Leeway Cottage (31 page)

Sydney tried to pretend she knew why they would be amazed. She took a swallow of soup; then curiosity got the better of her.

“Amazed?”

“About The Elms.”

“Oh. The elevator.”

This was a wild guess. But a good one. It had to be either stair lift or elevator; and the guess was worth it, Sydney hated not knowing or seeming to know all the important news before someone else could tell her.

“No,” said Eleanor. “That they're tearing it down.”

Even Laurus put his spoon down and looked at Sydney, and after a pause for the flame to travel up the wick and get to her, Sydney detonated.

“They are
WHAT
?”

Eleanor looked a little worried at this reaction. But a glance from Janet confirmed she
had
heard right…They both had.

“They're going to tear down the house and build something all on one floor, that Uncle Bernard can get around in…”

The look on her mother's face caused Eleanor to subside, though what she'd wanted to say was how cute Nana and Uncle Bernard were about it, how excited to be planning a big new project together.

“She
can't
tear down that house, that's not
her
house! It's
my
house, it's
yours, and Nika's and Jimmy's….”
Sydney roared. “That's
my
grandmother's house, she
built
it, she left it to
my
father, Candace never would have
heard
of Dundee if it weren't for…Oh, for
God's
sake…” And she ran out of the room with her face in her napkin. You couldn't tell if she was going to cry or throw up.

Eleanor and Janet looked at each other. Per and Britt-Marie looked helplessly at Laurus. Laurus went on with his soup until he had quietly finished it. Then he put his napkin into his napkin ring and said, “Eleanor, would you clear? You all go ahead.” And he left the table.

 

Sydney was in their bedroom, weeping with deep, wracking sobs. Laurus sat beside her and patted her back as she curled in on herself and cried, for her dead father, her miserable childhood, for her grandmother who had loved her but died, and with rage at her
stupid, selfish, unloving, snobbish, fake Southern belle, nobody from nowhere bitch of a mother.
“She's finally done it, just when I thought there was nothing else she could do to me, she's found the way to completely kill me. I didn't think she could, I didn't think she could, I thought we were past this,” she sobbed from somewhere inside the coiled whelk she'd made of herself. Then she'd start it again,
stupid, selfish selfish, coldhearted…

Laurus patted her. There was nothing else he could do. If he said, “I'm sure she does love you,” it made her madder, and besides, he wasn't certain it was true. Suddenly Sydney said, “I could stop her, you know. Under my father's will. She has no right to do this.”

“But you're never going to want to live in it yourself, are you?” Laurus knew she wasn't. She loved Leeway Cottage; The Elms was her past, not her future.

Sydney was trapped, as usual. She most likely
could
stop her mother, with a raft of lawyers, which Candace had probably forgotten. But if she did, she'd be paid back in the coin of her mother's outrage and her husband's diminished respect, and probably be thought behind her back to be a dog in the manger.

After a while he went back down to the table, and he was pleased when Sydney herself reappeared in time for dessert. Her eyes were swollen but she'd washed her face and put on fresh lipstick. She put her chin in the air, took a deep breath, and said, “Well.” And gave everyone a big smile. They ate their sherbet and cookies and then settled down in the living room to play Scrabble, while Eleanor and Janet cleared and washed the dishes. Later, tires were heard to crunch in the doorway and the girls went skittering out the back door, letting it slam behind them. Sydney could tell by the sound the engine made that they were off with that boy from the Neck with the ancient black Ford that the children called the Bomb. Nice boy.

Later, in bed, she cried some more, but this time without words, for her summer childhood, her best memories of her father and grandmother, about to be ripped out of the earth like ancient trees. For the fact that even her own children had so much she had never had, a loving mother, a living and sober father, sisters and brothers,
and
all the money and position that had been her only comfort. Laurus patted her.

After that night, she really did seem to have grown a new depth of scar tissue over her heart where her mother was concerned. She dealt with her evenly, calmly, for the rest of the summer, as if she would lose a life-threatening battle if Candace ever guessed how hurt she was. Which for Laurus was a good thing.

T
he Elms came down in October, and it seemed that
half the town went to work building the replacement, to have it ready for Mrs. Christie the next summer. The village buzzed about the design from November to June; the rooms were all strung out on one level, with huge glass sliding doors overlooking the bay, and a shed roof that was practically flat.

“Hell of a strange-
looking
thing” was Mutt Dodge's opinion. “Can't decide if it wants to be a freight train or the railroad barn.” Al Pease was puzzled over installing a bee-day in the master bathroom. “What do you suppose it's for?” he asked. “That you couldn't do in the flush or the sink?” There were plenty of people not far out of town didn't even have their plumbing indoors yet. Now here was a whole new thing for them not to have one of.

 

T
HE
L
EEWAY
C
OTTAGE
G
UEST
B
OOK

Which was hardly a metaphor, as Sydney had wept plenty over it. It had to be admitted that it wasn't just the loss of the old house, which had been a symbol perhaps of regrettable robber baron excess, sure, but as a house it had been gracious, imposing, and based on the best Old World models. So many such houses had already been lost on this coast in the great Bar Harbor fire of 1947, and now another one was gone for No Reason At All. Her mother's new house was not only not gracious, imposing, or curtsying in the direction of Old Europe, it was a triumph of ugliness. And it was in clear sight of the road, where everyone passing had to look at it eight times a day. It was completely out of scale and style with the vernacular architecture, as if it didn't know where it was, and didn't care. Sydney had learned that phrase, “vernacular architecture,” from Neville Crane whom she had cornered in her mother's horrible new “library” and forced to state an opinion. If she had been concerned in her heart of hearts that Candace and Bernard might come up with some new miracle of beauty and convenience that would make her dissatisfied with Leeway (and she had been), her fears were put to rest the minute she set foot in Abbott's on her arrival that summer, before she had even seen the new house herself. The town had seen it, and the town really hated it.

They weren't students of Frank Lloyd Wright, or Prairie Style, or any architectural style but their own, which was simple Greek Revival New England farmhouse. But they didn't need to know a two-dollar name for it to know they hated it. Mind you, the town was also prepared to fight fiercely for your right to build anything you wanted on your own land, it was your land and your home was your castle and they had never, up to now, thought they could be made to see two ways on that subject. This was a twentieth-century village with eighteenth-century politics, things had changed so much more slowly here than in the outside world. The word “zoning” had never even come up in town meeting before. It did in March of 1959, though. If a person could build a house like the Christies', why wouldn't somebody want to put in a Dairy Queen on his front lawn? The meeting grew quite hot on the subject when Kermit Horton made a violent speech about how his great-grandfather had settled on Beal Island in 1832 and from that day to this there had never been any interference in what a man did with his own property as long as he didn't kill anybody or poison the waterways. There was no reason to start sticking their noses into other people's business now. Reuben Jellison stood up without being recognized by the first selectman, and said, “Oh, really? I live right next to the Congregational Church, as Kermit Horton well knows. Is it all right with him if I decide to start strip mining? I think I've probably got some pretty good copper in that front field, right down there by Miss Leaf's garden. I don't think she'll mind the noise much, she's gone so deaf…” They had to adjourn for lunch to get people to stop shouting at each other.

Down at Olive's Lunch, during the break, old Carleton Haskell, who was known to begin the morning with a powerful shot of grain alcohol in his coffee before he started out fishing, kept braying that the house was ugly as tunket but that wasn't the nigger in the woodpile. Carleton himself lived in a trailer that wasn't very beautiful, and he didn't figure that was anybody's business but his. The thing everyone was missing was, this was the first time one of them summer complaints had built a house you could live in all winter. The town had gotten used to having them show up in the spring and stay into the fall, and no one wanted to give up the money they gave to the hospital and the library or the taxes on their shorefront property. Sometimes one of 'em would get old and take to bed to die here, but if it took more than a season, they moved into rented rooms in town for the winter and were carted back to their cottages when the weather warmed up. This kind of a thing, though, they build a thing like that with a cellar and furnace and there was nothing to keep them from staying. Retiring for the duration, if they wanted, didn't look to him as if they knocked themselves out working at much that would keep them away. They could start voting at town meeting, putting their kids in the school…next thing there'd be stoplights. A subway to take you from the bank to the grocery store. How were you geniuses going to like that, then?

Carleton Haskell was mean enough when sober, certainly no one was going to argue with him drunk, or even pay much attention. He was even right, though he wouldn't live to see it. He wouldn't as a matter of fact live to see Christmas. There were rarely any plumbing facilities on a lobster boat, and most fishermen who fell overboard and drowned had their flies open at the time; the percentage was particularly high among those who fished alone and whose breakfast consisted of spiked coffee. Carleton Haskell's trailer was hauled away by spring and the land allowed to revert to meadow. The new Christie house was, however, there to stay.

 

Nineteen fifty-nine was the year Sydney turned forty. She had never looked better, as she vividly knew. Her health was robust, her golf game was terrific, her elderly relatives were able to care for and amuse themselves, and so, at eleven, fourteen, and going on seventeen, were her children. Eleanor had an au pair job down on the Cape this summer but she and her bunch would all be back by the end of August to spend a week or two falling in and out of love with each other. Monica was having her last year at camp. (Monica loved camp, which made Sydney impatient. The kind of girls in her childhood who loved camp and were good at it were also the kind who had never been nice to
her.
) Jimmy was in Dundee, going to Scamp Camp in the mornings and tutoring with Mr. Jellison from the academy in the afternoons. The Leeway family went to The Plywoods every Sunday for lobster Newburg after church, but that was pretty much the extent of onerous family obligations that summer. As the August racing series approached, Sydney and Neville and Gladdy Crane decided one evening, after a lot of wine, to charter the Cochrans' International and race together that season. The boat wasn't very fast, but they had a wonderful time. They sang barbershop harmony during the doldrums. One race Sydney brought a handful of screws and nuts in her pocket and threw them against Ned Maitland's mainsail as the fleet rounded a mark; when they heard stray hardware rattling into the cockpit, Ned and Lucie thought their sail was falling down.

The cockpit of a racing boat is an intimate place. The skipper, or “the nut holding the tiller,” as they called her (Gladdy in this case), devotes total attention to the course, the sails, and the maneuvers of the other boats, trusting her crew to act and react without having to be asked or told. Sydney and Neville were on the jib, with Neville letting off sail on one side as Sydney trimmed in on the other, Neville knowing she needed the winch handle before she had to ask for it, four hands hauling the same sheet when it was too much for two to do alone. On spinnaker legs one trimmed the guy, the other the sheet, standing shoulder to shoulder with eyes never leaving the balloon of sail, lest an edge flutter lead to a curl and then to collapse of the chute. Rufus Maitland, their young muscle, took care of the mainsail. When they rounded the leeward mark, as soon as the jib was hoisted and trimmed, they were crouched together on the floorboards, thrown into the curve of the hull by the angle of heel, sometimes with green water coming over the rail and down their necks, repacking the spinnaker for a second set, pressed close out of Rufus's way as he rushed to clear and secured the spinnaker halyard, pole, and sheets, before they tacked and lost something overboard. Sydney quoted Neville a lot that summer. “The thing about The Plywoods,” she would say, at a Country Club dinner, or the race tea, or at intermission at Ischl Hall on Sunday afternoons, “is, it shows no respect for the vernacular architecture. You see. Otherwise I wouldn't mind so much.”

The final race of the series, they sailed the entire course in formal evening dress. Sydney was wearing a gown of her grandmother Annabelle's, with a capacious pleated bosom and jet buttons. Gladdy wore the dress she had worn to Elise Maitland's deb party, with an evening stole, since she could no longer begin to fasten the dress up the back. Neville wore his tuxedo jacket and ruffled shirt and a bathing suit, which caused everyone to whistle and clap for his shapely legs. Beautiful young Rufus Maitland was also wearing an ancient evening dress of his grandmother's, a flapper job in yellow. Bess Maitland complained that he looked better in it than she had. They didn't sail very well, but it was agreed at the tea, they won on style hands down.

 

When Sydney walked in the front door of Leeway, leaving a dripping spinnaker bag on the porch and carrying her foul-weather gear in her arms, her face was streaked with sun and salt; she was still wearing the bedraggled evening dress. At the same moment, Laurus was coming in at the back, so streaked with soot he looked like a coal miner. They met in the living room, and stared at each other.

Sydney explained the costume. “I've wrecked the hem,” she said, looking down sadly. “Maybe the French laundry in New York can do something with it. It was a panic, though. What are you dressed as?”

“There was a fire up by the old Burial Ground. Three-alarmer; I'm surprised you didn't hear the sirens.”

“We must have already gone to sea. Was anyone hurt?”

“A horse stepped on Al Pease's foot. Could be broken. We got all the animals out of the barn, though, and saved the house.”

“Whose house?”

They were on their way upstairs, Sydney peeling her finery off over her head, Laurus taking care not to touch anything with his blackened clothes.

“Webby Allen's daughter. Too bad—nice young couple.”

“That
is
too bad. You want the shower first?”

“You go ahead. You must be chilled through.”

“Thanks.”

He sat on the closed lid of the flush to pull off his boots, while Sydney got the water steaming and stepped into the bathtub. She pulled the curtain.

Laurus carefully undressed and dropped each garment into the hamper so he wouldn't get inky soot on the bath mats and towels. He could tell he smelled like a charred log. In the shower, Sydney began to sing. Laurus sat naked listening to her. It was one of the lieder from her student days; she was showing off for him. He was smiling when she got out of the shower.

When they were both clean and dressed, Sydney said, “Gladdy and Neville asked us for dinner, her peas are in and they have grilse in the freezer. Can you?”

“I told Hugh Chamblee I'd help him move a stove.” Hugh Chamblee was the new minister at the Congo church. Asking someone to help move a stove was a way a man asked another in for a drink.

Sydney just waited. “But I can tell Hugh another night,” said Laurus. Sydney had already told Gladdy they'd be there, so she smiled and went down to give Ellen orders about Jimmy's supper.