Leeway Cottage (36 page)

“Oh,
do
you,” she said, as if he had slapped her. “Fine. Let's play it out.”

They did, and Neville was right. When the last trick fell to Neville, Sydney looked stricken. No one spoke for what seemed like minutes. Then Sydney said to Laurus with effort, and a very forced smile, “Sorry, partner.”

“No harm done,” said Laurus, “we're still killing them.” And the deal passed to Gladdy. As she was shuffling, Sydney rose suddenly and left the table.

W
hen Sydney didn't come back, the other three
sat in silence.

 

“Do you suppose she's ill?” Laurus asked. The Cranes said nothing, and did not look at each other.

Finally, Neville said, “She seemed all right at dinner.”

“Gladdy…could you see? Would you mind? If she's sick, she'd rather have you than a man…”

When Gladdy still didn't say anything, Laurus seemed about to say more. Gladdy stood up. “Of course,” she said.

Now that the two men were alone at the table, there was another silence, until Laurus said conversationally, “I'm sorry we didn't get to Egypt. What do you know about the Library of Alexandria?”

 

Gladdy found Sydney in the guest room at the far end of the house. She was sitting on the blue-flowered bedspread sobbing as if her insides would come out. She stopped and looked up when the door opened; Gladdy saw a hope in her eyes that was almost desperate, but it fled the instant she saw who it was who had come. With a flip of her hand that expressed despair, she turned away from the door and her weeping resumed. She held a handkerchief in her lap, and she twisted and twisted it.

Gladdy closed the door behind her and went to a chair in the corner of the room. She sat up straight, not comfortably, and she looked at Sydney. She said nothing, and made no move to come closer.

“You shouldn't be here,” Sydney said, finally.

“I know. But your husband asked me to come.”

Sydney mopped at her eyes and held the handkerchief against her lips. She was trying to stifle her tears and hold her sobs in; it seemed important to her to show some self-mastery now. Gladdy sat quietly. She watched Sydney as if with curiosity.

Finally Sydney raised her ruined face to address her friend. The lens of tears made her eyes seem enormous.

“I don't under
stand,”
she said, “why it's always like this. Why am I
always
the one in tears?” There was a bitter edge to these last words and she looked at Gladdy as if she expected an answer. Gladdy said nothing.

“I don't understand, why he wouldn't…when I wanted…” She stopped again because she could hear that her voice now held anger, and she knew from long experience not to show that card when others might hold better ones.

Finally Gladdy said, almost gently, “You have much more money than I have, and you are much more beautiful. You always have been. But I am better at loving, and being loved.”

As the words hung in the air between them there was, most unwelcome, a tap on the door. Gladdy called, “Yes?”

“Oh, are you …?”

“We'll be out in a minute…”

Sydney looked at Gladdy and said, “I can't. I can't go out there.”

“I'm sorry,” said Gladdy, “but you have to.” She got up and slipped out the door, closing it behind her.

In the hall, waiting, was old Mrs. Maitland. “I'm so sorry, are the other loos full of people?”

“The other one I know how to find is full of my husband.” Mrs. Maitland smiled.

“Sydney will be out in a second.”

“Thank you.”

Gladdy went back to the card table where the men were talking about the Valley of the Kings, and when Sydney rejoined them, surprisingly composed, Gladdy dealt the next hand.

I
n the spring of 1964, Monica, a glorious senior, was
sunbathing by the pool in Connecticut with three friends from boarding school on a Sunday afternoon. They had slept until noon, and now were eating peanut brittle and smoking Kools. Monica heard the back door slam, and looked up to see her mother stalking across the lawn toward them. She sat up and pulled up her bathing suit straps.

Sydney stood over the girls, drawn up to her full height with her nostrils all pinched and flutey, a demeanor Monica perfectly recognized. Sydney waited for maximum attention, like a headmistress who refuses to speak until there is deathly quiet in the auditorium.

“Your sister,” Sydney finally announced in her grandest manner, “has cheated you out of a wedding.”

Monica couldn't understand the sentence.

“Eleanor?”

“Your sister
Eleanor.
Has
eloped
with Bobby Applegate.”

The other girls were now sitting up, attention riveted.

“Really? Cool!”

“Monica,
try
to speak English,” said Sydney, furious.

“What happened? Where are they now?”

“They were married in New York, yesterday, and I have no idea where they are now. On their way back to school, I suppose. She won't even be able to graduate as Eleanor Moss, you know. She won't even have her
real
name on her diploma.”

“Did you talk to her?”

“I did
not
talk to her. I talked to Bobby's father, who apparently was their witness. He
aided
and
abetted
the whole thing. I suppose he wanted to get out of paying for the rehearsal dinner.”

Monica made a successful effort to look grave. This preference for Bobby's parents over her own, after the circus of bride's magazines and wedding plans Sydney had already begun, though the young couple had not even announced an engagement, would be insanely wounding to her mother. Finally Sydney said, “I have to find your father,” and swept off.

When the kitchen door slammed, Monica began to laugh.

“What? What? Do you think she's pregnant?”

“Cheated
me
out of a wedding! Oh, God, isn't it wonderful?”

But her friends didn't quite understand it; only Eleanor would.

 

There was no celebration when Eleanor graduated from Skidmore, or as Jimmy (who was not in attendance) called it, Skidmarks. Monica wasn't allowed to leave school so close to her own graduation; at Miss Pratt's the weekends after May 15 were closed for seniors. So only Sydney and Laurus went. Eleanor had had to move out of the college dorm for the last few weeks of class, since it was thought unwholesome for a married woman, with her dangerous carnal knowledge, to live among innocents, but she'd found a very nice room in a boardinghouse which Mr. Applegate was paying for, until Sydney found out and insisted on paying instead. The Applegates senior attended the graduation with Bobby; Sydney kept introducing Eleanor as “my daughter, Mrs. Applegate,” to other girls' parents. Twice in Eleanor's hearing Sydney said loudly to relative strangers, “They eloped last month, and she isn't even pregnant! Isn't it ro
man
tic?”

Sydney set to work trying to make Bobby Applegate's mother into her new best friend, but she found it slow going. “So the king said, ‘Very
well,
my Jews will wear the yellow star, but so will I and so will
all
my subjects,'” Eleanor heard her shout. Mrs. Applegate murmured and smiled. Shortly after the graduation lunch, all the Applegates, including of course Eleanor, drove away, en route to Georgetown for Bobby's graduation.

Monica's graduation from Miss Pratt's was the following Thursday. The weather was fair, and Monica, in a white dress and a crown of flowers, was one of the honor guards of the Daisy Chain. There was sentimental weeping, and singing in the garden, and a Justice of the Supreme Court gave the commencement address. Monica tried her best to make everything perfect for her mother, since that was the niche in the family ecology that seemed available to her, but it was all for nothing. The night before the event, her parents, tracked by phone to the Wayside Inn, were informed that Jimmy had been expelled from school again.

 

Actually, he had been expelled after the fact, the fact being that he had disappeared entirely. The whole day of her graduation, Monica kept looking around for her parents, as she accepted the French prize, as she marched in the garden with her white crooked staff, beside the slowly marching white-clad girls bearing the long heavy rope of white daisies with yellow centers. Her parents were off somewhere, on telephones, her mother alternating between fury at the school, which had waited several days before admitting Jimmy was gone, and fear for Jimmy (where
was
he?). Her father was trying to keep his wife calm and take sensible actions. Laurus called the police to report a missing person while Sydney stood outside the booth whimpering and shouting instructions to him as to what to say. He had a long talk with Jimmy's dorm master, and another with the headmaster, while Sydney stood next to him and then made him repeat every word from the other end.

Monica had her trunk and suitcases packed, her pennants and stuffed animals all given to younger girls, her roommates helped to their parents' cars and kissed goodbye for the hundredth time. She was alone in an empty room when her parents finally reappeared. She and her father heaved the luggage down the stairs in several trips. They drove away from the school, with only a chemistry teacher Monica had never studied with happening by to wave as she departed. In the backseat, Monica lit a cigarette before they crossed the town line, to see if that would get a rise out of them, but it didn't.

When they got home, the cook (a new one, colored and ancient) said that yes, there had been messages. Many. She showed them the notepad where she had laboriously written them. Jimmy's school had called. Jimmy had called, to say he was all right. “Did he say where he was?” Sydney demanded, but the cook said no, and of course she didn't ask. Why would they need to know that? He was at some boarding school, as she understood it. She'd never met him. And Ellingod had called.

Sydney and Laurus looked at each other. Is this someone you know? each look asked the other.

“Ellen Gott,” said Monica.

“Yes,” said the cook, “that's what it says.”

Sydney dove for the phone on the wall.

“Oh, hello, Mrs. Moss,” said Ellen's big cheerful voice.

“Ellen, have you heard from Jimmy?”

“I've got him right here. I've been calling to see what you want me to do with him.”

“Oh, thank
God,”
Sydney breathed, and mouthed to the other two, He's there. Nodding her head. Yes. He's there.

“Is he all right?”

“Seems to be.”

“How did he get there?”

“Hitchhiked.”

“And walked,” Jimmy was heard to prompt from the background.

“And walked some.”

Laurus took the phone, and Sydney sat down at the kitchen table, where Monica was eating a cup of yogurt and thinking about what else was in the refrigerator that she could eat whenever she wanted, freed finally from the confines of formal meals at school.

Sydney said, “I could
kill
your brother,” in a tone that Monica knew meant that she loved Jimmy more than any creature on earth and was already in her mind turning this into a comic story, another of Jimmy's winning escapades.

“Be my guest,” said Monica.

L
aurus drove to Dundee to collect the reprobate.
The drive home was long and quiet. Around New Hampshire, Laurus asked Jimmy what he thought should happen now.

“There's a school in Vermont I could go to.”

“What kind of school?”

“It's like a farm, school, thing.”

“I'm not getting the picture.”

“It's this farm, and you grow your own food, all the vegetables and wheat and stuff. And you can eat meat if you want, but if you do, you have to raise the animals and slaughter them yourself. If you don't want to do that, you don't eat meat and you don't even wear leather, no shoes or belts or anything.”

“Is academic work included in this plan?”

“Oh, yeah. All that stuff. I assume. You rotate through the barns and the kitchen and learn to do all the jobs. It's, like, school about how the world works. Really.”

“And you think that would suit you?”

“Yeah,” Jimmy said. “It would be real.”

“What was not real about the very expensive school you just ran away from?”

“California?”

“Is that your answer? California was not real?”

Jimmy shifted unhappily and looked out the window.

“It was all right.”

“Then why did you run away?”

“I didn't want to be there.”

Several miles passed in silence.

“But you would want to be at this farm school? Does it have a name?”

Jimmy told him the name and said he would, yeah. He really would. He thought so.

“Do people go on to college from this school?”

“Is that so important?” Jimmy asked angrily.

“It is to your mother.”

“It's not her life.”

“I'm aware of that. Do you have an interest in farming as a career?”

“I like being outdoors.”

“But not digging holes for rich people's rosebushes.”

Jimmy shot his father a look. More silent miles.

“May one inquire how you heard about this school?”

“A friend of mine goes there.”

“Which friend?”

“You don't know her.”

“But what's her name?”

“Frannie.”

 

For once, Sydney got no chance to muddy the waters. Monica didn't see it happen, she never heard a raised voice or a charged conversation between her parents that June. They did spend a good many quiet evenings in the upstairs sitting room instead of coming down to the den for cocktails, while Jimmy sulked in his tent and Monica and her friends sat on the terrace in the heat-swollen evenings, watching fireflies and talking about their future lives. Dinners were pleasant and normal, served every night at seven-fifteen in the dining room, the cook passing the overcooked vegetables, and everyone drinking milk. Monica was away a lot, as many of her friends were having debutante parties. Candace had urged giving one for Eleanor, when she was that age: “Eleanor would love all that.” Sydney had known Eleanor
would
love all that, but refused. So naturally she wouldn't do it for Monica either. Which was fine, Monica would really
not
have loved all that, being the center of attention, though it was fun going to house parties and meeting her friends' friends, and all that dancing. However it was worked out, by the time the parents left for Dundee, Jimmy had been packed off to Denmark. Jimmy had made the mistake of letting his father know which briar patch he actually wished to be thrown into, and in his quiet way Laurus had remained adamant. His plan included keeping Jimmy away from Dundee for an entire year.

 

 

Candace and Uncle Bernard, whose special love for Eleanor, “his” baby, had never wavered, were giving a huge party for the newlyweds, with a tent on the lawn and a dance band, exactly like a wedding reception, and Sydney was furious about it. For one thing, she had
told
them, there was no reason to reward bad behavior in this way, but Bernard said, “Nonsense—she's married a wonderful young man and it's a cause for celebration.” (As if it were
his
business.) Kaj and Kirsten and two of their children were coming from Copenhagen, also goddam Nina, and Sydney was having all the work of feeding and entertaining them all and none of the fun of planning the party and being Queen of the Hop. Eleanor knew her mother would booby-trap things if she could, but remained unrepentant and pleased. She was in some way more Sydney-proof than Monica. She had Laurus's sunny steady temperament, which protected her from feeling her mother's attacks so deeply, and also, she had had those years alone with her mother during the war.

 

The day after the dance, Gladdy and Amelia Crane gave a lunch party for the young Applegates and the Danish cousins. Sydney was off escorting the senior Applegates and Kaj and Kirsten to Mount Desert where they would see Thunder Hole and have tea with popovers at the Jordan Pond House; Sydney had made a face with her tongue out at them behind their backs for Monica's benefit as she announced this. Nina had elected to stay home with Laurus. They were sitting on the porch, reading, when Laurus noticed an unfamiliar car come slowly up the lane and pause, just past the Leeway Cottage driveway. The driver peered up at the house, then crept off. In a moment the car was back, going in the other direction, and this time it turned timidly into the drive and came right up to the porch steps.

Laurus went to the top of the stairs and watched the driver dismount, a woman of about his age in a shirtwaist dress, nylons, and clean white sneakers. Not a Country Club girl, nor yet from any of the old year-round families, that he knew, anyway. Probably raising money for Ischl or the hospital.

“Good afternoon,” he said.

“Are you Mr. Moss?”

“I am. Are you where you mean to be?”

She smiled. “I am.”

“Please come up, then.”

The woman climbed the stairs and gave him her hand. “I'm Hannah Ober,” she said.

“Laurus Moss. This is my sister, Nina Moss.”

Laurus was still waiting for the shoe to drop.

“I'm Frannie's mother,” she said.

“Please,” said Laurus. “Sit down.”

The three of them sat and looked at each other. “I think you may know my husband Harold. From church,” said Hannah.

“This is the mother of Jimmy's girl,” said Laurus to Nina, who murmured and nodded.

Ellen appeared at the door from inside. “Oh, hello, Hannah!”

“Ellen, how are you?”

“I came to see if your company needed anything, Mr. Moss.”

“Could we have some iced tea, do you think? Will you have iced tea?” he asked Mrs. Ober. The atmosphere was distressingly polite. What had she come to say, that she demanded he keep his badly raised, unpleasant son away from her daughter? Who could blame her?

When Ellen had gone, Hannah Ober smoothed her skirt over her knees and asked, “Have you met Frannie?”

“No. My daughters have. But Jimmy is away this summer.”

“I know,” said Hannah. “Believe me.” And smiled. Her hair was graying and she wore no makeup, but when she smiled she was beautiful.

“Is Frannie here in Dundee?”

“She was. My husband took her back to Boston when he went down. My mother came for a visit and I didn't think I could handle them both at the same time.”

“Where do you live?”

“We have a camp up by Third Pond.”

“How old is Frannie?” Nina asked.

“Seventeen, just.”

“Ah. An older woman.”

“Yes.”

Ellen was back with the tea in tall glasses, with mint from the garden, and a plate of cookies. She gave them each a paper napkin with
LEEWAY COTTAGE
printed on it in navy blue. When Ellen had gone, Hannah said, “I like Jimmy very much.”

“Do
you?” Laurus knew that his son had his good points but was hard-pressed to know how others could recognize them.

“Yes, but I should add, I've always been a sucker for the bad boys.”

“And so is your daughter.”

“Oh, indeed. But don't tell
her
she and I have anything in common. I'm glad I remember giving birth to her or I'd swear she'd been left on the doorstep by wolves.” Laurus laughed and Nina smiled.

“No wonder she and Jimmy are soul mates.”

“I teach that age,” said Nina.

“On purpose?”

“Yes. They are a great deal of trouble to themselves, and of course
we
know nothing.” Her voice was unexpectedly warm with affection.

“We know
nothing.
Frannie's father and I are both heartless poops who never loved and won't lift a finger to fix what's wrong with the world. Frannie is furious about Vietnam, and apparently it's my fault.”

“Yours personally?” Nina asked, smiling.

“Yes.”

“I congratulate you,” said Laurus. “I would be pleased if Jimmy were angry about the state of the world, instead of his many personal complaints.”

“Wait until he's draft age,” said Hannah. “I understand he's in Denmark?”

“Yes. Working on a pig farm.”

Hannah smiled and drained her iced tea glass. “That's rather inspired.”

“Thank you,” said Laurus.

“But it won't last forever.”

“No.”

“Thank you for seeing me,” she said, rising. “Whatever happens next, I thought it would be wise if we'd met.”

“I agree.”

“If you'll give me a paper and pencil, I'll leave our telephone numbers here, and in Boston.” Laurus got a pad, and they exchanged numbers. “Frannie has one more year of boarding school.”

“Which she likes, I understand.”

“Yes, thank God she likes
something.
You notice there isn't an inch of leather on my person …We continue to eat the dear lambies and moo cows, though. It makes mealtimes with her a treat.”

“I wonder how she handles Jimmy's cheeseburger habit.”

“Is he going back to California?”

“No, we're keeping him at home. He'll go to the public high school.”

“And we shall see what we shall see.”

When she had gone, Nina said, “Nice woman.”

“Yes.”

“What if they
are
soul mates, Jimmy and her daughter?”

“Do you believe in soul mates?” Laurus asked.

“I think I do,” said Nina. And suddenly there were two big questions yawning between them, that neither would ask and neither should answer.

Nina stood and gathered the tea things. As she bent over the tray, Laurus noticed how thin she was. Suddenly he could see her as the children must, not a slightly faded version of the lovely girl she had been, but a bony older lady who always needed a sweater, even in August. He watched her open the door and slip into the dark house, and then sat by himself looking down the lawn to the bay. Sydney had run the Danish flag up the flagpole along with the Stars and Stripes, to honor the houseguests. They stood out smartly in the afternoon breeze. Very picturesque.