Leeway Cottage (2 page)

The entry in the Leeway Cottage Guest Book for the Sunday it started was in Ingvar's handwriting.

A house's guest book is a public document, while falling in love, though it often happens in public, is a private cataclysm. It happened to James when young Berthe happened to catch his eyes with hers and hold them a moment as she sang. He was one of the few sitting inside, steaming in white linen trousers and shirtsleeves. He hadn't seen Berthe in years. He remembered her fondly, the shy girl with the charming giggle who'd just put up her hair and gone into long skirts when they first came to the Point, and Bud Harbison made such a play for her. She'd been game and sweet and a great addition to their bunch that year. But now here she was all grown-up and apparently effortlessly making this astonishing sound. This young woman was
alive,
she had a whole vibrant universe inside her, and suddenly he saw his true home. He had been born to share that universe with her, to nurture and protect it, and to know that when she sang, no matter how many people heard her, he was her true audience.

It took him the rest of the summer to make her see what had to happen next. She returned his feelings fast enough, once she realized how serious he was. Who wouldn't? He was a sweet and lucky and happy man. They spent every minute together that they could. They took her younger brothers and sisters, along with several of the Leeway children, on picnics to the top of Butter Hill. She came to The Elms to sing for Louisa and Miss Burns; he borrowed the carriage from Osgood and drove her, with her parents, to Schoodic Point, which the Hanenbergers had always wanted to visit, and then to a tearoom where they had popovers and homemade jam. They gathered blueberries and played golf in full view of Annabelle and her set, maintaining cheerful decorum for all to see, while aching for each other. Once they dared to go out for a moonlight sail, just the two of them. The water was like melted silver and the stars seemed closer to earth than they had ever been. James asked Berthe to sing for him, and she did, her voice pure and gleaming; he felt it darting into the night sky as if it could sew the stars together, making a net that would suspend them together forever. After that, the thought of parting was unbearable. James proposed marriage. Berthe's soft brown eyes filled with tantalized hope, while her mouth said, But, but, but…Her father's plans for her. What she owed him. James said, “You are my life.” She said miserably, “I love you. But there are other people in the world…”She meant in her world. People she also loved, to whom she had obligations. He, elated, said, “But you love me.”

James went home and told his mother he was going to marry Berthe Hanenberger, half expecting congratulations. Annabelle said terrible and unjust things about foreigners in general and the Hanenbergers in particular. (One might know them socially, these were modern times, but to marry out of one's class and culture…James managed not to point out that his father had done just that when he married
her,
but holding his tongue made him nearly as miserable as speaking out would have.)

Berthe told
her
mother that they were terribly in love, hoping for an ally, but found none. Her parents wanted her to marry someone worldly, mature, highly cultured—these Brants, they were from
Ohio,
they hadn't traveled, they spoke no languages, they were grocers or something, weren't they?…The Hanenbergers belonged to an aristocracy of talent and accomplishment recognized the world over, while Annabelle Brant with her purchased grandeur was a comic figure. “You have a gift from God,” her father announced. “You can't build a
career
amid
burghers
in
Cleveland…”

It was terrible. James and Berthe suffered at their separate dinner tables the layered pain of having upset people they loved, and of being bereft themselves. They escaped from their houses and met in secret, in one of the changing cabins at the bathing beach where nobody went in the evenings. The cabins were made of wood, painted on the outside but unfinished inside, and they smelled strongly of pine sap and towels and damp bathing shoes. In Mrs. Eggers's cabin, where the children had made a row of sea urchin shells and sand dollars along the two-by-fours that braced the walls, they agreed that the furor they had caused was intolerable. They would part forever. They held each other, eyes brimming, the decision made. James touched her cheek with one finger, causing her tears to spill, as he murmured, “So beautiful…”Berthe turned away. His heart broke with love for every move she made, as she took one of the sand dollars from the shelf and slipped it into her pocket before she opened the door and walked away from him into the lavender twilight without looking back. James could see her shoulders shaking, and knew that she wept as she went. He stood looking out at the water, paralyzed with longing, thinking of what it meant, that she couldn't leave him without taking that sand dollar to keep. They endured exactly six days without seeing or talking to each other. On the morning of the seventh day they were married in Union by a justice of the peace, and then they were gone.

 

The newly minted Mr. and Mrs. Brant went to Europe for the fall. Berthe had to see her teacher in Germany, to explain, to pack up her belongings. These they left in storage in Munich until they knew where they would settle. They traveled for the rest of the autumn, and by Christmas, as James hoped would happen, Annabelle was ready to welcome them at home and present her new daughter-inlaw to Cleveland society. After Christmas in Ohio they went to Boston for the New Year and received the sorrowful blessing of Lottie and Thaddeuzs. Eventually they settled in New York, where Berthe resumed her studies and in time made her performance debut, and James went into business in the New York office of a Cleveland firm. They had ten years together; then, Berthe died.

 

“But how?” Annabee asked her grandmother. This was in 1924, when James Brant's only child was five, and old Annabelle was in the last summer of her life. The child had come up to her grandmother's bedroom at The Elms, where Annabelle spent most of her days on a chaise longue by the window, playing intricate solitaires and talking on the telephone.

The day was bright, and sheer curtains blew at the open windows overlooking the inner harbor. It was dry weather under a high mackerel sky, and Annabee's mother, Candace, had taken the machine and gone to Bar Harbor for the day. Annabee had pulled an album from the shelf, hoping it held gramophone records. Instead she found pictures of her father in his golden youth, and all manner of other mementos. She carried it to her grandmother for deconstruction. There were yellowed cuttings from newspapers, pressed leaves or flowers from corsages, dance cards, a four-leaf clover. Then they came to a studio portrait of her father, young, with a lady Annabee had never seen before.

It was taken in the autumn after James and Berthe were married. Berthe was smiling, her large expressive eyes wide, her beautiful dark hair piled on her head. James had one arm around Berthe's waist, a gesture of pride and protection. “This is your daddy's first wife, who died,” Annabelle said, touching the photograph with a lumpen finger. She knew perfectly well that the dread Candace had forbidden to have her daughter told that there had ever been another Mrs. James Brant. “Isn't her dress pretty? She had it made on their honeymoon in Paris, which is in France.”

Annabee was electrified. The dress looked fussily old-fashioned to her, but the news that Daddy had had a wife before her mother trumped all thoughts of personal style. “Why did she die?”

“She died having a baby,” said Annabelle.

“Why?”

“I'm not sure, I wasn't there.”

“Where was she?”

“In New York. Where they lived.”

“What was her name?”

“Berthe.” Annabelle made it sound as exotic as she could, and assumed a once-upon-a-time voice. “She was a beautiful girl, an opera singer. She gave concerts people paid money to go to. And she spoke many foreign languages. German and French. It
al
ian. They met right here in Dundee, you know.”

Annabee knew no such thing. This was absolutely the first she'd heard that her father hadn't been born the day he married her mother.

“Look,” said Annabelle, turning the page. “Here's an article in the paper about one of her concerts. Here is her name…”She tapped each
b
as she pronounced, “Berthe Brant.”

“What does it say about her?”

“That she sang very beautifully, and everyone clapped and clapped and clapped,” said Annabelle, sighing at the wonder of it. It didn't actually say that, Annabelle could no longer read newsprint without a magnifying glass and she didn't know what it said. But little Annabee got the picture.

 

Old Annabelle died in Cleveland in the spring of 1925, of pneumonia. She was buried in Lakeview Cemetery. Annabee was impressed at the depth of her father's sorrow, and with the fact that before they left for the funeral, he had fastened around her neck a locket that her grandmother used to wear, with “Annabelle” engraved upon it. He also showed her the beautiful triple rope of pearls with a diamond clasp that her grandmother wore in the evenings. He said he would put the necklace in a safe-deposit box for her until she was older. Her mother, Candace, had pearls, but these were bigger and there were a lot more of them.

Annabee had known she was special to her grandmother, and was very sorry she was gone, but didn't realize that meant gone forever. She could see she was gone from Cleveland; her bedroom was empty, all the medicines were thrown out, and the steam apparatus was put away. But she didn't entirely understand that she would also be gone from The Elms next summer and from everywhere, for all the years to come. Also church had been long and she was glad to be outdoors in the warm sun, and her father was standing apart from her, accepting condolences at the graveside. She began to relieve her boredom by seeing what she could make of the writing on the big stones. She could see that the one at the top of the hole that Granabelle's big fancy box had gone into said
ANNABELLE BRANT APRIL
3, 1838—which she could read because it was her own name. The one beside it was just the same size with the same kind of writing. It said something with a juh,
j,
that she knew stood for “James,” and then some numbers and then big words. (In fact, it read,
JOHN SYDNEY BRANT
,
OCT
. 1, 1835–
MAR
. 28, 1878.
TO EVERYTHING THERE IS A SEASON AND A TIME TO EVERY PURPOSE UNDER HEAVEN
. Annabelle, knowing she would not remarry, had had her own stone cut at the same time she ordered her husband's.)

Annabee next went to work at a stone a step or two away, that had two big
b'
s in the name. Brant was easy, her name again. She was working on the first name, sounding the letters quietly in sequence as her nurse had taught her, when her mother arrived beside her. Candace paused for a moment, then picked her daughter up, and kissed her on the cheek. Candace was pretty, with pillowy bosoms and hips, and she knew she made a touching tableau with sturdy small Annabee in her arms. Slowly, as if her feet were bound by sorrow, she stepped away from the watching mourners.

“I was reading,” Annabee said. She kept her voice quiet, she knew they shouldn't be talking.

“I thought you were, lovey. My smart girl.”

“I could read ‘Brant' on that one…”

“Yes, they all say ‘Brant.' It's the family plot. There is Grandfather, and Granabelle, and Auntie Louisa, with the picture of an angel.” Candace pointed to each grave. Louisa had died of the influenza the year Annabee was born. Annabee looked at the one she hadn't pointed at.

“The first name was a buh.
B.”

Candace gave it a minute. “Oh,” she said, as if it had just come to her, “that must be poor Berthe. She was married to your daddy for a little while, a long time ago.”

Aha. So it was true! Annabee had tried this topic last summer and it had not gone well, but this time Mummy herself had brought it up.

“I saw a picture of her, in Maine.”

“She was awfully pretty,” said Candace.

“Did you know her?”

“No, not at all, she was much older than I am. She was very vain, poor thing, and she laced her corsets so tight when she was having a baby that she punctured something and died.”

“What are corsets?”

“Something ladies wore in the olden days to make them curvy.”

“Did you?”

“No.”

“Because you're already curvy?”

“Because your daddy likes me just the way I am.” She smiled, so Annabee did too.

 

It wasn't actually true, though. Candace was not an easy person to like, and James didn't, much.

W
atching Candace Brant arrive at The Elms in
the summer of 1926 was like watching the
Aquitania
dock. She had refused to go to Dundee for more than a week each summer while old Annabelle was alive. Now, however, she gathered Annabee and the nanny, sent the cook, the waitress, and the housemaid ahead by train, and even so took so much luggage that two separate automobiles were required. The social secretary, Miss Somerville, drove Candace and Annabee, and Osgood followed with Lizzie and the trunks. Osgood drove so slowly now that it took him an extra day to get there, but he had been recently widowed and James wouldn't allow Candace to fire him. She wanted to. She preferred to staff the whole house with colored, whom her mother in Knoxville found for her and sent north.

Poor Auntie Louisa's wing at The Elms, with its separate kitchen and rooms for nursing staff, had been closed since her death. Candace ordered it opened and prepared as a nursery wing for Nurse Lizzie and Annabee.

“It will be so much better for Lizzie and Velma, Jimmy,” Candace explained. Velma, the cook, found a thousand ways to make her displeasure felt at home when Lizzie used “her” kitchen to prepare the nursery's meals. Nurse Lizzie was what Candace called a “high yellow,” and the rest of the staff resented her.

“But we'll never see Annabee if she's way over there. I like having her right down the hall.”

“It won't make any difference if she's down the hall or not. Could we just live like grown-ups for a couple of months a year? Do you think?”

When James arrived to join his family at The Elms, he found all the bedrooms on the second floor of the main house had been “freshened up” by a decorator from Knoxville he didn't remember being asked about. A great deal of chintz and chenille was involved. James walked from one to the next—this one in blues, mostly aquamarine, the next in shades of intense yellow, the wallpaper a mass of buttercups.

“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.