The White Suitcase

By Avery Wellings

In this captivating tale, we follow the extraordinary adventures of Sophie, a quirky and enigmatic woman whose unpredictable journeys blend humor, intrigue, and occasional tragedy. Shaped by a tumultuous upbringing within a dysfunctional family, Sophie's life is m

• Language: English
• Publisher: Book Writing Studios
• Release date: May 8, 2024
• ISBN: 9781962244602

Book preview

PENNSYLVANIA

1963 - The Screaming

Sophie sat in her usual place on the stairs outside her bedroom. The screaming began. With her green eyes wide open, she stared in terror. Sometimes she would bravely go down the stairs and stand at the entrance of the living room. She hoped her presence there might cause the screaming to stop. It never worked. She seemed invisible to them.

As she saw her mother laying on her side and being repeatedly kicked, Sophie ran upstairs and scurried under her bed. It felt safe. She cringed at the sounds from below. She covered her ears and tightly pressed her eyes shut. Sophie remained too afraid to move from under the bed until the screaming and cries had stopped.

During the years she was growing up and decades later, she would wonder why her mother had stayed and why her father would do this to her mother. Sophie was three years old.

Her father was thirty-eight years old and shoveling snow in the driveway, a cigarette in his mouth. He wore a heavy, dark navy blue wool coat, a plaid wool scarf and a hat. Sophie was running around in circles, enjoying the fresh snow. She was wearing three layers of clothes and sweating. She took off her hat that was under her hood. The blue quilted snowsuit that had fit her so well last year had grown too small. She went over toward the driveway to pick up her small play shovel.

Oh Daddy, you’re so silly! Making snow angels! Sophie laughed and fell next to her father to join him.

Get Mom, he whispered.

Oh, she’s not very silly! She won’t make snow angels with us. answered Sophie.

Go get Mom, Sophie. he said more loudly and touched her arm in a strange firm way.

Sophie ran into the house.

Mom, Dad wants you to come out and see him making snow angels! Sophie was so excited.

Her mother looked through the glass storm door and could see him on the ground. What?! Oh my God! she said, panicking.

Sophie’s mother ran outside without a coat and bent over her husband in just her nurses’ uniform and white chalky shoes. Sophie was right there by her father’s side as her mother loosened his tie.

Sophie, go to Margaret’s house and tell Mrs. Hertzman to come outside right away, her mother said sternly. Sophie ran next door awkwardly, in her tight snowsuit. Mrs. Hertzman stepped outside briefly in her brightly colored flower-patterned house dress. She then came back to tell Sophie to stay inside the house with Margaret. She put on her coat and switched from her warm slippers into her snow boots. Sophie pulled off her own boots, stripped off her snow clothes, and hung them up on a hook on the back of the front door to dry. She and Margaret were each other’s favorite playmates. They pressed their noses against the glass storm door but really couldn’t see or hear anything. Margaret was an only child and Sophie thought she had such great toys to play with down in the basement, so they headed down there.

They never heard the ambulance come to pick up her father and transport him to the hospital. Her father was in the hospital for several months. Once home, he had two nurses who worked in shifts at the house. Sophie and her brother Fred had to be very quiet when they were playing so they didn’t disturb their father while he was resting. It felt very unnatural for the young children to be quiet at play, but they felt scared to do otherwise. It was as if they could make their father even more ill. They had heard the term heart attack often, but it was never explained to them. They thought it had something to do with the war their father once fought in and involved an attack, like with soldiers.

Sophie remembers her pediatrician, Dr. Eisenberg, coming to her house on his way home from his office. Several weeks earlier she’d had a terrible sore throat and she’d had to swallow really big stinky pills ever since. The doctor told her not to run around the house or play outside until he said it was okay. Her mother told her he was visiting her at home, so she didn’t have to go to hospital herself, like her father. Her mother said they couldn’t afford to have two people in the hospital. Sophie and her brother thought it meant they didn’t have enough money. Their mother couldn’t deal with the stress of it. Years later, her mother would also explain to her why Dr. Eisenberg had been coming to the house and what rheumatic fever was. Sophie had just a strep throat originally but became extremely tired and achy and developed a rash and an extra sound in her heartbeat. She felt fine, so she didn’t think anything about it. Her mother came home one day to find her jumping on the bed and was furious.

Six months later on her fourth birthday, Sophie’s mother would invite an unusual number of children from the neighborhood to celebrate. There were chocolate cupcakes for everyone. Sophie had a special new fancy dress. She never wore dresses. Sophie only felt sad that day. She didn’t smile that day. She just wanted her father to get better and be normal again, even though normal wasn’t always nice.

1967 - Along the Way

Her mother spoke of the affair without any emotion. Sophie had already figured out what was going on. The woman with the short brown hair had been at the house one day when she came home from school. Sophie sensed something was odd about the woman’s presence, and her father acted strangely. The woman was very pretty and quite nice to her. She smiled at Sophie and asked what her favorite subject in school was. The petite woman wore makeup and was fashionably dressed as compared to her own mother, whom Sophie saw only in her white nurses’ uniform covered by a navy-blue cape or in her shabby bathrobe. Sophie’s mother explained to Sophie and her brother that the woman’s husband had just found out about the relationship between Sophie’s father and the man’s wife. Her mother then announced that the man was a big gun collector, and that they should all be afraid, very afraid.

Sophie’s mother worked at a steel factory as an occupational nurse on the night shift. The men that worked midnight to eight in the morning as a second job frequently grew tired while operating the heavy machinery. She often dealt with accidents involving men severing limbs. She provided first aid until the ambulances arrived to transport them to a nearby hospital.

She wore a dated nursing cap that looked like a toilet paper cover, as Sophie’s father never failed to point out. Her mother was always tired and had dark circles under her eyes to prove it. Sophie would wake her mother up when she returned home from school and thought she appeared dead most days, lying face down on her pillow. Sophie removed the bobby-pins from her mother’s hair while she remained asleep. Her hair would fall into circular pin curls as she wore in the 1940’s. Sophie’s mother wasn’t like the other mothers in the neighborhood. She went off to work each night. The other mothers stayed at home and seemed to be totally devoted to their families and happy. They often got together in the afternoons to drink Pepsi Colas while the children played outside. Her mother didn’t seem to have time for friends. When she wasn’t working, she was sleeping. Sophie thought her mother’s life was very lonely and sad.

She and Fred had great babysitters during the summers. Mrs. McLaughlin was average height, stout, and wore baggy cotton dresses with cloth aprons. She was married to a local farmer and was very affectionate. She prepared food in advance for dinner each night and always baked up a storm. There were usually cookies and banana breads or apple pies waiting for Sophie and her brother when they took a break from playing outside. Sophie’s brother was twelve and seemed to challenge any grownup, but Mrs. McLaughlin never let on that she was annoyed by his behavior. She didn’t really pay attention to their whereabouts, but it was the 1960s, when kids headed outside after breakfast, came in to grab a quick peanut butter and jelly sandwich for lunch, and headed back outside until dark.

Sophie’s father had worked as a successful chemical engineer since his college graduation in the 1940s. Two decades later, he was assigned to be a salesman and frequently traveled. This was because he was able to explain the technical aspects of the business to the clients. Smoking and day-drinking were in fashion. He began to drink to excess on a regular basis. Sophie would watch him go to work each day from the bay window in the living room.

Her father was a lone survivor of a plane crash in WWII. He still had a piece of shrapnel in his leg. A couple of neighbors had German Shepherds and her father was terrified of them. One of the dogs broke loose one day and ended up in their front yard. Her mother quickly called the owners to come and retrieve it. At the same time, her father came out of the house waving an antique handgun, threatening to shoot it. A child of the owners arrived and was terrified by the sight of Sophie’s father. The child leashed the dog and quickly ran away down the street.

Her father had been a junior at Notre Dame when Pearl Harbor was bombed. The next day all the young men on the campus enlisted. Her mother told Sophie and Fred his plane had been shot down in Germany. All the other men were dead. Their father somehow safely made his way to France. Their mother then had trouble speaking. She told them that when he was discharged, he only weighed 115 lbs. Her father was close to six feet in height. He ended up finishing his engineering degree a few years later. That was all she told Sophie and her brother about his war experience. They didn't understand the relationship between his war history and his violent personality.

Shelter from the Storm

Sophie was very close to one family in the suburban neighborhood. The Kruger family was an example of how others can make a difference in a child’s life. She thought their life was normal, what a family life could be like. It included one gregarious, larger-than-life father, Rudy; one outgoing, loving mother, Marianne; and four children: Ilsa, Kristin, Gretchen, and Rudy Jr. They were of German descent. Their grandparents would occasionally visit them at their house. They were usually overdressed and regal in how they carried themselves. Sophie’s father told her to stay away from their house whenever the grandparents were there. He felt they were most likely Nazis during the war.

The Krugers had a beautiful blonde aunt who was engaged to be married. The three girls were very excited about being junior bridesmaids and flower girls at her wedding. One night, her fiancé fell asleep while driving on a nearby highway. His vehicle crossed the median and was struck by another car, killing him instantly. The aunt was devastated. Her future evaporated. She came by the house, and to Sophie, she looked like a different person altogether. Pale and with her hair uncombed, she was smoking and had a glass of whiskey in her hand. Sophie hated the smell of whiskey. Whenever anyone consumed it around her, she could smell it on their breath from several feet away. Her father always had whiskey on his breath each evening when he would come into her room to say good night.

The Krugers took Sophie on their family vacations to the Jersey shore more than once. They seemed to know what was happening in Sophie’s house, but never said a word about it. It was with them that Sophie saw the ocean for the very first time. Mr. Kruger taught Sophie how to body surf on a clear, sunny day. They stayed in a rented beach house yards away from the sand. Marianne sewed her an outfit to match the other girls’ clothes. When Sophie’s family moved away when she was ten years old, Marianne gave her a book of photos so she would remember the many places of her childhood. The elementary school, the pool, the Kruger’s house, and the path to school. She left out a picture of Sophie’s house, probably for good reason. It wasn’t a place of happy memories.

Marianne had walked Sophie home after school and watched her as she keyed into the door. She was among the earliest generation of latchkey kids, spending several hours on her own and took care of herself as her mother slept and was unavailable until her father got home from work. She spent hours at the Kruger home nearly every day and was a buffer between the three sisters should they squabble. She watched the first moon landing at their house. Everyone who was alive remembers where they were at that time. Where were her parents? Most likely drunk and fighting or sleeping.

Sophie’s paternal grandmother, Mae, lived with them. Mae and her brother Fred tried to try to remain uninvolved in what was happening in the house and were peripheral fixtures for the most part. Once, when her parents' yelling became deafening, Mae fled to a neighbor’s house. When the man next door arrived asking if everything was alright, Sophie’s mother partially came down the stairs and put a washcloth to her face as though she was getting ready for the day and to hide her red swollen eyes from crying. She fooled no one.

Sophie often slept in her grandmother’s room, although Sophie did not like her grandmother in the least. On the fourth floor of the split-level house, one did not hear as much of the noise from below. Still, how Mae could sleep through it all was beyond all logic. Mae kept gumdrops in her dresser which Sophie would often help herself to during the night. This was when Sophie’s bouts of insomnia began. She also began to sleepwalk.

On the rare occasion that Mae would take her downtown, Sophie tended to get lost in the department stores. Sophie would approach a salesperson, inform them that she was lost, and they would page her grandmother over the store’s intercom. Eventually, Sophie didn’t even want to go on the bus with her at all.

On these visits to downtown, Mae would spend a few hours browsing around the various large department stores. She then would relax and spend an hour or two talking with women in the ladies’ lounges in bathrooms where they were allowed to sit. Sophie was too young at the time to understand the situation. They all had an unusual number of shopping bags. Years later Sophie would come to the realization that the women were homeless and were simply resting their feet.

Fred was three years older than Sophie. She assumed he remembered a lot more than she did. On occasion he would help his mother literally drag his father up the stairs. He was too drunk to make it on his own. Years later, Fred would be attacked by his drunken father while he was trying to protect his mother from the violence. Sophie witnessed this on a visit home during a summer break from college. Fred would end up living at home until he got married, for the very purpose of protecting his mother from the blows of his father.

Summer of ‘69

One summer day, Sophie’s parents both randomly appeared at home in the middle of the day and asked her and Fred to come into the family room. They knew something was wrong. Something was very wrong. Susie, the babysitter they had the previous summer, was dead. Before she or Fred could ask or say anything, her mother began to explain the details. Apparently, Susie had climbed out through a window of the hotel she was working at to reach a locked supply room. She had lost her balance and fallen several stories to her death. Sophie and Fred were so shocked that they found the whole story unbelievable. Years later, Sophie would speculate whether it was suicide and her parents had decided not to tell them the entire truth of the story.

During summers, Sophie and Fred lived outside. At the town pool all members of the swim team wore black and white Speedo bathing suits. Sophie’s pixie cut hair had been so bleached by the pool’s chlorine that it had turned from a shade of platinum white to a light green. Swim practice was held every morning and meets were on the weekends. They had a coach who went by the nickname of Bip. He made the kids all work hard during the practices and encouraged them to perform their best at swim meets. The backstroke was Sophie’s best swim stroke and she often would place second or third in the swim meets, depending on the competition.

One day some of the grown-ups explained that Bip was being called to serve as a Marine in Vietnam. He wasn’t there the following summer to coach. He came back the year after that, but something had changed about him. He went from smiling and making all the kids laugh on a daily basis to being extremely quiet and introverted. He’d lost his smile. This was confusing to all of the children on the team. Sophie’s father simply explained that war changed people.

Sophie enjoyed riding her bike every day to the pool but did not enjoy returning home to the never-ending chaos where she never knew what to expect. Once, when her mother had reached a breaking point, over what Sophie was unsure, her mother threw a whole pot of tomato-based vegetable soup against the wall behind the kitchen table. Then she just walked away. Her grandmother Mae was there and sat in silence at the table.

One afternoon, her mother called and told Sophie that she feared for her own life, and that she had left the house in a hurry. Her mother explained that she would be away for at least a couple of weeks. She told Sophie to have Fred go to friends’ houses as often as possible to eat dinner, and for her to do the same. Sophie would put out cereal boxes in the morning and open cans of soup for lunch. She washed and dried the dishes and reset the table. She was eight years old. On nights they weren’t hosted at friends’ homes for dinner, she and Fred poured out an additional bowl of cereal. They left a note posted on a kitchen cabinet when they ran low, hoping their father would see it and replenish the cereal. Mae was completely useless. She didn’t cook or ever watch her grandchildren in their parents' absence. Sophie’s mother returned from Philadelphia one day without any fanfare. She just went back to work, and back to sleeping.

Exasperated after a house hunting trip to Massachusetts, her mother once said that she’d either buy a gun or buy a house. As a frightened young girl, Sophie asked that she please not buy a gun. Her mother then laughed and looked at Sophie with a puzzled look. She explained she was joking, but Sophie felt threatened by the comment. Sophie began to shake and cry. It was a strange encounter. For several years, Sophie got into the habit of hiding the kitchen knives as soon as the screaming broke out in the house. She found a quick and nearby hiding place under the family room couch cushions.

MASSACHUSETTS

What is An Abortion?

Though Sophie was sometimes invited to spend the night at a friend’s house, she knew she was never able to reciprocate. She could never predict the situation at her home. She always felt that sleepovers were a great way to escape from home for the night. One of her closest friends in junior high had been a girl named Cindy, whose family seemed even more strange than her own. Cindy’s mother, who preferred to be called by her first name, was always home but not really present watching over the kids. She made a point of telling Sophie that she had gone to Mount Holyoke, an all-women’s college nearby, and that she was a lesbian. She explained that she’d married Cindy’s father because she just wanted to have children of her own. Cindy’s father was only around part-time. Cindy’s mother explained that he was schizophrenic and was in and out of mental institutions. Cindy went on to explain he was also a descendant of a very famous composer and pianist, who was also known to have suffered from mental illness.

Sophie had no idea what it meant to be a schizophrenic. She would look it up in the World Book encyclopedia when she got home. Sophie kept a list of new words she encountered in a journal. She would look them up after hearing them to avoid appearing ignorant in the future. Cindy had a younger brother and sister who played with each other and left Cindy and Sophie alone. They would take turns sending each other up and down the dumbwaiter in the house. It looked like great fun, but the older girls were too big to fit into it.

One afternoon when Sophie was visiting, Cindy’s mother came into her daughter’s bedroom. She asked Sophie if she happened to have an overnight bag or a small suitcase she could borrow later in the week. She explained she was pregnant again, and that she’d be going to have an abortion. Sophie thought of her small suitcase and said, Sure, it’s a little beat up, but you are welcome to use it. Sophie had no idea what an abortion was. Another word to look up in the encyclopedia. She returned to her house that afternoon and told her mother about loaning the suitcase to Cindy’s mother and why.

What? An abortion? She actually told you that? asked Sophie’s mother. "Forget it, just