Leeway Cottage (28 page)

“Thank you for one of the happiest weeks of my life,” he said.

She felt tears start, and to her own utter astonishment, said, “You're welcome.”

“Let's go down to the Seagull and have dinner together.”

“With the girls?”

“No, just us.”

She smiled, absurdly pleased, and went off to call a sitter.

 

In early August, Mr. Maitland came to call on Sydney to ask her to join the yacht club council. “It's time your generation started running things,” he said. “We thought you'd be the one to show them how.” Sydney accepted without asking Laurus.

They went to Gladdy and Neville's for supper in their little rented cottage down the Neck that Neville called Bug House. Their whole crowd was there, Elise and her young husband, Chris, and Lucie Cochran, who was now married to Elise's brother Ned. Of their whole crowd of childhood friends, only Tommy McClintock had disappeared in the Pacific. Their past did not seem gone, and a happy future, a thousand evenings like this with these old friends laughing together, was before them. They ate spaghetti with homemade sauce around a battle-scarred oak table. The men wore blazers without neckties and the girls were in simple sundresses, which was very daring; their parents still dressed in evening clothes for dinner, even here in Dundee. And spaghetti was daring. They had been raised to think of it as immigrant food, or food from a can for small children. Several of the boys had served in Italy and had brought back some news from the culinary front. Spaghetti made the older generation anxious, as if next their children would start putting grease in their hair and wearing loud ties and cologne. The world was changing.

Among the changes Sydney was pleased about was that she had her next project. The yacht club, hardly ever more than a spacious shed in the first place, had to be torn down to the studs and rebuilt over the winter; it was full of dry rot and carpenter ants. The council had hoped Sydney might chair a fund-raising committee, since she and her mother could, if they wanted, simply donate the whole amount needed. Sydney had accepted; she enjoyed giving money away herself and felt no shyness about telling others to do the same, whether they could do so as painlessly as she could or not, but in this case she had a better idea. She thought they should revive the long-standing tradition in the summer colony of do-it-yourself entertainment and put on a show to raise money. She could sing, and Neville, onetime star of the Princeton Triangle Club, could sing and dance, Chris and Elise could act and they could write, and God knows Laurus could play the piano. “C'mon, guys. It'll be a panic,” she boomed. They agreed with wine-fueled enthusiasm over the blueberry grunt, and retired to the living room, for two tables of the game of the summer, a form of gin rummy called Oklahoma.

 

There are silent movies, in color, of the performance they gave that Labor Day weekend. Sydney is everywhere: dancing a cancan with Gladdy and Elise, and soundlessly singing a duet with Neville Crane, both dressed as lobstermen, in oilskins and beards. Neville Crane appears again with Homer Gantry and some other man, no longer known, shirtless in flower leis and grass skirts over bathing trunks, playing ukuleles and dancing a hula. Eleanor and Monica, in their own middle age, find the film in the attic at Leeway after their parents are dead. “The Yacht Club Follies, 1947” is written on brittle masking tape on the canister in their mother's handwriting. They also unearth a projector, on a shelf in a downstairs cupboard crammed with rackets, board games, stilts, hula hoops, wicker laundry baskets of period clothes, shoes, and costume jewelry for children's dress-up, and a thing called a “one-man band” that Eleanor remembered someone giving their mother as a joke present one summer in the fifties. It has horns and drums and cymbals rigged so that when you pound it on the floor all the noisemakers sound at once.

Amazingly, the projector still works. They have to wipe off cobwebs, and it takes some time for Eleanor to remember how to thread the film; their father had shown her how, but it must have been forty years ago. They watch “The Yacht Club Follies” several times, projected against the lime green wainscot wall in the kitchen, before the bulb in the projector blows out with a pop. An old mimeo'd program inside the canister tells them that the duet their mother is singing with Uncle Neville is “The Lobster's Lament” to the tune of “Always.” They make plans to have the film transferred to videotape, so they can give copies to their friends whose parents (and grandparents!) are in the movie, looking younger than any of them can remember them.

W
hat Sydney principally remembered from the
winter of '47–'48, apart from being pregnant again, was that for Christmas, she ordered a full-length mink coat from Birger Christensen for her mother-in-law. She didn't tell Laurus she had done it. All through their own festivities, the shopping, the store windows, the decking of the apartment with pine ropes, and the secret wrapping of presents, it was her best secret of all.

Their Christmas Eve telegrams from Copenhagen arrived as always, but Sydney waited, giddy with pleasure, for her letter of thanks. She pictured Ditte speechless with gratitude, sending her the kind of mother love that shone in her face when Ditte looked at her own children. And that had never been seen in Candace's. As the snow whipped up and down the streets of the West Village, as the sun shone on crisp new whiteness when they took the children sledding in Central Park, she looked forward to it.

Laurus read the letter aloud when it came at last, translating, as his mother was shy about writing in English.

“‘Dearest Laurus and Sydney, Eleanor and Monica,

“‘We hope you had the happiest of Christmases, and all here wish you a joyous new year.

“‘First, we must thank you for the big box of treats from the U.S. Maple sugar and blueberry jam are both delicious and remind us of happy mornings with you in your beautiful Maine. We all enjoy the butter of earthnuts—'”

“The what?”

“Oh…peanuts, peanut butter. ‘We all enjoy the peanut butter and the Boston Brown Bread, even Kaj although he has not yet been to Boston—'”

“They call peanuts ‘earthnuts'?”

“They grow in the ground,” said Laurus.

“Oh.”

“‘And we look forward to having you here with us so we can introduce you to our wienerbrød and smørrebrød and other things we hope you will like as well. And thank you so much for the beautiful…' Long socks? Did you send them nylons?”

Sydney smiled, very proud of herself.

“‘That is a very great luxury for me and Nina, and Tofa too!

“‘Thank you for the photographs of Eleanor and Monica, and of your beautiful home in New York City, which we hope someday to visit.

“‘We had a very nice Christmas here, although we wish you could all have been here. Kaj's girl came to Christmas Eve dinner. Nina got the almond in her rice pudding and got an extra present. (A bar of English soap from before the war! I found it in a dresser drawer.) We all went to midnight service except Aunt Tofa, who has a sore throat. We had dinner Christmas Day with the Bing cousins…' Now she has a lot of news about people you haven't met yet…then…Here. ‘Last of all, my dear Sydney, I want to thank you for the beautiful mink coat, which the man from Birger Christensen brought on Christmas Eve—'Sydney! You gave her a fur coat?”

Sydney nodded, beaming.

“You are really something!” He turned back to the letter, now smiling too.

“‘You can't imagine my surprise as I opened it, and tried it on for all to see. I looked like a queen! You flatter me so much with your love and kindness in sending me such a present. I know you will understand that you have done me an even greater kindness than you could have known, which is to ease the worry in a mother's heart. I have been so troubled that our Nina seems never to be warm anymore, summer or winter, and especially in winter she must go out to work in all weathers, while I don't have to go out at all unless I want to. So when I am not using it, I am warmed to the heart to know that my little girl is beautiful and warm in that very, very beautiful coat, and I thank you with all my heart for your kindness to us. As the mother of your own dear little girls, I know you will understand what this means to me.'”

 

Eleanor and Monica, and even Jimmy, though he rarely paid attention to his mother's rants, were still hearing the story of this Christmas right up until Sydney lost her marbles, of how she gave Farmor the most beautiful mink coat in Copenhagen for Christmas, and Farmor gave it to goddam Nina. Faster Nina, pardon her French. A few years later, when it became possible again to buy new automobiles in Europe, she gave Farmor a brand-new English Ford, and when Ditte gave that to goddam Nina, too, that was it, Sydney was done.

 

T
HE
L
EEWAY
C
OTTAGE
G
UEST
B
OOK

 

Many years later when they find the old Guest Book, Eleanor and Monica will note, with tempered amusement, that they hadn't known until then that summer could have a single owner. But if it could and if their mother was in charge, it was no surprise that the owner was Jimmy.

They were late getting to Dundee that summer because Kaj Moss was married in Copenhagen to a plump and sweet-natured girl named Kirsten. The ceremony was at Grundtvig Church in the suburb where Kirsten's family lived, a bizarre-looking thing, Sydney thought, like a nightmare version of a proper Danish church, everything stretched out of proportion. Her neighbor at the wedding lunch, a dazzling older gentleman in a very elegant well-preserved blue suit, a Mr. Bennike (seated with her because of his excellent English) was pleased to discuss it.

No, Mr. Bennike said gravely, the great Grundtvig never saw this church; he died in 1872. The wedding church is a twentieth-century monument. No one outside Denmark knows Grundtvig, do they? Sydney agreed they did not. “Certainly the design is not everybody's taste,” said Mr. Bennike. “A Danish version of the architect Gaudi, perhaps—you know the Sagrada Familia in Catalonia?” She didn't, but she smiled and cried, “Aha!” And later, “My friend Neville Crane is an architect. He'll be so interested,” she said.

Missing his cue to break off and ask her to tell him all about her interesting friends and her life in the USA, Mr. Bennike then told her at numbing length about some important lectures someone gave about Grundtvig during the war, which sowed the seeds of the Resistance. These lectures woke the sleeping Holger Danske. Which was a mythical giant, apparently, who was supposed to rise up and save Denmark if it was threatened. She didn't really get all of it.

Sydney had enjoyed planning what she would wear to the wedding: now that there was plenty of fabric for clothes again, at least in the States, the New Look was skirts with yards and yards of material swooping around the calves like modern-day hoop skirts. Sydney's was pale lilac with shoes to match. With this she wore an enormous picture hat which blocked her view of almost everything but looked extremely stylish. She finally got tired of not being able to see, though, and took it off at lunch.

It was a hybrid wedding service, with both a minister and a rabbi, and included a part where the groom stepped on a wineglass and broke it on purpose. Eleanor was a flower girl, not that she remembers this but there are pictures to prove it, of her in a sort of dirndl with a wreath of sweet peas on her head. It wasn't a wedding with all the trappings you would have in America. For one thing, there were still many shortages in Denmark, and for another, Danes didn't go in for that sort of thing. The wedding lunch was at the Hotel d'Angleterre, so recently the haunt of the Wehrmacht, and the meal went on and on and
on,
with songs and speeches and endless toasts with champagne and caraway-flavored schnapps, God, was
that
awful stuff. Sydney enjoyed talking with Mr. Bennike, and then with his son Per, who was also very handsome.

“Do you come from a musical family, Mrs. Moss?” Per asked her.

“Sydney. My father was musical, and I sing.”

“Delightful. Perhaps you will sing something for us later?”

“I really couldn't,” said Sydney. Which Per took gracefully as modesty, though that wasn't what it was. “How about you?”

“Will I sing? You wouldn't like it if I did that.”

“No, is your family musical?”

“As listeners only. They are great admirers of your husband's playing.” Sydney beamed, and then there was one of those “What now?” pauses.

“So you and Kaj grew up together?” she asked.

“We knew each other. But the families grew closer during the war.”

“Oh! Were you in Sweden with Far and Mor?”

“I ended up there, yes.”

“Wait! You're the one, aren't you?”

“Possibly.” Per smiled.

“I know all about you! You saved them!”

“I did what I could. Many others did more.”

“C'mon…don't be modest!”

This stopped the conversation for a moment. Per was appalled at the thought of being anything
but
modest. Did Americans think modesty a vice? He had thought only Texas.

“And a man posed as a refugee, and then betrayed you, right?” Sydney had misunderstood his silence.

“Yes,” said Per.

“Do you know who he was?”

“Yes.”

“What happened to him?”

She expected to be told that no one knew, or that the man had been rewarded by the Nazis and was living in some tropical paradise.

“He was liquidated,” Per said.

Sydney was briefly silenced.

“The whole time I was in Sweden I dreamed about killing him,” Per said, “but when I returned, it had been done.” Sydney was thinking that she couldn't
wait
to get home and be asked how the wedding was. Who would have thought it? These mild, courtly people, a nation of murderers! Later she watched Per talking with Nina, who was wearing a slim and simple dress, looking wanly beautiful. She was thinking so much, though, about how she would tell the story of Per, her Danish hero, that she didn't see the sorrow in his face, the frozen misery in Nina's, as they moved stiffly a little away from the others, talking softly, their bodies not touching.

 

When the wedding party was finally over Sydney and Laurus went upstairs and slept for hours and it was still broad daylight when they woke up at nine at night, and she never did manage to sleep more than a couple of hours in a row during the whole visit because it was always daylight. It wasn't that the wedding wasn't fun, it was, and Sydney had made a toast at one point inviting everybody there to visit her and Laurus in Dundee, Maine, and welcoming Kirsten to
her
family, too, but just about all the rest of it was in Danish.

After the wedding and the usual round of sights in Copenhagen, they had traveled down to Fyn with Farmor and Farfar and Faster Nina. The little ones loved the ferry across the Storebælt. In Nyborg they slept at the Strand Hotel, but every day after breakfast they walked up the road to the Mosses' cottage on the beach and stayed there until well after supper, just sitting around. Well, there was the beach, and there were trips to market on bicycles, thank God.

They were invited by neighbors for coffee and pastries on several mornings. The neighbors ran American flags up their flagpoles along with the Dannebrog to honor them; every house seemed to have a flagpole, with a crisp red pennant with a white cross flapping in the summer light. Over the pastries everyone made stiff conversation in English, and making it was what it was like, elaborately cobbling at their mental workbenches with their useful little pile of English nails and tiny hammers, all the while smiling their beautiful Danish smiles, until the subject of little Monica's name came up. Then there would be a flurry of rapid Danish, the tone altogether different, in which Sydney came to recognize the words “gudbarn” and “MonicaVickfeld,” as Nina explained that her goddaughter was named for the Resistance heroine Baroness Wichfeld, who risked her life of safety and privilege to defy the Nazis, and died in prison in Germany. It had been Laurus's turn to name the baby when Monica was born, and now Sydney was glad. It made her and her children seem less foreign here.

After Denmark, Sydney at last got what she'd wanted all her life, a trip to Paris. Paris in high summer of 1948 with three children in tow, one a four-month-old baby, was perhaps not the Paris of James Brant and Berthe Hanenberger. It was hot and Sydney's French wasn't nearly as good as she had been led to believe at the Hathaway Brown School. By the time she finally got to Dundee, her universe felt not larger but much smaller. She had discovered she was not a citizen of the world, as Laurus was. She was not a musician anymore, and she was fluent in one language, period. Her husband was Danish, her children were half Danish, but she was American. And American was a great thing to be. The best thing to be. There was no reason for her ever to go anywhere where she felt diminished or off balance or bored. She had a great time in Dundee that August, surrounded by people who knew exactly who she was and why it mattered. She enjoyed the surprise and interest she saw in Neville Crane's eyes, when he said, “What did you think of the famous

Grundtvig Church?” And she said, “It's like what's-his-name, Gaudi's, Sagrada Familia. Only Danish.” Neville sat with her for a long time that evening, with his handsome face bent toward hers, telling her his theories of sacred architecture. Sydney watched the sunburnt triangle at the open neck of his shirt.

Back in New York that fall, when she'd gone to one too many wine and cheese parties after yet another concert of old chestnuts or tedious new music, and seen the glazed look come into some artiste's eyes when he turned to her and asked, “And what do
you
do?,” it all felt a little too much like a wedding in Denmark. Sydney announced that New York City was no place to be raising three children, and they must move to Connecticut.