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  By this time the conversation was so far from what Sydney had planned to tell them, about the Brutal Beasts, and the “O” boats they raced, about her triumphs on the bay, and the boys she had grown up with before she chose Laurus, that she just let it go. She drove them to The Elms without giving Candace any warning, and had the satisfaction of seeing her mother forced to be less than gracious, as she already had Bernard in the car on their way to a lunch party when Sydney’s station wagon crunched down the gravel driveway. After Candace and Bernard left, Sydney showed her guests over the house, but Papa Henrik stayed in the car, dozing, which offended her. She cut the tour short and took them home, announcing that no doubt they all needed naps.

  Laurus was so happy to have his family with him, he seemed like a different person. He was a quiet man, but now he almost chattered. And they kept forgetting to speak English, in their excitement, in their joy at each other’s presence, so Laurus was constantly having to stop the party and tell Sydney what they were saying.

  “You go ahead, catch up, I’m just happy to sit here and listen,” she said, which was entirely false. She had pictured this visit a whole other way, the Mosses eager to know all about her, the mother of their grandchildren, the girl who had made Laurus happy. Instead they kept talking about how she must come to Denmark, bring the children, how much she would like this or that. Then they went back to chattering to each other in Danish. She felt like a pebble thrown into a rushing stream. She had crashed right through the surface of the water and sunk to the bottom, while Laurus and his family went dancing and burbling over and past her, oblivious.

  Candace and Bernard invited the elder Mosses to dinner. Sydney and Laurus were giving a party for the young, to introduce Nina to their friends. Nina wandered into the big kitchen at about five in the afternoon. She had had a long nap and a swim and was getting some color in her cheeks.

  “May I help you?”

  Sydney was mashing potatoes; clouds of steam billowed up from the wide kettle as she pounded with the masher, periodically dumping in more butter, more cream.

  Nina hadn’t seen such plenty for years. The shortages at home were far worse than they had been during the war. In a sort of reparation for relative wartime comfort compared with the rest of Europe, Denmark had been pressured hard to give disproportionately in the peace to the recovery of Allied countries. Everything was scarce there now, not just food. You couldn’t get shoe leather. Some stores carried shoes made of fish skin. They were rather pretty, but they didn’t last very long. You couldn’t get rubber for tires. Nina’s bike at home had rope around the front wheel. Her friend Lars had replaced his ruined tires with little chunks of wood all around the bicycle rim. It was horrible on cobblestones.

  Sydney looked up from her work, her face red from effort and steam. Just then baby Monica began to cry upstairs. “Could you get the baby for me?”

  Nina simply looked at her, as if she hadn’t understood.

  “Could you run up and get the baby for me? Just bring her down here with a clean diaper, I’ll change her.”

  “No, I couldn’t.”

  “It’s right at the top of the stairs and the diapers are in the …Oh, never mind. Here, then do this.”

  With a flush of irritation, Sydney handed the masher to Nina and left the room. It was easier.

  Monica, who was fifteen months old, was standing in her crib with her face red and cheeks wet. She quieted the moment she saw her mother. She was light and wiry, clearly her father’s daughter, where Eleanor had been sweetly and calmly plump. Monica was a tense little thing. As Sydney scooped her up, feeling the loaded diaper as she did so, the baby gripped her with her arms and legs as if she were being rescued by a monkey mother from a river full of crocodiles.

  “Hushabye. Hushabye, little beezle, Mommy’s here. You had a lovely nap, didn’t you?” Sydney carried her down to the kitchen where Nina was bumping rather uselessly at the potatoes. Sydney changed the baby on a blanket on the floor beside the woodstove, then retrieved her masher from Nina. She stuck her finger into the potatoes, tasted, threw in another gob of butter and added salt and pepper. She moved now like one who has no more time for idle chat, so Nina drifted out. She was sitting on the porch listening through the window to Laurus playing the piano when the guests arrived. (And Sydney was still in the clothes she had worn all day, having had all the work of the dinner to cook, plus having to feed the babies and give them their baths, all while Nina sat in a rocker on the porch as if she didn’t know anyone but Laurus was in the house, and he kept her company.)

  THE LEEWAY COTTAGE GUEST BOOK

  Sunday, Aug. 3, 1947

  Eleanor Wells Moss and Monica Bing Moss were christened today by Mr. Davison. Forty here for luncheon on the porch. We saw a moose in the Peases’ field on the way to church—the Mosses feel their American visit is complete. Heavenly weather.

  The christening was in the Congregational Church, whose high cool white sanctuary looked so Scandinavian to the Mosses. Laurus played the music for the service, with a trio of Haydn before morning worship and Bach for the postlude. Mr. Davison preached well, by which Sydney meant briefly. Candace had done the flowers, and they were startling, mostly towering stalks of gladioli from her cutting garden. Eleanor, who was five, looked angelic in a little pink dress from the Women’s Exchange, with smocking across the bodice and patent-leather Mary Janes. Gladdy was Eleanor’s godmother; Nina was Monica’s. After lunch, they had an old-fashioned musicale as had so often been held here on a Sunday, in the old days. Ditte and Laurus played the four-hands Dolly Suite of Fauré together, while Sydney passed around the Guest Book, with its entry about the same piece of music played here so long ago, and the whispered exclamations over this only disturbed the musicians a little.

  “The longest three weeks of my life,” said Sydney to Glad, after she waved her houseguests off on the train. They were sprawled on the bathing beach, slathered in baby oil and smoking Pall Malls while a girl from the village monitored Eleanor and the other children at the water’s edge. Monica and tiny Amelia Crane were napping nearby on a blanket in the shade of the changing cabins.

  “Houseguests are hard,” said Gladdy loyally, though Leeway in her childhood had been filled with houseguests coming and going all summer, her parents’ friends and hers and Tommy’s all endlessly welcome.

  “There are only so many times you can drive to the Jordan Pond House for popovers.”

  “They did like sailing,” Gladdy pointed out.

  “It’s true, they did. And Nina played badminton. Once.”

  “Well, they were quiet,” said Gladdy, and both of them started to laugh. The Mosses had sat for hours on the porch, reading or simply staring at the bay in the silence, happy to be together and at peace. It made Sydney want to jump out of her skin.

  On the other hand, she had rarely known Laurus so utterly happy. His parents would sit at the bathing beach, watching Eleanor and her friends dashing in and out of the water, and it was to them like watching a double exposure, this beach plus another, with other little children, Laurus, Kaj, and Nina, the Hansen children next door, brown with sun and their hair bleached white. Sometimes Ditte would call Monica “Nina,” and it gave Sydney the creeps.

  The night they finally had the house to themselves again, Sydney felt herself working toward a tantrum, as if now that she could relax, a gate had swung open and in romped disappointment and fatigue and boredom and resentment from where they’d been grazing and nickering and watching from the other side of the fence all week, waiting to get at her. The disappointment seemed, absurdly, to be most of all aimed at Nina. Sydney had somehow thought that here at last would be a female person who would love her and read her mind. Now she felt bereft and foolish, and when she felt things she didn’t like to feel, she most often got rid of them by turning them into anger. And there sat Laurus in the next room playing the goddam piano.

  When she walked into the room, Laurus turned to her and stopped playing at once. Before sh
e could say a word, he went to her and put his arms around her, and whatever words were in her mouth melted.

  “Thank you for one of the happiest weeks of my life,” he said.

  She felt tears start, and to her own utter astonishment, said, “You’re welcome.”

  “Let’s go down to the Seagull and have dinner together.”

  “With the girls?”

  “No, just us.”

  She smiled, absurdly pleased, and went off to call a sitter.

  In early August, Mr. Maitland came to call on Sydney to ask her to join the yacht club council. “It’s time your generation started running things,” he said. “We thought you’d be the one to show them how.” Sydney accepted without asking Laurus.

  They went to Gladdy and Neville’s for supper in their little rented cottage down the Neck that Neville called Bug House. Their whole crowd was there, Elise and her young husband, Chris, and Lucie Cochran, who was now married to Elise’s brother Ned. Of their whole crowd of childhood friends, only Tommy McClintock had disappeared in the Pacific. Their past did not seem gone, and a happy future, a thousand evenings like this with these old friends laughing together, was before them. They ate spaghetti with homemade sauce around a battle-scarred oak table. The men wore blazers without neckties and the girls were in simple sundresses, which was very daring; their parents still dressed in evening clothes for dinner, even here in Dundee. And spaghetti was daring. They had been raised to think of it as immigrant food, or food from a can for small children. Several of the boys had served in Italy and had brought back some news from the culinary front. Spaghetti made the older generation anxious, as if next their children would start putting grease in their hair and wearing loud ties and cologne. The world was changing.

  Among the changes Sydney was pleased about was that she had her next project. The yacht club, hardly ever more than a spacious shed in the first place, had to be torn down to the studs and rebuilt over the winter; it was full of dry rot and carpenter ants. The council had hoped Sydney might chair a fund-raising committee, since she and her mother could, if they wanted, simply donate the whole amount needed. Sydney had accepted; she enjoyed giving money away herself and felt no shyness about telling others to do the same, whether they could do so as painlessly as she could or not, but in this case she had a better idea. She thought they should revive the long-standing tradition in the summer colony of do-it-yourself entertainment and put on a show to raise money. She could sing, and Neville, onetime star of the Princeton Triangle Club, could sing and dance, Chris and Elise could act and they could write, and God knows Laurus could play the piano. “C’mon, guys. It’ll be a panic,” she boomed. They agreed with wine-fueled enthusiasm over the blueberry grunt, and retired to the living room, for two tables of the game of the summer, a form of gin rummy called Oklahoma.

  There are silent movies, in color, of the performance they gave that Labor Day weekend. Sydney is everywhere: dancing a cancan with Gladdy and Elise, and soundlessly singing a duet with Neville Crane, both dressed as lobstermen, in oilskins and beards. Neville Crane appears again with Homer Gantry and some other man, no longer known, shirtless in flower leis and grass skirts over bathing trunks, playing ukuleles and dancing a hula. Eleanor and Monica, in their own middle age, find the film in the attic at Leeway after their parents are dead. “The Yacht Club Follies, 1947” is written on brittle masking tape on the canister in their mother’s handwriting. They also unearth a projector, on a shelf in a downstairs cupboard crammed with rackets, board games, stilts, hula hoops, wicker laundry baskets of period clothes, shoes, and costume jewelry for children’s dress-up, and a thing called a “one-man band” that Eleanor remembered someone giving their mother as a joke present one summer in the fifties. It has horns and drums and cymbals rigged so that when you pound it on the floor all the noisemakers sound at once.

  Amazingly, the projector still works. They have to wipe off cobwebs, and it takes some time for Eleanor to remember how to thread the film; their father had shown her how, but it must have been forty years ago. They watch “The Yacht Club Follies” several times, projected against the lime green wainscot wall in the kitchen, before the bulb in the projector blows out with a pop. An old mimeo’d program inside the canister tells them that the duet their mother is singing with Uncle Neville is “The Lobster’s Lament” to the tune of “Always.” They make plans to have the film transferred to videotape, so they can give copies to their friends whose parents (and grandparents!) are in the movie, looking younger than any of them can remember them.

  What Sydney principally remembered from the winter of ’47–’48, apart from being pregnant again, was that for Christmas, she ordered a full-length mink coat from Birger Christensen for her mother-in-law. She didn’t tell Laurus she had done it. All through their own festivities, the shopping, the store windows, the decking of the apartment with pine ropes, and the secret wrapping of presents, it was her best secret of all.

  Their Christmas Eve telegrams from Copenhagen arrived as always, but Sydney waited, giddy with pleasure, for her letter of thanks. She pictured Ditte speechless with gratitude, sending her the kind of mother love that shone in her face when Ditte looked at her own children. And that had never been seen in Candace’s. As the snow whipped up and down the streets of the West Village, as the sun shone on crisp new whiteness when they took the children sledding in Central Park, she looked forward to it.

  Laurus read the letter aloud when it came at last, translating, as his mother was shy about writing in English.

  “‘Dearest Laurus and Sydney, Eleanor and Monica,

  “‘We hope you had the happiest of Christmases, and all here wish you a joyous new year.

  “‘First, we must thank you for the big box of treats from the U.S. Maple sugar and blueberry jam are both delicious and remind us of happy mornings with you in your beautiful Maine. We all enjoy the butter of earthnuts—’”

  “The what?”

  “Oh…peanuts, peanut butter. ‘We all enjoy the peanut butter and the Boston Brown Bread, even Kaj although he has not yet been to Boston—’”

  “They call peanuts ‘earthnuts’?”

  “They grow in the ground,” said Laurus.

  “Oh.”

  “‘And we look forward to having you here with us so we can introduce you to our wienerbrød and smørrebrød and other things we hope you will like as well. And thank you so much for the beautiful…’ Long socks? Did you send them nylons?”

  Sydney smiled, very proud of herself.

  “‘That is a very great luxury for me and Nina, and Tofa too!

  “‘Thank you for the photographs of Eleanor and Monica, and of your beautiful home in New York City, which we hope someday to visit.

  “‘We had a very nice Christmas here, although we wish you could all have been here. Kaj’s girl came to Christmas Eve dinner. Nina got the almond in her rice pudding and got an extra present. (A bar of English soap from before the war! I found it in a dresser drawer.) We all went to midnight service except Aunt Tofa, who has a sore throat. We had dinner Christmas Day with the Bing cousins…’ Now she has a lot of news about people you haven’t met yet…then…Here. ‘Last of all, my dear Sydney, I want to thank you for the beautiful mink coat, which the man from Birger Christensen brought on Christmas Eve—’Sydney! You gave her a fur coat?”

  Sydney nodded, beaming.

  “You are really something!” He turned back to the letter, now smiling too.

  “‘You can’t imagine my surprise as I opened it, and tried it on for all to see. I looked like a queen! You flatter me so much with your love and kindness in sending me such a present. I know you will understand that you have done me an even greater kindness than you could have known, which is to ease the worry in a mother’s heart. I have been so troubled that our Nina seems never to be warm anymore, summer or winter, and especially in winter she must go out to work in all weathers, while I don’t have to go out at all unless I want to. So when I am not using it, I a
m warmed to the heart to know that my little girl is beautiful and warm in that very, very beautiful coat, and I thank you with all my heart for your kindness to us. As the mother of your own dear little girls, I know you will understand what this means to me.’”

  Eleanor and Monica, and even Jimmy, though he rarely paid attention to his mother’s rants, were still hearing the story of this Christmas right up until Sydney lost her marbles, of how she gave Farmor the most beautiful mink coat in Copenhagen for Christmas, and Farmor gave it to goddam Nina. Faster Nina, pardon her French. A few years later, when it became possible again to buy new automobiles in Europe, she gave Farmor a brand-new English Ford, and when Ditte gave that to goddam Nina, too, that was it, Sydney was done.

  THE LEEWAY COTTAGE GUEST BOOK

  July 29, 1948

  Arrived home yesterday, after a delightful jaunt to Denmark and France. It’s Jimmy’s first summer in Dundee. The birds have gotten most of the raspberries already, but everything else is perfect. Gladdy and Neville had us all to dinner last night and this afternoon we went to Beal Island for a picnic. The last of the old houses out where the town used to be was burned to make way for blueberry barrens. Laurus was with the firemen.

  Many years later when they find the old Guest Book, Eleanor and Monica will note, with tempered amusement, that they hadn’t known until then that summer could have a single owner. But if it could and if their mother was in charge, it was no surprise that the owner was Jimmy.

  They were late getting to Dundee that summer because Kaj Moss was married in Copenhagen to a plump and sweet-natured girl named Kirsten. The ceremony was at Grundtvig Church in the suburb where Kirsten’s family lived, a bizarre-looking thing, Sydney thought, like a nightmare version of a proper Danish church, everything stretched out of proportion. Her neighbor at the wedding lunch, a dazzling older gentleman in a very elegant well-preserved blue suit, a Mr. Bennike (seated with her because of his excellent English) was pleased to discuss it.