The Boston Girl

Katherine said I could also go back to writing about interesting lecture topics in Seen and Heard, but “nothing as upsetting as that piece about the Negroes.” She said there was a place for stories like that, but not on the women’s pages. She suggested I look into the work of the Women’s Educational and Industrial Union and the ladies who sat on the symphony board of trustees. “You’ll enjoy that.”

I did. But I also had to write the “how to” stories that had been Flora’s specialty: how to lose weight, clean the icebox, make homemade hand lotion, set the table for an afternoon of bridge or mahjongg, mend stockings so it didn’t show. It wasn’t hard, but it was a lot to learn about things that didn’t interest me at all.

Katherine kept everything running smoothly so Cornish could go on as he did before: coming in late, reading the papers, joking with the reporters, and leaving early. Katherine kept her distance from him but she read him the riot act when she saw me delivering his morning coffee.

“Miss Baum’s new responsibilities are such that she no longer has time to act as your personal servant. Please remember that.”

He was too surprised, or maybe too hungover, to come up with a snappy comeback. But if looks could kill . . .

Cornish didn’t speak to her at all after that. If there was something he absolutely had to tell her he dropped a crumpled-up note on her desk or sent a message through me. “Tell that blasted beanpole she’s got to cut ten inches today.”

I must have smiled at “beanpole,” which set him off making up funny names for Katherine: Miss Maypole, the Giraffe, the Boston Colossus. He started announcing them loud enough so everyone in the newsroom could hear. The reporters got a kick out of this until the day he called her the Monumental Bitch.

You could have heard a pin drop. It’s not as if those guys didn’t use that word and plenty worse, but there were rules about where and when you were supposed to say them. Katherine had been ignoring Cornish’s game but this time she said, in the sweetest, most ladylike voice, “My goodness, Ian. Do you kiss your mother with that mouth?”

That got a big laugh, and the police reporter, who was as foulmouthed as the rest of them, said, “Want me to get you a bar of soap to wash it out, Miss Walters?”

Work became a minefield for me after that. Katherine said she would let me go if I did any more favors for “that man.” But the minute she stepped out of the room, Cornish would send me out for a magazine or a bottle of aspirin and threaten to fire me if I didn’t do it.

To make things even worse, the weather was miserably hot and muggy. The newsroom only had three windows facing the street and when the sun hit them in the afternoon I bet it was ninety degrees in there. There was one fan, no water cooler, and those men didn’t shower every day.

—

Aaron’s letters became the bright spots in my life. They always started: My dear Miss Cavendish, I hope this letter finds you and your staff in the best of health.

The first one didn’t mention my snippy postcard, which was big of him, but he didn’t apologize for being so far away, either. He wrote about the trip west and his assignment, which was to talk to any state legislator who seemed to be leaning in favor of the amendment. He said he had eaten the best pancakes he’d ever tasted in his St. Paul hotel and was going to bribe the cook to give him the recipe.

He always ended his letters, Sincerely and forever yours, A. Metsky.

After a few weeks, his letters got to be less cheerful. It was as hot in St. Paul as it was in Boston, his hotel room was suffocating, most of the food was tasteless, and he felt invisible.

Going to Minnesota in the summer had been a big mistake; the state legislature wasn’t in session and the representatives were back at their farms, which were all over the state.

Aaron was riding milk trains to talk to possible supporters, but all he got was splinters on his backside from sitting on wooden crates and bites from mosquitoes he claimed were the size of bumble­bees.

He wired his boss to say that he might as well come back, but he was told to stay, find some stories about local child laborers, and get invited to speak at women’s self-improvement societies and church auxiliaries. Aaron said that if you can move a roomful of mothers to tears, you could raise an army for a cause.

There were plenty of stories. For sixty years, children had been sent to Minnesota on “orphan trains.” It was a well-intentioned idea, a way to give abandoned children a better life with wholesome farm families. Being out in the country had to be better than the misery of crowded orphanages, right?

Some of those children must have been well taken care of and loved, but it wasn’t hard finding kids who were not. Aaron struck up a conversation with a young man at a café who said he’d been put on the train from Baltimore when he was twelve and his younger brother, Frank, was five. He remembered being lined up on a platform where the women would pick out little children with blue eyes and good teeth—like his brother—and the men chose bigger boys who could go to work right away. He was told to forget about his old family and start over, but he didn’t forget his brother and tried running away to find him. He got a good hiding when he was caught.

There were plenty of orphan train children still living with families that had taken them in, but it wasn’t easy to talk to them.

Aaron ran into a girl named Martha when he was getting off the train at a stop just outside St. Paul. She was unloading sacks of flour and sugar as if they were full of feathers even though she wasn’t any bigger than me.

Martha was sixteen. She had been eight when the nuns put her on the train and the Olsens took her in. She didn’t pine for her family in New York; after her mother walked out, her father brought her to an orphanage. “He kept my brothers,” she said. “He told them he didn’t know what to do with a girl.”

When Aaron asked if she was happy with her Minnesota family, Martha said the Olsens were not her family. They weren’t as bad as some she knew about. They never hit her and she got plenty to eat and new boots when the old ones wore out. She said they even sent for the doctor once when she was sick. But they made Martha stop going to school when she was ten and they talked about her as “the girl.”

“Tell the girl to pass the milk.”

He said they treated her like something between a prize farm animal and a daughter.

Martha worked in the cookhouse, where she put out three meals a day for farmhands. In the winter, her hands bled from washing dishes.

She had taken to sleeping with a knife under her pillow in case one of the workers got any ideas, but she was really afraid of her “big brother,” who wouldn’t leave her alone. Martha said that Mrs. Olsen wouldn’t believe anything bad about her son.

Those were hard letters to read, but they were love letters, too. Aaron was showing me who he was, what was in his heart. The more I knew him, the more I loved him. And he opened my eyes to what was going on around me. I started to notice boys and girls who should have been in school selling newspapers, shining shoes, scrubbing stoops, and carrying baskets of laundry. It made me proud of what Aaron was doing.