Leeway Cottage (12 page)

It was August. Kaj would be working at the hospital in Copenhagen and Nina had a summer job in Jutland, taking care of some small children, but probably they got to Fyn for some weekends. Probably Aunt Tofa was there too, mending socks or knitting someone a jumper. After breakfast his mother and Aunt Tofa played four hands on the piano. It was a favorite morning sound, Aunt Tofa crying “Halt!” as she missed a trill or got tangled in her fingering, and the sound of the two sisters laughing.

And were there Germans in their pompous uniforms passing on the road outside? He didn't want to picture it, but he did.

 

Denmark was too small, and had allowed itself to be swallowed too quietly, to garner much attention in the American news, and even if you could get them there was no point reading Danish papers, which were censored. But once in a while an intrepid traveler would bring Laurus a newspaper from Stockholm, or better yet, the anti- appeasement
Handels-Och Sjöfartstidning
from G?oteborg, which would carry Danish news. Apparently many Swedes expected that the Germans were going to win in the end, and were striving to like it. From Swedish accounts it seemed that most Danes, or very many, were thinking the same way. The papers did report that the Danes had perfected a technique called the “cold shoulder.” He pictured everyone, from the king to his gentle father, with his love of puns and his courtly manners, pretending not to see the Germans so they didn't have to bow or nod. It hurt Laurus just to think about it. What must it cost to do it?

In November, Elise Maitland, in town for Thanksgiving, told Sydney and Laurus that Mrs. McClintock was dying. Neville and Glad had moved back to Philadelphia to be near her and to help Gladdy's father.

 

The life here is at an end,
Professor McClintock wrote in the guest book, when he closed Leeway Cottage in September. He had to carry his wife to the car, when the time came to go home, and he knew she would never be back. Getting her home was like transporting a cracked egg. He had her wrapped and bolstered into the front seat, and with every mile he feared that some bump or curve taken too fast would break her open, and the creeping poisoned larvae that were hatching all over her insides would cascade out loose in the car. When he got home, he wrote to Gertrude Abbott, the town realtor, to put Leeway on the market. That was like a death before the death. The McClintocks had hoped their grandchildren would grow up there. But they couldn't afford the house and the illness too, and the children could not yet afford to take it over. Neville Crane was just starting architecture school and neither Gladys nor her brother, Tom, had any money of their own.

But it's an ill wind that blows nobody good. Sydney Brant Moss had never had an unhappy moment at Leeway Cottage. When they heard that the house was for sale, she barely stopped to talk it over with Laurus before she bought it.

T
HE
L
EEWAY
C
OTTAGE
G
UEST
B
OOK

In fact, it was thoroughly strange to be there, not as a child and a guest of the house but as the mistress of it. As was the custom in the summer colony, the house had changed hands with all of its furnishings, in fact with virtually all of its contents. No one in the McClintock family had been able to bear to go in to harvest personal belongings. The McClintocks' sheets were on the beds. Their books were on the shelves, their games in the sea chests and window seats. Tommy McClintock's red and black plaid lumber jacket hung in the downstairs closet. He had worn that jacket all the summer that he was in love with Elise Maitland, and Sydney was in love with him. There were old slickers in various sizes with the yellow rubber flaking off, a dozen tennis rackets, untold pairs of sneakers, and a Cornell letter sweater of Dr. McClintock's that Gladdy used to wear. Even Portia and Ellen Chatto, sisters who had “done” for the McClintocks for years, had chosen to stay on at Leeway.

Mrs. McClintock had died in the spring. Her monogrammed towels were in the bathrooms, and a cardigan sweater Sydney had seen her wear a hundred times lay folded on a shelf in the bedroom closet. When Sydney lifted it down there was a whisper of her scent, something like lemon verbena. A rumpled handkerchief was in the pocket. Her most intimate things, underwear and so forth, had been removed by Portia, but there were cast-off bits of her outer shell everywhere. She had been the kind of mother who extended her cheerful love to shelter any number of young friends of her children or children of her friends, who found their way to her eaves and porches like starving birds in the snow to a cache of suet and sunflower seeds.

Sydney realized as she walked through the rooms of Leeway that her own mother had never been able to stand Molly McClintock. How interesting that she hadn't seen that until now, from here. Candace, with her jewels and her servants and her big bazoom, had been jealous of the dumpy impecunious professor's wife who had loved so many people.

Sydney was standing in the big front bedroom, Dr. and Mrs. McClintock's room, with the four-poster double bed (no Hays Office twin beds here) and the sleeping porch beyond. From downstairs she heard Laurus begin to play the piano. It was the Romanze of Brahms; she'd never heard him play it before, though she had tried it herself, at least the easy part in F major. Sydney stood listening, looking down the lawn and over the trees to the wide blue water. Her heart was full. To live in such peace and beauty, and with such music!

Laurus looked up as he was finishing the piece to see his wife standing in the doorway of the great room. The fading light was behind her, outlining her strong figure, her dark hair half falling down from where she had pinned it.

He got up. “Tomorrow, the piano tuner. What are you smiling at?”

“I just realized,” she said. “This is what it feels like to have a happy family.”

 

Nineteen forty-one was Laurus's first full summer in Dundee. He made the village his own as if overnight. He taught piano at Ischl Hall, coached a chamber group, and performed at concerts on Sunday afternoons. He soon had friends among the musicians and among the music lovers. But he equally relished the local men he met in the post office or at the garage, taciturn men with droll wits and immense competence in the physical universe. His proudest moment in the summer was the day Kermit Horton asked him to join the volunteer fire department.

Knowing Laurus would be busy at the hall much of the time, Sydney had pledged to herself that she would spend the summer working on her keyboard skills and practicing new repertoire. If she didn't begin to prepare another recital, Madame Dumitrescu was going to stop taking her seriously. But as the days unfolded so did another, as yet unsuspected, aspect of her personality, like a ball of paper, crumpled under kindling, that suddenly opens up and spreads itself when it catches fire.

She owned a house! It was hers! She could do whatever she wanted to it! She could care for it and alter it, change its shapes and colors, and every single thing she did would say to people, This
is what Sydney is like,
This
is what Sydney likes,
This
is what Sydney can do!
When she walked into the den and looked at the wallpaper, really looked at it, she could barely restrain herself from peeling it off. She pictured clean paint, a pale blue, for this room, with white on all the moldings. She'd go into the kitchen looking for a palette knife or spatula with which to start prying off wallpaper, and become transfixed, planning how much better
this
room would look if you took out the wall dividing the pantry from the kitchen and moved the stove over
there,
and then…

She spent so much time at the hardware store and the lumberyard that she was on a first-name basis with all the clerks. She bought drop cloths and paint buckets, brushes and hammers, putty knives and sandpaper. She was often seen downtown wearing painter's overalls with scrapers and rags sticking out of her many pockets, and her hair in a bandana. Sydney, talking on the street corner with this or that tradesman, quizzing Mutt Dodge about how to strip the paint off a door or Maynard Pease about how to fix the sink in the powder room. The first time she was discovered in this happy occupation by her mother, who was walking with Mr. Christie from the post office to Abbott's grocery (about the longest distance Mr. Christie was willing to travel on foot), all her mother could say to her was, “Oh, for
heaven's
sake.”

 

As for Laurus, the more Dundee felt like home, the more he saw Germans all over it. His body was in America, and he was too polite to impose his own preoccupations on others, but as he came and went in this peaceful village, he never ceased to be a man whose homeland had been invaded.

When he stood in the cool dark reading room of the library, and the front door opened, letting a sudden square of sunlight fall into the room between two walls of books, he helplessly imagined soldiers in uniform, black shapes in the doorway, wearing their heavy-browed helmets and big boots that made their feet seem like weapons. What if he turned and they were there, letting the door close behind them, as they advanced on Mrs. Pease at the circulation desk? All these people in the room are pretending not to notice them. The small boy and girl, sitting cross-legged in the children's book section, go on reading
The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins,
or
Kabumpo in Oz.
The cellist from down the Neck goes on reading the Boston newspaper. Mrs. Pease, though, will have to speak to them. Will she smile, as she does to everyone else? Or will she pretend that she cannot help them? And if she pretends that and they don't believe her, what do they do? How do they show their displeasure?

When he came out of Abbott's store he noticed the small group of teenagers sitting on the steps of the town hall across the street. They were always there, they or others like them. They were smoking cigarettes and lounging, filling idle hours by trying to look dangerous. Dundee was dead as a doornail in the summer if you weren't rich, or unusually smart, or old enough for a better job than raking blueberries. (Which aren't in until August anyway.) He watched their expressions as a large new convertible, a Packard, made the turn from the Carleton Point Road and headed through town toward the yacht club. It was filled with kids from away, summering in the colony, driving Daddy's fancy car probably to go sailing on someone's yacht. He saw the flat look in the eyes of the boys on the steps. What would happen to those boys, with their disappointments and their understandable resentment, when the Germans arrived with their uniforms and their big cars and their conviction that they deserve to rule the world? Would those boys find pride in themselves and outlets for anger in sabotaging the big German cars, in making the invaders' lives miserable and their work impossible? Or would they find pride in themselves and outlets for their anger in also donning uniforms, and the big shiny boots? In demanding respect from those who owed them none? Could he see those boys smiling and blocking the sidewalk as students from the Hall, carrying instrument cases, tried to make their way to the drugstore for a soda or back to their boardinghouses? Students whom even some of the nicest of the old-timers, who appeared to think they were merely noticing and embracing exotics, called “the fiddling Jews.”

Everyone said the war would never reach these shores, no such thing could ever happen here. But that was irrelevant. It could happen, period. It
was
happening. What did his father do if invaders gave him an order or asked a question? Pretend not to speak German? Or smile kindly? His father who believed if you treat all human beings exactly the same, with respect and love, they will be incapable of returning you something else. What did Kaj do if they came to him in their green uniforms to have their wounds dressed, their upset stomachs cured? What did Nina do when they smiled at her in the street?

 

Norway's reward for having resisted the Germans was that the Norwegian Nazi panderer Quisling now ran their country. At least in Denmark the government was Danish. King Christian was in Copenhagen, riding out on horseback most days to greet his people. His brother, King Haakon of Norway, had to flee to London with his family and the entire legal government. Denmark's reward, in turn, for having rolled right over when the Wehrmacht came goose-stepping over the border was to be bragged of as a “model protectorate”—the proof that Hitler was really easy to get along with if only you tried.

It wasn't Laurus's way to talk about how this made him feel. Fear and sorrow and panic could all be pumped up and made worse and then spread, like influenza, and what good did it do? You just end up like Tante Rachel who made an aria of everything, from a spider in the kitchen to a lump in the armpit, and as far as he could tell she was never calm, never well, and never much use to anybody. Better to do something practical.

Sydney found him in the kitchen one morning with Ellen Chatto, with flour, yeast, eggs, sugar, and butter all over the place. Ellen was rolling out pastry while Laurus coached her.

“Perfect—stop,” he ordered, and slapped a slab of butter down in the center of the pastry. “Now, observe…”

He folded the pastry sheet over the butter.

“Now you,” he said. Ellen followed instructions while he coached and nodded. “Now, again,” he said. Sydney stood with her hands on her hips, watching, and finally went out the back door, looking for sticks with which to stir paint on the side porch.