Enzie, needless to say, was bitterly opposed to Genny’s “dog-and-pony evenings,” as she called them; but the balance of power had shifted. Genny dug in her heels and refused to back down. Hadn’t she always done every last thing Enzie wanted? Hadn’t she cooked and cleaned and generally been an exemplary homemaker since before puberty? Hadn’t she abandoned her home from one day to the next, all for the sake of Enzie’s work? Now it was her turn, and long overdue. They were living in the middle of the most fascinating city in the world, and she was damned if she was going to pretend that they lived in a bunker.
“All right, then,” Enzie grunted at last, scrambling to reach stable ground. “You can have your little dinners, if they mean so much to you. But no more than once a month. And no questions about my work, you understand?” She clenched her eyes shut. “This is important, Genny. This is wichtig. No talk about the future whatsoever.”
“There’s a war on, dear, in case you haven’t noticed,” Genny said, taking a drag of her Virginia Slim. “The whole world might get atomized tomorrow. The last thing anyone wants to talk about is the future.”
* * *
If it strikes you as bizarre, Mrs. Haven, that my aunts should have thrown open their apartment, once a month, to both the dregs and the elite of late-sixties Manhattan, you’d be no more confounded than Enzie herself. And it was arguably the surprise of her duration (barring her later discoveries re: the chronoverse and the subjective mind) that she came to enjoy Genny’s soon-to-be-notorious Wednesday nights at least as much as her wayward sister did. The first dozen or so were harmless enough — assorted Bowery hopheads, a neighbor or two, the token physics grad student for Enzie to browbeat into a corner — but the mélange of Genny’s extravagant cooking, Enzie’s nutty-professor routine, and the sheer incongruity of the two of them there, in that apartment, in that neighborhood, at that particular juncture in the fourth dimension, proved an irresistible cocktail to Aquarian-era New York. Much was made of the sisters’ obvious lack of social cunning, and of the fact that they were never seen at anybody else’s parties — or in Enzie’s case, anywhere else at all. Scores of rumors entered circulation, none of them flattering, each of them heightening the Tolliver sisters’ mystique. Freaks were en vogue in those years, after all, and Enzie and Genny fit the bill superbly. It’s not beyond the realm of possibility, either, that they took a half-conscious pleasure in baffling all attempts to comprehend them. There can be safety, of a kind, in being misperceived.
A slew of anecdotal portraits were written about my aunts after their deaths: some affectionate, some lurid, a few of them nearly book-length. All the standard explanations were put forward. Often as not, the gossip rags viewed them as an old sapphic couple — incestuous, possibly, but more likely not sisters at all — which rumor neither of them seems to have discouraged. They were photographed often, and appear to have enjoyed striking poses: Carl Van Vechten took a snapshot (later much reproduced) showing Genny in a rumpled and corseted ball gown, and Enzie in a lab coat, playing the mad scientist to the hilt, resting her hands on her sister’s plump hips in what can only be described as a proprietary manner. Genny, for her part, is staring into the camera more frankly than I ever saw her do in life, secure in the knowledge that only a handful of people would see the result.
It’s not the least of the ironies in this history, Mrs. Haven, that this portrait would be reproduced in every newspaper in New York just a few decades later.
Van Vechten was far from the sisters’ only illustrious guest during their heyday, though their quota of Bowery bums and shop clerks never wavered. Harry Smith was a regular, entertaining all comers with his trick of tying human figures out of string; Eldridge Cleaver, by at least three accounts, showed up one night in ’69 with Sinatra’s stepdaughter — the one who couldn’t sing — but split when he saw William F. Buckley stagger drunkenly out of the loo. The dinners had become huge productions by then, almost monstrous: one night Genny counted fifty-seven dirty champagne flutes. The Aga Khan graced the General Lee, as did Joe Dallesandro, Charles Mingus, Buckminster Fuller, and Joan Didion, who published an account of her visit when “The Tolliver Case” was the talk of the town. I include it here in its entirety.
ENZIAN AND GENTIAN TOLLIVER: A
THOUGHT EXPERIMENT.
It’s a pretty nice evening and not much is happening so someone suggests that we go see the Sisters. Not having any idea who the Sisters might be, I wonder aloud whether they won’t object — it’s past ten o’clock on a Wednesday — but LaMont waves my question aside. “They’re having one of their nights,” he says, as if that explains things.
Who are the Sisters? I ask.
“The Sisters,” LaMont says again, with feeling. “Those crazy shut-in birds in Spanish Harlem.”
I remind him, politely, that I’ve only just arrived from Sacramento.
“They’re hermits,” says Jessup, coming to my rescue. “At least the older one is. She’s a physicist or something, but she spends all her time in that crumbly flat in that crumbly building with the ridiculous name. It’s called the General Lee, if you can believe it. And it’s smack in the middle of Harlem.”
The General Lee, it turns out, is what one might expect — a poor man’s Dakota in soot-stained concrete — but the Sisters are another thing entirely. One is plump and wide-eyed and childlike, and the other reminds me, to a startling degree, of Joan Crawford in the role of Mildred Pierce. There is only a strangeness about the eyes, and a kind of desperate indifference to fashion, to hint at the kinship between them. They are named, apparently, after a species of Austrian herb. Their accents are unclassifiable. One doesn’t think of them paying electric bills, or using the telephone, or addressing one another by their Christian names.
“It’s time for a ‘Mischung!’” the more compact sister, the one named Gentian, announces at the top of her voice. “Everybody switches to the right!”
We all change seats as directed, with the exception of the Sisters themselves. The feeling is not so much of a dinner party as of teatime in some rarefied asylum. The table sags under the weight of a huge mass of china, nearly all of it filthy. The party seems to have been going on for as long as anybody can remember.
It’s always six o’clock, I say to the guest on my left, an eager young man from Montevideo. To my surprise he recognizes the quote, and completes it for me, as if we’re exchanging a password.