by Mac Pope
There was an entry for the next day: “The Mistress, Julia Dyckman, said she will speak to the boy’s mothers after services at the Dutch Reformed Church and demand that they pay for the vegetables.”
Nora and I sat silent after we read that page. Nora spoke first, “Dear old Julia, her only worry was for her potatoes and onions!”
“Poor thing, I hadn’t thought about how helpless and alone she was out there, and so young then,” she thought for a moment, “it’s too bad things didn’t work out with Mr. S because with all his brains and ambition, and he had a whole lot of affection for her—by now they’d have a couple of grown up high-achievin’ sons and daughters and grandkids.” Nora shook her head. “He was right—she was just a monkey-flunky to those people. Look where she ends up, dried up and living with us.”
“We’re not so far down the line,” I said, glancing around our comfortable home.
“We’re just show,” she replied, “furniture.”
“If you want to see real money, there’s a girl in my class who lives in a nice brownstone one-family and her father has more than ten thousand dollars in the bank.”
“Anyway,” I said, “we’re still a cut above the crowd. That’s what brought her here and I’m glad she’s here—most days…”
I also reminded her that Mahala has ‘something put by’ and she said that Julia Dyckman had confided that there was ‘something’ in her will for Mahala—when her time came.
“I think that’s why Daddy wants her to stay here, like someday she’s going to bring us the golden egg.”
“Wouldn’t that be worth everything if it happened?” I said, “Everything we need, tuition for school, a new car…”
“Stop dreaming,” she laughed shortly, “we have Negro luck. Julia will probably leave her some old frocks and stockings… anyway, that incident she went through mellows her for me; makes her life-size, y’know? I think I’ll turn ladylike for her—see if she mellows.”
The next time I passed Mahala in the foyer, the memory of her ordeal with those rotten brats in 1941 flashed in my mind and I still felt angry.
“Aunt Mahala,” I said to her, “if anyone past or present messes with you, tries to hurt you, I would just punch their teeth out and not even look back!” She looked up at me with puzzlement, with alarm, and a trace of suspicion. There being no real reply to my outburst as she walked on gracefully up to her rooms.
Some while later, curiosity nudged me to check the most recent diary to see if Mahala had written down her thoughts about what she might inherit. I was surprised to see some thoughts about us:
“Diary: I am sure that my brother’s children are gifted with intelligence and will continue our line! The girl is my pride; with my guidance she becomes well spoken, nicely styled, and assertive. The boy is Howard University!”
I went on to read the last pages of the last book. The writing there was cool and serious in tone and I read until I had to stop because my hand holding the book was shaky.
"June 1st, 1955. Diary: The situation here is become unbearable. The family sees that poor Julia is going mad, has been off and on for years… until now they haven’t tried to institutionalize her because they believed her to still able to manage the house, the properties, and her capital. No one knows that for the last five years it has been my hand that has managed every detail of Julia’s life. She has signed the checks and invoices I put before her, the letters I type for her, everything! I even speak in her voice on the telephone to order supplies and repairs… Some days when she is ‘clear,’ she realizes her state: She told me she doesn’t want the ‘children’ (the youngest is now thirty-five years old) to finger through her holdings. She said she thinks they want to ‘put her away’ in some nursing home, penniless, to die. Then she begged me to help plan a way out of her situation.
I sat with her and we made her a plan. We agreed that she would secretly settle upon me a part of her capital, small enough that the heirs would not interfere but large enough to secure a mortgage on a comfortable small house. I would furnish it with old Dyckman goods that she would cede to me in writing. Later, I should sign papers as her caregiver and help her move from the institution her family would have placed her in. I would then carry on caring for Julia, as her companion to the end. One of her annuities, diverted to my account, would provide our upkeep, even allow for a housemaid.
Diary: Is this the way I go towards my end? With her? My education, my intelligence, my skills, and efficiency wasted?
My life spent serving Julia’s life… she has shown me the ‘things’ she’ll leave me at her death; a silver brooch, a crystal bowl, her orchid plants, etcetera… she hopes the money I get for those things will persuade my relatives to look after me until I also pass.
Diary: I feel as though we may as well be Egyptian. Will Julia Dyckman entomb her old servant with her in her pyramid?
“No. The worm turns…”
I bought a padlock and I secured the trunk which lay undisturbed until Mahala died fifteen years later. When family members opened it, they were disappointed to find no treasure, only dusty little books. They sent the trunk off to the city incinerator.
Nora’s children and my children went to University like we did, well endowed with trust fund money and filled with great expectations.
Part 1
Downstairs
Just before dawn, before the first yearning wails from the muezzins high up in slender towers all around Izmir, Barney and Isabel walked, bundled together from their bed, outside on to the wide, cool, marble floor of their apartment terrace. At that hour they were still naked, although she’d wrapped herself in the top sheet and he had pulled the blanket around himself. They went out every morning, into the clear air under diamond stars, to smell Izmir. The great ovens of the city’s factory bakeries were at high production then and filled the air with sweet, milky, yeasty odors of browning bread and rolls. Izmir and all of Turkey was peaceful under a white moon still as a hanging ball.
Always at that hour, the air was balmy and sensual as light ether, the views spectacular—from the dimly lit boats bobbing on the navy blue, glittering wash of open bay below them, to the palm-lined streets that radiated up from the bay, past their building, and on upwards to the hills overlooking Izmir. Those hills crowned by Kadif—Kale, the ancient ‘Castle of Cushions’—the crumbling walls of Alexander the Great’s summer palace.
Isabel spoke the first words of the day as they embraced, leaning against the balcony’s low wall, “Y’know, Herodotus wrote that Izmir—Smyrna back then, had the finest climate on the Earth…”
“Herodotus,” Barney whispered while nuzzling her ear, “didn’t know Maui.”
“Well, dahlin, time for you to get dressed and go get us a warm loaf. I’ll have coffee ready and the peanut butter and jelly ’n some orange juice…” her smiling, untanned face glowed iridescent blue under moonglow—she was hard to leave. “How about some goat cheese and sweet olives, Dollin’?” Barney asked, still kissing her.
“Those too,” she said, kissing him back.
“We’ll eat on the veranda, OK?”
“Out here on the terrace, dahlin.”
“I’ll get some fresh yogurt too, babaganush…” he broke off the kiss.
“Umm, whatever,” Isabel said as he padded off.“I guess I’m lucky!” she smiled to herself walking into the kitchen. “No woman, except ‘Blondie’ in the comics, gets called ‘Darling’ these days.” She recalled that they started calling each other ‘dahlin’ and ‘hunny’ the same week they met Jamel and Shamika, the young African American couple who lived in the apartment above theirs.
Before them, that kind of talk would have seemed superficial, goofy, but after watching those two clutch and merge on impulse whenever they came near one another, after hearing Jamal call Shamika sugar names in his Barry White low register and hearing her feminine high, southern—sexy responses, both Barney and Isabel came away believing that after a whole year of marriage, they were loo
king at real human love for the first time.
They had decided to copy Jamel and Shamika whole. Before that, they had modelled themselves on a couple in a 1930’s movie, sporting around in tuxedo and a silk dress. I think we started our bogus lifestyle with that movie, she thought as she measured coffee grounds. “But don’t knock bogus,” she warned herself, “bogus got us where we wanted to go, so far,” she grinned and balled her fists for emphasis. “Bogus got us diplomatic status, Izmir, two good salaries, classy careers—prestige up the ass! Bogus is good,” she said, “seriously; it brought us our best friends, Jamel and Shamika—and they claim they’re at least as bogus as we are!” She chuckled, thinking about their stories so far.
Both Barney and Isabel had been raised in orphanages; she in New York, he in Columbus, Ohio. They had been ordinary looking, introspective children, not exactly what Mr. and Mrs. America were looking to adopt, few prospective adopters paid them much attention.
Approaching their early teens, they had each decided to abandon Happy Family ideas and concentrate on their daydreams.
They met by coincidence. Their orphanages had sent them to a joint college prep program for poor kids with decent IQs. Each of them had scored near-genius on paper and suddenly they were hot property. That drew them together to joke about the stupid irony of the whole thing.
“Adopters!” Barney had intoned in his scratchy new baritone. “Dumb bastards missed having a couple of smart bastards!”
“Are you bragging?” Isabel had asked, she could see the self-esteem showing off in Barney’s shiny brown eyes.
She liked him. She understood that he, like her, was excited about the possible roads their intelligence might lead them on. As the two grew closer through phone calls and summer camps, they started sharing—first orphanage jokes and horrors, then, after a while, private dreams and plans: Barney wanted to be a CIA operative, nothing less. He knew he had an almost photographic memory, a passion for intrigue, adventure, maybe even danger. Isabel wanted the State Department, the Foreign Service—overseas; she’d read novels about diplomatic colony life. She was quick with languages, loved statistics and economics, and learned a lot from the library reference books she’d obsessed over. As they plotted their plans and ran together, they applied to Columbia University for prestige school backgrounds and both received full scholarships. In the year of their Cum Laude graduations, they gave each other their virginity, they changed their names and they got married. They had heard things about the Agency and the Foreign Service; that they were still Old Guard despite all their claims of reform and diversity. A good Eastern school and a good Eastern name still meant a lot… people said. Barney’s last name had been Padgett; they changed it to Barnaby Girard (Philadelphia Girards…?) Her name had been Isobel Belensky; she became Isabel Chapin, good Manhattan stock. They looked good; she with ginger colored hair and blue eyes, he with agent-short brown hair, deceptively clean cut face, physique buffed up by manic training. When they sat in the Agency and Foreign Service exams and interviews they weren’t even asked about their origins—the powers that be had their folders; they may have presumed that two society debs gave away their unwanted babies years before, and those good blood lines had come together nicely on their own. Luckily, the background checks, which turned up the legal name changes, came after the agency selection process. They were each contracted and were even told that they would likely be posted jointly on most overseas assignments.
Breakfast: They didn’t eat sitting across the table from one another anymore, now they copied the way Jamel and Shamika jammed their chairs together and sort of reclined to eat out of the same plate.
“Dahlin, it sucks you can’t tell me what it is you do all day…” she whined.
“Shhhh, Hunny, the very fact that I do something all day is classified…”
She glanced up at his Cheshire cat smile and frowned. “I bring you all the skinny on the crazy business I handle in the Consular Affairs Office… like that incident on May Day, when all the Americans in town where supposed to stay off the streets, especially near the radical University district, and, of course, we got a call that an army G.I. in uniform had struck a Turk student with his car outside the school. About a hundred Turkish students and street toughs had surrounded him…”
“Yeah, what happened, how’d you keep that from flashing?” he asked.
“Luck! Seems the kid’s wife was with him and she started bitching at him in the street—‘he’s a loser,’ wrecked their last car in Texas—she threw her bag at him and stomped off…”
“And?”
“And, the Turk men rushed in to cushion the poor guy’s male ego… they righted his car, which they’d flipped on its side, even the ‘injured’ guy helped, they patted the G.I. on the back and kept saying”Gecmes olsunl…"
“Which translates to ‘forgetaboutit.’”
“Yeh, roughly,” she said, “you know Turks, they’re like the Americans over here: unpredictable. Turkey changes people who stay here awhile… alters the DNA, I think, especially in Izmir, which is so sleek and flashy compared to the rest of conservative Turkey. ‘Izmir the whore!’ the mullahs call it, because Izmir types drink the good liquor, dress like Paris, party all night and love American things—if not Americans in person. And, God, if you haven’t noticed there are thousands of Americans in Izmir; Army and Air Force units, the NATO headquarters, my Consulate people… all with spouses and rugrats aplenty.”
Everyone lived in downtown Izmir, sharing luxury and semi-luxury midrise apartment complexes with the Turkish upper and middle classes; social interaction between the two worlds came mainly through the black marketing of goods from the PX and Commissary supermarkets, and that thrived. High-ranking military and civilian officials and their wives did genteel crime with their Turkish and foreign counterparts, exchanging furs, silks, cognac, and cigars for cash to build their retirement rocking chairs. Enlisted people dealt in cigarettes, liquor, blue jeans, and canned goods through shyster entrepreneurs. Turkish law prohibited US military investigators from operating in the country and although the traffic was officially illegal, only the ineptest Turkish detective failed to show a pack of Marlboros in his shirt pocket.
Isabel thought of Jamel and Shamika’s apartment upstairs—a shrine to the black market, they called it; a stunning place of handmade white leather sofas and chairs, rose quartz tables, breathtaking oriental carpets: Sarouks, Milas and Isfahans, with embroidered kilim covered cushions everywhere. Not bad for an Army two-striper, Jamel would say when Barney and Isabel visited.
Not bad at all: Jamel’s Public Defender and his Army recruiter back home in burnt-out Brooklyn had managed to have certain misdemeanor charges against him go unprosecuted, allowing him to enter the military. Shamika was pregnant with their first child, Marisa, then and he kept his promise to marry her, take her out of her unheated tenement room and bring her to his first permanent assignment. Jamel said they looked so shabby and scared, going through Istanbul airport… even the beggars looked away.
“Look at us now, though!” Jamel could rightly brag.
Because after about only six months of Brooklyn-style merchandising and socializing with the ‘fellas’; cadging and boosting ration cards from nonsmokers and nondrinkers, both of them hustling, Jamel and Shamika had made themselves a power name in Izmir. Normally, junior enlisted families found quarters in far less glamorous apartment buildings, but the two had the money and the ambition for the best. Even so, normally the Turkish Generals and other old families would not have tolerated their social class in the building, but word quickly went around that Jamel and Shamika were Muslims. The Turks were surprised and pleased by their presence then—and the couple were Muslims, at least technically; Jamel’s dad had been a firebreather Black Muslim, but his children had fallen away soon as they reached their teens. Jamel had remained a ‘Social Muslim’ never thinking that someday it might be an advantage. Shamika followed her husband, lovingly, but tended to backslide to Baptist sometim
es.
They were the only known American Muslims in the US colony in Izmir and the Turks looked after them like pet cats, helping them shop the bazaars, feeding them bits of Turkish and Mosque Arabic, and showed them off—in cabarets, at their homes, at the prayers. The Americans, including Jamel’s Commanding Officer, treated them with curiosity and cautious ‘sensitivity.’
On their way out of the apartment building, Isabel reminded Barney of their supper date at Jamel and Shamika’s in the evening. They’d wear their new caftans—Jamel and Shamika relaxed in long slinky-looking caftan gowns all the time, while they sat around looking like the Mertzes…
They had learned so much from those two. Learned how blank their own years of living in institutions had left them. Learned about high emotion; watching them argue so heatedly that Barney and Isabel thought the floor would split beneath them. Then, amazingly, Shamika would approach Jamel, he still silent and pouting—touch his arm and say:
“Y’hungry?”
“Ummm, ain’t had nuthin’…” he’d reply.
“Let me get you sumthin’…” And it would be over. They would step in to each other. The meal would be superb, with plenty for all of them. Barney and Isabel had never seen that kind of anger or love or good food or much of anything else in their orphanage and college cocoons.
They had dealt with each other and the world on the surface, jokingly, always imitating, always working to learn the rules and abide by them.
They had gone about their lovemaking like curious rabbits—and their sessions hadn’t lasted much longer, until Jamel, big brother patient smile on his noble-looking mahogany face, briefed Barney on the rudiments of foreplay, delay, and after play. Barney showed Isabel and she ran out and proclaimed him a God from the balcony, knowing Izmir wouldn’t hear or care.
Upstairs
Shamika let them in; her pretty, pecan-colored face bright and welcoming. A peach satin caftan clung to her tall lean shape as she “oohhed” Barnibel’s new look. (Jamel had contracted their names into ‘Barnibel’ and it grew into their nickname). The room was immaculate and plush; Shamika’s maid, Fatima, was one of the best in town. There were about eight other guests and Jamel also came to greet them and draw them into the group.
