Red Hook Road

by Ayelet Waldman

  “But don’t you want to make the arrangements?” Daniel asked. It was uncharacteristic of Iris to leave something this important to him, to trust that his decisions would reflect or even begin to approximate her wishes.

  “No,” she said, simply, and laid her cheek on her bent knees, a fall of curls hiding her face from his view.

  The Dunn & Burpee Funeral Home, on Main Street in Newmarket, was a large brick house of approximately the same vintage as his and Iris’s home in East Red Hook. It was plainer in design, bereft of gingerbread and scrollwork, with a turret but no widow’s walk, yet was somehow more imposing for its simplicity. The last of a block of stately homes constructed in the nineteenth century by the owners of the copper and granite mines that had once brought wealth to this now slightly seedy small city, the funeral home was flanked on one side by an auto parts store and on the other by a boxing gym called the Maine Event. The gym had always caught Daniel’s attention when he came to Newmarket, but as he had hung up his gloves thirty years before, he never had cause to walk through the door.

  Today, before mounting the broad stairs that led up to the front door of the funeral home, he stood for a moment on the sidewalk and stared at the blank steel door of the gym. The door banged open and a beefy young man stepped out, his head too small for his overdeveloped body. In one hand he carried a plastic milk crate full of iron dumbbells. He dropped the crate on the ground to prop the door open.

  “Hey,” the young man said, when he noticed Daniel watching him. “What’s up?”

  “Nothing much,” Daniel said.

  Inside the funeral home Daniel was greeted by the undertaker, a man of about his own age, in a dark suit, crisp white shirt, and shiny black tie. Daniel looked down at his own faded jeans and frayed polo shirt, embarrassed. The undertaker, not obviously perturbed by Daniel’s attire, steered him into a small wood-paneled room and sat him down on a maroon brocade couch.

  “Can I offer you something to drink?” he said. “Some coffee or a glass of water?”

  “A glass of water would be nice,” Daniel said, surprised at how normal he sounded. As if he were shopping for a new pair of jeans rather than a coffin for his daughter.

  The undertaker returned with his water and handed him a binder full of pictures of caskets. Daniel leafed through the binder, the sweat from his fingertips leaving smudged whorls on the Mylar-covered pages. With every turn of the page came the thought that every single one of these caskets, the Batesville Imperial Mahogany, the Steel Provincial Gold, the Stainless Tapestry Rose, would one day contain the body of someone’s child.

  The undertaker, adept at steering the inconsolable through impossible tasks, gently returned to a page at the front of the binder. “Fairfield Poplar is a nice choice for a young woman.”

  Daniel was suddenly conscious of feeling impatient, bored, even. Not with choosing the casket, or not only with that, but as if he were waiting for everything—the accident and his daughter’s death—to be over. As if it were a film that was dragging on for too long. The credits would have to roll at some point. If he just held on long enough, the last reel would end and Becca would no longer be dead.

  The undertaker quietly cleared his throat and Daniel managed with a great deal of effort to bring his attention back to the specifics of his task. “No, these aren’t right,” he said. “They’re too … too much. We’re Jewish.”

  “Ah,” said the undertaker, barely concealing his disappointment. “You’ll be wanting this, then.” He pulled a page from his desk drawer.

  Daniel looked at the plain pine box, unfinished, with three velvet looped handles on each side. Was this the casket his daughter would have chosen for herself? Or would she have gone for scrollwork and flounced cerulean satin, regardless of the dictates of the religion that she barely practiced? He shook his head clear of the bizarre image of Becca flipping through this book of coffins as if she were turning the pages of the L.L. Bean spring catalog. He willed himself to recall something, anything, that mattered: the way her hand had trembled in the crook of his elbow as he led her down the aisle.

  “Or if you’d prefer something of more lasting quality …” the undertaker said, handing Daniel another sheet of paper. This page had a glossy color photograph of a varnished pine casket with long wooden handles on the sides and a wooden Star of David on the gently rounded top.

  What would Iris choose? This task felt like a test she had assigned him, an exam for which he hadn’t studied, but on which, by some obscure logic, his future depended. Would Iris have tossed the page aside and asked what, exactly, the point was of “lasting quality” in an item whose very purpose was to decompose? Was there some sacred or aesthetic principle he was neglecting? Worried he would dampen the page with his sweating hands, Daniel put it down on the gleaming coffee table.

  The undertaker said, “The interior of the Eliazar is crepe, but we can arrange for velvet if you prefer.”

  Daniel looked from one page to the other. There was no reason to select anything but the most simple box, he told himself, told Iris. The coffin meant nothing. It symbolized nothing. It was only a convenient way of carrying the body of his daughter to the hole in the ground where corruption and biology could take their proper course. But what hole, and where?

  Iris would probably want her in the Red Hook graveyard where her own grandmother was buried, despite the fact that it had no Jewish section, something that had bothered Mr. Kimmelbrod enough that he had chosen to bury his wife far from her family, in a nondescript cemetery in Queens. Daniel was sure, however, that no matter where her own mother lay, Iris would never consider burying Becca anywhere but in Maine.

  Daniel felt disconnected from his own past, and thus had difficulty understanding the ferocious pride his wife and daughters took in the Maine part of their heritage. He always felt vaguely embarrassed when one or the other of them told a guest that Ruthie and Becca were the sixth generation to have lived in this house, or when they described a fellow summer resident as a “from-away,” or when they painstakingly layered the yearly dump sticker in the corner of the Volvo’s windshield in such a manner that you could see all the ones from the years before.

  Daniel’s family had come to America at the turn of the twentieth century and resided in a series of houses and apartments, first in New York and then in Pittsburgh, the locations of which had long since been forgotten. He felt no great loss at this lack of patrimony, and while Daniel had always enjoyed the summers in Maine—he liked the landscape, the cool air, the way their lives slowed down, all their New York and professional worries forgotten for a few months—he didn’t love the place the way his wife did. Daniel could have just as easily summered in the Hudson Valley, Block Island, Oregon—anywhere, as long as they were away from the city. Indeed, he sometimes thought he would have preferred a place where the water wasn’t so damn cold and where he didn’t spend a good portion of July bundled up in layers of fleece.

  “The Eliazar,” Daniel said. “Crepe is fine.”

  As he was signing the myriad documents the undertaker presented to him, Daniel heard a gentle bonging, a muffled doorbell.

  “Excuse me,” the undertaker said, and left the room.

  Daniel completed the paperwork and stepped out into the funeral home’s large entryway. There, standing beneath the crystal chandelier, he saw Jane conferring with the undertaker. She had known enough to try to dress for the occasion. She wore a plain blue skirt and a white top that gaped a bit between the buttons, revealing the ribbon at the center of her polyester lace brassiere.

  “Hello, Jane,” Daniel said, as he handed the undertaker the stack of documents.

  “Hello.”

  They stood awkwardly, Daniel wondering if he should reach out and hug her. If it were anyone else he might have. Or he would have if it were someone not protected by a carapace of New England reserve.

  After a few more moments of uncomfortable silence, Daniel said, “How are you?”

  “Fine,” Jane said. �
�You?”

  “Fine. Well, not fine, really. But, you know. Fine.”

  Jane pursed her lips in disapproval. Daniel felt an urgent need to leave the room, to leave her and the undertaker behind.

  As he was gearing himself up for his good-bye, Jane said, “I just confirmed with Mr. Burpee that we’re going to hold John’s viewing starting on Tuesday, and then the funeral on Thursday. Unless that conflicts with what you’re planning.”

  “No,” Daniel said. “I mean, I’m not sure what we’re planning.”

  “You’ll let me know,” Jane said. “We’ll come, of course.”

  “Of course.”

  “You’ll let me know,” Jane repeated. She gave him the details of John’s funeral and then turned her attention back to the undertaker, bidding Daniel good-bye with a curt nod.

  Daniel stood in front of the funeral home, blinking in the sunlight. For a moment he could not remember at which end of the block he’d parked his car. He peered up and down the road. He saw the old blue Volvo in front of the auto parts store, but instead of heading in that direction he turned the other way, to the boxing gym.

  The Maine Event looked exactly like every other gym in which Daniel had boxed, exactly like he expected it to. A cracked poured-concrete floor on which were spread mats of various colors. A row of heavy bags, another of hooks for speed bags, a wall of mirrors, a corner full of beat-up weights and an ancient Nautilus machine, and, in the center of the room, a ring, roped in red, the padding scuffed and torn in places. The room gave off the familiar stink of sweat and old socks, complicated by the metallic edge of disinfectant.

  “Can I help you?” The kid who Daniel had seen out in front of the gym was sitting in a teetering desk chair behind a decrepit desk by the door.

  Daniel shoved his hands deep in his pockets and jangled his car keys. He looked at the few men who were working out, one skipping rope on the far side of the ring, another lackadaisically jabbing at one of the heavy bags. Daniel wished, desperately, that he could lace on a pair of gloves and begin wailing on the bag.

  Boxing had been Daniel’s sport since the summer of 1954 when his father took him on a trip to New York City. It was the first time the two had been alone in each other’s company for longer than the length of a ball game.

  When their train from Pittsburgh had arrived at Penn Station, the early evening was gray and cold, harbinger of Carol, the hurricane that would soon ride up the eastern seaboard, killing sixty-six people, among them Jane Tetherly’s father. Despite the threatening rain, they set out walking uptown, Daniel’s father carrying the small cardboard suitcase into which he had packed a single change of clothes for each of them.

  Archie Moore was fighting Harold Johnson, and the Copaken men were going there, to Madison Square Garden, to cheer every jab, hook, cross, and uppercut. Archie Moore was one of Saul Copaken’s favorites; he felt for him the same devotion that he’d once reserved for Benny “the Ghetto Wizard” Leonard and for Little Joe Choynski, the greatest Jewish heavyweight ever. Daniel had been listening to boxing on the radio with his father for as long as he could remember, but he’d never been to a live fight. In the all too brief period between the entrance of Moore in his black silk Chinese robe and the stumbling final retreat of Johnson to his corner, Daniel experienced an unfamiliar cool blankness that crowded out his thoughts, his anxieties, the expression on his mother’s face when she came home from her visits to the D. T. Watson Home for Crippled Children, where Daniel’s older sister lived, mutilated by polio, her legs wizened and twisted, her toes curled under like the lotus blossoms of a Mandarin Tai Tai. Watching the fight, all that faded away. His whole world became a twenty-foot square of light, and the thwack of padded cowhide against bone and skin.

  By the time Daniel was a student at Harvard, he was winning amateur bouts all over New England. Saul showed up at every one of Daniel’s fights, whether they were in Boston or Bangor. He would sit as close to ringside as he could get, wearing the same two-tone zippered cardigan, his gray plaid fedora resting in his lap. When Daniel managed a particularly skilled combination or landed a liver punch that left his opponent gagging, Saul would simply nod his head, nothing more.

  After he graduated from Harvard, Daniel took up training and fighting full-time. But within a year or two it became clear that while he had easily beat most of his college opponents, and even held his own in his Golden Glove matches, his professional bouts were less likely to go his way. He was forced to scramble farther and farther afield to get bookings. He fought too hard and had too much of a chin to be hired by managers as a reliable palooka to match up with their up-and-comers, but he didn’t win often enough to be considered an up-and-comer himself. More and more he found himself handed the walkout bout, the last fight on the card, which only the diehards bothered to stay and watch. When Daniel met Iris, he’d known for a while that he was through, and he quit without much objection, although with a significant amount of regret.

  He had never stopped missing it, and now, more than ever, he ached to be back in the ring.

  “Hey, buddy!” called the ham-and-egger behind the desk. “I said, can I help you?”

  “You got a nice-looking gym here,” Daniel said.

  “Yeah. So?”

  Daniel looked around, wishing that he could once again contract his life to this room, these smells, that he could climb into the ring and shut out the world. “So nothing,” he said, and walked out the door.

  V

  They were gathered on the screen porch, Daniel with his sagging shoulders hunched against the doorpost, Ruthie lying on the couch with her head in Mr. Kimmelbrod’s lap, and Iris in the chintz armchair, where she’d been sitting since before Daniel had left for the funeral home. Mr. Kimmelbrod had passed the night at his own house in town and had returned late this morning. Mary Lou Curran and another elderly woman, Vienna Gray, were also sitting with the family, perched on slatted chairs at one end of the long table.

  The ample screen porch was a natural place for the family to congregate; it was where they spent most of their time in the summer. One of the first things they had done to the house upon taking it over was to add the porch onto the back, facing the sea. Iris had initially been loath to make such a drastic change to the footprint of the house. Generations of her family had sat outside in the backyard without benefit of screens, listening to the loons and watching the sky change colors, but although she had tried she had been unable to articulate to Daniel and her daughters’ satisfaction the inherent moral superiority of stoically enduring the billowing swarms of quarter-sized mosquitoes that whined in their ears and raised welts on their skin.

  Iris designed the porch herself. French doors allowed entrance from both the kitchen and the living room. For the floor she’d found wide sugar maple planks, salvaged from a defunct five-and-dime in Bangor, that matched those in the rest of the house. She had the builder trim out the framing around the huge screen windows to echo the house’s egg-and-dart moldings. The ceiling was painted in the traditional sky blue, to match the ceiling of the open portico that wrapped around the front and south-facing sides of the house. After completing the porch, Iris had gone on to the rest of the house, painting the walls of the formal living room a mossy green, a lighter version of the deep forest of the banks of built-in bookcases, the long, deep window seats, and the box moldings in the ceiling. She had gone through various shades in the kitchen before settling on butter yellow and white. She had not done much else to the kitchen, and it looked now like an only slightly spruced-up version of her grandmother’s, with the original slate sink, the massive O’Keeffe & Merritt enameled stove, and the assortment of hutches and armoires that had always substituted for built-in cabinets. Embroidered samplers dating back generations still decorated the walls, and the rag rug in front of the sink was one of a pile she’d found in a trunk in the attic. Most of the dishes, the silver, the assortment of baking pans and pots, had served generations of Hewins descendants. Iris’s only innovation to th
e kitchen was an island, topped with thick gray granite from the mine on neighboring Okamok Isle, on which she rolled out pie dough.

  Every change Iris made was carefully thought out in order to maintain the integrity of her great-great-grandfather’s home. Thus, even when they renovated, as when they’d combined two small bedrooms into one large master suite, or added bathrooms, she had insisted that everything be appropriate to the house’s history. For the new bathrooms she had found antique claw-foot tubs and pedestal sinks. If she couldn’t find original fixtures, she didn’t buy reproductions, but instead found modern fittings that were discreet enough not to jar the sensibility that the house maintained.

  The house was well loved and well lived in. The sofas were soft and wide, the rugs at once brightly colored and worn with age. The house was full of the detritus of the lives of the Copakens and the generations of Hewinses before them—not just the photographs that crowded the mantelpieces and the tops of the cabinets, but things like a pair of Iris’s grandmother’s ice skates in the bottom of the hall closet, stacks of sheet music from Becca’s childhood in the piano seat, children’s artwork hanging on every wall, crinkled and yellowed linen pillowcases from the trousseau of a long-dead relative stuffed into the back of a drawer in the linen cupboard, nautical maps from a hundred years ago lovingly restored and framed, a box of children’s costumes containing old prom dresses, a pile of old corsets and stays, dresses and jackets, suspenders and top hats—clothes Iris herself had dressed up in as a girl. The history of Iris’s family was encoded and inscribed in every part of the old house, especially on the back of the living room door, which had not been painted for decades in order to preserve the evidence that generation after generation had recorded the growth of its children, from the very smallest, near the threshold, “Eliza, age 9 months,” to a red mark six feet two inches from the floor, over which Iris had written Daniel’s name. There were thirty-eight different names on the door, most appearing at least a dozen times. As they grew, Iris had marked her daughters’ names near her own, so it was possible to see that while Becca at age two had been shorter than her mother at age two and a half, by the time she was thirteen she’d left Iris inches behind.