Red Hook Road (17 page)

“What women do in Red Hook,” Iris had told Becca that day, “is hardly a reflection of the world.”

“It’s no less the world than New York is. And anyway, I bet if you checked you’d see that most women in New York take their husbands’ names, too.”

Iris said, “I think you should take some time to think about this. You don’t want to do something you’ll regret.”

“I
have
thought about it,” Becca said. Reaching over her shoulder she grabbed her ponytail and twisted it into a firm knot at the base of her skull. She never stopped sounding pleasant, but her will, like her mother’s, was iron. “I’ve thought about it a lot. It’s important to me that I have the same name as my husband and my children. I know your argument: my name is my own, I belong to myself, not my husband. I
know
all that, Mom. And I know you’re disappointed, but I’ve made up my mind.”

“You have spent twenty-six years as Rebecca Copaken. Both personally and professionally. No conductor or musician is going to know who Rebecca Tetherly is.”

Becca laughed. “No musician knows who Rebecca
Copaken
is.”

“And what if you get divorced? What then? You’ll either end up saddled with a name you don’t want or you’ll have to go through all the rigmarole of getting your own back.”

“Nice, Mom,” Becca had said, not without affection. “Two days until my wedding, and you already have me getting divorced.”

Iris had not resigned herself to Becca’s decision. She kept hoping right up to the day of the wedding—the day Becca died—that when Becca was finally confronted with the reality of the words
Rebecca Tetherly
on a check or a loan application, she would reconsider, back down, see the light. And then, for a time, death had seemed to put an end to all such questions of Becca and the choices she was going to make. But when the time had come to choose the wording for the grave marker, Iris was torn.

On the one hand, there was her argument with Becca—there was always, it seemed, an argument with Becca. But even assuming Becca’s intransigence (which was not, Iris thought, a given), the girl had only
been a Tetherly, if at all, for one hour. And legally she had never been anyone but Rebecca Copaken; that was the name on her driver’s license, on her lapsed passport, on her bank account and Social Security card. That was the name on her death certificate. Furthermore, Iris had argued to herself, or to the memory of Becca, cemeteries and monuments exist to comfort the living, to consecrate a place dedicated not so much to the mourned but to the act of mourning itself. The dead never saw the memorials erected in their honor. Iris and her family were the only people likely to visit Becca’s grave. The marker was there for
them
. If it had John’s name on it, it would always feel wrong to them. It would seem like someone else was lying beneath the stone.

In making the case to her dead daughter for the decision that she had already made, Iris had allowed herself to imagine—contradicting her last point—that no one would notice, and that anyway, if they did, they would understand that she had made the right choice.

“We have to change it,” Ruthie said. Her nose was pink, either with cold or with tears, and her chin trembled.

“It doesn’t matter,” Iris said.

“It does matter!” Ruthie snapped. “It’s the
wrong
name.”

Daniel pulled Ruthie close and stroked her hair. “It’s done, Ruthie,” he murmured.

The rabbi cleared his throat. “There is no rule that prevents you from changing it. But there’s no need to decide now. Or even a year from now. This marker is for you. For your family. You can do anything with it that you like.” He looked over at John’s gravestone. “Although I would counsel against schooners in full sail.”

Iris, initially annoyed that he had seemed to give credence to Ruthie’s objection, now gave him a grateful smile.

“Perhaps we’ll continue now with the Eil Malei Rachamim?” he said.

The prayer was a dirge, slow and mournful, and Iris felt the music reverberate in her chest.

The rabbi closed his book, slipped it back into his capacious pocket, and said, “Now I would like to suggest that in conclusion we take a few moments of silence.”

“Wait!” Ruthie said, springing out of her father’s embrace. “Is that all?”

“Yes,” the rabbi said.

“What about the Mourner’s Kaddish?”

The rabbi shook his head. “We cannot say Kaddish.”

“Why not?” Ruthie asked, her voice shrill. “It’s the prayer for the dead! It’s the most important part.”

“We have no minyan,” the rabbi said. “We are only five people. And we are not permitted to recite the Kaddish without ten.”

Ruthie turned to her mother and said angrily, “Why didn’t you make sure we had enough people?”

“I didn’t know,” Iris said.

The rabbi said, “There is no requirement that the Kaddish be said at the unveiling. In fact, the ceremony itself is tradition, not biblically prescribed. You can recite the Kaddish at any synagogue.”

“We did this all wrong,” Ruthie cried. “Everything about this is all wrong.”

“It’s all right, sweetie,” Iris said, trying to take Ruthie’s arm. “It doesn’t matter that there’s no Kaddish. This isn’t even a Jewish cemetery.”

Ruthie flung her mother’s hand away. “And that was your decision, too, wasn’t it!”

Iris caught Daniel’s eye and raised her eyebrows, but Daniel shrugged and turned away.

Ruthie hunched her shoulders against the drizzle that had begun to fall. Raindrops merged her tears. “We should have had a real unveiling, with enough people to do it the way it’s supposed to be done.”

“I’m sorry, Ruthie,” Iris said. “I tried to make this special. It means as much to me as it does to you, and a private ceremony seemed like the right way to do it.”

“It seemed right to
you
.”

“Excuse me,” Mr. Kimmelbrod said, his tone so polite and neutral it could not help sounding like a dry commentary on the women’s behavior. “I am afraid I will not be able to stand for very much longer. Come, Ruthie. Help me back to the car.”

With a last reproachful glance at her mother, Ruthie rushed to Mr. Kimmelbrod’s side, and Iris watched them walk slowly back up the path to the cemetery gates.

Daniel massaged his forehead with both hands as though trying to rub away a headache.

Iris said, “Do you think we should have had a larger ceremony? Should we have invited more people?”

“More Jews, you mean? I don’t know,” Daniel said.

“It just seemed like this was the right way to do it,” she said. “Just us.”

Daniel gazed at the headstone, reading the inscription over and over again, as if he might have missed something.

“Do you think I made a mistake with her name?” she said.

He didn’t answer.

“Daniel? Do you think I made a mistake?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I’m going back.” He turned away and headed back up the path.

Standing alone with the rabbi, Iris read the name on the headstone again. Then she looked at John’s. They were so separate. Clearly intended for such different people. But for their proximity, one coming here would never know that they had loved each other, that for an hour they had been husband and wife. For a moment Iris felt a stab of regret so sharp she winced. She had made a mistake. But how was she to have known? She had no map, no chart, no carefully laid-out instructions on how to memorialize her daughter. How was she supposed to know what to do?

How was it, Mr. Kimmelbrod wondered, sitting alone at his daughter’s kitchen table a few hours after the unveiling, that a man who had experienced so much death, who was so rapidly approaching death himself, could muster so little in the way of comfort for the bereaved? Shouldn’t the magnitude of his losses have provided him with some insight into or ready familiarity with the things, the words and actions, that gave a person solace? And yet he found that, as ever, he had nothing to say to Iris, Daniel, and Ruthie: not at the grave site, not in the car, not on the screen porch where they had sat for an hour, uncomforted, watching the dismal rain. The pall that had been cast over the family for the past year remained in place, unlifted with the unveiling of the stone.

Daniel was gone now, out for a run, and Ruthie and Iris were napping. Mr. Kimmelbrod sat alone at the table, his fingers tented before him, the pressure of tip against tip keeping them from trembling as he contemplated his inadequacy, his ignorance in the face of grief.

What had he learned from the deaths of so many of those he loved? Only that there was no apparent limit to the amount of grief a man could endure if he allowed inertia and the passage of time to push him through his days. What wisdom could he give his children? Only that after a while it became possible to ignore the ache, as one grew used to even the foulest of one’s own bodily emanations until some shift of breeze, some change in position, carried the smell again to one’s nostrils, and the stomach rebelled.

Alone in the kitchen with the humming of the refrigerator, the ticking of the clock, a man with nothing to offer, Mr. Kimmelbrod’s only conscious certitude was of his longing to go back to the place on Peter’s Point
Road, to the rooms in which he and his wife had spent all but the first summer of their lives together, to the house that had been his and Alice’s first major purchase as a married couple. For eleven thousand dollars he and Alice had bought the little farmhouse on four oceanfront acres because, while he had been more than willing to pass his summers in Red Hook teaching at Usherman Center, there was less appeal in the prospect of living with his mother-in-law. And then, because he and Alice had ensconced themselves so thoroughly on Peter’s Point Road, his mother-in-law decided to leave her rambling Queen Anne to Iris.

Lately, however, Iris had begun a campaign to convince Mr. Kimmelbrod that he was too infirm to continue to spend the summers alone in the farmhouse. In New York, she argued, he was surrounded by neighbors, and only a panic button away from the doorman, but in Red Hook the house of his nearest neighbor was nearly a quarter of a mile away, and it might take as long as half an hour or more for an ambulance to respond to a 911 call. He recognized a legitimacy in her argument. Indeed, he understood its validity even better than Iris did, for he had concealed from her, with the rigid discipline he brought to everything he did, the true extent of his debility. Yet he was not ready to relinquish his independence. To allay her concern, he had agreed to make a few small concessions to his age, including a solemn promise to drive only when necessary and otherwise to call upon his family or colleagues for rides. However, he had not counted on the impingement, even the sense of emasculation, this promise would impose on him. To have to rely on another if he wanted to go to the grocery store, or out for coffee, or to work. To wait for a ride for just long enough that he lost interest in the activity that had inspired him to ask for it in the first place. His independence was being taken away, and he was coming to the conclusion that what remained of his life was no more than a short slide to incapacitation and oblivion.

The thought that Becca should have died while he—doddering and shaking, periodically frozen into hideous and panicked immobility, on the precipice of losing control even of his ability to urinate—continued to clutch tenaciously to life, inspired him with an anger so profound that at times he had felt the urge to abandon his customary reserve. This shook him to the core, because his veneration of control, both personal and
musical, defined him. It made him who he was as a man, and also as a musician. The music of Johann Sebastian Bach exemplified Mr. Kimmelbrod’s devotion to the idea that beauty could be created only through disciplined adherence to pattern. In Bach’s dense contrapuntal textures Mr. Kimmelbrod found his ideal: emotional exuberance firmly restrained by discipline, symmetry, and order. He received much the same satisfaction from Bartók and from Schoenberg’s twelve-tone logic.

The irony of Mr. Kimmelbrod’s career was that despite his commitment to restraint and structure, it was only when he played the Romantic composers, whom he considered emotionally obvious and even florid, that his music rose above mere technical perfection. His Bach Chaconne was lovely and precise, his performance of the Berg Violin Concerto uncontrovertibly flawless, but it was when he played Tchaikovsky’s Concerto in D Major, a piece of music he considered overplayed and banal, that he brought even the most jaded of concert audiences to tears. It was only in the expression of conventionalized sentimentality, which he loathed both on principle and by temperament, that his playing truly rose to the level of greatness.

When he played the Romantic pieces for which he was best known, nothing could be more different from the sound of his music than the cool and distant appearance of the musician. Onstage or off, with a violin in his hands or without, Mr. Kimmelbrod had always been tranquil and still. Even before the Parkinson’s had frozen his face into an expressionless mask, he maintained an impassive expression, one that revealed almost nothing. Mr. Kimmelbrod had always and thoroughly kept all emotion tamped down, so deeply hidden that it raised a near existential question. Could something be so thoroughly suppressed that it might as well not even exist?