Leeway Cottage by Beth Gutcheon Read Free Book Online

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.
    Candace had had James’s grave dug at the left side of the plot, beside his long-dead father, leaving a blank space on the right between old Annabelle and the marooned remains of Berthe Hanenberger Brant.
    â€œBut now there’s no room for your mother beside your father,” Gladdy said.
    â€œShe doesn’t plan to die,” said Annabee.
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    She was Anna after that, to everyone except her oldest friends. She and her mother both went into mourning, but for six months only. They didn’t go to Dundee at all that summer; instead, they went abroad.
    â€œA complete change; we both need it,” Candace announced. “You haven’t been anywhere except Cleveland and Dundee.” Candace and her Jimmy had done a great deal of traveling early in their marriage. In Annabee’s bedroom at The Elms she had a shelf full of nasty little dolls they had brought her, which you could only look at, not play with, in native costumes of Wales, Scotland, Norway, Sweden, Holland, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and Greece. “Where would you like to go most?” Candace asked now.
    â€œParis,” said Anna.
    â€œYou’ll be going to Paris your whole life,” said her mother. They went to Egypt. They sailed the middle of June on the Rex, of the Italian Line, and played bridge all the way across. The surprise to Candace was that Annabee played well from the beginning and got better and better. By the time they toured the Alameda Gardens in Gibraltar, they were arm in arm, laughing together more than they had in their lives.
    From Gibraltar they sailed for Tangiers and went on to Rabat and to Fez, where they bought rugs. After Morocco, they sailed for Port Said and from there went by train to Cairo. Tommy, Gladdy, Elise, and the others got postcards and letters all summer, with pictures of pyramids, of their hotels, of the S.S. Egypt on which they went up the Nile, of their private car and dragoman, of themselves attending a camel race, of Candace riding a camel. Annabee was homesick. Candace bought her a beautiful gray star sapphire and, when they got home, had it set in a dinner ring for her to commemorate the trip.
    â€œBetter than a doll in a burnoose,” Annabee wrote to Elise.
    Mother and daughter put off their mourning right after Thanksgiving; in spite of black clothes and the veil she wore in public, Candace’s social life was already back at full throttle. She played bridge several times a week, in the afternoons with her lady friends, sitting at card tables in someone’s living room, with crystal ashtrays and monogrammed lighters on little glass-topped tables at their elbows. At evening parties she played with Bernard Christie, the Brant family lawyer, a confirmed bachelor with soft hands and very pink cheeks. Mr. Christie became her escort for dinners and theater as well. He tried to interest her in opera, although she warned him she was allergic to singing. After two acts of Tosca she had to be taken home.
    â€œIt’s so affected,” she said in the car.
    â€œAll right, you tried it. If you don’t like it, you don’t.”
    â€œI get enough of that at the house, with Anna carrying on like Galli-Curci…”
    â€œShe has a voice, you know, ma belle.”
    â€œI know she has a voice, believe me. When she sings on the third floor, you can hear her in the kitchen.”
    â€œI think you should let her take lessons.”
    Candace rolled her eyes.
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    The week Candace and Annabee put off their mourning clothes, as the first Christmas cards of the season began to appear in the mail, they both received thick cream-colored envelopes bearing the following invitation.
    M R . AND M RS . O RVILLE B