The Boston Girl

I didn’t realize how scared I was until he was gone. My voice squeaked when I said we should call the police but Mrs. Morse said it wouldn’t help; the rum runners and the cops were in cahoots.

I said, “So what are we going to do?”

She patted my hand. “It’s not your problem, Addie. Go to sleep now. I’m going to sit here a while.”

There was no sleeping that night. I kept hearing the awful things George had said to me and to his mother. I could still see the ugly look on his face and the bruise on Mrs. Morse’s jaw and it made me remember a woman from Levine’s factory who came to work every Monday morning with a black eye or a swollen lip. Everyone pretended not to see it and no one said a word, including me.

What could I say? “Call the police”? If they did come, they were gone after a few minutes. “Leave the bum”? How could she feed her children on her own?

But with my own eyes I had seen George hurt Mrs. Morse. I knew I couldn’t let it happen again, but I had no idea how to stop it.

—

On Saturday, I met Bess Sparber, who knew Gussie from the courthouse. She was staying at the lodge that week and wanted to say hello and see how I was doing. She was a short blonde with a handshake like a longshoreman’s. She had a little space between her front teeth, which I always think makes a person look honest. I was desperate to talk to someone and told her what was happening to Mrs. Morse.

She said, “This happens all the time. I hear things in court that would make you sick to your stomach: a woman who lost an eye to a beating, a little boy who had maggots in the strap marks on his back. ‘Home sweet home’? Don’t make me laugh.”

She said she’d help in any way she could and that she’d get others to pitch in, too. That gave me the idea to find out who was staying in the room right over the kitchen.

George hadn’t shown his face for a few days but I knew he’d be back, so I locked the kitchen door at night to have some warning and kept a knife and a broom handy.

The moment I heard his footsteps, I tapped the ceiling with the broom handle, then waited to open the door until George started hollering. As soon as he came in, a dozen girls holding croquet mallets and tennis rackets surrounded him. Girls kept coming, quiet as mice, until they filled the room. The only sounds were his breathing and Bess smacking a baseball bat across the palm of her hand.

When George spotted Mrs. Morse standing at the door, he lunged at her, butting his shoulder into the girl next to him like a football player. It must have hurt but she didn’t budge and the others closed in until he was trapped.

Mrs. Morse told him to get out. George called her an old bitch and worse and kept throwing himself toward her. But the girls didn’t give and eventually they pushed him back out the door.

After the lock clicked, there was a big sigh of relief. Bess and I wanted to get everyone out of there as quickly as possible, but Mrs. Morse had to shake hands with each and every girl first.

In the morning, Bess came to the kitchen and said, “That was terrific, but now what are you going to do?” We might try to pull the same stunt for a few nights, but then a whole new group of girls would arrive and they might not be so willing. Or someone might let the cat out of the bag and get Mrs. Morse in trouble. Or George could bring a gun.

I had to get help from someone local and the only people I knew to trust aside from Mrs. Morse were Hannah and Lucy. Hannah laughed when I told her how we got George out of the kitchen. She said, “Wish I could have seen his face,” and said I should talk to Lucy because she knew everyone in town.

Lucy got very quiet when I told her what was going on. “George Morse is a shit-heel,” she said. “He grabbed me between the legs when I was ten years old and I still feel dirty from it. You tell Mrs. Morse not to worry anymore.”

I’m not exactly sure what happened but Lucy talked to her uncle Ned, a temperance man who wasn’t shy about using axes, and not just on whiskey barrels. Ned’s drunken father had broken his nose when he was a boy, so he saw it as his calling to protect the weak—by whatever means necessary.

A week went by without a visit from George. Mrs. Morse stopped jumping up every time the door opened and went back to sleeping in her own house.

Another week passed and it seemed that George Morse had vanished from the face of the earth, but since nobody wanted to see him, nobody went looking for him. There was a rumor about a body washing up on Long Beach but I didn’t see anything about it in the newspaper. Besides, he could have gone to Salem or Boston or anywhere.

Mrs. Morse never mentioned her son again in my hearing. But I had pie for breakfast every day for the rest of the summer.

By Addie Baum.

Remember when you were little and I let you stay up late so we could watch Upstairs, Downstairs? That show always made me think about Mrs. Morse’s troubles with George and how Miss Lettis never found out. It wasn’t because she was stupid or because we were so smart. She was just busy with “upstairs” dramas, like the girl who got appendicitis. But she went into a full panic when she was told to expect a newspaper reporter who was coming to do a story about Rockport Lodge.

It might not sound like a big deal, but publicity like that had never been welcome by the women who started Rockport Lodge; they grew up thinking that a lady’s name should only appear in the paper when she got married and when she died. But that had changed and those women—and their daughters—read the society pages whether they admitted it or not, especially in the Boston Evening Transcript, which ran a genealogy column every week and reported on the kinds of women’s clubs attended by Boston’s “First Families.” I’m talking about the Lowells and the Cabots and that set. The Transcript was like People magazine for Beacon Hill types, and the rest of us, too.

Miss Lettis got a phone call from the chairman of the Lodge board and was told to expect a certain “Miss Smith” and to make sure she left with a delightful impression. Everything had to look its best, which meant I polished the banister twice and dusted every damn book in the house. The night before the big visit Miss Lettis sat down in the kitchen—something she never did—and went over the lunch menu with Mrs. Morse.

She was nervous as a cat, folding and unfolding her hands, and telling us more than she was probably supposed to. She said our visitor was the most popular society writer in Boston so we had to put our best face forward or the whole world would hear about it.

Miss Lettis came from Pittsfield, so she didn’t know that “Miss Smith” had to be “Serena,” who wrote a column called Out and About. Everyone read it, not only because she had the juiciest gossip but also because sometimes she poked fun at the people she wrote about, like the time she said Beacon Hill ladies were such penny-pinchers they wore their shoes until the soles were thin as communion wafers.

Nobody knew Serena’s real name. There was a rumor that she was from a First Family herself, which would have made her a traitor to her class and even more fascinating. Some people argued that “she” had to be a man because a woman couldn’t be that witty. When the car pulled up in front of the lodge, I felt like a detective solving the mystery of Serena’s true identity. Reading all those newspapers paid off because the minute I laid eyes on her I knew it turned out that she was Mrs. Charles Thorndike. Case closed!

When a Brahmin like Tessa Cooper marries a Brahmin like Charles Thorndike, there was always an announcement in the paper and sometimes a picture of the bride. Miss Cooper had sent every editor in town a photo that showed off a bare shoulder. Very racy.