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Authors: Beth Gutcheon

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A week later, Nina is standing with a group from the factory waiting to be taken back to their barracks when a shoving match breaks out among two prisoners from Yugoslavia. She doesn't understand what they yell, or what it's about. Two SS men arrive quickly and quell the disturbance by knocking one of the girls on the head. Then as she lies on the ground, with her eyes rolled back and her mouth open, he seems to realize that now someone is going to have to either carry her to the infirmary or wait with her until she regains consciousness. They decide they don't care to do either, so the second guard shoots her. Now they can leave her there and send someone with a cart from the crematorium.

Then, almost as an afterthought,he orders the rest of them marched not back to their barracks,but forward toward the front gate, to the building with the fence around it. This is done.

When they get there, there is a wait until someone can come unlock the gate. There are always waits. Nina has a packet of Danish tobacco in her pocket. She catches the guard's eye, and tells her this. The guard makes a face and walks away. But as the wait lengthens,she thinks better of it. She comes back and holds out her hand for it. Then she says in German, “Go.” Nina walks off quickly toward her barracks. Behind her she can hear the guard respond to a question.“A mistake,” she hears her say.

Nina is now out of everything from her Red Cross package except a tiny piece of chocolate. She knows that if she has nothing left to trade, her life is over. But one afternoon, unable to sleep, as she lies in the bunk holding Zsuzsa's doll, there is a surprising shock of flavor on her tongue, and she realizes she has unwrapped the last piece of chocolate and eaten it. It is the thirty-first of March.

Five nights later, she is once again just inside the walls, waiting for the front gate to be opened. She is standing in a line.

A
l Pease got to Leeway first, followed by Dr.
Coles. After looking things over, they sat in the kitchen with Shirley, drinking the Mosses' breakfast coffee, and waited for someone to come from the sheriff 's office in Union.

“You shouldn't really have touched anything,” said the officer when he finally drove in. He was new to the area. He looked as if he weren't used to shaving yet, or else needed a sharper blade. He was big and young. He had his revolver in his holster and the handcuffs on his belt, and he clanked when he walked up the stairs.

“Well, the house was full of gas,” said Al. “She didn't have much choice if she didn't want to be blown up.”

The officer conceded this. He stood at the bathroom door and looked at the bodies. Then he wandered around the bedroom and spent a minute or so staring at the heater.

“Nothing wrong with it,” said Al. “It's just old. They knew never to turn it on without calling me to put it in order.”

“Sydney wouldn't have remembered that,” said Dr. Coles.

“He must have fallen,” said Al.

“Looks like she was trying to keep him warm.” Neither of them wants to look into the bathroom again.

“I'm surprised she remembered there
was
a heater,” said Andy.

“It's a real sorry way to go,” said the officer, wondering why nobody had been taking care of these sweet old people, if everyone knew they were so dotty.

“Oh, I don't know about that,” said Al.

The officer looked at him. He looked at the heater. He said, “Why wouldn't they put in a furnace, if they were going to stay here in the cold.”

“The house is on ledge. You couldn't use it far into the fall; the pipes would freeze.”

“They liked things the way they were.”

“What do we do now?” Shirley asked.

“Start calling the children, I guess.”

Shirley went into the study where Mrs. Moss kept the family telephone numbers written, in very big numbers, on a piece of paper attached to the blotter with yellowing Scotch tape. She began to dial.

E
leanor, Jimmy, and Monica are sitting in the dining
room with the photograph albums and scrapbooks, stacks of clippings, letters, snapshots, and grocery lists that have emerged from drawers, bookcases, and the cupboard behind the chimney. It's time to lock up the house and go, but none of them is ready to leave it. Eleanor picks up an old address book. It is bound in fabric with appliquéd felt golf balls and tees, and so stuffed with extraneous papers that a rubber band holds it closed. Eleanor found it back in the drawer of Sydney's bedside table. At one touch, the brittle rubber snaps. She starts turning the pages.

Monica looks up when she hears her sister say, “Oh, my God.”

Lying before her on the table are a blue envelope and a matching sheet of letter paper.

“What is it?”

On the back of the envelope, in pencil, their mother had written “7/19/63.” Eleanor hands the paper across the table to Monica. It reads:

I loved you, even now I may confess,

Some embers of my love their fire retain;

But do not let it cause you more distress,

I do not want to sadden you again.

Hopelessly and tongue-tied, yet I loved you dearly

With pangs the jealous and the timid know;

So tenderly I love you, so sincerely,

I pray God grant another love you so.

N.

 

Jimmy takes it and reads it quietly as Monica says to Eleanor, “It's Uncle Neville's writing.” Which they all recognize. That architects' printing.

After a pause, Jimmy says, “You didn't know?”

His sisters turn together to him. “You
did
?”

“It went on for years,” Jimmy says, with no pleasure. He is thinking of the year he was kicked out of Country Day. The long phone calls behind closed doors. Their mother's volatile moods that year, to which he was so attuned. The summer only he was at Leeway with Sydney, and she sang and laughed all the time. And the next summer, when she had herself taken away.

“Uncle Neville.” Eleanor and Monica were looking at each other. “And they had to go on seeing each other every day all summer, year after year…”

“How could she do that to Gladdy?” asks Monica.

“Did Dad know?” Eleanor asks.

“I couldn't tell,” says Jimmy. “Gladdy did.”

“How do you know
that
?”

“She caught me watching Mom and Uncle Neville at a yacht club party. I was fourteen. They were dancing together, and suddenly while I was watching
them,
I saw Aunt Gladdy was watching
me.
She gave me this very steady look, and then she turned away from the dancers and began talking to somebody. So I did, too.”

“She
adores
Uncle Neville,” says Monica, trying to take it in.

“And she forgave them,” says Eleanor, puzzled. “She forgave them both. I wonder how.”

 

After a long silence, Monica says, “Come on, orphans. We're going to freeze in here. Let's lock it up and go get dinner.”

A
CKNOWLEDGMENTS

Sanna Borge Feirstein has given me priceless support throughout the research and writing of this book, sharing impossible-to-find books from her family's library, and introducing me to the people and resources of the Scandinavia House in New York, where lectures and the library also proved invaluable. Sanna introduced me to Stig Høst, whose memories, writings, and advice were riches in themselves, as well as keys unlocking further doors. In Copenhagen, Henrik Glahns and Inge Bonnerup and Lars and Charlotte Lindeberg were extraordinarily generous, sharing memories, answering questions, lending an armload of books unavailable in English, not to mention supplying coffee and wienerbrød so delicious that we're still wistful about them. Jim Colias has been unfailingly generous, not to mention charming, with his knowledge and contacts. Aase Van Dyke spent hours with me translating, answering questions, and illuminating cross-cultural mysteries, and has continued to be so helpful with books, information, and resources that I'll never be able to thank her properly. Vebe Borge, pursuing a parallel project of his own, seemed sent from heaven as I was discovering exactly how hard it was going to be to get an accurate picture of life at Ravensbrück. John Hargraves introduced me to the Danish-American film- maker Alexandra Moltke Isles, whose documentary
The Power of Conscience: The Danish Resistance and the Rescue of the Jews
is a marvel of concision and who graciously shared resources and family stories that helped immensely. Jerri Witt was my rod and my staff when it came to Laurus's professional life and repertoire. Christina McHenry, Elvira Bass, Tom Richardson, Anne Johnson, and Bobby Patri all lent or pointed me to books I would otherwise have missed that contributed to my understanding of some aspect of my characters' lives. Neal Johnston shared his vast knowledge of things musical, and even came up with an incredible rarity, a book in English on how Bulgaria saved
her
Jews, which had nothing directly to do with my subject but satisfied a by then rampaging curiosity. Lars Lindeberg, China Neury, and Philip Armour IV gave generous help on Swedish matters. Lucie Semler, Robin Clements, Sanna Feirstein, Jerri Witt, Joy Richardson, Shery and Breene Kerr, Susan Richardson, David Gutcheon, Alison Rogers, Angelica Baird, and Lars Lindeberg each read the manuscript in various stages of its evolution and provided notes and comments for which I am forever grateful. And, as always, I am grateful to my agent, Wendy Weil, for her support, her judgment, her humor, and her lifelong friendship, and to Meaghan Dowling, my wonderful editor, for much the same.

For those wishing to know more about the historical underpinnings of this novel, a selected bibliography is available at
www.beth gutcheon.com.

B
ETH
G
UTCHEON
is the critically acclaimed author of
More Than You Know, Five Fortunes, Saying Grace, Domestic Pleasures, Still Missing,
and
The New Girls,
as well as several film scripts, including the Academy Award nominee
The Children of Theatre Street.
She lives in New York City.

To receive notice of author events and new books by Beth Gutcheon, sign up at www.authortracker.com.

Also available from HarperAudio

Also by Beth Gutcheon

More Than You Know

Five Fortunes

Saying Grace

Domestic Pleasures

Still Missing

The New Girls

Jacket design by Bradford Foltz

Jacket photograph by Lisa Tyson Ennis

This novel is a work of fiction. References to real people, events, establishments, organizations, and locales are intended only to convey a picture of the real world in which the fictional story takes place. All other names, characters, and places, and all dialogue and incidents portrayed in this book, are the products of the author's imagination.

LEEWAY
COTTAGE
. Copyright © 2005 by Beth Gutcheon. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

EPub Edition © APRIL 2005 ISBN: 9780061850301

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Gutcheon, Beth Richardson.

Leeway cottage : a novel / Beth Gutcheon.—1st ed.

    p. cm.

ISBN 0-06-053905-4

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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BOOK: Leeway Cottage
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