Red Hook Road

by Ayelet Waldman

  “It seemed right to you.”

  “Excuse me,” Mr. Kimmelbrod said, his tone so polite and neutral it could not help sounding like a dry commentary on the women’s behavior. “I am afraid I will not be able to stand for very much longer. Come, Ruthie. Help me back to the car.”

  With a last reproachful glance at her mother, Ruthie rushed to Mr. Kimmelbrod’s side, and Iris watched them walk slowly back up the path to the cemetery gates.

  Daniel massaged his forehead with both hands as though trying to rub away a headache.

  Iris said, “Do you think we should have had a larger ceremony? Should we have invited more people?”

  “More Jews, you mean? I don’t know,” Daniel said.

  “It just seemed like this was the right way to do it,” she said. “Just us.”

  Daniel gazed at the headstone, reading the inscription over and over again, as if he might have missed something.

  “Do you think I made a mistake with her name?” she said.

  He didn’t answer.

  “Daniel? Do you think I made a mistake?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I’m going back.” He turned away and headed back up the path.

  Standing alone with the rabbi, Iris read the name on the headstone again. Then she looked at John’s. They were so separate. Clearly intended for such different people. But for their proximity, one coming here would never know that they had loved each other, that for an hour they had been husband and wife. For a moment Iris felt a stab of regret so sharp she winced. She had made a mistake. But how was she to have known? She had no map, no chart, no carefully laid-out instructions on how to memorialize her daughter. How was she supposed to know what to do?

  II

  How was it, Mr. Kimmelbrod wondered, sitting alone at his daughter’s kitchen table a few hours after the unveiling, that a man who had experienced so much death, who was so rapidly approaching death himself, could muster so little in the way of comfort for the bereaved? Shouldn’t the magnitude of his losses have provided him with some insight into or ready familiarity with the things, the words and actions, that gave a person solace? And yet he found that, as ever, he had nothing to say to Iris, Daniel, and Ruthie: not at the grave site, not in the car, not on the screen porch where they had sat for an hour, uncomforted, watching the dismal rain. The pall that had been cast over the family for the past year remained in place, unlifted with the unveiling of the stone.

  Daniel was gone now, out for a run, and Ruthie and Iris were napping. Mr. Kimmelbrod sat alone at the table, his fingers tented before him, the pressure of tip against tip keeping them from trembling as he contemplated his inadequacy, his ignorance in the face of grief.

  What had he learned from the deaths of so many of those he loved? Only that there was no apparent limit to the amount of grief a man could endure if he allowed inertia and the passage of time to push him through his days. What wisdom could he give his children? Only that after a while it became possible to ignore the ache, as one grew used to even the foulest of one’s own bodily emanations until some shift of breeze, some change in position, carried the smell again to one’s nostrils, and the stomach rebelled.

  Alone in the kitchen with the humming of the refrigerator, the ticking of the clock, a man with nothing to offer, Mr. Kimmelbrod’s only conscious certitude was of his longing to go back to the place on Peter’s Point Road, to the rooms in which he and his wife had spent all but the first summer of their lives together, to the house that had been his and Alice’s first major purchase as a married couple. For eleven thousand dollars he and Alice had bought the little farmhouse on four oceanfront acres because, while he had been more than willing to pass his summers in Red Hook teaching at Usherman Center, there was less appeal in the prospect of living with his mother-in-law. And then, because he and Alice had ensconced themselves so thoroughly on Peter’s Point Road, his mother-in-law decided to leave her rambling Queen Anne to Iris.

  Lately, however, Iris had begun a campaign to convince Mr. Kimmelbrod that he was too infirm to continue to spend the summers alone in the farmhouse. In New York, she argued, he was surrounded by neighbors, and only a panic button away from the doorman, but in Red Hook the house of his nearest neighbor was nearly a quarter of a mile away, and it might take as long as half an hour or more for an ambulance to respond to a 911 call. He recognized a legitimacy in her argument. Indeed, he understood its validity even better than Iris did, for he had concealed from her, with the rigid discipline he brought to everything he did, the true extent of his debility. Yet he was not ready to relinquish his independence. To allay her concern, he had agreed to make a few small concessions to his age, including a solemn promise to drive only when necessary and otherwise to call upon his family or colleagues for rides. However, he had not counted on the impingement, even the sense of emasculation, this promise would impose on him. To have to rely on another if he wanted to go to the grocery store, or out for coffee, or to work. To wait for a ride for just long enough that he lost interest in the activity that had inspired him to ask for it in the first place. His independence was being taken away, and he was coming to the conclusion that what remained of his life was no more than a short slide to incapacitation and oblivion.

  The thought that Becca should have died while he—doddering and shaking, periodically frozen into hideous and panicked immobility, on the precipice of losing control even of his ability to urinate—continued to clutch tenaciously to life, inspired him with an anger so profound that at times he had felt the urge to abandon his customary reserve. This shook him to the core, because his veneration of control, both personal and musical, defined him. It made him who he was as a man, and also as a musician. The music of Johann Sebastian Bach exemplified Mr. Kimmelbrod’s devotion to the idea that beauty could be created only through disciplined adherence to pattern. In Bach’s dense contrapuntal textures Mr. Kimmelbrod found his ideal: emotional exuberance firmly restrained by discipline, symmetry, and order. He received much the same satisfaction from Bartók and from Schoenberg’s twelve-tone logic.

  The irony of Mr. Kimmelbrod’s career was that despite his commitment to restraint and structure, it was only when he played the Romantic composers, whom he considered emotionally obvious and even florid, that his music rose above mere technical perfection. His Bach Chaconne was lovely and precise, his performance of the Berg Violin Concerto uncontrovertibly flawless, but it was when he played Tchaikovsky’s Concerto in D Major, a piece of music he considered overplayed and banal, that he brought even the most jaded of concert audiences to tears. It was only in the expression of conventionalized sentimentality, which he loathed both on principle and by temperament, that his playing truly rose to the level of greatness.

  When he played the Romantic pieces for which he was best known, nothing could be more different from the sound of his music than the cool and distant appearance of the musician. Onstage or off, with a violin in his hands or without, Mr. Kimmelbrod had always been tranquil and still. Even before the Parkinson’s had frozen his face into an expressionless mask, he maintained an impassive expression, one that revealed almost nothing. Mr. Kimmelbrod had always and thoroughly kept all emotion tamped down, so deeply hidden that it raised a near existential question. Could something be so thoroughly suppressed that it might as well not even exist?

  He heard a creaking on the staircase and Ruthie came into the kitchen. Her cheek was seamed in pink from her pillow, and strands of her hair flew around her head, pulled loose by sleep from her ponytail.

  “Hey, Grandpa,” she said, standing behind his chair and putting her hands on his shoulders and pressing her cheek into the top of his head. “Sorry I was such a baby today, carrying on and making an ass of myself at the cemetery.”

  Ruthie was the baby, had always been treated that way. With the back of his head he felt her chest expand with her sigh. “Tears are not inappropriate under such circumstances,” he said.

  “I guess. I think Mom’s pretty mad, though
.”

  “Rather sad than angry, I think.”

  Ruthie lifted her cheek from his head and, after squeezing his shoulders, came around and sat in the ladder-back chair opposite his. “I just wish we’d had enough people there to say Kaddish.”

  “Kaddish. Tell me, granddaughter, what is all this about saying Kaddish? Suddenly you have found religion?”

  “No, it’s just—I mean, we’re supposed to.”

  “I believe, in fact, that at this point only your parents are required to say Kaddish. Our obligation to do so ended after the first thirty days of mourning.”

  Ruthie looked aghast. “Is that really true?”

  “I am no expert in the Talmud, but I believe yes. Only the parents and the spouse are meant to continue their mourning for the full year. After that they are to stop saying Kaddish, except on the yahrzeit, the anniversary of the death.”

  She gave her head a furious shake. “Well, that’s ridiculous. It doesn’t make any sense. Grief doesn’t just end because a group of ancient rabbis said it was supposed to.” She frowned. “Did you say Kaddish for Granny?”

  No, he thought, he had not. Not after the funeral. Instead he had played for his wife. Music was Mr. Kimmelbrod’s only meaningful means of expression. Until he lost his ability to play, Mr. Kimmelbrod had both contained and expressed his emotions only through his music. His violin wrung the emotions from him, translating the unspeakable and wailing it to the world. The Dembovski laughed for him. It flirted and giggled and snickered and howled with glee. But mostly it cried. The Dembovski wept for him, because he would not shed his own tears. Because he could not bear to remember the dead.

  The Dembovski remembered them—his parents, his brother, his sister. The myriad uncles, aunts, and cousins whose bodies and faces, ideas and loves, memories and bones, were nothing, not even smoke or ash. Because he could not mourn them, the Dembovski del Gesù, carved from a piece of maple by a luthier from Cremona, keened its lamentation, his lamentation, for all that had been lost. The Dembovski said his Kaddish for him.

  His violin had grieved for his wife, his beloved Alice, with her crooked smile and sly wit. With her knobby knees and sensible shoes. He shed no tears as he kept vigil beside the bed where she lay, the pauses between crepitations growing longer and longer until they stopped. No tears, even on that night when he stepped onto the small stone terrace outside their living room, closed his eyes against the cool night air, took up the Dembovski, and let it weep for the woman whom he loved more than he had ever been able to show.

  His disease had progressed so far that by the time Becca died, he could no longer play. He had no way to lament her loss. And without lament, was there grief? If one neither expressed a feeling nor allowed oneself to experience its sensation, then could one be said to feel at all?

  He had loved Becca. He missed her. But he felt like he stood at one end of a long, narrow hallway at the far end of which was a lantern in which a small flame flickered. If he squinted his eyes and stared very hard he could just barely make out the shadows behind the light, but the distance was too great for him to see what cast the shadows. Had he been able to play, the Dembovski would have transported him the length of the long, long hallway and brought him into the lantern’s glow. Without his violin he was trapped, immobile, much too far away to see or feel. He was wracked with fury and despair at his infirmity, but aware at the same time of being able to feel that grief—his grief for his lost talent—whole-heartedly, when it was this very infirmity that distanced him from all his other emotions.

  “Yes,” he said. “I said Kaddish for your grandmother. At the beginning.”

  “And for your family? Your parents and brother and sister? Did you say Kaddish for them?”

  “Also. A long time ago.”

  “Do you light one of those little candles for your parents? Like Mom does for Granny?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  Mr. Kimmelbrod shrugged. “I do not know what day they died.”

  Ruthie’s face crumpled, and he regretted immediately what he’d said. True as this was, it was an incomplete explanation. He might have lit a yahrzeit candle for his parents on the anniversary of their deportation, or even on their birthdays, or on the first of January, or on Groundhog Day, for that matter, but he had never been able to bring himself to bother. What use would it be? What comfort could be found in a feeble flame burning in a jelly jar?

  “I’m so sorry, Grandpa.”

  “Yes,” he said. “I know you are.”

  “But I still think we should do something for Becca and John,” Ruthie said.

  “Do something?”

  “You know, like a memorial or something. Or even just a … I don’t know what you would call it, not a party, but, like, a gathering. A celebration.”

  “A celebration?”

  “Yes! A celebration of Becca and John. We’d all be together, everyone. Our family, John’s, our friends. We’d all gather together and celebrate their lives.”

  How to explain to this sweet and naïve child that there was nothing she could do, nothing that any of them could do, that would take away her pain? Just as the unveiling hadn’t been enough, so would a “celebration” fail to fill the void. There was only time to rely on, and even time would never quite suffice.

  Ruthie leaned toward him eagerly. “We could do it on the anniversary. Or would that be too awful, somehow? Like we were celebrating the day they died?” She wrinkled her brow, the same expression he had seen on her face from the time she was a little baby trying to puzzle out a problem.

  “You don’t like parties, Ruthie,” he pointed out, but she didn’t seem to hear him.

  “We could do it on the Fourth. I mean, Mom and Dad are probably not going to want to have just their regular Fourth of July picnic now, and that’s the anniversary of the rehearsal dinner. It was a beautiful night. We were all so happy. It’s a date that has meaning, but that isn’t under a, you know, a pall of tragedy, like July fifth would be.”

  He felt so tired, drained by the day, by his daughter’s pain, by her husband’s wordless grief, by his granddaughter’s neediness. And yet he was conscious, lacking the Dembovski’s voice, of sharing her desire to do something, say something, not to let the moment pass in silence. “I don’t know, granddaughter. I don’t know that anyone is ready for a party.”

  Ruthie narrowed her eyes. “Are you feeling okay, Grandpa? Are you tired? Do you want to take a nap in the guest room?”

  How was it, Mr. Kimmelbrod wondered, that a child so blissfully ignorant in so many respects always knew how he felt, always read the hints of exhaustion that he managed to disguise from everyone else? He was desperate for the comfort of his own house. “I think perhaps I should be on my way home.”

  “I’ll take you right away,” Ruthie said. She helped him to his feet without waiting for him to ask for her arm and helped him to the car. As they started for home he was nearly overpowered by an almost annihilating desire to get into his own cool bed and close his eyes, but his granddaughter seemed so sad, so bereft, so deflated by his lack of enthusiasm for her idea of throwing a party for the dead, that as they were driving along Main Street he found himself, rather to his surprise, saying, “The rain has stopped. Let’s go to the Bait Bag. I’ll buy you an ice cream cone.”

  The Bait Bag—most people just called it the Bag—occupied some vague category of structure between trailer and shack, with a few huge lobster pots bubbling on propane burners out back and a deep-fat fryer the size of a kitchen sink. It was located in the middle of town, across the street from the Red Hook Public Library, kitty-corner to the Citgo station. Behind the Bait Bag stretched a small square of grassy yard with a few picnic tables, but nobody ever sat out there. Not because the view of the rear yard of the gas station was ugly, though it was. In addition to the vacant picnic tables, the yard featured a couple of rusted old beaters on blocks and, oddly, a pale pink antique refrigerator missing its door. But these were not
necessarily detractions from the ambience. The Bag’s customers were accustomed to, if not indeed the proud custodians of, yards full of refuse and junk. It was the bugs that kept people away. For reasons little understood, that patch of grass behind the Bag was home to the cruelest, most vigorous horde of mosquitoes in Red Hook—though there were other contenders. Every once in a while a couple of tourists would wander back there with their red plastic trays and lobster rolls. A moment later they would come running back, swearing and slapping at the red welts rising all over their faces and arms, even the lobes of their ears and the tops of their sandaled feet.

  Patrons of the Bag tended to eat either in their cars or sitting on the grass by the side of the road. There was a single rickety old picnic table on the edge of the parking lot, and Ruthie and Mr. Kimmelbrod managed to nab it. They pulled the car into the neighboring parking spot and turned on the radio so they could listen to music while they ate. WBQI was playing the Trout Quintet, and Ruthie attempted to console herself by dipping an order of onion rings one by one into a black-and-white.

  Smiling fondly, her grandfather shook his head as, neck tilted back, she dangled the string of greasy onion dripping thick, creamy milkshake over her open mouth.

  “It’s bad enough you eat those,” he said. “But to dip them?”

  “Before you condemn me, you really ought to try it,” she said with her mouth full. “It’s the perfect combination of savory and sweet.”

  “God forbid.”

  “Tell me you’ve never had an onion ring. I don’t believe you. Granny loved onion rings.”

  “She did, and I am sure I ate them once or twice with her. Sitting perhaps at this very table. But I promise you that despite having spent all the summers of her life in this hyperborean backwater, your grandmother’s manners and taste were too refined ever to permit her to indulge in the abomination you are so enjoying.”