After a childhood of wandering, author is home at last
EASTON -- "Rooms."
The small, wooden sign, studded with reflectors, hangs in the guest room of Michael Keith and Susanne Riette-Keith's 130-year-old farmhouse. It has meaning for each of them.
Riette-Keith was raised in the Brookline boarding house her parents ran. This sign hung outside; her father crafted it.
Michael Keith knocked about the country with his alcoholic father from the age of 5 until he joined the Army at 17. He slept in more rooming houses than he can remember.
"There were thousands of addresses, and we never stayed in any long enough to have a sense of home," Keith reflects. He wrote about the experience in "The Next Better Place" (Algonquin Books, 2003), a memoir due in paperback in June.
Making a home takes on new meaning when you grow up without one. The couple, in their late 50s, put a lot of stock in security, privacy, and the kind of vision that having your own place -- and not sharing it with paying boarders -- allows you to act on.
Keith's book has been glowingly received. It tells the story of a boy's wanderlust, and of his love and disdain for his father, who neither held a job nor stayed sober for long. Every few months, Keith and his dad would gravitate back to Albany, where Keith's mother and two sisters lived, and the boy would settle back into the routine of bathing, eating square meals, and going to school. But soon, the young boy would grow weary of the normalcy, and he and his father would hit the road again, where the next meal might be a sardine on a cracker, and school was an afterthought.
"A Huck Finn of the American roads," Keith puts it. He's an amiable fellow with graying hair and glasses, more like Tom Sawyer grown up than Huck Finn. Today, he teaches communications at Boston College and has written 14 books about radio.
For all the romance of travel, he led a lonely life as a boy. Keith evaded more than one encounter with men looking for sex, and spent a few nights in jail when a buddy used a stiletto to rob a paperboy. Most of the time, his father was oblivious.
"He was incapable of divining what was inappropriate or not right in how he conducted his life vis-a-vis his family," Keith explains. "His attitude was `Well, he wanted to come, and we had a pretty good time, didn't we?' "
Keith's father died more than 20 years ago, and it has taken that long for the writer to come to terms with his homeless childhood. "He was a hopeless alcoholic," he says of his father, "but he always cared for me and loved me and looked out for me. And I could see what a remarkable childhood I had. There was deprivation, but it was a 12-year adventure."
Keith and his father never passed through Brookline. If they had, they might have stopped at the rooming house where his wife was growing up.
"There wasn't too much privacy. You couldn't run around in your underwear," Riette-Keith recalls. "They'd share the kitchen with us. Three ladies lived there forever in one room together -- for 25 or 30 years."
"Your mother created a nice environment," Keith says. "She was the quintessential homemaker, and she ran that rooming house."
"My mother was recycling before it was PC," Riette-Keith says. "She was frugal. She saved and washed plastic bags to reuse them. She cut Kleenexes in half. Clothing would wear out and she'd remove buttons and zippers, and use the fabric as rags."
"At 90, she poured her own cement and re-cemented her front steps," Keith adds.
Riette-Keith's mother died in 1992, but look around the house and you'll see that she has inherited her mother's resourcefulness.
An artist, Riette-Keith designs fabric and toys. The house is filled with her artistry, from the colorful watercolors and acrylics on the walls to the many painted chairs and chests, and the displays set up in each of the five fireplaces.
"I can't stay away from color," Riette-Keith confesses. "I'm more an autumnal-type person. I like creating an environment, a warm feeling in the house."
"Susanne has a pillow fetish," Keith adds. "She tends to build rooms around pillows."
Riette-Keith's tastes are playful and exacting.
Keith remembers house-shopping with his wife four years ago. "We had put a down payment on a house in Mansfield," he says. "And the next morning, Susanne wakes up, turns to me with a panicked look, and says, `The house is too square.' The week after that, we found this place."
The farmhouse is cozy, but not square. The journey from Riette-Keith's studio upstairs to Keith's offices, built off the kitchen, ambles through several rooms.
In the living room, Riette-Keith has set up an assemblage in the non-functioning fireplace featuring one of her husband's antique radios. Antique toys, which she collects, occupy a shelf in one corner. She frowns at the carpet she chose for the floor -- a floral pattern laid over the suggestion of a grid.
"We got rid of the wall-to-wall when we moved in and put a wood floor down," she explains. "What a trial it was, to find a rug that matched everything in here. I tried six, and brought them all back, until I found this one."
Her designs use bright tones and layer geometric patterns with organic ones. The first piece of furniture she painted was a shelving unit, which she covered in vivid lemon and lime tones, with stripes and flowers. It stands in the upstairs bathroom, stocked with towels that match or complement the colors of the shelves.
Keith has found a partner whose sense of design and comfort might make him never want to leave. For all his wandering, he has landed squarely at home, living within 20 miles of his mother, two sisters, and his daughter from a previous relationship.
"Home, for me, represents all that I didn't have [as a child]: stability of place, a good environment, a place you can come back to and feel secure," Keith
says. "I still have wanderlust," he adds. "But now I always go away with the knowledge that I will come back to this place." 