Leeway Cottage

by Beth Gutcheon

  When he stood in the cool dark reading room of the library, and the front door opened, letting a sudden square of sunlight fall into the room between two walls of books, he helplessly imagined soldiers in uniform, black shapes in the doorway, wearing their heavy-browed helmets and big boots that made their feet seem like weapons. What if he turned and they were there, letting the door close behind them, as they advanced on Mrs. Pease at the circulation desk? All these people in the room are pretending not to notice them. The small boy and girl, sitting cross-legged in the children’s book section, go on reading The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins, or Kabumpo in Oz. The cellist from down the Neck goes on reading the Boston newspaper. Mrs. Pease, though, will have to speak to them. Will she smile, as she does to everyone else? Or will she pretend that she cannot help them? And if she pretends that and they don’t believe her, what do they do? How do they show their displeasure?

  When he came out of Abbott’s store he noticed the small group of teenagers sitting on the steps of the town hall across the street. They were always there, they or others like them. They were smoking cigarettes and lounging, filling idle hours by trying to look dangerous. Dundee was dead as a doornail in the summer if you weren’t rich, or unusually smart, or old enough for a better job than raking blueberries. (Which aren’t in until August anyway.) He watched their expressions as a large new convertible, a Packard, made the turn from the Carleton Point Road and headed through town toward the yacht club. It was filled with kids from away, summering in the colony, driving Daddy’s fancy car probably to go sailing on someone’s yacht. He saw the flat look in the eyes of the boys on the steps. What would happen to those boys, with their disappointments and their understandable resentment, when the Germans arrived with their uniforms and their big cars and their conviction that they deserve to rule the world? Would those boys find pride in themselves and outlets for anger in sabotaging the big German cars, in making the invaders’ lives miserable and their work impossible? Or would they find pride in themselves and outlets for their anger in also donning uniforms, and the big shiny boots? In demanding respect from those who owed them none? Could he see those boys smiling and blocking the sidewalk as students from the Hall, carrying instrument cases, tried to make their way to the drugstore for a soda or back to their boardinghouses? Students whom even some of the nicest of the old-timers, who appeared to think they were merely noticing and embracing exotics, called “the fiddling Jews.”

  Everyone said the war would never reach these shores, no such thing could ever happen here. But that was irrelevant. It could happen, period. It was happening. What did his father do if invaders gave him an order or asked a question? Pretend not to speak German? Or smile kindly? His father who believed if you treat all human beings exactly the same, with respect and love, they will be incapable of returning you something else. What did Kaj do if they came to him in their green uniforms to have their wounds dressed, their upset stomachs cured? What did Nina do when they smiled at her in the street?

  Norway’s reward for having resisted the Germans was that the Norwegian Nazi panderer Quisling now ran their country. At least in Denmark the government was Danish. King Christian was in Copenhagen, riding out on horseback most days to greet his people. His brother, King Haakon of Norway, had to flee to London with his family and the entire legal government. Denmark’s reward, in turn, for having rolled right over when the Wehrmacht came goose-stepping over the border was to be bragged of as a “model protectorate”—the proof that Hitler was really easy to get along with if only you tried.

  It wasn’t Laurus’s way to talk about how this made him feel. Fear and sorrow and panic could all be pumped up and made worse and then spread, like influenza, and what good did it do? You just end up like Tante Rachel who made an aria of everything, from a spider in the kitchen to a lump in the armpit, and as far as he could tell she was never calm, never well, and never much use to anybody. Better to do something practical.

  Sydney found him in the kitchen one morning with Ellen Chatto, with flour, yeast, eggs, sugar, and butter all over the place. Ellen was rolling out pastry while Laurus coached her.

  “Perfect—stop,” he ordered, and slapped a slab of butter down in the center of the pastry. “Now, observe…”

  He folded the pastry sheet over the butter.

  “Now you,” he said. Ellen followed instructions while he coached and nodded. “Now, again,” he said. Sydney stood with her hands on her hips, watching, and finally went out the back door, looking for sticks with which to stir paint on the side porch.

  At eleven Laurus called, “Sydney! Portia! Come to the kitchen, please, we need you!” When they arrived, mistress in paint-smeared overalls, maid in crisp uniform, they found coffee perked and the oilcloth table spread with mugs, sugar, cream in a jug, and a plate of pastries, rather misshapen, but glistening with sugar and smelling heavenly.

  “We need rabbits. Test pigs,” said Laurus. “Sit, sit.” He passed each one a plate with a pastry. They were still hot.

  “Guinea pigs,” said Sydney.

  Portia giggled and tried a bite. Ellen watched. Then she tried hers.

  “What’s in this?” Portia asked.

  “It’s called remonce.”

  “That doesn’t sound very Danish.”

  “It is, though.”

  “Whatever it is,” said Portia, “I’d like to eat a tub of it right now.”

  Portia and Sydney ate greedily, but Laurus and Ellen studied the flavors and textures in their mouths like two surgeons, bent over a patient whose innards were not conforming to the expectations they had formed before they cut him open.

  Laurus said, “Not flaky enough. And not enough nuts.”

  “I don’t think we rolled it thin enough to start with,” said Ellen.

  “Let’s try again. All right, pigs, you can go.”

  This went on well into August, when Ellen had mastered the pastry and Farfar’s famous fillings, marzipan, custard, chocolate, rum, and marmalade. They had branched out into kringles and braids, crescents, fans, and horn shapes, and Ellen had invented her own blueberry filling.

  “I’m going to enter these at the fair this year,” said Ellen, and Laurus smiled with pride. In fact she became famous throughout the county for her Danishes, and into her oldest age was begged to make them for church suppers and bake sales. The one thing she would never do was give the secret recipe for the almond ones.

  If you had asked Sydney and Laurus to describe that summer for posterity, the newlyweds themselves would have been most surprised at the contrast. For Sydney it was the beginning of the happiest years of her life. For Laurus every day was a golden cloth shot through with poison threads. He had left many hostages to fortune when he left Europe. His mother’s family was large, and Jewish. After Kristallnacht, who knew what might be coming? There could be pogroms, a phenomenon that had only recently seemed as distant to Western Europe as Custer’s Last Stand seemed to modern New York. His poor beloved little country. When Sydney told people how happy and lucky they were that Laurus was safe in America, he felt slightly sick.

  Not that he contradicted her. His task was to love her and she’d had contradiction enough in her life. But keeping one’s counsel and picking one’s fights is one thing when you are moving around in the world on your own as a single being. It’s another in a marriage, which is a closed system. If one partner stays small and quiet in one area of the universe of two, the other one may (or must) expand to fill the void. Such at least was the action of the system inhabiting Leeway Cottage that summer, and so a pattern for the marriage was created.

  One night in August, at a picnic on the bathing beach given by the Golf Association, now grandly called the Dundee Country Club, Laurus was sitting apart on a rock, watching the small children playing in the sand at the water’s edge, while the older ones swam to the float, and splashed and flirted with each other. Sydney was busy arranging the picnic tables with bowls of potato chips and Ellen Chatto’s coleslaw whil
e the men grilled hot dogs and hamburgers. Deep in thoughts of another beach and a different shade of twilight, Laurus was surprised when Gordon Maitland, carrying two cold bottles of beer, came to sit beside him. Gordon Maitland was the kind of big, rich, sporty American man most foreign to him. It was not a type they bred in Europe, though they saw a lot of the American variety in the summertime, arriving at the best hotels with their excited wives and overweight children, guidebooks stretching their pockets out of shape and their wallets full of American Express checks. Laurus accepted the offered beer, and Mr. Maitland settled down on his rock. After he’d drunk half his beer, gazing peacefully at the tranquil dusk on the bay, he asked, “How are you holding up?”

  “So far, so good,” Laurus said.

  “I’m afraid I’d be homesick as hell, if I were you.”

  Laurus took a long swallow of beer, and nodded.

  “Do you know Tommy McClintock?”

  “I only met him.”

  “Nice young man. He came to see me a month or two ago, about getting over to England. Wants to find something useful to do.”

  “Like what?”

  “Well, that’s what he wanted to find out. I asked him how his German was.”

  “And?”

  Gordon Maitland smiled. “He said he can sing ‘O Tannenbaum.’ How’s yours?”

  “My German?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good.”

  Maitland nodded. “French?”

  “Also good.”

  “Any others?”

  “Norwegian and Swedish, of course. Dutch. The Dutch is not perfect, though.”

  “Interesting,” said Gordon Maitland.

  It was their first serious argument. Not that it looked like an argument, since Laurus elected to tell Sydney in a public place. They were at dinner at a bistro on Hudson Street where they especially liked the coq au vin, their “special occasion” place. Sydney had dressed up, in a new suit with big shoulders, and a little matching hat.

  Now she had her elbows on the table, her hands steepled over her nose and mouth, to hide the unattractive way her mouth twisted when she cried. Laurus looked at his plate. He shifted in his chair, threw one arm over the back, looked at the far wall. Then he faced himself forward again, and stretched a hand to his wife.

  “Sydney.”

  She inhaled, trying to compose herself, and the sound of her stifled intake revealed that she needed a handkerchief. He took the square from his breast pocket and her face disappeared behind it. After miserable blowing and mopping, she reemerged. Her eyes were swimming, and her sultry lipstick was bitten half off. He reached across to touch her wet cheekbone, and said softly, “So beautiful.” His touch caused more tears to spill and slide down the wet cheek.

  “When I cry? Thanks a lot,” said Sydney.

  An approaching waiter with a bread basket saw her face and turned away to attend to another table. Laurus reached for her hand again, and was grateful that she let him take it.

  “We’ve been so happy.” Her voice embarrassed her, squeezed up into her highest register by tears.

  “It’s true.”

  “For the first time in my life,” Sydney added.

  “I too,” said Laurus, which wasn’t true, as he’d always been happy. He meant, I’m with you, we are one. Which wasn’t true either, although he meant it.

  “Why didn’t you tell me? Why didn’t we talk about it?”

  “It wouldn’t have made any difference. I have no choice.”

  “How could there be nothing I could say that would make any difference?”

  He heard a subtle shift in her tone, a sharp edge sliding a little way out of the deck and into view. He thought carefully before he answered. He hadn’t discussed his decision because there was no way she could understand (which he couldn’t say). She had seen too little, there were too many holes in her picture of his world.

  “Because I already know you are brave, and would insist I do the right thing.” In her turn, Sydney heard a subtle change in his voice, a cooling, a flatness. Don’t disappoint me. And certainly don’t make a scene.

  She didn’t want him to grow quiet and turn away from her. She wanted him to go on noticing that she was beautiful when she cried. Her weapon slipped silently back and disappeared from view.

  “I’ll come with you,” she said.

  At that, he smiled. “That makes no sense. What would you do? You’d know nobody.”

  “Be with you.”

  “But you wouldn’t be. My time won’t be my own. There’s much more you can do here.”

  “Like what?”

  He picked up his fork. “Be here for me to come home to.” Sydney picked up her fork, too, but put it down again. She wanted him with her. She wanted to keep him safe. The dangerous Atlantic. The U-boats. The bombs when he got there. Though it was true, he’d been battering himself against the walls of his cage, so desperate was he to find some way to fight. She suddenly saw a danger closer in; if he didn’t go, he’d see her as the cage. She began to cry again.

  By November of 1941, Laurus was in England, in the uniform of the Buffs. His last sight of Sydney was her figure at the pier beside the Hudson, in a long tweed coat with a silk scarf over her hair. It was a glowering day, threatening rain.

  When Sydney heard the mooing of the foghorns as the tugs pulled the ship out into the current and Laurus could no longer see her bravely waving, she had walked the cold blocks to the subway station, desolate as the brown leaves blowing in the street. When she was back in their apartment, warm with yellow lamplight, she lit a fire, turned on the radio, and settled down to knit a sweater for him, for the day he came home.

  As she was casting on stitches, Laurus was turning from his last sight for many years of the Statue of Liberty. The troubled slate gray ocean spread around him, heaving and opaque. He went below, to the tiny cabin he would share with three other men, and sat, rather stunned, on his narrow bunk. Now instead of growing together, twining around each other and learning to fill each other’s crooks and hollows, he and his young wife would have to grow straight while they were apart, so they would still fit together when they had each other back again. And how long in the future would that be? Would it ever be?

  By Christmas, the United States was at war, and Sydney knew for sure she was pregnant. Her tears had stopped as she settled in to make the most of this time in neutral, her time of waiting. She was oddly not frightened for Laurus now that he had survived the crossing. Nor was she sorry for herself, though she was passionately, personally angry at Hitler. Being alone was easier since Pearl Harbor, since all the young husbands were going now, or gone. It was less as if Laurus had left her when he really didn’t have to.

  She kept Christmas Eve quietly in their little apartment on Perry Street, where it was apparent that she had a sort of genius for nest-building. She had spent the time since Laurus left learning to use a sewing machine. She’d remade curtains and bedclothes and even re-upholstered two chairs with fabrics bought cheap on Orchard Street. On Christmas morning there was a telegram from Laurus, wishing her happy Christmas and telling her to look in the top shelf of his closet, behind his box of sheet music, for her present. (In London, over a hot English breakfast with his fellow trainees, all reminiscing and missing their families, Laurus remarked that his was the only bride in New York who wanted a power sander for Christmas.) Sitting by herself in their little sitting room, with a mug of coffee beside her and Christmas carols on the radio, Sydney opened the box he had wrapped in green tissue in October, and was excited and happy, at the present, and at being known and loved. For her next project she was planning to build shelves for toys and books in what would become the baby’s room. (If anyone raised the question of her music studies, she said she’d get back to that as soon as she had a minute.)

  She had Christmas lunch with the Maitlands, which was festive and sad, because Elise had just gotten engaged. Her fiancé was leaving immediately for the air force. Gordon Maitland found a m
inute to take Sydney aside to say that Laurus was doing important work and she should be proud of him. And she was proud of him. Languages were hard for her and she was amazed at the effortless way he moved from one to the next when they were with their musician friends. She could see it must be very useful now. But it filled her with longing for him, to see Elise and her Christopher holding hands under the table. These days were full of wrenching partings.

  Later in the afternoon, Candace called Perry Street.

  “Merry Christmas, dear,” she said cheerily when Sydney answered.

  “Merry Christmas, Mother.”

  “Thank you so much for the scarf and gloves. They’re very charming.”

  “You’re welcome. Thank you for the fruitcake.”

  “Did Laurus like his necktie?”

  “I’m sure he did.”

  “Your father always liked the neckties I chose for him.”

  “Yes, I know. He always said so.”

  There was a little silence.

  “I have some other news, dear.”

  “Do you?”

  “Yes. I want you to be the first to know that Mr. Bernard Christie and I were married last night. In a civil ceremony just like yours, dear, except ours was here at home with the Talbots as our witnesses.”

  After a pause, Sydney said, “Well, then I’m not the first to know, am I?”

  Another pause. “Excuse me?”

  “Congratulations, Mother,” said Sydney, rather loudly.

  “Well, darling, you don’t say that to the bride. You extend best wishes or something of the sort. You congratulate the groom on his conquest.”

  “Okay,” said Sydney. “Put him on.”

  This was not what Candace expected.

  After a lot of rustling of the receiver being held against a skirt or palm, Mr. Christie came on the line.