Leeway Cottage (32 page)

I
n the spring of 1962, Laurus was elected president of
the local YMCA board. Also, his prize student won a full scholarship to the Juilliard School in New York, the first of her family to get past high school. “A very talented colored girl,” Sydney wrote to her mother. “She's coming to dinner here with her parents next week.” (She was only sorry she couldn't be present to watch her mother read the letter.) Eleanor finished her second year at Skidmore College on the dean's list. Monica was at Miss Pratt's, and to her father's satisfaction had an au pair job lined up in Jaderslev, Jutland, working for a married daughter of the Mogens Wessel family, who were so fond of Faster Nina. And Jimmy was expelled from school for the first time.

Jimmy had been in hot water a couple of times already that spring. Laurus was particularly annoyed when Jimmy and his partner in crime since early childhood, who had a real name but was known as Winky, borrowed Laurus's elderly Nash Rambler and drove it down the lane to the cemetery, where, in attempting to learn how to use a stick shift without instruction, they succeeded in stripping out the gears. They left the car in the middle of the cemetery drive, ran home, and tried to establish alibis against the fairly inevitable moment when the car would be found and questions asked.

“I was home! I helped Mom carry the laundry up!”

“He
says
he had nothing to do with it,” Sydney added.

Laurus just stared at the two of them.

“And I watered the garden, Mom saw me!”

“So the car drove to the cemetery by itself?”

“Maybe a bum stole it.”

There was a long standoff in which Laurus merely looked, mildly but steadily, at Jimmy. If you listened to Sydney you'd have thought that Laurus came and went in an artistic fog, unaware of where the children were or how clean sheets got on the beds or the bills got paid, but now and then, and often at inconvenient moments, one suddenly saw that perhaps this was merely Sydney's version.

“May I ask why you left it in the middle of the road?”

Another long pause. “Winky couldn't get it out of reverse.”

Sydney looked at him, surprised. Jimmy had finally dropped his eyes to stare at his sneakers. There was something dark and unpleasant to the shape of his mouth.

“Winky,” said Laurus. Silence. “And you didn't think of coming home in reverse?”

“Yes, but we're not that good at backing up.”

Sydney had to turn away for fear of laughing, or making Laurus laugh. Although Laurus did not look so tempted.

“And it didn't occur to you to bring the keys with you? You couldn't make it go anymore so who cares if I ever see it again?”

Silence.

“Did it occur to you that you could have had an accident? And you and Winky are underage and unlicensed? And therefore uninsured? Do you know what could have happened to all of us if you had hit someone?”

Silence. It had not, of course, occurred to Jimmy or Winky. After very little more conversation Laurus informed him that he was grounded for two weeks except to go to school, and that if he touched the steering wheel of a car again before he had his learner's permit, he would be even sorrier than he was today. ( Jimmy had not mentioned being sorry.) After dinner that night Sydney disappeared with Jimmy into his bedroom, where she listened, murmuring, for a long time to a great deal of complaint.

“You know,” she said later to Laurus, “there aren't a lot of thirteen-year-olds who do know about liability insurance.”

“Did he know he wasn't allowed to drive?”

“Yes, but—”

She dropped it. And was very satisfactorily appreciated by Jimmy when on Saturday she let him go to the movies in the afternoon, knowing Laurus was in New York and wouldn't be home until Monday. Just their little secret.

 

On a Monday afternoon in May, Laurus arrived home from a student recital in which two of his pupils had particularly shone. The lilacs were in bloom and the air smelled of sunlight and cut grass. Monica was home for her one weekend allowed away from school. (At Miss Pratt's, weekends ran from Saturday noon to Monday evening. Eleanor claimed this was to keep the girls out of sync with the real world, by which she meant the boys' schools, so there was nothing for Miss Pratt's girls to do for their weekends off
but
come home.) From the driveway he could see Monica and her friend Meg sitting in lawn chairs beside the still-covered swimming pool with Latin textbooks in their laps and their faces turned toward the spring sun. Nika, with her fine-boned face and poreless polished skin, looked more and more like Nina at the same age. It was such a moment in the lives of these girls, full of tension and balance, the moment just before they plunged off into the new elements of whatever was going to happen to them. And could anyone prepare them or protect them? No. All people ever did was prepare for the disasters that have already happened. Who could have protected his beloved broken Nina from whatever it was that happened to her?

He walked across the lawn to them, his footsteps almost silent in the grass.

“I take it this is the meeting of the Classics Club?”

The girls' eyes snapped open. Meg jumped to her feet to shake his hand. “Hi, Mr. Moss.”

“Hi, honey, it's nice to see you. Sit down. What's going on here, pussy cat?” he asked Monica, ruffling her short sleek hair. “Latin exam coming?”

“Get your helmet, Dad. Mom's on the warpath.”

Laurus glanced toward the house. “Why?”

“Jimmy's been kicked out of school.” Monica took no pleasure in delivering this news. There had been such a steady drumbeat of expectation in the household from Sydney (who had not exactly triumphed in the educational arena herself ) that they
had
to get good grades, so they could go to the
right
boarding school, so as to get into the
right
colleges, the holy grail in the world according to Sydney…this felt terrifying to Monica, as if her brother had fallen off a moving train and would now lie dazed and ruined somewhere forever while his life roared off without him.

“I see. Do we know why?”

“Cheating was mentioned.”

Laurus looked up at the sound of the kitchen screen door opening. Sydney was there, waiting for him. Her hair was crimped and stiff from a recent permanent wave and she was dressed in cherry-pink shorts and a cable-knit sweater. He went toward her. She didn't like it when something was afoot and the children got to Laurus before she did.

“Before you get upset,” said Sydney, with the portentous air of a ten-star general (at least) who has met the enemy, defeated him single-handed, and completed the mop-up operation while everyone else was still trying to get his boots on. This was a familiar spot on her warpath, though a later one than Monica had apparently crossed. Sydney was perfectly capable of conducting all parts of a family drama herself, and it was just as well, this manner implied.

They had retreated to the den and closed the door. “I'm already upset,” said Laurus. “What happened? Where is he?”

“He's upstairs. But before you get upset, I want you to know that it's all taken care of. He can finish the term with a tutor and in the fall he'll go to the Cañada School in California.”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa. What the hell is the Cañada School? Let's get Jimmy down here, I want to hear what happened.”

“The Cañada School is a very good boarding school in California. He'll be far away from the troublemakers he hangs around with.”

“Troublemakers he hangs around with? Winky Sylvester?”

“I called Gladdy and Neville, and Neville knew exactly what to do, and we've both talked to the school and it's taken care of.”

“Hold on. Please. You called Gladdy and Neville before you talked to me?”

“I couldn't reach you.”

“I was right where I said I'd be.”

“I know, but I couldn't interrupt.”

They looked at each other steadily. Laurus went out and called up the stairs. “Jimmy?”

It took a long time and a certain sharpness added to his tone before he got an answer.

“Will you come down here, please? Your mother and I want to talk to you.”

When Jimmy shambled down, he flopped onto the couch and crossed his arms, his expression hooded and sullen.

“Young man.”

No response.

“Young man, look at me, please.”

Jimmy's eyes looked all over the room before he could force himself to meet his father's blue gaze.

“Tell me what happened.”

“Well, but first, Mr. Blodgett doesn't like me…”

“It's true,” Sydney said. “Mr. Blodgett has it in for him.”

Laurus's gaze never wavered. “And you don't think your own behavior has anything to do with that?”

“NO!”

In the next half hour, Laurus learned that Jimmy had already been suspended for a day in April for cheating on a math quiz. He said he hadn't cheated, it was a coincidence that his wrong answers matched the wrong answers of the boy sitting next to him, and Sydney had supported him. After a girlhood of feeling scorned herself, Sydney was working to protect Jimmy from the disaster that had already happened to
her,
by believing anything he told her as long as he looked straight into her eyes when he told it. And since she believed him, and it was shortly after the Nashcan-in-the-cemetery business, she hadn't wanted Laurus to have a cow.

“So no one thought to mention this to me?”

“You were in New York. You took Carla Thigpen to New York that day to audition,” said Sydney.

“A girl, by the way, who works like a Trojan at her music,
and
her schoolwork—”

“I'd work at music if you ever let me play the instrument I wanted,” said Jimmy.

“This is news. What instrument is it you want to play?”

“Drums,” said Jimmy.

 

(I
N
M
ONICA
'
S ROUND HANDWRITING
)

 

Laurus had flown to Denmark to spend two weeks with his parents and bring Monica home. For a week Monica was with him in Ny borg, with Farmor and Farfar and Faster Nina and Tante Tofa. Then they'd gone down to visit Kaj and Kirsten and Monica's little Moss cousins at their seaside house on the south coast of Zealand. Eleanor wasn't coming to Dundee at all that summer. She and two college friends had jobs at a dude ranch in Wyoming.

With everyone gone except Jimmy for so much of August, Laurus worried that Sydney might be in a mood when he got back, but in fact, she was blooming. Her color was high and bright, and she was bubbling with cheer. She even seemed to enjoy their homecoming dinner at The Plywoods, which Candace had so wanted to give, although her cook, Velma, was now about a hundred and seemed to have forgotten how to cook anything
but
lobster Newburg, and Monica and Jimmy were so tired of having it every time they saw their grandmother, they wouldn't eat it anymore.

“It'll be fine,” Sydney said brightly to Laurus, meaning, I won't have a tantrum about it. “We can go to Gladdy and Neville's tomorrow night and see all our pals.”

Candace and Bernard had some tedious old friend from Cleveland staying with them, a confirmed bachelor named Mr. Ellery. He was dapper and clean, at least, which was more than could always be said about the octogenarians. (What was it about that age that they stopped taking baths? Norris Cummings, Candace's old beau, still looked tidy, but he smelled like a garbage dump, as if decomposing had already begun.) Sydney was in rare form, flirting with Mr. Ellery and laughing at his jokes.

“…and so the king of Denmark said, ‘Very well, if you insist our Jews wear the yellow star, then I, too, will wear the yellow star, and so will all of my subjects.' And he was the first to put on the yellow armband and so did every one of the Danes, and the Germans were
simply
furious…”Sydney was telling Mr. Ellery.

“No! Why, that's marvelous,” cried Mr. Ellery.

At their end of the table, Monica whispered to her father, “Dad—that didn't happen.”

Laurus nodded and chewed intently on his salad without looking up.

“I asked Mr. Wessel
and
Faster Nina. It never happened.”

“I know,” he said to her softly, and touched her hand, but he kept quietly eating. Monica looked at him, puzzled. His mood had changed since they came home. She thought he might be homesick. She tried to tell if at this moment he was annoyed, or what, but she couldn't read a thing in his expression.

After dinner, when Sydney went into the trailerlike living room to make a fourth at bridge, Laurus took Monica home. He dropped her at Leeway, saying he would be down at the firehouse if there was a hurricane or her hair caught fire. He drove off to join Al Pease and Hugh Chamblee and Dr. Coles and the others at their poker game.

Monica didn't go inside. Instead she walked down the white ribbon of dirt road toward the bathing beach. There was a huge glowing moon low in the sky and silver light pooled on the flat plate of the bay. Denmark seemed like a distant planet, its smells and tastes and ways so unknown here. Here, no one seemed to know anything existed except America. She felt melancholy that there was so much about the world that was badly arranged, and she was so powerless to change any of it. And annoyed that on this beautiful quiet night, there was no point going into the house, which she loved and had also missed, because Jimmy, who had ridden his bike home the minute he was allowed to leave the table at Nana's, was upstairs in the bedroom next to hers, whamming away on his drum set.