OTHERS LESS FORTUNATE
A novel by Jessica Keener

Chapter One

I grew up in a six-bedroom house in Soquaset, Massachusetts. Nobody spelled the name of our town correctly. Letters came to our six-bedroom house that said Soquashit or Sacquatics, or Socket. And Massachusetts always invited too many esses and not enough tees. The town, seven miles inland, was close enough to water by car but a good hour north of Boston. In the fifties and sixties the town grew and became known for its excellent school system and green neighborhoods. By the time I turned seven, Mother let me—the second oldest and only daughter of four—walk to Soquaset Square without an adult.

Our blue, clapboard house had slanted ceilings in the attic bedrooms where my oldest and youngest brothers slept; window seats in the den; and closets full of Mother’s gowns, high-heeled shoes and cedar shoehorns. Neighbors admired our house for its stained glass windows in the turn of the stairs and in the dining room windows facing west. At dinnertime, when the sun exited the front yard, it left a trail of orange shadows across my plate.

Every weeknight at a quarter to six, my father trudged up the driveway, flung open the kitchen door, and closed it with a determined thud.

“Anybody home?” he bellowed as if he expected the house to be empty and the furniture cleared out.

My father, Leonard Kunitz, a tenured professor at a small, private college rarely modulated his voice between the podium and pantry. To think there might be a difference didn’t occur to him.

“Anybody home? Hello?”

In harmonic contrast my mother floated down from the bedroom to meet him for a pre-dinner drink. She moved without gravity when she took her pain pills before dinner, the ones that looked like aspirin, only bigger. The name typed on the vial said Irene Lenore. The instructions said Fiorinal 3x a day.

In the den, Father flipped two shots of vodka down his throat while Mother drank Scotch with a twist of lime and one ice cube. She took medium swallows. Together they smoked cigarettes in flowered armchairs, embraced by the arc of the bay windows that gave us a grand view of the backyard.

Usually dinner lasted all of seven minutes—a frantic rush to gulp down firsts, then seconds.

“There’s more in the kitchen,” Mother said. “Luanne? Could you bring the rice in?” Luanne was our maid from Haiti.

Father ate like a starved child, his dark, quick eyes scooping up the slightest imperfections in everyone around him. He had small shoulders, a slight paunch, and wore loosely tucked in shirts, blazers, knit ties, and crumpled corduroy pants, which set him apart from Mother’s fastidious appearance and those of her country club peers.

“Leonard. There’s plenty of rice.”

At the table, Mother sat straight as a violin bow, her back to the kitchen. She wore her dyed blond hair short and layered like rose petals, her favorite flower. Adorned in suits and matching scarves, she looked streamlined as a glass vase, even when she came in from the garden in slacks, the dirt and thorns clinging to her gloves.

“Why don’t you start the coffee now,” Mother said, as Luanne placed the rice, steaming in a covered dish, on the table.

She had petite features—tiny wrists, slim calves that she liked to show off at parties—and the largest collection of shoes in the neighborhood. She filled her days with bridge or luncheons during the week. On Thursdays, she went to the hairdressers then food shopping on Fridays. Occasionally, she signed up for a flower arrangement class or joined friends from the country club for communal sessions on cross-stitching. This didn’t last. Her rheumatic fingers refused such delicate work. But I have the pillow she made: a green and white checkerboard pattern backed with dark green felt. It’s a small item but I cherish it.

All these things replaced the musical life she once led: the violin recitals and college concerts, the discipline of rehearsals and practice replaced by a need for order in the house; the need to perform taken up with these variants of social gatherings, a way to keep herself on public display. Something else inside her was not keeping up. I just didn’t know it then.

“What are we having for dessert?” Father asked.

“Cookies.”

On Mother’s side of the family, Granpa Joe built a successful shoe manufacturing company, which my uncle took over and managed. Mother was the silent partner and the reason people said we were rich.

An elderly lady, Mrs. Brenwald, lived next door. She never went outside. Every Saturday a boy from the town market delivered grocery bags to her front porch. When I had nothing to do, I crouched by the living room window and waited for her to appear behind a curtain at night. Did she have a secret? An ugly past? My younger brother, Robert, said she was a witch but I believed that she floated in a world between earth and heaven—a harmless ghost, a lost angel.

The only evidence that Mrs. Brenwald once had an existence outside her house sat in her driveway. An antique Ford covered in a sheet was anchored to tires profoundly out of breath, squashed by endless seasons passing. More than once, Father called the police to take the car away. “A pile of crap,” he called it, but the car remained impervious even to him.

This proved to me that Mrs. Brenwald made a pivotal decision many years ago, and that she had willed her life into its present shape. I found this idea both mystifying and attractive. To form one’s destiny seemed monumental, like exploding holes through a mountain to get to the other side. But, in fact, that’s what I wanted to do.

I’d like to believe that Mother had wanted that too. Or, if, indeed, she had chosen an alternate path, she didn’t share it. She kept that decision to herself.

What started the course that caused her to fade away?

I turn to the past for answers, skipping as it is easy to do in my mind from one year to the next, to a place that is no longer there: our home. Yet, at sixteen years old, I can’t help myself. It’s like going toward forever, only backwards.

 

Chapter Two

“Sarah, bring me The Complete Works, will you?” Father said. He waved his fork like a sword, stabbing it in the air while he chewed.

I dashed through the rooms, across carpeting green as the fairways at the country club where we belonged. In the den with its built-in bar and bookshelves, I found the book of Shakespeare housed behind a picture of Father dressed in toddler’s clothes. His thick hair fell in ringlets to his shoulders, his white apron—a popular outfit of the period—rimmed his ankles.

My great grandmother, Sarah Davina, was there too, on the shelf, staring out from her tiny village in Russia. Her name, which I inherited, meant “beloved princess” in Hebrew. She wanted to become an opera star but that was an absurd dream for a poor, Jewish farm girl. Instead, she milked cows and married a teacher from the old country, a quiet, studious man who peered over the Torah. I stared at her picture and wondered what it must have felt like to give up a dream, to stand before the mountainside, the beautiful sky beyond, and realize that she had to turn away and go back down into a small, grimy town. I didn’t want that to be my fate.

She sang at shul. She sang to lighten her chores, she sang to her five children before bed at night; and through those children, she transported her musical seeds and they grew inside me.

Somewhere over the rainbow, way up high--

Judy Garland’s voice bubbled in my mind as I scanned the family line-up. Further down the shelf, my other grandmother looked square-faced. Tired. She died when I was too young to know her, a cold turned to pneumonia. Father told us she had blue periods, dark phases signaled by closed shades. In their Brooklyn apartment, his mother drank tea on a couch “the color of Flamingos!” On better days, something would shift in her, he said—the sun warming the kitchen table in the morning—and soon the house filled with her friends from the sisterhood, temple organizers, and bake sale fundraisers. The smell of cinnamon and coffee meant good times at home. Maybe this is what Father saw in Mother when they met: a darkness familiar to him in his childhood.

“Sarah? Are you lost? We’re waiting for you!” Father called to me.

I carried the book back to the table and sat down. By then, Luanne had cleared away the plates for dessert. She was a shy, comely woman with walnut brown skin who spoke in hushed, guarded tones around my parents. She became another person when my parents went out.

“Please, sing me that bridge song again,” I asked when I found her dusting a lamp in the den. I sat on the couch and squeezed my knees to my chest to show her I meant it. Please? She held a dust rag in her hand. The smell of lemon polish made my nose itch. It opened the pores in my brain.

She looked out the bay windows and opened her mouth in a wide O—Oh, lord, show me that bridge. I’m standing at the water, and I can’t see that bridge.”

It surprised me how she talked in a whisper yet sang solid and penetrating as an oboe.

On Sunday, her day off, she wore white hoop earrings, purple lipstick and a torso-hugging blue dress with matching hat. She walked to the end of our street. A black man picked her up in a white Dodge Dart and brought her back late the next evening, after I was asleep.

“We’ll have dessert and coffee now,” Mother said to Luanne. Mother straightened her shoulders whenever she spoke to what she called the help. Luanne nodded and headed back to the kitchen.

“Hamlet was riddled with ambiguities,” Father explained, opening the book and licking his lips. “I’ll do the openers.” He took a deep breath and boomed out the first line, “Who’s there?”

“Leonard, don’t shout,” Mother said, tapping her ears.

“You do it, then,” he said, supremely offended. He pushed the book at me and I passed it over to Mother.

“I’d like to read Ophelia’s part.” She turned the thin pages. “‘Could beauty, my lord, have better commerce than with honesty?’” she asked. She over-enunciated the words ‘commerce’ and ‘honesty’ and it made her look pained. The pills she took before dinner made her eyes small and distant, her voice tied down by something I couldn’t see.

“Ophelia doesn’t hiss, Irene. Read it again.” 

“I’m not hissing. ‘ Could beauty, my lord…’”

Luanne nudged open the swinging door and placed a platter of oatmeal cookies in the middle of the table.

“Coffee?” Mother said, turning toward her.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“I thought we were starting after dessert,” Elliot said. My youngest brother reached for the cookies but Mother stopped him. Elliot looked like Uncle Max. Soft around the stomach, and wide-faced, he was the baby but possibly the wisest of us all.

Elliot kept his deepest thoughts to himself, preferring sedentary activities, and was slow to speak. He gave the impression of excessive dreaminess.

“Just two, luv,” Mother said.

“I’ll read Orfeelya,” Robert said. Two years younger than I, he spoke in high grating tones.

“O-feel-ee-ah!” Father corrected him. “Say it.”

“I’ll feel ya,” Peter joked, grabbing three cookies with long, dexterous fingers. He was pale and light-haired like me. The oldest at fifteen, he sank into his chair, lanky—all arms and legs. A shadow of a mustache defined his lip.

Father pounded a fist on the table. “Enough!” The storm perpetually brewing beneath his skin surfaced and made his face turn red.

Luanne walked back in with two cups of coffee.

“Bring the coffee here, girl,” he said, fishing in his shirt pocket for a cigarette. He separated the cup from the saucer and used the saucer for an ashtray.

“Don’t talk to her like that,” I mumbled.

“Luanne, the ashtrays are in the cupboard above the refrigerator,” Mother said. She spoke slowly, a careful movement of her lips.

Robert jumped up, pressing his hands to his ears. “I can’t listen to this family!” He ran upstairs howling. Craven and overexcited, words spat out of his mouth from the time he had taught himself to read when he was three. We heard his footsteps and the bedroom door slam. Mother pressed her lips until they whitened.

“Give me the book, Irene.”

She obeyed.

“Sarah, tell Robert to come back down here. He was not excused.” He took a cookie and pushed it whole into his mouth. His cheeks changed shape, sticking out like miniature fists. The oatmeal crumbs settled on the corners of his mouth.

“Do it now.”

Father believed that families who ate together got excused together and anyone who veered from this cardinal family rule bordered on criminal behavior. Upstairs, Robert hung over the side of his bed reading a book. His dark hair shot up like his thoughts, abruptly and sharp.

“You’re invading my privacy,” he said.

“Dad wants you to come down.”

“I’m reading.” He rode the “r” until his lower jaw stuck out, then glared at his book.

“Just come down,” I said, in an attempt to offer an older sister’s advice, “or he’ll blow up again.”

Robert prickled and folded his shoulders to keep me away. But I knew if I stood still, he would calm down enough to reconsider. He shoved the book under the bed and followed me down.

By now it was pitch black outside and the large globe light above the table reflected off the windows like a bloated fish.

Robert stood in front of Father.

“You will not!” Father said, smacking Robert on the cheek, “leave the table without permission. Now you may be excused.”

Robert burst into tears and tore back upstairs. Father headed to his office and slammed the door. Elliot started humming. I didn’t move, paralyzed by my unintended betrayal of Robert.

“Elliot, time for a bath. Sarah, Peter, you have homework,” Mother said.

“You’ve got to be kidding!” Peter said, shoving his chair out from the table.

I went upstairs to my desk and stared out my bedroom window at the weeping birch tree that hunkered over the driveway in the dark. Later that night, I knocked on Robert’s door to apologize but he wouldn’t let me in. He had pushed his bureau in front of the door.

“I’m really sorry,” I said through the keyhole.

I went to bed and stayed awake a long time waiting for sleep, for my raw stomach to settle down. The hall light shone into my room. I hummed. The vibrations of the notes calmed my nerves. Ahhh, ooooo, eeeee. Oh Lord, show me the bridge. I mimicked the way Luanne opened her mouth and felt the tone change on my tongue, then shiver along the path of my cheekbones.

I watched the treetops at my window, still figures watching back, and the long backyard curving up to the stars. The bright moon gleamed on the wooden floors and made my floor melt and become liquid as a pond. I felt a universe away from the clattering of my three brothers, the relentless pontificating of my father, and Mother’s voice responding to him in sounds that were edgy and cold.

Under my blankets I invented songs for company. I imagined standing solo on stage singing to an auditorium filled with understanding faces. Come and see what I see.
I sang to the moon, the hall light, the honey summer light when the low sun slunk into my room. I hummed. I changed the notes from high to low. I rolled them on my tongue. Singing was like eating. It filled a hungry feeling.

Chapter Three

In the kitchen, Luanne snapped green beans for dinner. She wore pink, pearl-like earrings and she was humming. She seemed different, more distant after a day off. For two nights of the week, she lived in Roxbury, a poor, black section in Boston that white people avoided.

“What you want, Sarah?” she asked in a Haitian accent. Her skin looked creamy. She had high cheekbones and moist, glowing eyes.

I sat next to the window overlooking the driveway. I could see my neighbor’s bedroom window through a cluster of fir trees. Dr. and Mrs. Fineburg had a son my age who went to private school. I knew when Mickey came home because the lights in his bedroom stayed on late and the house, a white Colonial with a red door, made different sounds. Doors opened and shut. The station wagon came and went at different times of the day.

“You’ve got some thought in your head. I can see it.”

“Isn’t it hard living somewhere else and coming back here?” I asked.

She nodded but didn’t say anything. When she finished with the beans she put a whole chicken in the oven and asked me if I wanted to watch television with her. In her tiny, darkened room beside the kitchen she had draped the small window with a blue scarf. On her bureau, she kept a paper cup filled with earrings. I sat on the linoleum floor beside a straw basket piled with pink rollers. She sat on her cot.

We watched a movie about the Wild West on her black and white television, which she kept on a fold-up chair. During the commercial I said, “You could ask my mother for another day off.”

She shook her head. “That’s not your business.”

“Luanne!” Mother called from the kitchen.

Luanne left the room.

“We’ll need a salad,” I heard Mother say. The refrigerator door opened and shut. Cooking utensils clattered.

Luanne’s room felt secret and warm. I didn’t want to leave it. I stayed past the time Father came home, door slamming as usual, until my parents returned from the den with their drinks and called us to dinner.

Not long after, when winter’s icy roots plunged deepest and seemed destined to stay forever, I came home after school, plopped my books on the kitchen counter, and went looking for Luanne.

Her bedroom door was open. The room appeared lighter. Looking in, I saw that her bureau top had been swept clean of perfume bottles. I stepped inside. Her scarf over the window had been removed. Where were her cups of earrings? I ran upstairs to find Mother. My parents’ bedroom had views of the front, side and backyards and a dressing room with a wall of closets. She sat on a red upholstered loveseat sewing the hem of a skirt.

“Where’s Luanne?”

“She left, honey. I’ve called the agency. They’re sending someone out next week to replace her.” She removed her reading glasses and stuck her needle into a pincushion.

“Why?”

“She quit, dear.”

She explained that Luanne had left a note about finding a different situation. “Just as well. I always thought she was too young.”

I turned away from her matter-of-factness. Our family was the problem and I knew it. I ran upstairs to the attic to see if Peter had come home. Instead I found Elliot playing with miniature plastic animals in his room. He occupied himself well for a young child. We all did.

The following Saturday afternoon Luanne rang the doorbell to pick up the rest of her clothes. Father answered the door.

“Taking off to shack up with someone?” he said as I ran downstairs to see her.

She was already walking back to the front door with her suitcase in hand when I called to her. 

“Leonard, please,” Mother said standing next to him. “Are you sure you have everything, Luanne?”

She barely nodded and headed for the door.

“I’ll miss you,” I wanted to tell her but didn’t. She went through the front door and hurried down the flagstone walk. A black man waited for her in a white Dodge Dart. Something pushed me and I ran to the open door and shouted, “I’m sorry!” But it came out in a whisper that only I could hear. By then, Luanne was in the front seat closing the car door. The car flew off down our road in a cloud of exhaust and sand.

“Come inside, Sarah. It’s cold out. You don’t have shoes on,” Mother said.

I went back to my bedroom and shut the door. A sharp pain threaded my chest to my stomach. I tried singing a lullaby, leaning on my windowsill—Kumbaya My Lord—the notes low in my throat. Where was she now? Would she think of me ever? My imagination failed me. My heart felt cumbersome on my lungs. Yet the tears wouldn’t rise up or drain out of me. I went downstairs again to Luanne’s closed door in search of her quiet, kind essence. I turned the doorknob and went in. Bare bed. Bare floor. Bare everything.

Mother heard me. “These things happen,” she said, stopping in the hall outside Luanne’s old room. “It’s too bad. But there’s nothing we can do.” She turned and went into the kitchen.

Over several months, different black maids came and went. No one lasted more than six months. One white maid from Ireland stayed a week. None replaced Luanne. Then Dora—another black maid—took the position. She was different. She was obese, squat, and surly. She came from Florida and didn’t care about earrings or singing. She was efficient down to the minute and liked to tell me that she had five grown children so nothing could shock her. “You can’t fool me,” she said. She talked as if she knew all there was to know about life. Unlike Luanne, Dora had seen it all.