The Boston Girl

I’ve forgotten a lot more than I like to admit, but I have all the details memorized: the pink icing, Katherine’s beautiful yellow shoes, the lilacs, and the sound of Filomena’s bracelets when she threw her arms around me. Like a wind chime.

You never looked at me with anything but love.

Sometimes friends grow apart. You tell each other everything and you’re sure this is a person you’ll know the rest of your life but then she stops writing or calling, or you realize she’s really not so nice, or she turns into a right-winger. Remember your friend Suzie?

But sometimes, it doesn’t matter how far apart you live or how little you talk—it’s still there. That was Filomena and me.

The day after the wedding shower we got together in the North End. She had to go to a big family lunch after church so she wasn’t sure exactly what time she’d get away, but I didn’t mind waiting. I was sitting on a bench in front of St. Leonard’s in the North End on a beautiful day and people were strolling on Hanover Street. Old ladies in black dresses were feeding the pigeons and watching their grandchildren play. It was exactly how I remembered it from when I was growing up, except the hats were different.

There isn’t enough room to say much on a postcard, so I had a hundred questions for Filomena. I knew that some of her New Mexico friends were painters and that she spent a lot of time with an Indian potter named Virginia. I knew she was living by herself and watched the sunset every day. She was selling enough of her pottery to scrape by. But that was about it. It was like I had an empty coloring book for her to fill in.

At first, I didn’t recognize the frumpy woman in a baggy black dress who was waving at me. Filomena’s sisters had made her take off her “costume” before church and dressed her like a grandmother. They were furious at her. How could she come to Boston for a friend’s wedding when she hadn’t bothered to make it to her own nieces’ and nephews’ first communions and graduations? They calmed down a little when she told them her friends had paid for her tickets. I guess they forgot she’d been sending them money ever since she moved to Taos, and believe me, she never had much to spare.

Filomena unpinned her braid, pulled a woven sash and some bracelets out of her bag, and in one minute was back to looking beautiful. She said she was dying for an espresso. “I’ve been dreaming about coffee ever since I got on the train.”

We went to a café where not even the hats had changed. I never saw a person enjoy anything more than Filomena enjoyed that espresso. The waiter must have noticed, too, because he brought over a second cup before she could ask.

She said, “Grazie,” and it was like they were long-lost cousins, talking with their hands and interrupting each other, just like Jews, except everything sounds better in Italian.

Filomena had brought a stack of pictures to show me and laid them out on the table in rows, like she was playing solitaire. There were a few of her sitting at a table with Morelli and three couples who were making silly faces at the camera. They had been his friends in art school and shared a big house on the outskirts of Taos. Filomena said, “We stayed with them at first, but it was like living with the Keystone Cops.

“They loved each other but they fought all the time and I could never figure out who was mad at who. Crazy people, but they were always good to me.” Eventually she and Morelli moved into a cottage on their land.

I had always imagined her living in a little shingled house like the ones in Rockport, but the house in the picture looked like a big anthill. Filomena explained what adobe was and how cool her house was on hot days. I said it sounded like living inside of a clay pot.

She got a kick out of that.

There was a picture of Bob Morelli sitting at a pottery wheel, looking down at a lump of clay between his hands. It made me remember how handsome he was.

“That’s an old picture,” she said. For the first few years, Morelli had gone to New York to visit his son in the summer, but one fall he didn’t come back. He said his son needed him, but Filomena knew that wasn’t the only reason. He couldn’t work in bronze in New Mexico and he missed the city. “Did I write that he died last year? Car accident. I’m still getting used to the idea.”

I said I was sorry and I meant it.

Filomena was excited to show me pictures of her work and there were a few vases that reminded me of Miss Green’s designs. But most of it had a different shape: round at the bottom, sharper like a tulip bulb, and mostly very dark. To me, it looked like streamlined modern art, but it was an old Pueblo style called blackware.

She said the minute she laid eyes on it she had to find out how to make it. She handed me a picture of an Indian woman with wrinkled cheeks and white hair bending over a fire. She said, “This is my teacher, Virginia; my Pueblo Miss Green.”

Virginia was one of the few people who still made blackware but when Filomena asked to study with her, she said no. “The Pueblo people don’t have much use for the whites. To them, we’re like badly behaved children.”

But Filomena kept pestering until Virginia let her dig the clay for her pottery and collect the manure she burned in her kiln. It sounded to me like work that the slaves did in Egypt but when I asked if she got paid, she laughed. “Virginia thought I should be paying her and she’s probably right. She only started teaching me how to build the pots when she broke her arm. But now that she’s getting older, I think she keeps me around because she knows I’ll keep the tradition alive. Not that she’d ever say so.”

Virginia called Filomena’s first attempts “half-breeds” and “bastards.” But once she stopped smashing them when they came out of the kiln, Filomena knew she was making progress.

“I’m really getting the hang of it now, but the tourists aren’t interested.” People want colorful souvenirs that people back home would recognize as “Indian.” So she was giving art lessons to make ends meet. “Of all the Mixed Nuts, I always thought you’d be the teacher. It turns out I like teaching.”

—

Filomena was in Boston for a few weeks before the wedding and we saw each other a lot. Irene had a dinner party for us with Gussie and Helen, who brought her husband and kids. One evening, Aaron took Filomena and me out for ice cream. She had a lot of family obligations, but we made sure we had time alone and we never ran out of conversation because nothing was too trivial or painful to talk about. I don’t know how many times we each said, “I never told anyone but . . .”

I told her how I wished I’d been more sensitive and sympathetic to poor shell-shocked Ernie and how I had a dream about trying to save that poor farm girl in Minnesota. I confessed that I was relieved my mother wouldn’t be at my wedding, and how sad I was about feeling that way.

Somehow, telling Filomena about those things made them seem lighter and less terrible. I remember asking her if that’s what it was like after going to confession in church. She said “God, no. When I was a girl I thought I’d get in trouble if I didn’t say all the Hail Marys and Our Fathers. But nothing bad happened if I didn’t say them and I didn’t feel any better when I did. It was like putting a penny into a slot and nothing comes out. By the time I was twelve, I only went to church when my sisters made me.”

She said she felt better talking to someone she could see, someone who cares about her. “The time I almost died in that bathtub, what kept me going was the look on your face and Irene’s and that wonderful nurse. I could see how worried you were, not mad or angry

or disappointed. You just didn’t want me to die. And afterward, too, you never looked at me with anything but love: no pity, no judgment. I’ve thought about this a lot, Addie. You made it possible for me to forgive myself.”

I had no idea it was so important to her, just like she was surprised to find out what I remembered from our conversations that first week at Rockport Lodge. She changed the way I thought about myself. “You told me I had a good eye and that I was good listener. You laughed at my jokes and took my ideas seriously.”