Leeway Cottage Page 6

  “All.”

  “Yes.” He stood up. “You should be aware that I tried many times, over the years, to get your father to revise his will. It is simply good practice. But in his later years, business was not…his main interest.”

  Oh, thank you for reminding me, Annabee thought, wishing she could plunge his antique letter opener into his high round little tummy.

  “Goodbye,” she said.

  “Goodbye. Come in anytime you have questions.”

  Annabee was mad at everyone when she got to Dundee that summer. She was furious at her father for falling into a gin bottle and hardly bothering to flap his flabby arms as he went under. It never occurred to him that he had a daughter? That she was defenseless against this awful Mother person without him? She was furious that Leeway Cottage was rented this summer to some strangers from Buffalo. Tom McClintock was living at home selling men’s dry goods at a department store in Philadelphia. Gladdy was a counselor at a girl’s camp on Lake Winnipesaukee. Except for Elise Maitland, who was in Europe seeing all the sights Annabee hadn’t gotten to see, the Depression had finally gotten to almost everybody; even the younger crowd was depleted, with most of the girls busy babysitting and waiting on tables, anything for a little pin money. The only person who could crew for Annabee was poor tragic Homer Gantry, God, he was stupid. She won every race, but so what, they were racing against twelve-year-olds. Just when it seemed things couldn’t get any worse, Mister Christie came for two weeks, with a whole trunkful of sporty little play clothes and straw hats and it was Candace this and Candace that, morning, noon, and night. Annabee spent a lot of time by herself smoking Chesterfields in the shadow of the bridge at the reversing falls, God, it was boring. Mister Christie thought the house enchanting but just a little, you know…

  “Dowdy?” Candace supplied.

  “Well, you said it, not me,” he trilled, and they both laughed wickedly.

  “Everything was perfect in Annabelle’s day, nothing could be touched…”

  “Oh, I know, believe me. You know what would be really smart, though.”

  “Tell me.”

  “I mean, I’m just thinking out loud—”

  “Ber-nard…”

  “Well, what would be really smart would be to get rid of all this chintz, just get rid of it, and do the whole place over in black and gold, with mirrors.”

  Candace stared at him.

  “You hate it. Never mind, I was just thinking out loud…”

  “Brilliant.”

  “You think so?”

  “Brilliant…it’s just what it needs!”

  Candace was like a pointer quivering in the presence of a bevy of quail. So much to demolish! So much to buy! So much to spend!

  Annabee was so angry at both of them she was barely civil. She was so mad that when poor tragic Homer Gantry invited her to a student concert of chamber music at the Ischl Hall summer school, she went. And that was a revelation. Her Dundee world had always seemed to her like theater-in-the-round, with the bowl of the summer people around the bay, with their houses and cars and yachts and parties as the performance. Suddenly she learned that there were multiple stages. There were whole other worlds here, full of color and drama and incident, people making friends, making art, finding God, where no one knew what went on on the Point or cared. Here were people no older than herself, who had spent their golden hours in passionate study, their bodies pulsing with music that coursed out of private inner places and into the hall, causing everyone to see that they were beings apart, they were artists! When she saw a girl her age, no older, with a violin at her chin, give a tiny sign to her colleagues that caused all four, at precisely the second chosen by her, to commence the most gorgeous torrent of sound, she thought she would die of want.

  Here was a world. Of union, of beauty, of belonging. Such as she’d begun to fear didn’t exist.

  At the intermission, Homer turned to her and said, “I thought they took the Haydn a little fast, didn’t you?”

  “A little,” she said. Which had been the Haydn?

  “Would you like some lemonade?”

  Actually, what she wanted was to go home and find her piano music and begin the hours of practice she had balked at when she was ten. She followed Homer out of the hall, where old photographs of the Ischl Quartet and Fritz Kreisler, Ossip Gabrilowitsch, Leopold Auer, Efrem Zimbalist, were hung under the gaze of a stuffed moose head. Outside in the sun, young music students sold punch and cookies. Homer walked up to the girl who had led the string quartet.

  “Ho, there, Homer,” she said.

  “Hello. Took the Haydn a little fast, I thought.”

  “Did you? That’s what Sasha thought too. Well, come back Sunday, maybe you’ll like it better.”

  “I will. Zondra, this is my friend Annabee Brant.”

  The goddess of music gave Annabee a smile. “How do you do? Did you think the Haydn was too fast?”

  Before Annabee had to answer, another of the musicians came up and announced that a party was leaving to swim. Did they want to come? Zondra did. Homer said no, they wanted to hear the rest of the program.

  “All right,” said Zondra. “Are you coming tonight?”

  “To what?”

  “Cookout. At the Obers’ camp on Third Pond.”

  Homer looked at Annabee. Did she want to go? She did. And she would be welcome among these superior beings? Apparently.

  “Good,” said Zondra. “Can you give Elsie and me a ride?”

  On the way to pick up Zondra and Elsie, Annabee said to Homer, “I’m changing my name.”

  “Okay. Which one?”

  “I want to be called Sydney.”

  “Annabee Sydney?”

  “Sydney Brant.”

  “Okay. Why?”

  “I’m just done. I’m done being Annabee. Sydney is my middle name. I’ll be A. Sydney.”

  “Okay.”

  Annabee was completely astonished to find that for the rest of the summer she was doing something that resembled keeping company with Homer. Who dutifully struggled to call her Sydney when he remembered. The music students were lively, welcoming, serious about music but otherwise playful. They were snobs about nothing except talent. Annabee could understand not more than half of the musical banter, the teasing of the pair suspected of hanging the sign in the hall that said “Exit here in case of Brahms,” the ones who loved Schoenberg, the ones who loathed him, the gossip about the faculty, who couldn’t play anymore, who pinched the girls. At home, when no one could hear, she did go back to playing the piano. One afternoon at the hall she was asked to turn pages for a handsome boy called Josef who was playing a Schubert fantasy for a master class. She was as thrilled as if she’d been asked to play the piece herself.

  She loved that they didn’t know where she lived, she loved that they assumed she had been living and breathing music since toddlerhood, they thought everybody had. Homer wanted her to give a party at The Elms for them all, but she wouldn’t even talk about it. She didn’t want them meeting Candace, she didn’t want Candace meeting them. And she knew that if they saw her in that pompous house it would change everything.

  “And how is your daughter’s school year going?” asked Candace’s dinner partner over the consommé at a party in Hunting Valley that October.

  “It’s a bit of a mess,” said Candace.

  The man, who she believed was named Bill, was mildly startled, as in his experience mothers could be counted upon to have nothing but exceptional children. He’d forgotten the daughter’s name but had expected to hear Mrs. Brant drone on about her through the soup course, which would leave him free to eat.

  “Ah?”

  “First she decides to change her name. Now she thinks she wants to go to college. It’s ridiculous. What good does it do those girls? They just come home and turn into the kind of female who’s always running around asking people to give money to things. It’s not as if Anna were an intellectual.”

  “I see.”

>   “I think she should take a lovely finishing year in Florence or somewhere. Then if she wants to do something useful before she gets married she can join the Junior League. But no. You’ll never believe what she said to me this morning. She said, ‘Mother, I’d like to learn to cook.’” Candace did a very good Annabee imitation.

  “Cook?”

  “That’s what I said. I said, ‘Cook? What on earth do you want to learn to cook for?’ And she said she’d been to a picnic or hoedown or something this summer where the family lived in a cabin and the mother did the cooking. Can you imagine the sort of thing?”

  He could, actually.

  “I said, ‘Fine, but what kitchen do you plan on using?’ She said, ‘This one.’ I said, ‘Velma’s kitchen, you mean? And when she quits, are you going to do the interviewing and hiring, and firing when the new ones turn out to be drunk or pregnant?’”

  “Or—”

  “Yes, not know how to turn on the stove…Children have no idea, do they? The cook I had before Velma couldn’t cook but she could eat—she was so fat she broke the toilet seat in the servants’ bathroom. And before that—oh, before that was the one who got drunk during Anna’s birthday party. Here I am, trying to give her a perfect day, with thirty little children all washed and starched and waiting for their creamed chicken, waiting and waiting, and when I went to the kitchen, the cook was completely drunk, in tears because I didn’t love her.”

  The dinner partner started to laugh.

  “You laugh—that wasn’t the worst, the worst was that she was sitting on the birthday cake at the time.”

  He laughed louder.

  “She was—I had ordered one from the baker to save her trouble, ‘Happy Birthday, Annabee,’ it said, with an elaborate picture of a merry-go-round in icing. Anna was mad for carnival rides of all sorts at the time. The chauffeur had left it on the kitchen bench and this creature was sitting on it. Too fat to notice.”

  The dinner partner was laughing so much the hostess looked down the table to see what was happening. Bill for his part was extremely sorry when the next course was served and he had to turn to the partner on his left. He thought Mrs. Brant was delightful.

  Annabee couldn’t see how she was going to get out of the box she was in. She wanted her mother’s respect. She couldn’t imagine making life plans without her blessing. And yet everything her mother pictured for her future struck Annabee with horror. To go to Europe to be “finished”? Then loll around Cleveland waiting for some booby to marry her? There had to be something better than that. Yet whom could she talk to? Elise was going to Vassar, but Elise was brilliant. And Elise’s mother was “one of those females who serve on boards and run around asking people to give money to things.” Gladdy was going to be finished, and she thought that was fine. Her father couldn’t afford four years of college for her. She felt lucky that she’d have the year in Rome.

  College? As a matter of fact Annabee wasn’t an intellectual; higher math was agony for her and she hadn’t a very large curiosity. She didn’t even much like to read. She couldn’t think of a time since her father died when she’d been as happy as she was onstage. She’d been more than herself, something great, something good, then. Life was rich when you had a passion. The young musicians she’d met knew who they were and what they wanted to do with every spare minute. Annabee wanted that. She wanted to cook wonderful food and grow beautiful flowers and get better and better at something besides bridge.

  And in this state of suspension and confusion, she got up every morning, went through the day in her saddle shoes and brown blazer, doing what was expected of her, exactly as if she wanted nothing more than this life, forever, nothing more than being an inferior version of her mother, for that was certainly all she would attain to, if she held to the current plan. And would that have pleased Candace? Possibly.

  After Christmas, Candace began talking of giving Anna a ball of her own in June. It wasn’t much done, the private parties, in these economic times. All the more reason to give everyone a treat, said Candace. “If Jimmy were alive, he’d insist,” said Candace. (Since his death, Annabee noticed her mother had acquired the ability to read her father’s mind, speak for him, and be his interpreter on earth.) “You can invite your friends from Dundee and have a house party.”

  The party was to be in early June, at the Kirtland Club. Several families planned dinners beforehand, and all the girls in Annabee’s class, including the ones who had not concealed the fact that they couldn’t stand her, were now bubbly, thrilled at the fun of a party on the grand scale, as it used to be done. Several of the girls had been allowed to buy new dresses for it, which Yvonne at the Band Box was pleased about. But when it came to dressing Anna, Candace decided that this time, Cleveland was too small for her. Over the Easter break, she and Annabee took the train to New York and checked in at the Waldorf.

  They had a lovely week. Annabee spent most of the time with Elise Maitland, and Gladdy came up from Philadelphia for two nights. Elise and a friend from her Chapin days showed Annabee Greenwich Village, and they went to the opera one afternoon while the mothers played bridge. It was a first for Annabee. She couldn’t decide—did she want to be Elise, suavely hailing a cab and insisting politely at the box office that she preferred the dress circle, center, to a box with partial view? (What did it mean?) Or the soprano, in her majestic magenta nightgown, dying at the top of her lungs throughout the final act? One morning she even went off by herself (on the subway!) to meet Zondra at the Mannes School. The hubbub of music making, the dissonant noises from the practice rooms, the laughter and confident chat in the halls seemed a vision of heaven to Sydney, as Zondra called her.

  There were the mornings at Saks and at Bergdorf ’s, and finally a dress of ivory satin with a dropped waist and a tulle overskirt that all agreed emphasized Anna’s best points and was made for dancing. She could hardly believe her mother was saying yes. “It’s so expensive, for a dress I’ll wear once…”

  “You like it, don’t you?”

  “I love it.”

  “Well, then. You could add a train and some lace and wear it to be married in.”

  “Yes, indeed you could,” said the saleswoman, hardly believing her luck.

  By the time they boarded the train home, Annabee felt as if her blood had turned into light. She was shining. She and her mother played honeymoon bridge as the train rattled west in the dark night.

  Gradually through the wet weeks of May, Annabee felt herself floating on emotional thermals that seemed always to buoy her upward. Candace was always at Annabee’s side, consulting her about the dance band, the silver printing on the matchbook covers for the party, the menu for supper, the decorations, whether to serve coffee and bouillon at the door as guests waited for their cars, or just let them drive home drunk. Mr. Christie suggested champagne glasses with Annabee’s monogram for the guests to take home. Candace thought this, too, was a marvelous idea.

  Annabee was almost sick with anticipation the day of the party. She was terrified of not having fun, or of having fun and being punished for it. But Gladdy was full of happy confidence and Annabee tried to imitate her. At a lunch party, while Annabee could hear in her head what slightly malicious thing Candace would say afterward about the food, or the decorations, there before her was kind, wholehearted Gladdy saying, “How delicious! Thank you so much, I never had a better time,” and meaning it. If Gladdy and Annabee stood at the top of a staircase, Gladdy was filled with anticipation of the pleasure awaiting below, while Annabee was filled with the knowledge that she would probably trip on the way down, and that Candace would not be a bit surprised.

  To the Talbot family’s dinner for the debutantes before the dance, Annabee wore a short dress and the sapphire dinner ring from Egypt, and Gladdy, dressed in the only evening dress she had, said she’d never seen a human being look prettier than Annabee. There were toasts and good cheer and even Annabee began to forget to be nervous. This wasn’t so bad. The moon was full, she was ov
er her period and would not bleed on her clothes, and it seemed possible that nothing would go wrong after all. Toby Talbot and Tom McClintock were her escorts. Tom looked piercingly handsome, and even Homer Gantry was looking pretty good; he called her Sydney, he had a tall silk opera hat, and kept doing a rather funny imitation of Bertie Wooster.

  When the dinner was almost over, Ralph came to the door to drive Annabee to the club to change for the dance. At the last minute darling Gladdy went along to help.

  In the room Candace had taken for Anna to change in, Maudie had laid out everything she needed, before rushing off to dress Mrs. Brant. There were her new long gloves, her new ivory shoes, extra silk stockings, the long silk petticoat, and the ivory dress, the beautiful dress, with its deeply scooped neck and its shimmering skirt.

  They got her out of her dinner dress without getting any lipstick or powder on it. They got her into her shoes and petticoat. Annabee puffed herself with powder and flapped her arms to be sure she was dry in the armpits. Gladdy held up The Dress, and Annabee stepped into it. She watched herself in the mirror as Gladdy hooked her up and she and the dress became one.

  “Annabee! Look at you!” Gladdy cried, straightening.

  Annabee smiled. Yes, indeed. Her hair, which had been done that afternoon, was swept up onto her head and gleaming. The dress made her neck look like a swan’s.

  Maudie hurried in.

  “I’m sorry, Miss Anna.” She was supposed to help Annabee dress, but Candace had suddenly needed her instead.

  “It’s all right. Gladdy’s here.”

  “Hey, that looks pretty good on you!”

  “Pretty good! She’s a goddess!” said Gladdy.

  “Could you do this necklace for me, Maudie?” She was wearing her mother’s pearls. She had not made a peep about them. Let her mother wear Granabelle’s pearls; let her be buried in them. Annabee was young and looked wonderful. That was enough.