Leeway Cottage Page 3

  “Now when we have guests there will be at least a minimum of comfort,” Candace said.

  “When was there ever not?” James countered, but at once regretted it. Candace gave him The Look.

  “I couldn’t invite my family, with the rooms the way they were.”

  “I see,” said James. “I think I’ll go down now and see how Osgood is getting along.” He did the rest of his tour of inspection at another time, and by himself. He said nothing about the changes except to order that a leather chair that had been his father’s, which Candace had sent to the servants’ sitting room on the third floor, be brought back to his study.

  “I’ve asked Lizzie to bring Anna in to say good night, before we go out to dinner,” said Candace that evening. He’d been there for some six hours and still hadn’t been given a chance to see his daughter.

  “Who is Anna?”

  “Your little girl, my silly.”

  “Annabee?”

  “Do you know that that woman at the post office with the grande poitrine is known as Nellabee to one and all?”

  “Nella B. Foss?”

  “Yes.”

  “Yes, I know it. I’ve known her for donkey’s years. And …?”

  “Doesn’t it strike you that the ‘Annabee’ business is a little…”

  “What?”

  “Could you help me with my little pearls, please, lovey? The catch is hard, it’s so tiny.”

  He put on his glasses and went to her at her dressing table. “The ‘Annabee’ business is a little…?” He wanted to hear her finish the sentence. She wanted him to read her mind and agree with her. He fastened the clasp at the back of her neck in silence.

  “Oh…is a little…common.”

  James didn’t say anything. He stood behind her and met her eyes in the mirror of the dressing table.

  “Not the person, I mean. Mrs. Foss is a lovely person, all wool and a yard wide, as my daddy would say. I just mean the name.”

  There was a long pause. “Where is it we’re going for dinner?”

  “The McClintocks,” said Candace.

  “Thank God,” said James.

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s a house where you can still be sure of getting a drink.”

  There was a polite knock, and Lizzie opened the door. Annabee, pink from a bath and wearing a long linen nightgown and matching robe and slippers, bolted for her father.

  “Annabee!”

  “Daddybee!”

  James scooped her up and swung her around and around. After they kissed each other they buzzed, zzzzz, zzzz, at each other and laughed.

  “Jimmy, she just had supper…if you twirl her around, she’ll upchuck.”

  “No she won’t, not my honeybee.” He put her down, but didn’t stop smiling and didn’t let go of her hand. “Look how brown you are!”

  “Gladdy and Tom and I are going to be Indians when we grow up!”

  “That’s a wonderful plan.”

  “I have three arrowheads in my room, I found them!”

  “Yes, there’s a shell heap full of arrowheads on the McClintocks’ land, you’ll hear all about it. It’s so interesting,” said Candace. “Anna, do you want to put on perfume with Mummy?”

  Annabee shouted, “Yes!” and Candace looked at Lizzie and made a small gesture, as if the noise had hurt her ears, couldn’t Lizzie teach this child to behave like a lady?

  “Come here then, dear. We’ll use this one tonight, now you—No! Oh, for heaven’s sake, no, you don’t just douse yourself…”

  Annabee had eagerly seized the intended bottle, pointed at herself, and squeezed the atomizer bulb. Now she looked dismayed, and her mother softened. “You do it like this, watch Mummy.” Candace stood and sprayed the scent into the air before her and then stepped forward, with her eyes closed. She inhaled and opened them. “You see? You spray, then step into it, spray and step into it…” She pantomimed this action several more times, as if demonstrating a maneuver of daunting complexity. “That way the scent breathes around you all evening.” Finally she handed the bottle back to her daughter, who tried her best to imitate her mother this time. “Very good, now that’s enough, though, lovey, it’s very expensive…”

  And had mostly wound up on the rug. But Annabee quivered like a puppy, hoping her mother was now pleased with her.

  Candace and James were either out or entertaining every night of James’s stay that summer. They gave one large dinner, with dancing afterward, while Candace’s mother and sister (with family) were staying, and people drove over from Mount Desert for it. James ran into old Gus Dodge at Abbott’s the next day.

  “Heard you had quite a wingding out to your house last night,” Gus said to him.

  “We did.”

  “Heard it was some fancy.”

  “It was so fancy I didn’t know half the people there,” said James.

  Gus laughed. “Not your idea of rusticating?”

  “If I’d wanted to spend every night in a dinner jacket I could have stayed in Cleveland,” James said.

  Gus gathered his purchases and counted his change. “Let me know if you want to come in for a hand of poker down to the firehouse. Thursday nights, it’s come-as-you-are.”

  “Thank you, Gus. There’s nothing I’d like better. I trust you’ll come around and explain where I’ll be to Mrs. Brant?” Gus laughed, and so did Max Abbott behind the counter. After James had gone out, Max said, “I’ll look forward to that, Gus.”

  “To what?”

  “Hearing you explain to Mrs. Brant that he’ll be down at the firehouse playing poker.”

  “I’ll save you a ringside seat,” said Gus.

  James was, at least, allowed to spend his afternoons with Annabee. They went sailing in one of the yacht club’s small tubby sailboats, aptly named Brutal Beasts. Annabee loved it when the boat tipped, and adored the peaceful hours of sun and high blue sky alone with her father. They went swimming at the bathing beach if the tide was in, otherwise they went over to the salt pond and swam from the dock that had once belonged to the cellist from the Ischl Quartet, now owned by a family named Cluett. One day, when Kermit Horton announced the mackerel were running, James hired a fisherman named Tom Crocker to take them out trolling. It was pouring rain, but not cold. James and Annabee stood in their yellow oilskins and baited hooks with bacon. They had five lines with multiple hooks off the stern of the Ruth E, and once the mackerel struck, they hit so fast and furiously that two people couldn’t pull the lines in fast enough. Rain dripped from their sou’westers down their necks as they dumped the wriggling fish into a bucket, where they gawped their mouths and flopped until more came in on top of them. James and Annabee laughed with delight, and the rainwater ran into their mouths, as they rebaited the hooks and pulled in the lines hand over fist until they had filled two buckets.

  “Had enough?” their boatman asked.

  “I think we’ve got all we can handle, Captain Crocker. Annabee never eats more than two buckets of fish at a sitting.” Annabee giggled, giddy. Tom Crocker turned the boat around, heading back through the sheets of rain and slate-gray seas for the inner harbor. James stood in the stern cleaning mackerel on a blood-scarred board, throwing the guts to the seagulls, who screeched and cried and wheeled overhead, until they filled the air above the boat’s wake in a great noisy cloud. At the wheel, Tom Crocker stared straight ahead, and now and then took a pull from a flask he kept in the bib pocket of his oilskins and called his “hired man.”

  Until she was an old lady, Annabee remembered that day as one of the happiest of her life. She and her daddy went in by the kitchen porch when they got home, since Candace had turned the family mudroom into a swagged and carpeted “ladies’ cloakroom.”

  They left their wet slickers on the kitchen porch and were bundled into towels by Maudie, the upstairs maid, and led up the back stairs to take hot showers without disturbing Candace’s bridge party. When they were dry and dressed, they went to the kitchen where Velma had
soaked the mackerel in milk. Annabee sat with her daddy and watched as Velma dredged the fish in cornmeal and fried it in a huge iron spider. They ate at the kitchen table until they couldn’t eat another bite. Annabee, who never actually liked fish much in later life, remembered that meal as ambrosial.

  “You should just taste it once!” said Annabee, when she was brought in to say good night, wanting her mother to share the joy of the afternoon.

  “Lovey, that is trash fish,” said her mother.

  “You’re missing something,” said James. “Fresh caught…” But he didn’t push it. Candace had turned from her dressing table to give him The Look. Which meant, in this case, One more word, and I will tell you in front of this child what I think of you for deigning to put that cat food in your mouth.

  Full or not, James was required to climb into his dinner clothes and go out to an evening party. The party was an “all-talky” as Candace archly called entertainments that didn’t include contract bridge, at which she excelled. At the party, Candace apologized all through the meal for her husband’s rudeness in eating so little; the rest of the mackerel was ordered fed to the servants.

  James had protested, when Candace announced she was bringing her own household help with her instead of hiring locals, as his mother had done, that they would be lonely, Negro servants on the coast of Maine. Candace shrugged and said, “They’ll survive.” Her own staff knew how she liked to be served, and it made it easier for her. She didn’t add that if they had to keep to themselves, she’d be just as happy. She didn’t like to find herself dealing with people at Abbott’s who knew all the backstairs chat from her household.

  But it turned out James was wrong about the servants being lonely. There were a number of other households in the colony with colored help, and more in adjoining villages up the coast. When Candace gave her dancing party she had borrowed staff from her new friends to help serve refreshments and midnight supper; as a result her servants made backdoor friends with the servants from other houses and had quite a social life of their own. Mr. Britton’s driver Zeke began beauing Maudie; he took her on a picnic up Butter Hill on her day out, which Candace thought simply too droll. And on a Thursday night in August, the entire domestic staff of The Elms went off with Zeke in Mr. Britton’s big Packard car to the Colored Owl’s Ball in Orland. This was no inconvenience, as Candace was going out to play bridge that evening, and Peggy Somerville, the social secretary, who really was lonely, said she’d be glad to take care of Anna.

  When Candace arrived home at ten, Miss Somerville heard the car in the drive and hurried over from the nursery wing.

  “Good evening, Peg. Was she a trial?” Candace gathered her gloves and bag from the car and got out, leaving it in the driveway for Osgood to put away. The two women walked into the main house.

  “I’m afraid she wet the bed, I’m so sorry.” Miss Somerville brought some anxiety to this confession.

  “Didn’t you make sure she ‘went’ before you put her to bed?”

  “Yes, I did, and I asked her again after I read her a story. She swore she didn’t have to.”

  Candace stared at her. Her eyes were cold and her nostrils fluttered, a bad sign with Candace. Miss Somerville stood her ground, but blinked like a pigeon.

  Finally Candace said, “I thought we were through with that.”

  Miss Somerville said nothing.

  “Well,” said Candace. She strode off toward the scene of the disaster. Miss Somerville bobbed along behind her, trying not to wring her hands or twitter.

  When Candace arrived in Annabee’s room, the child was asleep. Her mother yanked the door open with a sound like a rifle shot. Annabee snapped awake and sat up, confused and staring, all in one motion. Her mother clicked on the overhead lights, which washed out the comforting circle of yellow night-light on her bedside table, cast by a small bulb like an egg held in the paw of a painted wooden bunny rabbit.

  Candace looked at her daughter and Annabee looked back. Actually, Candace did not see a child before her. She saw a humanoid being made of an uncontrolled and uncontrollable substance, the only thing in her life, now that her mother-in-law was dead, that couldn’t be compelled to behave in the way she required. You could give it orders, but it still shouted when it should speak normally, upchucked, ran fevers, ran when it should walk, broke things, sat with its knees splayed like a boy, soiled its underpants, lost its new shoes, and wet the bed.

  Candace stared down. Annabee met her eyes as much as she could, trying to guess if defiance or apology would help, and if not, would anything?

  Candace hurtled off into the bathroom and returned with the laundry hamper. She pulled out a wet sheet and stood holding it, looking down. To Annabee she looked nine feet tall. Without a word, but with a gesture of distaste, Candace let the sheet drop back into the hamper. She strode to Annabee’s dressing table for the broad-backed hairbrush. She strode back to the bed and jerked the clean covers off Annabee; taking her arm, she flipped her over onto her stomach. She pulled up the cotton-knit nightgown with pink satin bows threaded into the hem. She pulled down the little cotton underpants, not so easy to do, since Annabee now had her legs rigid and clamped together, all her muscles tensed tight against what was coming. Candace spanked her as hard as she could, blow after blow with the back of the hairbrush. Miss Somerville counted the slapping sounds from out in the hall.

  And events proved that Candace had done quite right that evening, as Annabee never wet her bed again, for as long as she had the use of her wits. (When she lost these, she became suddenly and spectacularly incontinent, but that was many years in the future, when everyone who might have made some sense out of the way her life began and the way it finished was long since unable to testify on the subject, including herself.)

  For Christmas in 1926 James gave Annabee her own Brutal Beast, painted yellow and named Honeybee. It was bobbing on its mooring when she arrived at The Elms the summer of 1927. Tom and Gladdy McClintock appeared within minutes to crow over her return and the new boat. They were off in it at once to sail to town for ice-cream cones and after that were out on the water almost every fine day. They sailed to the yacht club, around to the east side of the bay to visit the Maitlands, even out to Beal Island to poke around the abandoned houses. Business was booming and times were good; James also bought himself a sloop called Toccata, but the first time he took Candace out sailing, the wind came up, the boat tipped, she was splashed, and her hat blew off. She was filled with satirical remarks the rest of the summer about Some People’s ideas of pleasure. Then the children began winning sailing races. Candace, who liked winners, became sorry she couldn’t go out to watch. She demanded that James commission a motor launch for her, like the mahogany lake boats she had envied in her childhood. James ignored the fact that the boat she wanted was utterly inappropriate for tidal waters. He wrote to John Alden in Boston and commissioned one. When it arrived the next summer, the boat was noisy, very wet in any kind of chop, and wildly difficult for the boatman to get into and out of when the boat was on the mooring, but no one said a word to Candace about that, for fear she would start complaining about the tides, which no amount of money could correct.

  James hired young Harry Allen as boatman for the launch and provided him with a dashing uniform. This was necessary, since the Maitlands had in the bay a hundred-foot yacht with several dozen in crew who lived aboard and never were seen out of their crisp blue jerseys and spotless white trousers, with the yacht’s name embroidered on every garment. Bess Maitland reported that the laundry for the crew alone was simply staggering, and claimed she wished her husband would buy a sweet little boat like Toccata that they could sail by themselves, but of course her husband didn’t do anything of the kind, and a standard had been set.

  Annabee was skippering Honeybee this year, with Gladdy as crew. In July little Elise Maitland had won almost every race, but by August Annabee started to beat her, and once that happened, Candace was out every race day, sitting grandly in the f
orward compartment of her launch wearing a linen duster and carrying a parasol, being driven from mark to mark as if in a limousine. When Annabee won, her mother came to the tea at the yacht club following the race. When she lost, Candace went straight home.

  There was a wide group of children who sailed together, raced against each other, holed up at Leeway on rainy days, playing charades, or mah-jongg, or invading the kitchen to make fudge. Gladdy McClintock’s birthday became a favorite summer holiday. One year, Professor McClintock turned their whole living room into a spiderweb, and twenty children shrieked and laughed, tumbling over each other, trying to untangle it, each following her own string to a prize hidden behind books or under the window-seat cushions. Another year, there was a treasure hunt that took bands of children all over the Point deciphering clues, and yet another year, a scavenger hunt, during which they could walk, sail, paddle, or row but were not allowed to ride in anything with a motor. Even so, one team (Elise Maitland’s) succeeded in bringing in every item on the list, including a live goat.

  There was a maiden lady from Bryn Mawr named Violet Holmes on the Point who was raising her three orphaned nieces, Andie, Betty, and Lucie Cochran. Her cottage, Sherlock Holmes, was built right on the ledge overhanging the harbor, with porches wrapping around three sides, and heart-stopping views of the sunset. All the children on the Point called her “Aunt Violet,” and loved her. Every August, Aunt Violet had a “measuring party.” Each child stood against the porch wall to have her height marked on the shingles with her name and the date. The child who had grown the most since the year before won a prize. Once it was Annabee; often it was Lucie Cochran or willowy Elise Maitland and once it was Tom McClintock. It was never Gladdy. Gladdy was built like a fireplug. She had a quiet but bubbling sense of humor, and a gentleness that was universally felt and loved; physical beauty would never be among her personal glories, but no one ever born noticed that less than Gladdy. Of all Annabee’s friends, in Cleveland and Dundee, Gladdy was the one who made her feel completely loved for herself, not her boat or the size of her house or her father’s money. Most of all it was Gladdy who provided a counterbalance against the bewildering fact that Annabee’s mother so patently disliked her.