by Lisa Howorth
“He got back to Cuba, we assume. And Elena had intended to go with him. The police stopped them for speeding, and that’s why Elena came home that night. But they didn’t realize who Camilo was, and later let him go. But it wouldn’t surprise me if Camilo…disappears before long. Damn—I forgot about our hash browns.”
I was confused and angry and sick of hearing bad things about Elena, which I wasn’t sure I believed anyway. I ate my burger in silence.
Brickie sat down with his plate and a Scotch. “And not a word of this to Ivan, or anybody else. Understand?” I didn’t answer and decided that I wasn’t going to speak to Brickie anymore. Or at least not until tomorrow.
After eating, I went over to Ivan’s backyard. The day had been so sunny and beautiful, but the sky had suddenly turned leaden, and a fierce, cold wind had blown in, heaving the huge oak branches up and down in slow motion, while their leaves waved furiously like little hands until they fell with the gusts, brilliant scraps of color against the gray sky. We became excited, the brisk air telling us that it would soon be Halloween. “Let’s be Eisenhower and Khrushchev for Trick or Treat!” Ivan said. To please him, I offered to be Khrushchev. Ivan said, “We’ll put a stocking on your head to make you bald, and make Play-Doh warts for your face! You can carry a shoe and bang it and say, ‘We will bury you!’ at every house!” It was great to see Ivan happy.
We whirled around in the wind and leaves till dark, then Brickie called me in. Ivan became serious again. “This cold and wind will definitely kill all the spiders now, if there are any still around.”
“I thought we were through with spiders,” I said.
“We are. I’m just sad about them dying.”
“There’s always next summer,” I said.
“Yeah, there’s always next summer.”
* * *
——————
But by New Year’s, some of our neighbors—the Shreves and the De Haans—had moved away from Connors Lane. And not long after that, Josef was posted to the Philippines, taking Ivan with him, and this smashed my broken heart all over again.
Max had begun to draw away, spending more time with friends from Hebrew school and getting serious about playing basketball. We were still close friends, but I was aware of the age gap between us getting wider. Beatriz and I stayed good friends, too, but she was sucked further into the world of girls and had even less time to spend hanging around, although she and Max, of all people, did start walking together to Doc’s and talking on the phone. I felt jealous and betrayed and started calling them Popeye and Olive Oyl, which didn’t sit well with them, so I gave that up.
My mother did come back from St. Elizabeths, and I was very happy about that, at least until she started dating. Brickie and Dimma stayed on with us, maybe to keep an eye on things. My father married Carline and got a steady job managing a restaurant. Slutcheon got sent off to Charlotte Hall, after all—no more looking over our shoulders. And, as Brickie predicted, just before Halloween, Camilo Cienfuegos did probably disappear over the Straits of Florida.
Of course, nothing was the same without Ivan and Elena. Ivan and I wrote to each other a few times, and I learned he was sent to a boarding school in London, and I was glad about that. I didn’t tell him about Max and Beatriz ditching me, which would only have made him worry. The last time he’d written, he sent a little purple drawing of a pirate vinegaroon, and all the note said was “Your blood brother, Ivan.” I never saw or heard from him again.
Life went on, as it will. That summer stayed with me, surreal footage that seemed more and more like a movie with every passing day. We kids were merely flotsam and jetsam on the crazy river that life is, and even though we’d hit the whitewater of the adult world, we’d come up, bobbing along, but never again quite so buoyant. I can see that much of the drama was just Washington, where things can change fast, weirdness and treachery can prevail, people and things are neither what they seem nor what they are said to be, and the world’s issues and events are played out in neighborhoods like Connors Lane. And everybody is forever moving on. Eventually, I would, too, although wherever I happened to be, if I heard “The Twelfth of Never” or glimpsed a beautiful spiderweb, my heart bumped up hard against the indelible memories of our darling Elena and my dearest friend, Ivan.
Author’s Note
Although most of the characters in this book are fictional, I want to mention a few who are not. I took some small liberties imagining these characters’ parts in this novel.
James Hampton is one of the great American artists of the twentieth century. He was born in Elloree, South Carolina, in 1909, the son of a gospel singer, and went to Washington in 1928, later serving in the Army Air Forces in the 385th Aviation Squadron in Saipan and Guam, receiving a Bronze Star. He returned to Washington after the war and worked as a janitor for the General Services Administration until his death in 1964. During that time, in a garage on Seventh Street NW, he secretly created the masterpiece The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations’ Millennium General Assembly, a spectacular assemblage based on biblical prophesy and visions, with elements of African spiritualism. I remember well when, after his death, The Washington Post reported on the astounding discovery of The Throne, which is now at the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
Ezra Pound (1885–1972) was an expat American and major figure in modernist poetry. While living in Italy, he became controversial, embracing Fascism and supporting Mussolini and Hitler, which eventually led to his arrest and incarceration by American forces for treason. For a few weeks, he lived in a steel cage, causing his mental breakdown, after which he resided at St. Elizabeths in Washington for twelve years and was released in 1958. Ironically, during his incarceration, he was awarded the first Bollingen Prize by the Library of Congress for his Pisan Cantos. It is said in my family that my paternal grandmother and maternal great-grandmother, both Italian immigrants, spent time in St. Elizabeths in the 1940s or 1950s, and I’ve often fantasized about their paths having crossed Pound’s there.
Lieutenant Jacob Beser (1921–1992) was from Baltimore. His family was Jewish, and he was especially committed to defeating Hitler. He worked in Los Alamos on the Manhattan Project and was a radar specialist aboard the Enola Gay and the Bockscar—the only person to have served on both 1945 atomic missions to Japan. He has said that he felt no remorse over his part in those missions: “One must consider the context of the times.” Beser was awarded the Silver Star and other medals for his service.
Camilo Cienfuegos, born in 1932 in Havana, was close to Castro and Che Guevara and, like Che, a charismatic Cuban revolutionary who was one of the top guerrilla commanders in the struggle against dictator Fulgencio Batista. He also had studied art, played on Castro’s baseball team, Barbudos, and visited the United States twice, working in New York, San Francisco, Chicago, and Miami. After Castro’s victory in 1959, Camilo headed Cuba’s armed forces until his mysterious disappearance over the Straits of Florida. His plane was never recovered. Camilo remains popular and is memorialized all over Cuba.
I would also like to acknowledge a few books I consulted while writing this novel: Field Guide to North American Insects and Spiders, The National Audubon Society, Alfred A. Knopf, 1980; Naturalist, Edward O. Wilson, Island Press, 1994; Camilo: eternamente presente, Edimirta Ortega Guzman, compiler, Oficina de Publicaciones del Consejo de Estado, 2014; and The Bughouse: The Poetry, Politics, and Madness of Ezra Pound, Daniel Swift, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2017.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to so many for help and reading: Claiborne, Marian, and Norma Barksdale, Beckett Howorth IV, Sam Johnston, Po Hannah, Katie Blount, Amanda Hewitt, Darrell Crawford and David McConnell, Debra Winger, Babe Howard, Anne Rapp, Kathryn Wood, Jennifer Ackerman, Bill Cusumano, B. A. Fennelly, Curtis Wilkie, Jack Pendarvis, Gary Fisketjon, Joey Lauren Adams, Lee Durkee, Elizabeth Dollarhide, Jeff Dennis, Tom Verich, Bernard Kuria, Kyle McGreve
y, Kathy and Dan Woodliff, Homer Best, David Howorth, Biff Grimes, Patty Orama, and Tim Kosel at easysonglicensing.com. Thanks to my homey, Frank Rich, for a copy of the flabbergasting book Washington Confidential, and to my mom, Claire Johnston; dad, George Neumann; and brother, Rick Neumann, for childhood inspiration. Thanks to Chris Wait and Barbara Epler at New Directions; my friends Phin and Liam Percy, who provided their artistic talents; and to the P.P.P. at the Pig, and the B.D.S. at the Grocery, for keeping me laffing. As always, thanks to my husband, Richard, for advice and putting up. And tons of gratitude is due to my crafty agent, Lisa Bankoff, who gets things off the ground; to my incredibly hardworking, smart editor, Lee Boudreaux; and to everybody at Doubleday, especially the eagle-eyed Cara Reilly, copy editor Amy Edelman, designer Michael Collica, production editor Victoria Pearson, publicist Todd Doughty, and sales reps Julie Kurland and Jess Pearson.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Lisa Howorth was born in Washington, DC, where her family has lived for four generations. She is a former librarian and the author of the novel Flying Shoes. She has written on art, travel, dogs, and music for the Oxford American and Garden & Gun, among other publications. Howorth lives in Oxford, Mississippi, where she and her husband, Richard, cofounded Square Books in 1979.
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