Red Hook Road Read Free

rehearsal dinner; they’d been almost too drunk to set off the fireworks that the groom and his younger brother had driven all the way over to New Hampshire to buy. On the way to the church this morning they had nicked three bottles of champagne from the cases stacked up in the Grange Hall, taken the groomdown to the beach, and toasted him over and over, until he’d accused them of trying to get him too drunk to walk down the aisle. And then there was the joint they had just smoked when they were supposed to be searching the church for the flower girl’s lost basket.
    “Stand straight and shut up so we can get this damn picture taken,” the mother of the groom said, poking her younger son in the back.
    “Ow, Mum. Jeez,” he said. “You got me right in the kidney.”
    “Now, if you’ll all just look at me,” the photographer said from behind the lens of his Hasselblad. “And smile!”
    In the shot that the bride’s mother selected from among the proofs that showed up at her house a long five weeks after the wedding, most of the subjects were smiling, but none of them with the radiant exuberance of the bride and groom. With their blond hair, their suntans, and their nearly identical wide smiles, the bridal couple looked almost like brother and sister. They had fallen in love at sixteen and over the next ten years had, despite distance and difference, never swerved in their determination to reach this day. Their faces in the photograph were alight with joy, and for a long time the bride’s mother would not be able to pass the picture hanging in the front parlor of her summer house without feeling a knot in her stomach and a rush of tears. In time the photograph would recede into the general oblivion of furnishings and knickknacks. But even years later the bride’s mother would sometimes think of that afternoon in early summer, of the rustle of the fir trees that separated the country church from the winding main road, of the lavender lupines in the bridal bouquet, of the waves lapping the rocks of the tattered shore, and of the kiss her daughter’s new husband placed on his new wife’s cheek at the very moment the photographer clicked the shutter.

THE FIRST SUMMER

I

    The house in East Red Hook, a village a few miles outside the town of Red Hook proper, was a flight of Queen Anne fancy, with a witch-hat turret, obsessive gingerbread, multihued brickwork and tile, and a secret room hidden behind a bookcase. It was built in 1879 by a gentleman named Elias Hewins, to the precise specifications of his much younger bride. Elias had purchased the acres of rolling oceanfront meadow for a song from a farmer who’d finally given up on coaxing anything edible from the obdurate Maine soil. Elias had sited his new house to make the most of its view across East Red Hook’s small cove, out to the tiny islands scattered along the Eggemoggin Reach like crumbs on a wide blue tablecloth. Elias’s son Nathaniel was born, lived, and died in the house, then passed it on to his six adult children, all of whom had long since abandoned the Maine coast. Only Nathaniel’s youngest child, his only daughter, possessed the resources and the inclination to return to East Red Hook from New York City, where her husband had moved her. She transformed the house where she was born into her summer home, and for decades thereafter she and her daughter Alice passed their summers in the village, with Alice’s father visiting as often as his business interests would allow. In the summer of 1940, when Alice was twenty-six years old, already in the eyes of her parents an old maid, she met a young violinist, a Jewish refugee from Prague, whose exile had landed him in, of all places, Red Hook, where he was performing with the town’s renowned summer chamber music program, at the Usherman Center. After a brief courtship, Alice married Emil Kimmelbrod, and the couple bought their own summer house, down the road in Red Hook. Their high-spirited little