The Sabbathday River

by Jean Hanff Korelitz

  The tavern was lit like a beacon through the trees. Daniel let go of her hand and plunged into the back door, disappearing inside. Naomi went behind a tree. She had been deafened by the wind tunnel of her own breath. The tavern seemed unchanged by the naked man who had run inside. She looked down and saw her own nakedness and was abruptly consumed by that, as if there weren’t a wounded man somewhere on the riverbank behind her or a girl with a problem and a gun, perhaps, in the forest. Off to one side, in the next lot, a trailer with—oh, fortune—a laden clothesline. Naomi lunged for it, flinging her shaking arms into the arms of a pink housecoat which would not close over her chest. Amid panic, humiliation. She threw it off and jerked a man’s shirt off its clothespins. It came to her waist only, leaving her naked from there down. A towel then—thin and faded but large enough, and just in time: men swarmed out the tavern door, the sickly white of Daniel’s white chest in their midst, the unmistakable rumble of laughter in their wake.

  The man had been shot in the hip. His girlfriend, fourteen and pregnant, went to live with cousins in Maine. And all of that had long been forgotten when, years later, they were still telling how Daniel Roth had streaked into Woodstock’s one Saturday night, leaving his wife stark naked in the woods. See what you can expect of people like that?

  As for Naomi, the one thing she failed to grasp was why Daniel—with whom she had groped through rebellious agnosticism into the comfortable and eminently mature atheism of their respective parents-should, at his moment of crisis, suddenly have invoked a God he otherwise utterly disavowed. But Daniel would never admit that he’d called to God in the first place.

  Taking her tea to the bathroom, Naomi ran scalding water into the tub, stripped off the clothes she’d so carelessly thrown on in the prehistory of that very morning, and stepped cautiously to the mirror. The arc of her day, from guilty exercise dilettante to bearer of death, from murder suspect to, at the very least, unintentional obstructor of justice, wore itself in the indigo smudges beneath her widely spaced eyes, and this, unbidden, brought the image of the infant back to her. She felt herself move forward to the image and could not pull away, until it seemed to hover before her—a ghost image transparency separating her from the world.

  Steam gradually claimed the mirror, but she knew what she looked like; the decrepitude of age apart, indeed, she had always looked precisely the same and—truth in advertising, she thought ruefully—precisely as she was. The convex ark of her nose, for example, or the set to her jaw, the thick waves of hair practically hollered direct from the steppes of Russia! to anyone who cared to know. For years she had felt older than her age, with whatever beauty she had begun with utterly worn away, like a clock run so far ahead of itself that it had forgotten its own time. It always surprised Naomi when she caught some man’s look, because some men did look, and so the looking, in the end, she attributed not to herself, but to what she represented, at least to them. After all, having grown up in a community of people exactly like herself, it had taken her years to catch on to the fact that she was an exotic to most people, that—tethered to history by tribal umbilicus, as it were—she walked among the pale and civilized people of Goddard like something earthy and sensual, a swoon of seductive otherness.

  She felt herself grimace; then, lightheaded, she braced her forearms against the white porcelain of the sink. All of it, her life and marriage, the child who might have been born by now, her work, the friends who had receded from her and the ones who did not approach to take their places as a circle widened around her, leaving her abandoned: the center who could not hold, the woman left holding the bag, the bag left holding the baby, the baby thrown out with the bathwater.

  The baby in the river, Naomi thought.

  The emptiness in her belly heaved again, and again she felt herself double over. This time she wept not for the child but for herself, and for the injustice of it having to be herself after all. That it should have been she, and not even a summer person. That it should have been she and not Sarah Copley or Ann Chase or any of the other town stalwarts—from the Harvest Festival committee, and the school board, and the granite stock sunk generations into this rigid New Hampshire soil. That it should have been she, the encroacher, entrenched in her foreignness, her otherness, her Communism-by-any-other-name ideas about business, her glorification of women’s work, her hatred of men! How small this was, Naomi thought, to feel sorry for herself this way, when someone was dead. And yet there was a sweetness to it, too.

  Surprised, she looked up, wiped the mirror to find her own eyes, and saw it there, unmistakable. In one motion the force that had turned her head, drawing her gaze to the still white object in the Sabbathday River, had also rent the cloth that bound Naomi Roth—who was also immobilized, who was similarly dead. She could not mend it now, any more than she could return to set the baby back into the river. The same river twice, so the saying went, and nothing—she saw this now—would be left unaltered in its wake.

  Chapter 5

  Pad of the Evidence

  TO A NEW ENGLANDER, THE NORTHERN HARDWOODS’ annual shedding of their chlorophyll was not precisely the inauguration of beauty, the ecstatic cacophony of landscape-induced endorphins, that it was to the gaping outsider; rather, this predictable explosion of wild reds and speckled oranges, staunch evergreens and punctuations of yellow running the hillsides in their stripes and patches, was a starting pistol for the brief season in which substantial money might just possibly get made. Goddard, like any other town within striking distance of Boston and New York, assumed a communal and rictus-tight happy face, beginning now and lasting until the last leaf fell, after which anyone wandering into town would have the same chances as a local of finding a neighbor in a good mood. The Unitarian church at the north end of Elm, a dingy building adorned with the steeple of its predecessor on the site—the one element salvaged from a fire in 1968 —always attained an illusory sheen at this time of year, a hit of bone-white against the hillside of leaves rising behind it, as if newly skimmed with paint for an annual show. Downtown homeowners engaged in genially competitive decoration, lashing cornstalks and spent sunflowers to the doorposts and loading up their front steps with pumpkins and mums, as if each resident were intent on advertising his own personal harvest. The flatlanders loved it. Tom and Whit’s alone looked like the cover of a getaway guide to New England, with its cleverly peeling rockers, each endowed with a cleverly rocking urbanite in a red down vest or a rag sweater purchased in Harvard Square, each balancing a steaming coffee on the armrest and a fat Sunday Globe in his or her blue-jeaned lap. For this seasonal blink, the motels were full, even in mid-week, and the most unlikely of stores was crowded with the most unlikely of customers. Naomi herself was inundated with drop-ins at the mill, not a few of whom clutched their catalogues, which made her very happy. People walked straighter, conscious of being observed and thought typical of themselves. There was an inhalation of collective pretension. It wouldn’t last, but it wasn’t supposed to last. And naturally it all had to happen right now.

  Only three days after she had found the dead baby in the Sabbathday River, the drive into Goddard was slow, the road dense with creeping cars. Naomi, whose mood was foul anyway, could practically hear the “oohs” from inside the Connecticut Taurus she followed. She drove with one dull eye on the plate (RT 2 LIF) and another on the summit of Moosilauke, or a portion of its humpbacked summit, which loomed, by increments, into view, lurking like some bald and homely uncle at a family party. Moosilauke, so unlike those furry green mountains across the river, she thought now—incredibly, for the first time—those smooth Vermont mountains, like warm undulations in the landscape. Why couldn’t their mountains be like that? Here were only jags and bare patches of rock, unapologetic and uncivil. Green Mountain versus White Mountain, she mused. Marble versus granite. Well, what did you expect? In New Hampshire the mountains had nothing to hide; like their appointed spokesman, the Old Man himself, they showed their plain faces to the wind. She supposed it wa
s time for her to show her face, too.

  She pulled into the mill’s driveway, the right wheels of her station wagon dipping violently into a ditch—a remembrance of mud seasons past—as she rolled toward the front door, and the motion made her bite her tongue. Cursing softly, if gingerly, she stamped up the steps and across the porch, then went inside.

  “Let’s call Ashley,” Naomi said. “We’ve got to get that ditch filled. And the banister to the attic is jiggling again.”

  Mary Sully at the front desk was nearly obscured by mail, but not quite enough to hide her stare. “Uhkay. But … Miss Roth?”

  Naomi, she almost said. But she had given up. “Yup?” She set down her bag and automatically began turning over the order forms: Hawaii, Arizona, Connecticut. South Dakota—a first. There was a message from Heather, still down with stomach flu, who would need an extra week with her orders.

  “Is it true? About you and that baby?”

  Naomi’s face fell. “Yeah. My luck, eh?” Mary looked horrified. Naomi, in defeat, could practically hear her remark ricochet around the town. “I mean, it was terrible. God, I was sick about it yesterday. Couldn’t eat a thing.”

  “I couldn’t imagine.” Mary shook her head, the faintest ripple in her full, pale cheeks.

  Naomi couldn’t either, despite the fact that it had happened to her.

  “Was it … I mean, the paper didn’t say. Was it a boy?” Mary asked, her voice thick with dread. She had two herself—one in school, the other still in diapers.

  “No,” Naomi said with a thin smile, happy, at least, to deliver this wisp of good news. “A little girl.”

  There was the briefest instant of relief on the woman’s face. Then she summoned her horror again. “What’s going to happen?” Mary said. “What are they going to do?”

  Naomi fell into the nearest chair and grimly eyed the dust beneath Mary’s desk. Behind her, the murmurings of women had given way to blaring silence. Whatever she said next, she knew, would have to be loud enough for everyone to hear.

  “I don’t know any more than anyone else, Mary,” Naomi said. “You know, it was only chance that I was there. It doesn’t give me any special insight into what it means or what’s going to happen.” In the stillness, they waited for her to go on. “I do know,” Naomi said firmly, “that the police are taking it very seriously, as they should. The D.A. I met, well, he’s very determined. He came down from Peytonville to run the whole thing, and I don’t doubt that he’ll do whatever he feels is necessary. I’m sure he’ll find the …” She glanced at Mary’s face, tight with keen, if guilty, interest. “The one, you know, who put her there.”

  “The murderer, you mean.”

  Naomi looked up. Ann Chase was in the doorway. A half-completed rug featuring a dopey spaniel hung limp from her wrist, rendering her own harsh expression vaguely comical by association. Ann, once lithe and blond, had let age both thicken her and darken her hair and was now, blandly, “of certain years” and an indeterminate hair color. She wore pants the hue of river mud and a white sweater. She was glaring at Naomi.

  “I suppose.”

  “Suppose, hell. She murdered that baby.”

  “She,” Naomi managed. “Meaning?”

  “What are you, dense? That baby wasn’t just put in the river. What I heard, she was cut up like a pumpkin. The mother—”

  “Now you don’t know that!” Naomi’s voice rose in alarm. “You have no way of knowing it was the baby’s mother!”

  “Not the mother?” Ann Chase said shrilly. “Okay, then, where is the mother? Why don’t we hear her yelling and screaming about her baby’s gone missing and who took it? Somebody takes your brand-new baby out of its cradle and you’re on the horn to Nelson Erroll before the door slams, you know as well as me. Now where’s the mother if it wasn’t her?”

  “Ann,” Naomi said, “it might have been the baby’s father, did you think of that? Maybe he was mad about it. Maybe he didn’t want to be a father.” Even saying the words made her numb.

  “Fine,” Ann said, her voice suspended between airy and arch. “You want to pretend it isn’t true? You go ahead. But that doesn’t make it not true.”

  Naomi sighed heavily. She eyed the stack of orders on Mary’s desk with something like longing, imagining herself flicking on her computer, setting down her coffee mug. Mary sat stiffly, her eyes averted. In the mill room, the shuffling of feet, but no voices. Ann, with a huff, turned and went back in, and Naomi—almost against her will—felt herself rise and follow. She laid a palm on Ann’s white sweater and the woman stopped, rooted. Behind her an arc of six or seven, rugs spread over their laps, faces rapt. They had abandoned the pretense of not listening. “What?” Ann said.

  Naomi swallowed. “Do you know something? I mean, you seem …” She glanced at the ring of heads. “If you know something, you should go to Nelson, or this D.A. from Peytonville. If you know—”

  “If I know?” Ann said, smiling unaccountably. “I was born here, Naomi. You think I don’t know my neighbors? You think I don’t know who lives here?”

  Baffled, Naomi simply stared.

  “You think we’re in some big city and you can get away with thinking it’s a stranger?”

  This, Naomi thought, was somehow meant to refer to herself, but what it actually meant she found she ardently wished not to pursue.

  Ann smiled, showing an equal display of ivory denture, canary tooth, and coral gum. Then she stalked to her seat, smoothed the burlap across her lap, and, with the murmured assent of her company, yanked a vicious length of wool through her unfortunate spaniel’s paw. Naomi, for once relieved at the way the circle had closed, shutting her out, swung shut the door to the office and, beneath the fretful looks of Mary Sully, addressed her own work. That she knew fully well the unspoken lines of the conversation just past did not give her any comfort, but having spent the previous days pushing from her thoughts the dead baby in the river, Naomi found that little more effort was required to push this from her thoughts as well.

  The mood in the mill did not improve. Indeed, when Ann Chase headed home around lunchtime, and Naomi might reasonably have expected a dissipation of the tension, it seemed to grow even worse, as if, without their self-selected spokesperson, no one quite knew what to say to her and, not knowing, said absolutely nothing. A few times she had ventured into the back room, flashing a newly poured and steaming cup of coffee as if to advertise her willingness to talk—even to talk about that. But the heads stayed bowed over their work and nobody would look at her.

  Not, in itself, a very unusual state of play. What Naomi missed most about being married to Daniel—possibly, apart from sex, the only thing she did miss—was a level of conversational intimacy that dipped below the strictly ephemeral. Over the years she had felt the ties between herself and her women friends elongate into intangibility. There were such recognizable trajectories to their lives, she thought from her distant berth in the north country; they had entered professions, found mates, produced and nurtured children. Their heads were full of play groups and dissertations and organized protests and endless gatherings to talk and talk and talk. They did not talk much to Naomi these days. It had been two years since the last one had ventured upcountry to camp—with her two adopted Vietnamese children—in the amorphous “space” of the A-frame. Naomi’s friends were naturally happy to hear from her when she called; they were happy to learn that her business was doing well, that she was adjusting to living alone. But they had new friends now—from work, or seminars, or the playground. Naomi understood that they found it difficult to consider her own circumstances when they neither knew nor could begin to conjure the personalities involved. There seemed less and less to say about any of it.

  Meanwhile, there were no rap sessions in Goddard, shockingly enough. Few consciousnesses had ever been raised in the church basements or around the kitchen tables of Flourish’s knitters and hookers. Naomi, for her part, would gladly have been open with them—she had never been a secre
tive person, especially—but here there was no one to talk to. These women showed each other little enough of their lives, and yet they seemed to find ways of revealing even less to Naomi. It was barely possible to worm from them the names of their husbands, the ages of their children, let alone the nature of their various distresses. Now and then she might be able to glean some crumb of coded information, a morose reference to the Woodstock Tavern (which was the local dialect for My-husband-is-drinking-again) or a chilly reference to a sibling, signifying a lifetime of pained acrimony. When they spoke, it was to deflect attention from themselves or to condemn one another outright. When they laughed, it was at someone else’s failing. They did not view their own lives as mysteries to be unfurled, perplexities to be distilled, imbibed, and benefited from—the word “feeling” came from a foreign dialect; it simply had no meaning. The notion of emotional exploration, let alone directed counseling or—God forbid—psychiatry, was infinitely suspect. Even Heather, with whom Naomi engaged in a sort of pantomime of friendship, kept so much back that Naomi inevitably felt the scrim of distance between them.

  At five o’clock she put together another kit for Heather, scribbled a grocery list for herself, and locked the mill door behind her. The light over the Sabbathday was pink and the leaning birches rosy over the water. Robert Frost—celebrated swinger of birches that he was—would have had little use for these sorry specimens, she thought, revving the wagon’s tired engine. The thin trunks here had no spring—unlike the birches in the Frost poem, those catapults into the universe, unlike the graceful birches that had bowed to kiss their own reflections in the Sabbathday near the eddy where she had found the baby. These looked as if no amount of optimism could wring from them any momentum at all. They drooped their sorry lengths at an awkward angle near the mill’s back door, near the skeleton of a jungle gym so rusted as to reiterate that no child dwelt here who might inspire them to stand up straight and make themselves useful. They were depleted things, bowed by their own gravity and rooted to the spot. She sighed and tried to ease the car ahead, avoid the sinkholes as best she could in the dimming light.