The Landing

by John Ibbitson

  “Could be worse,” Henry replied. “You’ll be okay.”

  “Why don’t we take a look? Thank you, gentlemen,” because the Ahmic was getting ready to depart. Ben gave Cal a wave and a shrug and then hurried after Ruth Chapman, because she was already off the dock and climbing the steps. Ben had never seen a woman who seemed so comfortable and in charge around men.

  The granite steps from the dock to the cottage passed through a thin line of birches that ringed the edge of the island, up the rocky slope, through a stand of white pine, detouring around one ancient sentinel, its trunk three feet thick — it had been there since there were only Indians on the lake, miraculously escaping the lumbermen’s axe — before reaching the cottage, which was at the height of land, surrounded by pine, with a clearing in front to provide light. The place was a fair ways bigger than their house at the Landing, but still smaller than some of the mansion-cottages farther up the lake — a cedar-shingle roof, green-painted siding, a veranda along the front, large dormer windows on the second floor. Through the trees, the lake shimmered below, and a filtered sun played on the leaves and needles that carpeted the ground.

  The woman took a small silver case from her cloth bag, opened it and pulled out a cigarette. A quick half-look to see if either Henry or Ben were going to offer her a light, then she fished around in her bag and extracted a pearl-clad lighter. She flipped open the lid, flicked the wheel, took a quick drag, then snapped the lighter shut. Ben knew that women smoked — he’d seen it in the movies. But he had never seen one do it outside, in front of men; the girls that did that sort of thing drank in the Ladies and Escorts section of the Albion Hotel, and it was Ben’s life ambition to get in there. But Ruth Chapman didn’t care where she smoked or who saw her.

  “It’s beautiful.” She had been surveying the cottage forever, it seemed, but it could only have been a minute; the cigarette was still fresh. Ben silently agreed. There were cottages on the lake with turrets and cupolas (as the Hitchcocks called theirs), and wrap-around verandas and fancy woodwork and huge boathouses. Pine Island didn’t have a boathouse, and the cottage was hidden among the maples and pines, but there was something about it that appealed to Ben, something simple but substantial that seemed to blend with the rocks and the trees and the lake.

  Ruth Chapman ground the cigarette firmly underfoot — Ben was relieved to see that she made sure there was no smoke, because the bush was tinder-dry — and walked quickly up the three steps, across the veranda and through the screen door, Ben and Henry following. She wandered slowly through the rooms, rubbing her hands along the wooden planks that lined the walls, bending down to feel the floor. The main floor consisted of four large rooms with a hallway running down the middle and stairs leading up to the second floor. On your left as you walked in was the living room — framed by windows on two sides and by a granite fireplace on the third. A doorway beside the fireplace connected to the dining room, which was wrapped in windows that looked out on the other side of the island and the main body of the lake beyond.

  “Don’t you love the windows in this room?” she breathed, before passing through the French doors and across the hall into another room, lined with bookshelves and with another, smaller fireplace.

  “So this is the evening room,” she nodded knowingly. “Charles Wainwright designed this house, you know — that’s why I bought it, sight unseen. I’ve always loved his homes. They’re honest buildings. And he always had what he called ‘the evening room’ — something small, intimate, where you could retreat to at the end of the day.”

  It was beyond Ben’s imagining that people used rooms depending on the time of day. Their house had a parlor that you never went into, unless the minister was visiting, and a kitchen where they ate and read and basically spent their indoor waking hours, and bedrooms where they slept. But here you had a room to live in and a room to eat in that wasn’t the kitchen and a room just for nighttime.

  Ben thought the new owner would only glance at the kitchen — the rich can’t cook, which is why they hire others to do it — but she gave the stove a thorough going-over and looked around inside the walk-in pantry — the rotten planks caught her eye right away — and inspected the cupboards and the icebox, where Henry had already installed a block of ice. She looked around, spied the case of gin, pulled out a bottle and slid it into the icebox.

  “First things first,” she grinned, then made her way upstairs.

  The master bedroom had its own fireplace, and room for chairs and a bookcase as well as a large, four-poster bed and two end tables. There were even doors leading outside to a small balcony that looked east out onto the lake.

  “Wainwright always put a lot of thought into the master bedroom.” She looked around with satisfaction. “He didn’t believe that the lady of the house should come downstairs until after lunch.” Ben said nothing but thought of his mother, who was usually up before either of the men.

  She nodded in satisfaction at the big, claw-footed bathtub in the bathroom. Ben would have given anything for a house with a bathroom, for dashing to the outhouse in the dead of winter was misery, and a bath was something you took in a big metal tub that you hauled into the kitchen and filled with hot water while everyone else stayed upstairs. This bathroom had a flush toilet and a tub with actual plumbing.

  “Ah, roughing it,” she grinned, fishing for another cigarette, which explained that deep, raspy voice.

  “But there’s a lot to do here.”

  “Like I said —” Henry began.

  “I don’t like the look of the flooring on the veranda, and I counted three shutters hanging, and there’s the dock, of course, and the pantry.” She ignored him. “And we’re going to have to repaint the outside.”

  “The root cellar needs work as well,” Ben added. Might as well be honest.

  “So.” She looked at Henry steadily. “What will it take to get you to stay here and work on the place?”

  Henry shook his head. “Sorry. Have to run the Landing.” And he did. It was the busiest time of the season. There were two boats tied up at the dock right now needing work.

  “Well, there’s your nephew … I’m sorry, I didn’t get your name.”

  “Ben.”

  “Hello, Ben.” She looked at him, pulling on her cigarette, then tapping the ashes into a saucer she had brought from the kitchen. Ben flushed; he felt as if he was under inspection, which he was.

  But he must have passed inspection. “Would you be interested?” she asked him after a moment. “You’ve done good work here already, I can tell. In four weeks, we’ll have this place in shape.”

  “I need him at the Landing,” Henry interrupted. It was true, but Ben already knew what he wanted. This woman was interesting, with her cigarettes and her slacks and her casual authority. And working on the cottage would beat running around doing stuff for Henry.

  “Sorry, but —” Ben didn’t know if this was a real refusal or the beginning of negotiations.

  “I can pay him three dollars a day.”

  Ben’s eyes widened, then narrowed again at Henry’s warning glance. The very best guides, the ones who knew exactly where the pickerel and trout were, in sun and in rain, when the water was chilled or warm, who escorted the richest owners in their mahogany yachts, helping them with their lures and their lines — they sometimes charged two dollars a day. And she was offering a dollar a day more to a kid to help fix up a cottage.

  Ben feared Henry would insist on haggling, but this was more than even he could complain about. “I guess I could manage without him.”

  “Good.” She shook Henry’s hand, then shook Ben’s. Her grip was firm. “Let’s start now. The lot of you have managed to put every chair and every sofa and every bed and every dresser in the wrong place. We start up here.”

  “I’ll come back for him at six.” Henry headed for the door, offering Ben only a “Don’t mess this up” scow
l of warning. Three dollars a day. He’d be making more than Henry made at the Landing. And this lady would be a heck of a lot more interesting to work for.

  “Ben. In here.” She was already dragging furniture around. He hurried in to help.

  Sibelius

  Each morning after breakfast he rowed over to the island in the leaky old punt that Henry had never gotten around to fixing or getting rid of. He started with the dock — if those boards weren’t replaced, someone was going to go through them. Sizing, sawing and nailing down the planks took three days, and then it was on to the door of the root cellar, which took a couple of days more. His new boss seemed to pretty much ignore him; he figured she was used to having help around. But once he started work on the house, fixing the veranda and the shutters, replacing the floor of the pantry and scraping off the peeling paint, he was able to watch her, and he did watch her, closely, because she was a fascinating woman.

  Fascinating to Ben, at least. She was so different from his mother, or from the teachers he’d had at school. Since his father’s death, it seemed to Ben that his mother had been working more than living. Once she had loved to go out dancing, and she fussed over her hair and tilted her head back and laughed at his father’s jokes. But she never laughed now, though she still smiled when Henry’s latest rant amused her or she saw her son. Her hair had started to go gray over the last couple of years, and the dresses she wore had been around as long as Ben could remember, though she had had to take them in because she had gotten thinner after the accident.

  “You’re working yourself to death, Mary,” Henry had grumbled once, which may have been a compliment, because how well and how hard you worked was how Henry defined you; Henry didn’t think Ben worked hard or well enough and made sure Ben knew it. But it seemed to Ben that his mother did work harder than any of them. Henry had no skill as a farmer, and the field out back had been turning to bush before Ben’s mom had taken things in hand. She plowed the field herself in the fall with the horse and plow that they borrowed from the Morrisons. Horses listened to his mother in a way they didn’t listen to Ben or Henry. The next spring Ben and his mother sowed and tended and harvested the field together. She worked the vegetable garden, too, which was almost a half-acre by itself and had to be watered and weeded and protected from the rabbits and the crows. She cooked and cleaned and baked and laid down preserves and minded the store, which wasn’t really a store, just a large pantry off the kitchen and a second icebox that you had to squeeze past in the front hall. It held the milk from the cows she milked herself, and the butter she churned herself, and whatever vegetables were available from the garden. There were tins of tobacco in the pantry, and canned vegetables and ketchup and toilet paper and other things cottagers might need right away and were willing to pay twice the price for rather than go all the way into town. The cottagers liked her; sometimes they’d come for a bit of rhubarb, and the next day a can of peaches, and there was no need, but they liked to sit at the table and gab while his mom gave them their change from the cash box. His mom would smile and listen and nod and sympathize, without saying very much of anything herself, which Ben noticed is what people liked in other people. But Ben remembered the laugh that he hadn’t heard since the accident, and he missed it, and he missed the woman his mother had been.

  The other women in Ben’s life were varying degrees of stern, whether it was Mrs. Wilfrid or Mrs. White or Mrs. Cane — who loved to use one on the backsides of boys — the teachers who had come and gone at the one-room school he’d had to walk four miles to, or the widow Henkel, as everyone called her, who played the pump organ, badly, at the little Free Methodist church that they went to every Sunday — well, Ben and his mother always, because she insisted; Henry, when he was forced into it. Sometimes Ben would play his violin while the widow Henkel pumped and pounded away on the organ. She loved to shout out in rehearsal what he was doing wrong, though she hit the right notes at the right time more out of luck than anything.

  There were other women in the farms and houses and shacks along the shores of the lake. They started out lively enough, most of them, but the winters and the lack of money, and the lack of hope of money, and the children that were born one after the other, even though they couldn’t afford them, pressed down on them and lined their faces. None of these women was anything like Ruth Chapman. None of them even came close.

  He had no idea when she smoked her first cigarette each day, because no matter how early he arrived he could smell the smoke in the cottage, even with the open windows. Much of the day she had a cigarette in her hand, though Ben noticed that she would often stub it out in an ashtray half-smoked and then a minute later light another. Lighting the cigarette, butting it out, flipping the silver cigarette case over and over with her fingers, all seemed as important as actually smoking, though he figured she still went through two packs a day. The price she paid was a rasping cough that would come on unexpectedly or after she climbed the steps up to the cottage too fast, or even sometimes if she laughed too hard.

  “Damn filthy habit,” she warned him, after putting away the handkerchief that she held to her mouth during coughing jags. “Wish to hell I’d never started.”

  She swore like that, casually. Ben had never heard his mother swear, and Henry only swore when he was mad. The crews on the steamboats swore every second word, at least when the passengers or the boss weren’t around; it was like punctuation for them, or breathing. Ruth Chapman swore to give a sentence flavor, like salt. She swore the way she smoked, as a habit, but with confidence, because she was used to saying or doing anything she wanted.

  She laughed, too, a dusky, deep-toned laugh that matched her alto voice. She laughed easily because she seemed to think life was something to laugh about. She laughed when she read a passage in a book that amused her — she read a lot through the day, novels mostly, by authors he’d never heard of. She’d sit on the porch in a wicker rocking chair she had brought from the city, or indoors in a big leather chair if it was rainy or the mosquitoes were bad.

  “Have you read Fitzgerald?” she asked once when she caught him sneaking a look at the spine of the book she was holding. “You should read The Great Gatsby. Best book of the last decade, if you ask me. And Scott is a lot more fun at a party than Hemingway. Hemingway gets into fights.”

  He had no idea who Fitzgerald was, or Hemingway, but he figured they were famous, because she lived among the famous. Her husband had been a book publisher, and she lived in New York. “Born in Brooklyn, moved to the Upper East Side,” she told him. “It’s a long journey.”

  She read, and she worked in the cottage — she was willing and able to do her own housework, at least — and she took the boat out most days for a spin — “I love speed, don’t you?” she asked him, not wanting an answer, and then laughed as she angled the Greavette up to the dock and he trotted down to grab the bow line.

  And she fished, he discovered — “George and I went to Maine to fish every summer, and I always beat him, and he hated it” — so they shared one thing in common, at least, and she laughed long and hard as she pulled in a five-pound pickerel — walleye, she called them — that she had no right to be catching in the middle of the day, but pickerel were like that, sometimes.

  “Would you like me to clean it for you?” he asked her as she showed it to him, proudly, one fisherman to another.

  “Hell, no.” She dashed its head against a rock, took a filleting knife out of her tackle box, and in five fluid motions she sliced behind the gills and along the backbone, cut the gullet and scooped out the guts, then sliced two clean fillets from gill to tail, and Ben couldn’t see a single bone in either of them.

  “You can clean up the guts, though,” she grinned, wiping her hands on her pants before lighting a cigarette and disappearing into the cottage, where she had pickerel for lunch.

  There was beer with lunch, wine with dinner, Scotch in the evening and gin in between. One way or
another, there was always a drink around. He couldn’t really tell if she got drunk. She never slurred her words or got all emotional, but she would laugh more, later in the day, and swear more, and talk more, because after a week or so she had started to talk to him, a rambling sort of monologue that didn’t desire or require an answer: whether she should move the sofa to the other wall, what an idiot that fellow in the Ditchburn was — “he’s got the whole damn lake and he still manages to almost run me over, the bloody fool” — her life in New York.

  “It was Jamie Thurber who told me about this place, you know. Have you read any James Thurber? Well, he’s a writer, and a damn good one. He and Andy White are the best things in the New Yorker, and there are a lot of good things in the New Yorker these days. Wish we could get it up here. So Jamie told George and me that the Carlsons had this cottage in Muskoka they were trying to unload. Distressed sale — well, we were all pretty distressed after the Crash, but the Carlsons especially. And Andy had had a cottage up here, in Dorset. Do you know where that is? Of course you do, and he’d had Jamie up a couple of years ago, and they both just raved about Muskoka. And when I heard that Wainwright had built this place, and when I heard what the Carlsons were asking for it — well, here I am. Everyone had a huge party for me at the Algonquin, you know, the day before I left, and Dotty — Have you read Dorothy Parker? Have you read anyone? — well, Dotty said she’d read about my suicide in the newspapers, but I’m enjoying myself hugely. And who wouldn’t? Well, Dotty, I suppose.”

  She loved to talk, and Ben loved to listen. New York sounded like such an exotic place — people wore different clothes to eat dinner! — and there was something about that rich, dark, raspy voice, three glasses of gin and a pack of cigarettes into the day, and a hint of an accent — but what was it? Upper East Side? Brooklyn? — that made you want to listen to her talk even if it was just about the dreadful economy and the evil of taxes, or the heat — for the June heat had been replaced by a July heat, deadening and sticky, day after day, though there always seemed to be a breeze playing around the trees near the cottage.