Red Hook Road (6 page)

Mr. Kimmelbrod abandoned his career abruptly. He refused the farewell gala his supporters had sought to put on at Town Hall, the scene of his American debut, where he had brought a jaded audience to its feet with heartrending performances of Bach’s Partita in D Minor and Ernst Bloch’s 1920 Sonata no. 1. With a certain grim resolve he had sold all his instruments, except for the Dembovski, his beloved 1742 Guarneri del Gesù, which had been purchased on his behalf by a group of wealthy benefactors a few years after his arrival in the United States. Thereafter he redoubled his attention on his teaching, which until that time had been secondary in his mind to his concert career. He had come to realize that his legacy would be in the musicians he trained, not in the musician he had been himself, and his expectations of his students had risen, even as
his own abilities diminished. Meanwhile, the Dembovski lay in its case in a drawer, dreaming its simple fiddle dreams. The Dembovski wanted to sing, but there was no hand in which it could come alive.

“What are you thinking about, Grandpa?”

This was a favorite question of his granddaughter’s, one that, despite its intrusiveness, he usually tried his best to answer. He said, “I was thinking about my violin, and whether I owe it the right to be played.”

“You can still play it,” Ruthie said.

“Not well enough.”

“Can you ask someone to play it for you? Becca would play it, I’m sure.”

“I could give it away to someone who could play it.”

Ruthie raised her eyebrows, aghast. “You couldn’t give the Dembovski away, Grandpa. It’s a part of you.”

Could he really give the violin away? Mr. Kimmelbrod wondered. As much as the Dembovski felt like a piece of his body, so, too, had it always been, in many ways, his adversary, not unlike his body in recent years. The violins of Giuseppe Guarneri del Gesù were like that. Unlike their more famous cousins, the Stradivariuses, they did not make life easy for those who played them. They were demanding mistresses, willing to give up their beauty only when approached with the proper rigor and respect. That was why he loved the Dembovski, why he’d refused to accept any other instrument. The glory was in the challenge. Although of course now there was no battle, no struggle. The war that had borne such remarkable spoils was over.

Mr. Kimmelbrod said, “Unless it is played, a violin is nothing more than a beautiful piece of wood.”

“Don’t give it away, Grandpa.”

“No, I won’t. Idle thoughts, no more than that.”

Ruthie scooted her chair closer to her grandfather’s and laid her head on his shoulder. “Just let me know if you want to go home. Mom has people assigned to be designated drivers.”

He raised an aristocratic eyebrow. “She is so thorough that she has both assigned
and
designated them?”

Ruthie smiled. “Would you like a refill of your drink?”

He glanced at his half-full glass of wine and shook his head. She sipped her own drink. “I think the rest of the bridal party plans to get completely wasted,” she said.

“Is this your plan, as well?” he mocked her gently. “To get ‘completely wasted’?”

“That, or blotto. I haven’t decided. I’m such a party animal.”

He squeezed her hand. He knew that Iris worried about Ruthie being “unsociable,” but he admired her for it. Becca, ebullient and lively, enjoyed parties, gatherings, celebrations of all kinds. As committed as she had once been to her music, she had never quite been
serious
. In this way she was different from most violinists he had known, both his contemporaries and his students, who generally held themselves at a remove even from other musicians. His own temperament was more typical of the violin virtuoso: confident, yet introverted. Self-sufficient and a bit obsessive. He sometimes wondered if Becca’s gregariousness and sociability had not been the cause, or at least the harbinger, of her failure to fulfill her early promise.

And then here was Ruthie, standing in a corner of the room at a party, smiling if someone happened to glance her way, watching, observing, virtually guaranteeing that no one would get close enough to appreciate the sharp wit beneath her shy exterior.

“So, Becca and John aren’t here yet,” Ruthie said. “Weirdly.”

“They are having their photographs taken back at the church, no?”

“I suppose so. But it’s taking so
long
. How many pictures do they need?”

“Several thousand, it would seem.”

Ruthie sighed and then leaned over and pressed her cheek to her grandfather’s, rubbing her soft skin against his scratchy chin. She inhaled deeply. She loved the way he smelled, like polished wood, rosin, violets, and 4711 Kölnisch Wasser. “Should I get you some of the hors d’oeuvres?” she asked. “Mom and Becca spent months on the menu. I’m sure they’re delicious.”

He was about to demur but then realized that indeed he
was
hungry. How like Ruthie to notice that even before he did. “Yes, please. That would be very nice.”

As Ruthie picked her way through the crowd she looked up at the strands of fairy lights looped among the rafters. They were so pretty, she thought. It was amazing, really, the transformation of the Grange Hall. Looking around at the white lace-draped tables, the lush flower arrangements, the flickering candles, it was hard to imagine the room’s other incarnations, certainly not its regular Wednesday morning setting for a low-impact aerobics class. Most of the Wednesday regulars were here today, and Ruthie had never seen them so dressed up. Heels were high, dresses occasionally sparkled, and there were even one or two broad-brimmed and feather-trimmed hats.

By the kitchen Ruthie came upon the other two bridesmaids, Jasmine and Lauren, positioned next to the swinging door where Lauren could catch the waiters as they exited the kitchen with their full serving trays.

“I am so hungry, I think I’m going to die,” Lauren said, snatching two miniature hamburgers as they passed by. Ruthie took a couple and put them on a napkin. Jasmine shook her head at the waiter’s proffered tray; Ruthie couldn’t remember ever seeing Jasmine eat. Last night at the rehearsal dinner Ruthie had watched in fascination as Jasmine ransacked a lobster, extracting every last flake of meat, then rotated her plate so that her boyfriend could avail himself of the results of her industry. Lauren, on the other hand, seemed to be eating for two.

“I wish I knew what was keeping Becca and John,” Ruthie said as she accepted a few lobster puffs from a passing waiter. Her voice trailed away as out of the corner of her eye she saw the front door of the Grange Hall fly open, pushed so hard that it banged against the wall, the noise of heavy oak against plaster like the crack of a gunshot. On the rebound it swung back onto John’s brother, Matt, as he stumbled into the room. He was ashen, his bow tie askew, his dark hair standing up on his head. Ruthie stared at him, her stomach dropping and then seizing, like an elevator brought up short in the middle of a free fall. His eyes communicated his panic like an electric pulse over a wire.

Ruthie stood frozen in place, as if nailed to the ground. Matt lingered in the doorway, his shoulders shaking in his ill-fitting suit jacket.

Suddenly, and with another bulletlike crack, the door swung open again. Two large men in uniform—crisp black slacks, blue shirts, police
badges, a loop of leather strap across the chest—walked in. Sheriff’s deputies. One of them bumped into Matt and for a moment they clutched each other for balance, like fighters in a clinch. The deputy regained his footing and gently, almost tenderly, pushed Matt out of the doorway. The deputy took off his wide-brimmed hat. He and his partner wore identical expressions, mouths turned down, eyes narrowed. They scanned the crowd until they located Ruthie’s father standing on the far side of the room.

Ruthie felt a band growing tight across her chest, crushing the air from her lungs. She opened her mouth and gasped, the sound of her breath at once hollow and rasping. The deputies shouldered their way across the room, leaving behind them a broken parting in the crowd. Highball glasses hovered halfway to the mouths of guests whose small talk caught in their throats. Ruthie dropped the napkin she was holding, and a lobster puff rolled away across the gently sloping, wide oak planks, stopping only once it reached the barrier of a beige stacked heel. The foot in the shoe kicked the mushroom away.

“Ruthie?” Jasmine said. “Ruthie, what’s wrong?”

Ruthie, freed at last from the electric grip of Matt’s gaze, lurched away, elbowing people aside as she rushed toward her father. She stared at the older deputy’s bent head, his murmuring lips, too far away to hear what he was saying. Her father grabbed the back of one of the pretty white slatted chairs, crushing beneath his thick fingers its ornamental corsage of purple flowers. He staggered. One of the deputies caught him around the waist, and eased him into the seat.

“Dad!” Ruthie said. As she skidded to a stop in front of the chair, she tumbled from her left high heel, her ankle buckling painfully to the side. “What happened?”

Her father shuddered, and upset a water glass as he groped for it, soaking the white tablecloth and the mauve wrappings of the little party favors Iris had arranged at every place.

“What happened?” Ruthie said again, and then, as her father broke down, “Daddy?”

Ruthie had never seen her father cry. At his parents’ funerals there had been a dampness in the corners of his eyes, but wild, hoarse weeping
was impossible, a dark miracle, no less wondrous and terrible than if her father had suddenly burst into flames.

“Stop it,” Ruthie whispered. “Stop it!” She clutched at his sleeve, shaking his limp arm. “Please, stop.”

Daniel gulped and then pulled Ruthie onto his lap. He buried his face in the nape of her soft neck and held her tightly.

Across the room Iris stood, her blood rushing hollow in her ears. She had seen Daniel and Ruthie crying, knew that they were hanging on to each other as if the seas were rising around them. But the only person in the narrow focus of her horror was the sheriff’s deputy, illuminated as though trapped in a blazing spotlight. He held his hat over his heart, the chin strap caught on the shiny metal of his badge. The noises of the crowd faded to silence, and somehow Iris heard the deputy’s words from across the distance of the hall as though he were whispering them into her ear.

Someone had switched on the two racks of fluorescent tubes slung from the Grange Hall’s rafters, and the gaily decorated tables and flower arrangements looked tawdry in the harsh light, like crumpled and torn Christmas wrappings after the gifts had all been opened. The fairy lights twined through the wires shone wanly, like headlights in the daytime. The candles had guttered and gone out, the place settings stood stacked and pushed aside, and a skyline of dirty tumblers and wineglasses was crowded at the far end of the empty buffet table. All joy and expectation had been drained from the room, and in their absence what had seemed whimsical and elegant was now gaudiness, pretense. For a while the guests stayed, clumped into small groups. Whether up from New York for the weekend or summer people who’d known Becca since she was a sag-diapered baby digging in the rocky sand on Red Hook beach, the Copakens’ friends stood together, gripping one another’s hands and shoulders in a sudden camaraderie of disaster.

On the other side of the room stood the locals, the families of Jane and Frank and the few people not related to her whom Jane had invited. Unlike the from-aways, they were largely silent, each standing at a slight remove from the others, as though encapsulated in an invisible bubble of shock.

Everyone drank. Whether they were lobstermen or investment bankers, they placed their orders and drained their glasses in one or two gulps. The bartender was kept busy, although his work was simpler now. No one was ordering G&Ts or sea breezes. It was all scotch or bourbon, neat.

Then, as if by some inaudible signal, all together, the locals started to gather their things and head for the door. The summer people and
out-of-town guests hesitated only a moment before following, a few stopping on their way out to lay a useless hand on Daniel’s shoulder or offer Iris a hug she could not bear to accept.

The Copakens and the Tetherlys sat at separate tables, each family in its own stunned huddle. Someone, perhaps it was the caterer, had stripped these tables of place settings and flowers and set down pitchers of water and a few glasses, though a bottle of rye, Jane thought, might have been more welcome. Frank was not among them. He needed a smoke, he had said, and to Jane’s relief, after fifteen minutes he was still not back. His slatternly girlfriend had gone after him. Now Jane didn’t need to worry about what her son-of-a-bitch ex-husband might do or say. Infuriating, how even ten years after their divorce, he managed to embarrass her, as if his disgraceful behavior were still a reflection on her. She had been young and stupid enough to marry him, and she was paying for it still. And now the best of the three good things to result from her stupidity was gone.

John was dead. Even as she thought the words to herself, Jane felt a strange distance from them and her surroundings. She was proud that she had not broken down, that she hadn’t made an exhibition of herself. She was strong, like her mother, who had never cried, not even on the night her husband had been lost at sea. Jane was not the victim of her emotions. In fact, she was under such firm control that she was able to watch, dispassionately, as the old Wylie sisters, Jane’s clients for many years, sidled up to the long table on which were heaped dozens of gaily wrapped presents, some impressively huge and showy with ribbons, others tiny, no larger than a single silver spoon. Euphenia and Eudoxia Wylie conferred like a team of lawyers in front of the gift table, whispering behind their hands. Jane was not too overcome by sorrow to fail to observe as Eudoxia reached with a furtive hand for a shapeless package wrapped in silvery, well-creased snowflake-patterned paper; and plucked it off the large pile.