Leeway Cottage

  The role she had chosen for herself was a mixture of Lady Bountiful and the Queen of Sheba, occasionally (and sometimes jarringly) interrupted by portrayals of the Blessed Virgin in devotions to her sacred child. Although it was her son, James, whom she loved with a passion that was slightly unhinged, these maternal displays usually involved Louisa in the supporting role, a part gentle, stunted Louisa played nearly perfectly. There are worse things that can happen to some mothers than to have a child trapped in childhood, as long as the trap is sprung after continence has been achieved and before the onset of adolescent rebellion, and in Louisa’s case it had been. Miss Burns kept Louisa clean and groomed and prevented her doing anything unseemly in public, and Louisa’s own gentleness kept the illusion attractive.

  While Louisa played the changeless tot, her brother, James, was cast as the love interest in the family drama. The Victorian Age was one that so romanticized the bond between mother and children that this did not appear as grotesque as it might have to another era. Annabelle didn’t like a lot of surprises. It seemed natural for her to have all the important roles played by people who were dependent on her, financially or otherwise, and she was a woman of appetites, fun-loving and not yet old. James was a delightful young man, and he was hers; why wouldn’t she dote on him? For one thing, James took after her late husband. He was almost handsome, with a square-jawed open face, sleek dark hair, and a ready smile. He was gregarious and full of goodwill; he expected to be loved and approved of and he pretty universally had been. James had a dim understanding that his mother packed some big guns, with which she occasionally mowed down menials who displeased her, but as she had never turned her firepower on him, he didn’t concern himself. Instead he thought of her as a delightful eccentric, an attitude that charmed her, as most of his attitudes did. She enjoyed the tacit assumption that he was the love of her life and she was his, for twenty-eight years, right up to the moment he announced he had fallen in love with Berthe Hanenberger.

  It was a shock to both their systems. James was a rising young man of business in Cleveland by that time. He’d been a favorite beau to the city’s debutantes for a decade, as well as an invaluable escort and bridge-whist partner to his mother. Though he had his own social life, James took dinner with Annabelle several nights a week and every Sunday noon after church. He was available to take his sister for drives out to the Shaker Lakes, and to go to the theater. He joined Annabelle at The Elms for several weeks every summer and filled the house with friends and amusements. Annabelle expected he would marry someday, and she sometimes pictured planning a wedding with the grateful parents of some charming and biddable Cleveland bride. It would be another delightful entertainment, starring herself and her James. There was no room in this scenario for his loving the likes of Berthe Hanenberger.

  The entry in the Leeway Cottage Guest Book for the Sunday it started was in Ingvar’s handwriting.

  Very hot—most of the audience sat on the porch and listened at the windows. Two of Herman’s students played the new “Dolly Suite” of Gabriel Fauré, for piano à quatre mains. Extremely charming. Berthe Hanenberger is home from Germany and gave us some Brahms lieder. Mother served more than two gallons of lemonade and we ran out of ice. Thunderstorm after supper.

  A house’s guest book is a public document, while falling in love, though it often happens in public, is a private cataclysm. It happened to James when young Berthe happened to catch his eyes with hers and hold them a moment as she sang. He was one of the few sitting inside, steaming in white linen trousers and shirtsleeves. He hadn’t seen Berthe in years. He remembered her fondly, the shy girl with the charming giggle who’d just put up her hair and gone into long skirts when they first came to the Point, and Bud Harbison made such a play for her. She’d been game and sweet and a great addition to their bunch that year. But now here she was all grown-up and apparently effortlessly making this astonishing sound. This young woman was alive, she had a whole vibrant universe inside her, and suddenly he saw his true home. He had been born to share that universe with her, to nurture and protect it, and to know that when she sang, no matter how many people heard her, he was her true audience.

  It took him the rest of the summer to make her see what had to happen next. She returned his feelings fast enough, once she realized how serious he was. Who wouldn’t? He was a sweet and lucky and happy man. They spent every minute together that they could. They took her younger brothers and sisters, along with several of the Leeway children, on picnics to the top of Butter Hill. She came to The Elms to sing for Louisa and Miss Burns; he borrowed the carriage from Osgood and drove her, with her parents, to Schoodic Point, which the Hanenbergers had always wanted to visit, and then to a tearoom where they had popovers and homemade jam. They gathered blueberries and played golf in full view of Annabelle and her set, maintaining cheerful decorum for all to see, while aching for each other. Once they dared to go out for a moonlight sail, just the two of them. The water was like melted silver and the stars seemed closer to earth than they had ever been. James asked Berthe to sing for him, and she did, her voice pure and gleaming; he felt it darting into the night sky as if it could sew the stars together, making a net that would suspend them together forever. After that, the thought of parting was unbearable. James proposed marriage. Berthe’s soft brown eyes filled with tantalized hope, while her mouth said, But, but, but…Her father’s plans for her. What she owed him. James said, “You are my life.” She said miserably, “I love you. But there are other people in the world…”She meant in her world. People she also loved, to whom she had obligations. He, elated, said, “But you love me.”

  James went home and told his mother he was going to marry Berthe Hanenberger, half expecting congratulations. Annabelle said terrible and unjust things about foreigners in general and the Hanenbergers in particular. (One might know them socially, these were modern times, but to marry out of one’s class and culture…James managed not to point out that his father had done just that when he married her, but holding his tongue made him nearly as miserable as speaking out would have.)

  Berthe told her mother that they were terribly in love, hoping for an ally, but found none. Her parents wanted her to marry someone worldly, mature, highly cultured—these Brants, they were from Ohio, they hadn’t traveled, they spoke no languages, they were grocers or something, weren’t they?…The Hanenbergers belonged to an aristocracy of talent and accomplishment recognized the world over, while Annabelle Brant with her purchased grandeur was a comic figure. “You have a gift from God,” her father announced. “You can’t build a career amid burghers in Cleveland…”

  It was terrible. James and Berthe suffered at their separate dinner tables the layered pain of having upset people they loved, and of being bereft themselves. They escaped from their houses and met in secret, in one of the changing cabins at the bathing beach where nobody went in the evenings. The cabins were made of wood, painted on the outside but unfinished inside, and they smelled strongly of pine sap and towels and damp bathing shoes. In Mrs. Eggers’s cabin, where the children had made a row of sea urchin shells and sand dollars along the two-by-fours that braced the walls, they agreed that the furor they had caused was intolerable. They would part forever. They held each other, eyes brimming, the decision made. James touched her cheek with one finger, causing her tears to spill, as he murmured, “So beautiful…”Berthe turned away. His heart broke with love for every move she made, as she took one of the sand dollars from the shelf and slipped it into her pocket before she opened the door and walked away from him into the lavender twilight without looking back. James could see her shoulders shaking, and knew that she wept as she went. He stood looking out at the water, paralyzed with longing, thinking of what it meant, that she couldn’t leave him without taking that sand dollar to keep. They endured exactly six days without seeing or talking to each other. On the morning of the seventh day they were married in Union by a justice of the peace, and then they were gone.

  The newly
minted Mr. and Mrs. Brant went to Europe for the fall. Berthe had to see her teacher in Germany, to explain, to pack up her belongings. These they left in storage in Munich until they knew where they would settle. They traveled for the rest of the autumn, and by Christmas, as James hoped would happen, Annabelle was ready to welcome them at home and present her new daughter-inlaw to Cleveland society. After Christmas in Ohio they went to Boston for the New Year and received the sorrowful blessing of Lottie and Thaddeuzs. Eventually they settled in New York, where Berthe resumed her studies and in time made her performance debut, and James went into business in the New York office of a Cleveland firm. They had ten years together; then, Berthe died.

  “But how?” Annabee asked her grandmother. This was in 1924, when James Brant’s only child was five, and old Annabelle was in the last summer of her life. The child had come up to her grandmother’s bedroom at The Elms, where Annabelle spent most of her days on a chaise longue by the window, playing intricate solitaires and talking on the telephone.

  The day was bright, and sheer curtains blew at the open windows overlooking the inner harbor. It was dry weather under a high mackerel sky, and Annabee’s mother, Candace, had taken the machine and gone to Bar Harbor for the day. Annabee had pulled an album from the shelf, hoping it held gramophone records. Instead she found pictures of her father in his golden youth, and all manner of other mementos. She carried it to her grandmother for deconstruction. There were yellowed cuttings from newspapers, pressed leaves or flowers from corsages, dance cards, a four-leaf clover. Then they came to a studio portrait of her father, young, with a lady Annabee had never seen before.

  It was taken in the autumn after James and Berthe were married. Berthe was smiling, her large expressive eyes wide, her beautiful dark hair piled on her head. James had one arm around Berthe’s waist, a gesture of pride and protection. “This is your daddy’s first wife, who died,” Annabelle said, touching the photograph with a lumpen finger. She knew perfectly well that the dread Candace had forbidden to have her daughter told that there had ever been another Mrs. James Brant. “Isn’t her dress pretty? She had it made on their honeymoon in Paris, which is in France.”

  Annabee was electrified. The dress looked fussily old-fashioned to her, but the news that Daddy had had a wife before her mother trumped all thoughts of personal style. “Why did she die?”

  “She died having a baby,” said Annabelle.

  “Why?”

  “I’m not sure, I wasn’t there.”

  “Where was she?”

  “In New York. Where they lived.”

  “What was her name?”

  “Berthe.” Annabelle made it sound as exotic as she could, and assumed a once-upon-a-time voice. “She was a beautiful girl, an opera singer. She gave concerts people paid money to go to. And she spoke many foreign languages. German and French. Italian. They met right here in Dundee, you know.”

  Annabee knew no such thing. This was absolutely the first she’d heard that her father hadn’t been born the day he married her mother.

  “Look,” said Annabelle, turning the page. “Here’s an article in the paper about one of her concerts. Here is her name…”She tapped each b as she pronounced, “Berthe Brant.”

  “What does it say about her?”

  “That she sang very beautifully, and everyone clapped and clapped and clapped,” said Annabelle, sighing at the wonder of it. It didn’t actually say that, Annabelle could no longer read newsprint without a magnifying glass and she didn’t know what it said. But little Annabee got the picture.

  Old Annabelle died in Cleveland in the spring of 1925, of pneumonia. She was buried in Lakeview Cemetery. Annabee was impressed at the depth of her father’s sorrow, and with the fact that before they left for the funeral, he had fastened around her neck a locket that her grandmother used to wear, with “Annabelle” engraved upon it. He also showed her the beautiful triple rope of pearls with a diamond clasp that her grandmother wore in the evenings. He said he would put the necklace in a safe-deposit box for her until she was older. Her mother, Candace, had pearls, but these were bigger and there were a lot more of them.

  Annabee had known she was special to her grandmother, and was very sorry she was gone, but didn’t realize that meant gone forever. She could see she was gone from Cleveland; her bedroom was empty, all the medicines were thrown out, and the steam apparatus was put away. But she didn’t entirely understand that she would also be gone from The Elms next summer and from everywhere, for all the years to come. Also church had been long and she was glad to be outdoors in the warm sun, and her father was standing apart from her, accepting condolences at the graveside. She began to relieve her boredom by seeing what she could make of the writing on the big stones. She could see that the one at the top of the hole that Granabelle’s big fancy box had gone into said ANNABELLE BRANT APRIL 3, 1838—which she could read because it was her own name. The one beside it was just the same size with the same kind of writing. It said something with a juh, j, that she knew stood for “James,” and then some numbers and then big words. (In fact, it read, JOHN SYDNEY BRANT, OCT. 1, 1835–MAR. 28, 1878. TO EVERYTHING THERE IS A SEASON AND A TIME TO EVERY PURPOSE UNDER HEAVEN. Annabelle, knowing she would not remarry, had had her own stone cut at the same time she ordered her husband’s.)

  Annabee next went to work at a stone a step or two away, that had two big b’s in the name. Brant was easy, her name again. She was working on the first name, sounding the letters quietly in sequence as her nurse had taught her, when her mother arrived beside her. Candace paused for a moment, then picked her daughter up, and kissed her on the cheek. Candace was pretty, with pillowy bosoms and hips, and she knew she made a touching tableau with sturdy small Annabee in her arms. Slowly, as if her feet were bound by sorrow, she stepped away from the watching mourners.

  “I was reading,” Annabee said. She kept her voice quiet, she knew they shouldn’t be talking.

  “I thought you were, lovey. My smart girl.”

  “I could read ‘Brant’ on that one…”

  “Yes, they all say ‘Brant.’ It’s the family plot. There is Grandfather, and Granabelle, and Auntie Louisa, with the picture of an angel.” Candace pointed to each grave. Louisa had died of the influenza the year Annabee was born. Annabee looked at the one she hadn’t pointed at.

  “The first name was a buh. B.”

  Candace gave it a minute. “Oh,” she said, as if it had just come to her, “that must be poor Berthe. She was married to your daddy for a little while, a long time ago.”

  Aha. So it was true! Annabee had tried this topic last summer and it had not gone well, but this time Mummy herself had brought it up.

  “I saw a picture of her, in Maine.”

  “She was awfully pretty,” said Candace.

  “Did you know her?”

  “No, not at all, she was much older than I am. She was very vain, poor thing, and she laced her corsets so tight when she was having a baby that she punctured something and died.”

  “What are corsets?”

  “Something ladies wore in the olden days to make them curvy.”

  “Did you?”

  “No.”

  “Because you’re already curvy?”

  “Because your daddy likes me just the way I am.” She smiled, so Annabee did too.

  It wasn’t actually true, though. Candace was not an easy person to like, and James didn’t, much.

  Watching Candace Brant arrive at The Elms in the summer of 1926 was like watching the Aquitania dock. She had refused to go to Dundee for more than a week each summer while old Annabelle was alive. Now, however, she gathered Annabee and the nanny, sent the cook, the waitress, and the housemaid ahead by train, and even so took so much luggage that two separate automobiles were required. The social secretary, Miss Somerville, drove Candace and Annabee, and Osgood followed with Lizzie and the trunks. Osgood drove so slowly now that it took him an extra day to get there, but he had been recently widowed and James wouldn
’t allow Candace to fire him. She wanted to. She preferred to staff the whole house with colored, whom her mother in Knoxville found for her and sent north.

  Poor Auntie Louisa’s wing at The Elms, with its separate kitchen and rooms for nursing staff, had been closed since her death. Candace ordered it opened and prepared as a nursery wing for Nurse Lizzie and Annabee.

  “It will be so much better for Lizzie and Velma, Jimmy,” Candace explained. Velma, the cook, found a thousand ways to make her displeasure felt at home when Lizzie used “her” kitchen to prepare the nursery’s meals. Nurse Lizzie was what Candace called a “high yellow,” and the rest of the staff resented her.

  “But we’ll never see Annabee if she’s way over there. I like having her right down the hall.”

  “It won’t make any difference if she’s down the hall or not. Could we just live like grown-ups for a couple of months a year? Do you think?”

  When James arrived to join his family at The Elms, he found all the bedrooms on the second floor of the main house had been “freshened up” by a decorator from Knoxville he didn’t remember being asked about. A great deal of chintz and chenille was involved. James walked from one to the next—this one in blues, mostly aquamarine, the next in shades of intense yellow, the wallpaper a mass of buttercups.