Leeway Cottage

by Beth Gutcheon

  “Except you,” said Eleanor.

  “The whole place is a summer romance.” Ah good, Eleanor thought. He has passed this test. She couldn’t imagine not marrying Bobby, but she also couldn’t imagine marrying someone who didn’t get the point of Dundee.

  Elise Maitland’s brother Ned read a long and affectionate poem in dactylic hexameter. Gladdy and Neville Crane sang “The Old Mill Stream” in barbershop harmony: “Christo, you old salt-i-i-ine, When we first…met…yooouuu, You were twenty-twooo, Now it’s pruunes …for…you…”

  They had their words copied out on matching sheets of blue letter paper. Neville had to hold his at arm’s length in order to read it, while Gladdy had hers in near her nose.

  “Who are they?” Bobby asked.

  “Amelia Crane’s parents. My mother’s closest friends. They’re who I want to be when I grow up.”

  “Now that’s a recommendation.”

  “Come, I’ll introduce you.”

  Monica saw her father drive the station wagon down the lawn about ten minutes later to collect Candace and Bernard, so they didn’t have to trudge back up to the big house. (It was not clear that Uncle Bernard even could walk that far.) She was surprised when her mother got into the car with them and went home, too. Neither of her parents came back to the party, which was probably just as well, because Jimmy and his townie friends showed up toward sunset, and by the time Monica left, he and his mad bad girlfriend were so drunk they could barely stand up. As she walked away Jimmy was surrounded by admiring cronies, yelling in a British accent: “We will fight them in the outhouse…we will smite them with our brollies…”

  For Laurus, the most uncomfortable moment in that whole difficult summer was the dinner party Candace gave at The Plywoods on Labor Day itself. There was the inevitable lobster Newburg, and then bridge, four tables of young and old. Toward the end of the evening, he and Sydney were playing Neville and Gladdy. Sydney’s mood was dispiriting to him. She was angry again, hurt, sad, likely to behave like a cat in a bath at any moment. She’d been fine all evening, and then suddenly she was hissing and scratching. At poor Gladdy, of all people.

  It wasn’t anything that was said. It was the crackle of current around the table, a feeling like the punishing treble of a too-bright piano. Laurus was dummy. Sydney, unusually for her, had gone on drinking after dinner, her father’s late-night tipple, whiskey and soda. She moved in staccato, throwing down cards, snatching up tricks. At one point she laughed unkindly when she trumped an ace from Gladdy. The worst moment came when Sydney threw down her hand and said, “The rest are mine.” She was reaching to sweep up the deck when Neville said gently, “I think you’ve miscounted.”

  “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.

  When 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 understand,” 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.

  In 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 din
ner.”

  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 romantic?”

  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.

  Laurus 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.

  August 24, 1964

  Young Mr. and Mrs. Applegate arrived last night after a harrowing drive from Boston in rain and hail (flights to Bangor all canceled). They are blooming; lovely to have them both here. Bobby’s parents will be here tomorrow, weather permitting. Such fun to have the house full.

  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.