Leeway Cottage (38 page)

F
aster Nina died in the winter of 1992. Laurus and
Monica went over to Copenhagen for the funeral. It was small and quiet. Everyone agreed there was no point asking Sydney to go; she was increasingly made anxious by unfamiliar surroundings and she wouldn't understand the Danish service anyway. Nina had left careful instructions for her final arrangements: what hymns she wanted, a request for cremation, what clothes she wanted to wear, even a little doll she wanted to take with her. Her careful planning was just what one would have expected. But everyone was surprised by two things in Nina's will: one request for each brother. Nina had left a small bequest to someone they'd never heard of named Hans Katz, about whom she said only that he was born in Jutland in about March of 1943 and had emigrated to Israel with his family in 1958. She asked Kaj to find him and send him a sum of money and her blessing. The other was that Laurus scatter her ashes on the bay at Dundee.

“Why, I wonder?” Kaj and Kirsten had supposed she would go into the churchyard with Papa and Mama.

“She always said she was so at peace out on the water there,” Laurus said, but he was as surprised as they were.

Laurus knew, too, that the request was a measure of how close Nina felt to him, and was both glad for her forgiving love and bitterly sad that he hadn't seen more of her over the years, had her to stay longer, and more often. But. Well.

He and Monica flew home with Faster Nina's ashes in an urn wrapped in brown paper. Kaj's wife and daughters had taken care of finding the doll she had mentioned, and the final costume, all thoughtfully collected in a corner of the closet. That part was over by the time Laurus and Monica got there.

“What was the doll like?” Monica asked her cousin. She pictured a beloved memento from Nina's childhood, or maybe something she had hoped one day to give to a daughter of her own. Wouldn't that be sad.

“It was a scary little thing. More like a fetish than a doll. It had little stick limbs, with clogs and a babushka.”

Monica kept her godmother's ashes for the rest of the winter and brought them up to Dundee at the end of July.

 

In those days, Eleanor and Bobby rented a house down on the Salt Pond in Dundee and were there for most of the summer. The whole Applegate family came each week to Sunday supper at Leeway as once Leeway had gone to The Elms, and later to The Plywoods. Jimmy and his wife and children spent several weeks in July at Leeway and overlapped for a necessarily brief time when Monica and her children came for August. The Guest Book was kept in Laurus's hand or Monica's in these years.

 

That night they had family dinner at Eleanor's, and told stories about Nina, trying to fix her in their children's minds. How she shopped so carefully for each child's Christmas present. How she always had a book in French somewhere about her. How she loved Paris and was so grieved when the Jeu de Paume, her favorite museum, was closed. How she would sit on the porch at Leeway and look out over the gardens and the bay. How modest she was; how they never would have known about the brave things she did in the war if Per Bennike hadn't told them. It didn't feel as if she had left much behind, for a life of seventy years. The young blamed her smoking for a death that came too early. Laurus felt, but did not express, a very different sense of his sister's loss; that sometime during the war her essential self had been murdered, and she'd had to struggle on from there as a husk, without dreams or hope. Seventy years of that seemed to him quite long enough.

 

“Monica,” said Eleanor that summer, “do you think Syd Vicious should be driving?”

The sisters were playing golf together, content in the late-summer sunshine to see so many people around them on the tees and greens whom they knew and in many cases loved.

“Why, just because she keeps turning on the windshield wipers instead of her turn signal?”

“One of these days she's going to step on the gas when she meant the brake. We'll be lucky if all she does is kill her
self.
”

“Have you talked to Dad about it?”

“I brought it up.”

“What'd he say?”

“He said she doesn't drive very fast.”

They both laughed, and paused while Eleanor located her ball in the blueberry scrub.

When they were on the tee of the fourth hole, their friend Amelia came bowling up the Point Road in her little death trap, a restored Corvair convertible from her teenage years, kept on the road by ingenious substitutions of body parts her husband scavenged from an auto graveyard north of Bangor. The car lived in a decaying barn in the winter and was only driven on sunny summer days, as the top had long since disintegrated.

They waved and Amelia pulled off the road and left her car tucked in among some pines. She joined them on the tee.

“Who's winning?” she asked.

“We have no idea. Here, you're up.” Eleanor handed her a driver and Monica gave her some tees and a ball. When they were all safely over the road and wandering down the fairway, Eleanor said, “We're trying to figure out how to stop Big Syd from driving. I'm afraid she'll run over one of the children.”

“Uncle Laurus can't stop her?”

“Can't or won't. You know how they are. If you don't talk about it, it isn't happening.”

“They're very sweet together,” said Amelia. “I saw them having lunch here yesterday, talking about what it is they like to eat. Your mother couldn't remember the word for salmon.”

“Usually they just look up trustingly at the waitress and say, ‘that fish that we like, that's pink.'”

“Your father's got most of his marbles, though.”

“Thank heaven.”

“Syd Vicious can't remember the names of her grandchildren but she can sure hit a golf ball,” said Eleanor.

“Yes, but then she hates her grandchildren. She likes golf.”

“She couldn't hate her grandchildren,” said Amelia.

Eleanor and Monica looked at each other.

“Amelia—you've led a sheltered life.”

“She hates them. They interfere with her children paying their undivided attention to
her.”

“Come on, you beastly ball, go in go in go in. Oh! Rats.”

“The Gantrys have stopped driving,” Amelia said.

“Really! How did Georgie manage that?”

“Well, of course her mother's blind, but it was the three-martini lunches that really worried her. She and the boys discussed an intervention. But the more they talked about it, the more they said, ‘You know what? They're in their eighties, they've been drinking like this all their lives, if you took it away from them, what would they do with themselves? Take up brain surgery? Join the Peace Corps?' So they took away their licenses, and hired a driver.”

Amelia played one more hole with them, then ran back to her car and went on to wherever she had been going.

“Do you think Dr. Coles could help us?” Eleanor asked Monica.

“Yes, maybe.”

“Loser of this hole has to call him.”

 

On the eighth hole, Eleanor suddenly asked, for reasons of her own that Monica would understand only later, “Do you think Dad was always faithful to Big Syd?”

“Why? Don't you?”

“I don't know. He traveled so much. He must have been tempted.”

They both thought about how different their father seemed from men their own age. So formal. So courtly. So unbuffeted by emotion. Could that have been true, or was it just his manner? His manners?

“You know,” said Monica. “Once when we were sailing, just the two of us, he talked about a girl he knew in London during the war. A nurse from Oklahoma. She sang ‘White Christmas' in April, because someone asked her to. He thought that was priceless.”

“Really,” said Eleanor. “And why did that come up all of a sudden?”

“That's what I couldn't figure out. It just seemed to please him to talk about her.”

“Did he ever see her again?”

“Yes, he did. Maybe that's what brought it up…no, that can't be it, it must have been way earlier, because it was the summer he got the—”

“Monica!”

“Sorry. What he said was, he was in Chicago, decades later, with the Chicago symphony. Some big donors were giving a party for him, the way they do, and he walked into the house and there she was. She was the hostess. She was married and had about five children.”

“Yes? And?”

“And I don't know. How could I ask?”

“Did she know he was…you know, the person she knew in London?”

“Oh, yes. She'd been waiting for him. She was waiting for him to recognize her.”

“And he did right away?”

“Apparently. He said she looked just the same. He said, ‘It's you!' and asked her if she still sang ‘White Christmas,' and she said no, but she was still a hell of a dancer.”

Monica's ball had gotten in under the cedar trees, with no room for a backswing.

“You can drop out,” Eleanor said.

“No, I'll drive out with my putter.” She did so.

As they walked toward the green, Eleanor said, “Would we like it if we thought he…if they …?”

“I don't know. I think we really would, don't you?”

 

There was another car incident late in the summer, when Sydney went to call on Gladdy. Amelia's daughter Barbara was staying with her grandparents, as the little cottage her parents rented was full. She heard a car honking at the back door, then Grandma Gladdy calling from the back porch, “Sydney? Is that you in there?”

“Yes, I'm—”

Silence.

“I didn't recognize the car,” Gladdy called.

“No. It's rented,” Barbara heard Mrs. Moss yell from inside the car. “I got a bung in mine and it went to the shop. This is rented.”

“Well, come on in, I'm making iced tea.”

“I will but I …I can't figure out how the door unlocks.”

“Wait till I get my shoes on, I'll come help.”

“No, never mind. I've got the window down, I'll just climb out.”

At this point, young Barbara cried from the upstairs window, “Mrs. Moss! It's Barbara, just wait one second, I'm coming down,” and Sydney subsided and waited.

“I don't wonder you were troubled, Mrs. Moss,” Barbara said kindly as she opened the door for Sydney. Her feet were bare and her hair was wet from the shower.

“I kept pushing the—”

“Oh, I know. These Japanese ones are
so
different.”

“Well, thank you…dear.”

“Barbara. Amelia's daughter.”

“Yes, of course you are,” said Sydney. Barbara was perfectly sure she didn't know who she
or
Amelia was. As Sydney climbed to the kitchen, Barbara tried to keep from laughing out loud at her mental picture of Mrs. Moss getting halfway out the window in her big Bermuda shorts and then plunging headfirst onto the driveway. Which would probably break her neck and not be at all funny, but still…

I
n the early summer of 1993, Sydney was notified by
the DMV that she would have to come in to Union to requalify for her license. Laurus drove her over and sat with his straw hat on his knees while she went out in the Oldsmobile with the young man in brown, to demonstrate her ability to weave between orange cones, properly observe lights and street signs, and parallel park. This last had terrified her, because the arthritis in her neck made it hard for her to turn her head enough. Laurus had gone into town in the evening with her and coached her while she practiced and practiced in the empty parking lot of the Consolidated School.

She was beaming when she came in from her road test. Laurus raised both fists and shook them, a gesture of triumph. Submissively Sydney was then led into the back of the building to take her written test and have her eyes examined. When she came out, her license to drive had been canceled.

“I'm sorry,” said the nice young man in brown. Sydney was so mortified and angry she wouldn't look at anybody. Laurus put his straw hat on his head and his hand under Sydney's elbow, which she shook off. The young man in brown watched from the steps of the building as they drove off, just to be sure it was Laurus at the wheel.

 

Jimmy arranged for Tom Crocker's grandson Marlon York to come to work at Leeway Cottage, in theory as yardman, but in fact to drive Sydney wherever she wanted to go. Marlon drove slowly, which was fine with everybody. Also he didn't drink, having had a violent case of hepatitis when a boy, so he could drive in the evenings as well. The first summer Sydney submitted to this regime with bad grace, but by the following year, she had forgotten whatever point of pride the arrangement had wounded. She was glad, if mildly surprised, to see Marlon every morning, and came to enjoy going into the garden with him and teaching him things. Marlon was hopeless with the flowers and never learned, but as Sydney did not remember having already taught him what to do about rose hips, or staking the dahlias, she didn't realize she was explaining for the fifth or ninth time. She got respectful attention, and he got a patient teacher.

Laurus had turned eighty that year, and had some angina. The children began to worry about him sailing
The Rolling Stone
with only Sydney for company.
The Rolling Stone
was a graceful little sloop, with a comfortable head and four berths below and a dinghy called
No Moss.
(Sydney's sense of humor.) He had hoped Sydney would learn to like cruising, as nothing made him happier than to be anchored for the night in some wild harbor with only the sky and the gulls for company. She had tried, too, but she had never overcome her conviction that fascinating things were happening at home and she was missing them. He gave up, and enjoyed himself taking his grandchildren out exploring Frenchman's Bay and beyond, until they in turn grew too sophisticated to be missing the action onshore. Nowadays, he loved to go out on picnics, and to watch the August racing. He and Sydney had bought a new fiberglass International for the grandchildren, and rain or shine, Sydney was out there on deck with her binoculars trained on the racers, muttering “get it up get it up, get your damn spinnaker pulling…” and so forth, as if she were manning every position herself. Laurus ignored the fact that she was often watching the wrong boat.

“Pop's fine,” Jimmy said scornfully to Eleanor.

“I know he's fine. But what if he had a heart attack or a stroke? Or fell overboard? Mother wouldn't know how to get home, she couldn't use the ship-to-shore, they'd be off to the Azores.”

“Hey, look, I took care of the Marlon deal. Over to you.”

Eleanor waited for Monica to arrive in Dundee, and they faced their father together.

He listened to them quietly. Then they all stared at each other. Finally he said, “Thank you, girls. I appreciate your concern.”

There was another pause.

“But?”

“But what?”

“You appreciate it, but what are you going to do?”

“Think about it,” he said. And he got up and went upstairs.

 

Next Eleanor and Monica took their husbands out to dinner and explained their fears. The husbands looked at each other.

“What do you want us to do?”

“Talk to him. You have penises and deep male voices.”

“I wouldn't want my children telling me what
I
can and can't do,” said Bobby.

“I wouldn't, either, but we've probably all got a lot of things in front of us we aren't going to like.”

“What if they—”

“Okay,” said Bobby. “When he wants to go out,
I'll
go with him.”

Eleanor and Monica looked at each other. Neither one of them had thought of this, and it wasn't what they'd planned at all. It meant Bobby would be off attending to Laurus and Sydney at all kinds of moments when they would rather he were doing things
they
wanted him to do. Or else he wouldn't really do it, and Laurus would fall overboard and their mother would be found weeks later on the high seas in a horrible state and they'd be criticized. And they'd be sad about their father. “Nonsense,” said the husbands. “He'd be delighted to go that way.”

 

“Welcome back, Mr. Moss,” said Shirley Eaton. She was standing in her white uniform on the back porch of Leeway as the station wagon pulled in, loaded with all the strange gear the Mosses were accustomed to drag back and forth with them, framed pictures and waffle irons and doormats and you never knew what. Marlon York had gone down by bus to drive them to Dundee. Not that Mr. Moss couldn't, he drove everywhere at home; it just seemed better, even to him, that he not drive such a long way.

Laurus seemed to have shrunk over the winter. He was always a lean man but now he seemed actually diminutive. But spry and cheerful. Sydney was plump and her hair had gone white. She looked up the porch steps at Shirley and smiled and waved. She inhaled the air and looked around her as if she'd been in a time machine or space capsule and emerged to find herself in the most beloved place in the world. It pleased Shirley to see it.

Mrs. Moss greeted Shirley with a hug and kiss, then Laurus led her up to view the new arrangements where the flood had been. Shirley knew that in the old days there would have been an explosion right about the time she reached the top of the stairs. Paint not right, wallpaper imperfectly hung, tiles not the shade she liked. But instead she came downstairs beaming, after a thorough inspection, and said it was just lovely, how lucky she was, how thankful that they had taken it all in hand. Everything was perfect.

Eleanor came over as soon as Shirley called to say they'd arrived. She stopped in the kitchen to discuss the situation with Shirley, whom her children referred to as “the white army.”

“Drive went all right?”

“Seems so.”

“How'd she like the upstairs?”

“Seemed pleased as punch,” said Shirley. “I've never known her so cheerful.” Shirley, like anyone who had worked for Sydney, had had her share of fang marks to show for her trouble.

“Yeah, well. They may have finally gotten her meds right,” said Eleanor.

 

Sydney
had
gone straight down to the garden, marveling. The colors and shapes of the flowers seemed like exotic jewels, surprising and new, and yet also, somehow, like very old friends. She no longer remembered how many thousands of hours she'd spent in these rows, pruning and cutting and weeding, giving orders in the fall for things to be separated, fed, or rooted out, cutting flowers for the house in midsummer, arranging them at her worktable on the side porch. But she found the residual feelings from those hours waiting for her, of peace and pleasure and usefulness and belonging. Unfortunately, after reveling in these, she forgot to come back up to the house. Shirley realized it before Mr. Moss, and went down to find her, which wasn't as easy as it sounds, as Sydney had sat down on the grass path between the iris beds to wait for the situation to clarify. She smiled sweetly when Shirley appeared. The new gardener had watered that morning, and Mrs. Moss's skirt was quite wet, which she didn't seem to mind or notice. It was something of a job to get her onto her feet. Shirley was glad it wasn't Mr. Moss trying to lift her.

As they made their way back to the house, Sydney heard Laurus playing the piano and knew to go toward that.

Laurus looked up as they came into the great room. “The piano is in beautiful tune, Shirley. Thank you for having it done.”

“I know it pains you if it isn't right. Now, I think Mrs. Moss may want to change her…”

He got up and came to them. “Yes, I see. I'll take care of it. Thank you.”

Eleanor and Bobby drove up while the elder Mosses were upstairs. They went in through the kitchen to talk with Shirley, who told about the excursion to the garden. “No harm done, but…”

“We'll talk to Daddy,” said Eleanor. At home, the cook lived in the house, but in Dundee no one had done this since the year Ellen Chatto was getting divorced. Shirley thought it wasn't right for the Mosses to be alone in the house at night. It worried Eleanor, too, although she recognized that in Connecticut, in case of fire or flood, Laurus would have to rescue Sydney
and
the cook, who was almost as old as he was and in far worse shape.

Her parents came down, bathed and polished and dressed for the evening, her mother in bright nautical red, white, and blue and a string of white beads—she had started wearing costume jewelry years ago when she traveled, and had gradually forgotten she had anything else. Laurus was wearing a blazer and an ancient pink oxford-cloth shirt which he left here in his summer closet, spotless white slacks, and a pair of boating shoes that had to be forty years old. Eleanor felt a rush of love for them both, as they stood there all shiny and pleased, looking forward to the evening and the summer.

They all said good night to Shirley and went out through the kitchen and gingerly down the back stairs to where the station wagon was waiting. Marlon had unpacked it and swept it out and taken it into the village to fill the gas tank before the station closed for the evening. Mr. Moss liked to keep the tank topped up. (In case of what? Indian attack?) He took very good care of his belongings, disliking change or fecklessness or lack of method. He polished his own shoes, sewed on his own buttons, and put name tapes in his clothes, as he had begun doing during his war. He meticulously met every service recommendation for his cars, his lawnmower, his boat, and his pianos. He loved taking care of things.

On this beautiful lavender evening, smelling of fir trees and wood smoke, Eleanor and Bobby Applegate, both over fifty, climbed into the backseat of the station wagon like children while Laurus installed Sydney in the front, fastened her seat belt, walked around the rear of the car (as he had taught them to do as children, so as not to be run over should the car suddenly start up), got himself in behind the wheel, and fastened his own seat belt. He adjusted the seat, adjusted the mirrors, and finally, as if enjoying every familiar gesture and action, ceremoniously started the engine and inched off down the familiar driveway, on the way to yet another welcome dinner with their best friends, at the start of yet another Dundee summer.

 

“How are they?” asked Monica on the phone. She was not coming until August and then it would have to be for a short visit, as her widowed mother-in-law was having a health crisis, and Monica's husband was an only child. There was no one but themselves to see to her, and they'd been at it all spring with no end in sight.

“It's like living underwater,” said Eleanor. “They—do—every— thing—like—this…” She spoke at the retarded speed at which her parents seemed to her to move. “You take them to the club for lunch, you run up the stairs to get them a porch table, you move it into the shade, you get a pillow for Mother's chair, you go to the loo, you run back out to see if they're coming, and they're still getting out of the car.” Far away, Monica laughed.

The Rolling Stone
was in the water, on its usual mooring. One of Eleanor's sons was the designated boat boy, whose summer job, not that Laurus knew it, was to make sure that Granddad never went out alone. The boy would telephone Leeway every morning and confer with Laurus about the weather. Once in a while they'd agree that it would be a fine day to run down to Camden to look at the hills, or do what Laurus called “going to look for buffalo,” which meant just puttering along the coast, poking into little harbors, and nosing about deserted islands. More often they would agree that for one reason or another, the day was not auspicious for boating after all. They'd usually go out in the dinghy anyway and spend a little time aboard, polishing the fittings or fooling with the charts, plotting the best courses for cruises they would take when the time was right. Which it never would be.

On Thursday nights, when Laurus went to his poker game, Eleanor had her mother to dinner. In past years this had been very hard on her children, since Mommy Syd asked the same questions over and over; but sometimes her mother would surprise Eleanor with a story she'd never heard before, a memory that emerged undamaged by long submersion and uncorrupted by retelling. (Sydney, like so many others, believed implicitly in the last version of any story she'd told. Once she'd started telling it a certain way, not to mention embroidering for better effect, she had no idea what parts she knew and which she'd invented.) This year the dinners were actually easier, since Sydney had stopped using language much at all. Instead she hummed in a musical approximation of the rhythms of speech. It was rather comforting.