Within an hour the yard was empty but for the detritus of the celebration. The picnic table was crowded with empty beer bottles and plastic cups. A large green garbage bag propped against the leg of the table overflowed with lobster shells and paper plates. Empty folding chairs were arranged in crooked rows facing the place where Samantha had played. A few other chairs were scattered across the lawn, one down on its side. The white plastic chairs seemed to glow in the dim light.
Daniel, having just helped a trembling Mr. Kimmelbrod to his room, came down the porch steps. He gazed out over the empty yard. Nothing, he thought, looked as bereft as a party after the guests had gone. He took the green garbage bag, tamped down its contents with his foot, and began gathering the rest of the garbage. He collected the trash, tied up the bag, and tossed it into the bin. He gathered up the beer bottles, filling two recycling bins. Then he began to work on the chairs. He snapped them closed and stacked them inside the barn. He crossed the yard, climbed over the seawall, and made his way across the rocks over to the dock. It was almost dark now.
When he looked back toward the house he could just barely see Iris’s figure through the screened windows of the porch. She was sitting in her customary chair, her head bowed. There was a light on in Mr. Kimmelbrod’s bedroom; the white curtains glowed yellow against the darkened house. Daniel did not know where Ruthie and Matt were.
Daniel turned his back on the house and walked down the length of the dock. He could hear the water splashing gently against the wood. Over the water a loon gave its mournful cry. It was chilly, and the air raised goose bumps along his bare arms. He had piled the fireworks about halfway along the dock, and when he reached them he kneeled down and chose one of the smaller cakes. The black box was covered with pictures of bursting rockets. It was called, for no reason that he could think of, Meet the Neighbors.
Daniel set the box at the end of the dock. He took the lighter from his pocket and rolled his thumb across the wheel a few times before it caught. He lit the fuse and stepped back. For a moment the cake fizzed and popped, and then it went off, shooting up into the now-dark sky.
Daniel watched as one after another the effects went off, blue, red, white. Short staccato bursts and then larger ones, like giant umbrellas opening up beneath the stars. When the last light fizzled and fell toward the bay, Daniel sat down, wrapped his arms around his legs, leaned his forehead against his knees, and thought about where he would be next summer, because he knew now—had known for a long time—that he would not be here, in this broken place, spoiling the darkness of a Maine summer sky with a lot of cheap effects, noise, and smoke.
THE FOURTH SUMMER
I
Though it was filled with people and with nearly 130 years of history and ghosts, the house felt empty without Daniel. It was more than nine months since he had packed up his belongings and moved out of their apartment in New York—long enough to gestate and give birth to a baby—and yet Iris still felt as if she were stuck in the first trimester of her separation from her husband, lonely, lost, unable to grasp the ramifications of her new situation.
Iris made a pot of tea, but instead of drinking it, she held her mug in her hand and drifted from room to room. In the kitchen she opened the cupboards and gazed at the unopened boxes and tins of Daniel’s favorite cereal, the Italian coffee he preferred, the cookies he ate in the evenings before bed. On her first shopping trip after arriving in Maine she had automatically loaded his favorite foods into her cart, not realizing the pointlessness of her purchases until she was standing in the checkout line. She hadn’t returned the items to the shelves, had brought them home, as if by laying in a stock of shortbread cookies and Wicked Ale she could lure her husband home. Daniel’s favorite foods now sat gathering dust in her pantry.
In the mudroom Becca’s swim tote had a rival for Iris’s attention: Daniel’s boots, his coats and jackets on their hooks, his fishing rod. The living room did not interest her—it was Mr. Kimmelbrod’s and Samantha’s terrain, the piano heaped with scores, the battered music stand in the middle of the room. In the dining room she sifted through the piles of newspapers and magazines Daniel had left. Every summer he would stack his periodicals and newspapers on one end of the dining table. On the morning they returned to New York he would bundle them together, tie the bundles with twine, and drop them off at the dump as they drove out of town. Last summer when he left he had not bothered to throw out his vast repository of reading material, so here it still was, old copies of the The Atlantic Monthly and Harper’s, weeks’ worth of the Red Hook Daily Packet still stuffed with year-old circulars and tide charts. Every day Iris determined to haul it all to the dump, and every day she left it gathering dust.
In the days after the Fourth of July party, they’d seen almost nothing of each other. In the mornings Daniel woke early and left before Iris came downstairs. He did not return until well after dinner. She knew that he was spending his time at the boxing gym—their laundry hamper was full of stinking T-shirts, sweatpants, and socks. Once or twice, she tried to tell him how upset it made her that he continued to box, but he listened dumbly, shrugged his shoulders, and walked away. There was a quality of finality in his gestures that made her unable to pursue him.
His departure had been precipitated by no argument. He had merely come up to her one morning about ten days after the Fourth of July celebration as she sat in her accustomed chair on the screen porch drinking tea and cutting out the tide chart from the Daily Packet and said, “I’m sorry, Iris. But I don’t want to do this anymore.”
“Do what?”
“Any of it. You, me. Everything.”
For a moment Iris had been uncharacteristically silent. She just blinked, her mouth open and gasping, like a goldfish spilled onto the floor. At last she managed to say, “You want to leave?”
“Yes,” he said.
Iris reached up and clasped his hand. He flinched. She said, “You want to leave me?”
“Yes.”
She pulled her hand away. “You want to walk out on thirty-three years of marriage because Samantha’s coming to New York?”
Daniel sat down and said, “That’s not why. You know that’s not why.”
Her voice rough with the tears she was swallowing, Iris said, “Well, then, why? Why do you want to leave me?”
“I’m sorry, Iris.”
“Don’t leave,” she said.
He shrugged helplessly.
He had left her crying on the screen porch, gone upstairs, and packed his things. By noon he was climbing into Walt Mather’s beat-up old Chevy Suburban, what passed for Red Hook’s taxi service. Iris stayed on the back porch, following the sounds of his preparations and ultimate departure. Only once he was gone did it occur to her that Walt was most likely driving him to the airport, which meant he must have booked a flight at least a day ago. He had known he was leaving last night when they’d stripped off their clothing and gone to bed. He had known as they lay reading beneath the matching yellow glows of their bedside lamps. He had known as they breathed in each other’s nighttime exhalations. He had known when he walked into the bathroom this morning while she was showering. He had known while he was urinating loudly into the toilet. All this time he had known he was leaving, and she had never guessed.
As the summer wore on, Iris had called Daniel on his cell phone nearly every day, but on the rare occasions when he answered, their conversations were awkward. She found herself unable to rid her voice of a humiliating tone of supplication, and he barely spoke.
When she returned to New York at the end of August, with Samantha and Mr. Kimmelbrod in tow, Daniel was gone, staying in a dismal furnished efficiency apartment on West Forty-fourth Street. He came back once in September for his clothes and a few other odds and ends. She had not seen him since. For months she had kept calling him, but he refused her entreaties to come over for dinner, ignored her invitations to attend Samantha’s recitals. He saw her father occasionally, she knew that. Mr. Kimmelbrod was far t
oo circumspect and respectful of his son-in-law’s privacy to breach his confidence, but the home-health-care aide Iris had hired upon their return from Maine held no such compunctions. Iris was kind to Edwina, and Edwina, whose own husband had left her with three children and no savings, felt sorry for her. In the interests of sisterhood, she faithfully reported whenever Daniel showed up to take his father-in-law out to lunch.
The one consolation to Iris’s loneliness had been Samantha. Every evening Iris would meet Samantha at Mr. Kimmelbrod’s house, where Samantha would go right after school for her lesson. After her lesson, Samantha would sit on the floor in Mr. Kimmelbrod’s living room, doing her homework at the coffee table while he sat in his armchair reading the newspaper or dozing. Iris would arrive as early as her classes would permit, with groceries to prepare their dinner. Only after Mr. Kimmelbrod retired to his bedroom for the night would Iris and Samantha return home. Usually they walked the fifteen blocks between his apartment and hers, huddled together against the wind that blew up Riverside Drive. She had never stopped missing Daniel, but her loneliness and shock had been mitigated to a small extent both by the consuming nature of her job and, especially, by Samantha’s company.
But here in Maine, without her classes and faculty meetings to distract her, and with Samantha staying at Jane’s house with Connie, who had recently been released from Riverview, not even the company of her father and daughter could alleviate Iris’s forlorn desolation at being without Daniel, rudderless in an unfamiliar sea. Ruthie and Matt were living with Iris this summer, sleeping in Ruthie’s tiny bedroom down the hall, but they were no louder than two field mice, the occasional rustle of their bedsheets or squeak of a closing drawer the only evidence that they were there at all. Matt was, in fact, gone more often than not. He had reserved the first day of July for the launch of his boat and was frantically working to make sure it would be finished in time. In addition to working at the library, Ruthie had a part-time job as the evening receptionist at the Red Hook Inn. She was rarely home before ten.
Nor did Mr. Kimmelbrod provide his daughter with much in the way of company. His health was poor. His stamina had steadily been decreasing, and although he still managed to rise to the occasion of his lessons with Samantha and the other students with whom he was working this summer at Usherman Center, when he wasn’t teaching he spent most of his time behind the closed door of his bedroom, recuperating from his exertions. Iris prepared elaborate stews and casseroles to tempt his meager appetite, meals that required no cutting and little chewing but that would not slosh out of his spoon when his hand shook. Yet even when he felt strong enough to join her at the table, he rarely managed more than a few bites.
He had spent most of today in his room, conserving his energy in anticipation of the master class he was to teach tonight. Iris had asked him to consider postponing or even canceling the class, but he had brushed off her concern. It would not be fair to his students, he told her. He gave only one master class every summer, and the students had been practicing since it was announced. It was Samantha’s trio that was to perform, the first time she would appear on the Usherman Center stage, and he could not disappoint her. Moreover, the first master class would set the tone for all the master classes that followed, and he wanted to make sure that the other members of the faculty—especially Spiegelman—had a better understanding of what would be required of them this summer. Poor, long-suffering Spiegelman, Iris thought.
When Iris was finished with her solitary cup of tea, she collected her things and waited in the kitchen, looking at her watch. If they didn’t leave soon, they would be late.
“Dad?” she called. “Are you about ready to go?”
After a moment she heard his voice but muffled by his closed door, she could not make out what he was saying. “Dad?” she said again, heading down the long hall to his bedroom. “Is everything okay?”
Iris found her father sitting on the edge of his bed, holding one of his small, impeccably polished shoes, a stricken expression on his face. He had lost weight over the last year. His cheeks were hollow, which made his teeth look overlarge in his mouth. His top incisor had broken a few months before and the dentist, worried that he was not strong enough to undergo replacement surgery, had given him a temporary, removable bridge that he found too uncomfortable to wear. He was terribly self-conscious about the gap and had thus taken to curling his upper lip over his front teeth. He had dark brown circles under his eyes, the marks of the chronic exhaustion that plagued him. His insomnia had grown ever more acute, his sleep disturbed by both the rigidity of his body and the occasional jerking of his limbs, symptoms that infuriated him in their contradiction. He looked weak, nearly shattered, and the sight of him thus diminished broke all the unbroken places in his daughter’s heart.
“It appears I am unable to put on my shoe,” Mr. Kimmelbrod said, attempting a halfhearted, close-mouthed smile.
Iris rushed to his side. “I’ve got it,” she said. She knelt down and tenderly picked up the gnarled foot in its black silk sock.
“I am terribly sorry,” he said.
“There’s nothing to be sorry about,” she said, forcing a cheerful tone. She would not allow him to see the effect his deterioration had on her.
She eased his foot into the shoe. “Do you remember how Daniel packed two left shoes that summer?” she asked as she tied the knot. “And he had to wear sneakers to the wedding?”
“Is that why he wore sneakers?” Mr. Kimmelbrod said.
“You mean you didn’t know? He has two pairs of oxfords that look almost exactly alike. Why did you think he was wearing sneakers?”
Mr. Kimmelbrod rested a trembling hand on Iris’s head. “You are very good,” he said. “Very good and very kind.”
“No, I’m not,” Iris said. She took her father’s hand and pressed it to her lips. “I wish I was, but I’m not.” Gently, she pulled his socks up his hairless, bony shins. She propped his feet one by one on her bent thigh and laced the shoes tightly, the way she knew he liked it. As she helped him to his feet she said, “Are you sure I can’t convince you to postpone tonight’s class? Just until you’re feeling better?”
“I am as well as I will be, daughter,” Mr. Kimmelbrod said, taking her arm.
The Usherman Center’s small performance hall was a weather-beaten, shingled structure. Performances took place on a makeshift stage, a simple wooden platform set up in front of the large stone fireplace, beneath the benevolent gaze of a hulking moose head hanging from nails hammered into the mortar between the chimney’s stones. The moose was a legacy of the hall’s prior owners, a group of Boston bankers who had used the hall as a hunting lodge until Felix Usherman and the other members of his eponymous quartet purchased the building as their summer rehearsal studio in 1928.
This evening’s audience was small. Usherman Center students filled the back four rows, but only a few of the hall’s diehard local fans had turned out. Iris knew most of the attendees. John and Emma Love, summer visitors who had a few years ago retired to their family camp on Echo Pond, were there, as was the writer Roscoe Lord, author of a series of dishy potboilers set in a thinly fictionalized Red Hook, books whose publication were always the cause of a good deal of delighted outrage among the locals. Ancient Mary Jane Huntoon’s wheelchair occupied the same place in the front row since the hall first began presenting public concerts sixty-three years ago. Miss Huntoon was treated as royalty at Usherman Center both because of her longevity and because of the rumors, started no doubt by the old lady herself, that her will made the hall its primary beneficiary, to the tune of more than ten million dollars. Iris was far too worried both about her father and about Samantha’s performance to make competent small talk with the woman, however, and managed no more than a smile in response to Miss Huntoon’s inquiry after Mr. Kimmelbrod’s health.
At twelve years old, Samantha was much too young to be a regular student at Usherman Center, but she was the prodigy of Usherman Center’s most revered fac
ulty member, and her family was local. As the relationship between town and gown, or in this case between town and tails, was always in need of shoring up, accommodations had been made for her. She was not officially enrolled in the program, and thus did not live at Usherman Center. Instead of assigning her to two separate chamber groups, like the other students, Mr. Kimmelbrod placed her in only one trio, with a pianist in her fourth summer at the hall and a cellist whom Mr. Kimmelbrod knew from Juilliard. Samantha thus had three lessons with her mentor every week—two on her own and one with the trio. In addition to her own practice regimen, which, with school out, had crept up to five hours a day, she rehearsed every morning with the trio. In the evenings she would often check scores out from Usherman Center’s lending library and read them, playing through pieces she heard other students practicing. The girl was, joyfully and to the calloused tips of her fingers, immersed.
A few more people trickled in, and Iris shifted down a few seats to make room. It was not until Connie Phelps sat down that Iris recognized her. Jane was standing in the aisle, unwilling, it seemed, to follow Connie down the row.
“Hello, Iris,” Connie said.
“Connie! How are you? And Jane. So good to see you here.”
Connie’s face had filled out and was almost rosy. Her hair was colored a purplish auburn and looked freshly cut. “I’m good,” she said. “I’m doing all right.”
“It’s wonderful that you could make it tonight,” Iris said.
“Oh, we wouldn’t have missed it for the world,” Connie said.
With an audible sigh, Jane lowered herself into the aisle seat next to Connie.
Jane stared straight ahead of her, her hands resting on the brown leather pocketbook in her lap. She and Iris had seen each other only once this summer, on Iris’s very first day in Red Hook, when she had dropped Samantha off at her aunt’s house. They had spoken on the phone as little as possible over the winter, only when there was a specific piece of information about Samantha that needed to be transmitted: the date of her vacation, the time her bus was due to arrive at Port Authority or at the Bangor Greyhound station.
Red Hook Road Page 30
