Red Hook Road (2 page)

The bride’s grandfather rose in painful increments and, leaning heavily on his cane, made his way to the bottom of the church steps. The
photographer helped him up the steps, and the mother of the bride slipped her arm through his, stilling his tremor with the gentle pressure of her hand. She shifted her hip, as if urging him to lean against her, but he stiffened, uncomfortable as always with any reminder of his infirmity. He was eighty-eight years old, a violinist, once a prodigy of the Prague Conservatory, who had made his debut at age twelve on the stage of Smetana Hall to jubilant, almost fawning reviews. He had performed regularly for more than seventy years, until just a few years ago, when the first symptoms of his Parkinson’s appeared.

A lifetime of performing had given him a considerable formal wardrobe and he owned a second pair of patent leather dress shoes, nestled in a felt shoe bag on the back of his closet door. They were no help to his son-in-law, however, since the old man’s dainty foot barely filled a size 6.

The bridesmaids returned from the garden. “No luck,” said the bride’s younger sister. She winked her left eye, not out of amusement but because there was a speck of pollen or dust caught behind her contact lens. Her unruly dark curls had been woven into a simplified version of the bride’s elaborate hairdo, but tendrils had escaped around her face and neck.

The bride bent over and cupped the flower girl’s chin in her hand. “Baby, we don’t really need it, do we? You’ll still be beautiful, even without your flowers.”

The nine-year-old flower girl, from whom more competence, perhaps, might have been expected, looked wan, her leaf-gold skin sallow against her gown of lavender tulle. Even her thick black hair, cut in the China-chop her adoptive mother insisted upon, looked flat and dry, wisps of it sticking up at odd angles around her head. She was humiliated at having failed so miserably at a task that she had been determined to execute without flaw. “I’m sorry,” she whispered.

“Okay, then,” the photographer said. He turned to the bridesmaids. “Let’s have you three lovely girls stand here.” He motioned them to the second step. Only someone who knew that none of the bridesmaids liked her dress would have noticed the faint reluctance with which they took their places, first the bride’s younger sister, then the bride’s roommate from college, and then her closest friend. The bride had done her best to choose a style flattering to all three girls, one that could, she hoped, be easily worn
again, but her sister resented the childish empire waist of the simple dress, purple turned the friend’s handsome face to an active shade of green, and the former roommate was in the seventh week of an unexpected pregnancy and hunched her shoulders to hide the lascivious swell of her breasts.

The groom’s brother returned with his father and a reek of tobacco smoke in tow just as the other two groomsmen sheepishly exited the church and announced their failure to locate the missing basket, whose absence was rapidly taking on, in the photographer’s experienced view, unfortunate symbolic implications for the company. Only the groom’s mother noticed the skunky odor trailing the young men, but in the interest of not slowing down the process any further, she refrained from berating them for smoking a joint in the church.

The flower girl finally collapsed under the weight of her embarrassment and burst into tears. The mother of the groom, who would discover the basket two days later when she went to purge the church of all evidence of celebration, pulled a handkerchief out of her sleeve and wordlessly handed it to the girl.

“Oh, dear,” the bride said. Once again she crouched down next to the flower girl and cupped her cheek with her hand. “It really doesn’t matter, honey,” she said sweetly. “The picture will look fine without the basket.”

From down the row the bride’s grandfather said, “Some people might consider a basket of petals to be a bit de trop.”

The bride glanced at him and laughed appreciatively.

“Here,” said the bride’s sister to the young girl, handing over her maid of honor bouquet. “Hold my flowers.”

When the photographer developed the film—a week later than he originally intended because, after all, there was no rush—he would be troubled by the lack of balance in his composition: the puffy-faced flower girl clutching a long, trailing bouquet, the maid of honor holding nothing. He had missed this disturbing lack of symmetry because he was eager to take the photo, not to mention busy trying to keep as many people as he could between the groom’s mother, in her paisley, and his sister, in a frighteningly clashing pattern of shimmering metallic green. The groom’s mother had worn this red paisley eleven years before, to her daughter’s wedding, and
although she had known even then that neither the cut nor the color did her any favors, it would never have occurred to her to waste money on another new dress.

So the photographer steered the groom’s sister to the very end of the row, where she stood, glowering, her yellowed fingers twitching for their accustomed cigarette. She did not bother to conceal her resentment about being shunted aside. She was already furious about what she considered the unacceptable exclusion of her daughters, the groom’s only nieces, from the wedding party. Not trusting her future sister-in-law to choose a dress that would minimize her corpulence, she had declined the bride’s invitation to serve as a bridesmaid, but she was angry that her girls had not been given a role. She didn’t think much of the bride’s excuse—that they were too old to be flower girls but not old enough to be bridesmaids. The groom’s sister had never thought much of the bride, or of her family, and she was only too happy to have had her opinion of them confirmed. However they pretended otherwise, she thought, the bride and her family were nothing more than typical “from-aways,” with their fancy summer cottage and their sailboat that probably cost more than what she earned in a year of honest work. In making this unfavorable judgment she was untroubled by the fact that a year of honest work was considerably more than what she had ever found herself moved to undertake.

Between this unhappy woman and her mother the photographer inserted the father of the groom and his girlfriend. The girlfriend, whom the father of the groom would leave not a month after the shutter snapped, hooked one arm around her man’s waist and slipped her other hand between the buttons of his stained white shirt, pulling the fabric out of shape. He stared impassively ahead of him, ignoring both her hand on his chest and what he was sure was his ex-wife’s disgusted gaze. In fact, the mother of the groom was not even looking at her ex-husband, distracted instead by the three groomsmen horsing around on the step below her. The young men had started partying last night at the rehearsal dinner; they’d been almost too drunk to set off the fireworks that the groom and his younger brother had driven all the way over to New Hampshire to buy. On the way to the church this morning they had nicked three bottles of champagne from the cases stacked up in the Grange Hall, taken the groom
down to the beach, and toasted him over and over, until he’d accused them of trying to get him too drunk to walk down the aisle. And then there was the joint they had just smoked when they were supposed to be searching the church for the flower girl’s lost basket.

“Stand straight and shut up so we can get this damn picture taken,” the mother of the groom said, poking her younger son in the back.

“Ow, Mum. Jeez,” he said. “You got me right in the kidney.”

“Now, if you’ll all just look at me,” the photographer said from behind the lens of his Hasselblad. “And smile!”

In the shot that the bride’s mother selected from among the proofs that showed up at her house a long five weeks after the wedding, most of the subjects were smiling, but none of them with the radiant exuberance of the bride and groom. With their blond hair, their suntans, and their nearly identical wide smiles, the bridal couple looked almost like brother and sister. They had fallen in love at sixteen and over the next ten years had, despite distance and difference, never swerved in their determination to reach this day. Their faces in the photograph were alight with joy, and for a long time the bride’s mother would not be able to pass the picture hanging in the front parlor of her summer house without feeling a knot in her stomach and a rush of tears. In time the photograph would recede into the general oblivion of furnishings and knickknacks. But even years later the bride’s mother would sometimes think of that afternoon in early summer, of the rustle of the fir trees that separated the country church from the winding main road, of the lavender lupines in the bridal bouquet, of the waves lapping the rocks of the tattered shore, and of the kiss her daughter’s new husband placed on his new wife’s cheek at the very moment the photographer clicked the shutter.

The house in East Red Hook, a village a few miles outside the town of Red Hook proper, was a flight of Queen Anne fancy, with a witch-hat turret, obsessive gingerbread, multihued brickwork and tile, and a secret room hidden behind a bookcase. It was built in 1879 by a gentleman named Elias Hewins, to the precise specifications of his much younger bride. Elias had purchased the acres of rolling oceanfront meadow for a song from a farmer who’d finally given up on coaxing anything edible from the obdurate Maine soil. Elias had sited his new house to make the most of its view across East Red Hook’s small cove, out to the tiny islands scattered along the Eggemoggin Reach like crumbs on a wide blue tablecloth. Elias’s son Nathaniel was born, lived, and died in the house, then passed it on to his six adult children, all of whom had long since abandoned the Maine coast. Only Nathaniel’s youngest child, his only daughter, possessed the resources and the inclination to return to East Red Hook from New York City, where her husband had moved her. She transformed the house where she was born into her summer home, and for decades thereafter she and her daughter Alice passed their summers in the village, with Alice’s father visiting as often as his business interests would allow. In the summer of 1940, when Alice was twenty-six years old, already in the eyes of her parents an old maid, she met a young violinist, a Jewish refugee from Prague, whose exile had landed him in, of all places, Red Hook, where he was performing with the town’s renowned summer chamber music program, at the Usherman Center. After a brief courtship, Alice married Emil Kimmelbrod, and the couple bought their own summer house, down the road in Red Hook. Their high-spirited little daughter, Iris, spent the better part of every summer at her grandmother’s, where she was free to run and play
without concern for the silence demanded by her father’s rigorous practice schedule.

If they thought of it at all, Iris and her parents assumed that Iris’s grandmother had either bought out her siblings, the five sons of Nathaniel Hewins, or had inherited their shares in the house as in turn they died, but upon the old woman’s death it was revealed that no such formal transfers of ownership had ever taken place. Iris’s grandmother left her not the ramshackle old summer house but rather only the one-sixth share that was hers to bequeath. It took Iris nearly seven years to track down every last one of the twenty-nine heirs, some of whom had no idea that their origins lay in a harborside village of white clapboard, blueberry bogs, and lobster boats on the Down East coast of Maine. Most of the heirs were willing to sign away their claim to the rotting and sagging old house in return for their small fraction of its fair market value. But one cantankerous second cousin twice removed, a Texan, refused to sign a quit claim until Iris offered him significantly more than the $443 that was his share. Over the objections of her husband, Daniel, who, while he enjoyed Maine well enough, felt no ties to the land or the house that would justify such an expense, Iris wrote her distant cousin a check for $3,000. As soon as the deed was clear, she began the renovations, which were to consume her time and energy for years of summers to come. Her projects were so numerous and her plans so intricate that until the last moment there had been some concern that the latest work—adding a shower to the downstairs powder room—would not be finished in time for the wedding of Iris’s daughter Becca to John Tetherly, the son of the woman who had been coming to clean the house since before the death of Iris’s grandmother.