Red Hook Road (33 page)

“All right, not a gap year exactly. Call it a break. As in, ‘Give me a goddamn break.’ Sorry, Grandpa.”

Mr. Kimmelbrod shook his head. “No need to apologize. In fact, I must excuse myself for a moment.”

“Dad, don’t you want to finish your breakfast?” Iris said.

“A moment,” he said. They watched him make his laborious way back up the hall.

When the door to his room clicked shut, Ruthie said, “I’ve been in school for nineteen years. I don’t think it’s unreasonable for me to take a year off.”

Daniel said, “I don’t see why she couldn’t take a short break.”

“Oh, really, you don’t?” Iris said. “Let me explain it, then. She can’t take a year off because it’ll take her off track. Ruthie, right now you’re well positioned to get into a first-rate doctoral program. You could even continue on at Oxford. You don’t want to do anything to threaten that. You don’t want to end up teaching composition at some crappy college in North Dakota.” Iris regretted the words as soon as she said them. The law school at CUNY, where Daniel taught, fell into the category of the kind of institution she was dismissing so harshly.

“Not everybody has to teach at Columbia,” Ruthie said.

“Everyone in North Dakota wishes they were teaching at Columbia,” Iris said. “But fine. A break. Great. Terrific. So what do you plan to do with your break?”

“I don’t know,” Ruthie said, all defiance now sapped from her tone.

“What do you mean, you don’t know? You can’t just quit. You have to have a plan.”

“I don’t know. I’ll get a job or something.”

“What kind of job?”

“I don’t
know
, Mom. A job. Any job. I can wait tables or work retail. It’s not that important.”

“Really? What you do isn’t important?”

“Come on, Iris,” Daniel said. “Leave her alone.”

Ruthie said, “I guess it depends on what you mean by ‘important.’ Clearly, in this case you mean ‘important to you.’”

All at once Iris saw, panicking, the life she had imagined for Ruthie slipping away. She had never approved of Ruthie’s field; the English departments of America were lousy with scholars of the women novelists and poets Ruthie loved. But despite her poor choice of concentration, Iris knew that Ruthie was perfectly suited to the life of the mind. She, like her mother, took her greatest pleasure from reading. She always had. It didn’t make sense for Ruthie to do anything else. She was an ideal scholar, devoted to her subject, patient and thorough, easily immersed. Iris had counseled Ruthie to turn her attention to a lesser-traveled area of study but Ruthie had remained true to her passion, in the end Iris had admired her for it. Ruthie could not give up on her ambitions now, when she was well on her way to seeing them come to fruition. She couldn’t follow Becca’s pointless path.

“You could work as a paralegal,” Daniel said, keeping his eyes firmly averted from his wife, as if her objections were no longer at issue. As if Ruthie’s decision had already been made. “Law firms hire kids to work for a year before applying to law school.”

“She isn’t applying to law school,” Iris said. “Or are you, Ruthie? Have you suddenly decided to become a lawyer?”

“No, I’m not going to law school,” Ruthie said.

And with that—Ruthie’s vagueness, layered on top of Daniel’s obtuse acquiescence to her foolishness, an acquiescence Iris knew to be based as much on hostility to her as on concern for Ruthie’s welfare—Iris snapped.

“You’d better figure out what you want, Ruthie,” she said. “Before you make a complete hash out of your life.”

“Will you please give her a break,” Daniel said. “She’s not making a hash out of her life. She’s taking a year off from school, for Christ’s sake. You’re acting like she’s decided to become a crackhead.”

Iris said, “I just don’t want her to make a mistake that she’ll regret.” This conversation was far too reminiscent of the argument they’d had in the wake of Becca’s decision to quit the Conservatory. Then, too, Daniel had taken Becca’s side. At least this time her father had not added his voice to the chorus.

“You can’t order her around,” Daniel said. “She’s not a child.”

“Okay, who are we talking about now?” Iris said. “Are we talking about Ruthie and her future, or do you have something you want to say to me?”

“Jesus Christ,” Daniel said. “You really are a piece of work.” He leaped to his feet and strode across the room, scooped up his gym bag, and stormed out of the house, banging the screen door behind him.

For a moment Iris sat at the table trembling, wanting to leap up and follow him, to take back everything she had said. She took a deep breath and cupped her hands around her warm mug. Then she rose unsteadily and walked out to the screen porch, where her armchair sat waiting for her to settle into its familiar embrace.

She left Ruthie sitting alone at the kitchen table, her head resting in her hands.

“Samantha!” Iris called.

The girl spun around and waved. Then she raced across the yard toward Iris, her brown legs pumping up and down, her hair swinging wildly behind her. Samantha flung her arms up in the air and hurled herself forward in an ungainly cartwheel, her legs bent, her feet splayed every which way. She’d been practicing her violin for the last two hours while Mr. Kimmelbrod napped, and would still be hard at it had Iris not insisted that she take a break. Iris practically had to push Samantha out the door to get some fresh air, but now she was cavorting around like the little girl she was.

“Gather some flowers for the table, why don’t you,” Iris shouted. “There’s a patch of lupines on the other side of the Grange Hall.”

A few minutes later, Samantha returned bearing a lavish armload of purple, pink, and white flowers. Iris looked up from the dish of egg salad she had been preparing and saw Samantha holding the bouquet in her arms. Iris grew lupines because it was Becca’s favorite flower. Each June since the accident she had kept the house full to bursting with masses of lupines, refreshing the vases as soon as the petals showed the first sign of wilting. She would pick them until there were no more lupines to be had in the garden, or even by the sides of the most remote roads. She liked to be reminded of her daughter this way, and yet something about seeing the young girl with the enormous armload of purple flowers brought the wedding day back too forcefully.

Samantha’s smile faded, her eyebrows knotting with concern. “Did I take too many?”

“No,” Iris said. “You took the perfect amount. There’s an enameled pitcher on the table. You can put them in there.”

Samantha buried her face in the flowers, inhaled deeply, then sneezed. Iris burst out laughing. Samantha started to join her, then sneezed again.

“Here,” Iris laughed, offering her a tissue.

It was good to have a little girl in the house again. The giggles, the squeak of the bicycle brakes when Samantha pulled up to the house, the small feet running up the porch steps. The sound of the violin. Samantha tuned her A string in a manner very similar to Becca’s drawn-out, rising wail that grew louder as the bow traveled across the string. And just as when Becca was a child, the pitch of the string as she tuned it matched precisely the whistle of the old tea kettle that had been Iris’s grandmother’s. This morning, as on so many mornings long ago, Iris had rushed into the kitchen to pull the kettle off the burner, only to find it sitting unemployed, mocking her with its cold copper sides.

They had lunch on the screen porch and waited for Mr. Kimmelbrod to wake up from his nap. He had seemed tired this morning, and in the middle of the lesson he had excused himself, instructing Samantha to practice the first movement of the Bach Sonata no. 1 in G Minor, which they had been studying for the last few weeks. The piece was challenging for Samantha, more difficult, perhaps, than she could handle, and the effort of teaching her had exhausted him. He had gone to his bedroom, promising to return within the hour. Nearly two and a half hours had passed, and Iris now was starting to worry.

As if attuned to Iris’s thoughts, Samantha asked, “Do you think Mr. Kimmelbrod is okay?”

“I’m sure he’s fine,” Iris said. She would give him another few minutes before going to check on him. Her father was so private that she loathed intruding on him. It had been a very difficult transition for him, getting used to living in her house rather than alone in his. She had tried to make things easier for him by never entering his room uninvited.

“I hope he’s not sick,” Samantha said.

“Sometimes he just needs to recharge his batteries. He’s ninety years old, you know.”

Samantha, who had been about to take a large bite of her egg salad sandwich, stopped it midway between the plate and her mouth. “Should I go home and let him rest?”

“Of course not. We’ll enjoy our lunch, and by the time we’re done he’ll be awake. Unless you have somewhere you need to be?”

“This is the only place,” Samantha said.

“Are your lessons going well? Is Mr. Kimmelbrod being very hard on you?”

“Oh, no!” Samantha said. “I mean, yes, but I like it.”

“My daughter used to say that when he listened to her play he looked like a man in a dentist’s chair anticipating a root canal.”

Samantha laughed. “Sometimes he does. But sometimes, when he hears something he likes, he kind of nods, like this.” She executed a slow, solemn nod of her head. It was a surprisingly faithful reproduction of Mr. Kimmelbrod’s grave, slightly stiff Mitteleuropean demeanor, given its presence on the face of a young Asian girl.

“And does he nod often during your lessons?”

“It depends on how well I’m playing.”

“I wonder if he nodded for Becca like that,” Iris said.

“It must have been so nice for …” Samantha hesitated. “For your daughter to have her grandfather to play for.”

Iris smiled, touched and saddened as always that it was so hard for Samantha to say Becca’s name. So many people, young and old, seemed to be under the impression that the mention of the dead by name was a social transgression, something done in bad taste. No one understood how much Iris craved to hear Becca’s name spoken aloud, how important it was to have the fact that Becca had once existed acknowledged by more than just their family. When she made explicit mention of Becca in public, it was as though the name were a heavy stone dropped into the pool of conversation. It disturbed the tranquil surface, sending ripples across the room.

Iris said, “When she wasn’t giving him a root canal, Becca loved playing for her grandfather. Your family must enjoy hearing you play.”

“Not really. My mom likes rock and roll okay. Like Bon Jovi and stuff.”

“Not classical music?”

“Not really.” Samantha peeled the bread off the top of her sandwich and poked at the egg salad as though she were looking for something she had lost. “Sometimes I kind of, like, pretend …” Her voice trailed away.

“What?” Iris said. “Pretend what?”

“It’s stupid.”

“I’m sure it isn’t. Tell me.”

Shyly, Samantha said, “There are these Cambodian stringed instruments that you play with a bow, like a violin. I read about them on the Web. Sometimes I, like, imagine that my birth parents were musicians. That they played the
tro khmer
. If they did, that would explain why I, you know, can play.”

“That doesn’t seem silly to me at all,” Iris said.

“And it would explain why they gave me up, too.” Quickening to her topic now, no longer embarrassed or shy, Samantha said, “I was almost three when I was adopted, but I’d been living in the orphanage my whole life. The year I was born there was a drought, and a lot of babies were given up because their families couldn’t feed them. During a famine the first thing people would give up would be entertainment, don’t you think? If they were musicians my parents wouldn’t have been able to earn a living. They’d have been the first people to starve. So they had to give me up, to try to save me.”

Iris said, “It sounds like you’ve really thought this through.”

Samantha flushed and returned her gaze to her disassembled sandwich.

Iris hurried to add, “It’s a very plausible theory. And of course, musical gifts as profound as yours often run in families.”

“Like Becca and Mr. Kimmelbrod.”

Iris took Samantha’s hand and squeezed it gratefully. “Exactly,” Iris said. “And Mr. Kimmelbrod wasn’t the first in his family by any stretch. His mother’s family was very musical. She was a pianist, but back then a Jewish woman would never have been allowed to have a concert career. I often wonder what my grandmother’s life might have been like had she been born in another place and time.”

“Like me. Who knows what my life would have been like?”

“True. You might never have seen a violin.”

“Or I might have been playing music all my life instead of starting so late. I might have played the
tro khmer
with my mother.”

Or, Iris thought, you might have been adopted by a couple of Jewish psychiatrists and been enrolled in Suzuki when you were three years old.

She was touched by the naked yearning for connection, for a coherent
explanation of the wonder of herself, that she heard in Samantha’s voice. Iris thought of Becca’s life, how replete with music it had been. Although neither Iris nor Daniel was particularly musical—she had inherited none of her father’s gifts—their house had been filled with music. There was always something playing on the stereo or the radio. Not just classical music, but rock and roll, jazz, blues. Daniel loved Brazilian jazz and bossa nova, and he worshipped Miles Davis. Her daughters’ infancies had been bathed in music.