Leeway Cottage

by Beth Gutcheon

  “I call,” said Laurus. The hands were laid down and Laurus took the pot. The deal passed to Hugh, who shuffled and said, “Five-card draw, nothing wild.”

  “So what’s Tommy going to want to know when he gets to heaven?”

  “Prob’ly why Cressida turned him down,” said Mutt. “Poor bugger never got over that.”

  “Poor bugger never got over the Battle of the Bulge,” said Laurus. “Of course, according to Swedenborg, he may not know he’s dead yet. He’s probably standing around with his parents and some angels trying to get the hang of that. Oh ho, what have we here?” he added, as he looked at the cards he’d drawn.

  There was a round of betting.

  “Are we talking about angels with wings?” asked Mutt.

  “I don’t think so. I don’t know where they get their clothes, but they’re thick around us, looking pretty human.”

  “I’m having trouble with the idea of Tommy Hobbes as an angel,” said Al. “To tell the truth, I was looking forward to not having to deal with Tommy Hobbes at all in my afterlife.”

  They all laughed.

  “But in heaven, you might like him. Just think, with all the mask and outer shell stripped away, and nothing left but the pure Tommy, you might be crazy about him.”

  “With all that stripped away, he’ll smell better.”

  “He won’t smell at all. Without bodies, we only have sight and hearing.”

  “I thought you told us there would be marriage and sex in heaven.”

  “Yes, there will be. It’ll be different, but it’ll be great.”

  “Cressida’s looking forward to that,” said Al Pease.

  The deal passed to Andy Coles, who called for a hand of Texas Hold’em.

  “How do you know all these peculiar games, Andy?” Mutt asked.

  “Misspent youth. Did you ante, Laurus?” The way they pronounced it, it sounded like Lars.

  “What? Sorry.” He pushed some chips into the center.

  “I wish more of my patients could go like Tommy,” said Andy. “I hate when they’re suffering, and it goes on and on. I had a patient this winter, eighty-eight, in a coma, no living will. I had to send him up to Bangor. They kept doing things to him, when the family was begging them not to. Finally took off one of his legs and by the time he died the bill was thick as the Boston phone book. None of it did a damn bit of good. And all the money he thought he’d put by for his grandkid’s college…gone.”

  They played out the hand.

  Al said, “I don’t know why everyone thinks this should be left to doctors. Any plumber worth his salt can arrange to have everyone in the house wake up dead.”

  “Is that what you all talk about when you go to the Plumber’s Ball?” crowed Mutt. Al and Cressida had once gotten all dolled up and gone down to Portland for a Plumber’s Ball, and no one in Dundee had ever let Al forget it.

  “Listen, Al,” said Laurus.

  “What are we playing?”

  “Blackjack. Al, I want you to promise that when my time comes, you keep Andy away from me. I’m looking forward to heaven and I’m announcing here and now I want you to take care of it.”

  “I’ll be happy to. What’s a friend for?”

  “All right, you’re all my witnesses. Mutt?”

  “Hit me.”

  Laurus dealt around the table.

  Faster Nina died in the winter of 1992. Laurus and Monica went over to Copenhagen for the funeral. It was small and quiet. Everyone agreed there was no point asking Sydney to go; she was increasingly made anxious by unfamiliar surroundings and she wouldn’t understand the Danish service anyway. Nina had left careful instructions for her final arrangements: what hymns she wanted, a request for cremation, what clothes she wanted to wear, even a little doll she wanted to take with her. Her careful planning was just what one would have expected. But everyone was surprised by two things in Nina’s will: one request for each brother. Nina had left a small bequest to someone they’d never heard of named Hans Katz, about whom she said only that he was born in Jutland in about March of 1943 and had emigrated to Israel with his family in 1958. She asked Kaj to find him and send him a sum of money and her blessing. The other was that Laurus scatter her ashes on the bay at Dundee.

  “Why, I wonder?” Kaj and Kirsten had supposed she would go into the churchyard with Papa and Mama.

  “She always said she was so at peace out on the water there,” Laurus said, but he was as surprised as they were.

  Laurus knew, too, that the request was a measure of how close Nina felt to him, and was both glad for her forgiving love and bitterly sad that he hadn’t seen more of her over the years, had her to stay longer, and more often. But. Well.

  He and Monica flew home with Faster Nina’s ashes in an urn wrapped in brown paper. Kaj’s wife and daughters had taken care of finding the doll she had mentioned, and the final costume, all thoughtfully collected in a corner of the closet. That part was over by the time Laurus and Monica got there.

  “What was the doll like?” Monica asked her cousin. She pictured a beloved memento from Nina’s childhood, or maybe something she had hoped one day to give to a daughter of her own. Wouldn’t that be sad.

  “It was a scary little thing. More like a fetish than a doll. It had little stick limbs, with clogs and a babushka.”

  Monica kept her godmother’s ashes for the rest of the winter and brought them up to Dundee at the end of July.

  In those days, Eleanor and Bobby rented a house down on the Salt Pond in Dundee and were there for most of the summer. The whole Applegate family came each week to Sunday supper at Leeway as once Leeway had gone to The Elms, and later to The Plywoods. Jimmy and his wife and children spent several weeks in July at Leeway and overlapped for a necessarily brief time when Monica and her children came for August. The Guest Book was kept in Laurus’s hand or Monica’s in these years.

  August 2, 1992

  On this beautiful summer day, we took Faster Nina to the middle of Great Spruce Bay and said goodbye to her. Jimmy, all the Applegates, Mother and Dad and I, and Mr. Chamblee went with her. Mr. Chamblee read the 121st Psalm, and Dad read a poem by Robert Frost: “Nothing Gold Can Stay.” The Lord shall preserve thy going out, Nina, and thy coming in, from this time forth, for evermore. (Monica)

  That night they had family dinner at Eleanor’s, and told stories about Nina, trying to fix her in their children’s minds. How she shopped so carefully for each child’s Christmas present. How she always had a book in French somewhere about her. How she loved Paris and was so grieved when the Jeu de Paume, her favorite museum, was closed. How she would sit on the porch at Leeway and look out over the gardens and the bay. How modest she was; how they never would have known about the brave things she did in the war if Per Bennike hadn’t told them. It didn’t feel as if she had left much behind, for a life of seventy years. The young blamed her smoking for a death that came too early. Laurus felt, but did not express, a very different sense of his sister’s loss; that sometime during the war her essential self had been murdered, and she’d had to struggle on from there as a husk, without dreams or hope. Seventy years of that seemed to him quite long enough.

  “Monica,” said Eleanor that summer, “do you think Syd Vicious should be driving?”

  The sisters were playing golf together, content in the late-summer sunshine to see so many people around them on the tees and greens whom they knew and in many cases loved.

  “Why, just because she keeps turning on the windshield wipers instead of her turn signal?”

  “One of these days she’s going to step on the gas when she meant the brake. We’ll be lucky if all she does is kill herself.”

  “Have you talked to Dad about it?”

  “I brought it up.”

  “What’d he say?”

  “He said she doesn’t drive very fast.”

  They both laughed, and paused while Eleanor located her ball in the blueberry scrub.

  When they were on the tee of the four
th hole, their friend Amelia came bowling up the Point Road in her little death trap, a restored Corvair convertible from her teenage years, kept on the road by ingenious substitutions of body parts her husband scavenged from an auto graveyard north of Bangor. The car lived in a decaying barn in the winter and was only driven on sunny summer days, as the top had long since disintegrated.

  They waved and Amelia pulled off the road and left her car tucked in among some pines. She joined them on the tee.

  “Who’s winning?” she asked.

  “We have no idea. Here, you’re up.” Eleanor handed her a driver and Monica gave her some tees and a ball. When they were all safely over the road and wandering down the fairway, Eleanor said, “We’re trying to figure out how to stop Big Syd from driving. I’m afraid she’ll run over one of the children.”

  “Uncle Laurus can’t stop her?”

  “Can’t or won’t. You know how they are. If you don’t talk about it, it isn’t happening.”

  “They’re very sweet together,” said Amelia. “I saw them having lunch here yesterday, talking about what it is they like to eat. Your mother couldn’t remember the word for salmon.”

  “Usually they just look up trustingly at the waitress and say, ‘that fish that we like, that’s pink.’”

  “Your father’s got most of his marbles, though.”

  “Thank heaven.”

  “Syd Vicious can’t remember the names of her grandchildren but she can sure hit a golf ball,” said Eleanor.

  “Yes, but then she hates her grandchildren. She likes golf.”

  “She couldn’t hate her grandchildren,” said Amelia.

  Eleanor and Monica looked at each other.

  “Amelia—you’ve led a sheltered life.”

  “She hates them. They interfere with her children paying their undivided attention to her.”

  “Come on, you beastly ball, go in go in go in. Oh! Rats.”

  “The Gantrys have stopped driving,” Amelia said.

  “Really! How did Georgie manage that?”

  “Well, of course her mother’s blind, but it was the three-martini lunches that really worried her. She and the boys discussed an intervention. But the more they talked about it, the more they said, ‘You know what? They’re in their eighties, they’ve been drinking like this all their lives, if you took it away from them, what would they do with themselves? Take up brain surgery? Join the Peace Corps?’ So they took away their licenses, and hired a driver.”

  Amelia played one more hole with them, then ran back to her car and went on to wherever she had been going.

  “Do you think Dr. Coles could help us?” Eleanor asked Monica.

  “Yes, maybe.”

  “Loser of this hole has to call him.”

  On the eighth hole, Eleanor suddenly asked, for reasons of her own that Monica would understand only later, “Do you think Dad was always faithful to Big Syd?”

  “Why? Don’t you?”

  “I don’t know. He traveled so much. He must have been tempted.”

  They both thought about how different their father seemed from men their own age. So formal. So courtly. So unbuffeted by emotion. Could that have been true, or was it just his manner? His manners?

  “You know,” said Monica. “Once when we were sailing, just the two of us, he talked about a girl he knew in London during the war. A nurse from Oklahoma. She sang ‘White Christmas’ in April, because someone asked her to. He thought that was priceless.”

  “Really,” said Eleanor. “And why did that come up all of a sudden?”

  “That’s what I couldn’t figure out. It just seemed to please him to talk about her.”

  “Did he ever see her again?”

  “Yes, he did. Maybe that’s what brought it up…no, that can’t be it, it must have been way earlier, because it was the summer he got the—”

  “Monica!”

  “Sorry. What he said was, he was in Chicago, decades later, with the Chicago symphony. Some big donors were giving a party for him, the way they do, and he walked into the house and there she was. She was the hostess. She was married and had about five children.”

  “Yes? And?”

  “And I don’t know. How could I ask?”

  “Did she know he was…you know, the person she knew in London?”

  “Oh, yes. She’d been waiting for him. She was waiting for him to recognize her.”

  “And he did right away?”

  “Apparently. He said she looked just the same. He said, ‘It’s you!’ and asked her if she still sang ‘White Christmas,’ and she said no, but she was still a hell of a dancer.”

  Monica’s ball had gotten in under the cedar trees, with no room for a backswing.

  “You can drop out,” Eleanor said.

  “No, I’ll drive out with my putter.” She did so.

  As they walked toward the green, Eleanor said, “Would we like it if we thought he…if they …?”

  “I don’t know. I think we really would, don’t you?”

  There was another car incident late in the summer, when Sydney went to call on Gladdy. Amelia’s daughter Barbara was staying with her grandparents, as the little cottage her parents rented was full. She heard a car honking at the back door, then Grandma Gladdy calling from the back porch, “Sydney? Is that you in there?”

  “Yes, I’m—”

  Silence.

  “I didn’t recognize the car,” Gladdy called.

  “No. It’s rented,” Barbara heard Mrs. Moss yell from inside the car. “I got a bung in mine and it went to the shop. This is rented.”

  “Well, come on in, I’m making iced tea.”

  “I will but I …I can’t figure out how the door unlocks.”

  “Wait till I get my shoes on, I’ll come help.”

  “No, never mind. I’ve got the window down, I’ll just climb out.”

  At this point, young Barbara cried from the upstairs window, “Mrs. Moss! It’s Barbara, just wait one second, I’m coming down,” and Sydney subsided and waited.

  “I don’t wonder you were troubled, Mrs. Moss,” Barbara said kindly as she opened the door for Sydney. Her feet were bare and her hair was wet from the shower.

  “I kept pushing the—”

  “Oh, I know. These Japanese ones are so different.”

  “Well, thank you…dear.”

  “Barbara. Amelia’s daughter.”

  “Yes, of course you are,” said Sydney. Barbara was perfectly sure she didn’t know who she or Amelia was. As Sydney climbed to the kitchen, Barbara tried to keep from laughing out loud at her mental picture of Mrs. Moss getting halfway out the window in her big Bermuda shorts and then plunging headfirst onto the driveway. Which would probably break her neck and not be at all funny, but still…

  In the early summer of 1993, Sydney was notified by the DMV that she would have to come in to Union to requalify for her license. Laurus drove her over and sat with his straw hat on his knees while she went out in the Oldsmobile with the young man in brown, to demonstrate her ability to weave between orange cones, properly observe lights and street signs, and parallel park. This last had terrified her, because the arthritis in her neck made it hard for her to turn her head enough. Laurus had gone into town in the evening with her and coached her while she practiced and practiced in the empty parking lot of the Consolidated School.

  She was beaming when she came in from her road test. Laurus raised both fists and shook them, a gesture of triumph. Submissively Sydney was then led into the back of the building to take her written test and have her eyes examined. When she came out, her license to drive had been canceled.

  “I’m sorry,” said the nice young man in brown. Sydney was so mortified and angry she wouldn’t look at anybody. Laurus put his straw hat on his head and his hand under Sydney’s elbow, which she shook off. The young man in brown watched from the steps of the building as they drove off, just to be sure it was Laurus at the wheel.

  Jimmy arranged for Tom Crocker’s gr
andson Marlon York to come to work at Leeway Cottage, in theory as yardman, but in fact to drive Sydney wherever she wanted to go. Marlon drove slowly, which was fine with everybody. Also he didn’t drink, having had a violent case of hepatitis when a boy, so he could drive in the evenings as well. The first summer Sydney submitted to this regime with bad grace, but by the following year, she had forgotten whatever point of pride the arrangement had wounded. She was glad, if mildly surprised, to see Marlon every morning, and came to enjoy going into the garden with him and teaching him things. Marlon was hopeless with the flowers and never learned, but as Sydney did not remember having already taught him what to do about rose hips, or staking the dahlias, she didn’t realize she was explaining for the fifth or ninth time. She got respectful attention, and he got a patient teacher.

  Laurus had turned eighty that year, and had some angina. The children began to worry about him sailing The Rolling Stone with only Sydney for company. The Rolling Stone was a graceful little sloop, with a comfortable head and four berths below and a dinghy called No Moss. (Sydney’s sense of humor.) He had hoped Sydney would learn to like cruising, as nothing made him happier than to be anchored for the night in some wild harbor with only the sky and the gulls for company. She had tried, too, but she had never overcome her conviction that fascinating things were happening at home and she was missing them. He gave up, and enjoyed himself taking his grandchildren out exploring Frenchman’s Bay and beyond, until they in turn grew too sophisticated to be missing the action onshore. Nowadays, he loved to go out on picnics, and to watch the August racing. He and Sydney had bought a new fiberglass International for the grandchildren, and rain or shine, Sydney was out there on deck with her binoculars trained on the racers, muttering “get it up get it up, get your damn spinnaker pulling…” and so forth, as if she were manning every position herself. Laurus ignored the fact that she was often watching the wrong boat.