Now the Copakens gathered on their screen porch with crumpled faces, their red-rimmed eyes a stark contrast to the cheerful decor. People had been in and out all day, bringing food, sitting with them, patting their hands. And crying.
Iris was so tired of other people’s tears, of the tears of a friend from the yacht club who’d known Becca since she was little, of a girl who worked in the food co-op, of an old teacher of Becca’s from Usherman Center, of one of their New York friends who’d come up for the wedding. These people came ostensibly to offer comfort, but would invariably break down themselves, many as soon as they walked through the door. Iris and Ruthie would cry with them, a fresh bout of tears summoned by every new visitor. The visitors came to provide solace, and so the family’s grief must be available for consolation, no matter how exhausted they felt, no matter that all Iris wanted to do was sit alone in a dark room, dry-eyed and sinking into deep shadow. Iris allowed her resentment to build, unaware that in a few months’ time she’d be grateful for any sign that people remembered her loss.
Without intending it, the current visitors had caused a flurry of disagreement among the Copakens. Mary Lou and Vienna had come to let the family know that they weren’t to worry about the food for after the funeral. A group of volunteers had been formed to take care of everything.
“We just need to know where you plan on doing things,” said Vienna, a trim older woman with steel-colored hair chopped off at the chin.
“Doing things?” Daniel asked.
“After the cemetery. Will you come here? Or go to Jane’s? Or perhaps somewhere else?”
Mary Lou Curran said, “Some of us thought maybe the Grange Hall, but then there was some question about that. Because of the wedding.” Mary Lou and Vienna had been friends of Iris’s mother. Like Iris and her mother, they had been spending their summers in Red Hook all their lives. In the few years since Mary Lou had taken up permanent residence, people had come to refer to her, both kindly and unkindly, as the unofficial mayor of the town.
“No, not the Grange Hall,” Iris said. “We’ll do it here. Unless Jane wants to have it at her house.”
“I think Jane’s planning something else,” Daniel said.
“What do you mean?” Iris said.
“When I saw her at the funeral home she told me they are planning on holding a viewing starting day after tomorrow, and that they’re going to bury him at the end of the week.”
“At the end of the week?” Iris said. “Did you explain to her that we’re not allowed to do that? That we’ve got to have her buried right away? Like, tomorrow?”
“No,” Daniel said.
“Oh, for God’s sake, Daniel. Why not?”
“I don’t know.”
Iris glared at him. “Well, did you at least talk about the graves? Where they’ll be?”
“John’s going to be buried in Frank’s family plot in the Red Hook cemetery.”
“In his family plot? That’s crazy. They should be buried in our family plot. They should be buried together.”
“I don’t think Jane’s thinking that way,” Daniel said.
Iris said, “That’s ridiculous!”
Vienna and Mary Lou exchanged a glance and then simultaneously got to their feet. “We’ll leave you to discuss this on your own,” Vienna said. She raised a restraining hand to Daniel, who had risen from his slump against the wall. “We’ll see ourselves out.”
After they had gone, Daniel turned to his wife. “What do you want to do, Iris? Do you want to bury Becca in your family’s plot at the Red Hook cemetery? They don’t have a Jewish section. They probably don’t even have a Jew.”
“They must,” Ruthie said, sitting up. “There are plenty of Jews in Red Hook. Right, Grandpa?”
“Summer visitors,” Mr. Kimmelbrod said gently. “They aren’t buried here. Jewish law requires that a Jew be buried in consecrated land. That is why your grandmother is buried in New York.”
Daniel said, “What do you want to do, Iris? There’s a synagogue in Bangor, so there must be a Jewish cemetery. We could bury her there. Or we could take her home.”
“First of all, when have you ever cared about Jewish law?” Iris said. “And second of all, we are home.” It didn’t matter that her own mother was born in the same hospital on 100th Street and Fifth Avenue where Iris showed up twenty-nine years later. It didn’t matter that, except for her four years as an undergraduate at Swarthmore, and the two she spent at Oxford getting her master’s degree, Iris had spent her entire life living in the same twenty blocks of Manhattan, first in a modest two-bedroom apartment with an extravagant view of Central Park, then with Daniel on West 78th Street, and finally, for the past twenty years, in a spacious apartment on the Columbia faculty’s Gold Coast, Riverside Drive. Iris knew that to most people she seemed like a quintessential New Yorker: a Jew, and a professor of comparative literature with an acerbic wit and a short temper. Not, she knew, the typical biography of the Red Hook native. But Maine was her home, and that of her daughters, too, despite the fact that they’d been raised as city girls, Riverside Park their playground and their backyard, despite the fact that by the time they were in third grade, they knew the phone number for Empire Szechuan by heart.
“There are as many Hewinses in the Red Hook graveyard as there are Tetherlys or Stoddards. Becca belongs here,” Iris said. “Dad, don’t you think that would be better? We should bury Becca here.”
“I can’t say,” Mr. Kimmelbrod said. “This is for you and Daniel to decide.”
The thought, unbidden, came to Iris that her father had not always been so retiring when it came to decisions about Becca. It had been he, after all, who had given her permission to abandon her musical career, he who had said that Becca was correct in her assessment of her own abilities. “We’ll bury Becca here,” Iris said, firmly. “With my family, and with John. I don’t believe in that ‘consecrated land’ business. I’m sure the rabbi who did the wedding won’t mind if we bury her here, with her family.”
“Whatever you want,” Daniel said.
“That’s what I want,” Iris said. “We’ll have the funerals together. I’ll talk to Jane.”
Daniel asked, “Do you want me to come?”
This would be, Iris thought, the first time she and Jane would interact not as employer and employee, nor as mothers of the wedding couple, nor in the crazed fog of that first hour after the accident. This was the first moment of their new relationship. Was there a Yiddish word for this new relationship, she wondered bitterly. Did machetunim apply when the points of contact were dead?
“I’ll take care of it myself,” Iris said.
VI
At six o’clock in the morning on the second day after the accident, Jane unlocked the door to the Unitarian church and hesitated on the topmost step, steeling herself against what she knew awaited her inside. The wide oak door seemed heavier than usual as she put her shoulder to it, and for a moment she felt an unfamiliar and intolerable lassitude. Then she shook it off, set her jaw, and shoved the door open. As she had expected, the church had not been cleaned. In the past, at the behest of the sexton, the ladies of the congregation would have assumed that responsibility, but now those willing to carry out the chore were too old, and the younger women, while happy enough to arrange flowers for the pulpit on a Sunday, were less inclined to get on their knees and polish the wooden pews. The small congregation could no longer afford a sexton’s salary, and so instead had hired Jane’s cleaning service to maintain the church for a nominal fee. It was her job, and she saw nothing undue or surprising in the fact that today, of all days, no one had thought to relieve her of it.
She had forgotten about the church herself until just a few hours ago, when she shot up in bed with a creak of the old oak bedstead, having passed the second night after the accident as she had passed the first: awake, watching the shadows cast by the tangled fringes of her bedside lamp play across the walls, noting the progress of a brownish water stain creeping across t
he ceiling. Last week she had asked John to take down a bit of the sheetrock to see if he could find the source of the leak, and he had promised to get to it as soon as he and Becca returned from their honeymoon. She was going to have to do the job herself now, and she would need a ladder. It was when she thought of the folding aluminum ladder they had used to light the tapers in the church’s sconces that she remembered the mess and the burden that awaited her.
The nave looked forlorn, the candles burned down to stubs, the flowers wilted and brown at the edges. The aisle was littered with shriveled rose petals, and someone had torn loose one of the hydrangea garlands looped between the pews. Beneath the pulpit, a galvanized bucket of flowers had toppled over onto its side, leaving a white-rimmed water stain on the pale blue carpet. The rest of the carpet was spotted with smudged footprints and the tiny pockmarks left by stiletto heels. Jane shook her head. All those ladies from New York teetering around in their impractical shoes.
Armed with a bucket of cleaning supplies, Jane made her way down the aisle, ripping down the loops of garland and bundling them into a black leaf bag that she tied to her belt loop. The physical effort involved in jamming the garlands and the drooping and withered floral arrangements into the bag, of bending over to pick up bits of trash, of leaning into the pews to return the hymnals to their racks, did her good. Since losing her temper with the sheriff at Jacob’s Cove, Jane had felt weighted down, numb, and lethargic, as though her blood had stopped flowing in her veins. But now the repetitive motion, the comforting, familiar exertion of cleaning, seemed to unbottle and roil all her stagnated feelings: Jane cleaned the church in a perfect fury. She was furious with Becca’s spoiled-brat friends for having hired an out-of-town limousine when a car would have done; furious with the photographer for being so slow, so dawdling and methodical; furious with the Copakens for planning such an elaborate wedding; furious with John for having entangled himself with that useless, pretentious, hapless family in the first place. And, most of all, she was furious with her son, her good, strong, beautiful son, for dying.
She filled bag after bag with dead and dying flowers, and dragged the bulging sacks down the aisle behind her. She jabbed at the sconces with a penknife, prying loose the candle stubs, then scraping out the last bits of wax. She jerked the vacuum along behind her like a foolish, recalcitrant child, banging the brush loudly against the sides of the pews. She took care only when emptying the glass vases of their blown and rotting treasure: she could reuse the vases at the wake.
She had arrived at the church planning only to throw away the trash and vacuum up the rose petals. But by the time Iris showed up, Jane had polished the brass sconces, oiled the leather cushions on the seats behind the altar, and climbed the ladder to take a Q-tip to the seams in the wood of the window casings, scraping out years, generations, of dust. Jane was on the ladder, hands black with grime, strands of limp brown hair pasted to the sweat on her face, stinking of hard work and spray cleaner, when Iris walked in.
Iris hesitated in the doorway of the church, looking around with an expression of dull wonderment at the thoroughness, Jane supposed, with which Jane had erased all evidence of the wedding. The woman seemed to be looking for some trace—a flower arrangement, a candle, a card-stock program—but it was all gone, bagged and stacked and ready for a trip to the county dump.
“Matt said I’d find you here,” Iris said.
From her perch Jane could see strands of white in the part of Iris’s hair. She wondered for the first time if Iris might not be the older of the two of them. Because of the way she always dressed—like a teenager in jeans cut off at the knee or khakis and a wrinkled man’s button-down shirt—Jane had always assumed that Iris was younger. Grief or insomnia had aged her by a dozen years.
“What do you need?” Jane said, and then, less harshly, “I mean, is there something I can do for you?”
Iris blinked, eyes huge and swimming in the thick lenses of her glasses. Jane had never seen her in anything but reading glasses, perched on the tip of her nose.
“It’s about the funeral,” Iris said. “Daniel and I … Jane, we really hope that you’ll reconsider and agree that the children should be buried together.”
So this was it, then. Iris had come to assert her will over this, as she had over the wedding, as she had even over John’s education. Why, Jane wondered, had she imagined she would be free of Iris’s intervention in how to bury her son?
Jane lowered herself slowly down the rungs of the ladder and followed Iris to the front pew, where she took a place as far from Becca’s mother as civility would allow. As soon as she sat down she was overwhelmed by exhaustion, by a sense that she might never be able to get up again. She loathed the idea of sharing her son’s grave with these people. However long John and Becca dated, they’d been married for less than an hour. Less than an hour! Why should they spend eternity side by side? Yesterday she had made it clear to Daniel that she was not interested in a joint funeral or a joint gravesite.
However, yesterday she had also been operating under the assumption that John would be buried in the small Tetherly plot that her ex-husband’s grandfather had bought for his descendants. But when she got back from the funeral home and called Frank to tell him to make the arrangements with the undertaker, her ex-husband had informed her, without even a trace of sheepishness, that he had sold his interest in the plot years ago. “Didn’t know I’d need it, did I?” he’d mumbled, clearly half in the bag. It was a miracle he could remember that he’d ever had anything to lose.
There was no Stoddard plot; Jane’s family lay sown here and there throughout the cemetery. She would have to call Town Hall and inquire about a plot. No doubt she would end up with one of the new ones, across the road, far from the water. And even that would cost a bundle. Her business did well enough in the summer, but she had no cash reserves, and paying for the casket had already depleted the scant savings she possessed. The casket had been far too expensive—she had chosen a more elaborate one than she should have. To buy the casket and pay for the embalming she’d had to dip into the money she set aside every year for property taxes. She had no idea how much the burial plot would cost, but whatever it was, it would certainly be more than she could afford. She’d end up with no money with which to last out the winter.
“My family is all in the Red Hook Cemetery,” Jane said now.
“That’s fine. Mine is, too,” Iris said.
Jane narrowed her eyes slightly. Iris was one of those from-aways who insisted on their Maine roots, as if a lifetime’s worth of summers made you of a place. As if who your family was, what your stock was, wasn’t what tied you, but rather just the fact of your presence. As if a Jew from New York who had never suffered through a black, bleak March in Red Hook had any idea what it meant to be a Mainer, or had any of the hardy tenacity it took to live here.
Iris continued, “My great-great-grandparents are buried in the Red Hook cemetery. You know the tall white obelisk down by the water, to the left of the Wescott family crypt? That’s my great-great-grandfather Elias Hewins. He bought all the area along the slope leading down to the bay for his family. For us. My grandmother’s buried there, too. We could put Becca and John at the far edge, closest to the water.”
It figured that Iris would own the nicest part of the whole graveyard, the area with the most magnificent view. The area where John would have most wanted to rest, if he had ever given a moment’s thought to the question.
So there it was. Jane could insist on burying her son alone, away from his one-day wife and her summertime family, and go into debt to buy a strip of patchy grass on the far side of the road in a lot crammed between the post office and Granville’s building supply. Or she could acquiesce and bury John with the view of the sea that he had loved, the water he had sailed and fished since he was a boy.
Jane said, “Fine.”
Iris looked startled, taken aback by having gotten her way so easily. “Really?”
Jane shrugged, not
quite believing it herself.
“You’ll let us bury them together. In our plot.”
“Might as well,” Jane said.
“Thank you,” Iris said. She extended her hand, as if about to touch Jane, but Jane reared back, and then discovered a sudden and pressing need to scrub a spot off the back of the pew with the rag she still held in her hand.
Iris pulled her hand back into her own lap and said, “Daniel said that you plan on having the viewing tomorrow.”
“Yes.”
“If you did it in the morning, we could have the funeral later on, in the afternoon.”
“That’s not the way it’s done,” Jane said, shaking her head. “People will need time, they’ll want to come by after work, some will be coming from far away. We can’t just do it all in one day.”
“The problem is, as Jews, well, we don’t embalm,” Iris said, in the patient tone of voice Jane imagined she adopted with her slower students. “Five days is a long time. Too long. I understand that you’ve always done things a certain way, but if you would consider a compromise we’d be so grateful.”
As far as Jane could tell, when this woman asked for a compromise she was really demanding that things be done her way.
“We might be able to do it the next morning,” Jane said.
“We really can’t wait.”
“Not even a single day?”
Iris bit her lip. Then she said, “Okay. I think we can do that.”
“Good,” Jane said. “We have our ways of doing things, too.”
Red Hook Road Page 8
