Leeway Cottage (3 page)

Candace looked at her daughter and Annabee looked back. Actually, Candace did not see a child before her. She saw a humanoid being made of an uncontrolled and uncontrollable substance, the only thing in her life, now that her mother-in-law was dead, that couldn't be compelled to behave in the way she required. You could give it orders, but it still shouted when it should speak normally, upchucked, ran fevers, ran when it should walk, broke things, sat with its knees splayed like a boy, soiled its underpants, lost its new shoes, and wet the bed.

Candace stared down. Annabee met her eyes as much as she could, trying to guess if defiance or apology would help, and if not, would anything?

Candace hurtled off into the bathroom and returned with the laundry hamper. She pulled out a wet sheet and stood holding it, looking down. To Annabee she looked nine feet tall. Without a word, but with a gesture of distaste, Candace let the sheet drop back into the hamper. She strode to Annabee's dressing table for the broad-backed hairbrush. She strode back to the bed and jerked the clean covers off Annabee; taking her arm, she flipped her over onto her stomach. She pulled up the cotton-knit nightgown with pink satin bows threaded into the hem. She pulled down the little cotton underpants, not so easy to do, since Annabee now had her legs rigid and clamped together, all her muscles tensed tight against what was coming. Candace spanked her as hard as she could, blow after blow with the back of the hairbrush. Miss Somerville counted the slapping sounds from out in the hall.

And events proved that Candace had done quite right that evening, as Annabee never wet her bed again, for as long as she had the use of her wits. (When she lost these, she became suddenly and spectacularly incontinent, but that was many years in the future, when everyone who might have made some sense out of the way her life began and the way it finished was long since unable to testify on the subject, including herself.)

F
or Christmas in 1926 James gave Annabee her own
Brutal Beast, painted yellow and named
Honeybee.
It was bobbing on its mooring when she arrived at The Elms the summer of 1927. Tom and Gladdy McClintock appeared within minutes to crow over her return and the new boat. They were off in it at once to sail to town for ice-cream cones and after that were out on the water almost every fine day. They sailed to the yacht club, around to the east side of the bay to visit the Maitlands, even out to Beal Island to poke around the abandoned houses. Business was booming and times were good; James also bought himself a sloop called
Toccata,
but the first time he took Candace out sailing, the wind came up, the boat tipped, she was splashed, and her hat blew off. She was filled with satirical remarks the rest of the summer about Some People's ideas of pleasure. Then the children began winning sailing races. Candace, who liked winners, became sorry she couldn't go out to watch. She demanded that James commission a motor launch for her, like the mahogany lake boats she had envied in her childhood. James ignored the fact that the boat she wanted was utterly inappropriate for tidal waters. He wrote to John Alden in Boston and commissioned one. When it arrived the next summer, the boat was noisy, very wet in any kind of chop, and wildly difficult for the boatman to get into and out of when the boat was on the mooring, but no one said a word to Candace about that, for fear she would start complaining about the tides, which no amount of money could correct.

James hired young Harry Allen as boatman for the launch and provided him with a dashing uniform. This was necessary, since the Maitlands had in the bay a hundred-foot yacht with several dozen in crew who lived aboard and never were seen out of their crisp blue jerseys and spotless white trousers, with the yacht's name embroidered on every garment. Bess Maitland reported that the laundry for the crew alone was simply staggering, and claimed she wished her husband would buy a sweet little boat like
Toccata
that they could sail by themselves, but of course her husband didn't do anything of the kind, and a standard had been set.

Annabee was skippering
Honeybee
this year, with Gladdy as crew. In July little Elise Maitland had won almost every race, but by August Annabee started to beat her, and once that happened, Candace was out every race day, sitting grandly in the forward compartment of her launch wearing a linen duster and carrying a parasol, being driven from mark to mark as if in a limousine. When Annabee won, her mother came to the tea at the yacht club following the race. When she lost, Candace went straight home.

There was a wide group of children who sailed together, raced against each other, holed up at Leeway on rainy days, playing charades, or mah-jongg, or invading the kitchen to make fudge. Gladdy McClintock's birthday became a favorite summer holiday. One year, Professor McClintock turned their whole living room into a spiderweb, and twenty children shrieked and laughed, tumbling over each other, trying to untangle it, each following her own string to a prize hidden behind books or under the window-seat cushions. Another year, there was a treasure hunt that took bands of children all over the Point deciphering clues, and yet another year, a scavenger hunt, during which they could walk, sail, paddle, or row but were not allowed to ride in anything with a motor. Even so, one team (Elise Maitland's) succeeded in bringing in every item on the list, including a live goat.

There was a maiden lady from Bryn Mawr named Violet Holmes on the Point who was raising her three orphaned nieces, Andie, Betty, and Lucie Cochran. Her cottage, Sherlock Holmes, was built right on the ledge overhanging the harbor, with porches wrapping around three sides, and heart-stopping views of the sunset. All the children on the Point called her “Aunt Violet,” and loved her. Every August, Aunt Violet had a “measuring party.” Each child stood against the porch wall to have her height marked on the shingles with her name and the date. The child who had grown the most since the year before won a prize. Once it was Annabee; often it was Lucie Cochran or willowy Elise Maitland and once it was Tom McClintock. It was never Gladdy. Gladdy was built like a fireplug. She had a quiet but bubbling sense of humor, and a gentleness that was universally felt and loved; physical beauty would never be among her personal glories, but no one ever born noticed that less than Gladdy. Of all Annabee's friends, in Cleveland and Dundee, Gladdy was the one who made her feel completely loved for herself, not her boat or the size of her house or her father's money. Most of all it was Gladdy who provided a counterbalance against the bewildering fact that Annabee's mother so patently disliked her.

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.