Leeway Cottage Read online

  No, Mr. Bennike said gravely, the great Grundtvig never saw this church; he died in 1872. The wedding church is a twentieth-century monument. No one outside Denmark knows Grundtvig, do they? Sydney agreed they did not. “Certainly the design is not everybody’s taste,” said Mr. Bennike. “A Danish version of the architect Gaudi, perhaps—you know the Sagrada Familia in Catalonia?” She didn’t, but she smiled and cried, “Aha!” And later, “My friend Neville Crane is an architect. He’ll be so interested,” she said.

  Missing his cue to break off and ask her to tell him all about her interesting friends and her life in the USA, Mr. Bennike then told her at numbing length about some important lectures someone gave about Grundtvig during the war, which sowed the seeds of the Resistance. These lectures woke the sleeping Holger Danske. Which was a mythical giant, apparently, who was supposed to rise up and save Denmark if it was threatened. She didn’t really get all of it.

  Sydney had enjoyed planning what she would wear to the wedding: now that there was plenty of fabric for clothes again, at least in the States, the New Look was skirts with yards and yards of material swooping around the calves like modern-day hoop skirts. Sydney’s was pale lilac with shoes to match. With this she wore an enormous picture hat which blocked her view of almost everything but looked extremely stylish. She finally got tired of not being able to see, though, and took it off at lunch.

  It was a hybrid wedding service, with both a minister and a rabbi, and included a part where the groom stepped on a wineglass and broke it on purpose. Eleanor was a flower girl, not that she remembers this but there are pictures to prove it, of her in a sort of dirndl with a wreath of sweet peas on her head. It wasn’t a wedding with all the trappings you would have in America. For one thing, there were still many shortages in Denmark, and for another, Danes didn’t go in for that sort of thing. The wedding lunch was at the Hotel d’Angleterre, so recently the haunt of the Wehrmacht, and the meal went on and on and on, with songs and speeches and endless toasts with champagne and caraway-flavored schnapps, God, was that awful stuff. Sydney enjoyed talking with Mr. Bennike, and then with his son Per, who was also very handsome.

  “Do you come from a musical family, Mrs. Moss?” Per asked her.

  “Sydney. My father was musical, and I sing.”

  “Delightful. Perhaps you will sing something for us later?”

  “I really couldn’t,” said Sydney. Which Per took gracefully as modesty, though that wasn’t what it was. “How about you?”

  “Will I sing? You wouldn’t like it if I did that.”

  “No, is your family musical?”

  “As listeners only. They are great admirers of your husband’s playing.” Sydney beamed, and then there was one of those “What now?” pauses.

  “So you and Kaj grew up together?” she asked.

  “We knew each other. But the families grew closer during the war.”

  “Oh! Were you in Sweden with Far and Mor?”

  “I ended up there, yes.”

  “Wait! You’re the one, aren’t you?”

  “Possibly.” Per smiled.

  “I know all about you! You saved them!”

  “I did what I could. Many others did more.”

  “C’mon…don’t be modest!”

  This stopped the conversation for a moment. Per was appalled at the thought of being anything but modest. Did Americans think modesty a vice? He had thought only Texas.

  “And a man posed as a refugee, and then betrayed you, right?” Sydney had misunderstood his silence.

  “Yes,” said Per.

  “Do you know who he was?”

  “Yes.”

  “What happened to him?”

  She expected to be told that no one knew, or that the man had been rewarded by the Nazis and was living in some tropical paradise.

  “He was liquidated,” Per said.

  Sydney was briefly silenced.

  “The whole time I was in Sweden I dreamed about killing him,” Per said, “but when I returned, it had been done.” Sydney was thinking that she couldn’t wait to get home and be asked how the wedding was. Who would have thought it? These mild, courtly people, a nation of murderers! Later she watched Per talking with Nina, who was wearing a slim and simple dress, looking wanly beautiful. She was thinking so much, though, about how she would tell the story of Per, her Danish hero, that she didn’t see the sorrow in his face, the frozen misery in Nina’s, as they moved stiffly a little away from the others, talking softly, their bodies not touching.

  When the wedding party was finally over Sydney and Laurus went upstairs and slept for hours and it was still broad daylight when they woke up at nine at night, and she never did manage to sleep more than a couple of hours in a row during the whole visit because it was always daylight. It wasn’t that the wedding wasn’t fun, it was, and Sydney had made a toast at one point inviting everybody there to visit her and Laurus in Dundee, Maine, and welcoming Kirsten to her family, too, but just about all the rest of it was in Danish.

  After the wedding and the usual round of sights in Copenhagen, they had traveled down to Fyn with Farmor and Farfar and Faster Nina. The little ones loved the ferry across the Storebælt. In Nyborg they slept at the Strand Hotel, but every day after breakfast they walked up the road to the Mosses’ cottage on the beach and stayed there until well after supper, just sitting around. Well, there was the beach, and there were trips to market on bicycles, thank God.

  They were invited by neighbors for coffee and pastries on several mornings. The neighbors ran American flags up their flagpoles along with the Dannebrog to honor them; every house seemed to have a flagpole, with a crisp red pennant with a white cross flapping in the summer light. Over the pastries everyone made stiff conversation in English, and making it was what it was like, elaborately cobbling at their mental workbenches with their useful little pile of English nails and tiny hammers, all the while smiling their beautiful Danish smiles, until the subject of little Monica’s name came up. Then there would be a flurry of rapid Danish, the tone altogether different, in which Sydney came to recognize the words “gudbarn” and “MonicaVickfeld,” as Nina explained that her goddaughter was named for the Resistance heroine Baroness Wichfeld, who risked her life of safety and privilege to defy the Nazis, and died in prison in Germany. It had been Laurus’s turn to name the baby when Monica was born, and now Sydney was glad. It made her and her children seem less foreign here.

  After Denmark, Sydney at last got what she’d wanted all her life, a trip to Paris. Paris in high summer of 1948 with three children in tow, one a four-month-old baby, was perhaps not the Paris of James Brant and Berthe Hanenberger. It was hot and Sydney’s French wasn’t nearly as good as she had been led to believe at the Hathaway Brown School. By the time she finally got to Dundee, her universe felt not larger but much smaller. She had discovered she was not a citizen of the world, as Laurus was. She was not a musician anymore, and she was fluent in one language, period. Her husband was Danish, her children were half Danish, but she was American. And American was a great thing to be. The best thing to be. There was no reason for her ever to go anywhere where she felt diminished or off balance or bored. She had a great time in Dundee that August, surrounded by people who knew exactly who she was and why it mattered. She enjoyed the surprise and interest she saw in Neville Crane’s eyes, when he said, “What did you think of the famous

  Grundtvig Church?” And she said, “It’s like what’s-his-name, Gaudi’s, Sagrada Familia. Only Danish.” Neville sat with her for a long time that evening, with his handsome face bent toward hers, telling her his theories of sacred architecture. Sydney watched the sunburnt triangle at the open neck of his shirt.

  Back in New York that fall, when she’d gone to one too many wine and cheese parties after yet another concert of old chestnuts or tedious new music, and seen the glazed look come into some artiste’s eyes when he turned to her and asked, “And what do you do?,” it all felt a little too much like a wedding in Denmark
. Sydney announced that New York City was no place to be raising three children, and they must move to Connecticut.

  Everything was in boxes. Boxes going to Connecticut, boxes going to West Eighty-sixth Street. The children were in Dundee, at The Elms, with a nanny and two girls from the village to keep them out of Nana’s hair. Sydney, dressed in dungarees with a smear of grime along her chin, paced in and out of emptied rooms waiting for the moving van, while Laurus and two of his students carried boxes of his clothes, piano scores, books, and bedding out to a rented truck. The moving van still hadn’t arrived when the boys went out with the last of their load, a large oriental carpet Sydney had given Laurus for their anniversary, and a ficus tree in a terracotta pot. They shoved these into the back of the truck, slammed the back doors shut, climbed into the cab with Laurus, and drove away.

  Sydney wandered from room to room, looking at a life that had just days ago been full of colors and curves and softness, now transformed into squared-off heaps of dun-colored cardboard blocks. She couldn’t even call the moving company to find out where the van was; the phone had been disconnected. The heat of late June was pillowy and dense. She needed a bath, but all the towels were packed.

  It was late afternoon when the boys finished carrying Laurus’s boxes in from the elevator on Eighty-sixth Street, thanked Mr. Moss for generous tips, and left to return the truck. The only thing that was where Laurus wanted it was his piano, which two men the size of refrigerators had carried out of Perry Street yesterday and delivered here this morning. He supposed the piano bench was somewhere. Meanwhile boxes of books that belonged in the study were in the bedroom and boxes of clothes were in the Pullman kitchen, and boxes of music were everywhere. There was a sofa in the front room that Sydney hadn’t wanted, but he couldn’t sit on it; the cushions were packed. He had the beginning of a headache but he had no idea where his wash kit, with the little bottle of aspirin, might be.

  To be back in a rented apartment, alone, with his life in boxes and nothing in the refrigerator, reminded him of the night that seemed a world away, when he and Imre Benko drank beer at the oompah joint, and Imre told him there was a voice student at Mannes who would pay an accompanist. He knew Imre had survived the war and was back in Budapest, but he hadn’t seen him, and didn’t know if he ever would again.

  It was possible, barely, to remember Sydney as a girl he had just met. A girl he thought he could see—but they were both so young. He could see her so much more clearly now, recognize that he had taken parts of things for the whole of her. Perhaps it was the same with her. No one had intended to deceive. Very likely all marriages are like that, though if he thought of his parents’ marriage, he couldn’t see beyond the charmed surface. Did Henrik and Ditte ever quarrel or make each other unhappy? He couldn’t imagine it. He thought of his own marriage as if they had been two people on a balance scale, each hovering about level as they studied each other, discovered things that surprised or delighted, as they fell in love. But when he had thrown his marriage vows into Sydney’s scale pan, her side had begun to dip. And somewhere during the war years, when his attention was elsewhere, her dish of weights had gotten so full of must and should and want to and can’t and won’t that it had plunged toward the ground, leaving Laurus’s light and amiable dish of can, and have, and why not, swinging in the breeze. She had the money. She had the three children. She had the moods and the hurts and the big vision of herself that had to be seen by others the way she saw it, or something really bad would happen. Life was full of surprises.

  Laurus was stretched out asleep on his half-unrolled carpet, with his sweater for a pillow, when Sydney finally let herself in. He woke at the sound of her key in the lock and sat up, taking in the twilight sky outside.

  “God, that was boring,” said Sydney.

  “What time did they finally get there?”

  “I don’t know, I packed all the clocks.”

  “I can’t find my toothbrush.”

  “I’m not surprised. They were quite sweet really. They’d gotten lost trying to get into Manhattan from New Jersey. Then they got stopped for driving a truck on the East River Drive—”

  “They were lost.”

  “Yes. Who knows if we’ll ever see our stuff again, they’re probably in Virginia by now, trying to find New England. Did you have a good nap?”

  “I’m a little stiff.”

  “Did you dream?” She always asked him this. Unlike hers, his dreams were so playful.

  “No. Yes…” He thought a minute. “Yes, as you came in I was just dreaming I’d been crowned Queen of the May.”

  Sydney roared with laughter, one of Laurus’s favorite sounds in the world. She looked around at the mess of half-empty boxes. “Did you get the bed set up?”

  “No, I couldn’t do it without you. I found the sheets, though.”

  “That’s all we need. Let’s go eat, I am faint with hunger.”

  The thing about the period you grow up in is, you’re a child. You have no knowledge that history exists. You think it’s the world, you don’t know it’s the fifties.

  Eleanor, Monica, and James Brant Moss lived in a big white clapboard house with fieldstone walls bracing the rolling lawns. They had a small swimming pool, a child-sized wooden roller coaster on the lawn, and a full complement of bicycles, skates, badminton and croquet equipment. A family of boys lived a few minutes’ bike ride up the lane, and on evenings and weekends there was always a quorum of kids at the Mosses’ house for sardines or kick-the-can or spud. In the winters or on rainy days, they turned over the living room furniture and made blanket forts (the other parents in town were very happy to have this going on at the Mosses’ house and not their own).

  A lot of their games were war games. One boy had a life-sized dummy German Luger, and everyone had cap guns. But they were all experts at making explosive gun noises with their mouths, so anyone with a thumb and forefinger was armed. They watched Captain Video and Howdy Doody on a tiny black-and-white television screen in an enormous case, and sent away boxtops for things like secret decoder rings that glowed green in the dark if you held them under a lamp first and then wore them into the closet.

  All three Moss children studied piano. Eleanor dutifully worked through her Thompson piano books, with some talent but no interest. As soon as she had done her forty-five minutes after school, she was off down the lane on her bike in search of company. Monica had to be nagged all week to practice. “You don’t know how lucky you are,” Sydney would announce angrily, as if she had personally carried coal scuttles barefoot through snow in childhood to earn these luxuries for her daughter. “There are children in China who don’t have enough to eat, let alone piano lessons.” Monica mostly kept her head down, her shoulders drawn in, hoping her mother would tire of prodding an inert substance, so she could go back to The Black Stallion. She had learned passive resistance as her only defense the morning that, under the spell of some spunky defiance shown by Pocahontas or Cherry Ames, Visiting Nurse, in a book she was reading, she had said, “If you think piano lessons are so great, why don’t you take them?” She had to walk into her third-grade classroom a half hour later with her eyes swollen and a clear red handprint on her cheek. She learned two lessons that day. First, that challenging her mother’s idées fixes about how her children should live their lives did not improve matters. Second, that if anyone in this town thought the Moss children shouldn’t be whacked at will, they were keeping quiet about it. Not a question was asked, nor a word spoken, about the flaming mark on Monica’s face. She wondered if anyone ever told her father about these and many similar moments in their childhoods, but to that she never learned the answer. She went on joylessly with her music lessons until she left for boarding school.

  By contrast, as a toddler, Jimmy used to sit on his father’s lap for hours while Laurus played, feeling the leg muscles flex with the pedaling, feeling how the whole body went into making the noise. Before he had language for it, Jimmy was moved by the light and dark col
ors of the sounds, the shapes of the floods of music his father produced; it was a river he was born knowing how to swim in. He understood playing as a motion that started from the center of the body and radiated out of the hands and feet and into the machine of wood and wire and ivory. He saw it as magic and power; he felt about driving that piano the way other little boys felt about trucks or trains. And he was deeply musical. By the time he was four he could repeat, note perfect, pieces he’d heard once, so that it seemed he must be reading, though he wasn’t. He couldn’t read “Jump, Spot,” and he certainly couldn’t read Für Elise. Sydney was convinced he was another Mozart.

  Sydney rejoiced at what her husband was passing on to their children, but she had been afraid her hearty and sporty neighbors wouldn’t know what to make of Laurus. Not that she wanted a husband who drank too much or chased women or wore loud pants, but she wanted him to fit in. Sydney worked like an animal, as she put it, to join the country club and tennis ladder and volunteer for every possible committee, to make the Mosses a force in this town. So she was thrilled when Peg Barker said one day, “Now your husband, Sydney…he’s a real man’s man.”

  “It’s wonderful, the way he’s made a place for himself,” chimed in a woman named Marjorie. Meaning, in spite of being arty and foreign, which the women liked, but were surprised that their husbands did too. (They didn’t know about the half-Jewish part; they might not have liked that so much.)

  “He must miss New York,” Peg said. It was during a break in contract bridge; one of the girls in their foursome was extremely gravid and had to answer a sudden call of nature.