Leeway Cottage (29 page)

E
verything was in boxes. Boxes going to Connecticut,
boxes going to West Eighty-sixth Street. The children were in Dundee, at The Elms, with a nanny and two girls from the village to keep them out of Nana's hair. Sydney, dressed in dungarees with a smear of grime along her chin, paced in and out of emptied rooms waiting for the moving van, while Laurus and two of his students carried boxes of his clothes, piano scores, books, and bedding out to a rented truck. The moving van still hadn't arrived when the boys went out with the last of their load, a large oriental carpet Sydney had given Laurus for their anniversary, and a ficus tree in a terracotta pot. They shoved these into the back of the truck, slammed the back doors shut, climbed into the cab with Laurus, and drove away.

Sydney wandered from room to room, looking at a life that had just days ago been full of colors and curves and softness, now transformed into squared-off heaps of dun-colored cardboard blocks. She couldn't even call the moving company to find out where the van was; the phone had been disconnected. The heat of late June was pillowy and dense. She needed a bath, but all the towels were packed.

It was late afternoon when the boys finished carrying Laurus's boxes in from the elevator on Eighty-sixth Street, thanked Mr. Moss for generous tips, and left to return the truck. The only thing that was where Laurus wanted it was his piano, which two men the size of refrigerators had carried out of Perry Street yesterday and delivered here this morning. He supposed the piano bench was somewhere. Meanwhile boxes of books that belonged in the study were in the bedroom and boxes of clothes were in the Pullman kitchen, and boxes of music were everywhere. There was a sofa in the front room that Sydney hadn't wanted, but he couldn't sit on it; the cushions were packed. He had the beginning of a headache but he had no idea where his wash kit, with the little bottle of aspirin, might be.

To be back in a rented apartment, alone, with his life in boxes and nothing in the refrigerator, reminded him of the night that seemed a world away, when he and Imre Benko drank beer at the oompah joint, and Imre told him there was a voice student at Mannes who would pay an accompanist. He knew Imre had survived the war and was back in Budapest, but he hadn't seen him, and didn't know if he ever would again.

It was possible, barely, to remember Sydney as a girl he had just met. A girl he thought he could see—but they were both so young. He could see her so much more clearly now, recognize that he had taken parts of things for the whole of her. Perhaps it was the same with her. No one had intended to deceive. Very likely all marriages are like that, though if he thought of his parents' marriage, he couldn't see beyond the charmed surface. Did Henrik and Ditte ever quarrel or make each other unhappy? He couldn't imagine it. He thought of his own marriage as if they had been two people on a balance scale, each hovering about level as they studied each other, discovered things that surprised or delighted, as they fell in love. But when he had thrown his marriage vows into Sydney's scale pan, her side had begun to dip. And somewhere during the war years, when his attention was elsewhere, her dish of weights had gotten so full of must and should and want to and can't and won't that it had plunged toward the ground, leaving Laurus's light and amiable dish of can, and have, and why not, swinging in the breeze. She had the money. She had the three children. She had the moods and the hurts and the big vision of herself that had to be seen by others the way she saw it, or something really bad would happen. Life was full of surprises.

 

Laurus was stretched out asleep on his half-unrolled carpet, with his sweater for a pillow, when Sydney finally let herself in. He woke at the sound of her key in the lock and sat up, taking in the twilight sky outside.

“God,
that was boring,” said Sydney.

“What time did they finally get there?”

“I don't know, I packed all the clocks.”

“I can't find my toothbrush.”

“I'm not surprised. They were quite sweet really. They'd gotten lost trying to get into Manhattan from New Jersey. Then they got stopped for driving a truck on the East River Drive—”

“They
were
lost.”

“Yes. Who knows if we'll ever see our stuff again, they're probably in Virginia by now, trying to find New England. Did you have a good nap?”

“I'm a little stiff.”

“Did you dream?” She always asked him this. Unlike hers, his dreams were so playful.

“No. Yes…” He thought a minute. “Yes, as you came in I was just dreaming I'd been crowned Queen of the May.”

Sydney roared with laughter, one of Laurus's favorite sounds in the world. She looked around at the mess of half-empty boxes. “Did you get the bed set up?”

“No, I couldn't do it without you. I found the sheets, though.”

“That's all we need. Let's go eat, I am faint with hunger.”

T
he thing about the period you grow up in is, you're
a child. You have no knowledge that history exists. You think it's the world, you don't know it's the fifties.

Eleanor, Monica, and James Brant Moss lived in a big white clapboard house with fieldstone walls bracing the rolling lawns. They had a small swimming pool, a child-sized wooden roller coaster on the lawn, and a full complement of bicycles, skates, badminton and croquet equipment. A family of boys lived a few minutes' bike ride up the lane, and on evenings and weekends there was always a quorum of kids at the Mosses' house for sardines or kick-the-can or spud. In the winters or on rainy days, they turned over the living room furniture and made blanket forts (the other parents in town were very happy to have this going on at the Mosses' house and not their own).

A lot of their games were war games. One boy had a life-sized dummy German Luger, and everyone had cap guns. But they were all experts at making explosive gun noises with their mouths, so anyone with a thumb and forefinger was armed. They watched
Captain Video
and
Howdy Doody
on a tiny black-and-white television screen in an enormous case, and sent away boxtops for things like secret decoder rings that glowed green in the dark if you held them under a lamp first and then wore them into the closet.

 

All three Moss children studied piano. Eleanor dutifully worked through her Thompson piano books, with some talent but no interest. As soon as she had done her forty-five minutes after school, she was off down the lane on her bike in search of company. Monica had to be nagged all week to practice. “You don't know how lucky you are,” Sydney would announce angrily, as if she had personally carried coal scuttles barefoot through snow in childhood to earn these luxuries for her daughter. “There are children in China who don't have enough to
eat,
let alone piano lessons.” Monica mostly kept her head down, her shoulders drawn in, hoping her mother would tire of prodding an inert substance, so she could go back to
The Black Stallion.
She had learned passive resistance as her only defense the morning that, under the spell of some spunky defiance shown by Pocahontas or Cherry Ames, Visiting Nurse, in a book she was reading, she had said, “If you think piano lessons are so great, why don't
you
take them?” She had to walk into her third-grade classroom a half hour later with her eyes swollen and a clear red handprint on her cheek. She learned two lessons that day. First, that challenging her mother's idées fixes about how her children should live their lives did not improve matters. Second, that if anyone in this town thought the Moss children shouldn't be whacked at will, they were keeping quiet about it. Not a question was asked, nor a word spoken, about the flaming mark on Monica's face. She wondered if anyone ever told her father about these and many similar moments in their childhoods, but to that she never learned the answer. She went on joylessly with her music lessons until she left for boarding school.

By contrast, as a toddler, Jimmy used to sit on his father's lap for hours while Laurus played, feeling the leg muscles flex with the pedaling, feeling how the whole body went into making the noise. Before he had language for it, Jimmy was moved by the light and dark colors of the sounds, the shapes of the floods of music his father produced; it was a river he was born knowing how to swim in. He understood playing as a motion that started from the center of the body and radiated out of the hands and feet and into the machine of wood and wire and ivory. He saw it as magic and power; he felt about driving that piano the way other little boys felt about trucks or trains. And he was deeply musical. By the time he was four he could repeat, note perfect, pieces he'd heard once, so that it seemed he must be reading, though he wasn't. He couldn't read “Jump, Spot,” and he certainly couldn't read
Für Elise.
Sydney was convinced he was another Mozart.

Sydney rejoiced at what her husband was passing on to their children, but she
had
been afraid her hearty and sporty neighbors wouldn't know what to make of Laurus. Not that she wanted a husband who drank too much or chased women or wore loud pants, but she wanted him to fit in. Sydney worked like an animal, as she put it, to join the country club and tennis ladder and volunteer for every possible committee, to make the Mosses a force in this town. So she was thrilled when Peg Barker said one day, “Now your husband, Sydney…he's a real man's man.”

“It's wonderful, the way he's made a place for himself,” chimed in a woman named Marjorie. Meaning, in spite of being arty and foreign, which the women liked, but were surprised that their husbands did too. (They didn't know about the half-Jewish part; they might not have liked that so much.)

“He must miss New York,” Peg said. It was during a break in contract bridge; one of the girls in their foursome was extremely gravid and had to answer a sudden call of nature.

“Not at all,” said Sydney. “He keeps his apartment in town. He can be there as much as he needs to be. But he says he had enough of being away from home all those years during the war. He says he decided then that what he wanted from life was a happy family.”

The war years. The women nodded. The war explained most things they didn't understand about their husbands. It was a mystery box in the back of their mental closets, into which they put all kinds of things. “It must be so interesting, being married to an artist.”

“Yes,” said Sydney. Being married to an artist meant having a husband who can be looking right at you and yet be a thousand miles away, playing through that moody adagio in his brain while you're talking to him, but there was no point explaining it. Being married to an artist meant having the bedside light go on at two
A
.
M
., and when the next morning you read what he has scrawled, hoping for a revealing dream or a reminder to take the car for an oil change, you found “Presto! not Allegro! 3d movement, to the repeat.”

“So…performing? He just gave that up?” Peg asked.

Was there a needle concealed somewhere in the folds of this question? That she'd been selfish in making her husband move to the country? Sydney could spot criticism of herself the way an X-ray machine sees through flesh.

“He performs more than he wants to,” said Sydney, lighting a cigarette. “He prefers the preparation. He's preparing some Lukas Foss right now and he's happy as a clam, even though it sounds like a tray of dishes being dropped down the stairs. And he loves his students here, they're so grateful to work with someone of his caliber. He has a private student right here as good as anyone at Mannes. Your deal, partner,” she added to their pregnant companion, who sank back into her chair and took up the deck.

“My husband is going to ask Laurus to join the board of the YMCA,” said Peg as the cards were served around. “Don't tell him I told you.” Peg's husband was one of those men who was at the center of things no matter where he was. He did something on Wall Street, and practically owned Nantucket.

Sydney, thrilled, rushed home to tell Laurus immediately. She felt she'd won a long and difficult campaign. “When George Barker asks you to join his board, you know you've arrived.”

“I'm glad to hear that,” Laurus said gravely. “I wouldn't want to fall out of the train before we got to the station.”

She looked at him to see if this was a joke, or what. It probably was. Danes were always joking.

W
hen Jimmy was eight, the fact that he still
couldn't read “Jump, Spot!” was beginning to be more important than his being a musical prodigy. You could go a long way in this world without playing Rachmaninoff, but you couldn't get far if you couldn't read.

In fact, a strange thing had developed from Jimmy's unusual gift. Rather than making him feel specially blessed, it had made him furious. Music came to him the way water falling over a cliff becomes a waterfall, and it no longer interested Jimmy, any more than the waterfall interests the cliff. He'd rather have been eight feet tall, or strong as Superman, or able to fly. Of course he wanted to be special, he wanted to be admired and feared, but he didn't want to sit all day in goddam school, where even ordinary difficulty in learning new things seemed to him like trudging in lead boots through hot tar. He'd had the experience of being born knowing, and he thought all learning should be like that. At least for him.

“He
is
one of the youngest in the class,” said Mr. Blodgett, the headmaster of their little Country Day School. Mr. Blodgett sat behind his big desk and Jimmy's teacher sat on a chair positioned as if she were ready to dive for cover if Mrs. Moss opened fire.

Sydney sat spinning the diamond she wore with her wedding ring around and around her finger. She had not expected ever to be told a child of hers should be held back, and she wasn't pleased. She had just spent the best part of the spring organizing a Parents Talent Show for this school. She'd been in the building every day for weeks, no one could have mentioned there was a problem?

“And he's a little small for his age. We think it would do him good to be a social leader. He'd have an advantage in sports too.” Oh, did he need one? He was a spaz as well as a retard? Mr. Blodgett could see That Look in Mrs. Moss's eyes.

“This child is a prodigy,” said Sydney, her voice alarmingly soft.

“He certainly is, at the piano. Quite amazing,” said Mr. Blodgett. “Maybe we should just go over some of his math and reading homework, though, to give you an idea.”

Laurus looked it all over quietly. He was a source of great curiosity to the teachers. In the faculty room it was said that Sydney and Laurus Moss were like a tiger and a zebra married to each other. What
were
those two doing together? Did Mr. Moss even know what his wife was like with people who couldn't defend themselves? One of the teachers who had Jimmy in kindergarten had taken to telling homeroom teachers to be sure to keep a raw chicken to toss at her if Mrs. Moss started to pace at parent conferences.

Laurus asked some questions. He noticed that when Jimmy wrote anything at all, he used the space on the page very strangely, cramping his numbers together in odd places instead of on the lines provided, as if the empty sheet looked like a minefield to him and he were forced to compress himself around the edges to avoid something fearful.

Mr. Blodgett agreed it was odd. He had no idea what if anything it meant, except that Jimmy had learned bung-all about arithmetic this year and would be in worse shape if they passed him to the Green Level and he had to do long division.

Sydney and Laurus left this meeting in separate cars, as he had a lesson to give and she had a golf match. As she wound through the leafy byways to the club, rich with the emerald green of early summer and the smell of moist earth, she thought about having to tell all her cheery pals her son had been left back. And Jimmy himself would be shamed and furious, she expected, and have to make all new younger friends. There are no stupid people on Laurus's side, none. I suppose these dumb genes are supposed to be from
my
family. And they probably are, too. Goddam Candace.

That night they broke the news to Jimmy, who looked at his sneakers and said not a word while Sydney cooed the news to him. Then he went down to the playroom and colored all over the pages of Monica's treasured copy of
King of the Wind.
Sydney made all Jimmy's favorite food for supper, as if it were his birthday, lamb chops and mashed potatoes and floating island. Later when Monica appeared in the doorway of the den weeping, with her spoiled book in her hand, Jimmy burst in after her crying angrily, “It was an accident!”

Monica, too enraged to speak, turned the pages, holding the book toward her mother. The Godolphin Arabian's noble eyes, his delicate flared nostrils, had been ferociously scarred with orange and purple attack weapons.

“Oh, leave your brother alone, Monica, he's had a bad day.”

A strangling cry for justice rose from her throat.

“I said
leave him alone,
Monica!” Sydney snapped. “Act your age!”

After a stunned moment, both children stomped out of the room. Monica, who had never, that she could remember, been either the oldest or youngest, wanted to kill somebody when she heard that particular phrase. Whatever age she was supposed to act was not ever the age it was convenient to be.

Afterward, left alone together in the pine-paneled den lined with book sets and stacks of
American Heritage
magazine, Sydney saw that Laurus was looking at her, with that mild expression that meant he was thinking things he would rather not say out loud. As if he were wondering, “Who
are
you?”

She did not want to talk about it. She knew it wasn't fair, but when she looked at those two stormy faces, her differently loved children before her, it was as if some vast desire took over her brain and did what it wanted, blotting out reason. It was the way she was, there was no point in revisiting the moment now that it had passed.

“They'll both have forgotten it in the morning,” she said, with a dismissive wave of one hand.

 

T
HE
L
EEWAY
C
OTTAGE
G
UEST
B
OOK

 

Jimmy stayed home with Ellen the next night while Sydney went to dinner at The Elms. Her mother was in rare form and Bernard was better than he'd been in years. The doctors had made him stop smoking, which he hated. “And he was a beast the whole time,” said Candace, spooning her soup. “Weren't you, darling.”

“I thought I behaved very well,” said Bernard.

“You're lucky you have any friends left at all,” said Candace, and the Maitlands laughed. Sydney looked up surprised, and noticed something that had eluded her. Her mother and Bernard actually loved each other. How, she couldn't imagine.

“Now tell us all your news, darling,” said Candace. She had a way of turning the attention to Sydney at the exact moment that she had a plate of hot food in front of her and wanted to be left alone to eat. Sydney looked with regret at the delicious-looking pile of lobster Newburg she'd just dumped onto her plate, and rose to the bait.

“Laurus has taken home leave,” she said. “Monica went with him, to spend the month at the beach with her grandparents.” She deliberately said this as if her children only had
one
proper set of grandparents.

“And Eleanor?”

Bernard's adoration of Eleanor was undimmed by the fact that she was growing pudgy hips and breasts and a fascination with hair-styles.

“She's at
that age,”
said Sydney. “Too old for camp really, too young for a job. She'll do one month at camp with her best friend, as CITs, and then they'll both come up for August.”

“And Jimmy?”

“Most adorable-
looking
little boy…” put in Mrs. Maitland, chewing.

“You know, he was an April baby. One of the youngest in his class and he's small, too. We thought, you know, what
is
the rush here? Let's hold him back for the class he probably should have been in all along, and let him be the oldest and one of the biggest. Fortunately, the school thought we were absolutely right.”

A brief silence.

“And is
he
happy about it?”

“Jimmy? Oh sure, he's the Go-along-get-along Kid.” Having dispatched the subject with this spectacular piece of misinformation, she addressed herself to her cooling Newburg, which was beginning to look like library paste.

It was Amelia Crane, Gladdy's daughter, who began tearfully referring to Jimmy Moss as “Crash,” because his way of barging at the start of a sailing race, or disputing buoy room, was to yell ferociously at the boat he was fouling and ram it if it didn't yield. Other boats protested him race after race, and he usually lost, but it didn't make the other children feel better. Sydney contended he was just learning to be a good, aggressive little competitor, but by the end of July, half the yacht club was referring to her son as “Crash” and she held it against young Amelia. It was said by some that Sydney had in semiprivate remarked that Amelia Crane had always been a whiner. If Gladdy heard it, she never ever treated her friend with anything but steady, cheerful affection. In later years it seemed completely forgotten, but there was a time that summer when there was a certain strain in the friendship.

T
HE
L
EEWAY
C
OTTAGE
G
UEST
B
OOK

 

In the margins, Britt-Marie had drawn a beautiful picture of the bald eagle they had seen in flight over the bay while sailing one afternoon. She also drew a little family of harbor seals sunning themselves on Tide Rock.

Per and Britt-Marie were Sydney's idea of perfect houseguests. They spoke perfect English, they entertained themselves all day, Per sailed expertly, and Britt-Marie played good tennis. Further, they were good company when carried off to a picnic or dinner with a lot of Sydney's lifelong friends who happily laughed and teased and gossiped among themselves as they had every summer since they were children, treating outsiders exactly as they treated each other, as if guests were bound to enjoy immersion in their own narrow summer world, but also as if they had known these newcomers since childhood and fully expected to know them for the rest of their lives.

It was not every visitor who enjoyed this treatment. Some felt it skipped several stages of formality that upset the natural order and robbed the shy or reserved of necessary decorum, others that it was bloody boring to be expected to take an interest in who was related to whom and oft-told tales about eccentric characters or comic events from the dim past. But some felt there was nothing more fun than a place at the table where food, affection, high spirits, and goodwill abounded and all you needed was enjoyment of a joke and a reasonable sense of self-deprecation to be wholly welcome. Per and Britt-Marie fit right in. Per was handsome with a dry, Laurus-like sense of humor. Britt-Marie won herself many fans by being smart and funny and rather dumpy.

At their first Dundee dinner party, Britt-Marie announced firmly that there was a ghost in the guest wing at Leeway. Sydney denied it; Britt-Marie insisted. It flushed the toilet in the middle of the night when she was in bed and Per was beside her and everyone else was upstairs. It smoked cigars outside her window and it rearranged her books. And it spoke Swedish. It was only the Swedish books that it took an interest in.

“Isn't it scary, though?” asked Lucie Cochran Maitland.

“No, of course it isn't scary. It's not as if it spoke German,” she said. There were roars of laughter, and the talk turned, as it so often did, to Dundee history. Someone always told the story of the house around the other side of the bay that had once been out on Beal Island, that had a ghost so angry and frightening that the owners gave it to the Dundee fire department, who burned it down.

“Really! A perfectly good house?”

“Laurus was with them,” said Sydney.

“You were?”

“No I wasn't, it was before I joined. But Mutt Dodge was. He swears that when the house was engulfed he saw a figure inside, at the upstairs window, trying to get out. He almost had to quit fire-fighting he was so upset.”

“And there was no one there.”

“No, of course. They had searched every inch of the house beforehand. And they searched the ashes afterward.”

“Ooooo,
creepy,”
someone always said, delighted.

 

Per and Britt-Marie had met in Stockholm during the war. She teased him charmingly about how it had taken him six years to come courting her. “Holding a torch for someone else, I think…”she would say.

“No, just stupid,” Per always replied.

Britt-Marie was posted to the Swedish delegation at the U.N. Per had had two novels published in Denmark and was at work on a third, writing in English. They said they loved New York.

“Americans are so welcoming. Very accepting,” Per said.

This delighted the Americans, since it was a nice thing to say and also just what they thought themselves. Sydney insisted on introducing Per as “our friend Per I'm-No-Hero Bennike”; she had told all about the part he'd played in rescuing Laurus's parents, but if anyone mentioned it, he brushed it aside. At a party toward the end of their visit, Ned Maitland called down the table to Per, “All right, you Danes, let's have it, it's time. We want to know how you saved the Jews, without being heroes.”