Leeway Cottage

by Beth Gutcheon

  The day after the dance, Gladdy and Amelia Crane gave a lunch party for the young Applegates and the Danish cousins. Sydney was off escorting the senior Applegates and Kaj and Kirsten to Mount Desert where they would see Thunder Hole and have tea with popovers at the Jordan Pond House; Sydney had made a face with her tongue out at them behind their backs for Monica’s benefit as she announced this. Nina had elected to stay home with Laurus. They were sitting on the porch, reading, when Laurus noticed an unfamiliar car come slowly up the lane and pause, just past the Leeway Cottage driveway. The driver peered up at the house, then crept off. In a moment the car was back, going in the other direction, and this time it turned timidly into the drive and came right up to the porch steps.

  Laurus went to the top of the stairs and watched the driver dismount, a woman of about his age in a shirtwaist dress, nylons, and clean white sneakers. Not a Country Club girl, nor yet from any of the old year-round families, that he knew, anyway. Probably raising money for Ischl or the hospital.

  “Good afternoon,” he said.

  “Are you Mr. Moss?”

  “I am. Are you where you mean to be?”

  She smiled. “I am.”

  “Please come up, then.”

  The woman climbed the stairs and gave him her hand. “I’m Hannah Ober,” she said.

  “Laurus Moss. This is my sister, Nina Moss.”

  Laurus was still waiting for the shoe to drop.

  “I’m Frannie’s mother,” she said.

  “Please,” said Laurus. “Sit down.”

  The three of them sat and looked at each other. “I think you may know my husband Harold. From church,” said Hannah.

  “This is the mother of Jimmy’s girl,” said Laurus to Nina, who murmured and nodded.

  Ellen appeared at the door from inside. “Oh, hello, Hannah!”

  “Ellen, how are you?”

  “I came to see if your company needed anything, Mr. Moss.”

  “Could we have some iced tea, do you think? Will you have iced tea?” he asked Mrs. Ober. The atmosphere was distressingly polite. What had she come to say, that she demanded he keep his badly raised, unpleasant son away from her daughter? Who could blame her?

  When Ellen had gone, Hannah Ober smoothed her skirt over her knees and asked, “Have you met Frannie?”

  “No. My daughters have. But Jimmy is away this summer.”

  “I know,” said Hannah. “Believe me.” And smiled. Her hair was graying and she wore no makeup, but when she smiled she was beautiful.

  “Is Frannie here in Dundee?”

  “She was. My husband took her back to Boston when he went down. My mother came for a visit and I didn’t think I could handle them both at the same time.”

  “Where do you live?”

  “We have a camp up by Third Pond.”

  “How old is Frannie?” Nina asked.

  “Seventeen, just.”

  “Ah. An older woman.”

  “Yes.”

  Ellen was back with the tea in tall glasses, with mint from the garden, and a plate of cookies. She gave them each a paper napkin with LEEWAY COTTAGE printed on it in navy blue. When Ellen had gone, Hannah said, “I like Jimmy very much.”

  “Do you?” Laurus knew that his son had his good points but was hard-pressed to know how others could recognize them.

  “Yes, but I should add, I’ve always been a sucker for the bad boys.”

  “And so is your daughter.”

  “Oh, indeed. But don’t tell her she and I have anything in common. I’m glad I remember giving birth to her or I’d swear she’d been left on the doorstep by wolves.” Laurus laughed and Nina smiled.

  “No wonder she and Jimmy are soul mates.”

  “I teach that age,” said Nina.

  “On purpose?”

  “Yes. They are a great deal of trouble to themselves, and of course we know nothing.” Her voice was unexpectedly warm with affection.

  “We know nothing. Frannie’s father and I are both heartless poops who never loved and won’t lift a finger to fix what’s wrong with the world. Frannie is furious about Vietnam, and apparently it’s my fault.”

  “Yours personally?” Nina asked, smiling.

  “Yes.”

  “I congratulate you,” said Laurus. “I would be pleased if Jimmy were angry about the state of the world, instead of his many personal complaints.”

  “Wait until he’s draft age,” said Hannah. “I understand he’s in Denmark?”

  “Yes. Working on a pig farm.”

  Hannah smiled and drained her iced tea glass. “That’s rather inspired.”

  “Thank you,” said Laurus.

  “But it won’t last forever.”

  “No.”

  “Thank you for seeing me,” she said, rising. “Whatever happens next, I thought it would be wise if we’d met.”

  “I agree.”

  “If you’ll give me a paper and pencil, I’ll leave our telephone numbers here, and in Boston.” Laurus got a pad, and they exchanged numbers. “Frannie has one more year of boarding school.”

  “Which she likes, I understand.”

  “Yes, thank God she likes something. You notice there isn’t an inch of leather on my person …We continue to eat the dear lambies and moo cows, though. It makes mealtimes with her a treat.”

  “I wonder how she handles Jimmy’s cheeseburger habit.”

  “Is he going back to California?”

  “No, we’re keeping him at home. He’ll go to the public high school.”

  “And we shall see what we shall see.”

  When she had gone, Nina said, “Nice woman.”

  “Yes.”

  “What if they are soul mates, Jimmy and her daughter?”

  “Do you believe in soul mates?” Laurus asked.

  “I think I do,” said Nina. And suddenly there were two big questions yawning between them, that neither would ask and neither should answer.

  Nina stood and gathered the tea things. As she bent over the tray, Laurus noticed how thin she was. Suddenly he could see her as the children must, not a slightly faded version of the lovely girl she had been, but a bony older lady who always needed a sweater, even in August. He watched her open the door and slip into the dark house, and then sat by himself looking down the lawn to the bay. Sydney had run the Danish flag up the flagpole along with the Stars and Stripes, to honor the houseguests. They stood out smartly in the afternoon breeze. Very picturesque.

  In the winter of 1965, Eleanor was pregnant; she and Bobby spent Christmas with the Applegates. Supposedly to fill in the gap made by Eleanor’s absence, Nina Moss was invited to come for Christmas in Connecticut. Laurus was so pleased with this plan that Sydney had to pretend to rejoice (in spite of the fact that Nina stepped off the plane wearing the mink coat, and never once seemed to think that this was anything to do with Sydney).

  It wasn’t anything Nina did that you could object to. She was pleasant, she agreed to anything you planned for her, she brought thoughtful presents for everyone. It was just all so measured, so chilly, as if she expected any minute you would step in something smelly and walk around with it on your shoe. To everyone except Laurus it was as if she were behind an invisible shield, or under a bell jar. No matter what hubbub swirled around her, and with Jimmy and his new friends slamming in and out, playing pool downstairs, having constantly to be asked to turn the music down, there was plenty, Faster Nina sat quietly in the wing chair in the living room reading Camus, in French.

  “She teaches French, you see. In Copenhagen,” Sydney would say when explaining her to other guests at Christmas parties. Sydney could just picture her, with her pencil-slim skirt and her snobby posture and sleek little head and a little pince-nez on the end of her nose. (Not that Nina wore glasses.)

  The part of this visit Sydney remembered longest was the night they played a game called Careers that someone had gotten for Christmas. Jimmy was out “at a dance,” he had said (smoking pot in somebody’s p
oolhouse was more like it, Monica thought), but Monica was at home. In this game, each player had to decide in advance what proportion of Happiness, Fame, and Fortune she required for a successful life, then try to acquire it. Monica had played before and explained the rules. “Why do they say fortune, when they mean money?” Laurus asked. He and his sister glanced at each other at the same moment, wearing the same smile.

  “What’s the difference?” asked Sydney. It was always like this when Nina was around, there was a secret current running between brother and sister. Sydney felt left out, and it made her mad.

  “Why fame?” asked Nina. “Why fame instead of love?”

  “If you have fame, you can get all the other things,” said Monica, without irony. She was home for her first vacation from college.

  “I see,” said Nina, smiling.

  As they played, Sydney began to tell Nina what a lovely visit they’d had this summer with Per Bennike and his delightful wife and children, how she really ought to go see them when she was in New York. Nina sat quietly looking at the game board. Later Sydney couldn’t have told you when or how Laurus seized the wheel from her, but suddenly she found they were right out of the strait of Delightful Times the Family Had Shared with Scandinavians Not Including Nina, and into the wide and pacific bay of Emanuel Swedenborg.

  Monica was quite interested, as she’d had a formidable teacher at Miss Pratt’s who was Swedenborgian. They talked about heaven in the shape of the Grand Man, about how everyone’s masks and dodges would fall away and they would become their essential selves, entirely composed of what on earth had been their ruling loves. And there would be work in heaven, and sex. (Monica couldn’t wait to tell her friends about that.) There would be hell, too, but the people who were in it wouldn’t experience it as hell, they would experience it as what they had always thought was the truth about how the world worked.

  Laurus rolled and landed on “Climb Famous Peak” and earned six Happiness hearts.

  “Unfair!” said Monica. “Look how many hearts you already have!”

  “But that’s the way the world works,” said Nina. “Those with great happiness always get more. Oh, look, lucky me, I can start farming!” She paid $1,000 in scrip for the privilege. That was as close as Nina got to gaiety.

  “Do people from Swedenborg’s heaven get to visit hell?” Monica wanted to know.

  “Would you want to?” asked Laurus.

  “I would, very much,” said Nina.

  Scary, Sydney thought. She could picture Nina behind a one-way mirror in a heavenly viewing box over a pungent dark red sea of the damned, as in the hidden observation room in the children’s nursery school where teachers and parents could watch how the children behaved when they felt unobserved. Sydney had thought it rather mean and unfair, especially the time they made her spend the morning watching little Jimmy.

  “Does Swedenborg believe in reincarnation?” Monica asked.

  “I do,” said Sydney. “I’m sure I’ve lived before.” She rolled the dice.

  “You are?”

  Sydney counted out her steps to a square that said “Lunch with Royalty, Draw 2 Opportunity Cards.” “Absolutely. I have dreams where I know things I couldn’t have seen. Or I’ll come to a new place, and know I’ve been there before.”

  “Like when?” said Monica.

  Sydney appraised her Opportunity cards, and said, “The first time it happened I was your age. It was in Egypt. Think about it, why wouldn’t God want to give you more than one chance to get it right?”

  “You think God cares?” Nina asked.

  “Well, it would make all the difference, if the world isn’t really as unfair as it looks.”

  Nina thought about this gravely and then gave Sydney a sweet smile.

  Laurus said, “The thing that’s so hard about being human is the not knowing how to do right, not knowing what the grand scheme is. In Swedenborg’s heaven you know exactly where you fit in the Great Body. You know what your job is. It’s unknowing that makes you feel far from God.”

  Monica was looking skeptical. At nineteen, she felt far more certainty about many things than her father apparently did. “Does Faster Nina know about seeing your movie in heaven?”

  “No, I don’t,” Nina said. “Tell me.”

  “Daddy says, in heaven you get to see the movie of your life, with all the mysteries explained. You get to see all the scenes you missed and the parts you never understood.”

  “Like what?” Nina turned to Laurus.

  Because he didn’t want to say, he answered lightly. “Everything. Where you lost your favorite pen. Where all your missing socks went. Curiosity is the great underestimated passion.” He smiled, so Nina couldn’t tell if he was serious or not.

  “But Daddy, once you’ve seen your movie, then what?” Monica asked. “Do you get born again?”

  “Then you’re content. You can be done with life and go on.”

  “To what?”

  “To being part of God. Being filled with Knowing.”

  “But …what will happen?”

  He passed Monica the dice. “I guess that curiosity will be satisfied, too.” Monica looked as though being filled with Knowing didn’t sound like much of a payoff. She wanted to know if she could come back another time as Nefertiti, or a dolphin. And whether she got to choose.

  But after that Laurus talked more often, cheerfully, of how he was looking forward to Seeing His Movie. And Sydney, finally paying attention, wondered what it was he wanted to see. She knew it would be about her, and she was afraid she knew which scene.

  Most of the family’s milestones were to be seen in the Leeway Cottage Guest Book. Eleanor and Bobby brought Annabel Applegate, the first of the Mosses’ grandchildren, to Dundee in 1966. Monica’s wedding in 1971, which Sydney was allowed to design and manage from stem to stern, was recorded as the most perfect thing that ever happened, although a number of the key players had memories that substantially contradicted that report. Jimmy’s passage through the late sixties and early seventies, which included several colleges, a great many drugs, and mercifully only one motorcycle crash, was largely unremarked in the Guest Book, though it was writ large in the family annals elsewhere. Frannie Ober’s wedding was in the Guest Book; Jimmy, Laurus, and Sydney were all invited, and Laurus and Sydney went. By the time Jimmy sobered up, cut his hair, took a bath, and looked around wondering where ten years had gone, Frannie was serving her first term in Augusta as state congresswoman.

  Candace’s death was recorded in the Guest Book, in the sense that Bernard’s first (and last) summer alone at The Plywoods was remarked. Candace had bought burial plots for herself and Bernard in the New Cemetery at the head of the bay in Dundee, and there she was laid in the early spring of 1975. No one records that on that occasion Sydney threatened to have her father and Berthe Hanenberger dug up and moved there from Cleveland, where no one was left to care about them. She was persuaded not to, for reasons of seemliness and also by the fact that the New Cemetery, opened in 1848, was running out of plots. Also unmentioned was the fact that in Candace’s will the famous Annabelle pearls were left not to Sydney but to Eleanor, to hold for baby Annabel. Eleanor loved the pearls and wore them constantly until her Annie came of age, but never in her mother’s presence.

  There was note of Ditte Moss’s death, as the family had to pack up and fly to Copenhagen in the middle of an August, but not of Henrik’s, since he died in winter. Summer after summer had been filled with houseguests from Connecticut, and rotating visits from the grown children and growing grandchildren, and occasional appearances of Kirsten and Kaj, and Danish cousins, and infrequently and briefly goddam Nina. House and equipment repairs and replacements were noted, and in 1986, the centennial party was held for the house itself, as suggested by Neville Crane all those years ago.

  By 1986, it was possible to see what the end would be. Not how it would happen, or what it would mean, but what it would look like.

  June 30, 1986 (In Sydney’s
hand)

  Arrived last night. Few flowers in garden yet—a cold wet June. House looks very well, with reshingling finished and a new 52 gall. hot-water heater in the guest wing. Ellen Gott has retired, replaced by Shirley Eaton, and a college gal as 2d maid. Few flowers in garden yet.

  Laurus’s enduring pleasure those years were his Thursday-night poker games. They were no longer at the firehouse, where the active volunteers were now younger men, though Al Pease was still fire chief. They most often met at Mutt Dodge’s house; Sue Dodge liked to have them. They’d have been welcome at Hugh Chamblee’s as well, but gambling at the manse…well, there could have been talk.

  They were playing seven-card stud, deuces wild. As he dealt, Al said, “You get much of a turnout for Tommy Hobbes, Hugh?”

  “Quite a good house. The young were fond of him. They dedicated the academy yearbook to him last year, did you know that?”

  “Tommy Hobbes hung up his boots?” said Laurus, as he raised the ante. He’d been in Boston the past five days.

  “He did.”

  “When?”

  “Tuesday. Went to bed Monday night and woke up dead.”

  “Well, that’s the right way to go,” said Laurus.

  “In’ it. See and raise.” Tommy was a World War II vet who had come back from the war all right, but all wrong. He’d been an only child of an English couple who’d come to the village in service in one of the big cottages, and stayed. Both parents had been dead for years, and Tommy lived on in a ramshackle house in the woods, with a great many cats. He was always to be seen around the town at a loose end, happy to carry your groceries or help pull your car out of a snowbank. In summer he found work on the road crews, holding the sign that told cars when they must stop and wait, and when they might proceed. He always smiled his bug-eyed smile.