Red Hook Road (10 page)

“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.

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 the 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.

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.