|
Miniatures
Excerpt
Byzantium
I,
Fern Alice Jacobi, being of sound mind and body, being
neither a borrower nor lender, being of upright stature
with opposable thumbs, born under the sign of the crab
with an ascendant in fire, borne from the past into
certain and unredeemable failure; shy, aloof, defensive,
intolerant, bitter, once innocent, twice denied; being
prone to excess but free from addiction; I, being all
these things and less, swear to tell the truth, the
whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me God.
Truth #1: I am sitting before a Smith-Corona typewriter
and have allotted myself exactly three days to compile
this memoir. At midnight on January third in the year
of our Lord, 1999, I promise I will remove my fingers
from the keys and commit this document to the ashes
of apples and earth where it belongs. My typewriter
will be transformed into a pumpkin, and I, glass slippers
and party dress restored to rags, will suffer to fall
off the page and disappear forever. My time choice is
arbitrary. My mode is ink. My method is confession.
These truths are situational. Others are relative, suspect,
or ugly. Watch out for them; they may leave scars or
stain the carpet. Truth #2: I am not a biographer. I
admit this readily and offer it as both apology and
explanation. I find myself in the awkward position of
having to tell the story of a woman whom I never met
and who died several years before I was born. Did she,
does she need me to defend her? Of course not. But let's
say history needs a slap in the face to wake it from
its own nightmare. Let's say that she, Frances Warren
Lieb, the first wife of Owen and predecessor to Brigid
needs me far less than I need her. Things in life have
roots in death. There's a rarefied pearl of wisdom for
you, a new catchphrase for the dress-in-black crowd,
a painful anodyne for what ails us all. We can't escape
ourselves so let's join the party! Don't you ever feel
that the age-old homilies are all lies? That whatever
does not kill you, does not, in fact, make you stronger?
Stopped clocks may be right more than twice a day? All
roads lead to roam? Don't you ever feel outraged by
the grand conspiracy that is life in general and your
own life in particular? Whatever you have thought or
dreamed or run from, believe that. Believe this: they
are out to get you. And if they could get to her, to
Franny, the first Mrs. Lieb, they can get to anyone.
So please, I implore you, read on with skepticism. I
hope that you cannot find it in yourself to believe
me. You like books that promise either facts or the
revelation of mysteries. You don't like to sit on the
fence. I know, I know, I feel the same way myself. It
is only that in attempting to tell this story, to tell
the truth, I find I don't even know what that
word means and really, honestly, I cringe every time
I strike those keys. I feel like a beleaguered cheerleader:
T is for the time we spent together; R is for-; well,
you get the idea. Read the biographies. Run your own
set of tests. Hire professionals. I wish none of my
story were true and that ultimately your disbelief will
offer me some respite, hope that perhaps I am merely
delusional, wrong, untrustworthy, that not only did
these events not transpire, but that these people, myself
included, do not exist. Having undertaken the idea,
having recalled and recollected and become perhaps vengeful,
perhaps authoritative, but more than anything else,
having become-I know too what I have so long
denied and feared. I remember everything.
These
are the facts as I recall them. During the months of
September and October of 1990 I found myself employed
by a married couple of modest fame, ill repute, and
certainly, more than anything else, beauty. And while
I had heard of them, or more specifically of him, of
Owen Lieb, I had never encountered or contacted them
before that autumn. I was initially hired for a single
project, perhaps two or three days, but we all seemed
so happy together; we were strangers in a strange land.
It was so naturally unnatural, that they asked me to
stay on with them. Or rather, he asked me to live with
them as a companion to his young wife who was fragile
and lonely. He worried that she would not last through
the oncoming winter in such a desolate location. I did
not think about ghosts or history, about the ridiculousness
of my own guilt and innocence, my susceptibility, no,
no, my inability to understand the game being played
around me. It begins now, my story, no more digressions,
no further preambles. It begins and began in September
on a day all of sun, but it will end on the night of
Halloween with a rainstorm that turned first into hail
and then unexpectedly into snow which fell and did not
stop until twelve inches had accumulated and blanketed
the tiny fishing villages and farms all along Galway
Bay to our house near the western seacoast. The three
of us were trapped, yes, I suppose that is the word
for it, trapped, together and perhaps we thought it
was the end of the world, because for some reason we
were all impelled to tell the truth, to reveal our secrets
and scars and tattoos. The whole truth and nothing but
the. So help me.At
the time of the events in question I was twenty-one
years old. Frances Warren Lieb was thirty years dead.
Owen Lieb was a thousand and barely looked fifty, while
his young wife, Brigid Lieb née Pearce of Indianola,
Iowa was twenty-nine. We are the major characters in
this strange little drama. I regret that the ending
of this story will be less than happy. Although I have
not yet written it, I can tell you that as I foresee
it, as the events play out again and again in my memory,
exactly, so that the most minute details do not change
from year to year or dream to dream, I can see the white
nightdress Brigid wore as she came down the staircase
on the night of the storm and how she held the banister
and the sharp perfect angle of her elbow awkwardly turned
out as she misstepped and almost fell, but then caught
herself and smiled down at us and said in her familiar
tone, gone now, lost now: How's that for an entrance?
And often too I see Lieb take his wife by her thin
delicate arm and lead her to the sofa, and it seemed
that he loved her, and no one in the world could doubt
that. It was only for the sake of Brigid that I came
back.There
have been any number of books about Frances Warren Lieb.
This is not one of those books, not in the strict sense.
She, in her lifetime, wrote two and published only one
novel. You probably own it. You may have certain passages
memorized. Owen Lieb has, to date, eighteen books, no,
there was a new one only last month, so make that nineteen
books to his credit. Three are psychological novels;
there is a play or two, screen adaptations, a translation
of the complete works of an unpopular French Symbolist
poet, a strangely obfuscating memoir about his boyhood,
two volumes of poetry, and the rest, however many that
adds up to, are short prose. When she was twenty-five
Brigid Lieb published a slim and pretty collection of
stories, Julia's Room, about an unhappy Midwestern
girl out of place at an Eastern college, a girl who
begins to drink overly much and in the final award-winning
title story meets a dark and mysterious character not
unlike Owen Lieb himself. On the cover of the paperback
edition there is a soft-focused photograph of a vanity
table strewn to look carefully careless with girlish
collectibles: lipsticks, a romance novel, matchbooks,
a painted china kitten, diaphragm case, wrist corsage
of pink roses, a string of pearls. They are, all in
all, the Liebs, mister and his various missuses, a bookish
and prolific lot. Brigid,
during those brief months of our acquaintance, was at
work on her second book, a biography. It took perhaps
nine, maybe more than ten years to finally complete-but
it was for her a new homeland, the one place in the
world where she felt truly safe. She set up house in
that book. She arranged the words like furniture, reupholstered,
stripped down, polished up, decorated with clever throw
pillows, dreamed, restored, replaced. Nonfiction offered
her all of the amenities and little pain of the past.
So it is no wonder, you see, that she had no real incentive
to finish. She wasn't tearing across the keys at my
frantic and fevered pace trying to sweat the sickness
of a story out of her system. There is no nostalgia
or fondness here; there is nothing pretty. I'm in the
mood to smash the remaining evidence; anything left,
anything delicate, I'll shatter. Anything flammable,
I'll set aflame. I want nothing more than what you see
around me. This room: imagine it. This is the place
where stories are told without regard to continuity
or consequence. Every bodice-ripper and tale of international
espionage, each penny-ante mystery novel that you read
into ragged submission-cover torn, pages thumbed, fingerprints
of strawberry jam like the trail left by the reckless
killer himself-it was, they were written in this room
on a black typewriter that sits on a desk beside a window
outside of which snow has either just stopped falling
or is falling fast on all the foreign cities and towns
and forgotten avenues of the past. This place is nothing
more than a shell of necessity. There may be a bed;
there must be a bath? And enough paper to last through
the next ice age.. I've set the dial on the time machine
to return me home in exactly three days. Why three?
Why not three thousand? Or seven days, after the mode
of the Lord's creation? Perhaps because I don't want
to dwell on the events. I want to rid myself of them.
With this limited time frame, you have my assurance;
I'll stick to the facts. I won't wander off course.
I'll tell my story and then get out before I can do
any more damage. I've seen how it happens in the movies;
the longer one spends reliving the past the less chance
there is to get out unscathed. I could alter atoms and
events by mistake. I could change outcomes with a keystroke.
Could it happen like that? Could I become trapped back
there, the ghost of autumns past? Cloaked in a cape,
with broomstick and scythe, condemned to an eternity
of bobbing for apples? The headless horseman lobbing
rotten eggs at sweet-faced kids in Superman suits? A
waterlogged witch sinking in a bathtub? I am and have
been certain of so few things in my life, but I know
that I will finish this story, not necessarily in a
stylish or pretty way, perhaps in a manner that will
best be described as brutal, traitorous, or self-destructive,
but I will finish because. Well, because I have
a mean streak or believe in what I can only call, no
matter how idiotic it sounds, cosmic justice; because
I am vengeful; because. I'll leave it at that. While
I will finish for the sake of being done with the entire
sordid mess, Brigid never wanted to leave the pages
of the epic biography that she felt held within its
monumental reach and grasp the ghost of her own beginnings.
Of course, I admit I have not seen her since the night
of the storm. Do you want again to see her coming down
the stairs that night to make her grand entrance? I
do. I wish I could more than recollect the pale nightdress,
her unloosened hair, bare feet missing footing a step
to slip to fall to catch herself by and for and with
the grace of her thin bare arms to catch the banister.
And the rain had, I think, already begun. Owen Lieb
stood by the window and parted the curtains.I
was at this time, among other things, painfully shy,
nervous, lost, and full of an aimless and unrequited
self-loathing. And if I was not happy, I cannot say
that I was, in fact, unhappy. I was incendiary, wayward,
and moody. Or was I sleepy, docile, and undemanding?
I admit that my personality changed, fluctuated according
to the independent axis of my life: whatever I was reading
at the time. For a long time I favored biographies.
It's funny, no, strange to temper the past and announce
with polite authority and discriminating taste, I
favored biographies-when the truth is, I used to
crave them, biographies. As a child I took a morbid
and yet educational pleasure in reading the deathbed
scenes and breakfast menus of historical figures. Why?
Did it make them more real, or me more heroic because
much like Nathaniel Hawthorne I too tended to run the
other way when walking down a street at dusk I recognized
in the half-light the face of someone I knew but to
whom I could not bear to speak? Hawthorne took to wearing
a black veil and ran into the woods to avoid conversation.
Sweet young Mary Shelley learned to read tracing the
inscription on her mother's tombstone. Heidegger ate
seasoned pork sausage fried with onions every morning.
Flaubert died a raving syphilitic. Ida McKinley, the
President's wife, knitted slippers to make the hours
pass. In one year she knit 3,500 pairs of booties. The
Marquis de Sade spent thirteen years in prison for poisoning
prostitutes with the aphrodisiac cantharides. The extracted
heart of ten-year-old Louis XVII, the lost dauphin,
was wrapped in a handkerchief and kept by an attending
physician as a souvenir. Need I go on? And while I knew
on some level that biography as a genre, as a subset
of the truth, was morally wrong in its subjective re-creations
of lives better left for dead and dust-I could not stop
myself from wandering the aisles of the library or buying
thick paperbacks whose midsections shined with the promise
of glossy photo inserts picturing how the world was
once, when everyone was younger, when we were all civilized.
I know it is and was all a lie, the first lie, the only
lie-that any given life can be detailed, inventoried
with some semblance of truth or connection to reality-but
still I read about Jackie-O, Benjamin Franklin, Elvis
Presley, Florence Nightingale, Dostoevsky facing the
firing squad, Tina Turner and her rocky years with Ike,
Lizzy Borden took an axe, Edie Sedgewick, Ingmar Bergman's
youthful embrace of Nazi ideology; there were pop idols,
inventors, film stars, brave doctors who fought disease,
saints who suffered, presidents, pornographers, authors,
royalty, comedians, athletes, models, and murderers.
I never truly gave up on biographies, but gradually
I began, no, I forced myself to look to other genres,
to explore mysteries and romance novels. And while for
a brief time they made me happy and brought a slightly
pink-cheeked delusional pleasure to my uncertain young
life, they did not offer the guilty and morally bankrupt
thrill of opening a new biography for the first time
and allowing yourself, myself, to become entirely from
breakfast scraps to deathbed rigors, someone else. A
girl can dream, I suppose, although most of the time
she shouldn't. Most of the time she should run into
the woods and never look back. I regret that my running
has left me wary of strangers and tourists with cameras
strapped around their necks, and yes, yes, familiar
faces who approach me in the twilight but then as they
near me, I know, I am relieved to find they are always
strangers, and I drift back into anonymity as I become
to them, to myself, to anyone on the darkening avenue,
a passerby.
It was on a bright morning that I set out by bicycle
for my journey. I was hired by the Liebs to clean their
house. They did not hire me specifically; they happened
to contract the cleaning service for which I was working,
illegally, yes, paid out under the table in lodging
and incomprehensible foreign bills, in morning tea and
cream biscuits. Was it an anonymous choice, a strange
vagary of fate that caused me to be sent to the Lieb
house instead of the other cleaning girl (what was her
name? Ellen? Eileen? Or, no Aileen, who wasn't feeling
well that day-the flu? A cold? Perhaps an allergic reaction
to shellfish? Something that required a week of bed-rest
and broth.), and thus, inadvertently my story was set
in motion? Or did it start when my parents packed me
overseas less out of desire for me to see the world
and have madcap adventures than to separate me from
the boy I was seeing, for whom they did not, cough,
cough, in particular care? Maybe it began years before
when I was a child and haunted the library stacks like
a store detective in search of shoplifters. When does
anything start? Not at the beginning, but only at the
moment of re-creation, the lie. It begins only now when
I see how it was then but tempered with the knowledge
of how it will all undo itself. I packed a knapsack
with an apple, Jackie Collins's Hollywood Wives,
orange soda, and a sweater. I had been told that a box
of cleaning supplies, gloves, solvents, and the like
would be waiting inside the house for me, and a key
would be under a flowerpot near the front door. Was
it a mythic journey on which I set out that morning?
Was this the beginning or had it begun years before?
I hated myself; did I mention that part? Because I was
self-centered and lived in a proverbial dreamworld,
because each journey was mythic, each boy was the
one, all memories brought me to tears, and every
story had to revolve, if only by virtue of first person
narration, around me.There
I was. Fern. Can you see me? Pedaling my bicycle on
that warm autumn morning into a wind that promised the
underside of the cold months ahead. There I go, riding,
aimless, idiotic, unsuspecting, all twenty-one years
and three months of me, the kind, the sort of girl who
falls through the cracks willingly, and if not cheerfully
then waving up at the onlookers as she careens downward.
While I'm on the subject of confessions, I'll tell you
something else: she, that girl, doesn't seem very much
like me. I don't think she even looks like, you know,
resembles me. She is a little taller. Her eyes seem
suspiciously blue. She is after a fact another Fern
entirely, a fiction, but a truthful one; we are less
ourselves in the past because we didn't know, we couldn't
know what would happen and how innocent we would seem
when finally forced to put that version of ourselves
into words. But let's get back to that girl. She is
almost there, almost winding her way up the ruined drive
speckled and spattered with windfall apples. It is impossible;
there is still time for her to turn back.Unlike
the Liebs I was neither by nature nor trade a writer.
I was then simply another girl who graduated from college
without plans or hopes and allowed herself to be pulled
along, twisted into one of those last-minute knots of
fate. And for a while, I admit again, there was a young
man and we shared a terribly happy unhappiness against
the scenic backdrop of a Midwestern college town, but
then, as you can imagine, it fell apart as those sorts
of things always do. My overly cautious parents, worried
that out of their five children, it was their only daughter
who showed precocious and intemperate wildness, exiled
me off to Europe as a graduation present. And I found
myself alone in Dublin, pretending to be foreign while
studying DART train maps with a duffel bag slung over
my shoulder. In my accumulated possession: glossy picture
postcards in the shape of beer bottles, a Bram Stoker
key ring purchased at the Irish Writers Museum right
down the street from the James Joyce Museum on Parnell
Square where on a sunny weekday afternoon I was overrun
by twenty-six French schoolchildren on holiday clamoring
Oolissee as they clattered down the staircase
(note: no curios bought then in the crowded gift shop;
I told myself I would go back, but of course I never
did), a tourist's cheap camera, coins, buttercream scones
wrapped in bakery paper, and an ever-dimming memory
of the boy at home who suffered painlessly, I was certain,
from the absolute lack of me. I headed by train up to
the north, but once there, after spending three rainy
August days in the ravages of the British Empire, after
innumerable cups of tea in shops where the reproving
face of Queen Elizabeth the Second stared down from
framed portraits, after a young man took my arm on an
empty street whose large parking lots were fenced in
and twisted with razor-wire and I was briefly thrilled
only to realize that I had wandered into an IRA control
zone and he was helping, not soliciting me, after the
girl at the concession counter at the Virgin Cineplex
in Belfast asked when I ordered popcorn: sweet or salty?
I left the north and found myself on a bus packed with
cheerful Swiss tourists en route to an oyster festival
in Galway, where Nora Joyce had grown up. It was as
likely a destination as any. I was that aimless. It
was in June of that year that I began to keep a notebook
into which I scrawled the intimate details of my travails.
Note: my three favorite books that summer were The
Myth of Sisyphus, Danielle Steele's Daddy,
and a tattered collection of Victorian erotica entitled,
The Pearl, found, strangely enough, abandoned
in a women's restroom in the airport in Amsterdam. Quoting
myself, August 30, 1990: My life is going to change.
I can feel it. And if it does not, what difference will
it make? Minus my French existentialist bitter twist
of lime at the end, was I right? Did I foresee the future
and how the next two months, how September which was
bright and burning, and October, a month all of rain,
would change the course, the past and future both, of
my life? In September the Liebs returned. And by October
the days became dark and we were forced too much, too
long to spend our hours together in the living room
with Brigid curled up on the sofa wearing her reading
glasses, her book fallen to the floor, the gray cat
sleeping precariously on her hip; Lieb in the armchair
reading aloud with contempt a film review from the newspaper;
while I with a bucket of oil soap and sponge scrubbed
clean the grime, the years, the dust from the mouldings
and baseboards. Oh please, stop, please, Brigid
used to say. Let's all pretend we're civilized. Oh
please, Fern, come here and sit with us. And the
dog, John Paul Jones, slept on through the rains, patiently,
long-suffering, the most faithful one of the bunch,
at Owen Lieb's slippered feet. And
I, not to confuse you, that is, the girl on the blue
bicycle who does not and cannot anticipate October even
in September, arrives, arrived at the house on that
day of sun and suspiciously promising wind. And it was
not without a certain amount of trepidation that I approached,
because I knew about the first Mrs. Lieb, the young
novelist who died an ocean away from her home in that
house during the coldest winter any biographer could
dream up, left alone with only her young son, she died,
and they taught us this in school: no one could save
her because she was unwilling to save herself. As rumors,
obituaries, and legends told it, she died at the age
of thirty in the second-story bathroom down at the end
of a long hallway, electrocuted in the bath while a
storm raged outside. And yes, some people said the place
was haunted; and many speculated that her death was
less than accidental, and that Owen Lieb never returned
out of fear of the worst sort of revenge-poetic justice
. For almost thirty years with only the benefit
of a caretaker visiting to clear away the refuse of
the seasons, the house had been abandoned; the windows
boarded over, the garden grown wild and then dying off
into bitter weeds and beehives, the drive ruined, the
orchard wracked. When I arrived for the first time that
morning, I felt if not a genuine foreboding, then a
sort of secondhand fear. My instincts (and on what else
could I rely?) told me that I should turn back, head
home, and forget I had ever seen the Lieb place.In
my defense, ladies and gentlemen, you sometime skeptics,
you who are prone to disbelief until the exact thrilling
moment that suspension is warranted, to you I will confess
all that is left of the truth. Something drew me in.
I could not turn back. Now in the course of remembering
that girl with her ragged fingernails, unruly curls,
legs speckled with mosquito bites, her inability to
drive a car or perform simple mathematics, her morbid
obsession with deathbed drama, her love of chocolate
bars, coffee too light with cream, pop songs on the
radio, her hyperopia, her flannel shirt with sleeves
rolled, charm bracelet jangling; in the course of re-creating
the image of that girl I am tempted to swing the pendulum
toward fiction and away from truth. Say instead she
does not get off her blue bicycle, but rather, seeing
the day has suddenly gone gray and threatens rain, she
takes it as an omen, a portent of ill favor, and turns
back in the direction from which she has just arrived.
And so she goes anti and against the sun and into a
future impossible to predict; but no, this will not
happen, because? Because today we are not in
the business of fiction. Today and forever in this story,
suffice it to say that this Fern, our Fern, the one
who comes always between us, approached, left her bicycle
in the high grasses of the ruined drive and proceeded
on toward the house.I
could not stop myself. Perhaps it was years of mystery
novels about proper old ladies sleuthing crimes and
uncovering bloody butter knives buried in the garden
among the zinnias. Perhaps it was the strange similarity
between the words mother and murder. I
left my bicycle in front of the house and then, to prolong
my indecision and fear and uncertainty, I walked around
back to the orchard. On the trees already were small
hard apples, row after row of trees having grown wild
and sweet from years of decadence, of sun and season.
I turned back to the house and went as I had been directed
to the front entrance only to find absence of both flowerpot
and hidden key. I was about to leave when as an afterthought
I tried the door. It did not resist me any more than
I can resist confessing to you. We will have to go carefully.
There are nails, shards of glass, and splinters on the
floor. I turned the handle and the door opened.Before
we go in, there is one more thing that I should tell
you. Do you know that maddening riddle about the man
who announces that he either always lies or else speaks
only the unadulterated truth? And the impossible convolutions
of logic that you go through to figure it out: is he
lying when he says he lies? And thus telling the truth?
Or is it the other way about? Does he lie when he says
he speaks the truth? How can anyone ever trust a storyteller?
Let me tell you, from here on trust neither the truth-teller
nor the liar; choose heads nor tails, rely on your own
intuition and cast the odds aside. Stop reading now
before we go into the house or promise me that you will
read this confession in its entirety and reserve judgment
on me and my story until our three days are concluded;
then you may announce: She lies! She speaks only
truth. God help us all.I
found myself in an unlighted vestibule and so moved
forward impelled by darkness, dust, shadow, by memory
and mothball, the musty odor of lives prematurely shut-up
and closed-down, by something read in a book and long
since willed away, a story dreamed and soon dismissed.
I ran my fingers over the velveteen wallpaper. And as
I walked down that dismal hallway I became less and
less myself until I was more and more the unlikely heroine
of a romance novel: an orphan, heiress, or innocent
aviatrix. At that moment, passing through the entryway
of the house as though some grand transforming mirror,
I could have been anyone at all. I stood in the kitchen
taking in the ruin of that once monumental room-its
marble counters and boarded-over hearth. I saw through
the darkness the work ahead of me, the generation of
neglect, haste in which the previous occupants had left,
an old calendar hanging on the wall, pots and pans still
years later drying on the drainboard. A door leading
from the kitchen outward into the rest of the house
was closed, but I knew as though I had been in those
rooms a hundred thousand times before that it would
lead to the living room and beyond that to the staircase
up to the second story where the bedrooms were, and
at the end of the hallway, the bath looking out, as
the books promised, onto a grove of lilacs. I pushed
through the doorway from the darkness of the kitchen
with the inexplicable awareness that there was no going
back. I opened the door.
It
was just briefly impossibly bright, first, and then
second, I was certain I heard whispering, so I feared
that it was true, ghosts-everywhere-and in the light
which disoriented me I turned by sound and then shape
and then saw the shrouded sofas and chairs, rolled rugs,
boxes, no one there, no one; I was alone. And then I
heard it again and so turned toward the western window,
or was it the east? There was sunlight where the slated
wood had been torn away-a crowbar on the floor, nails,
sheets, sawdust, her, a girl, yes, I saw her then on
the floor with her pale hair unloosened and her back
to the sun and her face toward me and her white shoulders
white, breasts bare. I should, of course, have seen
her immediately, but sometimes it is difficult to see
real people when you are in search of ghosts, and she
was real enough, the girl, naked in the sun, her eyes
closed. There was a man with her-at first I didn't see
him, or maybe I didn't want to see the two of them naked
amidst the dust and decay. He was obscured from me by
a shrouded heap of sheets. But then her eyes opened,
and I stood for a moment watching them before running
from the room with all the embarrassment that they themselves
did not feel. I ran from the house, and I recalled only
moments later as though it had happened years before-the
girl in the sun with her back to the window and her
eyes opening suddenly, sleepily without shame or remorse
or more specifically surprise that this tryst, that
she and her lover had been uncovered, found, Eve, the
two of them, and Adam, hiding, hidden from the world
in a place that should have been but was not abandoned.
And as I ran from the house into the brown golden brightness
of the morning, it occurred to me: I have only just
met the Liebs.
Also available by this author:
|
