The Sabbathday River (8 page)

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Authors: Jean Hanff Korelitz

BOOK: The Sabbathday River
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Naomi, weary, shrugged. “I didn't, you know, I don't really know Heather that well,” she said.
“Few seem to,” Charter said helpfully. He was writing again.
“I mean, I go out to the house sometimes, to collect her work, and sometimes we chat a bit. I was out there earlier this week, as I said. But she doesn't really put herself forward. She doesn't talk much about her life, you know. She's just quiet, I guess. She's a
wonderful
mother,” Naomi said again, sounding rather lame in her insistence.
Charter pursed his lips, reading what he had written. He seemed to like it as little on the page as in the air.
“What else?” he asked finally.
It seemed easier to get mad than admit her inability to come up with additional qualities.
“Well, I would think, Mr. Charter, that her being a good mother is quite possibly more germane to your inquiry than any fleeting impressions
I might have about her cooking ability or talent for joke telling.”
He reached a weary hand up to his crown and needlessly smoothed his steel-colored comb-over. “What do you know about Heather Pratt's personal life?”
“By which you mean her sex life. Am I correct?”
He confirmed this with an inclination of his head.
“I know what the gossip is, but she herself has never told me who Polly's father is. To tell you the truth, I'm not very curious about it. You may have noticed that Heather's taken on the entire responsibility for raising her daughter, without any help or financial support from the father. And in my view, if a man's not taking the remotest interest in his child, it really doesn't matter
who
he is. He's just a shit.” She scowled at them both.
“You think it's irrelevant, then,” Charter observed.
“I think it's none of your damn business. But more to the point, this is all completely beside the point. Heather didn't have that baby. She wasn't
pregnant.”
“We think she was, Naomi,” Nelson said quietly. His voice retained the faintest memory of heat, but that was enough to give her an instant's pause. “Just about everyone in town thinks she was.”
“Fantasy,” she spat. “Absolute bullshit.” She glared at Nelson.
“I wish it was fantasy.” Nelson's voice was sad. “I don't think it is.”
“I don't know who all these close personal friends of Heather's are, telling you this. They certainly don't hang around her much.”
Charter said nothing. Maddeningly, he was waiting for her to continue, and to her own disgust, she did. “You should have seen her the other day. She had some flu, she was weak as a mouse.”
Charter raised an eyebrow. “I'm not surprised. She would have given birth a few days earlier.”
Naomi went cold, furious at herself. “I didn't mean … She wasn't …”
“She wasn't … postpartum?”
“Of course not.”
“And you know this because you examined her yourself? Women's health in the hands of women?” He leaned forward. “Our bodies, ourselves?”
She sat back in her chair. “Jesus fucking Christ.”
“Naomi.” Nelson sat forward. “Help us out. We need to get to the bottom of this.”
“Oh sure,” said Naomi, her voice brittle. “I can help you out. It's an easy one. I can solve it all for you right here in my office with pure logic. If a woman can have one out-of-wedlock baby, then she's surely capable of a dozen, so that part's easy. Also, a woman who's already a slut is also a woman capable of killing a baby. So there you have it: one baby equals two babies equals dead baby. Hell”—she grinned at them —“you won't have any trouble getting a New Hampshire jury to convict based on that. C'mon, let's go over and get her now. We'll just explain to her that we've managed to eliminate the through-hikers and the gals living in sin with their boyfriends, and all the prostitutes in New Hampshire have alibis for the last two weeks, so it's her. She's from Goddard Falls. She'll understand.” “Are you finished?” Charter said, almost affably.
Naomi felt herself panic. The truth was that even though she had no deep love for Heather, it was still clearly present within her, this compulsion to speak on the girl's behalf. For whatever reason, the town had selected Heather to bear responsibility for the baby in the river, and though Naomi herself could believe no part of it, she understood the pointlessness of averting the tide. To herself was left the role of speaking for the one they had already condemned; she had not asked for it, but neither would anyone else accept it if she refused. For that alone she wanted to curse the girl.
“You say Stephen Trask brought Miss Pratt's work to you.”
“Yes”—Naomi nodded—“that's right.”
“And did he mention, at that time, why she was leaving the sports center?” Charter asked.
Naomi turned to him. “No, actually. And I didn't think to ask. And in any case, Stephen spoke very highly of Heather, I recall. Of her
character.”
“But you were hiring her for her needlework skills, not to teach Sunday school,” Charter observed coolly. “Why do you think he was at such pains to recommend her?”
The question caught Naomi short. “I don't know,” she said truthfully.
“Perhaps Stephen Trask knew something about Heather that you hadn't heard yet. Or perhaps he was anxious for you not to credit something you
had
heard.”
She looked at her hands in her lap. She had hired not Heather specifically but the person who had made the exquisite work Stephen had
brought her. She did not interview artisans for the collective, she included them—that was the whole point. Heather, as far as she knew, was leaving the sports center because the work there hadn't suited her. There was no mystery about it. At least, she had not known just then that there was a mystery. She shook her head.
“Mrs. Roth?”
Naomi looked up. “This is a collective of workers, Mr. Charter. I don't interview, at least in the ordinary sense. I don't ‘check people out.' Heather came to me wanting work. Her work was extraordinarily good, and so she was included in the collective. I made no judgments about her personal life then, and I'm not overly anxious to make them now.”
“That's admirable,” Charter said dryly.
“It a pretty big leap you're making here,” Naomi said, her voice steely.
He put away his pad and clicked his pen. “That doesn't make it wrong,” he said.
The Gene for Faith
“SO
YOU'RE
THE QUILT LADY,” JOEL FRIEDMAN said, taking a glass of wine from Naomi's hand. “We heard about you. Our contractor said there was another woman from New York.”
“Well, I think that about says it all.” Naomi laughed. She went back to her kitchen for the Brie, then set it on the trunk that passed for her coffee table. Judith cut a piece for herself. “I've been here nine years and I'm still the woman from New York.” “Naomi came here with VISTA,” Judith prompted. She had evidently told him this already.
“No kidding,” he said. He sounded—astonishingly—impressed.
“No kidding. I was indeed part of that legion of light. I came with my ex-husband a year after we graduated. Well”—she laughed—“after I graduated. Daniel was supposed to be writing a thesis about Paul Robeson, but he kind of petered out after a year or two. I wanted to go to South America, but this is as far as we got.” She drank her wine. The tannin bit her tongue.
“Not quite as exotic as South America,” Judith said.
“No. But there was still stuff for us to do. I mean, unemployment was something absurd, like 40 percent. And the women—forget it. Daniel started a maple syrup co-op.”
“He still around?” asked Joel.
Naomi shook her head. “Moved on to a higher karmic plane. Woodstock, New York.” She saw that they did not know precisely what to make of this, and shrugged. “He went to live with an old college friend. Five socialists on a farm where nothing gets farmed, floated by somebody's trust fund. Revolutionary inertia: the last social disease of the eighties.” Naomi grinned, disarming them. “You know, these guys, they want to change the world, but only if they can do it by their shining example. If you have to actually make an effort, that's cheating. But—and I'm sure you'll agree this is shocking—the good folks of Goddard, New Hampshire, did not turn into Luddites because Daniel Roth moved into town and built a house without a television. When I got all these women together and we started making money, he acted as if I'd become a Reaganite. Suddenly I'm a counterrevolutionary because I want a toilet that flushes! Anyway”—she sighed—“I'm sure he's happy. I have no doubt he's living a life of virtue, preaching to the converted and accomplishing absolutely nothing.”
Joel smiled, a little nervously. “Well,” he said, “he's bucking the trend, anyway.”
“The trend?” said Naomi.
“Oh sure. They're fishing their draft notices out of the ashes, you know? Half the training program at Morgan Stanley knew each other from the Little Red School House. There was one guy I remember from college—this was a little before your time,” Joel told his wife, “he led a sit-in to protest ROTC on campus. Then he dropped out to organize full-time. Then he disappeared—I think he got radical. I just assumed I'd never see him again. I swear to God”—he grinned—“I saw him in a suit on Madison Avenue a few months ago. He smiled at me. He
blushed
at me.” Joel shook his shaggy head, smirking. “Like it was all one great mass adolescence and everybody just grew up.”
“Hey”—his wife hit his arm—“speak for yourself. Some of us are still out there hacking away. Look at what Naomi's doing. I might get ambitious myself. Start up a New Hampshire branch of the National Abortion Rights Action League or something.”
Naomi grinned. “Hate to disillusion you, Judith, but NARAL already exists in New Hampshire. This is a pro-choice state.”
She was stunned. “You're kidding.”
“I'm not. Always has been. But it isn't a women's issue here, it's a privacy issue. Believe me, they'd as soon hunt feminists the way they hunt deer, but they'd rather hunt the government than either of them. They loathe Washington here. That's why they love election years, cause the candidates come and kiss their butts.”
“Gee,” Judith said, still dealing with it.
“NARAL.”
“Oh, there's still plenty to do, don't worry,” said Naomi. She got to her feet and went to check the stew. “This is a place where state-funded education doesn't even kick in till first grade,” she called from the kitchen. “It's assumed that women are home, you see. Men get custody of the kids in divorces here, even when they've beaten their wives to a pulp. Lesbian parents? Forget it. Equal pay for work of comparable value? Dream on. Listen,” she said, carrying the large pot to the dining table and placing it on a wooden board, “women barely speak to one another here. That's the single thing that keeps everything so static. I mean”—she ladled stew into their bowls—“of course they
speak
to each other, but they don't talk about their lives. Never. You've heard of Yankee reserve? Everybody's in their own shell, so you get gossip but no meaningful exchange.”
“I guess they call it the Granite State for a reason.” Joel grinned. He was older than Judith, Naomi thought, his bushy mustache and unimposed-upon hair gone early gray. He had that distracted brilliance she had always liked, the kind that could eradicate ancient diseases but couldn't figure out how to match socks. Indeed, she observed, he was staring at his socks even at that moment.
“Oh,” Judith said,
“Joel.
Didn't I say you should change?”
“You said I should change my pants. You didn't say anything about my socks.”
Judith gave Naomi a look that told all.
Joel frowned at his feet. “I went down to the river in back of our house. The Sabertooth River, or whatever it's called.”
“Sabbathday.” Naomi laughed.
“Sabbathday.” He considered. “Discovered on the Sabbath?”
“Well, not exactly. These settlers were on their way to their new homes, and they stopped by the river on the Sabbath. They started thinking about what it would be like when they got where they were going, and they turned around and went home. That's the story, anyway.”
“Is that true?” Judith said.
“I don't know. It's what I heard. And they named it Sabbathday in honor of their change of heart.”
“Our Sabbath?” Joel laughed. “Or theirs?”
“Oh, theirs. I don't think there were too many Jews in New Hampshire two centuries ago. There aren't that many now. And anyway, then it would be Shabbosday, wouldn't it?”
“I guess.” He grinned.
Naomi surveyed the table. “I think we're ready.”
They came and sat, Judith and Joel across from Naomi, an arrangement she regretted almost immediately, since it must look to them as if she were somehow interviewing them. She wasn't. Well, she was, but they had already passed.
She watched them eat. Joel threw salt over his stew.
“You know, the house you bought is beautiful. I've never been inside it, but I've driven past it about a million times.”
“The last owners moved south.” Judith nodded. “Virginia, I think they said. Gaylords, from Boston.”
“Yes, I knew her,” said Naomi. “They were up here in the summers. She bought some things from my collective.” She lifted her glass. “Are you winterized?”
“We'll soon find out.” Judith grinned. “The contractor thinks we might have some trouble with the plumbing.”
Naomi rolled her eyes. “That's Ashley. He's always got an eye on the next crisis. I once had him in to refit a storm door, and of course we ended up with a whole wall ripped open. Water damage, he insisted. Still”—she sighed—“you can trust him. He won't make off with anything, and he won't start somebody else's job till he's finished yours.” She shrugged. “Who knows. Maybe there
was
water damage. My ex-husband built this house. He sort of made it up as he went along.”
Judith smiled. Her hair wound down in tight rings over her chest. Her eyes were set a millimeter too close for
Vogue,
and her nose had a convex curve another woman might have fixed years ago.
Joel was already dragging a heel of bread over his plate. “This is so good,” he said, and she took the hint and got him more. “I haven't had a home-cooked meal since we moved here.”
“The kitchen,” Judith said quickly.
“Right.” He glanced at her. “And it'll only get worse once she starts her job.”
Naomi looked at Judith. Their previous conversation, amid the orange tomatoes and shiny cucumbers, had not covered this rather essential topic.
“I'm starting at a law firm in Peytonville next week,” Judith said.
“You're a lawyer?” Naomi heard, and rued, the note of disapproval in her voice.
“Oh, don't look so scandalized.” Judith laughed. “This firm has the public-defense contract for central New Hampshire. Indigent cow thieves, as my dear husband says. Well”—she shrugged—“at least that's one thing I never saw at Manhattan Legal Aid, though I think I saw just about everything else.” She sighed and looked down at her plate. “Of course, I was going to wait awhile before starting, but I don't really see the point now. I'm going a little nuts rattling around here. And Joel's started already. So I called Peytonville and said I'd come on Monday.”
“I know you're going to teach at Dartmouth,” Naomi told Joel apologetically. “But I don't know
what
you're going to teach.”
“Biology. Well, it's all very confusing. Genetics, specifically. And I'm technically at the medical school,” he said. “I mean, my appointment's there, but my lab's in the science complex, attached to the biology department.”
“And he doesn't actually
teach
anybody,” Judith said dryly. “Sometimes I wonder why they bother admitting students to these places at all.”
“Oh now.” He smiled. “Students are fine, but I'm not a very gifted teacher. I just like to get on with things in the lab. And Dartmouth offered me less teaching for more money and a better lab.” He shrugged. “So sue me.”
“Genetics,” Naomi mused. “Watson and Crick. Those fine gentlemen who shoved Rosalind Franklin out of the way in their noble—or should I say Nobel?—pursuit of the double helix.”
He put up his hands. “Hey, no argument from me there!”
“I read somewhere that one day they'll be able to look at our DNA and tell us what kind of cancer we're going to get.”
“Oh, not just cancer,” Joel said eagerly, a scientist taking the bit. “Everything's there. Well, we can't prove it yet, but we're going to be able to see a whole life in a single cell. One little bit of a baby's skin and we'll be able to tell if he's going to have blue eyes, or a stroke, or a good sense of balance, or cancer, or genius …”
“Or bad breath,” Judith said tersely. “But do we want to
know?
We've
blundered along for a few thousand years without knowing how we're going to die. Why would we want to change that now?”
“Because, in the case of disease we want to treat it early, and in the case of genius we want to nurture it.”
“Sounds very
Brave New World,”
Naomi said affably. “I don't think I'd want to know if my child—”
“No, you would,” Joel said. “I mean, if you thought about it, you probably would.”
Naomi, abruptly quiet, understood that they had arrived on some hazardous ground. But she did not like the silence, so she went on as if there were no silence to break.
“Well, I'm glad you're here.” She looked at Judith. “It's great news for me.”
Joel, too, looked at his wife. He smiled. “She didn't want to come, but I threw her over my shoulder. After all, I'm the man, right?”
“Please.”
Judith rolled her eyes.
“And I don't see bringing up kids in New York.”
“You have kids?” Naomi looked at them both. They were looking at each other. An entire conversation, inaudible to her, passed between them. At last Judith turned to her.

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