me to learn all about Shabbat and the Havdalah service, my personal favorite, with the lovely braided candle and the spice box. For a while there I collected those little boxes. I even know how to bake a challah. Or at least I used to.”

“I’ll bet you still can,” Daniel said. “So today would have been your anniversary, in a way.”

“I suppose it would have been,” she said. “Though I think now the day’s come to mean something else for all of us.”

“I suppose,” he said. “But tomorrow would be … more accurate.”

“Perhaps,” Mary Lou said. “But Jewish holidays start the night before.” She raised a gnarled finger to the sky. “One—I think we can count Venus, don’t you? Two. And there, just barely visible. Three.”

Daniel’s view of the stars was suddenly obscured by the dark planet of his wife.

“Should we start?” Iris said.

“Where’s Ruthie?” he said.

“Down by the water, I think. Do you have the fireworks?”

“Matt put them out at the end of the dock.”

“Okay, then.” Iris raised her voice. “Everyone! Can I have everyone’s attention?”

All remaining conversation stopped and the guests looked expectantly at Iris.

“If you’ll all come down to the beach, we’ll say a few words and then set off the fireworks.”

The guests silently rose and followed her down to the water. It was a ghostly, mute procession. No one knew what to say, so they said nothing at all. When they reached the beach they huddled together, waiting.

“Ruthie,” Iris called. “Ruthie? Do you want to start?”

Daniel peered through the dark at the crowd, looking for his daughter. She was standing on the beach. We waved but she shook her head.

“Ruthie?” Iris called again.

Daniel put his hand on his wife’s arm and, leaning down to her ear, whispered. “You do it.”

Iris seemed about to object, but then she sighed. She lifted her glass in
the air and said, “Do you all still have your drinks?” Those who did followed her lead and held their wineglasses, tumblers, and bottles of beer in the air.

“To Becca and John,” Iris said.

At that moment, before her toast could be echoed by the other guests, there was a sharp cry. Everyone turned in the direction of the sound and, nearly in unison, gasped as they watched Mr. Kimmelbrod tumble to the ground. His cane had skidded across a slippery boulder and he had lost his footing on the rocky beach.

“Dad!” Iris shouted and ran to his side, pushing people out of her way.

Ruthie was there before her, and fell to her knees, pulling Mr. Kimmelbrod’s head into her lap.

“Don’t move him!” someone shouted.

The guests pressed closer, straining to see. Across the minds of those who had in the first place disapproved of the idea of a celebration to commemorate the dead couple flitted the thought that this wasn’t unexpected. Not that the old man would fall, certainly, but that something bad would happen. Others simply shuddered at the terrible symmetry of this second accident. Had he broken his hip? Hurt his head?

“Please,” Iris said, “someone call an ambulance.”

“No,” Mr. Kimmelbrod said. “I don’t need an ambulance. I’m fine.”

He was trying to sit, frantically jabbing his cane at the ground to try to push himself up.

“Don’t,” Iris said. “Just wait until the ambulance gets here.”

Ignoring her mother, Ruthie slipped her arm beneath Mr. Kimmelbrod’s shoulders and pulled him up to sitting.

“Please,” Mr. Kimmelbrod said. “I am fine. Just a clumsy old man.”

“Do you want to try to stand up, Grandpa?” Ruthie said.

Iris said, “Dad, don’t. Something could be broken. Your hip, your leg.”

“Nothing is broken,” he said.

Ruthie squatted down next to him and was about to hoist him up when Daniel stepped forward. “Let me,” he said, and lifted Mr. Kimmelbrod up to his feet as though he weighed no more than a child.

With sighs and sounds of encouragement, people made room for Mr. Kimmelbrod, supported by Daniel on one side and Ruthie on the other, to
walk up to the opening in the low wall that separated the lawn from the rocky beach. After the three of them had passed through, the crowd of guests followed, until everyone was standing on the lawn.

“Up to the house?” Daniel asked.

“No. Here, I think,” Mr. Kimmelbrod said.

Matt appeared holding a white wooden folding chair in his hand. He unfolded it and set it on the grass, pushing on first one leg, then the others, to make sure it was steady.

With a wince he tried to suppress, Mr. Kimmelbrod lowered himself into the chair.

Iris said, “Are you sure you’re okay, Dad? Do you need an ice pack?”

“Only a drink,” he said.

A small hand appeared, holding a tumbler. “It’s ginger ale,” Samantha said. “I only took two sips.”

Mr. Kimmelbrod accepted the glass, patting the girl on the head.

“Thank you. Ginger ale was exactly what I had in mind.” He turned to Iris and said, “Please, continue. Light the fireworks.”

“I’ll sit with you,” Ruthie said.

“No, you go down to the water where you can see.” He glanced at Samantha, who was hovering anxiously. “This young lady will keep me company, won’t she?”

Samantha leaped forward and positioned herself next to his chair like a sentry.

Mr. Kimmelbrod raised his glass in the direction of the guests. “To Becca and John,” he said.

People hesitated, looking at one another.

“To Becca and John,” he repeated.

“To Becca and John,” they replied.

After the last of the fireworks had been lit, after the last of the guests had collected their things and left, Iris sat alone at the end of the dock, her bare feet in the water. She moved her feet in slow circles, trailing twin spirals of green phosphorescence. When Becca was a toddler Iris used to take her out in a little old dory at night. She would strap Becca into a life
jacket, throw a few more on the bottom of the boat for padding, and prop the little girl, not much more than a baby, really, on top. Then she would row out to the middle of the harbor, ship the oars, and they would drift. In the too-big life jacket Becca looked like a tortoise flipped on its back, her chubby legs and arms waving uselessly. Periodically she would try to lean over the side of the boat, straining to reach the water. Iris would grab the back strap of the life jacket and lower Becca far enough so she could plunge a fat little hand into the water, waggle it around, and squeal at the sight of its sparkly green wake. She had rejected Iris’s explanation of how plankton emitted energy in the form of light when disturbed, and instead insisted that phosphorescence was another word for fairy dust.

The only thing little Becca had loved as much as the sea was music, especially hearing her grandfather play. They would sit together in the living room, the child on the little willow rocking chair that had belonged to generations of tiny Godwins and Hewinses, the old man seated on the piano bench. She would stare at him, rapt, her eyes wide and her mouth hanging partly open, whether he was playing a Bach fugue or a series of scales. Becca had been entranced by Mr. Kimmelbrod and his music, just as Samantha had been entranced by him tonight.

Iris stared at her feet, long and white in the moonlight, like pale salmon swimming in place against a seaward-flowing tide.

“Iris,” Daniel called. “Are you coming in?” She winced at the loud insistence of his voice. At night sound traveled well over the water, a fact that, as a teenager, Becca had never seemed to realize. When she was late for curfew, Becca used to have John bring her home in one of the boats from the yacht club, figuring that her parents would be listening for the sound of a car on the road. Iris, from her bedroom overlooking the backyard and the sea, would hear the slap of the oars as the boat approached the dock. She would hear the kids’ hushed voices. She would even hear an occasional moan that she did her best not to interpret. She would listen to the slow scrape of the screen door against the frame, and she would know that Becca had caught it before it could make its trademark gunshot slam.

“Iris!” Daniel called again.

Iris wished she could sleep out here, on the water. She didn’t think she could bear another night on her side of their wide mattress, another night
when she never once touched Daniel’s body because she could not bring herself to reach across the divide.

“Iris!”

“I’m coming,” she said softly, wondering if her voice would carry like his did, like Becca’s had. She padded up the dock in bare feet, then stopped to slip on her tennis shoes before picking her way across the rocky beach. She’d been wearing the same pair of torn Keds for more than a decade. Becca had hated them, had said they looked like an old woman’s shoes, with lumps on the side from the corns on her pinkie toes.

She took the long way back to the house, going around to the opening in the wall at the far end of the property instead of using the one near the dock. If she hadn’t made the detour she would never have seen the couple sitting on the steps of the Grange Hall’s side door. If there hadn’t been a moon or if she and Daniel hadn’t pulled down the dying white pine between their yard and the Grange Hall’s, she wouldn’t have noticed the two bodies pressed against the door, less two distinct forms than one dark mass. They didn’t see her; she was at least thirty yards away and they were busy with each other. As she watched, one of the forms partly detached itself from the other. At that moment, the cloud that had been obscuring the moon shifted and a ray of clean white moonlight shone on the couple, placed perfectly to illuminate the pale globe of the girl’s bare breast. Matt bent his head and the breast disappeared. Iris heard Ruthie moan softly, her voice carrying just like Becca’s had, all those years ago.

Saul Copaken always claimed that no heavyweight, not Joe Frazier, not George Foreman, not even Ali, could hold a candle to Archie Moore, who fought for twenty-seven years and knocked out his last opponent at the age of fifty. While Daniel had always loved Moore, he had never truly appreciated the majesty of the accomplishment that had so impressed his father until this moment, when he found himself trying to convince the young manager of the Maine Event to let into the ring a fifty-five-year-old man with an amateur’s license that had expired before the kid was born.

Daniel had started training the morning after they buried Becca. He found that the harder he pushed his body, the easier it was to empty his mind of grief. At first he had limited himself to running and jumping rope—a modified version of his college boxing coach Tommy Rawson’s roadwork regime—and for almost two years that had been enough. This spring, however, he found himself requiring ever more prolonged and more rigorous exertion to achieve that desired hollow space in his head. One Saturday afternoon in early May, still crackling with energy after a ten-mile run through Central Park, he decided to clear out his and Iris’s storage locker in the basement of their building on Riverside Drive. Each tenant was entitled to an eight-by-six-foot cage, and theirs was packed full of boxes and odds and ends of furniture. He could not bring himself to open any of the boxes for fear of finding something like Becca’s elementary school report cards, or one of the sweaters his mother had knit for her when she was a baby, and in the end he did little more than shift the contents of the cage from one side to the other. The job was taxing, but still, he didn’t work up the sweat he had been hoping for.