Leeway Cottage Page 28

  As a man’s man, which Laurus truly was, he also relished having his countryman to talk to. One afternoon when Sydney and Britt-Marie were playing tennis, Per came out to join Laurus in the garage behind the house where he was wrestling with the outboard motor from his dinghy. It hadn’t run right all summer, so he and Per had carried it up from the dock, and now Laurus had it clamped to a rain barrel with the screw in the water and the housing off. He was happily puttering.

  “Goddag,” said Per, and Laurus answered him in Danish, hardly aware that he’d done it. They had taken care to speak English throughout the visit so that Sydney would not feel left out. Laurus gave a mighty pull at the engine’s starter cord and it screamed to life, making a piercing racket and churning the barrel to a froth before it coughed and died.

  “You cleaned the spark plug?” Per asked.

  “Sure.”

  They peered together into the Evinrude guts. “Must be the timing chain,” Laurus said.

  “Yes,” said Per. And then, as Laurus set to work, Per settled down on a crate and said carefully, “Tell me—how is your sister?”

  Laurus looked up at him. “You aren’t in touch?”

  “Not since we moved to New York.”

  There was a pause. “Not much has changed. She’s got her doctorate. She teaches French.”

  “At university?”

  “Gymnasium, like Papa. She likes the seventeen-, eighteen-yearolds.”

  “Like herself, before she went away.”

  “Yes. She goes to France every summer and comes home thinner than when she left. I keep hoping someone will reach her. That she’ll meet a man.”

  Per looked at his shoes. “Has she ever told you what happened to her?”

  Laurus shook his head.

  There was a pause. “And would it do us any good to know?”

  Laurus was still for a moment. It felt different, to be talking of this in his own language, and to someone who (he was pretty sure) had loved Nina once. “I’ll tell you what I think,” he said. “I think that if God is God, and He’s also good, His ruling love is curiosity. It would explain so much evil. He can’t interfere, He can only watch, and love, and wait to see how it comes out. So He knows what she saw, and to Him it means something we can’t know about.”

  “It’s very hard, not knowing,” said Per. “Not being able to help.”

  “Very.”

  Per said, “When we go to God, if we do, do we find out finally all the things we didn’t understand?”

  Laurus said, “That’s my theory exactly. Being with God will mean understanding all the things that were hidden.”

  “Then heaven will be a sad place.”

  “I don’t think so. I think it will bring us peace. It will be like watching the movie of your life but all the stories will have endings.”

  As Sydney’s station wagon crunched into the driveway and parked under the huge oak, Laurus added, “If death didn’t bring peace, there’d be a lot more upset ghosts around than your wife’s cigar-smoker.”

  As her door slammed, Sydney called, “Okay, we found you. We know you’re in there talking about our bra sizes.”

  “Actually,” said Laurus, “I was just explaining heaven to Per.”

  “Per already knows about heaven,” said Britt-Marie. The two women glowed with recent exertion as they approached. “It’s in the shape of the Grand Man.”

  “No,” said Per, “it’s in the shape of a movie theater. Laurus says we each get to see our own movie in heaven, and in it we’ll see everything that was hidden before.”

  “Good,” said Britt-Marie to Laurus, “then maybe I’ll understand how your damn wife managed to beat me in straight sets.”

  “That’s your idea of heaven?” Sydney asked Laurus. “I can’t even get you to go to the movies now.”

  “Well, after the movie there will be dinner and dancing,” said Laurus.

  “Listen,” said Per to Laurus. “If you get to see the movie before I do, will you find a way to let me know how it comes out?”

  Sydney saw something pass between them she didn’t understand.

  “A heavenly postcard?” Laurus suggested.

  “Guys, come on,” she said. “Let’s go fall into a pitcher of gin and tonic.” The two women started for the house, and Sydney looked back to be sure the men were coming.

  THE LEEWAY COTTAGE GUEST BOOK

  July 15, 1958

  The Bennikes are back! They drove up from Boston last night and got here in time for Ellen’s fish chowder and blueberry muffins. They’ve brought their adorable little twin babies, Hanne and Inge, born on Christmas Day! Lovely to have them here.

  “Just adorable,” Sydney said, holding baby Inge and pushing her nose against the baby’s nose, saying, “Gugugugugah! Are they family names? Hanne and Inge?”

  Britt-Marie looked at Per, who answered, “They’re named for some girls I met during the war.”

  “Oh, that’s lovely, you know our Monica is named for Monica Wichfield,” said Sydney. “AAAaghgugugugugug!” And she wiggled her face down into the baby’s. “Are they identical?”

  “No,” said Britt-Marie.

  The Bennike family was in the upstairs guest room this year. This was so they could hear the babies from the dining or living room if they cried, which they could not have done if the babies were off in the guest wing. Also, because Eleanor was fifteen this year and she and her best friend, Janet, were spending their summer in Dundee getting their driver’s licenses. Janet and Eleanor had a portable record player and a great many records the grown-ups did not care to hear over and over (“To KnoooowKnoooowKnooow him, is to Luuv-LuuvLuh-uve him…”) so the guest wing was a far better place for them than upstairs.

  Eleanor and Janet were the envy of their friends at home. Maine allowed licenses very young, as many farm children needed to drive tractors and such, sometimes on public roads. The girls already had their learner’s permits, and vied with each other to be allowed to drive Laurus or Sydney into town to Abbott’s or the drugstore. The rest of the time they lay on the lawn or the beach, slathered in baby oil tinted with iodine, holding batwing reflectors under their chins to accelerate their tans. In the evenings, if they didn’t have to babysit, they went with Eleanor’s crowd of friends to moonlight picnics on Beal Island, or to the drive-in up in Trenton with the glamorous older crowd (usually with about eight of them in one car), or zipped back and forth across the bay in Eleanor’s outboard, to friends’ cottages to play poker or spin the bottle or to climb Butter Hill in the dark. On afternoons when there was nothing else to do, they would take the outboard and a stack of True Romance magazines out to the middle of the bay and drift around, smoking cigarettes and reading, and roasting marshmallows stuck on pencils over purloined kitchen matches. They came home in the evening burnt, sticky, and stinking of smoke; it was blissful.

  They were the envy of Monica because they had freedom and breasts and were developing boyfriends. They were the envy of Jimmy because they had the outboard, and matches, and they didn’t have to go to goddam camp all summer. Jimmy and Monica both did have to.

  Which it turned out wasn’t all bad, as they missed the brunt of the major Sydney firestorm of the summer. Eleanor caught most of it, but just to watch was something Janet never forgot, Sydney savaging Eleanor for something they had done together, as Janet sat on the other bed in their little room staring at her sneakers and listening to invective pelting on Eleanor’s head and shoulders. When, late in the summer, some of the boys stole a sign from the French camp down the Neck, and Eleanor and Janet hid it for them under a bed and Sydney found it, she swelled up and raged so terribly that Janet was afraid she might actually beat them, which Eleanor said had been known to happen. But by the next day Sydney smiled and joked as if nothing had happened and she had no idea why they were cowering from her. And maybe she didn’t.

  The cause of Sydney’s hair-trigger emotional state was this. (If you didn’t count the fact that Eleanor and Janet had bre
asts and freedom and maybe boyfriends and Sydney had other things but, except for the breasts, not those, and she’d never had an easy time with people having things she didn’t.) Bernard, whom Sydney had in a sarcastic way grown rather fond of, had had a mild stroke in the spring, and he was having trouble with stairs. They had installed a staircase lift in the house in Cleveland, and could easily do that here, too, but had not yet; instead, Bernard’s bedroom had been moved downstairs for this summer. Sydney explained all this to the Bennikes as they drove over to pay their duty call at The Elms.

  Bernard and Candace were out on the terrace overlooking the bay. They were playing hearts and drinking sun tea when Sydney led her guests in, hallooing.

  “Hello, darling, how nice! Hello, Mr. Bennike, Mrs. Bennike, how nice to see you again!” Candace rose (stiffly) to welcome them.

  “You’ll forgive an old man for not getting up,” called Bernard from his chair. “I would, but I can’t.” His speech slur was almost unnoticeable.

  “Of course,” and “Of course not,” and “So nice to be here, how are you?” were lobbed back and forth for several minutes until all were settled and a bell was rung for more iced tea and a plate of cookies.

  “Now, Mother, did you ever see cuter babies in your life?” Sydney was holding Hanne toward her as if she were a stuffed animal. Britt-Marie was right beside her with Inge. “They’re twins.”

  “Oh, aren’t they precious? Look at the cunning little fingers! Are they twins?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are they identical?”

  “They’re identical, aren’t they?” Sydney asked Britt-Marie.

  “No.”

  “But so much alike, aren’t they too cute?”

  Bernard was holding out his arms, his smile almost one of longing, and Britt-Marie handed her bundle to him. The baby settled into his arms and he began talking quiet nonsense to her while Sydney watched, pleased. Wasn’t that just typical? It was Bernard, the fussy old bachelor, who truly loved babies, while showing one to her mother was like handing a kitten to someone who hates cats. Such a private pleasure.

  They had a very nice visit, filled with an update of the Bennikes’ situation, Per’s new book, a bigger apartment (Well, I should hope so! With twins!). And Sydney had a lot to tell Candace and Bernard about the Cluett Cup dinner at the yacht club she was running, and about Mrs. Maitland getting cross with Homer Jellison that her dining room chairs had not been recaned in spite of a wait of three years. “Why, Mrs. Maitland, if I had known you were so drove up about them chairs…” he had said indignantly.

  They took themselves off when Velma tottered in to indicate she was ready to serve Mr. and Mrs. Christie their lunch. They had a lovely sail that afternoon while Eleanor and Janet stayed with the napping babies. When they got home, without even being asked to do it, Eleanor and Janet went off on their bikes to have tea at The Elms. Sydney took deep breaths as if inhaling pleasure as she moved around the Leeway kitchen rattling the end of her cocktail in her glass, and heating the dinner Ellen had left ready.

  So it was a thunderstroke when they were together around the dining room table, and Sydney called to Eleanor, “Did you girls have a good visit with Nana?,” Eleanor said, “Yes! But we’re amazed, of course.”

  Sydney tried to pretend she knew why they would be amazed. She took a swallow of soup; then curiosity got the better of her.

  “Amazed?”

  “About The Elms.”

  “Oh. The elevator.”

  This was a wild guess. But a good one. It had to be either stair lift or elevator; and the guess was worth it, Sydney hated not knowing or seeming to know all the important news before someone else could tell her.

  “No,” said Eleanor. “That they’re tearing it down.”

  Even Laurus put his spoon down and looked at Sydney, and after a pause for the flame to travel up the wick and get to her, Sydney detonated.

  “They are WHAT?”

  Eleanor looked a little worried at this reaction. But a glance from Janet confirmed she had heard right…They both had.

  “They’re going to tear down the house and build something all on one floor, that Uncle Bernard can get around in…”

  The look on her mother’s face caused Eleanor to subside, though what she’d wanted to say was how cute Nana and Uncle Bernard were about it, how excited to be planning a big new project together.

  “She can’t tear down that house, that’s not her house! It’s my house, it’s yours, and Nika’s and Jimmy’s….” Sydney roared. “That’smy grandmother’s house, she built it, she left it to my father, Candace never would have heard of Dundee if it weren’t for…Oh, for God’s sake…” And she ran out of the room with her face in her napkin. You couldn’t tell if she was going to cry or throw up.

  Eleanor and Janet looked at each other. Per and Britt-Marie looked helplessly at Laurus. Laurus went on with his soup until he had quietly finished it. Then he put his napkin into his napkin ring and said, “Eleanor, would you clear? You all go ahead.” And he left the table.

  Sydney was in their bedroom, weeping with deep, wracking sobs. Laurus sat beside her and patted her back as she curled in on herself and cried, for her dead father, her miserable childhood, for her grandmother who had loved her but died, and with rage at her stupid, selfish, unloving, snobbish, fake Southern belle, nobody from nowhere bitch of a mother. “She’s finally done it, just when I thought there was nothing else she could do to me, she’s found the way to completely kill me. I didn’t think she could, I didn’t think she could, I thought we were past this,” she sobbed from somewhere inside the coiled whelk she’d made of herself. Then she’d start it again, stupid, selfish selfish, coldhearted…

  Laurus patted her. There was nothing else he could do. If he said, “I’m sure she does love you,” it made her madder, and besides, he wasn’t certain it was true. Suddenly Sydney said, “I could stop her, you know. Under my father’s will. She has no right to do this.”

  “But you’re never going to want to live in it yourself, are you?” Laurus knew she wasn’t. She loved Leeway Cottage; The Elms was her past, not her future.

  Sydney was trapped, as usual. She most likely could stop her mother, with a raft of lawyers, which Candace had probably forgotten. But if she did, she’d be paid back in the coin of her mother’s outrage and her husband’s diminished respect, and probably be thought behind her back to be a dog in the manger.

  After a while he went back down to the table, and he was pleased when Sydney herself reappeared in time for dessert. Her eyes were swollen but she’d washed her face and put on fresh lipstick. She put her chin in the air, took a deep breath, and said, “Well.” And gave everyone a big smile. They ate their sherbet and cookies and then settled down in the living room to play Scrabble, while Eleanor and Janet cleared and washed the dishes. Later, tires were heard to crunch in the doorway and the girls went skittering out the back door, letting it slam behind them. Sydney could tell by the sound the engine made that they were off with that boy from the Neck with the ancient black Ford that the children called the Bomb. Nice boy.

  Later, in bed, she cried some more, but this time without words, for her summer childhood, her best memories of her father and grandmother, about to be ripped out of the earth like ancient trees. For the fact that even her own children had so much she had never had, a loving mother, a living and sober father, sisters and brothers, and all the money and position that had been her only comfort. Laurus patted her.

  After that night, she really did seem to have grown a new depth of scar tissue over her heart where her mother was concerned. She dealt with her evenly, calmly, for the rest of the summer, as if she would lose a life-threatening battle if Candace ever guessed how hurt she was. Which for Laurus was a good thing.

  The Elms came down in October, and it seemed that half the town went to work building the replacement, to have it ready for Mrs. Christie the next summer. The village buzzed about the design from November to June; the roo
ms were all strung out on one level, with huge glass sliding doors overlooking the bay, and a shed roof that was practically flat.

  “Hell of a strange-looking thing” was Mutt Dodge’s opinion. “Can’t decide if it wants to be a freight train or the railroad barn.” Al Pease was puzzled over installing a bee-day in the master bathroom. “What do you suppose it’s for?” he asked. “That you couldn’t do in the flush or the sink?” There were plenty of people not far out of town didn’t even have their plumbing indoors yet. Now here was a whole new thing for them not to have one of.

  THE LEEWAY COTTAGE GUEST BOOK

  July 5, 1959

  Arrived in time for Mother’s big housewarming. She wants us to call this new thing The Elms, but it should be The Plywoods. It’s enough to make you weep.

  Which was hardly a metaphor, as Sydney had wept plenty over it. It had to be admitted that it wasn’t just the loss of the old house, which had been a symbol perhaps of regrettable robber baron excess, sure, but as a house it had been gracious, imposing, and based on the best Old World models. So many such houses had already been lost on this coast in the great Bar Harbor fire of 1947, and now another one was gone for No Reason At All. Her mother’s new house was not only not gracious, imposing, or curtsying in the direction of Old Europe, it was a triumph of ugliness. And it was in clear sight of the road, where everyone passing had to look at it eight times a day. It was completely out of scale and style with the vernacular architecture, as if it didn’t know where it was, and didn’t care. Sydney had learned that phrase, “vernacular architecture,” from Neville Crane whom she had cornered in her mother’s horrible new “library” and forced to state an opinion. If she had been concerned in her heart of hearts that Candace and Bernard might come up with some new miracle of beauty and convenience that would make her dissatisfied with Leeway (and she had been), her fears were put to rest the minute she set foot in Abbott’s on her arrival that summer, before she had even seen the new house herself. The town had seen it, and the town really hated it.