Red Hook Road

by Ayelet Waldman

  “I’m sure they’ll be here in a few minutes,” Iris said.

  Ruthie said, “Hey, Mom, do you think Becca’s expecting us to decorate their car? With, like, shaving cream and cans?”

  “Oh, lord. I hope not.”

  “Well, I hope that the best man has it under control, because it was not on my list.”

  Iris had prepared a flowchart of all the wedding tasks and provided each member of the family with a personalized to-do list, updated weekly, and then, as the day got closer, daily. Trashing the bride and groom’s getaway car had not been on anyone’s list.

  “Don’t worry about it, honey,” Iris said. “I’ll take the fall if someone needs to.”

  Ruthie watched her mother scan the crowd, her eyes finally alighting on Mr. Kimmelbrod, sitting at a table on the far side of the room, alone but for Samantha Phelps, the flower girl, who was perched on a chair on the opposite side of the same table.

  “Honey, will you go make sure your grandfather’s okay? He’s sitting over there with just Samantha for company.”

  “She’s so cute,” Ruthie said. Samantha was tall for her age, with a perfect bee sting of a mouth, and shiny dark eyes. Who could resist a lavender-taffeta-clad little girl, no matter how ineptly she’d strewn her petals?

  Becca had invited Samantha to be her flower girl only a week ago, and they’d had to pay the dressmaker twice the cost of the dress because of the late notice. Ruthie was surprised that Iris had never objected to the added expense, but perhaps it was because Samantha’s story played on her heartstrings. She had been adopted six years ago by Jane’s niece, Connie, whose husband had promptly run off with the NCO of his army reserve unit and not been heard from again. Over the years Connie had been in and out of the psychiatric hospital outside of Augusta, leaving Samantha to the less than tender ministrations of her aunt Jane, the only one of Connie’s relatives who’d been willing to take the girl.

  Iris and Ruthie watched Samantha sway in time to the music. “She likes the band,” Ruthie said.

  “She’s adorable,” Iris said. “But I can’t imagine that she and your grandfather have much to talk about. Go over and sit with him, why don’t you, Ruthie.”

  Sending her daughter away made Iris feel vaguely guilty, as usual. Ruthie could be so needy, so desperate to know what Iris was thinking, so afraid that something might be going on from which she was excluded. When she was small and someone would tell a family story or simply share a recollection, Ruthie would always ask, in a tone of great desolation, “Was I born yet?” She clung close, Ruthie did, both to her older sister and to Iris. It used to drive Becca out of her mind, the way Ruthie would follow her around, asking to be included in every game, especially when Becca had a friend over. The girls were five years apart and not particularly well matched as companions. Becca’s patience, though long for a child—she loved her sister—was not infinite. Sometimes she would set on Ruthie, pushing her out of the room or shrieking at her just to go away.

  Iris would scold Becca for these outbursts, even punish her, but in truth she’d sympathized with her. Ruthie’s neediness could be exhausting. Even as a baby all she’d wanted to do was sit on her mother’s lap, one pudgy hand slipped into the top of Iris’s shirt. Iris would be twitching in her seat, thinking of all the things she had to get done, the articles that needed writing, the house that needed cleaning, the bills that needed paying. There was dinner to make and there were papers to grade, but Ruthie would nestle her head firmly under Iris’s chin, content just to sit and breathe in her mother’s scent. When Iris finally succumbed to her urges and lifted Ruthie off her lap, the baby would weep in deep despair, as if her mother had left her on an orphanage doorstep, an anonymous note pinned to her little terry-cloth romper, instead of having merely set her down on the kitchen floor while she unloaded the dishwasher.

  Iris knew most mothers would have killed for a placid baby like Ruthie, but Iris had preferred her older daughter’s energy. Becca had been an active and animated child. She’d slept little and was quiet in Iris’s arms only when she was nursing. She walked at nine months, so early that she looked like an animatronic baby barreling through the house on too-small legs. As a baby, Becca bored easily, so Iris scheduled music, gym, and art classes, outings to the park, visits to the museum in the winter and the beach in the summer. Their days began at dawn and ran at full speed until dark, when Iris collapsed into a deep and dreamless sleep until Becca woke her up with an excited cry and an effervescent smile, ready for more. She twitched, wiggled, and moved so much that Iris once insisted on an appointment with a pediatric neurologist. There was, of course, nothing wrong with the girl.

  Becca’s hectic motion ceased only when she heard music. Then she would pause, wrinkle her brow, and concentrate with a furious focus, her hands held out, fingertips extended, as though they were antennae through which the sound entered her body.

  Iris had gone back to work when Becca was six months old, and the baby had adapted easily to day care. She liked the stimulus, the constantly changing cast of characters. When Iris tried to take Ruthie to day care, on the other hand, the poor thing had cried so hard that she made herself vomit day after day, until the day care center finally told Iris she’d have to find alternative arrangements. Iris and Daniel hired a nanny they couldn’t really afford, but at the time Iris was closing in on tenure and there had been no way for her to take another semester off.

  It seemed obvious to Iris that some parents were better suited to certain kinds of children, and vice versa. Some children’s personalities mesh with their mothers, and others do not. Loving Becca was as simple as breathing, like a reflex—a knee jumping when hit by a doctor’s hammer. But loving Ruthie took concentration. It was not that Iris loved her second daughter any less. It was more like there was a nearly imperceptible hitch, a millisecond’s pause, before she was reminded of the ferocity of her maternal devotion. It was ironic, really, because Iris had far more in common with Ruthie than with her eldest. Ruthie was an intellectual, for whom academic work was a pleasure rather than a chore. When she was younger, Daniel used to joke that the words extra credit gave Ruthie the same thrill that the words snow day gave to other children. Like Iris, she was rarely found without her nose in a book; she had read through the entire contents of the Red Hook Library children’s collection by the time she was in middle school and had taken on the role of unofficial children’s librarian, priding herself on being able to find a book to suit the tastes of the most discerning—or least bookish—patron. But despite these similarities, and despite the fact that Becca had not once in her life read a book that was not assigned for school, it was Becca whom Iris found easier to love.

  “Hey, Grandpa,” Ruthie said when she arrived at his side. “What happened to Samantha?”

  “The flower girl? She informed me that she needed to use the restroom, so I assume that’s where you’ll find her.”

  Mr. Kimmelbrod had set his place card neatly on top of his plate and hung his cane from the back of his chair. His trembling hands were folded in his lap.

  “I wasn’t actually looking for her. I was looking for you. How are you?”

  “I’m well, thank you,” he said, in his customary formal tone. Although technically Czech, Emil Kimmelbrod’s family had always considered themselves German Jews, hyperrational, self-controlled, disciplined—altogether similar in temperament to the people who would soon begin to slaughter them so efficiently. Even after sixty years in the United States, Mr. Kimmelbrod comported himself with a Teutonic decorum. He wore a necktie at all times, kept a handkerchief in his pocket, and disliked familiar terms of address. This formality was born of his reserve, and his reserve reflected his control. Mr. Kimmelbrod was as devoted to structure—musical, personal, ethical—as other men were to the idea of the divine. He was not a controlling man—he did not care to dominate anyone other than himself—but his veneration of discipline and technical perfection was legendary.

  From the moment she could
toddle over and climb up into his lap, Ruthie had resisted—if not, in her loving way, scorned—this terrible formality. Without having words to express what she felt, she recognized and embraced the emotional ferment behind her grandfather’s precise reserve, the passion that others saw expressed only in his music. She pressed secret kisses to his sober cheeks and clutched his diffident fingers. She insisted on calling him Grandpa, a usage he would have tolerated from no one else. Even Becca, with whom he had spent so much time—although he had not since she was a young child been her teacher, he had directed her musical education—did not see, or break, through him so effortlessly. Certainly Becca never adopted this casual tone of address. When she was with other musicians she called him Mr. Kimmelbrod; at home she called him Grandfather.

  “Are you getting tired?” Ruthie said, sitting down next to him. He patted her small hand with his, all blue veins and swollen knuckles. A single lock of his wiry white hair had sprung loose from the grip of the violet-scented pomade he applied every morning. It dangled by the long, fleshy lobe of his ear. Ruthie gently smoothed the hair back into place. She knew how much he loathed being even a little unkempt.

  “I’m not tired,” Mr. Kimmelbrod said, although of course they both knew this was untrue. Ruthie could always tell when his strength was failing, but, more important, she always knew when it wasn’t, when he felt fine—unlike his daughter, who insisted on viewing him as perpetually infirm. Mr. Kimmelbrod’s first noticeable symptom of Parkinson’s disease was the one that had caused him to stop performing: the thumb and forefinger of his right hand had begun a rhythmic motion as if they were trying at furious speed to roll a pill. There followed an infuriating cascade of symptoms: periodic rigidity and inflexibility of his muscles; a lack of balance that sometimes caused him to freeze, worried that another step would send him crashing to the ground; and the shrinking of his handwriting to a crabbed and wavering cryptogram.

  Mr. Kimmelbrod abandoned his career abruptly. He refused the farewell gala his supporters had sought to put on at Town Hall, the scene of his American debut, where he had brought a jaded audience to its feet with heartrending performances of Bach’s Partita in D Minor and Ernst Bloch’s 1920 Sonata no. 1. With a certain grim resolve he had sold all his instruments, except for the Dembovski, his beloved 1742 Guarneri del Gesù, which had been purchased on his behalf by a group of wealthy benefactors a few years after his arrival in the United States. Thereafter he redoubled his attention on his teaching, which until that time had been secondary in his mind to his concert career. He had come to realize that his legacy would be in the musicians he trained, not in the musician he had been himself, and his expectations of his students had risen, even as his own abilities diminished. Meanwhile, the Dembovski lay in its case in a drawer, dreaming its simple fiddle dreams. The Dembovski wanted to sing, but there was no hand in which it could come alive.

  “What are you thinking about, Grandpa?”

  This was a favorite question of his granddaughter’s, one that, despite its intrusiveness, he usually tried his best to answer. He said, “I was thinking about my violin, and whether I owe it the right to be played.”

  “You can still play it,” Ruthie said.

  “Not well enough.”

  “Can you ask someone to play it for you? Becca would play it, I’m sure.”

  “I could give it away to someone who could play it.”

  Ruthie raised her eyebrows, aghast. “You couldn’t give the Dembovski away, Grandpa. It’s a part of you.”

  Could he really give the violin away? Mr. Kimmelbrod wondered. As much as the Dembovski felt like a piece of his body, so, too, had it always been, in many ways, his adversary, not unlike his body in recent years. The violins of Giuseppe Guarneri del Gesù were like that. Unlike their more famous cousins, the Stradivariuses, they did not make life easy for those who played them. They were demanding mistresses, willing to give up their beauty only when approached with the proper rigor and respect. That was why he loved the Dembovski, why he’d refused to accept any other instrument. The glory was in the challenge. Although of course now there was no battle, no struggle. The war that had borne such remarkable spoils was over.

  Mr. Kimmelbrod said, “Unless it is played, a violin is nothing more than a beautiful piece of wood.”

  “Don’t give it away, Grandpa.”

  “No, I won’t. Idle thoughts, no more than that.”

  Ruthie scooted her chair closer to her grandfather’s and laid her head on his shoulder. “Just let me know if you want to go home. Mom has people assigned to be designated drivers.”

  He raised an aristocratic eyebrow. “She is so thorough that she has both assigned and designated them?”

  Ruthie smiled. “Would you like a refill of your drink?”

  He glanced at his half-full glass of wine and shook his head. She sipped her own drink. “I think the rest of the bridal party plans to get completely wasted,” she said.

  “Is this your plan, as well?” he mocked her gently. “To get ‘completely wasted’?”

  “That, or blotto. I haven’t decided. I’m such a party animal.”

  He squeezed her hand. He knew that Iris worried about Ruthie being “unsociable,” but he admired her for it. Becca, ebullient and lively, enjoyed parties, gatherings, celebrations of all kinds. As committed as she had once been to her music, she had never quite been serious. In this way she was different from most violinists he had known, both his contemporaries and his students, who generally held themselves at a remove even from other musicians. His own temperament was more typical of the violin virtuoso: confident, yet introverted. Self-sufficient and a bit obsessive. He sometimes wondered if Becca’s gregariousness and sociability had not been the cause, or at least the harbinger, of her failure to fulfill her early promise.

  And then here was Ruthie, standing in a corner of the room at a party, smiling if someone happened to glance her way, watching, observing, virtually guaranteeing that no one would get close enough to appreciate the sharp wit beneath her shy exterior.

  “So, Becca and John aren’t here yet,” Ruthie said. “Weirdly.”

  “They are having their photographs taken back at the church, no?”

  “I suppose so. But it’s taking so long. How many pictures do they need?”

  “Several thousand, it would seem.”

  Ruthie sighed and then leaned over and pressed her cheek to her grandfather’s, rubbing her soft skin against his scratchy chin. She inhaled deeply. She loved the way he smelled, like polished wood, rosin, violets, and 4711 Kölnisch Wasser. “Should I get you some of the hors d’oeuvres?” she asked. “Mom and Becca spent months on the menu. I’m sure they’re delicious.”

  He was about to demur but then realized that indeed he was hungry. How like Ruthie to notice that even before he did. “Yes, please. That would be very nice.”

  As Ruthie picked her way through the crowd she looked up at the strands of fairy lights looped among the rafters. They were so pretty, she thought. It was amazing, really, the transformation of the Grange Hall. Looking around at the white lace-draped tables, the lush flower arrangements, the flickering candles, it was hard to imagine the room’s other incarnations, certainly not its regular Wednesday morning setting for a low-impact aerobics class. Most of the Wednesday regulars were here today, and Ruthie had never seen them so dressed up. Heels were high, dresses occasionally sparkled, and there were even one or two broad-brimmed and feather-trimmed hats.

  By the kitchen Ruthie came upon the other two bridesmaids, Jasmine and Lauren, positioned next to the swinging door where Lauren could catch the waiters as they exited the kitchen with their full serving trays.

  “I am so hungry, I think I’m going to die,” Lauren said, snatching two miniature hamburgers as they passed by. Ruthie took a couple and put them on a napkin. Jasmine shook her head at the waiter’s proffered tray; Ruthie couldn’t remember ever seeing Jasmine eat. Last night at the rehearsal dinner Ruthie had watched in fascination a
s Jasmine ransacked a lobster, extracting every last flake of meat, then rotated her plate so that her boyfriend could avail himself of the results of her industry. Lauren, on the other hand, seemed to be eating for two.

  “I wish I knew what was keeping Becca and John,” Ruthie said as she accepted a few lobster puffs from a passing waiter. Her voice trailed away as out of the corner of her eye she saw the front door of the Grange Hall fly open, pushed so hard that it banged against the wall, the noise of heavy oak against plaster like the crack of a gunshot. On the rebound it swung back onto John’s brother, Matt, as he stumbled into the room. He was ashen, his bow tie askew, his dark hair standing up on his head. Ruthie stared at him, her stomach dropping and then seizing, like an elevator brought up short in the middle of a free fall. His eyes communicated his panic like an electric pulse over a wire.

  Ruthie stood frozen in place, as if nailed to the ground. Matt lingered in the doorway, his shoulders shaking in his ill-fitting suit jacket.

  Suddenly, and with another bulletlike crack, the door swung open again. Two large men in uniform—crisp black slacks, blue shirts, police badges, a loop of leather strap across the chest—walked in. Sheriff’s deputies. One of them bumped into Matt and for a moment they clutched each other for balance, like fighters in a clinch. The deputy regained his footing and gently, almost tenderly, pushed Matt out of the doorway. The deputy took off his wide-brimmed hat. He and his partner wore identical expressions, mouths turned down, eyes narrowed. They scanned the crowd until they located Ruthie’s father standing on the far side of the room.