The Boston Girl

On the day I moved out, I was sitting on the steps waiting for Levine to pick me up with his car. The idea of living under the same roof as my mother made me feel like I was fifteen again—in other words, miserable. But then the mailman came and handed me a letter from Aaron. It was like one of those silly coincidences that only happen in novels. I kissed the envelope. I nearly kissed the mailman. I was on top of the world until I opened it.

Dear Addie,

I hope you won’t be too upset but . . .

Aaron was on a train to Minnesota to see if he could help get the amendment passed in St. Paul. Only four states had ratified so far and they badly needed a win. He said it would only be a few weeks, maybe a month. The rest of what he wrote was apologies: Forgive me. I love you. We’ll be together soon. I’m sorry. Don’t be mad.

I wasn’t just mad, I was spitting nails mad. Hadn’t he said it was a lost cause? Wasn’t I more important than a lost cause? Who knew how long he’d really be gone and how long I’d be stuck in Roxbury with my mother breathing down my neck?

I wrote him an angry letter and tore it up. I wrote him a whiny, woe-is-me letter with tear stains all over it and tore that up, too. In the end I sent a postcard to the hotel where he was staying. Dear Mr. Metsky. Please send mail for Miss A. Baum to Miss Henrietta Cavendish at the Boston Evening Transcript. It wasn’t nice but it could have been worse.

—

Moving into the house in Roxbury felt like I’d gone backward in time. Betty was upstairs with her family and I was on the first floor with my parents. It seemed as if nothing had changed, even though nothing was the same.

The boys had changed the most; all of them were taller, smarter, and louder. My mother called them wild animals—vilde chayas—and said Betty wasn’t strict enough. But Jake, Eddy, Richie, and Carl were just healthy kids who got good grades and did whatever their mother asked. They were always glad to see Auntie Addie when I visited—especially Eddy. But after I told them how big they were getting and after they told me what they were doing in school, we didn’t have much to say to each other. I was like a friendly moon circling around their busy little planet.

And even though he lived downstairs, my father was even more distant. I’m not sure he even knew which grandson was which. He never fell in love with any of them the way he had with Lenny. And he didn’t see much of them, since he was in the house only to eat and sleep.

After Papa got laid off from his job, he did exactly what Levine had suggested and spent his days in the synagogue library with Avrum and a bunch of old men. We called them alter kockers. Today they would be “retirees.”

The rabbi studied with them sometimes, and one day he asked if Papa would be interested in teaching boys to get ready for their bar mitzvahs. The parents would even pay something for his trouble.

I think that was my father’s dream come true. He went to the barber and asked Betty to help him choose a new suit, “because a man who teaches Torah can’t go around looking like a peasant.” He didn’t act much different at home, but he held himself taller. You could almost say he was happy.

Mameh had changed the least. She cleaned and cooked and complained. She wouldn’t touch Betty’s washing machine; she said it ruined the clothes and didn’t get them as clean as she got them with her washboard, and then she groaned about how doing the laundry was killing her back. She grew cabbages in the backyard—bitter and hard like baseballs. No one would eat them but Mameh, who said at least they were fresh and what did we know.

My mother did go out of the house more since they moved to Roxbury. Maybe because there were no neighbors in the same building, or maybe it was because there were fewer cars. At first she did some of the shopping, but the greengrocer kicked her out of his store when she accused him of putting his thumb on the scale. She gave the butcher such a hard time about how much fat he left on the meat that he wouldn’t let her in his shop, either.

Eventually, the only place Mameh could go was the fish market, where she was friends with the owner’s wife, who was as quiet as a fish herself. She had an unmarried nephew and the two of them decided he was perfect for me. Mameh said he was from a good family and he made a nice living. “He’s thirty-nine years old and ready to settle down.”

Betty said, “He’s two hundred pounds and not very smart. Leave Addie alone, Ma.”

“With ankles like that, she’s not such a catch herself,” she said, as if I wasn’t in the room.

They still didn’t know about Aaron. I wasn’t worried about introducing him in person: a Jewish man with a good profession, from a nice family? What’s not to like? But until he was standing next to me, I didn’t think I could have said his name out loud without crying like a baby.

I have no choice, Addie.

At least I still liked my job, which was never boring.

Miss Flora announced that she was leav

ing to be the editor of the women’s page of the Cincinnati Enquirer. I was stunned. I always thought she was as Bostonian as the statue of George Washington in the Public Garden. And just as permanent.

If Flora had been a man, I’m sure Cornish would have understood why she’d want to run her own section, but he said good riddance and it just proved that women were fickle and didn’t belong in the newsroom. The morning after she left I found him passed out under his desk. When he sobered up, he told Katherine that she’d have to take over Flora’s work in addition to her own.

Katherine marched into Mort’s office and said she would stay on only if she got a promotion and a raise, and if I came on as her full-time assistant. Cornish called that “uppity” and thought she should be fired, but Mort gave her everything she asked for.

I hadn’t known much about Katherine or Flora. We didn’t pal around after hours like the men did. Katherine was a hard worker but Flora had been the bigger talker. Until she took over, I didn’t know how much Katherine had on the ball.

She told everyone to call her Miss Walters and to call me Miss Baum. “You and I can be familiar with each other,” she said, “but why should they call us by our Christian names if we can’t do the same to them? We’re not their maids.” She was right, but nobody in the newsroom was ever going to call me Miss Baum. When you start out somewhere as “the girl,” you never grow up.

Katherine—Miss Walters—told me I would still be writing Seen and Heard, but she wanted more about the younger set, especially what they were wearing. She brought in a stack of Vogue magazines and I learned a whole new language: organza, peplum, bias cut, ­pinafore.

All that reading made me take a new look at what Katherine was wearing. Maybe I hadn’t noticed because she was always in black, but now I realized that she wore whatever was the latest “silhouette,” one of my new words, and that her drop-waist dresses were perfect for a woman of her height.

No one would ever call Katherine Walters a pretty woman: her face was strangely flat and one eye was a tiny bit higher than the other. After Flora left, she took off her hat, cut her bangs, and was suddenly striking and stylish, which is actually much better than pretty.