Leeway Cottage

by Beth Gutcheon

  He found Sydney in the little study at the end of the porch. She was sitting at her desk with her back to the door. Her head was bowed over arms folded on the desk, and her body was shaking with silent weeping.

  “Sweetheart,” he said. She jumped, as if she’d forgotten someone else lived here. She turned to him, her eyes and nose streaming. She made a pathetic attempt at a smile, then groped for Kleenex.

  Laurus went to sit in the chair next to her desk. What on earth was happening here? Had someone died? Who? Whom did she love enough to mourn so much, besides Jimmy? He’d known her to weep with anger, but this was different, this was devastation.

  Finally he put his hand on her arm and said softly, “Tell me. What’s happened.” She shook her head and covered her face with the tissue she was holding, and lost control again.

  “It’s not any of the children, is it? The girls?”

  She shook her head.

  “Your mother?”

  Sydney shook her head.

  Finally she managed, “I’m sorry to frighten you. Everyone’s all right.”

  Then what was this? Certainly a death of some kind, if it wasn’t the beginning of some really terrible emotional sea change.

  She stood up suddenly. Her eyes were magnified behind a sheen of tears. She looked at him, direct to the point of nakedness, and said, “Would you hug me?”

  He stood quickly and enfolded her. She cried more, she wiped her nose, she grew slowly calmer. He murmured and rocked her from one foot to the other.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, when she was a little calmer. “I know I must be scaring you.”

  “Don’t be sorry. Tell me how I can help.”

  She shook her head, and stepped away from him. “You can’t.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I think I’ll go upstairs and take a hot bath.”

  “That’s a fine idea,” Laurus said.

  He watched her go, still mystified. He listened as she crossed the great living room to the stairs. Laurus sat down again. He looked at the flowers in a vase on the desk, one of the beautiful things that Sydney did all summer, bringing the garden into every room. A square blue envelope facedown on the blotter. A library copy of Anthony Adverse open over the arm of the couch where Sydney usually sat. The big terracotta pot of geraniums outside the door on the porch, now in afternoon sun, and the thunderheads beyond darkening the sky over the bay. What had happened? What just happened?

  Suddenly Sydney was back in the room. She was naked except for her wrapper. She came in quickly, and sat down opposite him. She said, “There is something you can do for me.”

  “Tell me.”

  “I don’t want to be here now. I don’t want to be here. Take me somewhere else.”

  “You don’t want to be in Dundee?” Dundee was the only place she ever wanted to be in summer. Probably the only place she wanted to be, ever.

  “Not right now.”

  There was a pause as he thought about his commitments. About the problem of Jimmy. Then he thought of the beautiful summer places of Europe he hadn’t been to in so long, or ever. Brahms’s own Ischl retreat. Baden-Baden. Capri. Was there really anything to prevent their going?

  “All right. Go have your bath. In fact, take your book and get into bed. I’ll bring our supper up on a tray.” He knew this was not an evening to devote to Jimmy’s sulks and self-justifications. He had decided what to do about Jimmy.

  Sydney looked as if a huge weight had been lifted from her heart. She picked up her book and stood up. She picked up the blue envelope from her desk and slipped it into the book as a place mark. She went out. Laurus went on sitting where he was, as the late-afternoon light began to leak out of the room.

  When Jimmy got home he found his father waiting for him in the kitchen. He took a Coke from the refrigerator without speaking and was about to stroll on to the dining room and about his business when his father’s voice stopped him like a hand on the back of his collar.

  “Young man, sit down.”

  Jimmy turned and looked, trying to gauge what his chances were of ignoring this summons. Nil, he decided resentfully. He walked back, every step a grudge, and flopped down across the kitchen table from his father. He took out his expensive pocketknife, opened his Coke with one of the many blades, and took a deep swig from the bottle. Finally he put the drink down, leaned his elbows on the table, and said, “So?”

  “Mutt Dodge tells me he had to fire you.”

  “Fire? Is that what he called it? I’d say I quit.”

  “And you’re proud of being a quitter?”

  “Don’t call me names, Dad. It’s my life. I don’t want to spend it digging holes for rich people’s rosebushes, so sue me.”

  “I’ve got news for you. It’s not your life yet.”

  “Whose is it, then?” Jimmy was startled and contemptuous.

  “You are a child of this house, beholden for every mouthful you eat and every pop you drink, and as long as you are under my roof, you will behave as if you have some character.”

  Jimmy was amazed. He had come to assume, given his mother’s power and her adulation of himself, that his father was more or less afraid of him. He said rudely, “It’s Mom’s roof.”

  Laurus remained utterly calm. “There are a great many things you do not understand, and that statement reveals one of them.”

  “There’s a lot I do understand, though. That you don’t,” Jimmy said aggressively, and his gaze met his father’s.

  “I doubt that,” said Laurus. “But if it’s true, believe me, I don’t want to hear about it from you.”

  Jimmy was surprised that every time he thought he’d landed a knockout punch, he found his father still out of reach, and moving faster than he was. Since he’d never seen him fight, he didn’t know that he could.

  “God, you’re smug,” he said finally.

  “You are welcome to think so. Think whatever you want. But as long as you’re under this roof, you will behave like a gentleman.” Then he described to Jimmy how he was to spend the rest of the summer.

  And for the rest of the summer, Jimmy entertained his new townie friends with renditions of this speech. Whenever they got enough beer in them, they called for him to “do the Great Dane.” Jimmy was a wicked mimic, and when he was finished with declaiming, “You will behave like a gentleman,” in his father’s accent, he would swing into Winston Churchill. “We will fight them on the beaches! On the rooftops! We will fling our pots and pans!” Their war. Their heroism. Their Brave New World. They thought they knew everything.

  The third Tuesday in July, Cressida Pease, in her pink uniform and white Hush Puppies, had Mrs. Moss’s formula all mixed up in a purple paste. It was ten past ten.

  In the mirror, Ronnie saw her glance at the clock. She was herself working on Mrs. Christie, who liked her hair rinsed a shade of blue that approached indigo.

  “Your daughter’s late for her appointment,” Ronnie shouted at her cheerfully. Candace had taken her hearing aids out for her shampoo.

  “What? My daughter?”

  “Yes. She must be running late.”

  “You’re expecting her?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, she’s in Greece.”

  Cressida loomed up beside Ronnie to make sure she had heard that right. She and Ronnie held a long glance in the mirror.

  “Greece, is she!” Ronnie shouted pleasantly. “Why, she was just here a week ago, I thought she was here for the summer.”

  “I know! So did I! But they upsidoodle changed their plans, and went off to Greece.”

  “Doesn’t that sound nice,” shouted Ronnie, looking hard at Mrs. Christie’s blue head so as not to look at Cressida.

  “With their boy, Jimmy?” Cressida asked. She knew from Sue Dodge that Mutt had had to fire him, after giving him the job in the first place when there were local boys who needed the money. If she learned he’d been rewarded with a trip to the Aegean, she thought she might have to shoot somebody.
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  “Why, Jimmy is living with Ellen Chatto and her new husband. He has a job fishing with Mr. Crocker. I offered to have him stay with us, but I really don’t think Mr. Christie would have liked it. He’s not used to having people going in and out at four in the morning…” She waved her hands to indicate that this was of course impossible, nobody could actually put up with that.

  Cressida was now shoveling purple goo into the trash basket. Then she went to the phone.

  “Is Mrs. Cluett in? Well, could you give her this message? It’s Cressida Pease at HairCare. I know she was hoping for a morning appointment and one just opened up. Yes. You can tell her I can take her every other Tuesday at ten. Yes. Starting next week. I’ll expect her then unless I hear from her. You’re welcome.”

  Down at Olive’s Lunch, on a Friday in early August, Tom Crocker came in for his dinner after he’d stowed the day’s catch. His clothes were soaked with sea salt and sweat. He stumped through to the washroom in the back to clean his hands and face before he sat down at the counter.

  Mutt Dodge was there, finishing his coffee.

  “Tom.”

  “Mutt.”

  “You look like you’re getting around a little easier.”

  “Yuh. Believe I am. Been a warm summer, that oils the joints some.”

  “It has been warm. How you making out with that Moss boy?”

  Polly Abbott brought Tom a plate of fried scallops and a cup of coffee without being asked. Tom looked at his plate, as if trying to recognize what was on it, then said, “Well. I hate him, but I’ve decided not to kill him.”

  “That’s good, Tom. That’s probably the right decision.”

  “He needs killing, quite a bit, but at least he’s getting a little faster at the work. And he doesn’t talk. That’s in his favor.”

  Tom was famous for his hatred of the summer people, and he hated them twice as much when they chattered.

  “He getting to work on time?”

  “Yuh. Ellen’s boy drops him on the dock every morning at four-thirty sharp. Some mornings he’s even conscious.”

  August 18, 1963

  So glad to be back. We’ve had a beautiful sail through the Greek Isles and the coast of Turkey. Both brown as berries. Eleanor and her young man arrive tomorrow. Monica comes the end of the week. Per and Britt-Marie were here with the twins for a week while we were gone, and Ellen says they had a grand time. (Didn’t sign guest book, as no one could find it.)

  Jimmy wasn’t allowed to come home even when his parents were back at Leeway. No one wanted to have to get him up and drive him to work. This was hard on Sydney, but she didn’t complain much. Laurus settled with Mr. Crocker that Jimmy would finish work the weekend before Labor Day and be allowed to move home for a week of vacation with the family. But it didn’t take Eleanor and Monica long on the ground to figure out why they weren’t hearing wails of complaint from Jimmy about this. Unable to keep the hours of the summer kids, not that he was so crazy about most of those ass-holes anyway, Jimmy had gone native. He was in with the year-round kids who worked raking blueberries and waiting on tables, went to the local academy and planned to go to Husson College in Bangor after high school, if they went to college at all. Monica heard he even had a girlfriend, a wild child named Frannie Ober, who could drive.

  Monica, Eleanor, and Bobby Applegate, Eleanor’s beau who was having his first look at Dundee and Dundee at him, took a picnic out to the south end of Beal Island, to try to find where the village used to be. Everyone said there were ghosts out there if you found the right cellar hole. Also there was a beautiful island graveyard up on the ridge, but you needed local knowledge to get to it, and that was rarely shared with the summer people. They never found it, but they’d had a fine time plunging around in the underbrush, eating blueberries, and gathering mussels from the tidal flats to take home for supper. After they ate the sandwiches and fruit Ellen Gott had packed for them, they went skinny-dipping, their sun-heated flesh fairly shrieking at the chill of the water; there was nothing to do but plunge in headlong, which they did, squealing. Seagulls wheeled overhead and the deep August sky arched over them, sporting high streaks of cloud.

  “Mare’s tails,” said Bobby, treading water violently to keep warm.

  “What kind of weather does that mean?”

  “I have no idea.”

  The three of them lay naked in the sun afterward, drying off, sheltered from the view of passing fishing boats and yachtsmen by a boulder that sat across from the nub as if it were a beach ball a giant had bounced down to the water’s edge and then lost interest in. They were waiting for the tide to come back up and float the out-board, which lay on its side on the wet sand. They could have carried it, if they all heaved together, but why bother?

  “Got to see a man about a dog,” said Bobby. He roused himself and started up the beach toward the alder scrub, brushing sand from his blue-white backside. After a few high steps, the shells and stones biting into his feet, he came back and put on his sneakers and marched off again, naked from the ankles up.

  “Watch out for bears,” said Monica.

  After a moment, Eleanor sat up groggy with sun and started to look around, for her clothes.

  “I hate putting on underwear in mixed company,” she said. Monica sat up, too, and decided it would be odd for her to remain naked if Eleanor was dressing; after all, Bobby was her boyfriend. She found and pulled on her underpants and shorts. She used her T-shirt to brush the sand off her feet before putting her sneakers on, but they were full of sand anyway.

  “Do you think Big Syd is on something? Drugs?” Eleanor asked.

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know. Her pupils are all tiny little pinpricks.”

  “She might be. She hasn’t said anything horrible to me since I got back.”

  “Me either. Or to Bobby.”

  “Though she does keep calling him ‘Mr. Applegate.’” They both laughed.

  “She’s young for the change of life, isn’t she?”

  Bobby was making his way down the beach toward them.

  “Uh-oh…Déjeuner sur l’herbe reversed.”

  “And minus the grass,” said Eleanor. Bobby was shaking the sand out of his boxers, which he then tried to put on without taking off his sneakers, which involved a lot of undignified hopping on one foot when the shoe got stuck.

  “That’s the way they do it in the Mr. Universe contest, I’m pretty sure,” he said when the girls stopped laughing.

  “You’re my Mr. Universe, honey,” said Eleanor.

  “Oh, mine, too,” said Monica.

  Well now, thought Monica in the bow of the boat on the way home across the bay, that’s what love should be like. Easy. Friendly. Fun.

  Distinctly unlike the marriage they’d grown up observing. Lucky Eleanor.

  On Labor Day weekend, Elise Maitland Henneberry gave a fiftieth birthday party for her husband at her parents’ boathouse. The party was called for noon, so that people could sail over, or come by canoe if they liked, and so the older folk, Bess and Gordon, Candace and Bernard, Miss Holmes who was at least a thousand years old, would enjoy themselves and not worry about dinner being served too late or getting to bed after nine o’clock. There were kegs of beer and laundry tubs full of ice, with wine bottles and cold soda ever replenished. The volunteer fire department was cooking the lobsters on the beach in exchange for a large contribution to their budget from the senior Maitlands.

  In the Maitlands’ cove, the yachts were dressed with pennants up the headstays from the bow to the tops of the masts and down the backstays to the afterdecks. The children were down playing at the water’s edge; the teenagers and college kids swam off the end of the dock or played capture the flag on the vast sloping lawn. In the boathouse, the main room was set with tables for the blue-hairs. Everyone said it was the best Labor Day weather they’d had in years.

  Laurus was on the beach with Al Pease and Mutt Dodge and the others, stoking the fires beneath huge iron gri
lls made years ago by old Bowdoin Leach. They were heating mammoth pots of water for steamers and lobster and corn on the cob. Up in the boathouse kitchen, the firemen’s wives were preparing Ronnie Dodge’s corn- bread for crisping, and making huge bowls of coleslaw.

  Monica, sitting on the seawall quietly observing, noticed her mother in the boathouse by herself, looking a little lost. She was on her way to keep Sydney company when she saw Cressida come out of the kitchen with a huge tray of shucked corn, intersecting Sydney’s meander.

  “CressEYEda! How are you, sweetie? I missed you!” cried Sydney. Her tone was loving, little girlish, certainly no tone Monica had ever heard her use with the help before.

  Cressida missed a beat or two, before replying neutrally, “Welcome back, Mrs. Moss. Did you have a good vacation?”

  “It was lovely! Have you been to Greece?”

  Cressida, who didn’t actually get to Bangor that often, looked at her.

  “No,” she said.

  “You can’t imagine how clear the water is! It’s turquoise. You should make Al take you. Of course I didn’t let anyone touch my hair while I was away, I couldn’t trust anyone but you. Look at those roots, I look like a skunk.”

  This remark left Cressida nearly speechless. Finally she managed, “Well, give us a jingle, we’ll get you fixed up,” and escaped with laden tray.

  Monica told her sister that the look on Cressida’s face as she went down the stairs was like someone who had just been told that Martians were talking to her through her fillings.

  When Mrs. Dodge had set out gallons of homemade blueberry ice cream, Elise’s children came out of the kitchen with a sheet cake blazing with candles, and everyone sang. Bobby stood with his arm around Eleanor. “This is amazing,” Bobby whispered to her. “Everyone’s so happy. It’s like a wedding with no strangers to be polite to.”