“Those are the handwillows.”
“Handwillows? Which ones?”
“With the speckled-sort-of leaves. All trunk-ish.”
“I see the ones you’re pointing at,” Lower Montana said. “Is that what they’re called, handwillows?”
“It’s what I call them,” Steppy Alouette answered.
“What do arborealists call them?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t any on staff.”
They were back in the sunroom, having had lunch. Tomato soup, and then chicken dumplings. Steppy got half her soup down, almost two dumplings. Both refused the aggressive and multiple offers of sour cream from the maid.
“Must mix sveet vith sour or vill get chilblains,” she admonished.
“Oh, hush with you and your Old Country nonsense.”
“Is dangerous, vun taste all by lonesome.”
Steppy threw her napkin at her.
“Out.”
The maid’s black-and-white uniform was starched, and so made a racket as she left. They were in the formal dining room; Steppy didn’t eat in there much anymore, but she liked being fancy for guests. It was how you showed love, she thought: by breaking out the good forks. The exterior wall was mostly window, and it faced north so there was never any harsh glare, just creamy illumination; it was bright enough that the stemware needed to be truly clean. All fourteen places had been set, and Steppy was at the head of the table with Lower kitty-corner to her right. The art was neutral; the floorboards were even.
“I’d fire her, but the woman cleans like the devil’s after her. It’s a shame I’m dying; the house has never looked better.”
“You’re not dying.”
“Oh, can it.”
So Lower did, and ate two more dumplings, and then two more–they were pork, and Lower was usually a vegetarian, but Steppy didn’t allow vegetarianism in her home–so that there were none on her plate; silently, the large Belarussian entered, served Lower four more dumplings from over her right shoulder. Then came the ladle of sour cream, which Lower parried with her butter knife CLANG and the maid lunged, so Lower riposted CHANG their eyes were locked.
“I don’t want any.”
“You vill summon the demons Dazhbog and Stribog! Eat the soured cream!”
Steppy yelled, or as got as close to yelling as she could, at the two of them,
“Hey! Knock it off! You! Out!”
The large Belarussian withdrew, and there was a sound that was like silence, but also like a woman chewing a dumpling.
“Do you,” Lower asked with her mouth full, “know her name?”
“What’s the point in being rich if you have to learn the maid’s name?’
They were back in the sunroom, having had lunch. The mismatched furniture, the empty bird cage, the chair which maybe used to be orange that Lower sat on, the faded-green couch Steppy had laid out on and covered herself with a knitted blue quilt, the low table in between them with the whirring tape recorder. Two cups of coffee, one with lipstick on the rim.
“Where were we?”
“The dining room. Don’t go batty, now.”
“What were we talking about?”
“The War. No, not quite. We were talking about my sister. She was killed before the War, although it had already started, really. It was personal. I found that out later, it was personal, and that made sense because neither she nor her useless husband were political in any sense. But I suppose if the person you have a problem with is a Brownshirt, then it’s a political problem. Poor girl. At least there weren’t any children.”
Steppy sipped her coffee, grimaced, placed it back on the saucer, continued,
“Daddy had to go over there to get her body. I think that’s what killed him. Bardolph’s family threw a perfect fit. Can you imagine? ‘Ze vife vill be buried und de sacred grounds viz ze husband.’ Ridiculous people. Pedigreed, the Europeans. They’ve all got their papers, just like the dogs at the show. Affencrumtz Schnickter Gustav Gustav Bardolph Edelweiss Jurgen von Knucklehoff.”
“That was the husband? The count?”
“I’m missing 10 or 12 of his names. There were 19. He had a mnemonic to help you remember it, and he tried to teach it to me, but it was in German and I wasn’t paying attention to him because he was a twit.”
“How did your father get your sister’s body back?”
“Paying off everyone in sight. They had names and a castle, but Daddy had his checkbook. A checkbook is much better than a trebuchet against a castle. I remember going down to the Fourth First Bank to make these complicated international transfers. He brought her back, and we buried her in Foole’s Yard where she belongs. And then Daddy went next to her a few months later. Don’t let anyone tell you that 1936 was a good year.”
“I don’t think anyone has.”
“And as far as I was concerned, the War had started. Bastards had killed my sister and my father. So I did the only thing I could: sicced the museum on ’em.”
The Little Aleppo Museum of Art was the pride of the neighborhood, even if most of the neighborhood had not visited since being forced to as schoolchildren. There was a healthy history of businesses advertising themselves as “museums” in the area since shortly after its inception–Professor Parness’ Palace of Ethnic Freaks comes to mind–but LAMA was the first, and so far only, swear-to-god museum. Gift shop, docents, post-docs carefully wiping dust off Vermeers, Robert Hughes’ photograph by the door with a note reading DO NOT ADMIT. It was a world-class establishment.
“Maybe ‘sicced’ is a bit much. One must avoid self-aggrandizement. Daddy always said that. Might be why the crowd at his funeral was so small. Or it could have been the rain. One of those.”
Steppy had quit smoking cigarettes 30 years prior; she reached for one on the table, laughed at her own hand.
“The Nazis were looting art. You know this.”
“Yes.”
“Thugs. No one who appreciates art could ever loot it. Heist, maybe. At least there’s a bit of panache in a heist.”
Steppy’s eyes clouded over as if she were thinking of something she was not telling Lower.
“But looting? Banging on the door in the middle of the night with a gang of armed goons, knocking Grandma to the floor, and ripping the Kandinsky off the wall? Terrible days. So, anyway, I bought as much as I could. Klee, Roeder, Moll. Whoever was on the Degenerate List. They didn’t start burning paintings until ’42, did you know that? July of ’42. They started burning Jews in January of ’42, but they held off on the paintings until July. Essie would have found that funny. She was such a silly little girl.”
The sky was bluer than a meaningful guitar, and the grass was soft-looking, and the trees were varied; there was a mandala made from posies and mums that Steppy used to trudge halfway through looking for nirvana, only to get bored and decide to play tennis; two courts (grass, clay); the pool, which was shaped like a pool and not like a kidney, with its diving board; the gazebo and the portcullis and the pergola; the creeping ivy and the throttling ganymedes; fountains catching piss from angels made from chubby plaster; several small monuments to dead peacocks. There was no barbecue. The gardeners were toiling. That was the difference between a backyard and grounds: a backyard needed a swipe with the lawnmower once a week, but grounds required constant staffing.
“Bought everything I could. Hated most of it, but what do I know? We had some people in Paris, Berlin, Munich. Art dealers. Half of them were Nazis, the other half were pretending to be. It cost less to bribe the real Nazis. Always wondered why that was. Anyway, we got as much off the continent as we could. You should have seen the museum. Packed. Packed!”
“With people?”
“God, no. Little Aleppians enjoy talking about art, or forging it, or using it to launder money. But look at the stuff? Never. No, I meant the museum was packed with art. Walls were full, you could barely turn around from all the sculptures. Place looked like a warehouse. And the warehouse looked like the Collyer Brothers’ house. I had to start giving things away to friends. ‘Here, take the Wollheim. Hang it in the children’s nursery.’ Didn’t you ever wonder why there was a Chagall on the wall of the Wayside?”
“The one by the bathroom? That was real?”
“Oh, yeah. Owner never came calling for that one. Make sure you write that in your book. I gave the damn paintings back. Most of them, anyway. Most of them. Some went to the wrong Jews. And I got conned out of a bunch of Picassos, but that’s no great loss. We kept records, but…it was complicated. And then the War officially started.”
“And you joined up?”
“Joined up? I wasn’t an 18-year-old farmboy from Iowa, Lo. I received a commission from the Navy. OSS. You know what the OSS was?”
“They became the CIA.”
“That they did. And I became a spy.”
“You spied on the Germans?”
“How on earth would I do that? I know just enough German to tell the waiter to stop bringing me sausages. I spied on the British.”
“We didn’t spy on the British.”
“Of course we did. We spied on ourselves; why wouldn’t we spy on the British? I hated it. Not the work, the work was a hoot, but Christ I hated London. Nothing but rain, and you couldn’t get an orange. Plus, you know, the nightly bombing. Came back home as soon as possible. Late ’42, I believe.”
“And did what?”
“Same thing as in London, but warmer. Little Aleppo was riddled with spies. The harbor? The Hun wanted it gone. The foreigners were easy enough to catch, but then there were the double agents. Neighborhood was thick with them. Nazis had a spymaster who lived on Polanco Street. Said his name was Smitty Johnson, which was our first clue. Never did find out what his real name was. We turned him. Which made our jobs easier, honestly. Much simpler to find a double agent when you’re the one who’s turned him into a double agent.”
“The logic is becoming circular here.”
“War is hell, Lo. We used to interrogate suspects here. In the basement. I’ll show you later.”
“Here?”
“Well, we couldn’t take them anywhere official. Used to bring them up in a gardener’s truck. They’d be in a big sack next to the mulch. No one notices a gardener’s truck on this street.”
The large Belarussian entered, refilled the coffee cups from a white, porcelain pot, exited without a word.
“And that was my War,” Steppy concluded. “You’re not bored?”
“Not at all. No, not at all.”
“Stories about the old days. Despicable. No one was ever interested in old King Arthur, fat and bald and Excalibur’s all rusty, and he’s still at the Round Table telling the same old jokes. ‘Did I ever tell you where I got my sword?’ No one wants that.”
“Historians do.”
“There was an eighth Segovian Hills for a brief period in ’52. It was immediately branded a Communist.”
“None of that is true.”
“So? Put it in your book, anyway. Spice things up.”
“I don’t even know if I’m writing a book.”
Little Aleppo: Everything We Can Prove had been a surprise best-seller after mistakenly being labeled as Fiction and reviewed as such. SciFi outlets praised Lower’s world-building and gloriously haphazard blending of the real with the semi-real; the Asian lady from the Times called the book “…almost too American, if wobbly in its plotting.” The publishers (Harper College Press) naturally were after her for some more material.
“You must. Publish or perish.”
“I’m tenured.”
“Publish, anyway.”
“Tell me about Manfred.”
And Steppy Alouette was young again, or at least middle-aged, at the sound of his name.
“He served on the USS Dextrous.”
“Yes, and took Communist shelling.”
“Oh, he told you, did he?”
She pointed towards the filigreed cigarette box, and Lower flipped the lid open, took out a well-rolled joint and silver Dunhill lighter FFT PHWOO and handed the joint to Steppy; they were both smiling.
“You have to admit there’s something very primal scene about it. Being shot at like that with nowhere to run. Can’t blame the man for being shaped by the experience.”
“His war was different than mine. He was a waiter when I met him, among other things. Nero’s. I think the menu’s exactly the same today as it was then. This was 1960 or so.”
“Among other things?”
“Well, you knew him. Manfred was social. He knew everyone. So he would introduce people.”
Lower took the joint from Steppy’s skinny fingers.
“A pimp.”
“Oh, God, no. Pimps have hats and that whole thing. Manfred just…monetized his little black book. He knew young, sexy people without any money, and he also knew old people with money who wanted to have sex.”
Lower slouched back into her chair.
“The man was a father to me.”
“Daddy had a side-hustle. Get over it.”
No one grows up smoothly, linearly, itty-bit at a time, no instead it is like slip faults within the earth that crack and shift dozens of miles in one sudden and terrible stroke, and you’re a different person just like that–retconned, the geeks would say–and all information needs to be reevaluated, and the info’s sources, too, and you feel like there should be a soundtrack. Atheists never use that as an argument: if there was a God, then why wasn’t there ominous music playing when she told me she had something to confess? Why weren’t there violin strikes when my brother started coughing and couldn’t stop?
“It’s just a bit…tawdry.”
“You always did leave the bar so early,” Steppy said. “And you’re young.”
“I’m 35.”
“You still think you can know people.”
“You can absolutely know people. Absolutely.”
Steppy had the joint now, which was creased and folded in on itself just like her fingers, and she shwopshwopshwop small puffs from it (favoring her lungs) and there was her sister and there was daddy and there were her tortoises.
“Maybe you can. Perhaps I just didn’t learn how. Maybe you’ve figured it out.”
“Manfred.”
“Mm, right. He was a waiter and whatever when I met him. Took to him right away. I loved him; we hated the same things. Only gay man I could ever take in large doses. Flippant and tetchy, most of them. Not Manfred. And he wanted to open a bar.”
“The Wayside.”
“My name. Well, I didn’t come up with it. But I suggested it.”
The original Wayside Inn was a saloon/brothel established in 18– right on the Main Drag, the second business venture (after the Turnaway Mine) in the valley that had not yet been named Little Aleppo. Miss Valentine owned the joint, and she had girls, whiskey, opium, games of chance and ample spittoonage. She burned, along with half the neighborhood and 36 other souls, in 1871 during what would be called the Wayside Fire. They threw the whores’ bodies in the mass grave up in the Verdance, where everything grows; they named the courthouse after Miss Valentine.
“Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why name it that? It was…it was kind of a terrible place.”
“Only if you read books. If you watch movies, it was a violent paradise. Honest and rugged.”
Steppy was right. Historians know the past for what it was, monstrous and covered inch-deep in shit, but the rest of us can hear the reins being slapped around the post outside the saloon, and the double-doors swinging, now the piano stops and everyone appraises the newcomer, and then the piano kicks back in and from there a man can make his fortune, or not, according to his wits. There are also hoochie-girls.
“And, besides, no one else was using it. So the Wayside Inn it was.”
“Manfred told me that he opened up in ’63.”
“It was 1964. In February. The same night as The Beatles were on Ed Sullivan.”
Lower picked the joint from her hand.
“I’m going to close my eyes for ten minutes.”
“Should I go?”
“No. We haven’t gotten to the end yet.”
And the light came streaming through and swallowed everything that was, which is the point of a sunroom, and Lower shut off the recorder and sat back with the joint and her coffee, regarding the handwillows on Pharaoh Lane, which is a street in Little Aleppo, which is a neighborhood in America.
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