Red Hook Road (18 page)

He heard a creaking on the staircase and Ruthie came into the kitchen. Her cheek was seamed in pink from her pillow, and strands of her hair flew around her head, pulled loose by sleep from her ponytail.

“Hey, Grandpa,” she said, standing behind his chair and putting her hands on his shoulders and pressing her cheek into the top of his head. “Sorry I was such a baby today, carrying on and making an ass of myself at the cemetery.”

Ruthie was the baby, had always been treated that way. With the back of his head he felt her chest expand with her sigh. “Tears are not inappropriate under such circumstances,” he said.

“I guess. I think Mom’s pretty mad, though.”

“Rather sad than angry, I think.”

Ruthie lifted her cheek from his head and, after squeezing his shoulders, came around and sat in the ladder-back chair opposite his. “I just wish we’d had enough people there to say Kaddish.”

“Kaddish. Tell me, granddaughter, what is all this about saying Kaddish? Suddenly you have found religion?”

“No, it’s just—I mean, we’re
supposed
to.”

“I believe, in fact, that at this point only your parents are required to say Kaddish. Our obligation to do so ended after the first thirty days of mourning.”

Ruthie looked aghast. “Is that really true?”

“I am no expert in the Talmud, but I believe yes. Only the parents and the spouse are meant to continue their mourning for the full year. After that they are to stop saying Kaddish, except on the
yahrzeit
, the anniversary of the death.”

She gave her head a furious shake. “Well, that’s ridiculous. It doesn’t make any sense. Grief doesn’t just
end
because a group of ancient rabbis said it was supposed to.” She frowned. “Did you say Kaddish for Granny?”

No, he thought, he had not. Not after the funeral. Instead he had played for his wife. Music was Mr. Kimmelbrod’s only meaningful means of expression. Until he lost his ability to play, Mr. Kimmelbrod had both contained and expressed his emotions only through his music. His violin wrung the emotions from him, translating the unspeakable and wailing it to the world. The Dembovski laughed for him. It flirted and giggled and snickered and howled with glee. But mostly it cried. The Dembovski wept
for
him, because he would not shed his own tears. Because he could not bear to remember the dead.

The Dembovski remembered them—his parents, his brother, his sister. The myriad uncles, aunts, and cousins whose bodies and faces, ideas and loves, memories and bones, were nothing, not even smoke or ash. Because he could not mourn them, the Dembovski del Gesù, carved from
a piece of maple by a luthier from Cremona, keened its lamentation,
his
lamentation, for all that had been lost. The Dembovski said his Kaddish for him.

His violin had grieved for his wife, his beloved Alice, with her crooked smile and sly wit. With her knobby knees and sensible shoes. He shed no tears as he kept vigil beside the bed where she lay, the pauses between crepitations growing longer and longer until they stopped. No tears, even on that night when he stepped onto the small stone terrace outside their living room, closed his eyes against the cool night air, took up the Dembovski, and let it weep for the woman whom he loved more than he had ever been able to show.

His disease had progressed so far that by the time Becca died, he could no longer play. He had no way to lament her loss. And without lament, was there grief? If one neither expressed a feeling nor allowed oneself to experience its sensation, then could one be said to feel at all?

He had loved Becca. He missed her. But he felt like he stood at one end of a long, narrow hallway at the far end of which was a lantern in which a small flame flickered. If he squinted his eyes and stared very hard he could just barely make out the shadows behind the light, but the distance was too great for him to see what cast the shadows. Had he been able to play, the Dembovski would have transported him the length of the long, long hallway and brought him into the lantern’s glow. Without his violin he was trapped, immobile, much too far away to see or feel. He was wracked with fury and despair at his infirmity, but aware at the same time of being able to feel
that
grief—his grief for his lost talent—whole-heartedly, when it was this very infirmity that distanced him from all his other emotions.

“Yes,” he said. “I said Kaddish for your grandmother. At the beginning.”

“And for your family? Your parents and brother and sister? Did you say Kaddish for them?”

“Also. A long time ago.”

“Do you light one of those little candles for your parents? Like Mom does for Granny?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

Mr. Kimmelbrod shrugged. “I do not know what day they died.”

Ruthie’s face crumpled, and he regretted immediately what he’d said. True as this was, it was an incomplete explanation. He might have lit a
yahrzeit
candle for his parents on the anniversary of their deportation, or even on their birthdays, or on the first of January, or on Groundhog Day, for that matter, but he had never been able to bring himself to bother. What use would it be? What comfort could be found in a feeble flame burning in a jelly jar?

“I’m so sorry, Grandpa.”

“Yes,” he said. “I know you are.”

“But I still think we should do something for Becca and John,” Ruthie said.

“
Do
something?”

“You know, like a memorial or something. Or even just a … I don’t know what you would call it, not a
party
, but, like, a gathering. A celebration.”

“A celebration?”

“Yes! A celebration of Becca and John. We’d all be together, everyone. Our family, John’s, our friends. We’d all gather together and celebrate their lives.”

How to explain to this sweet and naïve child that there was nothing she could do, nothing that any of them could do, that would take away her pain? Just as the unveiling hadn’t been enough, so would a “celebration” fail to fill the void. There was only time to rely on, and even time would never quite suffice.

Ruthie leaned toward him eagerly. “We could do it on the anniversary. Or would that be too awful, somehow? Like we were celebrating the day they died?” She wrinkled her brow, the same expression he had seen on her face from the time she was a little baby trying to puzzle out a problem.

“You don’t
like
parties, Ruthie,” he pointed out, but she didn’t seem to hear him.

“We could do it on the Fourth. I mean, Mom and Dad are probably not going to want to have just their
regular
Fourth of July picnic now, and that’s the anniversary of the rehearsal dinner. It was a beautiful night. We
were all so happy. It’s a date that has meaning, but that isn’t under a, you know, a pall of tragedy, like July fifth would be.”

He felt so tired, drained by the day, by his daughter’s pain, by her husband’s wordless grief, by his granddaughter’s neediness. And yet he was conscious, lacking the Dembovski’s voice, of sharing her desire to do something, say something, not to let the moment pass in silence. “I don’t know, granddaughter. I don’t know that anyone is ready for a party.”

Ruthie narrowed her eyes. “Are you feeling okay, Grandpa? Are you tired? Do you want to take a nap in the guest room?”

How was it, Mr. Kimmelbrod wondered, that a child so blissfully ignorant in so many respects always knew how he felt, always read the hints of exhaustion that he managed to disguise from everyone else? He was desperate for the comfort of his own house. “I think perhaps I should be on my way home.”

“I’ll take you right away,” Ruthie said. She helped him to his feet without waiting for him to ask for her arm and helped him to the car. As they started for home he was nearly overpowered by an almost annihilating desire to get into his own cool bed and close his eyes, but his granddaughter seemed so sad, so bereft, so deflated by his lack of enthusiasm for her idea of throwing a party for the dead, that as they were driving along Main Street he found himself, rather to his surprise, saying, “The rain has stopped. Let’s go to the Bait Bag. I’ll buy you an ice cream cone.”

The Bait Bag—most people just called it the Bag—occupied some vague category of structure between trailer and shack, with a few huge lobster pots bubbling on propane burners out back and a deep-fat fryer the size of a kitchen sink. It was located in the middle of town, across the street from the Red Hook Public Library, kitty-corner to the Citgo station. Behind the Bait Bag stretched a small square of grassy yard with a few picnic tables, but nobody ever sat out there. Not because the view of the rear yard of the gas station was ugly, though it was. In addition to the vacant picnic tables, the yard featured a couple of rusted old beaters on blocks and, oddly, a pale pink antique refrigerator missing its door. But these were not necessarily detractions from the ambience. The Bag’s customers were accustomed to, if not indeed the proud custodians of, yards full of refuse and junk. It was the bugs that kept people away. For reasons little understood,
that patch of grass behind the Bag was home to the cruelest, most vigorous horde of mosquitoes in Red Hook—though there were other contenders. Every once in a while a couple of tourists would wander back there with their red plastic trays and lobster rolls. A moment later they would come running back, swearing and slapping at the red welts rising all over their faces and arms, even the lobes of their ears and the tops of their sandaled feet.

Patrons of the Bag tended to eat either in their cars or sitting on the grass by the side of the road. There was a single rickety old picnic table on the edge of the parking lot, and Ruthie and Mr. Kimmelbrod managed to nab it. They pulled the car into the neighboring parking spot and turned on the radio so they could listen to music while they ate. WBQI was playing the Trout Quintet, and Ruthie attempted to console herself by dipping an order of onion rings one by one into a black-and-white.

Smiling fondly, her grandfather shook his head as, neck tilted back, she dangled the string of greasy onion dripping thick, creamy milkshake over her open mouth.

“It’s bad enough you eat those,” he said. “But to
dip
them?”

“Before you condemn me, you really ought to try it,” she said with her mouth full. “It’s the perfect combination of savory and sweet.”

“God forbid.”

“Tell me you’ve never had an onion ring. I don’t believe you. Granny loved onion rings.”

“She did, and I am sure I ate them once or twice with her. Sitting perhaps at this very table. But I promise you that despite having spent all the summers of her life in this hyperborean backwater, your grandmother’s manners and taste were too refined ever to permit her to indulge in the abomination you are so enjoying.”

Ruthie smiled, but then her eyes grew sad. “I miss Granny.”

Alice Marie Kimmelbrod, née Godwin, great-granddaughter of Elias and Alice Hewins of Red Hook, Maine, had died of breast cancer when her youngest granddaughter was eleven years old, in the forty-fifth year of her marriage to Emil Kimmelbrod.

Over the dozen years since she died, Mr. Kimmelbrod’s memories of his wife had calcified into a series of images and vignettes. Alice at her
dressing table, a row of bobby pins in her lips, rolling her hair—honey blond when they met, then faded to a soft downy white—into a chignon. Alice bent over the old slate sink in the kitchen of the house on Peter’s Point Road, the gentle roll of her waist straining against her dress. Alice stretched out on the dock, a filterless Pall Mall dangling from her lips, a fishing rod propped beside her, cracking her long toes. Alice with her eyes closed, listening to him play.

He remembered the way Alice would hold court from a small tufted armchair tucked beneath an east-facing window in the corner of the Usherman Center recital room on warm August Wednesday afternoons, when the students performed. Often she would bring Becca and Ruthie with her. When Becca listened to music she sat perfectly still, her eyes narrowed, her expression rapt. The look of surprised horror on the girl’s face when a musician struck a false note always put Mr. Kimmelbrod in secret danger of cracking a smile. Ruthie had sat quietly, too, a good girl, but as she leaned against her grandmother’s knee it had often seemed that she was entranced less by the music and more by her grandmother’s palm smoothing her hair.

Another memory. Of Alice lying in bed, fishbelly white skin pulled taut over sharpened cheekbones, teeth clamped together to keep from moaning in pain.

Ruthie dunked another onion ring in her milkshake and chewed it slowly. Mr. Kimmelbrod licked his cone, allowing the ice cream to melt on his tongue. She stretched her legs out along the sun-warmed bench and sighed.

They had almost finished eating when a maroon minivan nosed sharply into the parking space next to theirs, scraping the bottom edge of its front bumper against the low cement barrier. Through the open window they heard a woman’s gruff voice say, “You want ice cream or not?”

The rear door slid open on its roller, and a small, dark-haired figure stepped out.

“Hey!” Ruthie called. “Hi, Samantha!”

The girl frowned, as if trying to place Ruthie. She waved tentatively. Then she cocked her head to one side and listened. A flurry of piano notes came out of the open windows of the Copakens’ car.

Samantha stood there with her eyes closed, her head rocking from side to side.

The driver’s side door opened and Jane stepped out, slamming it hard behind her. As she came around the side of the car toward the picnic table she said, “You’re being spoken to, miss.” To Ruthie, Jane said, “Sorry.”

“That’s all right,” Ruthie said. “How are you, Jane?”

“Fine. We’re fine. And you?”

“We’re all right.”

Mr. Kimmelbrod watched the small, dark-eyed girl. She had long arms, and she stood with her hands held a little in front of her body, her fingertips faintly trembling. Her small, round chin darted in time with the music.

“Do you like the music?” he said.

She opened her eyes and smiled hesitantly, her face suddenly crowded with large white teeth.

“Do you know this piece?”