Red Hook Road (4 page)

For the past few years John had been working nonstop on restoring a 1938 Alden schooner that he’d found in a boatyard in Machias, where the cruiser had been rotting for as long as anyone could remember. He’d been sent up for a load of rare hardwood—the owner of the Machias yard had some padauk, a termite-resistant and rose-scented wood that he wanted to get rid of. But when John arrived at the yard he was sidetracked by the derelict schooner in dry dock in the farthest corner of the yard.

The way John told the story, it was love at first sight. He was boat-struck, he said, even before he saw the name looped in fading white cursive across the stern. And then? Well, how could he
not
buy a boat named
Rebecca
?

The Alden, however, had already been a source of conflict between Iris and Becca. Becca, who now earned a simulacrum of a living teaching sailing and working odd jobs in the winter, was a violinist who, even if she didn’t share her grandfather’s prodigious gifts, certainly possessed talent sufficient for a career as an orchestral musician. She had begun playing as a toddler, on a one-sixteenth-sized violin, and all of them, including the girl herself, had expected her to have a musical career. And then, at age twenty, she abruptly quit, dropped out of the New England Conservatory of Music, and moved in with John. Iris had hoped that after a little while Becca would come to her senses and return to her music. She had told her daughter that even if she wanted to remain in Red Hook with John, she could still continue her career. Bangor, with its more than adequate symphony, was ninety minutes away, and during the summers the Usherman Center brought dozens of the country’s best musicians to the area. But her older daughter was the one person in Iris’s life who was unresponsive, even insensible, to the force of her arguments. Once the girl made a decision, she could not be swayed, and she had decided that, as she would never be the kind of musician she’d dreamed of being, she no longer wanted to play. The final blow had come last year, when John had run out of money for the restoration of the boat. Becca had rebuffed her parents’ offer of a loan and sold her violin, cashing in her past, she said, for an investment in her and John’s future. Iris had been furious, and the two had a series of bitter arguments that resulted in their not speaking for nearly a month.

Eventually, they made up, or rather chose not to revisit the subject
of their disagreement, until today, when Becca, while waiting for the limousine to drive her to the church, had announced that she and John were planning on using the money they received as wedding presents to finish the restoration of the boat. Iris did her best not to lose her temper, but her disgust at the foolishness of such an investment when the money could be spent on, for example, the down payment on a house, had been all too clear. Their argument would have escalated but for Daniel’s insistence that they not allow any unpleasantness to disturb the joy of the wedding day.

“The Caribbean?” Mary Lou said now. “Can one really make a living sailing the Caribbean?”

“If anyone can, John will,” Daniel said. Then, seeming finally to notice that he was in danger of renewing the argument he himself had previously squelched, he said, “Can I get you ladies a drink? Mary Lou, some champagne?”

“I’ll take a G&T,” Mary Lou said.

“I’ll get it,” Iris said.

She arrived at the bar to find that the young members of the bridal party had made a disturbing rush for the alcohol, and had by now completely crowded out the other guests. Iris put a restraining hand on one of the groomsmen’s sleeves, and tried gently to steer him out of the way. At the same time, Jane Tetherly, John’s mother, swam into the fray.

“Enough of that now,” Jane said, pushing the young people aside. “You need to wait your turn. You’re not the only folks who need a drink.” Barking at the bartender to move over, she rolled up her sleeves and began pouring drinks. “Take this,” Jane said, handing a tumbler of vodka and cranberry juice to one of the girls. “And I don’t want to see you back here until everyone else in this room’s got a drink in their hands.”

Iris watched Jane thrust drinks at the kids and shoo them away from the bar. Jane knew how to take charge, you had to give her that. Jane popped the top off a bottle of beer and took a long gulp before wiping the mouth of the bottle with her sleeve and passing it to one of the boys.

Within a few minutes Jane, with the assistance of the much slower bartender, managed to fill the groping hands of the young people and send them on their way. She looked up and caught Iris’s eye.

“What can I get you?” she asked.

“Leave that and go enjoy yourself, Jane,” Iris said. “You’re going to get us in trouble with the bartenders’ union.” For some reason Iris always found herself assuming a false jocularity with Jane. She made bad jokes, and Jane never laughed, or even smiled. And still, Iris would do it again the next time they met.

Jane pursed her lips and then shrugged. “Fine,” she said. Briskly, she wiped her hands on a napkin. She had splashed tonic across the front of her dress, and when she stepped out from behind the bar you could see the wet fabric clinging to her heavy thighs.

As with so many awkward, painful, or hopeless situations, there was a Yiddish word for the relationship that as of this afternoon obtained between Iris and her cleaning woman. Her father had reminded her of it before they left for the church, as she was rushing around straightening up the house.

“You’ll have to fire Jane,” he’d said. “It will be awkward to have her cleaning your house now that the two of you are …” What was the word he’d used? Iris had motioned him out of the way with her broom, refusing to concede that there was any need to let Jane go. The woman owned and managed a service, Iris argued; it had been years since she had actually cleaned houses. In truth, Iris knew that Jane had cleaned the Copaken house just last summer, when one of her “girls” (who ranged in age from sixteen to seventy-six) had gone into preterm labor.

If Iris and Jane were not on close, or even truly amiable, terms, at least, Iris thought, they could take comfort in the weekly smoothness of their transactions. Iris had once supposed that, with the kids dating each other, she and Jane might gradually achieve a more familial, or at least a simply friendly, relationship. After all, but for the lucky accident of Iris’s grandmother having married a banker from New York rather than a local fisherman, and her father being a concert violinist rather than a boatbuilder, they might have had similar lives. But Jane had no interest in any relationship with Iris other than the most formal, her manner making Iris so uncomfortable that she inevitably found herself fulfilling what she imagined to be Jane’s worst expectations of the fancy-pants New York from-away: frivolous, silly, and, above all, condescending. When Iris spoke
to Jane, her voice crept into a high, shrill register and she said the most absurd things, like commiserating over the high cost of heating oil, as if the Copakens had anything like the financial concerns of the Tetherlys. It maddened Iris to find herself forced to act out the position of lady of the manor. In New York she knew and socialized with people whose financial straits were far more dire than Jane’s without ever confronting this attitude of resentful deference.

Iris had little hope that they’d be like family, but she was determined not to allow this distance to evolve into dislike. She reminded herself that she admired Jane—here was a woman with no education and a miserable freeloader of an ex-husband, a woman who had started and succeeded at her own business. She was a veritable feminist role model.

Iris sighed. There was a reason, she thought, that the English language contained no word for the relationship created when one’s children marry.

Machetunim
, that was it. Iris and Jane were now
machetunim
. As, Iris supposed with a barely repressed shudder, were she and Frank, a legendarily mean drunk who in the winter drove snow plows and in the summer worked the roads, and who seemed no more capable of having fathered sweet, talented, open-hearted John than Jane did of having mothered him.

When Iris returned to Mary Lou’s side she found that someone else had already provided the old woman with the desired drink.

“Just put it down on the table,” Mary Lou said to Iris. “I’ll get to it soon enough.”

Mary Lou was now surrounded by a group of Red Hook Library Board ladies, or perhaps they were garden club ladies, or Red Hook Women’s Club ladies, or VFW Ladies’ Auxiliary ladies, and they quickly turned their attention to Iris, their voices blending into a bubbling murmur of good wishes.

So interesting with that canopy, what was it called? And the glass. They’d heard about that before, of course, but never seen it. A lightbulb? Not a glass at all? My, how clever, because a glass might not break, and then where would you be? The minister seemed not to mind having the rabbi there. But then the Unitarians wouldn’t, would they? Just try that at St. Paul’s. Can you imagine Pastor Osgood tolerating all that Hebrew?
And Becca’s dress! So lovely, with the tulle and the beading. We heard she bought it in New York. Little Annie Field, from over by Dorchester way, she had her dress made in Boston, but New York, my goodness. What a distance. But, then, you live in New York, don’t you? Though your grandmother and my mother were in grade school together. And then your mother met your father in town, didn’t she? Of course he was from away. Just up for the summer, at Usherman Center. European, isn’t he? Oh my, Prague. A refugee, wasn’t he? Well he was certainly lucky. To have gotten out in time.

The ladies’ attendance at the wedding was, Iris thought, an acknowledgment of her status as
almost
if not quite
of
this place. A few years before, an eager new librarian had inspired a mania for genealogy in the ladies and their retired husbands. The children who showed up at the library after school to pretend to do their homework found all the computer terminals and the long wooden tables full of grandparents peering through their cataracts at volumes of census records and church baptismal certificates. The luckiest of the amateur genealogists proudly created six- or seven-generation family trees filled out in spidery handwriting and complemented by gravestone rubbings on large sheets of delicate tracing paper. The ones whose great-great-great-great-grandparents were part of the original sixty Protestant families whose settlement of the township was a condition of the General Court of Massachusetts’s land grant began treating the scions of later-comers with a gracious condescension. Those whose family trees were sprinkled with names like Chenard, Benoit, and Giroux developed what the Roundys, Woods, and Hinckleys considered something of a perverse pride in their Acadian roots. Still, everyone agreed that if you couldn’t trace at least a few relatives to the period prior to the late-nineteenth-century invasion of the summer boarders, then you had, in all honesty, to consider yourself from away. Iris’s family name, Hewins, popped up on the township rolls far earlier than that. In fact, the largest porgy oil business on the Red Hook Peninsula had been owned by one Benjamin Hewins, whose father, Nehemiah Hewins, uncle of Iris’s great-great-grandfather Elias, took a musket ball to the fleshy pad of his thumb while serving in the 3rd New Hampshire Regiment at the Battle of Bunker Hill. These impeccable credentials somewhat made up for the fact
that there was another branch of Iris’s family that came to Red Hook in the late 1880s, only because they could not afford summer cottages in Bar Harbor.

From across the room, Ruthie Copaken watched as her mother attentively and gracefully chatted up the Red Hook ladies. It never ceased to amaze Ruthie how Iris, who was notorious for not suffering fools gladly, seemed to have an infinite amount of patience for these women. She attended every last bean supper and blueberry breakfast of the season, and never missed a library board meeting, even if its sole purpose was to debate, for the umpteenth time, whether it was appropriate to have a hermit crab tank in the children’s section. (
It’s a library, after all
, some of the ladies argued,
not a zoo
.) Iris, whose intellect was so firm and frightening that Ruthie’s New York school friends, themselves the daughters of bankers, doctors, and professors, tended to panic at the prospect of a conversation with her, spent her summers trying to befriend the wives of lobster men, few if any of whom had even gone to college, and none of whom she would have bothered to exchange more than pleasantries with if they lived in New York. That was what was different about Maine, especially Red Hook, Ruthie thought. When she visited friends in their summer homes out in the Hamptons or upstate, they never bothered to socialize with the locals, even going so far as to avoid the bands of local kids who hung out on the beach or in the parking lot of the Dairy Queen. In Maine the division between local people and summer people was as stark, but much more complicated. The locals were the ones who viewed the from-aways with a certain amount of disdain, and it was the from-aways who, in some sense, scrambled for approval. It always made Ruthie a little uncomfortable to watch her mother go so far out of her way to be friendly.

To her sister, Becca, on the other hand, it all came so effortlessly. Unlike her mother, Becca did not actively seek out friendships with local people. She just happened into them naturally. Becca genuinely neither noticed nor cared where someone was from. If they were cheerful and amusing, if they tempered their comic sarcasm with kindness, if they could be trusted to douse a foresail and tack a jib, if they could make a decent pie—Becca was an avid baker whose blueberry peach crumb crust pie had won a blue ribbon in the county fair two years running—she was happy to
be their friend. Perhaps it was because Becca had been with John for so long that she was free of snobbery. She clearly didn’t view the local people as her social inferiors, which Ruthie always thought her mother sort of did, no matter how hard she tried to pretend otherwise.

When Ruthie could no longer stand to watch her mother feigning enthusiasm (or, worse, perhaps, actually being enthusiastic) about the upcoming rummage sale on behalf of the Methodist church’s new roof, she crossed the room and slipped through the bevy of ladies to her mother’s side.