Red Hook Road (11 page)

“There are as many Hewinses in the Red Hook graveyard as there are Tetherlys or Stoddards. Becca belongs here,” Iris said. “Dad, don’t you think that would be better? We should bury Becca here.”

“I can’t say,” Mr. Kimmelbrod said. “This is for you and Daniel to decide.”

The thought, unbidden, came to Iris that her father had not always
been so retiring when it came to decisions about Becca. It had been he, after all, who had given her permission to abandon her musical career, he who had said that Becca was correct in her assessment of her own abilities. “We’ll bury Becca here,” Iris said, firmly. “With my family, and with John. I don’t believe in that ‘consecrated land’ business. I’m sure the rabbi who did the wedding won’t mind if we bury her here, with her family.”

“Whatever you want,” Daniel said.

“That’s what I want,” Iris said. “We’ll have the funerals together. I’ll talk to Jane.”

Daniel asked, “Do you want me to come?”

This would be, Iris thought, the first time she and Jane would interact not as employer and employee, nor as mothers of the wedding couple, nor in the crazed fog of that first hour after the accident. This was the first moment of their new relationship. Was there a Yiddish word for this new relationship, she wondered bitterly. Did
machetunim
apply when the points of contact were dead?

“I’ll take care of it myself,” Iris said.

At six o’clock in the morning on the second day after the accident, Jane unlocked the door to the Unitarian church and hesitated on the topmost step, steeling herself against what she knew awaited her inside. The wide oak door seemed heavier than usual as she put her shoulder to it, and for a moment she felt an unfamiliar and intolerable lassitude. Then she shook it off, set her jaw, and shoved the door open. As she had expected, the church had not been cleaned. In the past, at the behest of the sexton, the ladies of the congregation would have assumed that responsibility, but now those willing to carry out the chore were too old, and the younger women, while happy enough to arrange flowers for the pulpit on a Sunday, were less inclined to get on their knees and polish the wooden pews. The small congregation could no longer afford a sexton’s salary, and so instead had hired Jane’s cleaning service to maintain the church for a nominal fee. It was her job, and she saw nothing undue or surprising in the fact that today, of all days, no one had thought to relieve her of it.

She had forgotten about the church herself until just a few hours ago, when she shot up in bed with a creak of the old oak bedstead, having passed the second night after the accident as she had passed the first: awake, watching the shadows cast by the tangled fringes of her bedside lamp play across the walls, noting the progress of a brownish water stain creeping across the ceiling. Last week she had asked John to take down a bit of the sheetrock to see if he could find the source of the leak, and he had promised to get to it as soon as he and Becca returned from their honeymoon. She was going to have to do the job herself now, and she would need a ladder. It was when she thought of the folding aluminum ladder they had used to light the tapers in the church’s sconces that she remembered the mess and the burden that awaited her.

The nave looked forlorn, the candles burned down to stubs, the flowers wilted and brown at the edges. The aisle was littered with shriveled rose petals, and someone had torn loose one of the hydrangea garlands looped between the pews. Beneath the pulpit, a galvanized bucket of flowers had toppled over onto its side, leaving a white-rimmed water stain on the pale blue carpet. The rest of the carpet was spotted with smudged footprints and the tiny pockmarks left by stiletto heels. Jane shook her head. All those ladies from New York teetering around in their impractical shoes.

Armed with a bucket of cleaning supplies, Jane made her way down the aisle, ripping down the loops of garland and bundling them into a black leaf bag that she tied to her belt loop. The physical effort involved in jamming the garlands and the drooping and withered floral arrangements into the bag, of bending over to pick up bits of trash, of leaning into the pews to return the hymnals to their racks, did her good. Since losing her temper with the sheriff at Jacob’s Cove, Jane had felt weighted down, numb, and lethargic, as though her blood had stopped flowing in her veins. But now the repetitive motion, the comforting, familiar exertion of cleaning, seemed to unbottle and roil all her stagnated feelings: Jane cleaned the church in a perfect fury. She was furious with Becca’s spoiled-brat friends for having hired an out-of-town limousine when a car would have done; furious with the photographer for being so slow, so dawdling and methodical; furious with the Copakens for planning such an elaborate wedding; furious with John for having entangled himself with that useless, pretentious, hapless family in the first place. And, most of all, she was furious with her son, her good, strong, beautiful son, for dying.

She filled bag after bag with dead and dying flowers, and dragged the bulging sacks down the aisle behind her. She jabbed at the sconces with a penknife, prying loose the candle stubs, then scraping out the last bits of wax. She jerked the vacuum along behind her like a foolish, recalcitrant child, banging the brush loudly against the sides of the pews. She took care only when emptying the glass vases of their blown and rotting treasure: she could reuse the vases at the wake.

She had arrived at the church planning only to throw away the trash and vacuum up the rose petals. But by the time Iris showed up, Jane had
polished the brass sconces, oiled the leather cushions on the seats behind the altar, and climbed the ladder to take a Q-tip to the seams in the wood of the window casings, scraping out years, generations, of dust. Jane was on the ladder, hands black with grime, strands of limp brown hair pasted to the sweat on her face, stinking of hard work and spray cleaner, when Iris walked in.

Iris hesitated in the doorway of the church, looking around with an expression of dull wonderment at the thoroughness, Jane supposed, with which Jane had erased all evidence of the wedding. The woman seemed to be looking for some trace—a flower arrangement, a candle, a card-stock program—but it was all gone, bagged and stacked and ready for a trip to the county dump.

“Matt said I’d find you here,” Iris said.

From her perch Jane could see strands of white in the part of Iris’s hair. She wondered for the first time if Iris might not be the older of the two of them. Because of the way she always dressed—like a teenager in jeans cut off at the knee or khakis and a wrinkled man’s button-down shirt—Jane had always assumed that Iris was younger. Grief or insomnia had aged her by a dozen years.

“What do you need?” Jane said, and then, less harshly, “I mean, is there something I can do for you?”

Iris blinked, eyes huge and swimming in the thick lenses of her glasses. Jane had never seen her in anything but reading glasses, perched on the tip of her nose.

“It’s about the funeral,” Iris said. “Daniel and I … Jane, we really hope that you’ll reconsider and agree that the children should be buried together.”

So this was it, then. Iris had come to assert her will over this, as she had over the wedding, as she had even over John’s education. Why, Jane wondered, had she imagined she would be free of Iris’s intervention in how to bury her son?

Jane lowered herself slowly down the rungs of the ladder and followed Iris to the front pew, where she took a place as far from Becca’s mother as civility would allow. As soon as she sat down she was overwhelmed by exhaustion, by a sense that she might never be able to get up again. She
loathed the idea of sharing her son’s grave with these people. However long John and Becca dated, they’d been married for less than an hour. Less than an hour! Why should they spend eternity side by side? Yesterday she had made it clear to Daniel that she was not interested in a joint funeral or a joint gravesite.

However, yesterday she had also been operating under the assumption that John would be buried in the small Tetherly plot that her ex-husband’s grandfather had bought for his descendants. But when she got back from the funeral home and called Frank to tell him to make the arrangements with the undertaker, her ex-husband had informed her, without even a trace of sheepishness, that he had sold his interest in the plot years ago. “Didn’t know I’d need it, did I?” he’d mumbled, clearly half in the bag. It was a miracle he could remember that he’d ever had anything to lose.

There was no Stoddard plot; Jane’s family lay sown here and there throughout the cemetery. She would have to call Town Hall and inquire about a plot. No doubt she would end up with one of the new ones, across the road, far from the water. And even that would cost a bundle. Her business did well enough in the summer, but she had no cash reserves, and paying for the casket had already depleted the scant savings she possessed. The casket had been far too expensive—she had chosen a more elaborate one than she should have. To buy the casket and pay for the embalming she’d had to dip into the money she set aside every year for property taxes. She had no idea how much the burial plot would cost, but whatever it was, it would certainly be more than she could afford. She’d end up with no money with which to last out the winter.

“My family is all in the Red Hook Cemetery,” Jane said now.

“That’s fine. Mine is, too,” Iris said.

Jane narrowed her eyes slightly. Iris was one of those from-aways who insisted on their Maine roots, as if a lifetime’s worth of summers made you of a place. As if who your family was, what your stock was, wasn’t what tied you, but rather just the fact of your presence. As if a Jew from New York who had never suffered through a black, bleak March in Red Hook had any idea what it meant to be a Mainer, or had any of the hardy tenacity it took to live here.

Iris continued, “My great-great-grandparents are buried in the Red
Hook cemetery. You know the tall white obelisk down by the water, to the left of the Wescott family crypt? That’s my great-great-grandfather Elias Hewins. He bought all the area along the slope leading down to the bay for his family. For us. My grandmother’s buried there, too. We could put Becca and John at the far edge, closest to the water.”

It figured that Iris would own the nicest part of the whole graveyard, the area with the most magnificent view. The area where John would have most wanted to rest, if he had ever given a moment’s thought to the question.

So there it was. Jane could insist on burying her son alone, away from his one-day wife and her summertime family, and go into debt to buy a strip of patchy grass on the far side of the road in a lot crammed between the post office and Granville’s building supply. Or she could acquiesce and bury John with the view of the sea that he had loved, the water he had sailed and fished since he was a boy.

Jane said, “Fine.”

Iris looked startled, taken aback by having gotten her way so easily. “Really?”

Jane shrugged, not quite believing it herself.

“You’ll let us bury them together. In our plot.”

“Might as well,” Jane said.

“Thank you,” Iris said. She extended her hand, as if about to touch Jane, but Jane reared back, and then discovered a sudden and pressing need to scrub a spot off the back of the pew with the rag she still held in her hand.

Iris pulled her hand back into her own lap and said, “Daniel said that you plan on having the viewing tomorrow.”

“Yes.”

“If you did it in the morning, we could have the funeral later on, in the afternoon.”

“That’s not the way it’s done,” Jane said, shaking her head. “People will need time, they’ll want to come by after work, some will be coming from far away. We can’t just do it all in one day.”

“The problem is, as Jews, well, we don’t embalm,” Iris said, in the patient tone of voice Jane imagined she adopted with her slower students.
“Five days is a long time. Too long. I understand that you’ve always done things a certain way, but if you would consider a compromise we’d be so grateful.”

As far as Jane could tell, when this woman asked for a compromise she was really demanding that things be done her way.

“We might be able to do it the next morning,” Jane said.

“We really can’t wait.”

“Not even a single day?”

Iris bit her lip. Then she said, “Okay. I think we can do that.”

“Good,” Jane said. “We have our ways of doing things, too.”

“No. No, of course. Thank you, Jane. Really.” But this time Iris did not sound quite as grateful, and after that she seemed to run short of things to say to the woman alongside of whose son her daughter’s body would lie until doomsday.

“I’d better finish up,” Jane said.

Iris stood up. “I won’t take any more of your time.” She looked around the stripped and scrubbed church. “Did you—I’m sorry you had to clean this up on your own.”

“No matter,” Jane said. “It’s done now.”

Jane sat in the pew until she heard the church door click shut, leaving her alone once again. She leaned her head back against the pew and closed her eyes. It was a day, she told herself, a single day. A few hours that would be misery to get through, with or without Iris and the rest of the Copaken family. And after it was over she would have nothing more to do with them. After that there would be only a pair of gravestones by the sea.