Leeway Cottage Read online

  They weren’t students of Frank Lloyd Wright, or Prairie Style, or any architectural style but their own, which was simple Greek Revival New England farmhouse. But they didn’t need to know a two-dollar name for it to know they hated it. Mind you, the town was also prepared to fight fiercely for your right to build anything you wanted on your own land, it was your land and your home was your castle and they had never, up to now, thought they could be made to see two ways on that subject. This was a twentieth-century village with eighteenth-century politics, things had changed so much more slowly here than in the outside world. The word “zoning” had never even come up in town meeting before. It did in March of 1959, though. If a person could build a house like the Christies’, why wouldn’t somebody want to put in a Dairy Queen on his front lawn? The meeting grew quite hot on the subject when Kermit Horton made a violent speech about how his great-grandfather had settled on Beal Island in 1832 and from that day to this there had never been any interference in what a man did with his own property as long as he didn’t kill anybody or poison the waterways. There was no reason to start sticking their noses into other people’s business now. Reuben Jellison stood up without being recognized by the first selectman, and said, “Oh, really? I live right next to the Congregational Church, as Kermit Horton well knows. Is it all right with him if I decide to start strip mining? I think I’ve probably got some pretty good copper in that front field, right down there by Miss Leaf’s garden. I don’t think she’ll mind the noise much, she’s gone so deaf…” They had to adjourn for lunch to get people to stop shouting at each other.

  Down at Olive’s Lunch, during the break, old Carleton Haskell, who was known to begin the morning with a powerful shot of grain alcohol in his coffee before he started out fishing, kept braying that the house was ugly as tunket but that wasn’t the nigger in the woodpile. Carleton himself lived in a trailer that wasn’t very beautiful, and he didn’t figure that was anybody’s business but his. The thing everyone was missing was, this was the first time one of them summer complaints had built a house you could live in all winter. The town had gotten used to having them show up in the spring and stay into the fall, and no one wanted to give up the money they gave to the hospital and the library or the taxes on their shorefront property. Sometimes one of ’em would get old and take to bed to die here, but if it took more than a season, they moved into rented rooms in town for the winter and were carted back to their cottages when the weather warmed up. This kind of a thing, though, they build a thing like that with a cellar and furnace and there was nothing to keep them from staying. Retiring for the duration, if they wanted, didn’t look to him as if they knocked themselves out working at much that would keep them away. They could start voting at town meeting, putting their kids in the school…next thing there’d be stoplights. A subway to take you from the bank to the grocery store. How were you geniuses going to like that, then?

  Carleton Haskell was mean enough when sober, certainly no one was going to argue with him drunk, or even pay much attention. He was even right, though he wouldn’t live to see it. He wouldn’t as a matter of fact live to see Christmas. There were rarely any plumbing facilities on a lobster boat, and most fishermen who fell overboard and drowned had their flies open at the time; the percentage was particularly high among those who fished alone and whose breakfast consisted of spiked coffee. Carleton Haskell’s trailer was hauled away by spring and the land allowed to revert to meadow. The new Christie house was, however, there to stay.

  Nineteen fifty-nine was the year Sydney turned forty. She had never looked better, as she vividly knew. Her health was robust, her golf game was terrific, her elderly relatives were able to care for and amuse themselves, and so, at eleven, fourteen, and going on seventeen, were her children. Eleanor had an au pair job down on the Cape this summer but she and her bunch would all be back by the end of August to spend a week or two falling in and out of love with each other. Monica was having her last year at camp. (Monica loved camp, which made Sydney impatient. The kind of girls in her childhood who loved camp and were good at it were also the kind who had never been nice to her.) Jimmy was in Dundee, going to Scamp Camp in the mornings and tutoring with Mr. Jellison from the academy in the afternoons. The Leeway family went to The Plywoods every Sunday for lobster Newburg after church, but that was pretty much the extent of onerous family obligations that summer. As the August racing series approached, Sydney and Neville and Gladdy Crane decided one evening, after a lot of wine, to charter the Cochrans’ International and race together that season. The boat wasn’t very fast, but they had a wonderful time. They sang barbershop harmony during the doldrums. One race Sydney brought a handful of screws and nuts in her pocket and threw them against Ned Maitland’s mainsail as the fleet rounded a mark; when they heard stray hardware rattling into the cockpit, Ned and Lucie thought their sail was falling down.

  The cockpit of a racing boat is an intimate place. The skipper, or “the nut holding the tiller,” as they called her (Gladdy in this case), devotes total attention to the course, the sails, and the maneuvers of the other boats, trusting her crew to act and react without having to be asked or told. Sydney and Neville were on the jib, with Neville letting off sail on one side as Sydney trimmed in on the other, Neville knowing she needed the winch handle before she had to ask for it, four hands hauling the same sheet when it was too much for two to do alone. On spinnaker legs one trimmed the guy, the other the sheet, standing shoulder to shoulder with eyes never leaving the balloon of sail, lest an edge flutter lead to a curl and then to collapse of the chute. Rufus Maitland, their young muscle, took care of the mainsail. When they rounded the leeward mark, as soon as the jib was hoisted and trimmed, they were crouched together on the floorboards, thrown into the curve of the hull by the angle of heel, sometimes with green water coming over the rail and down their necks, repacking the spinnaker for a second set, pressed close out of Rufus’s way as he rushed to clear and secured the spinnaker halyard, pole, and sheets, before they tacked and lost something overboard. Sydney quoted Neville a lot that summer. “The thing about The Plywoods,” she would say, at a Country Club dinner, or the race tea, or at intermission at Ischl Hall on Sunday afternoons, “is, it shows no respect for the vernacular architecture. You see. Otherwise I wouldn’t mind so much.”

  The final race of the series, they sailed the entire course in formal evening dress. Sydney was wearing a gown of her grandmother Annabelle’s, with a capacious pleated bosom and jet buttons. Gladdy wore the dress she had worn to Elise Maitland’s deb party, with an evening stole, since she could no longer begin to fasten the dress up the back. Neville wore his tuxedo jacket and ruffled shirt and a bathing suit, which caused everyone to whistle and clap for his shapely legs. Beautiful young Rufus Maitland was also wearing an ancient evening dress of his grandmother’s, a flapper job in yellow. Bess Maitland complained that he looked better in it than she had. They didn’t sail very well, but it was agreed at the tea, they won on style hands down.

  When Sydney walked in the front door of Leeway, leaving a dripping spinnaker bag on the porch and carrying her foul-weather gear in her arms, her face was streaked with sun and salt; she was still wearing the bedraggled evening dress. At the same moment, Laurus was coming in at the back, so streaked with soot he looked like a coal miner. They met in the living room, and stared at each other.

  Sydney explained the costume. “I’ve wrecked the hem,” she said, looking down sadly. “Maybe the French laundry in New York can do something with it. It was a panic, though. What are you dressed as?”

  “There was a fire up by the old Burial Ground. Three-alarmer; I’m surprised you didn’t hear the sirens.”

  “We must have already gone to sea. Was anyone hurt?”

  “A horse stepped on Al Pease’s foot. Could be broken. We got all the animals out of the barn, though, and saved the house.”

  “Whose house?”

  They were on their way upstairs, Sydney peeling her finery off over her
head, Laurus taking care not to touch anything with his blackened clothes.

  “Webby Allen’s daughter. Too bad—nice young couple.”

  “That is too bad. You want the shower first?”

  “You go ahead. You must be chilled through.”

  “Thanks.”

  He sat on the closed lid of the flush to pull off his boots, while Sydney got the water steaming and stepped into the bathtub. She pulled the curtain.

  Laurus carefully undressed and dropped each garment into the hamper so he wouldn’t get inky soot on the bath mats and towels. He could tell he smelled like a charred log. In the shower, Sydney began to sing. Laurus sat naked listening to her. It was one of the lieder from her student days; she was showing off for him. He was smiling when she got out of the shower.

  When they were both clean and dressed, Sydney said, “Gladdy and Neville asked us for dinner, her peas are in and they have grilse in the freezer. Can you?”

  “I told Hugh Chamblee I’d help him move a stove.” Hugh Chamblee was the new minister at the Congo church. Asking someone to help move a stove was a way a man asked another in for a drink.

  Sydney just waited. “But I can tell Hugh another night,” said Laurus. Sydney had already told Gladdy they’d be there, so she smiled and went down to give Ellen orders about Jimmy’s supper.

  In the spring of 1962, Laurus was elected president of the local YMCA board. Also, his prize student won a full scholarship to the Juilliard School in New York, the first of her family to get past high school. “A very talented colored girl,” Sydney wrote to her mother. “She’s coming to dinner here with her parents next week.” (She was only sorry she couldn’t be present to watch her mother read the letter.) Eleanor finished her second year at Skidmore College on the dean’s list. Monica was at Miss Pratt’s, and to her father’s satisfaction had an au pair job lined up in Jaderslev, Jutland, working for a married daughter of the Mogens Wessel family, who were so fond of Faster Nina. And Jimmy was expelled from school for the first time.

  Jimmy had been in hot water a couple of times already that spring. Laurus was particularly annoyed when Jimmy and his partner in crime since early childhood, who had a real name but was known as Winky, borrowed Laurus’s elderly Nash Rambler and drove it down the lane to the cemetery, where, in attempting to learn how to use a stick shift without instruction, they succeeded in stripping out the gears. They left the car in the middle of the cemetery drive, ran home, and tried to establish alibis against the fairly inevitable moment when the car would be found and questions asked.

  “I was home! I helped Mom carry the laundry up!”

  “He says he had nothing to do with it,” Sydney added.

  Laurus just stared at the two of them.

  “And I watered the garden, Mom saw me!”

  “So the car drove to the cemetery by itself?”

  “Maybe a bum stole it.”

  There was a long standoff in which Laurus merely looked, mildly but steadily, at Jimmy. If you listened to Sydney you’d have thought that Laurus came and went in an artistic fog, unaware of where the children were or how clean sheets got on the beds or the bills got paid, but now and then, and often at inconvenient moments, one suddenly saw that perhaps this was merely Sydney’s version.

  “May I ask why you left it in the middle of the road?”

  Another long pause. “Winky couldn’t get it out of reverse.”

  Sydney looked at him, surprised. Jimmy had finally dropped his eyes to stare at his sneakers. There was something dark and unpleasant to the shape of his mouth.

  “Winky,” said Laurus. Silence. “And you didn’t think of coming home in reverse?”

  “Yes, but we’re not that good at backing up.”

  Sydney had to turn away for fear of laughing, or making Laurus laugh. Although Laurus did not look so tempted.

  “And it didn’t occur to you to bring the keys with you? You couldn’t make it go anymore so who cares if I ever see it again?”

  Silence.

  “Did it occur to you that you could have had an accident? And you and Winky are underage and unlicensed? And therefore uninsured? Do you know what could have happened to all of us if you had hit someone?”

  Silence. It had not, of course, occurred to Jimmy or Winky. After very little more conversation Laurus informed him that he was grounded for two weeks except to go to school, and that if he touched the steering wheel of a car again before he had his learner’s permit, he would be even sorrier than he was today. ( Jimmy had not mentioned being sorry.) After dinner that night Sydney disappeared with Jimmy into his bedroom, where she listened, murmuring, for a long time to a great deal of complaint.

  “You know,” she said later to Laurus, “there aren’t a lot of thirteen-year-olds who do know about liability insurance.”

  “Did he know he wasn’t allowed to drive?”

  “Yes, but—”

  She dropped it. And was very satisfactorily appreciated by Jimmy when on Saturday she let him go to the movies in the afternoon, knowing Laurus was in New York and wouldn’t be home until Monday. Just their little secret.

  On a Monday afternoon in May, Laurus arrived home from a student recital in which two of his pupils had particularly shone. The lilacs were in bloom and the air smelled of sunlight and cut grass. Monica was home for her one weekend allowed away from school. (At Miss Pratt’s, weekends ran from Saturday noon to Monday evening. Eleanor claimed this was to keep the girls out of sync with the real world, by which she meant the boys’ schools, so there was nothing for Miss Pratt’s girls to do for their weekends off but come home.) From the driveway he could see Monica and her friend Meg sitting in lawn chairs beside the still-covered swimming pool with Latin textbooks in their laps and their faces turned toward the spring sun. Nika, with her fine-boned face and poreless polished skin, looked more and more like Nina at the same age. It was such a moment in the lives of these girls, full of tension and balance, the moment just before they plunged off into the new elements of whatever was going to happen to them. And could anyone prepare them or protect them? No. All people ever did was prepare for the disasters that have already happened. Who could have protected his beloved broken Nina from whatever it was that happened to her?

  He walked across the lawn to them, his footsteps almost silent in the grass.

  “I take it this is the meeting of the Classics Club?”

  The girls’ eyes snapped open. Meg jumped to her feet to shake his hand. “Hi, Mr. Moss.”

  “Hi, honey, it’s nice to see you. Sit down. What’s going on here, pussy cat?” he asked Monica, ruffling her short sleek hair. “Latin exam coming?”

  “Get your helmet, Dad. Mom’s on the warpath.”

  Laurus glanced toward the house. “Why?”

  “Jimmy’s been kicked out of school.” Monica took no pleasure in delivering this news. There had been such a steady drumbeat of expectation in the household from Sydney (who had not exactly triumphed in the educational arena herself ) that they had to get good grades, so they could go to the right boarding school, so as to get into the right colleges, the holy grail in the world according to Sydney…this felt terrifying to Monica, as if her brother had fallen off a moving train and would now lie dazed and ruined somewhere forever while his life roared off without him.

  “I see. Do we know why?”

  “Cheating was mentioned.”

  Laurus looked up at the sound of the kitchen screen door opening. Sydney was there, waiting for him. Her hair was crimped and stiff from a recent permanent wave and she was dressed in cherry-pink shorts and a cable-knit sweater. He went toward her. She didn’t like it when something was afoot and the children got to Laurus before she did.

  “Before you get upset,” said Sydney, with the portentous air of a ten-star general (at least) who has met the enemy, defeated him single-handed, and completed the mop-up operation while everyone else was still trying to get his boots on. This was a familiar spot on her warpath, though a later one th
an Monica had apparently crossed. Sydney was perfectly capable of conducting all parts of a family drama herself, and it was just as well, this manner implied.

  They had retreated to the den and closed the door. “I’m already upset,” said Laurus. “What happened? Where is he?”

  “He’s upstairs. But before you get upset, I want you to know that it’s all taken care of. He can finish the term with a tutor and in the fall he’ll go to the Cañada School in California.”

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa. What the hell is the Cañada School? Let’s get Jimmy down here, I want to hear what happened.”

  “The Cañada School is a very good boarding school in California. He’ll be far away from the troublemakers he hangs around with.”

  “Troublemakers he hangs around with? Winky Sylvester?”

  “I called Gladdy and Neville, and Neville knew exactly what to do, and we’ve both talked to the school and it’s taken care of.”

  “Hold on. Please. You called Gladdy and Neville before you talked to me?”

  “I couldn’t reach you.”

  “I was right where I said I’d be.”

  “I know, but I couldn’t interrupt.”

  They looked at each other steadily. Laurus went out and called up the stairs. “Jimmy?”