Our end of Connors Lane was populated by an intriguing array of mostly international families. The De Haans lived next door in a big new house shoehorned onto a lot too close to ours, according to my grandparents. The De Haans were Dutch and had two boys, Kees and Piet. I didn’t play with them much because they didn’t go to Rosemary School with me but to Beauvoir—a school where Europeans sent their children who were in danger of becoming too American. Kees and Piet dressed nicely and were opposed to getting dirty, which didn’t sit too well with me and my two best friends, Max and Ivan. Max had heard his dad say that General de Haan had been a Nazi sympathizer during World War II. I couldn’t understand why, if he was the enemy, he hadn’t been hanged or shot by a firing squad and was living freely in America, but apparently it was the fault of “lily-livered, bleeding-heart eggheads” like Adlai Stevenson, according to the father of the Shreve boys down the street. The General was tall, with an imposing gut, and dressed impeccably in wool vests and velvety moleskin pants, even in summer. Like Kees and Piet, he slicked back his hair, which in his case only accentuated his baldness. I never saw him smile. They’d built a small, ridiculously blue swimming pool—very unusual for Chevy Chase back then—and it was wunderbar, but Max was never invited to swim because he was Jewish, and then we were all banished for something atrocious we’d done to Kees and Piet to get back at them for excluding Max. We deeply regretted what we did, or so I said in an apology note Dimma had made me hand-deliver, but mainly our regret had to do with not being allowed in their pool. My grandmother occasionally had tea with Madame de Haan, who had crammed their house with lovely old European antiques “No doubt acquired from their Jewish neighbors,” Brickie said. But Dimma enjoyed their Old World culture and felt sorry for Madame. “She must be twenty years younger than he is,” she told my grandfather. “He doesn’t even let her drive.”
“Of course he doesn’t,” Brickie said. “Because she would drive the hell away. Just like, I might add, those one hundred thousand Dutch Jews who would’ve liked to.”
The Friedmanns, Max’s family, on the other side of the De Haans, didn’t want Max playing with Piet and Kees, even though the Dutch boys were polite and much better behaved than Max and Ivan and I were. The Friedmanns had escaped Austria before the war, after the Anschluss. They lived in a brownish, decrepit farmhouse that was cool and dim inside and smelled like pineapple. I thought this was because Mrs. Friedmann baked a lot, maybe with special Jewish ingredients, but Dimma said that the aroma was due to “lax housekeeping.” I’d pointed out that at least it didn’t reek of Clorox and ammonia, like our house after our maid, Estelle, cleaned. Things were just old and worn out. The Friedmanns were kind of poor by our neighborhood’s standards because they’d had to leave everything behind when they fled Austria. The nicest things in the house were the handsome bookshelves Mr. Friedmann had built to hold their many books, some of which were in Hebrew. Mr. Friedmann had been an electrical engineer in Austria, but now tuned pianos and fixed clocks and radios and tended a huge vegetable garden in their backyard. Mrs. Friedmann wore peasant skirts and kept her salt-and-pepper hair in a long braid down her back. She went to a lot of meetings at their synagogue, Adas Israel in Cleveland Park, and read newspapers in other languages, like Esperanto. Brickie called them “beatniks, but without the jazz and poetry.” But he occasionally helped Mr. Friedmann with his garden, and loaned him records. In return we got delicious tomatoes, and sometimes his prized watermatoes; a successful experiment in crossing cherry tomatoes with watermelons. Their tabby cat was named Wiesie, for Simon Wiesenthal, because, as Max said, “She stalks and executes mice like Wiesenthal with the Nazis.” Since Max was going on ten, a year older than Ivan and I, he liked to be the authority on things, and his much older sister was a rich repository of teenage wisdom. Max informed us about things like how babies were made, and born, which was so disturbing it couldn’t possibly be true. He also knew what queers did—mate with guys—doubly unimaginable.
In the house beyond the Friedmanns lived an ancient spinster, Miss Prudence Braddock, neighborhood doyenne by virtue of being one of the original inhabitants on Connors Lane before the farm had been divided up and sold off. We never saw her and we were told to leave her alone and stay out of her yard—she didn’t like children, possibly because our baseballs often threatened her spectacular lavender azaleas, which were as ancient as she was and as big as rooms. She owned a magnificent dollhouse full of tiny, precious furnishings she’d collected over her long lifetime. Dimma and my mother had been invited to see it, but not Liz, still deemed a kid, nor our Brazilian friend, Beatriz—Miss Braddock didn’t like foreigners, either. Beatriz didn’t really care, but my sister was sorely disappointed and she vowed to break into Miss Braddock’s to get a look. “She’s mean, and she’s going to die any minute, anyway,” Liz said. And eventually die she did, and the dollhouse went to the Smithsonian, without any of us children ever getting a look.
The Andersens lived on the other side of us. Mr. Andersen was an artist; I don’t know why they lived in Washington, or where they’d come from. They were very “modern,” Dimma said, not admiringly; their immaculate Craftsman home featured a carefully tended yard, new Danish furniture, and a ferocious charcoal-colored Giant Schnauzer named Foggy, who we believed was mainly there to keep us off their property. Even though he was behind a fence, we were terrified of him—he hated all living things but especially us, possibly because we often threw magnolia-pod hand grenades at him. Once we’d seen him eat a box turtle whole, like it was a chocolate-chip cookie, and a regrettable thing had happened not too long before involving the Shreves’ cat and Estelle, our maid. Dimma believed the Andersens looked down on us as déclassé, and she declared that they “put on airs,” and were “dour,” which I took to mean boring, but they had spectacular arguments that were anything but. There was an angry daughter a little younger than Liz—Maari—who was even scarier than my sister. Max and Ivan and I had once seen Maari break a baseball bat when she was emphasizing where she thought home plate should be, and this was so impressive we steered clear of her. And there was a three-year-old we called Punchy Jane because she held her hands in fists and worked her elbows fiercely when she walked.
Next to the Andersens were the Wormy Chappaquas, so-called because they’d given me worms, or at least Dimma decided they had, possibly because their skin was a dark gray. They were new to Connors Lane from a place called Chappaqua, which we decided must be an Indian reservation, maybe explaining their skin color. We didn’t play with the three girls because they were girls, and too young, but we were intrigued with what they referred to as the Mess: a tiny car with all kinds of strange gadgets. It had only three wheels and opened from the front. My grandfather said it was made from the nose gear of a German Messerschmitt warplane, and, “Who in hell would want to drive around in a piece of crap like that? How many people were killed by that thing?” We would have loved to drive it around, and I guess I got the worms from them the one time we went over there and tried to bully the girls into letting us play Sputnik in it. Brickie said we’d be traitors if we played in it, and Mr. Friedmann told Max he agreed. It’s possible they were kidding, but we took it to heart.
At the corner of Connors and Brookville was the Pond Lady, whose yard, tangled with vines, featured a brown pond that obsessed us, although, like Miss Braddock’s yard, the pond was off-limits to us. Of course, this hadn’t stopped us from twice sneaking in to meddle with the pond creatures, most notably an albino frog we named Peachy because of his pale, rosy body, which we could see through. His insides looked like M&M’s. We’d gotten caught last time by Josephine, the Pond Lady’s helper, who yelled at us but never told on us, maybe because she and Estelle were friends. The Pond Lady lived in an iron lung that we were keen to get a gander at—I’d described it to Max and Ivan as similar to a personal-size submarine or a coffin, based on a terrifying movie my dad took me to see—The Monolith Monsters—in which a lady was in an iron lung because of some radioactive meteorites. Brickie said the Pond Lady wrote spy books that were “grossly inaccurate,” but because she was British, Dimma approved of her—the piece in the Whitman’s Sampler filled with Nut Honey Caramel, as opposed to the weirder Liquid Pineapples.