Red Hook Road (51 page)

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.

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 bay. 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.

“Why don’t you get some dry clothes on,” Daniel said. “I’ll get some food on the table.”

When everyone was clean and dry, they sat in the living room around the light of a fire and of two oil lamps with sky-blue glass bases. Here and there sputtered years of accumulated candle stubs in votives and jelly glasses, a pair of beeswax tapers in Iris’s mother’s Sabbath candlesticks, a fat, squat candle scented with bergamot. Daniel put bowls of coleslaw and potato salad on the coffee table and scooped lobster salad into hotdog buns that he had toasted over the fire.

None of them spoke as they ate. They just worked their way through the coleslaw and the potato salad, took second and third helpings of the lobster rolls in their charred buns. At last Iris, sitting on the floor, leaned back against the couch, her head resting against Ruthie’s thigh.

“I don’t suppose you had time to make dessert?” she said.

“As a matter of fact …” Ruthie said. She shifted Iris’s head aside and went to the kitchen. A few moments later she returned with a heavy ceramic baking pan and a handful of forks.

“You didn’t,” Jane said from her armchair close to the fireplace. She
had slipped off her borrowed slippers and sat warming her toes on the fire screen.

“I did,” Ruthie said. She set the Nilla wafer banana pudding down on the carpet and distributed the forks.

“No plates?” Jane said.

“No need,” Iris said, and dug her fork into the pan. She took a bite and frowned, cocking her head to one side, “You know, this is pretty good, Ruthie.”

“It tastes just like yours, Mom,” Matt said, admiringly.

“Better,” Jane said.

When they had scraped the pan clean, Daniel got up to throw another log on the fire. The wicker basket they used as a wood box lay beside the living room door, and as he grabbed a log, his gaze strayed to the dense thicket of scribbles in pencil and marker and twenty different colors of ink on the back of the door. It had been a long time since he had taken note of them.