The staircase leading up to our neighbor’s front porch is crumbling. The paint is flaking off and splinters of wood, sometimes whole boards, are falling onto a patch of garden alongside our house. This has been happening since Mrs. Lederer’s death three months ago, almost as if her life force, even away in a nursing home, were the only thing holding her house together.
The front of the yard was kept free of leaves and litter through the efforts of Anna, a grossly underpaid and overworked servant who remained mysteriously loyal to Mrs. L. It was through Anna that we got most of the dirt about our neighbor. Anna had only to appear on the front stoop for those of us with nothing better to do than collect gossip to surround her. And Anna was only too happy to spill the beans.
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“But if she’s so horrible, why do you care?”
The old house next to hers, which had a big garden on a second lot, was torn down, and a billboard went up picturing an impressive edifice: the Cleveland Street Mansion. This building was to fill the two properties right up to their borders. A variance was needed, and a paper arrived for Mrs. L. by special messenger. Anna reported that Mrs. Lederer gave orders not to accept the letter: she was against signatures of any type, Anna said, and against the intrusion of strange documents into her house. There followed a period of frantic phone calls from the developer, calls the lady hung up on. When the calls persisted, Mrs. L. refused to answer the phone at all. One day the developer came in person to her door and rang the bell. Anna was instructed to go down and tell him to go away. After that the developer used every device to get through to Mrs. L.–the mail, Western Union, Federal Express, leaflets promising increased property values for neighbors of the Cleveland Street Mansion–but nothing worked. What was the reason for this adamant resistance? we asked. Was Mrs. L. prejudiced against ostentation? Was she secretly an environmentalist, demonstrating against wall-to-wall buildings? None of these, Anna told us. “She just don’t like to sign her name to nothing. And she doesn’t want me doing it for her neither.”
“Every time I say something, she tells me I’m in her will and I’ll get some good money when she’s gone.” Anna sighed miserably. “I don’t know if I’ll last. I’m not well myself anymore.”
More members of Mrs. Lederer’s family appeared: two younger Oklahomans and a few women who might have been their wives or sisters. The men were even taller and heavier than their father, with thick black beards, the women spry and skinny; all of them dressed in T-shirts and jeans. Their van was even bigger than their father’s, and they backed it up across the sidewalk to the bottom of the front steps. They thundered up and down to the second floor, bearing furniture, dishes, small electric appliances, and Mrs. Lederer’s trunk. The junk they deposited in the alley: a sizable amount of carpeting, green with yellow flecks, and heaps of drab clothing. I noticed that even the scavengers rifling through our garbage cans took a pass on Mrs. Lederer’s throwaways.
