A Promise to Late Housekeeper Leads to Unforgettable Search for the Truth

The Housekeeper's Secret by Sandra Schnakenburg

The increasingly popular memoir genre may not be famous for unputdownable books but The Housekeeper’s Secret by Sandra (Krilich) Schnakenburg is certainly one such memoir. The story reads like a fast-paced novel, with an ensemble cast of well-defined characters and a mystery to solve from the start. Per its title, Schnakenburg writes about the Krilich family’s beloved housekeeper Lee Metoyer and the author’s efforts — thanks to a poignant deathbed request from Lee herself — to piece together Lee’s secret past.

The book’s introduction starts with October 1994, when Lee is dying of lung cancer and the author comes home to Illinois to see her. In this last meeting between them, Schnakenburg promises to write a book about Lee’s life, a book Lee always intended to write but ran out of time. It’s a big promise, because from the day Lee gets hired, the six Krilich children are forbidden to ever ask her anything about her past. All they know is that her husband and son Pierre have been killed in a car accident. Their photos — a white man in a military uniform and a young boy about two years old with light brown skin and crossed eyes — decorate Lee’s bedroom. In the few times Schnakenburg dares to ask Lee any personal questions, Lee clams up.

The intro then shifts ahead twenty-three years to 2017, with Schnakenburg arriving in Maneto, Illinois, “the home of the mental hospital that held the answers to so many of my questions.” She leaves a message for a man who’d worked for years at the mental hospital and knows everything about it. “This was it. I was going to hear answers I’d hoped would tie up the last loose ends of … Lee’s life. I’d already learned things that had astonished me, truths that had given me dark, fitful nightmares. But I needed to hear the rest.”

The memoir itself alternates between conversational accounts of the Krilich’s busy family life in the remote Chicago suburb of Barrington, Illinois — from 1965 to the mid-1980s — and shocking tidbits the author unravels — from Lee’s 1994 death to late 2017 — as she ferrets out the mystery of Lee’s prior life. The years Lee helps raise the six children at their mansion on Rainbow Road are sometimes bucolic, sometimes turbulent but always make an engaging read. The author opens up about the domestic abuse her father inflicted on her mother with his angry demands, unpredictable moods, and cruelty to not just his wife but the kids too, not the least of which is the effect of his year-long stint in prison.

There is color galore. The family mansion suggests a lifestyle that is wealthy and high maintenance, with a helipad, tennis court, horses, dogs, chickens and rabbits and, typical of that region, a tornado fallout shelter in the basement. Descriptions of Lee are vivid, with her short black shiny hair, “bottle thick glasses” and the way she moves “like a bent-over duck”, with one foot pointed outward and “a walk like her legs were not put on straight.” She smokes Pall Mall cigarettes, lights each one with a Chicago Cubs lighter and worships Ernie Banks, the first Black man to play for the Cubs.

Schnakenburg’s research into Lee’s secrets follows a necessarily convoluted path as she tracks down family members and others who might have known Lee. Starting out with the find that the Metoyer family name was a wealthy Creole family of French and African descent, centered in Natchitoches, Louisiana, the author digs deeper, ferreting out family connections from a wide swath of leads and more digging.

Lee’s story is at times difficult to read owing to the severity of the crimes she suffers but the details inform our understanding of the often racist and misogynistic times she endures. “Do we ever get over the severe wrongs done to us?” asks the author. For Lee at least, she seems to have taken to heart the words of her sister Hazel, that “It doesn’t matter what you decide to do, as long as you do it well.” In Schnakenburg’s view, Lee does just that, easing the pain and smoothing the transitions for the Krilich family as “part Dear Abby, part Sigmund Freud, part Mary Poppins, part Maria Von Trapp. Grace, empathy, insight and intelligence. All laced with magic.”

The Housekeeper’s Secret is an exciting read, at times thrilling, at times heart-breaking. The impact Lee Metoyer has on a family whose very survival depends on her loving care and unwavering judgment shows the strength of the human spirit, and is likely to stay with you, far beyond this book.