Leeway Cottage

by Beth Gutcheon

  “How long did you—”

  They looked at each other for another stretch. Finally Laurus said, “Let’s just neck.” So they did that.

  When they got to Perry Street, Sydney paid the taxi, as Laurus had no American currency. When he walked into the apartment he had visited so often in memory, he put down his bags in the middle of the room and stared. Sydney stood to one side, watching him. The living room was smaller than he remembered, the ceiling lower, but the windows were larger. He went toward the kitchen and stood looking in. Sydney had painted it a creamy yellow. There were bright white curtains, and a fan in the open window at the back moved the soft summer air and carried in traffic noise from the next block. He drank all the colors with his eyes. He went in and opened cupboard doors. Then the refrigerator. He stared at the unfamiliar packages, the cleanliness and plenty.

  She followed him into their bedroom. The walls had become sky blue in the bedroom, the moldings and ceiling white. There were crisp sheets on the bed and a blue bedspread Sydney had made to match the curtains. He turned to her.

  “It’s beautiful.”

  “Thank you.”

  “You’re beautiful…”

  He put his arms around her and whispered into her hair. “All those years, missing this, missing you …and you’ve made it even better than my dreams.”

  Floating in bliss, he took his wife to bed in the middle of the afternoon. It was fast, it was wild, nearly explosive. Afterward they lay in a tangle.

  “Happy?” Sydney whispered.

  “You can’t imagine how happy.” And he fell soundly asleep.

  It was dark when he woke. It took him a full minute to realize where he was. Not his bare room in London. Not his bedroom in Copenhagen. At last he came all the way into himself.

  He stretched. He felt the temptation to go back to sleep and sleep for a year. He’d had no idea how tired he’d been, couldn’t remember when he’d sunk into such an assurance of safety and peace. But he roused himself, pulled on his shorts, and went out to the living room, where he stood in the doorway, watching Sydney sit in lamplight, knitting a sock. She was dressed for the evening, with her hair up in combs or pins, however girls did that.

  Something made her look up and she smiled at him. “Welcome home,” she said.

  “Indeed.” He stretched and scratched the back of his neck. “What time is it?”

  “Eight-thirty. Are you hungry?”

  “Famished.”

  “They’re holding a table for us at Table d’Hôte.”

  “Perfect.”

  When he reappeared a half hour later, his hair still wet, he was wearing a suit that had hung in the closet for four years. It was a little tight across the shoulders now, but the pants were loose. He hadn’t realized he’d changed.

  “You can’t imagine what it’s like to have an American shower. All that water, as hot as you want it. I thought of staying in forever, but I missed you.”

  She returned his smile. “You’re not going to wear your uniform?”

  A moment’s pause.

  “Do you want me to?”

  “It’s just the way I pictured it.” Her war hero. The heads turning in the restaurant.

  “Do you want me to change?”

  “Of course not. You must be sick of it.”

  “It was so nice to open the closet and see these old friends. Look how baggy the pants are.”

  “Let’s go out and fatten you up,” said Sydney.

  They walked arm in arm up to Hudson Street. “What a gorgeous night,” Laurus said. “Isn’t it beautiful, the streetlights on, the glow from all the windows.” She smiled at the look on his face. He was in love with everything. She’d forgotten that about him, his glorious cheer.

  There was a fuss over them at the restaurant. Their specialoccasion place. Bruno, the owner, who was Algerian but pretended to be French, welcomed Laurus, held Sydney’s chair, was quickly back at their table with the bottle of Veuve Clicquot Sydney had ordered in advance. When the glasses had been filled and the waiter retired, they raised their glasses to each other.

  “To us,” said Sydney.

  “To us. Skål.” He looked deep into her eyes and tried to hold them as they drank, but Sydney had forgotten and looked down, smiling, set her glass down, and picked up her menu. Unbidden it brought him a memory he didn’t want.

  When Sydney had decided what she wanted to eat, she put her menu aside, sighed deeply, and said, “Well. Where shall we begin?”

  Laurus began. Once he started talking he felt like a man who’d reached an oasis after years in a desert. He told her about his fear for his family when the roundup of the Jews began. How helpless he felt. He told how he felt when he learned his little sister had been captured, how he schemed to get a message to her, of the terrible day he learned she was no longer at Frøslev. It had taken weeks to find out where she was; thank God for the Red Cross and all they did to protect prisoners of war! He told how he wept when he knew that Folke Bernadotte had succeeded in getting the Scandinavians out, and that Nina was in Sweden with his parents. And finally, seeing them! With his own eyes! To hold each one of them in his arms, to see little Nina, with her skin so dry and thin, to feel her shoulder blades poking out of her fleshless back like folded wings, to see the way she disappeared in front of their eyes, her face going dull, her mind somewhere else…What was she seeing? Would they ever get her all the way back? What could he do for her?

  He stretched a hand to Sydney, beseeching her help, about to say, Tell me, with your woman’s heart, now that you understand, tell me how to heal this damage. And found that his wife was weeping the tears his sister could not. Her cheeks were wet, and when he touched her, she dropped her head and started to sob.

  They were back where they’d been when he told her he was going. This restaurant, this wine, practically this same table.

  “Darling,” he whispered. Appalled. What was it? What had he done, what did she have to tell him? She had some awful disease? She loved somebody else, she was leaving him?

  She struggled. He handed her his handkerchief. She mopped and blew and held up a finger to say, Just a second. Just a second.

  At last she looked him full in the face. Her eyes were red, her mascara was smeared. “You’ve been home…” She had to pause for a shuddering breath, a diverted sob. “Eight hours.”

  “Yes…”

  “You’ve been home eight hours and you haven’t asked me one thing about the baby!” She clamped her hands over her mouth and fell to sobbing again. Laurus fell back in his chair.

  “You forgot me! You just completely forgot me, you forgot what I’ve been through, you forgot we have a baby, who isn’t even a baby anymore …I want my baby!”

  “Where is she?” He was stricken.

  “She’s at Gudrun’s.”

  “Let’s go get her right now.” He put his napkin on the table and pushed back his chair, just as the waiter swept in with two plates of hot food and placed them with a flourish.

  “No!”

  “Yes! Let’s go right now. Let’s start this evening over—”

  “We can’t. It happened. I planned this dinner for you, and I pictured it for four years, and you’re goddamn going to eat it! At least something will be the way I wanted it.” And she began furiously sawing away at her duck à l’orange, putting great chunks of meat into her mouth and chewing while she wept as if she could chew his head off.

  THE LEEWAY COTTAGE GUEST BOOK

  July 28, 1945

  Home at last, wrote Laurus. As we drove into the village this morning, we passed a young black bear on Butter Hill eating blueberries next to the Baptist Church. Everything looks exactly the same. It feels as if I’ve been on another planet.

  Eleanor had slept on the backseat or sat on Sydney’s lap all the way up from New York. She was adjusting to Laurus slowly. He didn’t know any of her dolls’ names, and she wasn’t allowed to go in and get into Mommy’s bed anymore when she woke up, and for the first
time she now had to wait to speak until the grown-ups were finished talking. He preferred to play the piano by himself without any help from her, although Mommy let her hammer the keyboard at will, and laughed at the noise she made and told her she was a clever bug. She kept asking Sydney when he was leaving. If you could have read the silent thoughts of the three people traveling north in the new station wagon that morning, you’d have thought they were all on different planets.

  To Sydney, Laurus seemed unnaturally formal. Had he changed, or was he always like that? When they met she was so young, he was so grown-up, she’d wanted his approval so badly. She’d wanted everyone’s approval so badly. Now she couldn’t help noticing that he never could pin Eleanor’s diaper on right, and whenever he pulled out of a parking lot or gas station she had to yell to keep him from trying to drive on the wrong side of the road. She had thought he would be the kind of father her own daddy had been, longing to escape from the bridge game or the dinner party to play hooky with his little girl. Laurus seemed only to want to escape to the piano.

  Laurus had once told Sydney that touring when he was young was torture, the least musical time of his life, because the only access he had to his instrument was onstage, and onstage the quartet rehearsed and played their one program. In the morning in a new town, after a late arrival, the string players were all in their hotel rooms running their scales and refreshing themselves with different repertoire while he stared out at unfamiliar rooftops and longed for home.

  “You know how you live in the music in your head,” he would say to her. “You’re always playing it through, moving around inside the tempi, suddenly hearing that the alto line should be singing out over the treble in a particular measure, dying to try it…” He didn’t wait for confirmation. She was a musician, too. Of course she understood. Except, she wasn’t a musician anymore.

  He couldn’t explain his longing for hours and hours uninterrupted at the keyboard. It was an appetite he couldn’t control, he had missed it so much. He longed for certain composers the way a starving man longs for foods from childhood, except that gorging himself on Schubert after all this time didn’t make him sick, it made him more voracious.

  He had lost muscle tone in parts of his hands and arms he’d never known he needed, as he never since early childhood had gone so long playing so little. He started at the beginning of Hanon and played his way through the exercises, hours a day, C major, A minor, F major, D minor, repeated notes in groups of four, detached thirds and sixths. Sydney watched him from the doorway as he stared past the music with eyes unfixed, his hands moving along the keyboard like matched horses in harness, and wondered what was going on in his brain. He reminded her at those times not of a musician but of a cuckoo clock. In the evenings his arms ached and he fretted about wrecking his hands, like Schumann, but he couldn’t seem to pace himself.

  But Schumann was a nutcase, Sydney pointed out. Thank God for Dundee, the high healing sky, and the meadow stretching down past the garden to the lilac hedge, beauty you could drink like a tonic. In Dundee she made him promise to stop playing after lunch, to spend the afternoons with her and Eleanor. He did it, and she watched him uncoil in the sun, each day a little more, before he went absent again. Oh, well—she was surrounded by friends in Dundee, and accustomed to an absent husband.

  And then there was the sunny afternoon at the Maitlands’ pool, when Sydney, lying gossiping with Elise, sat up and cocked her sunglasses to look to the shallow end of the pool, to see what was making Eleanor squeal with laughter like that.

  Laurus was standing up to his waist in water, while Eleanor bobbed joyously in her little cork life belt, stretching her chin up to keep her face above water, her eyes riveted on her father. Laurus picked her up with his hands under her arms. “All right, stay right there,” he said. “I’ll be right back, don’t go away…” And he’d take his hands away, dropping her into the water, to screams of delight.

  “Do it again, Daddy!” Eleanor cried, bobbing and splashing and laughing.

  “But I told you not to move!”

  “Do again!” And he picked her up, grinning.

  “Be careful, honey…” Sydney called, not really knowing which one she was talking to. It didn’t matter, as neither of them paid her any attention.

  “Again, Daddy!” Eleanor gurgled. Sydney looked at their beaming faces, entirely heedless of her, and felt like Candace, sourly watching her husband and daughter cavorting, and didn’t like it at all.

  “I’m offered an artist in residence post at Mannes,” Laurus said, holding up a letter, with a small crow of delight.

  It was early October. He’d been out on his new bicycle with the baby seat attached behind the saddle; he’d ridden to Central Park and back with Eleanor, while Sydney labored over a recipe from the newspaper, for some Greek eggplant thing called moussaka that was a lot more trouble than it sounded. The baby was down for her nap now and Laurus was reading his mail at the kitchen table.

  “What does that mean?” Sydney was having an inner dialogue with an imaginary Laurus about how much effort she was making to be sure they all learned to eat peculiar new vegetables.

  “Eight or ten students. The cream of the crop. Meet with them once or twice a month. I’d have time to perform, to prepare new repertoire. Or whatever I want.”

  Sydney paused and stared at the grease-spattered recipe again. “Is it worth it?” she asked.

  He’d expected congratulations. “I don’t understand the question.”

  “Is it worth it? The time it would take? You don’t need the money.”

  After a surprised silence he said, “That’s hardly the point.”

  “Sorry. What is the point?” The eggplant seemed to have absorbed a whole bottle of cooking oil and she was running out of paper towels and places to put the greasy slices.

  “It’s an honor. And it’s refreshing to work with talented students. One needs a structured place in one’s professional world.”

  “One does?” She’d begun needling him about Briticisms that had crept into his speech. They reminded her that for four years he’d had a life that had nothing to do with her, made friends and who knows what all with people who had never heard of her.

  “I thought you’d be pleased, Sydney. It means I can teach and work without having to travel much. I’m not ready to leave you again, and I didn’t think you wanted me to. My music doesn’t exist if nobody hears it.”

  There was a silence. He waited for her to say something, but she turned and opened the refrigerator. She began rooting in the cheese drawer. After a while, when it was clear she wasn’t going to answer, he said, “Remind me who these people are who are coming?”

  “Anselma Thorne. Dr. Carey’s niece. And her new friend Olivia. You’ll like them, Olivia plays the flute.”

  What surprised Laurus about the evening was that he did like Olivia very much, and Anselma quite well enough. Anselma dressed in well-cut trousers and saddle shoes and a man’s crisp white shirt. Her hair was short and glossy, her hands beautifully manicured. She had a lovely voice, a cello voice, and a delightful, ready laugh. Olivia was petite and pink with a messy cloud of curly hair. She played the flute like an angel. She’d brought her instrument and some music, and after the moussaka and some retsina, Olivia and Laurus sight-read together. They finished with faces shining from shared pleasure. The women had cooed over Eleanor and brought her a Raggedy Ann. They talked with excitement about the stone farmhouse in northwestern Connecticut they’d just bought. When Sydney mentioned the Mannes offer, in an exploratory way, Olivia turned to Laurus as if he’d won a Nobel prize. When they had gone and Laurus was washing the dishes, Sydney came into the kitchen and kissed the back of his neck.

  “I’m so pleased about Mannes,” Sydney said.

  “I’m very glad,” said Laurus, and meant it. “And thank you for a delightful evening.”

  “Thank you. It was fun, wasn’t it?”

  “Great fun.”

  THE LEEWAY COTTAGE
GUEST BOOK

  Tuesday, July 15, 1947

  Papa, Mama, and Nina are here at last! They came by train to Bucksport, where we met them last night. Weather glorious for their arrival. Also, Mr. Brown arrived from Union with our new icebox. Exciting day.

  It was Sydney’s handwriting. Laurus and little Eleanor had looked forward to this visit so intensely that it probably couldn’t fail to disappoint, and there were already signs that it wouldn’t. Fail. Papa Henrik hadn’t slept at all well for several days—he hated traveling, apparently. He barely spoke on the drive from Bucksport to Dundee. And Mama Ditte was warm and a dear, of course, but to say her English was rusty was putting it kindly. And Nina…well, much as Sydney had looked forward to embracing the sister she’d always wanted, there were early signs that Nina was not what Sydney had had in mind.

  Sydney spent the first day of the visit driving her new family from place to place, famous in her legend, so they could get to know her, and all that she had brought to Laurus. They saw the golf course, then the yacht club. Henrik and Ditte exclaimed to each other in Danish in the backseat, and finally Nina translated: “It looks so much like Gilleleje.”

  “What’s Gillal-EYEa?”

  There was a little silence. There was too much to say about Gilleleje, and no way to say it right. Their own fear, and that of so many others. The hundreds of Jews who escaped from there, the kindness of strangers, and the worst betrayal of the dark days of the roundup. For a Dane to explain Gilleleje was like an American having to explain that sometimes people took honeymoon trips to Niagara Falls.

  “It’s on the north coast of Zealand,” said Nina. Sydney wondered if they thought she had memorized the map of Denmark. They hadn’t exactly got the map of New England nailed down, she noticed. Ditte seemed amazed that Dundee was more than an hour from Boston.