Family Secrets by Rona Jaffe Read Free Book Online

had a horrid name for the rest of your life?”
    “Melissa.”
    “Melissa Saffron.”
    Melissa shrugged. She wasn’t anxious to go to school; she liked playing out of doors with her friends. There was never a child who had so many friends. She climbed trees and jumped rope, she made up little plays to act out with the other girls, she gave tea parties for her dolls and invited the whole neighborhood.
    School was different for Melissa than it had been for Lavinia, for Melissa didn’t care. She hated studying and hardly ever did her homework, but because she was so pretty the teachers were partial to her. Whenever she did get hit she really didn’t seem to care; she loved to whisper to her friends and if she got caught, well, that was the price you had to pay. She loved to sing and dance, and dreamed of learning to play the piano. When the class sang “The Star-Spangled Banner” it was Melissa’s voice that soared out above the rest of them, a sweet, pure soprano. She was the essence of everything that was feminine, and if she stumbled over her reading or did not remember her multiplication table, her huge, guileless green eyes said that after all, what business did a little girl have with such matters?
    Lavinia knew that Melissa was a fake. She was a little devil, and she was smarter than most of them, but she was lazy. She did exactly as much schoolwork as she had to, and she was always testing her teachers to see if she could get away with doing a little less. She was all energy and dreams. Yet, although she was so different from her sister, she adored Lavinia. They were very close, two sides of the same universe; one the sad, serious moon, the other the bright insouciant sun. Melissa knew that she had Papa and Mama and Lavinia and the world. Lavinia feared that she had no one. If Papa gave Melissa a smack for disobeying, Melissa knew it was only a smack. It was Lavinia who brooded over slights and injuries, who promised herself never to forget. Melissa cried whenever she couldn’t have her way. Lavinia never cried any more.
    Lavinia loved books. It was from her books that she chose the children’s names. After Melissa came Hazel. Hazel neither looked nor acted like her two sisters. She had a flat, sullen face, with little bewildered eyes, neither green like Melissa’s nor brown like Lavinia’s, but a sort of muddy combination of both. She thrust her jaw out like a turtle, stubborn, slow. She couldn’t understand what they understood, and she was angry because no one waited to listen to her. But she was so slow! She could hardly get the words out. At first she screamed when she found herself ignored; later when she was older and stronger she devised a simple method of being noticed: like a turtle she snapped hold of the victim’s arm with her two strong hands instead of jaws, and held on until her mind and tongue could form the words, no matter that it was finally nonsense.
    The family simply ignored Hazel’s problem. It was the easiest way, and they did not really understand it. Only Lavinia, “the orphan,” felt compelled to defend her. “She has a fat tongue,” she would say, and everyone accepted that.
    The first-born boy was named Andrew by Lavinia, and that is what the family called him, except of course for the old witch, who was still living with them, and who called all the children by their Hebrew names except Lavinia. She called Lavinia “Orphan.” There was a curious bond of hate between Lavinia and her grandmother. Lavinia was the only one of the children who knew Yiddish, therefore she was the only child who could ever communicate with the old woman. She felt compelled to fight with her, and the old woman felt compelled to pick on this child, simply because she was an old woman whom everyone ignored. Her daughter Polly was dead, her son was dead, her youngest daughter, Lucy, lay panting and sickly in bed for weeks at a time, and her son-in-law kept her on in his house out of pity, not