Leeway Cottage (27 page)

To Sydney, Laurus seemed unnaturally formal. Had he changed, or was he always like that? When they met she was so young, he was so grown-up, she'd wanted his approval so badly. She'd wanted
everyone's
approval so badly. Now she couldn't help noticing that he never could pin Eleanor's diaper on right, and whenever he pulled out of a parking lot or gas station she had to yell to keep him from trying to drive on the wrong side of the road. She had thought he would be the kind of father her own daddy had been, longing to escape from the bridge game or the dinner party to play hooky with his little girl. Laurus seemed only to want to escape to the piano.

 

Laurus had once told Sydney that touring when he was young was torture, the least musical time of his life, because the only access he had to his instrument was onstage, and onstage the quartet rehearsed and played their one program. In the morning in a new town, after a late arrival, the string players were all in their hotel rooms running their scales and refreshing themselves with different repertoire while he stared out at unfamiliar rooftops and longed for home.

“You know how you live in the music in your head,” he would say to her. “You're always playing it through, moving around inside the tempi, suddenly hearing that the alto line should be singing out over the treble in a particular measure, dying to try it…” He didn't wait for confirmation. She was a musician, too. Of course she understood. Except, she wasn't a musician anymore.

 

He couldn't explain his longing for hours and hours uninterrupted at the keyboard. It was an appetite he couldn't control, he had missed it so much. He longed for certain composers the way a starving man longs for foods from childhood, except that gorging himself on Schubert after all this time didn't make him sick, it made him more voracious.

He had lost muscle tone in parts of his hands and arms he'd never known he needed, as he never since early childhood had gone so long playing so little. He started at the beginning of Hanon and played his way through the exercises, hours a day, C major, A minor, F major, D minor, repeated notes in groups of four, detached thirds and sixths. Sydney watched him from the doorway as he stared past the music with eyes unfixed, his hands moving along the keyboard like matched horses in harness, and wondered what was going on in his brain. He reminded her at those times not of a musician but of a cuckoo clock. In the evenings his arms ached and he fretted about wrecking his hands, like Schumann, but he couldn't seem to pace himself.

But Schumann was a nutcase, Sydney pointed out. Thank God for Dundee, the high healing sky, and the meadow stretching down past the garden to the lilac hedge, beauty you could drink like a tonic. In Dundee she made him promise to stop playing after lunch, to spend the afternoons with her and Eleanor. He did it, and she watched him uncoil in the sun, each day a little more, before he went absent again. Oh, well—she was surrounded by friends in Dundee, and accustomed to an absent husband.

And then there was the sunny afternoon at the Maitlands' pool, when Sydney, lying gossiping with Elise, sat up and cocked her sunglasses to look to the shallow end of the pool, to see what was making Eleanor squeal with laughter like that.

Laurus was standing up to his waist in water, while Eleanor bobbed joyously in her little cork life belt, stretching her chin up to keep her face above water, her eyes riveted on her father. Laurus picked her up with his hands under her arms. “All right, stay right there,” he said. “I'll be right back, don't go away…” And he'd take his hands away, dropping her into the water, to screams of delight.

“Do it
again,
Daddy!” Eleanor cried, bobbing and splashing and laughing.

“But I told you not to move!”

“Do again!” And he picked her up, grinning.

“Be careful, honey…” Sydney called, not really knowing which one she was talking to. It didn't matter, as neither of them paid her any attention.

“Again, Daddy!” Eleanor gurgled. Sydney looked at their beaming faces, entirely heedless of her, and felt like Candace, sourly watching her husband and daughter cavorting, and didn't like it at all.

“I
'm offered an artist in residence post at Mannes,”
Laurus said, holding up a letter, with a small crow of delight.

It was early October. He'd been out on his new bicycle with the baby seat attached behind the saddle; he'd ridden to Central Park and back with Eleanor, while Sydney labored over a recipe from the newspaper, for some Greek eggplant thing called moussaka that was a lot more trouble than it sounded. The baby was down for her nap now and Laurus was reading his mail at the kitchen table.

“What does that mean?” Sydney was having an inner dialogue with an imaginary Laurus about how much effort she was making to be sure they all learned to eat peculiar new vegetables.

“Eight or ten students. The cream of the crop. Meet with them once or twice a month. I'd have time to perform, to prepare new repertoire. Or whatever I want.”

Sydney paused and stared at the grease-spattered recipe again. “Is it worth it?” she asked.

He'd expected congratulations. “I don't understand the question.”

“Is it worth it? The time it would take? You don't need the money.”

After a surprised silence he said, “That's hardly the point.”

“Sorry. What
is
the point?” The eggplant seemed to have absorbed a whole bottle of cooking oil and she was running out of paper towels and places to put the greasy slices.

“It's an honor. And it's refreshing to work with talented students. One needs a structured place in one's professional world.”

“One
does?” She'd begun needling him about Briticisms that had crept into his speech. They reminded her that for four years he'd had a life that had nothing to do with her, made friends and who knows what all with people who had never heard of her.

“I thought you'd be pleased, Sydney. It means I can teach and work without having to travel much. I'm not ready to leave you again, and I didn't think you wanted me to. My music doesn't exist if nobody hears it.”

There was a silence. He waited for her to say something, but she turned and opened the refrigerator. She began rooting in the cheese drawer. After a while, when it was clear she wasn't going to answer, he said, “Remind me who these people are who are coming?”

“Anselma Thorne. Dr. Carey's niece. And her new friend Olivia. You'll like them, Olivia plays the flute.”

What surprised Laurus about the evening was that he did like Olivia very much, and Anselma quite well enough. Anselma dressed in well-cut trousers and saddle shoes and a man's crisp white shirt. Her hair was short and glossy, her hands beautifully manicured. She had a lovely voice, a cello voice, and a delightful, ready laugh. Olivia was petite and pink with a messy cloud of curly hair. She played the flute like an angel. She'd brought her instrument and some music, and after the moussaka and some retsina, Olivia and Laurus sight-read together. They finished with faces shining from shared pleasure. The women had cooed over Eleanor and brought her a Raggedy Ann. They talked with excitement about the stone farmhouse in northwestern Connecticut they'd just bought. When Sydney mentioned the Mannes offer, in an exploratory way, Olivia turned to Laurus as if he'd won a Nobel prize. When they had gone and Laurus was washing the dishes, Sydney came into the kitchen and kissed the back of his neck.

“I'm so pleased about Mannes,” Sydney said.

“I'm very glad,” said Laurus, and meant it. “And thank you for a delightful evening.”

“Thank
you.
It was fun, wasn't it?”

“Great fun.”

 

T
HE
L
EEWAY
C
OTTAGE
G
UEST
B
OOK

 

It was Sydney's handwriting. Laurus and little Eleanor had looked forward to this visit so intensely that it probably couldn't fail to disappoint, and there were already signs that it wouldn't. Fail. Papa Henrik hadn't slept at all well for several days—he hated traveling, apparently. He barely spoke on the drive from Bucksport to Dundee. And Mama Ditte was warm and a dear, of course, but to say her English was rusty was putting it kindly. And Nina…well, much as Sydney had looked forward to embracing the sister she'd always wanted, there were early signs that Nina was not what Sydney had had in mind.

Sydney spent the first day of the visit driving her new family from place to place, famous in her legend, so they could get to know her, and all that she had brought to Laurus. They saw the golf course, then the yacht club. Henrik and Ditte exclaimed to each other in Danish in the backseat, and finally Nina translated: “It looks so much like Gilleleje.”

“What's Gillal-EYEa?”

There was a little silence. There was too much to say about Gilleleje, and no way to say it right. Their own fear, and that of so many others. The hundreds of Jews who escaped from there, the kindness of strangers, and the worst betrayal of the dark days of the roundup. For a Dane to explain Gilleleje was like an American having to explain that sometimes people took honeymoon trips to Niagara Falls.

“It's on the north coast of Zealand,” said Nina. Sydney wondered if they thought she had memorized the map of Denmark. They hadn't exactly got the map of New England nailed down, she noticed. Ditte seemed amazed that Dundee was more than an hour from Boston.

By this time the conversation was so far from what Sydney had planned to tell them, about the Brutal Beasts, and the “O” boats they raced, about her triumphs on the bay, and the boys she had grown up with before she chose Laurus, that she just let it go. She drove them to The Elms without giving Candace any warning, and had the satisfaction of seeing her mother forced to be less than gracious, as she already had Bernard in the car on their way to a lunch party when Sydney's station wagon crunched down the gravel driveway. After Candace and Bernard left, Sydney showed her guests over the house, but Papa Henrik stayed in the car, dozing, which offended her. She cut the tour short and took them home, announcing that no doubt they all needed naps.

Laurus was so happy to have his family with him, he seemed like a different person. He was a quiet man, but now he almost chattered. And they kept forgetting to speak English, in their excitement, in their joy at each other's presence, so Laurus was constantly having to stop the party and tell Sydney what they were saying.

“You go ahead, catch up, I'm just happy to sit here and listen,” she said, which was entirely false. She had pictured this visit a whole other way, the Mosses eager to know all about her, the mother of their grandchildren, the girl who had made Laurus happy. Instead they kept talking about how she must come to Denmark, bring the children, how much she would like this or that. Then they went back to chattering to each other in Danish. She felt like a pebble thrown into a rushing stream. She had crashed right through the surface of the water and sunk to the bottom, while Laurus and his family went dancing and burbling over and past her, oblivious.

Candace and Bernard invited the elder Mosses to dinner. Sydney and Laurus were giving a party for the young, to introduce Nina to their friends. Nina wandered into the big kitchen at about five in the afternoon. She had had a long nap and a swim and was getting some color in her cheeks.

“May I help you?”

Sydney was mashing potatoes; clouds of steam billowed up from the wide kettle as she pounded with the masher, periodically dumping in more butter, more cream.

Nina hadn't seen such plenty for years. The shortages at home were far worse than they had been during the war. In a sort of reparation for relative wartime comfort compared with the rest of Europe, Denmark had been pressured hard to give disproportionately in the peace to the recovery of Allied countries. Everything was scarce there now, not just food. You couldn't get shoe leather. Some stores carried shoes made of fish skin. They were rather pretty, but they didn't last very long. You couldn't get rubber for tires. Nina's bike at home had rope around the front wheel. Her friend Lars had replaced his ruined tires with little chunks of wood all around the bicycle rim. It was horrible on cobblestones.

Sydney looked up from her work, her face red from effort and steam. Just then baby Monica began to cry upstairs. “Could you get the baby for me?”

Nina simply looked at her, as if she hadn't understood.

“Could you run up and get the baby for me? Just bring her down here with a clean diaper, I'll change her.”

“No, I couldn't.”

“It's right at the top of the stairs and the diapers are in the …Oh, never mind. Here, then do this.”

With a flush of irritation, Sydney handed the masher to Nina and left the room. It was easier.

Monica, who was fifteen months old, was standing in her crib with her face red and cheeks wet. She quieted the moment she saw her mother. She was light and wiry, clearly her father's daughter, where Eleanor had been sweetly and calmly plump. Monica was a tense little thing. As Sydney scooped her up, feeling the loaded diaper as she did so, the baby gripped her with her arms and legs as if she were being rescued by a monkey mother from a river full of crocodiles.

“Hushabye. Hushabye, little beezle, Mommy's here. You had a lovely nap, didn't you?” Sydney carried her down to the kitchen where Nina was bumping rather uselessly at the potatoes. Sydney changed the baby on a blanket on the floor beside the woodstove, then retrieved her masher from Nina. She stuck her finger into the potatoes, tasted, threw in another gob of butter and added salt and pepper. She moved now like one who has no more time for idle chat, so Nina drifted out. She was sitting on the porch listening through the window to Laurus playing the piano when the guests arrived. (And Sydney was still in the clothes she had worn all day, having had all the work of the dinner to cook, plus having to feed the babies and give them their baths, all while Nina sat in a rocker on the porch as if she didn't know anyone but Laurus was in the house, and he kept her company.)

 

T
HE
L
EEWAY
C
OTTAGE
G
UEST
B
OOK

 

The christening was in the Congregational Church, whose high cool white sanctuary looked so Scandinavian to the Mosses. Laurus played the music for the service, with a trio of Haydn before morning worship and Bach for the postlude. Mr. Davison preached well, by which Sydney meant briefly. Candace had done the flowers, and they were startling, mostly towering stalks of gladioli from her cutting garden. Eleanor, who was five, looked angelic in a little pink dress from the Women's Exchange, with smocking across the bodice and patent-leather Mary Janes. Gladdy was Eleanor's godmother; Nina was Monica's. After lunch, they had an old-fashioned musicale as had so often been held here on a Sunday, in the old days. Ditte and Laurus played the four-hands
Dolly Suite
of Fauré together, while Sydney passed around the Guest Book, with its entry about the same piece of music played here so long ago, and the whispered exclamations over this only disturbed the musicians a little.

 

“The longest three weeks of my life,” said Sydney to Glad, after she waved her houseguests off on the train. They were sprawled on the bathing beach, slathered in baby oil and smoking Pall Malls while a girl from the village monitored Eleanor and the other children at the water's edge. Monica and tiny Amelia Crane were napping nearby on a blanket in the shade of the changing cabins.

“Houseguests are hard,” said Gladdy loyally, though Leeway in her childhood had been filled with houseguests coming and going all summer, her parents' friends and hers and Tommy's all endlessly welcome.

“There are only so many times you can drive to the Jordan Pond House for popovers.”

“They did like sailing,” Gladdy pointed out.

“It's true, they did. And Nina played badminton. Once.”

“Well, they were quiet,” said Gladdy, and both of them started to laugh. The Mosses had sat for hours on the porch, reading or simply staring at the bay in the silence, happy to be together and at peace. It made Sydney want to jump out of her skin.

On the other hand, she had rarely known Laurus so utterly happy. His parents would sit at the bathing beach, watching Eleanor and her friends dashing in and out of the water, and it was to them like watching a double exposure, this beach plus another, with other little children, Laurus, Kaj, and Nina, the Hansen children next door, brown with sun and their hair bleached white. Sometimes Ditte would call Monica “Nina,” and it gave Sydney the creeps.

The night they finally had the house to themselves again, Sydney felt herself working toward a tantrum, as if now that she could relax, a gate had swung open and in romped disappointment and fatigue and boredom and resentment from where they'd been grazing and nickering and watching from the other side of the fence all week, waiting to get at her. The disappointment seemed, absurdly, to be most of all aimed at Nina. Sydney had somehow thought that here at last would be a female person who would love her and read her mind. Now she felt bereft and foolish, and when she felt things she didn't like to feel, she most often got rid of them by turning them into anger. And there sat Laurus in the next room playing the goddam piano.

When she walked into the room, Laurus turned to her and stopped playing at once. Before she could say a word, he went to her and put his arms around her, and whatever words were in her mouth melted.