Beatriz’s family, the Montebiancos, lived on the corner opposite the Pond Lady. Senhor Montebianco was some kind of cultural attaché at the Brazilian embassy and worked with museums and galleries around Washington. He was extremely handsome, and I got the same wiggly feeling seeing him as I did watching Clipper on Sky King, or Mary Martin and Cyril Ritchard in Peter Pan—I loved their tights. Senhor Montebianco wore slim, beautiful suits, and smiled warmly with big white teeth like piano keys. Sometimes he smelled faintly of something like my grandmother’s Shalimar, but how could that be? We played with Beatriz, “an unbridled tomboy,” according to Dimma, who liked her in spite of this because she had nice manners that might rub off on me. She was Max’s age, and smart, funny, and tough. Beatriz didn’t go to school with us, but to Visitation, a Catholic girls’ school down in Georgetown. She had to wear a navy-blue uniform and her shiny black hair in long pigtails, so Max sometimes called her “Little White Dove,” from “Running Bear,” a popular song we boys liked. The Montebiancos were very religious. Brickie didn’t seem suspicious of them, although I’d heard him say to Dimma, “At least they’re not more goddamn Reds,” to which Dimma had replied, “That’s enough, John. Little pitchers.” Every morning, when we began our trek to Rosemary School, a good mile away, the Senhor, Beatriz, and her older brother went off in their Mercury Montclair, the Senhor and Beatriz waving enthusiastically and calling, “Oi! Tchau! See you later!”
The Shreves lived in a small, newish house next to the Montebiancos and across the lane from the Chappaquas. They were from Louisiana—Shreveport, they liked to point out—and they might as well have been from another country, too. We had more trouble understanding Mrs. Shreve than we did our foreign neighbors. We didn’t have a lot in common with the Shreve boys, Beau and Davis Lee, called D.L., and, although we sometimes played together, we were intimidated by them. They went to Bullis Prep and were mainly interested in baseball—playing it, as well as following the Senators and the team from where their dad had gone to college, a place the boys referred to as “Ella Shoe.” The Shreve boys believed that the Montebiancos had probably been Nazis because a lot of them hid in South America after the war. Beatriz’s older sister, Zariya, had blond hair, a thalidomide arm, which I’m sorry to say we referred to as a “flipper,” though not around Zariya or Beatriz, and was retarded, which Beau and D.L. thought proved their theory. I don’t think anyone else believed this; Brickie said it was “ridiculous and mean-spirited.” Beau and D.L. scorned our preoccupation with collecting butterflies—“Queers collect butterflies,” we were told. Their parents were nice, though. Mr. Shreve had gotten a big job at the FBI because he’d helped to send Earl Long to the nuthouse. He seemed dumb sometimes, and I had a notion that Brickie thought so, too, because he made fun of things like Mr. Shreve always wearing a walkie-talkie device on his belt.
Beside the Shreves, across the street from us lived my very best friend, Ivan Goncharoff. The Goncharoffs’ sprawling stucco bungalow—shrimp-colored—looked like something from the British Raj. It was pretty much the center of our universe because there was not a lot of supervision over there, and the enormous wraparound porch was a great place to play and skate on rainy days. But mainly we liked to hang out there because of Elena, Ivan’s gorgeous, fascinating aunt, whom we boys worshipped. We thought of her as the Goddess of Connors Lane. And we weren’t the only ones. We loved her because she was lovely, with long auburn hair, and she never appeared without eyeshadow and lipstick, just like a movie star, but also because she was lively and kind and always took an interest in the things we did. The Goncharoffs seemed fairly well-off, and Elena often took Max, Ivan, Beatriz, and me to movies at the Hiser, to get ice cream at Gifford’s, or on outings to Glen Echo amusement park, where she would ride on the hair-raising white roller coaster with us, not the pink one that chickens like Ivan and I preferred. Of course we loved her! Josef—Ivan called his father by his first name, and we were allowed to, too—had been ambassador to Mexico but was now “between assignments,” according to Ivan, who thought it was because his father had a heart condition. Brickie put it another way: He’d been “recalled” by President Eisenhower for “some unpleasantness.” Josef and Elena, brother and sister, had come to America from the Ukraine when they were young, to get away from Stalin, but even so, the Soviet connection didn’t endear Josef to my grandparents. Or at least that’s what I thought, although their misgivings might have been about Elena, about whom I’d overheard Brickie say, “consorts with unsavory refugees.” Because of all that, Brickie and Dimma didn’t like us hanging around the Goncharoffs’, but they liked us hanging around our house even less. They approved of Ivan, though, because he was sweet, quiet, and studious—and I think they may have felt sorry for him. Josef and Elena didn’t get along at all; they had loud, disturbing arguments. Ivan didn’t get along with his father, either—he never wanted me and Max to come over if Josef was home. Luckily, he was not around much and was often away for a week or two. Ivan’s mother had taught Spanish at B-CC, the local high school, but she’d died after having Ivan’s younger brother and sister, twins, and that was when Josef had brought Elena to Washington—to help take care of Ivan and the toddlers. The household was pretty much run by Maria, the housekeeper, who’d come with the family from Mexico and lived in the Goncharoffs’ attic. Maria was the enforcer but mainly was busy with Katya and Alexander, who ran naked most of the time, going jungle-potty, causing Dimma to declare that “too European” for her and the neighborhood. Which didn’t make any sense, considering all the Europeans who lived on the street, but it was just another thing that was said that I didn’t understand. Ivan rarely talked about his mother, although I knew he missed her. It was part of the strong bond that existed between us, missing our mothers, and surely a part of why we clung to Elena like little limpets.
Last, next to the Goncharoffs, were the Allgoods. They were old, and we largely ignored them, but they had a high school–aged daughter, Dawn, who was blond and almost pretty, but mean and not a good babysitter. She was viciously jealous of Elena. Dawn occasionally babysat if my grandparents were desperate enough, and she took great pleasure in beating me and Ivan at Chinese checkers. Max said his sister said Dawn was a “b-i-t-c-h,” and we were inclined to agree.