The Boston Girl

Miss Lettis had put on her best “welcome” face, but when she saw three cameras hanging from the driver’s neck, she gasped, “I didn’t get permission for pictures,” and ran inside to call Boston for instructions, leaving Miss Smith high and dry.

She perched on the porch railing and lit a cigarette.

The portrait didn’t do justice to her heart-shaped face and her big eyes. Her dark hair was almost as short as a man’s and parted on the side—a style you might have seen in a fashion magazine but much too much for Boston.

I must have been feeling very brave that morning because I went right out there and said, “Would you like something cold to drink, Mrs. Thorndike?”

She looked surprised at hearing her name, but then she smiled and shrugged. “You read the papers, do you? I could do with a drink but I don’t suppose you have a gin fizz handy.”

I didn’t know what to say: it was eleven o’clock in the morning and the middle of Prohibition.

She laughed. “Relax, child. I’m joking. Are you here from one of the girls’ clubs?”

I wasn’t about to tell her I was the maid, so I said I was a member of the Saturday Club, which was true.

She knew who we were. “Mother’s missionary society bought all their Christmas presents from you

r little shop a few years ago. Are you one of those adorable pottery girls?”

“Adorable”? She was getting on my nerves. I said no, that I was a secretary in a real estate office and taking classes at Simmons College. “That makes you a real go-getter as well as a fan of the gossip columns.”

That rubbed me the wrong way, too, so I said the society pages were a big waste of time, “except for Serena.” Then I looked her right in the eye and said, “I get a kick out of the way you poke fun at Boston’s high and mighty.”

That wiped the smug little smile off her face.

Miss Lettis reappeared, calmer now that she had her marching orders. There would be no pictures inside the lodge and no pictures of the girls.

“Doesn’t leave much, does it?” said Mrs. Thorndike. She stood up and flicked her cigarette out on the lawn. It must have taken all of Lettis’s self-control not to run over and pick it up. “Let’s get this over with.”

They went off on a grand tour that had been carefully laid out. They stopped at the tennis court, where it just so happened that the two best players were in the middle of a game, and from there paid a visit to a group of well-groomed girls who were reading poetry to each other. Another bunch was crocheting handbags—all of it phony as a three-dollar bill.

Tessa Thorndike didn’t seem all that interested. She didn’t talk to any of the girls or write down a word of what Miss Lettis told her about the history of Rockport Lodge or what happened there. Instead of eating lunch in the dining room with everyone else, she had her lunch on a tray in the parlor, by herself.

The lodge emptied out in the afternoon for a sailboat ride out of Rockport Harbor. Miss Lettis took the photographer to take pictures of the grounds and the house and Mrs. Thorndike went back to the porch to smoke.

I wandered out there with a book under my arm.

“No sailing?” she said.

I said I got seasick and asked if she was having a good time.

She sighed. “Not really. I’m on a tight leash; no funny business allowed.” She sounded discouraged and less snooty. “The only reason I’m here is that Charles’s mother gives money to this place and told the publisher she wanted something nice. If I were to be even a little bit clever, she would not be pleased.”

I asked if her mother-in-law suspected that she was Serena.

“Mother Thorndike would make her son divorce me. She finds Serena vulgar, but Charlie thinks she’s funny.”

“He’s right,” I said.

“Why, thank you,” she said and asked my name.

She said, “Addie Baum. That would make a good byline.”

And just like that, I could see it in my head, by Addie Baum, in black-and-white. That’s what I wanted to do with myself: I would write for the newspapers.

I had goose bumps, but I pulled myself together and said, “I don’t think I could remember things as well as you do.”

“You mean because I don’t take things down? That’s only because I’m lazy and nobody really cares what I write as long as I get the names straight, and they have someone else check to make sure that I do.”