Being a mother wasn’t as scary as I thought it would be, not only because Aaron was a good father, but because I didn’t have to invent the wheel. I learned from Betty that it was good for children to have fun with them, to get on the floor and play. And I watched the way Irene talked to her son and daughter almost as if they were grown-ups. There was no baby talk and no beating around the bush in her house. Irene always told the truth and called a spade a spade and a penis a penis. That was unheard of in the ’30s. When her little boy, Milo, said “penis” at a family dinner it was as if he’d murdered the pope.
When Irene’s kids were both in school, she got a job as the office manager for the Birth Control League of Massachusetts; she didn’t keep it a secret from Joe’s family, either. They were horrified and tried to get him to make her quit, but Joe knew better than anybody that there was no way to make Irene do anything. And he loved her for it.
Irene and Joe, Aaron and I were a foursome. We spent so much time together, our kids were like cousins and when Joe lost his job in the Depression, it didn’t feel so much like charity when we had them over for supper twice a week.
Not that we didn’t feel it, too. We ate a lot of beans and I remember putting newspaper in a pair of shoes to get another summer’s use out of them. But compared to most people, we had an easy time. Aaron didn’t lose his job, but what made the biggest difference was that Levine moved us into one of his buildings in Brookline and wouldn’t let us pay rent. “You’ll mow the lawn,” he said.
The lawn in front of that triple-decker was so small you could cut it with a pair of scissors. But that was my brother-in-law. He was a know-it-all his whole life. If you asked Levine what time it was, he’d give you a lecture about how his watch was the best one on the market and only a nudnik would buy anything else. But I don’t think he ever evicted a single tenant from the buildings he owned.
It’s strange to say, but I had some of the best years of my life during the Depression, because that was when I had your mother and aunt. They were nothing like their namesakes. Your mother, Clara, was the opposite of Celia. Clara was a spitfire who started talking at seven months, and once she started walking, I never sat down. Your aunt Sylvia was nothing like Aaron’s birth mother, Simone, who was famous for her sense of humor and for starting the Metsky hug. My Sylvia didn’t say a word until she could talk in sentences and always took things to heart too much, but she was the kindest, most loyal person you ever met.
So much of who a person is has to do with temperament. I think my sister Celia was probably born without any defenses, like Betty was born with skin like a rhinoceros.
I’m somewhere in between. It helped that I was born in America and that I got to go to school. But there was something built into my makeup, too; something that let me connect to the friends and teachers who helped along the way. I think my girls inherited that from me.
They both did well in school, too. Your mother was the valedictorian at Northeastern.
You didn’t know? That’s terrible! You should do an interview with her next. Or maybe it would be better to wait until you’re a little older, when you’re completely cooled off from adolescence.
—
Oh, yes, your mother and I butted heads when she was in high school. I didn’t like her friends—a bunch of rich girls who treated her like a pet dog and started her smoking cigarettes. She thought I was telling her how to live her life and treating her like a five-year-old. We were both right, but it took until she was out of college for us to admit it.
Old friends are the best.
The year both of the girls were in school, I decided I would take some daytime classes. Aaron picked up the Simmons catalog and asked if I’d be interested in Social Work Practice with Delinquent Youth. I’m sure he would have taken that class if he could, but after years of listening to Aaron’s stories from work at the Child Welfare League, it sounded interesting to me, too. I’d never given social work a thought because those classes were held all the way downtown. But Aaron said so what; the trolley went downtown, too, and we could have lunch together, just the two of us.
So I signed up and that was that. The minute the teacher op
ened her mouth, I knew what I was supposed to do. Ann Finegold was one of those people who lights up a room. You wouldn’t think so to look at her: she was in her forties, five feet tall, plump, frizzy-haired, and brilliant.
She told us that social work was a young profession still finding itself. She called it a “creative science” and said that, in her opinion, the best social workers were intelligent and compassionate, and while she could give us ideas and tools to help our fellow man, she couldn’t teach us how to put ourselves into another person’s shoes. She said, “If you don’t already know how to do that, you should drop this class and consider another line of work.”
She reminded me of Irene: no bullshit. She made me think of my Shakespeare teacher, too, because he was so passionate about his subject and curious about us. Ann insisted that everyone use first names in class, which was unheard of back then.
I took every class she taught and we got to be good friends. The husbands, too. You probably don’t remember, but they were at your bat mitzvah.
When I had to do my fieldwork, Ann sent me to Beth Israel, where I did intake interviews with women who were waiting in the emergency room.
I was given a list of questions to ask: age, where they were born, years of schooling, marital status, reason for coming to the hospital. There was one woman—she was my age but looked twenty years older—who answered everything in a flat, quiet voice. When I asked how many children she had, she stopped and gave me a hard look. Then, as if she was admitting to something terrible, she whispered, “Three living children, but six times pregnant.”
It was all I could do to keep from throwing my arms around her and telling her that I had two living children, but I’d been pregnant four times.
I had two miscarriages before your mother was born and I was sure it had been my fault: I’d eaten the wrong thing or ridden on a bumpy streetcar or maybe I shouldn’t have gone to see that scary movie. Or else it was a sign that I shouldn’t have children because I wasn’t fit to be a mother.
I didn’t talk to anyone about how brokenhearted I was or how hopeless I felt. I had no idea how common it was to lose a pregnancy. Betty came to see me in the hospital after I lost the second one. She noticed I hadn’t touched the cookies she brought the day before.
I said I didn’t feel like eating.
But instead of her usual noodging, she sat down next to me on the bed and told me that she had lost a baby, too. “It was after you got married. We really did want a little girl.”
I said, “Why didn’t you tell me?”
She said, “I don’t know.”
Women used to think we were supposed to act as if nothing had happened, as if losing a baby you wanted wasn’t a big deal. And if you did say something, people told you that you’d forget all about it when you had a healthy baby. I wanted to punch them all in the face.
Betty cried. I cried. We had never been closer.