Winner of Multiple Book Awards -- The Landlady of Maple Avenue is a poignant and humorous literary family saga inspired by true events. Set in the 1950s, it follows the aging Marceline Gillis, an immigrant mother of seven, as she plots to reclaim her position as the matriarch and rightful landlady of a Victorian house on Maple Avenue. Battling family tensions, disappointments, and the grief of losing loved ones, Marceline navigates the complexities of power, ownership, and legacy within her tight-knit Catholic family. Her journey is filled with heartache and determination as she seeks validation after a lifetime of hardship. Gillis demonstrates remarkable skill in bringing the complex dynamics of a mid-20th century immigrant family to life in a way that modern readers can easily connect with. Her sharp wit shines through in the dialogue between family members, creating moments of levity that balance perfectly with the more poignant aspects of the story, and every character felt so real like they'd jumped straight out of a time machine.
Winner of Multiple Book Awards -- The Landlady of Maple Avenue is a poignant and humorous literary family saga inspired by true events. Set in the 1950s, it follows the aging Marceline Gillis, an immigrant mother of seven, as she plots to reclaim her position as the matriarch and rightful landlady of a Victorian house on Maple Avenue. Battling family tensions, disappointments, and the grief of losing loved ones, Marceline navigates the complexities of power, ownership, and legacy within her tight-knit Catholic family. Her journey is filled with heartache and determination as she seeks validation after a lifetime of hardship. Gillis demonstrates remarkable skill in bringing the complex dynamics of a mid-20th century immigrant family to life in a way that modern readers can easily connect with. Her sharp wit shines through in the dialogue between family members, creating moments of levity that balance perfectly with the more poignant aspects of the story, and every character felt so real like they'd jumped straight out of a time machine.
April 1951, Cambridge, Massachusetts
Maple Avenue had long been considered one of the prettiest streets in all of Central Cambridge. Sandwiched between Inman Square and Harvard Square, the street was lined with elm, oak, and maple trees on both sides, sprouting out of its richly colored red brick sidewalks. Its many properties consisted mainly of Greek Revivals and Victorian homes built in the late nineteenth century, once occupied by some of Cambridge’s wealthiest families.
Many homes had since fallen into disrepair, given their sheer size and constant need for upkeep. Several had been split into two or three separate units, reflecting the current economic times while providing rental income to help with the costs of running such large homes once inhabited by live-in servants.
The particular house in question—No. 27 Maple Avenue—was one such home. It was a three-story Queen Anne Victorian that now had three separate units, each requiring considerable work. Its once glorious exterior had been beaten down to chipped, old brown paint, broken turrets around its dormers, and missing shutters from several of its many large windows. There were visible bare spots along its steep roof where the original scalloped shingles had been blown off by the harsh New England weather. A rusted rooster weathervane sat on its highest perch, tied on by some wire, having been rescued before, as it tilted too much to one side while twirling in the soft April breeze.
A realtor’s "For Sale" sign was on the front metal gate, and a recently added "Sold" sticker was slapped across it. It looked rushed and conspicuously applied. Parked by the front gate sat four members of the Gillis family inside a 1948 Buick Special, staring up at the massive home and its current state of disarray.
The thirty-seven-year-old driver, Bernie Gillis, peered through the bug-splattered windshield with a proud look before addressing his mother, Marceline Gillis, who sat in the back seat of his car.
“So, what do you think, Ma? You wanna go in and take a look around?” Bernie asked, holding out the keys in his hand. “I got the keys right here.”
Marceline ignored her eldest son, staring out the passenger window. She had been given the best view of the new house, while her youngest, thirty-year-old son, Johnny, sat up front with Bernie, and her elderly husband, Fred, sat in the back seat beside her.
She didn’t respond, still floored by the sheer size of the "new" house. She was a stocky woman of sixty-two, dressed in a plain brown dress and hat she often wore to church.
“Well, say something, Marce. The boys are talking to you!” her husband, Fred Gillis, said next to her. He was a frail-looking man of seventy-three, who lowered his newspaper, annoyed. “Do you want to take a look inside or what? We’re all getting hungry back here,” he complained.
Marceline again failed to respond, too focused on the main double door entrance with its wraparound porch that hugged the right side of the driveway. The main doors were barely visible through the overgrown rose bushes that covered the entire front yard and walkway leading up to the house.
“You’ll have to climb a few stairs to get to the second-floor unit, Ma, but it’ll be well worth it once you look at your new kitchen!” Johnny smiled, smoking his Cuban cigar up front.
“So, what’s it gonna be, Ma?” Bernie asked impatiently, still holding the new keys. “Tommy’s waiting for us back at the apartment, and he’s expecting us to pick him up for lunch,” he said more firmly.
“Yeah, Marce. What’s it going to be?” Fred griped. “We’re all getting hungry just sitting here!” He clutched his stomach as it grumbled under his overalls, which he could set a clock to.
“Hush up, you! I’m thinking,” Marceline finally uttered, having refused to see the house before today.
She thought it was all unreal somehow, having grown up dirt-poor on a potato farm in New Brunswick, Canada. She had never owned anything of value her entire life and had always hoped to own a house—a dream that never materialized given her disappointing marriage to Fred, which resulted in her being forced to raise seven children practically on her own while caring for an alcoholic husband for most of her adult life.
She recalled her favorite son, Andrew Gillis, who was instrumental in finding the house, referring to it as “a place for Ma to rest and own of her very own.” Those words kept playing in her head, cut short by her son’s tragic death just before the final purchase of the house.
“So, what’s it gonna be, Ma? We’re all getting tired just sitting here,” Johnny repeated, blowing a perfect smoke ring out his cracked passenger window.
“Just look at all those rose bushes, Johnny,” she finally said, unable to see the entire front porch. “Why, you’d be taking your own life into your hands just trying to move anything in there.”
“Don’t worry about that, Ma,” Bernie laughed, wearing a new suit and tie to mark the special occasion. “We already hired some kids to cut those bushes down in the morning, so it’ll be all cleared away before we get here with the truck. Right, Johnny?”
She still couldn’t bring herself to imagine living there.
“Don’t worry, Ma. Once we get all this moving stuff done, you’re going to love living here. And just think—you’ll never have to move again!” Johnny confirmed in his own new suit, winking at his older brother beside him.
But she was still too reluctant to go inside, knowing the house had previously been owned by rich people who had live-in servants. Despite the house needing so many repairs, living in this section of Cambridge was overwhelming to her. She had gotten so used to the poor side of town, having lived in some of the worst housing in Cambridgeport for most of her adult life.
“I suppose it can wait till the morning,” she finally said worriedly. “There’s no use finding fault with it now, seeing how it’s already bought and paid for.”
“That’s the spirit, Marce! Look a gifted horse right in the mouth, after all the boys did for us. Let’s go get lunch now, Bernie. Tommy’s waiting,” Fred sighed, tapping his eldest son’s shoulder.
“Who said anything about getting lunch before we go to the cemetery?” she snarled at her husband beside her.
“But Tommy’s—”
“Let him wait! I want to make sure they put Andrew’s headstone in right. That’s the least we can do, seeing how he’s responsible for all of this,” she uttered.
“All right, Ma. We’ll stop by there first,” Bernie said as he started up the car.
The car pulled away from the curb as Marceline glanced back at the new house through the rear window, still unable to digest it all.
***
Dark clouds hung over Andrew Gillis’s grave at the Cambridge Cemetery that morning. A new, modest headstone had been installed in the double plot, with Andrew’s birth and death dates engraved on it. The dates indicated that he was a young man of thirty-two, having died only a few short weeks ago, with the ground still covered in dirt.
Marceline dusted off the top of the headstone, seemingly pleased with its appearance despite her heartache over losing her favorite son. “My poor dear boy. And such a good boy he was, always wanted to please his ma,” she sighed, shaking her head.
Her other two sons didn’t like to hear her saying things like this, as they were used to being forced to compete for her love. They knew, even as children, that their brother Andrew was far more successful at this, always finding a way to please their mother in both his words and deeds—until he’d dropped dead of a heart attack on the kitchen floor.
The military had rejected Andrew Gillis from the war, not allowing him to enlist, unlike his three brothers and sister, Anna Mae, who all served in the Army. He was forced to stay home with his mother and father due to a heart condition—something Marceline often referred to as the “bad Gillis hearts.” It was true that the Gillis men had inherited weak hearts from Fred’s side of the family, which condemned many of them to endure premature deaths.
“It’s a shame he never even got a chance to live in the new house. And after all he did just to find it for all of us,” Bernie sighed, smoking his usual Lucky Strike cigarette by the grave.
“It was just like Andrew to always think of others first, isn’t it, Ma?” Johnny said, still smoking the same Cuban. “He even saved up working two jobs while we were all busy fighting the war, just to help pay for it.”
Fred placed a penny on his son’s new headstone and made the sign of the cross over his gray sweater, feeling the deep loss of his first dead child.
It was a double plot where another family member could also be buried later on, which the family assumed would be Fred, as he was already outliving many of the rest of the Gillis men, which puzzled them all.
“He’ll be missed, all right,” Marceline agreed. “If only he didn’t have that bad Gillis heart! Who knows what might have happened had he been allowed to stay with us longer.”
“Stop saying that!” Fred grunted, standing beside her.
“What?”
“Stop saying he had a bad heart!” Fred insisted, standing half a foot shorter than his stocky wife.
“Oh, hush up. It’s common knowledge all the Gillis men have bad hearts in this family, and you know it.”
“They do not! It’s only you who has the bad heart, Marceline, and we’re reminded of it every day!” Fred complained.
“Jesus, Ma and Pops! Can we not talk about this in the cemetery?” Bernie said, glancing around, hoping nobody was hearing them shouting. He could sense another family fight coming on and was always the first to try and put a stop to it.
“Yeah. Isn’t that like asking for bad luck?” Johnny asked, agreeing that this was no topic to be discussing in a cemetery.
“I have a ‘bad’ heart? Me, from the Ouellette side of the family?” she scoffed. “After your own father, Joseph, died of a heart attack at age fifty? And his brother John Gillis who died at forty-two. And then your uncle Augustus from Sydney who died—”
“All right, already! You made your point. Are you happy now?” Fred said, glaring at his wife, who had a large indent in her forehead that had been accentuated over the years from her endless disappointments in life.
“Can we just drop it and get lunch already? Tommy’s waiting, and we’re all getting anxious about that move tomorrow,” Bernie reminded them, always being the sensible one in the family.
Bernie tossed his cigarette aside as they all followed him back to the car, except for Fred, who lagged behind, removing his flask from under his gray sweater. He took a long swig before hiding it again and getting into the back seat of Bernie’s car.
Fred gave Marceline a nasty glare as the car left the cemetery. He knew his wife was right. The Gillis men did have a long history of heart disease, often leading to their early deaths. But as long as they were all good, decent men with kind hearts, that was all that mattered to Fred. He knew that God would agree with him on that, and not his wife, despite her always bringing up the “bad Gillis hearts.”
As the family drove back to Cambridgeport, they passed several of their old tenement apartment buildings where they had lived during the Great Depression and the war. The boys were particularly familiar with these streets, having survived many fistfights and snow fights, typically caused by insults lavished on their father, commonly referred to as the “local drunk.”
Bernie’s Buick approached their current building on Washington Street, where Tommy Gillis stood on the front stoop, pacing back and forth in panic while wringing his large hands.
“They forgot me! They forgot about Tommy!” he said, finally hearing Bernie’s car horn toot from the street below.
His eyes lit up like a Christmas tree as he spotted Bernie’s familiar car. He darted down the front steps two at a time to meet the family. He grabbed onto the car door handle before Bernie could stop the car.
“Where you been, Bernie? I’s been waiting, and nobody came!”
“Hold on, Tommy! Let me stop the car, for God’s sake. We’re not that late!” Bernie said, opening the back door with his free hand.
His nearly three-hundred-pound brother jumped into the back seat, forcing Fred closer to his wife, which annoyed her.
“Get off my dress!” she said, pulling it out from under her husband’s tiny butt.
Tommy was once the most promising of all the four Gillis sons until he ended up serving in the war. After his military discharge, he was a forever-changed man, having suffered a brain injury that left the twenty-five-year-old with the mind of an eight-year-old child.
His brain injury wasn’t caused on the battlefield but instead by his commanding officer, who forced Tommy and some other Marines to unload a truck full of military supplies in 110-degree Texas weather. After collapsing from severe sunstroke, Tommy woke up in the hospital three days later, a permanently altered being. He was soon discharged, becoming his family’s permanent responsibility for the rest of his adult life, after receiving an honorable discharge and full military pension.
***
A short while later, the Gillis family sat in their favorite booth at the S&S Restaurant in Inman Square, enjoying their favorite meals to help celebrate the special day. They each knew that the purchase of the new house meant the Gillis family would no longer be considered poor. This was especially true given the new neighborhood they would now inhabit, along with becoming first-time homeowners, allowing them to move into the more prosperous middle class.
The family rarely ate out, but when they did, it was typically here, where Marceline and Fred had previously worked as dishwashers during the Great Depression. It had been a hard time for all, especially after Fred got fired for showing up to work drunk too often, forcing Marceline to take over his night shifts just to keep their family fed.
The restaurant was owned by Ma Edelstein, an immigrant from Russia who first introduced the family and other locals to Jewish cuisine, some of which were now Fred’s and the family’s favorite foods.
As the family enjoyed their meals, Bernie noticed his mother’s sullen look as she sat staring at her plate while not eating.
“What’s with you, Ma? You’re not eating your meatloaf,” Bernie stated, enjoying his melted Reuben on rye with extra sauerkraut. “Yeah, Ma, you love their meatloaf here,” Johnny agreed, enjoying his usual turkey dinner with giblets and liver stuffing.
“I guess I’m just not that hungry,” she said, pushing her food around with her fork, unable to concentrate on anything except what she knew was about to come.
This was to be the final move for her, Tommy, and Fred, as they would be expected to spend the rest of their days living in the new house. Only now, with Andrew gone, it would be up to her and Fred to be Tommy’s full-time caregivers, while her two sons, Bernie and Johnny, would live elsewhere with their new wives.
She knew that everything had now changed since Andrew’s death, leaving her two sons in charge instead of her and her favorite son. Instead, she was told she was too old and ill-equipped to manage a house that size, which meant Bernie and Johnny would be doing it all by themselves, along with their brides.
As for Marceline’s three daughters—Lena, Gertie, and Anna Mae—they had long since moved away from Cambridge, leaving their mother and brothers to take care of the rest of the family. They had all married as soon as the war ended and moved far away, rarely returning to visit, as they did not want to be reminded of their painful childhoods of growing up poor in Cambridgeport. They, too, along with their four brothers, felt ashamed of their father’s drinking problem, which they were often teased about in school and in the neighborhood.
Being the three girls of the family, they also had added duties that the boys didn’t have, forced to act as caregivers to their brothers and their father while their mother worked nights. They had to cook and clean for them all and make sure the house was run properly until their mother returned home, often too tired to do any of the work herself. They also had to make sure all the kids were off in the mornings on time to St. Mary’s Catholic School with their homework done and their uniforms pressed and clean.
These added duties for Marceline’s three growing daughters made them resent her and their lives and contributed to their already harsh childhoods, making them want to escape their past and family as soon as they became of age.
They, too, had assumed that Andrew would be managing the new house, and their mother would, by all accounts, be the official landlady. She had always been the matriarch of the family up until now, but that had all changed with Andrew’s death and the end of the war.
Her sons’ newfound wealth allowed them to purchase the Maple
Avenue house easily with their GI loans, as well as the savings Andrew contributed before his death. As far as Bernie saw it, the new rental property would be a profitable investment for the entire Gillis family to rely on for years to come, ensuring they never again fell back into a state of poverty. But that was not how Marceline viewed it or wanted it. She wanted that house all for herself, the way her son Andrew had always promised.
“But it’s my piano, Bernie. It has to go first, right, Ma?” Tommy insisted, eating his juicy hamburger beside his father, who enjoyed the same.
“As long as it goes on the truck, who cares when it goes?” Bernie asked, hating the thought of taking it down all those stairs, knowing it would be left up to him and Johnny to do alone now without Andrew’s help.
“Let him have what he wants,” Fred insisted, enjoying his juicy burger and fries. “He’s just anxious about the move is all, as we all are, so what’s the point in arguing?”
Fred was right. The Gillis family hated to move, having endured it so many times before. It was especially hard on them all during the Depression years, after being evicted from many buildings for unpaid rent. It brought back horrible memories while also making Fred feel more guilty about not always doing his part in helping the family.
“I know what we’ll do! We’ll get some pie! Ma loves the pecan pie they have here,” Johnny said, flagging the waitress down. “We’ll take five slices of pecan pie, Gloria, all with ice cream and some hot coffee!”
“Ice cream!” Tommy repeated with glee as the waitress walked away.
Hearing that pie was coming quickly restored Marceline’s appetite. She finished her dinner just before it arrived, never being one to waste good food.
***
Moving day had finally arrived for the Gillis family. Bernie and Johnny were still busy loading the family furniture onto the Penny Smart rental moving truck parked in front of their Washington Street apartment building. The truck was already half full of their old, beat-up, secondhand furniture, which had been moved many times before. Only the last of the furniture remained inside their fifth-floor apartment, including Tommy’s upright piano, which they dreaded moving and were hoping to leave for last.
Marceline was in the kitchen, putting away the last of her old, secondhand china she had purchased decades ago at the Salvation Army. She was never one to buy anything new, not caring about whom the items had belonged to previously as long as they were still useful and cheap. Her small kitchen was almost empty, leaving a hole where her old maple table and six chairs had sat for years. With them now in the truck, she couldn’t imagine how they had fit into such a small room while still managing to feed a family of nine.
Somehow, the kitchen looked smaller than she remembered from when they had first moved into the apartment eight years ago. Like all the Gillis furniture, it had been purchased secondhand or found abandoned along the streets of Cambridge.
It was on the streets that Marceline’s sons had found some of her favorite pieces, right after Harvard or MIT students had graduated and moved on. The rich students often left these pieces behind on the sidewalks in late May or early June, not wanting to spend the money to ship them back home. They never took the time to donate them either, leaving them on the sidewalks or outside their dorms or apartment buildings for anyone to take. The Gillis boys quickly snapped them up, including a large rolltop oak desk that Marceline loved, along with Tommy’s long-boy twin bed, his two matching dressers, and a number of well-made, handcrafted caned chairs.
But it was Marceline’s red china cup that she treasured the most, even with the glued-on broken handle. That cup had seen her through many troubling times as she nursed countless long and hard Lipton teas from it. The cup had been her companion through some of her most tragic times, including Andrew’s recent death. She could still recall the very spot on the kitchen floor where he had lain dead before the ambulance arrived to take him to the hospital, where they pronounced him dead.
Today, however, was supposed to be a day of celebration, she kept trying to remind herself. This had been repeated many times by her two remaining “healthy” sons, Bernie and Johnny, who did their best to move past the recent death in the family and look to brighter days ahead. Only those days didn’t feel like a celebration to Marceline at all, not after the promise she had been given about the house was no longer being honored since the death of her favorite son.
It was now her eldest son who was in charge of everything, making all the decisions for the family instead of her. Bernie had never agreed with Andrew’s idea that the house should be left in their mother’s charge. He never would have trusted its care to her, knowing how she could be such a selfish and stubborn woman at times, who didn’t always put the needs of the entire family ahead of her own. It was his idea to make sure she didn’t manage it all now and to leave it up to him, Johnny, and their wives instead, while she just lived in the house along with Fred and Tommy, focusing on taking care of them.
But that notion strongly irked Marceline, who was used to running her own house and her children’s lives. She wasn’t about to let her dreams die that quickly just because they could finally afford to buy a house.
As Marceline saw the new deed to the Maple Avenue house sitting on her kitchen counter, she got angry just thinking about it. She assumed it was left there by Bernie to remind her of just how far the Gillis family had come. She picked it up and looked at it, as the indent in her forehead deepened.
“That deed. That awful deed,” she mumbled, holding it.
It had only Bernie and Johnny’s names written on it, along with Julie’s name as Johnny’s wife. She had made such a fuss about it that Julie finally agreed to sign off on any claims to the property should something happen to Johnny. She had also delayed Bernie’s marriage to his pregnant fiancée, Corinne, just to prevent her name from being added as well.
But it was the fact that her own name didn’t appear on the deed at all, as well as the fact that her son Andrew’s name had been removed, that upset her the most.
“My piano! They forgot my piano!” she heard Tommy shout from the front of the building.
She rushed to the front living room window to see what was happening below as Tommy paced before the building, making a fuss about his piano for all to hear.
“My piano! They forgot my piano!” he shouted again as Bernie and Johnny tried to get past him at the front entrance, holding her fourposter bed in their hands.
“Shut up already about the piano, Tommy!” Bernie yelled. “Like I said, we’ll get it as soon as we’re done moving the rest of the stuff to make sure we have room in the truck!”
“Don’t you talk to him like that!” Marceline yelled down from the fifth-floor window. The Gillis family had always lived on the top floor, knowing the rent was cheaper.
“And be careful with that bed. I’ve had it for as long as I can remember, and I don’t want it broken before it gets there!”
She was referring to her old four-poster pineapple maple bed that she had bought secondhand the day she first moved to Cambridge from Lawrence, Massachusetts, nearly forty years ago.
She knew the neighbors would soon be complaining about Tommy’s yelling, along with their landlady, whom she knew would be all too happy to see the family go.
“My piano! They forgot my piano!” Tommy yelled again, blocking the way for his two brothers.
“For God’s sake, take his piano next so he doesn’t have another stroke! And find your father. I still need help with the rest of these boxes up here!” she said, returning to her kitchen.
It was then that Fred emerged from between the two buildings, taking a last sip from his flask. He put it away as he spotted his two sons at the front doorway, trying to get the bed out of the hallway in one piece.
“You know that thing comes apart, don’t you?” Fred uttered as he walked up to the front of the building.
“Jesus, Pops! Why didn’t you tell us before we carried it down all those stairs?” Johnny shouted, dropping his end of the bed.
“You only moved it a dozen times already! I figured you knew by now,” Fred said, walking up to the stoop before sitting on the top step.
His sons removed the legs in the hallway as Tommy kept pacing before them, shouting.
“My piano! They forgot—”
“Tommy, sit down and be still! Nobody’s forgetting anything!” Fred said, grabbing Tommy’s leg and forcing him to sit beside him. “You know how your mother gets on days like this, so don’t go making her crazier. It’s gonna be hard enough to survive today as it is!”
The boys finally got the bed legs off and put it into the back of the truck. They joined their father and Tommy on the top stoop to take a smoking break.
“Jesus, I’m tired! And we still have to get all this stuff into the new house,” Johnny complained, having worked up a sweat before lighting up his Cuban.
“You can say that again,” Bernie agreed, equally exhausted, while lighting up a Lucky Strike cigarette beside him. “It’s worth it, though, as soon as Ma sees that new kitchen. No more cramped living quarters for this family. From now on, we’re living in style. Ain’t that right,
Johnny?”
“You bet, Bernie. Nothing but the best for us now, right, Pops?”
Fred patted Johnny’s knee as the four Gillis men looked out at their old neighborhood. They were ready for a change, having taken in all its familiar sights, sounds, and smells—filled their hearts with both fond memories as well as pain.
“Is that where you all are now!? Sitting down there taking a smoking break while I’m up here doing all this work!?” Marceline yelled, having returned to the front window.
“Be quiet, woman!” Fred yelled up to her. “They’re just taking a quick smoke break, is all. It’s not the end of the world just yet, as far as I can tell!”
“Your whole life has been one long break, Fred Gillis! And don’t think I don’t know what you’ve been up to since we got back from lunch. If I smell one hint of liquor on your breath today, I swear, you’ll be good and sorry! I can promise you that!” she said, closing the window.
“Oh, Jesus! We’d better get up there,” Bernie said as they suddenly spotted a middle-aged couple passing by. The couple noticed the moving truck parked out front while ignoring the four Gillises sitting on the stoop.
“Hello, Mr. and Mrs. Hinkley, how are you today? Out for a nice stroll, are you?” Johnny asked pleasantly as the couple walked by, not saying a word to the family.
“What’s with them? They can’t say hello?” Johnny asked, feeling insulted by their silence while tossing out his cigar.
“That’s your mother’s fault,” Fred remarked. “She was never liked by any of the neighbors—not wanting to hear their gossip. She was too afraid of what they might be saying about her!” He laughed.
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph! If you four don’t get up here now, I’m coming down there myself!” Marceline yelled again, having reopened the window. “And why haven’t you moved Tommy’s piano yet? Do we need to have him screaming about that again, bothering all the neighbors?”
Tommy flew to his feet again, shouting, “My piano! They forgot my piano!”
“We’re getting it now, Ma!” Bernie and Johnny shouted as they flew into the building, followed by Tommy.
Fred remained behind on the front stoop, removing his flask again. He suddenly realized it was empty, which disappointed him, knowing he had such a long day ahead already. He wondered where he had hidden his new whiskey bottle inside the apartment and was about to go look for it when he spotted an old toothless bulldog approaching him. The dog always gave him a friendly greeting, unlike his other neighbors.
“Hello there, Mrs. Goldman. How’s old Chester doing? Still eating okay with those missing teeth of his?” Fred asked, hoping to pat the dog, who was trying desperately to get up the steps to greet him while being held back on his leash by his owner.
Animals always had an innate ability to tell the good people from the bad, Fred knew, as Mrs. Goldwater ignored his words and pulled her dog down the street as he protested not being allowed to visit with Fred.
Fred was used to this treatment, knowing his reputation preceded him, leaving a bad taste in everyone’s mouth. He was hoping the new neighborhood might be different when he suddenly spotted his disassembled bed in the back of the moving truck.
He jumped up, shouting, “Good lordy, Marceline! Did you know our bed’s out here?” he said in a panic. “Where the hell are we supposed to be sleepin’ tonight? I hope it ain’t in the back of that stinkin’ truck!” he cried, disappearing into the building.
That was the last day the Gillis family lived in Cambridgeport or paid rent to another landlord.
Suzanne Gillis's The Landlady of Maple Avenue is a captivating and heartfelt look at family, legacy, and the strength of the human spirit. Set in 1950s America, the novel follows Marceline Gillis, an aging immigrant mother, as she deals with the complexities of her large, intertwined Catholic family. Gillis skillfully weaves a narrative that goes beyond its historical context, striking a chord with modern readers despite its time-specific details.
The novel's strength lies in its well-developed characters. Marceline is a compelling main character. Her strong desire to reclaim her place as the family leader is shaped by years of hardship and loss. The author steers clear of simplistic views of family dynamics. Instead, she paints a complex picture of love, resentment, and the subtle power struggles that define family relationships. Each character feels real and fully formed, coming alive through their unique quirks and motivations. The sharp, witty exchanges between family members add a layer of realism and bring moments of humor that balance the more emotionally intense scenes.
Gillis vividly captures the atmosphere of the 1950s, illustrating the era’s social norms and the challenges immigrant families face. The Victorian house on Maple Avenue serves as a strong symbol of ownership, legacy, and the ongoing fight for recognition. Marceline's journey to regain control of her home reflects her broader struggle to reclaim her identity and self-worth after years of sacrifice.
While the novel tackles themes of struggle and heartbreak, it ultimately tells a story of resilience and the enduring strength of family bonds. Gillis's writing style is engaging and easy to read, making The Landlady of Maple Avenue a truly rewarding experience. The mix of humor and emotional depth leaves a lasting impression, making it a highly recommended choice for anyone interested in family stories, historical fiction, or a well-crafted, emotionally rich tale.