“I feel, when I cough, that I might die.”
“Have you seen a doctor about it?”
“Many.”
“What do they say?”
“It depends on their specialty.”
Steppy Alouette was neither lying nor making a joke; she had physicians from allergists to urologists attending to her lately. She had the best insurance west of the Segovian Hills, which is a fifty-year history of being one of the local hospital’s largest donors. Blue Cross/Blue Shield is decent, but having the pediatric wing named after your family is far better. She didn’t even have a co-pay.
The pulmonologist said it was her lungs, and the nephrologist thought it was her kidneys, and the sports doctor recommended Tommy John surgery. All the pediatricians agreed that Steppy’s symptoms sprang from her being too old. The gynecologist ruled definitively that her vagina was not to blame, and Steppy thanked her for that, and then a passing plastic surgeon offered to–quote–“snazzy up that chooch,” and Steppy declined. The pathologist said there was nothing she could do for her yet.
The pediatricians were right, she thought. Just too damn old.
They were in the sunroom. Houses on Pharaoh Lane had sunrooms. On the Downside of Little Aleppo, there was a street called Faro Lane, and the houses there didn’t even have windows, but the houses on Pharaoh Lane had sunrooms. It was just before noon and there was nothing but light and ferns. Steppy had her feet up on the fabric of the gently rotting sofa–it used to be British racing green but had faded to lime–and she laid against the high arm, a pillow tucked under her. Lower Montana had a pad, and a pen, and a recorder on the table in between her and Steppy, and she was sitting in what was, by her estimates, the most uncomfortable chair in the universe. It was high-backed and the seat cushion was a lie. The chair did not match the sofa, or the table, or any other of the furniture.
“It’s the poking I hate. Dying isn’t as bad as it’s made out to be, but Christ you get poked at.”
Lower didn’t know what to say to that, so she didn’t say anything. Steppy looked, cloudily, at the recorder and continued,
“I was born in 1908. In the bedroom upstairs. The family is from Montreal, but Daddy came out here in…’02 or ’03, I don’t remember…to invest in the Salt Wharf. He met Mother in the bar at the Norwegian Hotel in ’05. I know that because he liked to tell the story about it. She was there with another man, but she left with Daddy. That behavior would continue the rest of her life.”
“How did your father feel about that?”
“Oh, Daddy didn’t have feelings. Not that I ever noticed. There was nothing inside the man. Some took it for mysterious, or serious, but he was just a bore. It’s a tragedy, but it happens. Mother was inclined towards an opposing disposition. Maybe a little too much. But they never fought. She jabbered at him and he went ‘Humph, yes, imagine that’ at her while he ate his eggs. He made the cook burn the damned things. I can still remember the stink. This is not what you want to hear.”
“That’s for historians a hundred years from now to figure out. Just get as many details recorded as you can and let our great-grandchildren sort out the mess. That’s my motto.”
“Is this what you’re teaching your students?”
“Absolutely.”
“Good God. They need to be taught real history.”
“And what is real history?”
“Generals and such.”
Steppy’s words would have carried more weight had she not endowed the History Department chair at Harper College that Lower had occupied since gaining tenure, which she received after her first book, Little Aleppo: Everything We Can Prove, became a surprise best-seller after being accidentally labeled as fiction.
“I think the generals have enough books about them.”
“Oh, never. What ever could be more important than a man with a gun?”
“What was Little Aleppo like when you were a child?”
“Smaller. You’re supposed to say ‘bigger,’ I suppose. ‘When I was young, everything seemed so vast.’ Not Little Aleppo. It was a rinky-dink place back then. Sheep were still grazing in the Verdance. I remember that. I remember the farmer had a dog, one of those black and white ones that bends sheep to its will.”
“Border collie.”
“The Tahitian. I remember The Tahitian. It started as a nickelodeon, you know. Well, sort of. You know their scam.”
Lower did; it was the focus of one of the chapters in her book. The Tahitian offered two tickets for nine cents, which made it a better deal than the theaters over the hill in C—–a City. It was an even better deal for the theater’s owner, Augusta Incandescente, whom everyone called Gussy, because the change was given in the form of a counterfeit penny.
“There were these short little films. Ten or fifteen minutes. The cops would chase the robbers, or the cowboys would chase the Indians. That’s all movies have ever been good for: chase scenes. And there were travelogues and these things called illustrated songs. Did you ever hear of them?”
“It was like a group karaoke thing, right?”
“Ha, yes. The lyrics would be on the screen and the organist would play. Everyone would sing. It was dire. I remember looking up at my nanny while she was singing along, and thinking she was a simpleton.”
“You had a nanny?”
“Darling, I had a wet nurse. I had a governess. The wealthy can hardly be expected to raise their own children.”
Lower nodded in agreement and mumbled Mmm under her breath. She had been raised in a two-bedroom slab house on Themistocles Street; her parents had hired babysitters, but no nannies. But one of the tricks she had learned while interviewing people was this: if you just kept nodding and making confirmatory sounds, people would talk forever.
“I was educated at home. Tutors came in. Latin and elocution and all that. The Latin came in handy later. And then Radcliffe. I was 16, I think. Daddy was Harvard so I got shipped Back East to finish up. Those goddamned winters. Twenty below and the sun didn’t come up until ten in the morning. Never got used to it, hated it the whole time. Haven’t seen snow since then. Never even gone skiing.”
“It’s fun.”
“I won’t be cold.”
“What did you study?”
“Who can remember? Arguments of the long dead; irregular French verbs; the volume of a conic cylinder. The usual. I was a conscientious student, but not particularly invested. Mostly, I studied Carrie.”
“Carrie?”
“Eleanor Middlecott Saltonstall. She was called Carrie. Don’t ask me why. She had brown hair. God, we fucked like monkeys. I didn’t know I was gay–there was no ‘gay’ back then, this was 1924–but I couldn’t give a fig about boys. The other girls were obsessed with them, but I couldn’t tell one from the other. Braying jackasses. She married one.”
“Carrie?”
“Mm. Brahmins. They have a duty to breed. Someone has to rule New England, after all. We shared a table at dinner the first night I was in Cambridge. Her cuffs were uneven. She was wearing a sweater over a long-sleeved blouse, and the cuffs were uneven shooting out of the sleeves. I remember that, but I don’t remember what we talked about. We were sitting next to each other. Our knees touched. It was like lightning. Oh, I can remember. Being afraid to look her in the eye.”
Steppy smiled like her lips were dreaming, and pointed at the carved wooden box on the table. Lower flipped the lid: a dozen perfectly-rolled joints and a silver Dunhill lighter. She took one out, the lighter, FFT, PHWOO, and put the joint in Steppy’s outstretched hand. She swopped in bitty little puffs. Lungs weren’t what they used to be. The couch seemed a paler shade.
“The summer after our sophomore year, she married him. Moved out of the dorm and into an apartment on Brattle. Never spoke to me again.”
“That’s terrible.”
“I always thought so. She died young. Giving birth. That happened a lot more back then. Even to decent people.”
She grinned. Steppy had the best dentures money could buy; you could still tell. Too white.
“And then I came back home. Time for another marriage.”
“Whose?”
“Mine. Just had to find the right man. He was out there, maybe. I was 21 by then, which was old to be single, especially for the people I came from. Daddy stopped donating to Harvard for years.”
“Why?”
“They had failed, in his estimation. He sent me there to find a husband, and instead I got an education. And what did I need that for? Whosoever could possibly require an education less than a rich girl?”
Steppy’s painted tortoises, Lenny and Honey, padded through the backyard. Steppy used to paint them, but now one of the maids did it. Both tortoises’ shells were done up in the Soviet Realism style.
“Damned woman is from Belarus and won’t stop with the heroes of the proletariat. I told her that the animals preferred Expressionism. She accused them of being aspirational.”
“So tough to find good help.”
“You’ll take them when I die.”
“The turtles?”
“Tortoises. They’re dry. They’re tortoises. You have a little yard.”
“And a cat. She’ll attack them.”
“She’ll drool on them, at best. Your cat’s retarded, Lo.”
“We don’t use that word.”
“It’s my house, and I’ll call cats retarded if I want. And I’m not wrong. There’s something wrong with that poor creature. Her eyes don’t work in tandem.”
Steppy was neither lying nor making a joke: Fizz was a special animal. She spent most of her days staring blankly into the middle distance and had never quite mastered the litter box. Flower Childs, who shared the small cottage on Alfalfa Street with Lower, hated the cat. She spent her days at the fire station with Ash-Nine, a Dalmatian so inbred it was ninth in line for the Hapsburg throne, and then had to come home to a genetically defective kitty. Other people got to have clever pets, she thought, but she was surrounded by four-legged morons.
Lower Montana loved Fizz, though, and was not surprised at her shortcomings, mostly because Lower had specifically requested “the cat no one wants” at the shelter.
“Fizz is a kind soul.”
“Of course she is. She’s too dumb to be mean. What were we talking about?”
Lower checked the scrawl in her notebook.
“You got home from college and were trying to get married.”
“I wasn’t trying, my father was. It was embarrassing for him. My little sister Essie was married. She eloped with some fat count named Bardolph. I mean, he had 19 names, but he went by Bardolph. Can you imagine how absurd the other 19 names were if he chose ‘Bardolph?’ Industrious fellow. No job, but industrious. You should have seen the castle they lived in.”
“Big house?”
“No, sweetheart, an actual castle.”
“Oh.”
“Overrated. Good as a military installation, but useless as a house. Too drafty. Only visited her there the once. They were executed by the Nazis in ’36. Not executed, I suppose. Hacked to death. ‘Executed’ makes it sound more dignified than it was.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I warned her. I told her that it was dangerous for such a silly girl to live anywhere but California.”
Steppy ‘s hands did not shake and she drew in small puffs from the joint pwahpwahpwah and and blew out through her thin lips phwoo.
“The world’s a savage place, I told her. She gave me the line about the kindness of strangers. Heh. Write that down, Lo. Esmer Glassice Alouette–G-L-A-S-S-I-C-E, it’s a family name–depended on the kindness of strangers in 1930’s Bavaria. Dumb as your cat.”
She could feel her sister’s hand in hers. They were walking to The Tahitian. She had her sister’s hand in her left and a new dime in her right with Liberty in her Phrygian cap on the front and ONE DIME written on the back; it pressed into her palm, and both girl’s strappy shoes were shined up black. It was quiet in the sunroom except for the tape recorder.
“It’ll be lunch now,” Steppy said, and a tall, blonde woman in a maid’s uniform entered the room; she announced “Luncheon” in a thick accent, withdrew. Lower smiled.
“Is that the tortoise-painter?”
“Can’t tell a White Russian when you see one? Ethnically distinct people. Help me up, I’m hungry.”
Lower took her hand and Steppy rocked back and forth oncetwicethree times and then she was standing–neither woman was much over five foot–and Steppy grasped her arm with both hands and nodded at the recorder, which Lower picked up, and they walked from the sunroom into the house on Pharaoh Lane for lunch, which was served at 1:00 precisely on the Upside of Little Aleppo, which is a neighborhood in America.
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