Leeway Cottage

by Beth Gutcheon

  Annabee’s summer crowd grew older. By 1931, they still hiked and picnicked and sailed together during the golden days, but at night, the older ones took to dancing to Victrola records and began to fall in and out of love with each other. A shy, rather strange boy named Homer Gantry was given a Model T which he drove to an evening party at Sherlock Holmes. He left it quivering and burping in the driveway rather than turn it off, as getting it started again without the help of the chauffeur was not a trick he had fully mastered. When he finally managed to herd some of the gang outside to marvel, the car was gone. He raised a hue and cry that it had been stolen, until Andie Cochran gently pointed out the dark bulk of the car in the bay, where it had evidently driven itself; the running lights could be seen still glowing beneath the water. Gladdy and Annabee weren’t there, but they heard about it. Everybody heard about it. Poor Homer.

  The same year, 1931, a trim young German named Werner Best signaled his ambitions for advancement within his political party, the National Socialists, by writing a policy paper. He urged that Communists and Social Democrats should be “reeducated” in concentration camps. Jews should be deprived of the legal protection of the state. They should be forbidden to buy flour or medicine, or to use the telephone, or to travel on public transportation. Leadership of the party was not yet clearly established; perhaps Dr. Best thought this would make him a candidate.

  Dickie Britton and some of the racier boys in the Dundee summer colony started running with a couple of the Eaton boys from the town. One night four of them were coming down Great Spruce Bay in the Brittons’ motorboat, having been all the way to Canada, when a launch full of revenue officers came booming out of March Cove on Beal Island. Before the chase boat reached them the boys had to drop an entire case of Canadian rye whiskey overboard. There was much laughter the rest of the summer about the fact that they’d dumped it in the very deepest channel of the bay, where it remains.

  By January of 1933, leadership of the National Socialists was firmly in the hands of Adolf Hitler, and it wasn’t only the party that was taking him seriously. In Berlin, elderly President Hindenberg was forced, unhappily, to invite Herr Hitler to become chancellor of Germany and form a government.

  In the summer of 1933, when Gladdy and Annabee were fourteen, the McClintocks celebrated The Gladys Birthday by taking the whole bunch out to Beal Island for an evening lobster picnic. They hit the beach in a flotilla of motorboats, sailboats, and canoes. The girls gathered driftwood for the fire while the boys helped Dr. and Mrs. McClintock off-load bushels of corn and steamer clams and dozens of live lobsters packed in seaweed. The young roamed in groups, gathering berries and playing sardines while the food was being cooked. They ate sitting on the rocks, using stones to pound open the lobster claws, and throwing the empty shells into the sea to be carried out on the tide. When supper was over and the daylight almost gone, the grown-ups packed up their gear and pushed off home, leaving the young to come later, after moonrise.

  They built up the fire and cuddled around it, watching lights of the night sky on the water. Annabee had a crush on Tom McClintock that year, but he was hopelessly smitten with Elise. Somebody’s houseguest had a flask of bootleg rum which they poured into the punch after the grown-ups left. Elise and Tom drew back from the circle of firelight so they could neck. Homer Gantry got completely drunk and threw up on his pants. One of the boys had a ukulele and could play a little. The Cochran girls sang beautifully, but nobody sang as beautifully as Annabee. When it was nearly time to pack up and start back, Annabee (who had not been drinking) started to cry.

  Gladdy and several others formed a circle around her.

  “It’s all right…it’ll be all right,” Gladdy said in distress, not that she had any idea what was making her friend so sad. She stroked Annabee’s arms and back. “Do you want me to call Tom?” Annabee shook her head violently. Of course, it was nothing to do with Tom.

  “Can you tell me?” Gladdy was trying to imagine what, besides heartache, could cause such a storm of grief to a girl like Annabee.

  “I just don’t want to go home,” Annabee managed to say.

  “You don’t?” Gladdy couldn’t imagine this. She loved home.

  “Do you want to spend the night out here?” asked Lucie Cochran, kindly.

  “Yes, do you?” Others around the fire chimed in, quite liking the idea. “We could all stay, and watch the sunrise…” Annabee was shaking her head.

  “That won’t help…” She was getting control of herself, slowly. “I mean to Cleveland. All my happy times are here.”

  Gladdy thought about this for a long moment. She could think of false comforts to give but it wasn’t in her nature to utter them. So she stroked Annabee’s back, and said, “Oh, honey.”

  In Germany, by 1936, things were going pretty well for the chancellor. There were some civil-liberty issues that were unattractive, but he’d gotten the country back to full employment while the rest of the world was in a depression; it was better than the guy in the White House had done. A lot of the employment was involved in rearming the military, creating an air force, things Germany wasn’t supposed to do, but Hitler claimed that France and Britain had never disarmed to the level they were supposed to, either, under the Treaty of Versailles. He was just keeping things fair. It was humiliating, the Versailles Treaty. There were maybe parts of it that hadn’t been such a good idea in the first place. Take the Rhineland. Sure, you can see why France wants a buffer zone, but the Rhine is German, and the Rhineland is German. How would it feel if they said, “Okay, from now on the Mississippi is French? You can’t do anything east of the Mississippi that France doesn’t like”? In March of 1936, Hitler took the Rhineland back. He marched his troops into it and there he was. Everybody said, “Now what?”

  Annabee’s father was a good deal older than her mother. In 1936, he was sixty-three, overweight, and smoking two packs of Camels a day. During Prohibition he’d started to drink too much, almost as a matter of principle. When it ended, he saw no reason to modify the habit. In Cleveland he continued to go to an office in the Arcade during the day, but he didn’t do much but manage his investments, and his days generally included long lunches at the Tavern Club, drinking martinis and playing backgammon. He played a little golf on weekends. He continued to serve on charitable boards and to play very good bridge in the evenings. On all-talky evenings at home he would often be struck, after a couple of what he called “stumplifters” at the cocktail hour and wine with dinner, with the desire for an audience. He would lean back in his chair a little, and spread his arms benevolently, and start prying open canned stories, to see if anyone would eat them. If there were guests (and they would only be old friends at this point), they would fall quiet and wait for the oft-told punch line. If there were no guests, Annabee tried to supply the lack; Candace didn’t bother.

  James and Candace had kept separate bedrooms for years, as when he was drunk, he snored. One morning in the spring of that year, after Annabee had left for school but before Candace was up, James slipped in his shower and broke his hip, and wasn’t found until water overflowed the shower stall, where his body blocked the drain, and ran out under the door and into the hallway. He never recovered; Annabee was to see him only once more, in the hospital, so full of dope he was barely awake. He died alone, at three o’clock the following morning.

  Annabee was devastated. The house was soon crammed with people and flowers. She sat in mortified silence as her mother said to her circle that Maude was upstairs packing up Jimmy’s clothes—she had given the lot to the gardener, who was almost the right size.

  “Candace—hadn’t you better wait a little while?” Bud Harbison asked. He had recently been widowed himself.

  Candace tapped a cigarette out of her case and lit it crisply.

  “Why?” Blue smoke came out of her nose and mouth.

  “There’s no rush. Annabee might like to go through them first.”

  “Anna? She can’t use them…”


  “No, but he was her father.”

  Candace looked over at Annabee, who was staring at her shoes. After a pause she said, “Well, I don’t want her going all to pieces.”

  “No. But still. It can wait a week or two.”

  Annabee’s classmates from Hathaway Brown came to pay their sympathy calls. They came with their mothers, dressed as for church. Annabee had the sense that the mothers viewed this as a teaching opportunity, rather than an action intended to produce solace. This is the way we pay a Sympathy Call. They sat together stiffly and said things about how terrible they would feel if their own fathers died. None of them had known James at his best.

  The one thing that taught Annabee anything about true kindness was that Gladdy came from Philadelphia to the funeral. When Annabee telephoned her, weeping, Gladdy said, “Oh, no!” and burst into tears herself. Then called back, and asked if she could be met at the Terminal station at eight-fifteen the next morning. She came without proper mourning clothes, though her mother had lent her a black shawl to wear over her Sunday-school dress. At the funeral, Gladdy walked with the family, and at the graveside, she held Annabee’s hand as the huge mahogany casket was lowered into the ground, while the sun shone and birds sang and the cemetery bloomed with dogwood.

  Candace had had James’s grave dug at the left side of the plot, beside his long-dead father, leaving a blank space on the right between old Annabelle and the marooned remains of Berthe Hanenberger Brant.

  “But now there’s no room for your mother beside your father,” Gladdy said.

  “She doesn’t plan to die,” said Annabee.

  She was Anna after that, to everyone except her oldest friends. She and her mother both went into mourning, but for six months only. They didn’t go to Dundee at all that summer; instead, they went abroad.

  “A complete change; we both need it,” Candace announced. “You haven’t been anywhere except Cleveland and Dundee.” Candace and her Jimmy had done a great deal of traveling early in their marriage. In Annabee’s bedroom at The Elms she had a shelf full of nasty little dolls they had brought her, which you could only look at, not play with, in native costumes of Wales, Scotland, Norway, Sweden, Holland, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and Greece. “Where would you like to go most?” Candace asked now.

  “Paris,” said Anna.

  “You’ll be going to Paris your whole life,” said her mother. They went to Egypt. They sailed the middle of June on the Rex, of the Italian Line, and played bridge all the way across. The surprise to Candace was that Annabee played well from the beginning and got better and better. By the time they toured the Alameda Gardens in Gibraltar, they were arm in arm, laughing together more than they had in their lives.

  From Gibraltar they sailed for Tangiers and went on to Rabat and to Fez, where they bought rugs. After Morocco, they sailed for Port Said and from there went by train to Cairo. Tommy, Gladdy, Elise, and the others got postcards and letters all summer, with pictures of pyramids, of their hotels, of the S.S. Egypt on which they went up the Nile, of their private car and dragoman, of themselves attending a camel race, of Candace riding a camel. Annabee was homesick. Candace bought her a beautiful gray star sapphire and, when they got home, had it set in a dinner ring for her to commemorate the trip.

  “Better than a doll in a burnoose,” Annabee wrote to Elise.

  Mother and daughter put off their mourning right after Thanksgiving; in spite of black clothes and the veil she wore in public, Candace’s social life was already back at full throttle. She played bridge several times a week, in the afternoons with her lady friends, sitting at card tables in someone’s living room, with crystal ashtrays and monogrammed lighters on little glass-topped tables at their elbows. At evening parties she played with Bernard Christie, the Brant family lawyer, a confirmed bachelor with soft hands and very pink cheeks. Mr. Christie became her escort for dinners and theater as well. He tried to interest her in opera, although she warned him she was allergic to singing. After two acts of Tosca she had to be taken home.

  “It’s so affected,” she said in the car.

  “All right, you tried it. If you don’t like it, you don’t.”

  “I get enough of that at the house, with Anna carrying on like Galli-Curci…”

  “She has a voice, you know, ma belle.”

  “I know she has a voice, believe me. When she sings on the third floor, you can hear her in the kitchen.”

  “I think you should let her take lessons.”

  Candace rolled her eyes.

  The week Candace and Annabee put off their mourning clothes, as the first Christmas cards of the season began to appear in the mail, they both received thick cream-colored envelopes bearing the following invitation.

  MR. AND MRS. ORVILLE BROWN TALBOT

  REQUEST THE PLEASURE OF YOUR COMPANY

  AT A SMALL DANCE IN HONOUR OF THEIR DAUGHTER

  ALICE ST. JOHN

  DECEMBER TWENTY-EIGHTH,

  AT TEN O’CLOCK

  THE MAYFIELD CLUB

  Et cetera, et cetera. Alice Talbot was a grade ahead of Annabee at school, but her twin brother, Toby, was a sort of friend of Annabee’s. They had danced together at dancing school and once won a silver dollar which he had let her keep.

  “Wasn’t that kind of Polly to include you,” said Candace.

  “But I’m not out yet.”

  “No, you’re not, but almost…”

  “You mean, I can go?”

  “Oh, why not?” Candace looked up and smiled. “You won’t wear a long dress, of course. Polly was devoted to your father, you know.”

  Annabee did know, and it mattered to her. There were not so many who had remained devoted to him.

  Of course she had nothing to wear to Alice’s party. They went shopping. First to Halle Brothers, where Candace had a favorite saleswoman. Annabee stood in her best silk underwear in the dressing room, surrounded by mirrors, while Candace sat in a plush chair and smoked Old Golds. Mrs. McCall ran in and out with dresses gathered from every department. Everything Mrs. McCall could find was either too poufy, or too décolleté, or not suitable for dancing. At the end of the day, they put two dresses on hold, and went downstairs to salvage the expedition by buying Annabee’s first long white kid gloves.

  “Oh, dear,” said Annabee as they settled into the backseat of the car. Osgood had finally been retired and Candace was driven now by a patient colored man from New Orleans named Ralph. It was beginning to snow, and the streetlights were already on.

  “Don’t worry. Tomorrow we’ll go to the Band Box. Yvonne will have something, she always does.” The Band Box! Yvonne was from Paris and so were the clothes, and if she couldn’t suit you, she’d have something made up. Annabee might wear a dress from Paris, like Berthe, the lost love of her father’s life.

  At the Band Box, Annabee stood in the middle of the room, while Yvonne walked around her as if examining a horse. She used her hands to pull Annabee’s shoulders back, then with one finger caused her to lift her chin, as if she’d forgotten Annabee was alive and a speaker of English. She gazed thoughtfully, then cried, “Ah!,” and left the room in a rush.

  Candace sat as if at a performance. Yvonne reappeared at the door to her atelier and said, “I have it, mam’zelle, come with me,” and Annabee did.

  When she reappeared, Annabee was wearing a swirl of royal blue taffeta, with draped shoulders, a V-neckline, and a very small waist.

  Candace stubbed out her cigarette and sat up straight. “Yvonne!”

  Yvonne used her hands to cause Annabee to rotate slowly. “Ooh la la, non?” she said to Candace, complacently.

  “Anna, you look simply marvelous.”

  Annabee blushed. While she had been tucking and pinning her in, Yvonne had rattled off names like Schiaparelli and Lanvin; Annabee wasn’t sure that one of them had actually made this dress, but she knew it was très chic, and it certainly might have been made for her.

  “We just have to take it in here, and here.” Yvonne to
uched the waist in the back and the shoulders. “And of course she needs a little…” She touched Annabee’s tummy.

  Candace chuckled. “Yes, I see she does.”

  “What?” asked Annabee. She couldn’t see that she needed anything else if she had this dress.

  “A little corseting, lovey. Should we take care of that before you do the fitting, Yvonne?”

  “No, pas du tout. We can fit her now.”

  “I suppose I don’t dare ask what this will cost?”

  Yvonne laughed merrily. “No, I wouldn’t, madame. You can see the dress is perfect for her, par-faite, so what can you do?”

  “Not a thing,” said Candace, exhaling a stream of smoke, and Yvonne called toward the atelier for a seamstress.

  When the dress arrived at the house, in a huge box as full of cushioning tissue paper as if the dress were made of glass, Candace and Annabee retired at once to Candace’s dressing room for a viewing. Annabee had on her girdle, her first, and satin slippers dyed to match the blue taffeta. With the dress on, she turned this way and that before the full-length mirror as her mother stood in the doorway.

  “You know,” Candace said, “it’s too bad you can’t put your hair up.”

  Annabee took her hair in her hand and twisted it up onto her head. Suddenly she looked years older, and terribly sophisticated.

  “Can I not?”

  “Not until you’re out, but it’s too bad. What jewelry do you think of wearing?”

  Annabee hadn’t thought of any jewelry; she was thinking that if Tyrone Power happened to be at the party, even he would fall in love with her.

  She mostly had costume jewelry, except for a ring with her birth- stone her father had given her, and the locket that said “Annabelle.”