Leeway Cottage (30 page)

Per looked across the table at Laurus.

“There has to be an answer,” said Elise. “What is it about Denmark?”

“There
is
an answer,” Britt-Marie said, clearly implying that if the Danes were too modest to talk about it, a
Swede
wasn't.

“Denmark is a small country…” said Per, and was surprised when everyone laughed. One of Sydney's routines was that when you asked a Dane anything, he started by saying that Denmark is a small country.

“Well, it is,” Laurus put in. “It's small and there are national traits. Danes love peace. And they love comfort, and they'll sacrifice a lot for them. But they cannot enjoy peace and comfort while behaving badly. Also, they have great respect for each other. They trust each other to behave. So when they saw that they had to, they all acted the same way out of simple pride, and assumed their fellow Danes would do the same.”

“It was a matter of self-respect. Their sense of their own identity,” added Per I'm-No-Hero.

“If
that
isn't the most Danish thing you ever heard in your life…” said Sydney.

 

When Gladdy and Neville were brushing their teeth that night, she said, “Weren't you interested in what Laurus said tonight?” She was wearing an old pair of Neville's pajamas. The bathroom, wainscotted with layers of white paint chipping in places, showing the original ancient blue beneath, smelled of soap.

“I
was,”
said Neville. “What did you think?” She rinsed her mouth but did not move away from the basin.

“What I was thinking,” Gladdy said, “was that I finally understood that marriage.” Their eyes met in the mirror for a moment before she turned, touching him fondly on the butt, as he stepped to the sink and she left the room.

 

Laurus enjoyed the Bennikes' visit very much. On rainy days, he and Britt-Marie would go through the upstairs shelves and cabinets of Leeway looking for Swedish artifacts left by the Eggerses. They found many works of Emmanuel Swedenborg; someone in the family must have been a devotee. Britt-Marie's favorite uncle was Sweden-borgian. The more she talked about it, the more interested Laurus became, and the more (she claimed) the cigar-smoking phantom would leave olfactory signs of his presence, which, she added, was palpably benign. This disappointed young Jimmy of course, who would have preferred blood and guts and rattling chains in the spare rooms.

As a man's man, which Laurus truly was, he also relished having his countryman to talk to. One afternoon when Sydney and Britt-Marie were playing tennis, Per came out to join Laurus in the garage behind the house where he was wrestling with the outboard motor from his dinghy. It hadn't run right all summer, so he and Per had carried it up from the dock, and now Laurus had it clamped to a rain barrel with the screw in the water and the housing off. He was happily puttering.

“Goddag,” said Per, and Laurus answered him in Danish, hardly aware that he'd done it. They had taken care to speak English throughout the visit so that Sydney would not feel left out. Laurus gave a mighty pull at the engine's starter cord and it screamed to life, making a piercing racket and churning the barrel to a froth before it coughed and died.

“You cleaned the spark plug?” Per asked.

“Sure.”

They peered together into the Evinrude guts. “Must be the timing chain,” Laurus said.

“Yes,” said Per. And then, as Laurus set to work, Per settled down on a crate and said carefully, “Tell me—how is your sister?”

Laurus looked up at him. “You aren't in touch?”

“Not since we moved to New York.”

There was a pause. “Not much has changed. She's got her doctorate. She teaches French.”

“At university?”

“Gymnasium, like Papa. She likes the seventeen-, eighteen-yearolds.”

“Like herself, before she went away.”

“Yes. She goes to France every summer and comes home thinner than when she left. I keep hoping someone will reach her. That she'll meet a man.”

Per looked at his shoes. “Has she ever told you what happened to her?”

Laurus shook his head.

There was a pause. “And would it do us any good to know?”

Laurus was still for a moment. It felt different, to be talking of this in his own language, and to someone who (he was pretty sure) had loved Nina once. “I'll tell you what I think,” he said. “I think that if God
is
God, and He's also good, His ruling love is curiosity. It would explain so much evil. He
can't
interfere, He can only watch, and love, and wait to see how it comes out. So
He
knows what she saw, and to Him it means something we can't know about.”

“It's very hard, not knowing,” said Per. “Not being able to help.”

“Very.”

Per said, “When we go to God, if we do, do we find out finally all the things we didn't understand?”

Laurus said, “That's my theory exactly. Being with God will mean understanding all the things that were hidden.”

“Then heaven will be a sad place.”

“I don't think so. I think it will bring us peace. It will be like watching the movie of your life but all the stories will have endings.”

As Sydney's station wagon crunched into the driveway and parked under the huge oak, Laurus added, “If death didn't bring peace, there'd be a lot more upset ghosts around than your wife's cigar-smoker.”

As her door slammed, Sydney called, “Okay, we found you. We know you're in there talking about our bra sizes.”

“Actually,” said Laurus, “I was just explaining heaven to Per.”

“Per already knows about heaven,” said Britt-Marie. The two women glowed with recent exertion as they approached. “It's in the shape of the Grand Man.”

“No,” said Per, “it's in the shape of a movie theater. Laurus says we each get to see our own movie in heaven, and in it we'll see everything that was hidden before.”

“Good,” said Britt-Marie to Laurus, “then maybe I'll understand how your damn wife managed to beat me in straight sets.”

“That's your idea of heaven?” Sydney asked Laurus. “I can't even get you to go to the movies now.”

“Well, after the movie there will be dinner and dancing,” said Laurus.

“Listen,” said Per to Laurus. “If you get to see the movie before I do, will you find a way to let me know how it comes out?”

Sydney saw something pass between them she didn't understand.

“A heavenly postcard?” Laurus suggested.

“Guys, come on,” she said. “Let's go fall into a pitcher of gin and tonic.” The two women started for the house, and Sydney looked back to be sure the men were coming.

 

T
HE
L
EEWAY
C
OTTAGE
G
UEST
B
OOK

“Just adorable,” Sydney said, holding baby Inge and pushing her nose against the baby's nose, saying, “Gugugugugah! Are they family names? Hanne and Inge?”

Britt-Marie looked at Per, who answered, “They're named for some girls I met during the war.”

“Oh, that's lovely, you know our Monica is named for Monica Wichfield,” said Sydney. “AAAaghgugugugugug!” And she wiggled her face down into the baby's. “Are they identical?”

“No,” said Britt-Marie.

 

The Bennike family was in the upstairs guest room this year. This was so they could hear the babies from the dining or living room if they cried, which they could not have done if the babies were off in the guest wing. Also, because Eleanor was fifteen this year and she and her best friend, Janet, were spending their summer in Dundee getting their driver's licenses. Janet and Eleanor had a portable record player and a great many records the grown-ups did not care to hear over and over (“To KnoooowKnoooowKnooow him, is to Luuv-LuuvLuh-uve him…”) so the guest wing was a far better place for them than upstairs.

Eleanor and Janet were the envy of their friends at home. Maine allowed licenses very young, as many farm children needed to drive tractors and such, sometimes on public roads. The girls already had their learner's permits, and vied with each other to be allowed to drive Laurus or Sydney into town to Abbott's or the drugstore. The rest of the time they lay on the lawn or the beach, slathered in baby oil tinted with iodine, holding batwing reflectors under their chins to accelerate their tans. In the evenings, if they didn't have to babysit, they went with Eleanor's crowd of friends to moonlight picnics on Beal Island, or to the drive-in up in Trenton with the glamorous older crowd (usually with about eight of them in one car), or zipped back and forth across the bay in Eleanor's outboard, to friends' cottages to play poker or spin the bottle or to climb Butter Hill in the dark. On afternoons when there was nothing else to do, they would take the outboard and a stack of
True Romance
magazines out to the middle of the bay and drift around, smoking cigarettes and reading, and roasting marshmallows stuck on pencils over purloined kitchen matches. They came home in the evening burnt, sticky, and stinking of smoke; it was blissful.

They were the envy of Monica because they had freedom and breasts and were developing boyfriends. They were the envy of Jimmy because they had the outboard, and matches, and they didn't have to go to goddam camp all summer. Jimmy and Monica both did have to.

Which it turned out wasn't all bad, as they missed the brunt of the major Sydney firestorm of the summer. Eleanor caught most of it, but just to watch was something Janet never forgot, Sydney savaging Eleanor for something they had done together, as Janet sat on the other bed in their little room staring at her sneakers and listening to invective pelting on Eleanor's head and shoulders. When, late in the summer, some of the boys stole a sign from the French camp down the Neck, and Eleanor and Janet hid it for them under a bed and Sydney found it, she swelled up and raged so terribly that Janet was afraid she might actually beat them, which Eleanor said had been known to happen. But by the next day Sydney smiled and joked as if nothing had happened and she had no idea why they were cowering from her. And maybe she didn't.

The cause of Sydney's hair-trigger emotional state was this. (If you didn't count the fact that Eleanor and Janet had breasts and freedom and maybe boyfriends and Sydney had other things but, except for the breasts, not those, and she'd never had an easy time with people having things she didn't.) Bernard, whom Sydney had in a sarcastic way grown rather fond of, had had a mild stroke in the spring, and he was having trouble with stairs. They had installed a staircase lift in the house in Cleveland, and could easily do that here, too, but had not yet; instead, Bernard's bedroom had been moved downstairs for this summer. Sydney explained all this to the Bennikes as they drove over to pay their duty call at The Elms.

Bernard and Candace were out on the terrace overlooking the bay. They were playing hearts and drinking sun tea when Sydney led her guests in, hallooing.

“Hello, darling, how nice! Hel
lo,
Mr. Bennike, Mrs. Bennike, how nice to see you again!” Candace rose (stiffly) to welcome them.

“You'll forgive an old man for not getting up,” called Bernard from his chair. “I would, but I can't.” His speech slur was almost unnoticeable.

“Of course,” and “Of course not,” and “So nice to be here, how are you?” were lobbed back and forth for several minutes until all were settled and a bell was rung for more iced tea and a plate of cookies.

“Now, Mother, did you ever see cuter babies in your life?” Sydney was holding Hanne toward her as if she were a stuffed animal. Britt-Marie was right beside her with Inge. “They're twins.”

“Oh, aren't they precious? Look at the cunning little fingers! Are they twins?”

“Yes.”

“Are they identical?”

“They're identical, aren't they?” Sydney asked Britt-Marie.

“No.”

“But
so
much alike, aren't they too cute?”

Bernard was holding out his arms, his smile almost one of longing, and Britt-Marie handed her bundle to him. The baby settled into his arms and he began talking quiet nonsense to her while Sydney watched, pleased. Wasn't that just typical? It was Bernard, the fussy old bachelor, who truly loved babies, while showing one to her mother was like handing a kitten to someone who hates cats. Such a private pleasure.

They had a very nice visit, filled with an update of the Bennikes' situation, Per's new book, a bigger apartment (Well, I should hope
so!
With twins!). And Sydney had a lot to tell Candace and Bernard about the Cluett Cup dinner at the yacht club she was running, and about Mrs. Maitland getting cross with Homer Jellison that her dining room chairs had not been recaned in spite of a wait of three years. “Why, Mrs. Maitland, if I had known you were so drove up about them chairs…” he had said indignantly.

They took themselves off when Velma tottered in to indicate she was ready to serve Mr. and Mrs. Christie their lunch. They had a lovely sail that afternoon while Eleanor and Janet stayed with the napping babies. When they got home, without even being asked to do it, Eleanor and Janet went off on their bikes to have tea at The Elms. Sydney took deep breaths as if inhaling pleasure as she moved around the Leeway kitchen rattling the end of her cocktail in her glass, and heating the dinner Ellen had left ready.

So it was a thunderstroke when they were together around the dining room table, and Sydney called to Eleanor, “Did you girls have a good visit with Nana?,” Eleanor said, “Yes! But we're amazed, of course.”