A lost midcentury classic—the farcical misadventures of a queer Black teen sharing a house with
two adoptive mothers a lascivious cook and a reticent ghost. In a small Michigan town in the
late 1950s the widow Etta Klein—wealthy and Jewish—has for more than thirty years relied for
aid comfort and companionship on her Black housekeeper Harriet Gibbs. Between Aunt Harry” and
Etta a relationship has developed that is closer than a friendship yet not quite a marriage.
They are inseparable at once absurdly unequal and defined by a comic codependence. Forever
mourning the early death of her favorite son Sargent Etta has all but adopted Aunt Harry’s
nephew the precocious gay seventeen-year-old Oliver who has been raised by both women.
Oliver is facing down his departure to college—and fending off the advances of Etta’s cook
Nella Mae—when the household is disrupted by the arrival of a self-proclaimed warlock ” one
Maurice LeFleur who has convinced Etta and Harry that he might be able to contact Sargent in
the afterlife . . . Ladies of the Rachmaninoff Eyes was the debut of the extraordinary Henry
Van Dyke whose witty and outrageous novels look back to the sparkling elaborate comedies of
Ronald Firbank and forward to postmodern burlesques like Fran Ross’s Oreo. There is nothing
else quite like them in American fiction.
