Leeway Cottage

  They freshened their lipstick, they powdered their noses. They squirted their clouds of perfume and stepped into them.

  “Ready?”

  “Ready.”

  “Should we go down, is Mother ready?”

  “She’s just getting her face on,” said Maudie. “Go ahead.”

  They could hear the orchestra as they descended the staircase. Tommy McClintock and Toby Talbot were waiting in the hall, and Annabee could see in their faces how pretty she looked. Herbie Calhoun was waiting for Gladdy, and waiters were gliding around with trays of champagne in monogrammed glasses.

  “A bit of all right!” cried Homer Gantry, in full Bertie Wooster mode.

  “Where will you receive?” Tommy asked.

  “We’ll ask Mother, she’ll be right down.” The hall was beginning to fill with boys in black tie, and girls in strapless gowns that made them look like groups of tulips.

  Annabee was looking toward the ballroom, like a Thoroughbred in the starting gate. She was ready, she was fit, she was finally eager to run. This was going to be a night to remember.

  She saw a look of surprise on the upturned faces of several girls who were facing the staircase. She saw the expression spread to their escorts. She saw Mr. Harbison come to the door of the ballroom as if to be sure of what he was seeing. This moment took less than a second, before Annabee turned around, but in memory it seemed to last an hour. What on earth?

  Mr. Christie was now in the hall, at the foot of the stairs, impeccable in his tailcoat. Annabee looked up the stairs.

  Her mother was on her way down, her carriage and pace majestic. Except for a slightly rosier tinge to the satin encasing the dramatically cantilevered bosom, Candace and her daughter were wearing the same dress.

  “Oh, honey…” Gladdy whispered, close at Annabee’s side. She put her gloved hand on her friend’s naked back.

  What happened next was that, of course, Annabee put herself entirely and egregiously in the wrong for the rest of the evening, at least to Candace’s satisfaction. She turned on her heel, took a glass of champagne in one hand and Tommy’s hand in the other and went into the ballroom where she insisted he dance with her, and he did.

  Mr. Christie came and tried to cut in; Annabee wouldn’t let go of Tommy. Mr. Christie followed the waltzing pair around the dance floor insisting she stop and come out and receive with her mother.

  “No,” Annabee said. She put her empty glass on a passing tray and took another one. In the outer rooms, no one knew what to do. After a while the young gave up and went in to join the party. Annabee happened to be dancing with Homer when Candace herself hove into the room and bore down on Annabee like a steamer running down a wayward dinghy.

  “I’ve never seen anything like this behavior, Anna.”

  “Don’t talk to me.”

  “It’s completely ridiculous. Our figures are entirely different, no one but you even sees a resemblance…”

  Annabee took over the lead in the dance and clumped off with Homer to another part of the dance floor.

  When the houseguests were finally all gone, having had the time of their lives, and Annabee had nearly recovered from her hangover, she took the Rapid to Mr. Christie’s office again.

  “I am eighteen now,” she said.

  “I know you are.”

  “You said when I was eighteen I could have my money.”

  “I believe, if he had known he would not be here to guide you, your father might have provided for a longer-running trust—”

  “But he didn’t.”

  “…but he didn’t. As I was about to say. He didn’t, and control of it is yours now, if you want it. I take it you do?”

  “I do. Where is it?”

  “It’s at the Cleveland Trust, of course. If you will calm yourself.”

  “I’m perfectly calm.”

  He looked at her, with an eyebrow cocked. It was really just as well, he thought, that he’d never had children.

  He pushed a button summoning Miss Doughty.

  “Miss Doughty, would you please bring in Miss Brant’s trust agreements, and her latest statement?”

  When Miss Doughty delivered them, he handed them to Annabee.

  “The first is the trust your grandmother set up to pay for college.”

  “What if I don’t want to go to college?”

  “Read the language of the trust. If you make the case to the trustees of an educational purpose—”

  “And the trustees are?”

  “Your father was one. In his absence, Mr. Watson, and I—”

  “What if I want to study music?” she interrupted. Again.

  “As it happens, my dear, I have always believed that you should be allowed to study music.”

  “Oh.”

  After that she listened quietly as he explained that the education trust was to continue for her children. The other, much larger account was hers outright, though he strongly advised her to confine herself to spending the income and leave the principal where it was. That was all. He leaned back in his chair and looked at her, as if he had done his duty and had no intention of doing more. If she wanted to go off and run through it like a dose of salts, that was her affair.

  She paid a visit to Mr. Watson, the family banker, and arranged to have income checks delivered on a monthly basis to a bank she would name as soon as she was settled. She demanded a large amount of cash which Mr. Watson begged her to put into traveler’s checks. Then she went to the station and left for New York. Her mother found out she was gone when Maudie informed her a suitcase was missing and the bed hadn’t been slept in.

  1938

  “What’ll it be, gents?”

  “Do you have any Danish beer?”

  “Whaddya think, this is a beer garden. Of course we got Danish beer. Also Dutch, German, Austrian, Czech…”

  “Carlsberg?”

  “Two of those?”

  The waiter hustled off into the smoke and racket.

  “Homesick?”

  “I must be,” Laurus said. “What did you think of the violist?”

  “Fair.”

  “Why?”

  Imre settled his violin case between his feet where he was sure nobody in lederhosen would step on it. He turned his palms up and shrugged.

  “Very correct. But not enough . . . chutzpah. Brillo. Something.”

  “You never like the violists.”

  “Just because I said they’re the idiot children of chamber music?”

  They were slowly divesting themselves of their gloves and mufflers. Laurus wore knit gloves inside leather mittens to protect his hands, while Imre lavished all his protection on Beatrice the fiddle, which was after all 175 years older than he was and by a factor of several hundred the most valuable thing he owned.

  “I heard her do a lovely Harold in Italy.”

  “I’m happy for you. What do you hear from home?”

  “They’re worried about der Führer.”

  “Are you taking any home leave this winter?”

  “I wish I could get my parents to come to New York; they’ve never been here. But they won’t. Everyone’s busy. Nobody likes a winter crossing.”

  “Will they come next summer, then?”

  “They pretend they will. But in the summer they love their nights by the sea. Those endless twilights.”

  “I don’t blame them.”

  There was a silence while they thought of summer and home. Outside, the wind on West Fifty-seventh Street blew the last of the October leaves, and with a rattle as of buckshot thrown against the windowpanes, the rain began. The waiter came, with brimming pilsner glasses on a tray balanced on his back-bent hand. He swooped this onto the table in a graceful motion that ended with the tray under his arm and his pad and pencil in his hands held before his chest. He looked at them over his glasses with the air of a man who has only a two-bar rest before the music will carry him off again, and hopes his partners haven’t lost their places in the dance. The young friend
s ordered bratwurst and sauerkraut, cheap and filling, and more beer.

  “Skål.”

  “Skål. What are you working on?”

  “The Diabelli Variations,” Laurus said. “Some Chopin, some Ravel. And of course I have to do the Grieg in January…”

  “You can do that in your sleep.”

  “That’s a problem in itself. How are things at school?”

  “I have three students of real talent, and ten who should be violists. At least they work like animals. Oh!”

  “What?”

  Their hot food had arrived and someone in the bar had turned up the recording of the oompah band.

  “I should have mentioned this when I called, Clara asked me to. There is a vocal student preparing her first recital. She needs an accompanist. It would be a lot of work…but easy money, and no traveling.”

  Laurus had just discovered he was famished.

  “Tell me about her.”

  “She has a voice, I’m told. No technique.”

  “Uh-oh. Pretty?”

  Imre considered. “More handsome than pretty. She moves badly. In that way of American girls, as if they are on the hockey field.”

  “What is she preparing?”

  “Of course, a Schubertiade.”

  “I might rather enjoy that. And she can pay?”

  “It seems so.”

  Laurus Moss first laid eyes on Sydney Brant in a practice room at the Mannes School of Music. She was very nervous. She was taller than he, with dark hair she wore piled on her head, which gave her an old-fashioned serious look. She had a streak of white at her temple, though she was very young. Her eyes were red, as if she had been crying (she had, but they did not speak of it), and in spite of the fact that she was neatly dressed and appeared clean, he could smell the sweat of nervous fear on her skin. Poor beast. He sincerely hoped she had at least a thimbleful of talent.

  They shook hands. Sydney saw a neat man, compact and vaguely foreign, with short brown hair and pale blue eyes. He was very well trimmed, somehow. She especially noticed his hands, which were small, with wide palms and short strong fingers. His manner was kind, a quality she was desperate for. Her German pronunciation was atrocious and she had just come from a diction class in which her classmates had not been gentle.

  “Where shall we begin?” Laurus seated himself at the piano and played a series of arpeggios.

  “Perhaps here,” said Sydney. She opened her music to Meeres Stille, and placed it before him.

  He knew the song. He knew, too, that whatever they started with would be something she thought she did well.

  “How do you like to take it?”

  She gave him the count with her hand, and he began. She did not. They both laughed, he kindly, she embarrassed.

  “Are you ready? All right, again.”

  This time she sang. The song was low, mournful, and the sound she produced was cellolike. But he could see that she was working so hard to remember her breath, her diction, her acting, all the thousands of things a singer must be master of, that he couldn’t tell if she had any musical intelligence at all. When the song was finished there was an uncomfortable pause.

  Laurus said, “Before we go on, would you do me a favor?”

  “What?”

  He knew she was waiting to be told something about her performance, but there was nothing he could say about it that would help.

  “Sing something for me in English.”

  “Oh, I—haven’t prepared anything, I don’t know the—”

  “Anything. A folk song. Something from the radio.”

  “Really?”

  “Please.”

  She stood for a moment. Then she began to sing the first thing that came to her, which turned out to be “Falling in Love with Love.” She addressed the song to a far corner of the practice room.

  When she finished and looked at Laurus, she blushed because of the way he was smiling.

  “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  “Tricky intervals,” he added by way of praise.

  They were both embarrassed for a moment; he because he knew so much that she did not, and yet was not here for the purpose of teaching her. She, because the situation was utterly alien to her, and she felt, as she had about a dozen times a day since she arrived in New York, that she had no idea who she was. Princess, frog, master, servant, artist, or joke person. It was amazing how much emotional dissonance one could experience and continue to function.

  “Shall we go on?”

  “All right.”

  “Meeres Stille again?” When she hesitated, he knew that she knew it had not been good.

  “What about Gretchen am Spinnrade? I assume you will try that one…” Anything to get her to make a fresh start.

  She turned to the page and he began. She sang this time with a self-forgetting that let the music flow a little better.

  When it was over, he said, “That was fun. Let’s do it again.”

  After the first week, feeling guilty (though grateful) for the amount she was paying him, he invited her out for coffee.

  “Your English is so good,” she said, when they had hot mugs and a small plate of cakes between them. They were in a tea shop in the basement of a brownstone just off Madison. Outside the day was bright and cold, with a smell of snow in the air.

  “I come from a small country; nobody learns Danish. It is the same with the Dutch. We have to learn everyone else’s languages early.”

  “Do you?”

  “Have you never been to Europe?” he asked, marveling at how disconnected these Americans were from the rest of the world.

  Sydney explained about the trip to Egypt.

  “This mother is formidable, then.”

  “She’s a horror,” said Sydney. And saw that she had shocked him. “To me, anyway. The world is filled with people who think she’s a wonderful woman.”

  “Your brothers and sisters? What do they say?”

  “I’m an only child.”

  “Ah.”

  “I take it your mother isn’t a horror?”

  “Oh, no. She is a joy. She has no faults at all except that she is too plump, and she refuses to learn to ride a bicycle.” He was smiling without knowing it, and this made Sydney smile, too.

  “So your father. Is he a horror?”

  “Parents are not allowed to be horrors in Denmark. He’s like a sprite. He is small and lively and he has a great sweetness. And it’s his fault that my mother is plump, because his hobby is baking. At weekends he smells of almonds and usually has powdered sugar all over his clothes. Sometimes in his hair.”

  “And he can ride a bicycle?”

  “All Danes can ride bicycles. Except my mother.”

  A pause.

  “Brothers and sisters?” Sydney asked.

  “One of each. My brother Kaj just finished his medical studies. He’s a young toad, of course,” he said happily.

  “Kye?”

  “Yes. K-a-j. My little sister is Nina. She’s at university.”

  A pause.

  “Are you the only musician in the family?”

  “My mother performed when young. She teaches now. And my aunt Tofa. Mor plays piano, Tofa plays violin.”

  “Do you miss them very much?”

  “I do.”

  There was a silence. Sydney looked sad.

  “Where is this formidable Mama, then?” Laurus asked.

  “Ohio.”

  “And that’s where you live?”

  “It’s where she lives. I live here.”

  This had the feeling of a statement that was true, but concealing more than it said.

  “But if someone asked you, where is home?”

  “Oh! I would say ‘Dundee, Maine.’”

  “Dundee, Maine! You are from there?”

  “Have you heard of it?”

  “Of course I have heard of it! Home of the Ischl Quartet, of the Thieles and the Eggerses and the Hanenbergers! Everyone who pl
ays chamber music knows Dundee, Maine.”

  Sydney said, “My father was married to Berthe Hanenberger, Thaddeusz’s daughter.”

  “Really!” He sat back in his chair.

  “Before I was born. She was a singer. Have you heard of her?”

  “No. But her father…My mother spoke of hearing him. She said he played like a god.”

  “Did you always know you would be a musician?” Sydney asked. She hoped he would say no, as she was always looking for clues that there were others with this vocation who began as late as she.

  “Oh, yes. My mother began to teach me when I was very small.”

  “And then…”

  “And then, when I was older she arranged for me to play for some important people, who sponsored me for conservatory training. When I was seventeen I won a competition and went to Vienna to study, and after that, touring. You know the sort of thing.”

  She didn’t. She had no idea how real musicians made livings, but then she had little idea how any working people made their livings. She nodded and smiled.

  The coffee after her practice hour became a ritual, at least on days when Sydney’s lessons were over and Laurus had no rehearsals. They talked of pianos; Laurus’s mother had a beautiful Hornung & Møller grand in a walnut case. It was the piano he learned on and the one against which he measured all others. His earliest memory was of his mother at that piano playing Chopin, with morning light pouring into the room over her shoulder. Sydney knew only American pianos. Her grandmother had a square Steinway grand at The Elms which was used at parties. Sydney had a Mason and Hamlin upright now.

  “You live in a flat by yourself?” Laurus lived in a tiny studio he sublet from another musician who was in Australia for the year. It was crammed with the books and clothes and boxes of music of both of them. He pictured Sydney in a similar place.

  What he pictured wasn’t so far wrong, as pictures go, but it lacked completely all the background detail that would clarify what the foreground meant. Girl alone in New York apartment, sitting at piano dreaming of the concert stage. Up to a point.

  When the newly created Sydney first arrived in the city she had gone to a hotel for single women. There were people to talk to at meals and there were curfews, and rules, as in a girls’ dormitory. It was home to many girls just out of college, in first jobs or at secretarial school. Also to older ladies in reduced circumstances who discreetly sold antiques or jewelry on Madison Avenue, who moved among the young ones like living reminders of the way big dreams could go wrong.