Susan Kenney

1.
The House at 36 State

  I don't know which of the odd things about the house at 36 State truly distinguished it in my mind; that it looked little and old but had six bedrooms, four bathrooms, an L-shaped living room, a formal parlor lined with bookshelves full of books, and a dining room with a door that was always kept closed, that there were rusty velvet curtains – green on one side, maroon on the other – hung in some of the doorways and at the beginning of the long back hall, that it had a goldfish pond and five tall narrow poplars in its narrow backyard, that it had a front porch that seemed to go all the way around the house, though in reality it only went halfway.
  I think it was the porch – for I can remember describing the house to other children, "It has a porch that goes all the way around," and indeed that is what, coming up the hill from town, one saw and noted about the small-looking white old house with green shutters set back from the corner of Academy and State. The lot sloped downward, so that at the southern corner of the porch the floor and the ground were a good seven feet apart, and this space was camouflaged by a lattice arrangement with huge hydrangeas and lilac bushes in front.
  But because the space under the porch was so large and convenient and because my grandfather had wasted nothing in his ingenuity, the lattice was hinged at one point (though you couldn’t tell just where by looking at it), and opened up so that the lawn mowers, rakes, tricycles, and so on could be stored there.
  Being under the porch was like being in a tunnel. At the uphill end it was very shallow, just child-high, then deepened until a grown man could walk comfortably around the corner and down to the other end of the porch which overlooked the tiny garden. The latticework let in checkers of light, but under the porch was sufficiently gloomy to make playing there interesting. If I got tired of grubbing in the dirt for old bottles and bolts, or of playing captive maiden or hid-out bandits (of which I preferred the latter as a role), I could with some effort open a wide, heavy door in the old foundation leading into a finished room in the basement that had been turned into a studio for my late uncle Rennie the artist after he and my Aunt Daisy suffered financial reverses and came back to live with my grandparents in the 1930s.
  The room was partitioned off from the rest of the musty basement by knotty pine paneling with built-in bookcases, and a door that led to a old smelly toilet, and had a ping-pong table and a large old player organ that with lots of stops that wheezed out various tunes from rolls when the foot pedals were vigorously pumped. The rough stone walls were whitewashed, the floor tiled in red and white linoleum; there was a deep recessed window made of glass blocks on the garden side that let in plenty of light, and a kerosene stove for heat. But just the same, the room was damp and finally useless, for things left there molded and rotted and warped from the damp. I remember dusty old bottles with melted wax dipped artistically over them and mildewed books, "Girl of the Limberlost," "Forever Amber," a 1930 Onondagan, the Syracuse University yearbook with photos of my mother as a lively young woman on nearly every page. But as a young child, of those who had drunk the wine, burned the candles and read the books, I knew nothing.
  Still, this room had its special fascination, for the other distinguishing thing about the house to a child was the secret staircase that led from this basement room up through a trap door into a closet under the stairs in the front hall. You had to lift up the trap door to get out, and I can remember still the feeling of coming up against that flat panel with my head and pushing upward, because even though it had a counterweight arrangement that was designed so that it would lift up smoothly and without much effort, at the age of six or so that was the only way I could lift it up from below. Whenever I could, I would come in that way from playing, because it was so much easier than going back outside and climbing up those high porch steps to the front door. Besides, it was the closest thing to a secret passage I knew of in real life, and the closet door was never locked.
  Left to my own devices, I would creep up the dark, narrow staircase step by step until my head touched the trapdoor, then keep on going, raising the door with my head and shoulders until the counterweight would engage and I could reach up and push it aside with my hands. It did not really hurt, but the door felt rough and heavy on my head. For a while I thought I was developing a callus there, from the many times I raised the door that way, for I could feel a thickened bump right where the door rested, but I suppose in reality the bump I have in the middle of my head is the one I was born with.
   Perhaps none of the grownups in the house knew about my forays up the stairs, as they did not think to tell me not to do it. But I was expressly forbidden to go down the stairs from inside the closet because, I was warned, they were so dark and steep I might tumble down and break my neck. From inside the closet the trap door looked just like ordinary floorboards, all the more exciting because this made it so much more secret. It really was the floor of the closet and not a real door, and you would have to know enough to move ice skates and boots and push aside coats to operate the door and get at the stairs. I would go and stand inside the closet, longing to be old and strong enough to manage the trap door all by myself. But even with the counterweight I could barely lift the door up from the closet floor by myself, so I could only venture down when my older cousin Rennie Jr. was there to help me raise it.
  Every once in a while as I was creeping down the stairs the door would not be pushed back far enough to engage the counterweight that held it open and would come crashing down just as I was far enough below the opening to stand up. This is perhaps why I have always associated down those stairs with a very specific and throbbing sensation in the crown of my head. I suspect too that on those few occasions when Rennie Jr. and I still shared the mysterious playing grounds of 36 State, the door may have slammed down less than fortuitously and with more than gravity's force on my head. Looking back, I wonder now why I was not permanently concussed from negotiating that irresistibly enthralling secret passage by myself, let alone with my cousin Rennie.

3.
My Mother and her Sisters

  My mother was the youngest of three girls, of whom the first was allegedly brilliant (Phi Beta Kappa at Smith, 1922) and a talented painter (Cooper Union, 1924), the second, a beautiful and a talented concert pianist. Although I do not know how many of my mother's stories of her growing up are true, for a great many of them had a certain early 20th century Sarah Crewe-like melodramatic flavor--the solitary, rejected and lonely young girl through pluck, luck and persistence, finally winning through--if any of them are to be believed, my grandmother's astringent attitude toward her was a sufficient reason, or excuse, for the odd turn in her personality.
  It seems her mother made no bones about the fact that her youngest daughter was an accident, the obvious implication being "unwanted": "I was just fit to be tied when I found out I was expecting again at MY age!"(she was 34). Unlike her buxom, blond, handsome and accomplished sisters, my mother was thin, dark, homely, and had no obvious artistic talent, leading her mother to make the observation that "I must have run out of material when you were made." In other words, somehow she had not done her usual robust job of producing yet another top-notch offspring, but it was really not her fault; she had "done the best she could."
&nbsp In a family atmosphere where that phrase was a sufficient defense for any kind of perceived or actual failure, the extent to which her mother's comments--no doubt offhand, possibly even joking--wounded my mother, is incalculable. Along with the explicit and implicit reproach that, "Daisy paints and Rosie plays the piano, what do you do?" her mother’s thoughtless words shadowed her the rest of her life. But the older she grew, the more she came to resemble the father she idolized--tall, dark-haired and gangly, lively, quick-witted and resourceful, jack of all trades and master of most. Later on in life, she liked to say that she was the son her father always wanted, and determined to follow in his footsteps. And like Sarah Crewe, she would show them all.

  All three girls took piano lessons from an early age, practicing on the old upright in the L-shaped living room. Daisy soon lost interest and turned to painting; my mother's public career ended at a recital where she was supposed to play Mozart’s "Queen of the Night" in front of a large and appreciative audience. She got as far as the piano bench, turned around and saw all the people, curtseyed prettily and walked off the stage. Rosie took her place and played on to great acclaim. In spite of this embarrassment, my mother did not give up on her piano playing. Three times a week from the age of 14 she took the trolley to Syracuse University's College of Fine Arts where Rosie was a freshman majoring in piano. Once she told me that her teacher, who was Rosie's also, said she had the makings of a better pianist than her sister; that Rosie was technically brilliant, but had no intellectual or emotional understanding of what she played. My mother had feelings. She also had no reach – her small hands could barely span an octave. Years later when I went through her things I found many of Liszt's Piano Concertos and a few others by Chopin; all she had kept of my aunt's musical scores were the ones she could play only with extreme difficulty, or not at all.

I suppose somewhere too in my mother's early life, there was an art teacher who told her she could draw better than her sister the artist; this seems to me to be logical and probable, if not inevitable. At any rate, she did draw incessantly and cleverly, expressive faces in the margins of letters. When we were children she drew for us and used her hands in other ways – making doll furniture, little houses, puppets, knitting; in this way she was a wonderful companion in our youth. Was there always the silent and bitter competition going on in her mind as she made the little chair or table – the secret, "If I had wanted, I could have played better than Rosie, or painted better than Daisy, if I had wanted to..."? What it was she really wanted to was never clear, although it was Aunt Daisy who told her bitterly on numerous occasions that she had “an overdeveloped sense of humor” and this is perhaps what led her to think she might combine her talents and become a humorist on the order of the newly popular James Thurber.

to be continued