Red Hook Road Read Free Page B

history derived from a part of Europe that no longer existed, a vanished land of thirteenth-century synagogues, of cemeteries with thousand-year-old graves carved with Hebrew lettering. This side of her heritage was as lost to her as were her father’s parents and siblings, killed at Terezin, and thus the Maine side, the Red Hook history, took on greater importance. Red Hook might only have been her summer residence—the rest of her life had been passed on the Upper West Side of the island of Manhattan—but her roots went deep into this rock. She had planted her daughters here, like perennials that bloomed every summer. Even her husband, a transplant less suited, perhaps, to the climate and the land, had, she thought, laid down his own, albeit shallow, roots.
    After she took title to her ancestral home, Iris, with her customary energy and passion, took on the project of restoring the Grange Hall, applying to the state for grants, organizing rummage and bake sales, hosting bean suppers, and petitioning her neighbors, summer visitors and localpeople, to donate toward the hall’s renovation. In the end, she’d dipped deep into her and Daniel’s savings, one of the reasons that they were still making do with an ancient, unreliable furnace long after the Grange Hall had resumed its service to the village as an all-purpose gathering space.
    Today all her hopes for the Grange Hall and for the place that she had made for herself in the village had reached their apotheosis. In this beautiful building first imagined and financed by her great-great-grandfather, her daughter would celebrate her marriage to a man whose roots in the town went deeper even than her own.
    Last week, John, Becca, and a gang of their friends had repainted the Grange Hall, and the brilliant white paint shone fresh and promising of all the renewal that summers in Maine had always meant to Iris and her daughters. Yesterday the bridesmaids had picked hundreds of flowers and woven fragrant garlands to festoon the wood banisters leading up the porch steps and around the front door. The hall was a riot of purple, violet, lavender—shades of Becca’s favorite color. How the girls had managed to gather so many lupines this late in the season, Iris couldn’t imagine. Early this morning, Iris had filled the room with votive candles, setting them in circles on every table and in long glimmering rows on the windowsills.
    The feeling she and Becca had been going for in decorating both the Grange Hall and the Unitarian church was a kind of rustic opulence, at once simple and glorious. Profusions of fresh flowers in hand-tied bouquets tucked into mismatched china vases, white wooden folding chairs looped with garlands, place cards written not by a calligrapher but in their own hands. She and Becca had scoured the thrift shops and rummage sales for the white lace tablecloths that were draped over the twenty round tables. The caterer, a summer visitor who served with Iris on the library board, had designed a simple but elegant meal. Organic produce from nearby farms, beef and pork from a local man who did his own slaughtering, bread and rolls baked by the local food co-op, lettuces from Iris’s own vegetable garden, and a wedding cake made by a friend of the groom’s who had recently received his certificate in culinary arts from Central Maine Community College.
    The caterer had obviously managed to get the range lit, because the waiters were making the rounds with the miniature crab cakes, sliders, andlobster puffs. The guitarist of the band due to play later in the evening began warming up the crowd with a prelude by Robert de Visée. Trust Becca to find a blues band fronted by a classical guitarist, Iris thought.
    Iris glanced up at the ceiling and frowned. One of the strings of white Christmas lights draped over and through the rafters had come loose; if it dropped any lower it was liable to get tangled in someone’s hair. Iris’s eyes skated over the crowd,