Red Hook Road (39 page)

Ethan said, “You going to be all right if I stitch this closed again?”

“Yeah.”

“So how’d you get this?” Ethan said as he peeled open a small suture pack and picked up the needle with his forceps.

“Boxing.” Daniel flinched as the doctor poked the hooked needle through his skin. “Man, that hurts.”

“Don’t be a pussy,” the doctor said. “It can’t hurt more than getting punched in the face.”

“You’d be surprised.”

“Just one more. What the hell are you doing boxing, anyway? An
alter kocker
like you.”

Daniel shrugged, his shoulder banging against the doctor’s hand. “Fuck!” he said.

“Yeah, well, don’t move. You know, a few years ago I took up flying.”

“Flying?”

“Yuh. Almost bought myself a Cessna. You’re all done.” He sat back, snapped off his rubber gloves, and shot them into the trash can.

“Almost?” Daniel said.

“Came to my senses and got a divorce instead. Let’s go. They’ll be missing you at home.”

While the guests ate their lobster, Mr. Kimmelbrod went to his bedroom to fetch his violin. In spite of his tenancy, the room appeared no less anonymous than it had when it had been used as a guest room. His clothes barely filled two of the four drawers. His shirts took up no more than a few inches of the hanging bar in the maple chiffonier that had stood between the two windows on the eastern wall of the room since the spring of 1902, when it had been ordered from the Sears, Roebuck and Co. furniture catalog by Iris’s grandmother for $8.45 painstakingly saved from her housekeeping allowance. His black leather wash kit lay, zippered closed, on the back of the toilet. The only way a stranger would know this was Mr. Kimmelbrod’s room was by the violin case that lay on the white chenille spread.

Since he had lost his ability to play, Mr. Kimmelbrod had not been sufficiently conscientious about making sure the Dembovski was played as often as it needed to be. To keep its suppleness and tone, an instrument must be played. He remembered how Alice used to say that a violin was like a marriage. Untended, it became stiff and brittle, it lost its sound. He wondered how long it had been since Iris and Daniel had tended to their marriage.

Mr. Kimmelbrod unbuckled the violin case. It was, he knew, foolhardy of him to trust a child with such a valuable Guarneri—he could only imagine what his insurers would say, those neurotics in suits whose demands that the violin be stored at all times in a locked safe he so assiduously ignored—but she handled it with due reverence, and played, despite her inexperience and her size, with confidence and aplomb. At first he had been surprised by Samantha’s proficiency on the Guarneri, given that her everyday instrument was only three-quarter size. The spaces between the notes on the strings were more elongated on a bigger violin, and normally a student could not switch back and forth without having serious problems of intonation. Samantha, however, had long fingers for a girl her age, and she managed very well.

He traced the pearwood purfling of his violin with a trembling finger. He was never as conscious of the ruin of his body as when he held his eternal violin. He looked at his gnarled, shaking hands, the spiky black hairs sprouting from his knuckles, the cracked, dry, yellow nails, his loose and papery arm, flakes of skin drifting like dandruff from his elbows. He was a wrecked vessel, a walking carcass, but the Guarneri was whole and unchanging; it mocked and measured his decay. Its timelessness was not in the nature of something inorganic, a gem or a statue; the Dembovski was not an inanimate object. It breathed, it had a personality of its own. He was devoted to his violin as to a lover—a moody, complicated lover who demanded that you touch her in a certain way. He had fallen in love with the Dembovski in the Bond Street showroom of the venerated W. E. Hill & Sons violin dealers on a wet and freezing November afternoon in 1958, and had immediately contacted the generous consortium of music lovers who had offered to buy him a worthy instrument.

His Dembovski was the equal, Mr. Kimmelbrod believed, of Menuhin’s Lord Wilton and Heifetz’s David. Better than any Stradivarius. For Mr. Kimmelbrod, a Strad, no matter how bright or pure in tone, could not compare to the dark, throaty melancholy of the finest Guarneri del Gesù. Indeed, the Dembovski, Mr. Kimmelbrod sometimes worried, was a better violin than he deserved. He was by any estimation a renowned virtuoso who had had an enviable concert career. He had soloed with the finest orchestras in the world, including the London, New York, and Israel Philharmonics and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. His 1947 recording of the Brahms Violin Concerto with the Boston Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Sergei Koussevitzky was still considered the finest contemporary interpretation of that most challenging of pieces. Before he and André Previn had their final, irrevocable falling out in 1971, he had toured with the London Symphony Orchestra throughout Europe and Asia, never to anything but warm reviews. But he had never achieved the level of international acclaim of some of his contemporaries: Menuhin, Heifetz, Zimbalist, Stern, or even David Oistrakh.

It was often said about Mr. Kimmelbrod, by those who withheld the highest acclaim in their judgment of him, that he resisted his own talent, that he betrayed his musical self. Had he but permitted himself to embrace
without reservation his gift for interpreting the violin works of the Romantic masters, there is no knowing—some said—to what heights he might have soared. Mr. Kimmelbrod’s concert career had lasted for decades, but if he was celebrated at all now, it was as a teacher of genius, at Juilliard and here at Usherman Center.

“Mr. Kimmelbrod?” Samantha said. She was standing in the doorway dressed in a pretty party frock, visibly nervous. “Iris said it’s time for me to play.”

Mr. Kimmelbrod lifted his eyes to the girl and smiled. She was so singular in her focus, so eager to exclude everything from her mind and heart but music. Even with so little experience she exhibited a kind of technical and musical courage he had rarely seen in his career as a teacher of the violin. His granddaughter had not had that courage. At her best Becca played cleanly, solidly. But when confronted with the most difficult pieces, she had sometimes faltered, cowed by the complexity of the music, despite knowing that she possessed the technical skill necessary to play it. Samantha, he felt, would never cower even before the trickiest and most demanding piece. He hoped he would be alive long enough to hear her tackle something like the Britten Violin Concerto, or like the Chaconne.

Iris had asked Mr. Kimmelbrod to introduce Samantha to the guests, but he had declined. Although he was not opposed to the idea of Samantha exhibiting her skills to a small, familiar audience—especially an undiscerning one—neither did he want to endow the occasion with too much portent. As great as her promise was, they all needed to remember that she had been playing only a little more than a year. She would make mistakes today, she
should
make mistakes; only then could he be sure that she was reaching far enough. He did not want her to consider this a performance, but rather an exercise.

“Friends!” Iris called, clapping her hands to attract their attention. “We have a lovely treat in store this evening. I’m sure that most of you will remember Samantha Phelps, from Becca and John’s wedding.” The crowd grew suddenly still. “Well,” Iris continued, “Samantha’s talents extend far beyond being a flower girl.” A few people laughed. “She’s also an accomplished violinist. Tonight she’ll be treating us to a little Bach. The first two movements of Sonata no. 1 in G Minor.”

Samantha stepped forward. She was wearing a white sundress patterned with red cherries and had her hair pulled back with a shiny red plastic headband. Just as Iris began to lead the guests in a round of applause, Jane came around the corner of the house, bearing her Nilla wafer banana pudding before her like an armored shield. Samantha noticed her aunt immediately and grinned. Then, when her aunt did not return her smile, her face fell. She lowered her violin and waited, as if she thought it possible that Jane had come to call off the recital, to drag her back home to her Casio keyboard and her lonely bedroom and her dreams of a family of people who loved music and lived in music and serenaded each other nightly on the
tro khmer
.

Jane placed the pudding on the picnic table with the other desserts.

“Jane!” called Iris. “It’s so good to see you.”

Jane smiled grimly. She had had no intention of coming to this party. As Iris had anticipated—it was no great feat of prognostication—Jane was furious with Iris for going behind her back to Connie, for intruding herself once more, and in a way and a place that Jane considered to be completely out of line; so furious that she felt there was no guarantee that she would be able to control herself in Iris’s presence. But Samantha had begged her to come to her “debut.” The old man was going to let Samantha use his million-dollar Italian violin, and Samantha had insisted on Jane coming to hear her play Bach on the ancient instrument. Jane had heard of Stradivarius, even though Mr. Kimmelbrod’s wasn’t one of those. And so in her desire to support her niece there was also a certain amount of curiosity to see with her own eyes this high and mighty fiddle.

Jane peeled back the plastic wrap from the Nilla wafer pudding. She had actually been looking forward to not being obliged to make the damn pudding this year, but then, when she had decided to come, she seemed to be unable to prevent herself. And so once again she had found herself standing in her kitchen, slicing four dozen bananas while staring at a sampler her mother-in-law had embroidered for her as a first anniversary gift, with its homely saying that had struck Jane, then as now, as an ironic if not overtly hostile comment on Jane’s skill in the kitchen. “Bake a little love into every bite,” it read, in letters once bright red and now faded to a murky pink. But the subsequent improvement in Jane’s cooking had little to do
with love. Baking was no different than anything else; there was a right and a wrong way to do it, and no room for forgiveness of one’s mistakes. While she had waited for the meringue to brown in the oven, she had wondered if the bile, fury, and scorn she was baking into every bit of this particular Nilla wafer pudding would manage to affect its flavor.

As she made her way to the back of the crowd, Jane passed Matt and Ruthie. Ruthie smiled and put out her hand, as if to touch Jane’s shoulder. Jane flinched and Ruthie drew back. At that moment, Jane saw Bill Paige come around the house with an easy, loping step, carrying two cases of Geary’s. He set them next to the cooler, tore open one of the boxes, and pulled out two beers before catching up with Jane. Jane accepted the beer he handed her and watched with pleasure as the realization broke across Iris’s face. Serves her right, Jane thought. That’ll teach her that she doesn’t know half as much as she thinks she does. Jane nodded briskly at Samantha, and now once again the girl lifted up her violin.

Samantha launched into the first movement of the Bach as though she were leaping into the ocean. She threw her whole body into the music, her bow dancing across the strings. Her presence when performing was the opposite of Mr. Kimmelbrod’s. Where he had been still, she was kinetic, twisting, shivering, whipping her body back and forth.

At first Iris could barely pay attention to the music, so taken aback was she at the sight of Jane Tetherly and the sheriff together. She watched them closely, trying to asses both the extent of their relationship and the effect of Samantha’s playing on them. Iris allowed herself to imagine that Samantha’s exceptional playing would move Jane so that she would realize that the girl deserved the opportunities only the Copakens could provide her. Then, perhaps, the lingering guilt Iris felt at having gone behind Jane’s back might finally be expunged. Jane’s expression, however, was unreadable, although Sheriff Paige looked at once astonished and pleased.

Samantha was so caught up in the joy of playing that when she began the second movement, the fugue allegro, she inadvertently picked up the tempo, her fingers flying, her bow arm flapping. By the end she was racing along, and because there were so many running notes, she had a little trouble with the sixteenth notes. But even those few guests who noticed her mistakes were astonished at her skill.

Listening to Samantha’s frantic second movement, Iris tried desperately to recall having heard Becca play the same piece. Surely Becca had performed it in one of the hundreds of recitals in which she had participated over the course of her childhood. She could remember other children performing it; there was a tiny Chinese-American boy, no older than six, who had run through the second movement at such a breakneck pace that it was exhausting to watch. By the time he had finished Iris had been out of breath, too tired to focus on Becca’s more stately Schumann. She could remember others playing it, too. One teenage girl who’d sucked her lower lip the whole time. Another who had made so many mistakes she’d been led away after the first movement. But Iris could not remember ever having heard her own daughter attempt this piece.