Neighbors

As I was growing up, we had neighbors, a brother and sister, living down the street. My sisters, who are much older than me, used to call the brother “baldie”. He was, as it said, bald, tall, thin and slightly lame in one leg. He must have been over 60 years old when he and his sister started to attract my young attention. The sister, who was a few years younger, had wide green eyes and looked distinctive for two main reasons. She always wore a coat even in the hottest days of summer and she had unmistakable outdated sense of fashion. I was not able to identify these two features in my early years of curiosity about them, but as I became older the coat and the old-fashioned look marked her off in my mind.

He apparently had no steady work. I used to see him walking around in the neighborhood in the afternoons with slow steps and serious, even grim, face. The sister, on the other hand, was going out and coming back home on fixed hours.

They could have been the-bit-weird-neighbors anybody could have, except for what my sisters told me about their past. The brother and sister had had another younger sister and they used to be very rich. They had been hosting lavish parties at their house for many years, and baldie was engaged to a beautiful woman. My sisters insisted that baldie himself was very handsome although I could not trace, in his shape at the time I was growing up, signs of old handsomeness.

According to my sisters, all changed dramatically in a short period of time. The young sister passed away, the parties stopped, the fiancée disappeared and the signs of wealth gradually faded. The brother fell ill and became paralyzed for a while before a recovery that left him with one lame leg.

Neither in their prosperous years nor in their austere times the brother and sister cared to extend social bridges with other neighbors, so we never knew the reasons behind the change in their life. My sisters' stories about the past were fascinating since I only knew those neighbors as the old poor silent brother and sister living down the street.

I recall an unusual incident that took place few years later. A loud part-time maid who used to clean their house, and other houses in the street as well, claimed one day that the brother exposed himself to her and decided not to work for them anymore, but the credibility of her claim remained debatable.

As they were discrete in life, they were in their death too. We did not know when baldie exactly passed away. The news spread that he died few months after his exact date of death. The sister lived alone for a while and then disappeared. She might have moved, passed away or just vanished. The house remained close for years before new residents came in.

I mentioned them to one of my sisters recently who she was quite surprised that I still recall them. I tried to remind her of some details but she said her memory was too cloudy to remember what I was saying.