Red Hook Road (12 page)

And really, was that so bad? After so many years Jane had grown fond of Becca. Becca was a good kid. She didn’t butt in where she didn’t belong—she always waited to be asked, and then when you asked her for help or an opinion she gave it without drama or attitude, often as not with a smile, a cheerful remark. And the girl had loved John. That was obvious. If she had not come from a summer-cottager family, Jane probably wouldn’t have had any objection to the marriage at all.

Jane gathered up her cleaning supplies, draining the bucket into the sink in the cleaning cupboard next to the sacristy, rinsing out the sponges, and stowing away the vacuum. On her way to return the ladder to its
place, she happened to glance behind the pulpit. There, lying on its side, was Samantha’s basket of petals, its lavender bow unknotted. Jane turned from it. She put the ladder away, and then wiped her dusty hands on her jeans.

Only once she’d rubbed away the worst of the dirt on her hands did she pick up the basket. For a moment she ran her fingers along the woven willow branches. She closed her eyes, remembering the frantic search for the basket, Samantha’s annoying insistence on finding it before the photographs could be taken, Becca and John’s patient indulgence of the girl. John had been such a fond and easygoing man; he had demanded so little. Kind and strong. Generous, perhaps to a fault. A son whom any mother would have been proud to call her own.

With an angry grunt Jane threw the basket to the ground and stamped on it. The sound of the willow splintering, the feel of the sticks breaking beneath her heavy shoe, satisfied her deeply. She brought her foot down again and again, until all that was left was a pile of broken sticks, a grimy twist of purple ribbon, and a smear of crushed petals. She crammed the broken bits of the basket into the last open trash bag, and hauled the bags out to her truck. On the way home she stopped at the county dump and swung the bags up onto a high, stinking mound of garbage, where they belonged.

John Tetherly’s relatives and friends were dressed in dark clothes—cheap black suits, navy blue skirts, black blouses, muted ties. Becca Copaken’s mourners formed an odder assortment. Most of them had come up from New York for a wedding but stayed on for a funeral, and thus had nothing even remotely appropriate to wear. Even the regular summer people were at a loss. No one packed funeral clothes for a summer in Maine. Had it been a cold day things would have been easier—most people had a sweater or two tucked away in their luggage. But it was a perfect summer day: the sun sparkling off the water, not even a single white cap marring the calm sea. The summer people and the New York people had confronted a choice: to wear their casual Maine summer attire, their Easter-hued golf clothes or tennis whites, or the clothes they had worn to the wedding four days before. All chose the last. Once again they sat in the white clapboard church in their festive seersucker suits, their pastel linen sheath dresses, their silk summer prints, their gay ties, their open-toed sandals and white bucks.

The funeral wasn’t as awkward as Iris had feared. Or, rather, it was so awful, painful, and miserable that all logistical difficulties were beside the point. The church, stripped by Jane of its wedding finery, looked bare. Its spartan Unitarian iconoclasm was far easier for a Jew to bear, Iris thought, than Catholic fripperies would have been. It was almost possible to forget that they were holding their daughter’s funeral in a church.

The shutters were thrown open, letting in bold shafts of sunshine that tapered and crossed over the coffins. Iris sat in the same pew, in the same place she had occupied at the wedding, watching light fall in a lattice over the wood beneath which her daughter lay. There was no room in front of
the pulpit for the caskets to lie side by side, so instead they lay end to end, Becca’s simple pine coffin, its only ornament a Jewish star, like a rickety boxcar behind the gleaming locomotive that now held John. His casket was of burnished poplar, its four corners fitted with squat neoclassical columns carved at the tops with a figure of a sloop in full sail. At one end of the casket there extended a half-open drawer lined with powder-blue ruched satin, on which was embroidered the same sloop and the words “Sailing Home.” In the drawer were keepsakes and messages from John’s family and friends. The casket was grotesque, an unwitting parody of a sailor’s casket, and although Iris had nothing to do with its selection, she was embarrassed by it. And yet, at the same time, she found herself wanting to explain to John’s people that Becca’s coffin was so simple not because she and Daniel were cheap but because Jewish law mandated a modest receptacle. Except that she wondered if the law might not really be about modesty and humility before God but instead might merely encode and validate the inherent miserliness of her people. Within a few days Iris wouldn’t remember who spoke or what they said. But the two contrasting caskets, the mismatch between the boxes that Jane and Daniel had each chosen to hold the remains of their children was an image that would stay with her for the rest of her life.

After the service the pallbearers lined up on either side of the caskets. They were strapping men, John’s relatives and friends, a few sons of friends of the Copakens, and Matt, poor Matt, the smallest and slightest among them. But after they had each taken hold of a handle, one remained unmanned, and for a moment there was a hint of confusion. Then a large man stepped forward and grabbed hold of the free handle. It took Iris a moment to recognize William Paige, dressed not in his sheriff’s uniform but in a plain blue suit.

The pallbearers loaded the coffins into the two hearses, which then set off down Main Street. Most of the funeral guests chose to walk behind the hearses along the quarter mile of road that led from the church to the graveyard. The black hearses rolled slowly in the lead and stretched behind them like the long, multihued tail of a kite came the mourners, half in their somber suits, half in their gay wedding clothes. An older couple, tourists, wearing identical lobster T-shirts and moose-antler ball caps,
walked out of Seafarer’s Gifts and stopped in the middle of the sidewalk, staring. The husband raised his camera to his eye, but the wife, more sensitive than her attire might suggest, stilled his hand. A green minivan with New Jersey plates pulled up behind the last of the marchers and honked.

Because Mr. Kimmelbrod had needed Daniel to drive him to the gravesite, Iris and Ruthie walked alone at the head of the procession, directly behind the creeping second hearse. Over and over again Iris found herself reading the letters and numbers of its license plate, the word “Vacationland” repeating itself in her head.

As Iris passed a wooden sandwich board by the side of the road inviting her to a bean supper at the VFW, she pried her eyes away from the hearse and looked out over the water. Squinting at the boats in the harbor, she named them silently.
Wind Dancer
, the Fields’ sloop.
Cool Change
, the Barretts’ gaff-rigged cutter.
Afikomen
, the Ziffs’ topsail schooner. Iris remembered how Becca used to call
Afikomen
Red Hook’s token Jewish boat. Then, last summer, the new owner of the Red Hook Inn launched a Boston whaler named after his mother:
Mitzie’s Mazel Tov
.

Today somebody had anchored a large brigantine in the reach, out beyond the small bay, and for a moment Iris watched the square sails on the first mast billow gently in the wind. Onshore, that wind calmed to a soft breeze that played over her cheeks and cooled the midafternoon air. Iris stopped and lifted her face to the breeze. She closed her eyes and stood, motionless but for the loose tendrils of her hair shifting in the gentle breath of wind.

“Mom?” Ruthie said, cupping her mother’s elbow gently in her hand.

Iris startled, realizing suddenly that the hearse had pulled far ahead. Behind her the procession had bunched up and spread out, ground to a halt, no one willing to pass the grieving mother with her face turned to the sky and sea. She took a last look at the faraway boat, and then began to walk again, quickening her step to catch up to the hearses, which had by now turned into the cemetery. The procession followed the hearses as they drove between the two stone pillars and down the dirt road that wound among the gravestones. At the water’s edge the hearses stopped opposite a large hole cut in the sod next to which someone had set up two rows of white plastic chairs. Mr. Kimmelbrod and Daniel stood at a slight remove from the grave.

The pallbearers brought the coffins down the slope from the hearses and settled each of them on one of the motorized lowering devices over the graves. Mr. Burpee, the undertaker, owned only one such device; he had recently upgraded to a Master, with a telescoping stainless-steel stand, selling his old Standard to help defray the cost. In thirty-four years of burying the dead, he had never before needed two units at once, and to meet today’s needs he had been obliged to borrow a second device from a Bangor colleague, an old Imperial, not as nice or new as his own. He had briefly considered lowering one of the coffins with a simple arrangement of straps and poles, but the idea of one coffin gliding smoothly down into the hole on its cams while the other jerked and lurched in the gravediggers’ hands offended him. Especially because it would make the most sense, in that case, to use the motor on the heavy poplar casket and let the boys struggle with the lighter pine box. With the deceased girl being a Jew from away and the boy a local, he feared people would have interpreted the disparity in lowering devices as prejudice. Which it certainly was not. Mr. Burpee had no problem with Jews, in spite of the fact that it cost next to nothing to bury one.

Iris and Ruthie came up to where Daniel and Mr. Kimmelbrod were standing and Iris took her father’s arm as they walked across the grass to the plastic chairs set up in front of the double grave. She helped him into his seat and then sat down next to him. Jane, who had walked far behind, at the tail end of the procession, sat at the other end of the row. There were three empty chairs between them.

“Ruthie, come sit down,” Iris said.

Ruthie sat next to her mother, and then Maureen, after settling her two daughters and little Samantha in the second row, took the seat next to Jane. Maureen turned to her brother. “Matt,” she said, patting the seat between her and Ruthie.

“It’s okay,” Matt mumbled. Two splotches of dark red stood out on his pale cheeks. “You take it,” he said to Daniel.

“That’s all right, son,” Daniel said. “You go ahead.”

The chair remained empty as the silver-haired minister stepped forward and intoned Psalm 23. They were indeed in a green pasture by quiet waters, Iris thought. But she felt no one guiding her on the path to righteousness or anywhere else. Each of them was utterly alone in the valley of
the shadow of death. Each grief separate and unique. Iris couldn’t imagine goodness, mercy, and love following her now, even on a glittering summer day like today. Not with her daughter lying in the dark in a plain pine box.

After the minister said what he had to say, the rabbi began to pray in Hebrew. He was redheaded and unprepossessing, and so short that the bald spot incompletely covered by a maroon velvet yarmulke on the top of his dead barely grazed the reverend’s bony chin. An angry red rash was doing its best to escape the confines of his beard. But his voice as he led them in the Kaddish was deep and sonorous, a nourishing stew served in a battered tin cup. There were few people, even among those who had never before heard the Jewish prayer for the dead, who didn’t cry. One of the few to remain stubbornly dry-eyed was Mr. Kimmelbrod, for whom the prayer meant little, so many of his family having been sent to their deaths without even the minimal comfort of its incantation.

As the caskets were lowered into the ground, the whir of the motor reverberated in Iris’s head. Suddenly she regretted her decision not to look inside the coffin when the undertaker had offered to open it for her. At the time she had said no at once, but now she felt a desperate urge to yank open the lid before it was too late—for what? To ensure that Becca was really there? To take her dead body out of its box and hold it one last time? Iris clenched her jaw and closed her eyes.

She tried to will herself not to remember the quarrel with Becca over John’s boat that had marred the afternoon of the ceremony. Why had Iris not apologized? How could she have let an argument, a stupid disagreement over money, become the last substantive conversation she ever had with her daughter?

She closed her eyes and listened not to the voice berating her inside her head but to the sounds coming from the crowd of mourners. The creak of a chair, the rustle of a skirt in the breeze, a nose being blown. She felt the presence of all these people massed behind as a single entity, breathing, pressing, urging her along on a path she had no desire to follow. She tried to remind herself that she was grateful to have so many people, so many friends and relatives, here. The funeral had drawn a sizable crowd: all the wedding guests, and then many people from town to whom a death offered a kind of hospitality that the wedding had denied them. Whether they were here for Becca or John didn’t matter. Only that they’d come.