The Boston Girl

You know, Ava, it’s good to be smart, but kindness is more important. Oh dear, another old-lady chestnut to stitch on a sampler. Or maybe one of those cute little throw pillows.

—

I guess I hadn’t written much about the classes I’d taken, because Filomena wanted to know about college and my teachers and the subjects I’d studied. When she asked what I was taking in the fall, I said I wasn’t planning to sign up. I already felt like an old lady with all the eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds and anyway, once I had children, I wouldn’t have the time and I’d really be too old.

It wasn’t like today. In those days you never heard of a married woman going to college. But you’d have thought I’d said I was going to join the circus or enter a convent. Filomena gave me a lecture about women in Taos who started businesses at fifty, even sixty. She said Virginia’s niece was in her forties when she left her kids with her mother and moved to Albuquerque for three years to become a nurse.

She said, “You’re not even thirty years old, which means you’ll be in your fifties when your children are grown up, and you don’t have to wait anyway. When they go to school, you can go to school, and you don’t even have to move to Albuquerque.”

I said maybe, but that wasn’t enough for Filomena. “Give me one good reason why you shouldn’t keep taking classes at least until you have a baby.”

The reason was that I still didn’t know why I was taking classes at all. It would have been different if I wanted to start a business or be a lawyer. But I was still just “dabbling” and I wasn’t even enjoying it.

I had taken literature classes thinking maybe I should be an ­English teacher like people had been telling me since I was a kid. It was true that I loved reading stories and novels. But the only courses I could take were about Milton or Dryden or Chaucer. They weren’t easy to understand. And the professors? They didn’t care whether we understood the poems, much less loved them. None of my homework was as interesting as the writers I was reading in the magazines or books I took out of the library: Willa Cather, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis.

Filomena said she was going to talk to Aaron about my staying in school. “He’ll be all for it. You still don’t know how smart you are, just like you don’t know how pretty you are. But Aaron knows. He also thinks the sun and moon revolve around you. What wouldn’t I give to have someone care about me that way.”

I said, “But I thought you didn’t want to get married.”

“That has nothing to do with wanting to be loved,” she said. “I know you never liked Bob and things didn’t turn out the way I wanted, but he was the love of my life. The time we spent in Taos was the happiest I’ve ever been. He found us a studio and made me believe in my talent. We were together day and night. He used to say we were made out of the same clay.”

Filomena said she was “keeping company” with someone. “He’s very nice, but you only get one great love in a lifetime.”

Then it was my turn to make a speech. “Who made that rule?” I said, and ticked off the war widows I knew who were happily remarried.

Filomena said she wasn’t complaining. She liked her independence and privacy and the fact that nobody judged what she did or didn’t do.

She admitted that she got lonely for her family—and for me. She missed Italian food and good coffee and the smell of the ocean. “But I belong to that landscape now, to the sky and the mountains. I wouldn’t be happy anywhere else.”

From the moment Filomena walked into my wedding shower, I had wanted to ask if she was ever coming back to live in Boston. That wasn’t the answer I wanted to hear, but I meant it when I said, “Then I’m happy for you.”

Don’t let anyone tell you things aren’t better than they used to be.

It wasn’t a fancy wedding. No long gown or veil, like Betty wanted, but I think I looked pretty great in my tan dress with the pearl beads, and I wore the most beautiful hat I ever owned. There was no music and no dancing the hora, but it was much bigger than I’d imagined and not only because there were so many Metskys. Between my family, all of my friends, and their families, there were plenty of people on the Baum side, too.

Levine held one of the poles for the huppah. He almost cried when I asked him. Aaron’s brother held another and I don’t remember who the other two men were. It never occurred to me to ask Betty or Rita. Fifty-eight years ago, asking a woman to do that would have been like asking when a man was going to walk on the moon—something only a crazy person would say.

Don’t let anyone tell you things aren’t better than they used to be.

—

We had lunch in the synagogue because there were too many people to fit into Betty’s house. There were long tables with white tablecloths, big platters of herring, rye bread, salad, and pickles—the usual. There was plenty of wine and even a bottle of whiskey with a real label, a wedding present from someone. Since we were in a temple, we didn’t even have to put it in a teapot so we wouldn’t be raided. Prohibition didn’t end until ’33, which I only remember because it was the year your aunt Sylvia was born.

After we ate, there were toasts and jokes about how Aaron and I met. Filomena stood up and asked us to open her present in front of everyone because there was a story to go with it.

Her gift was a big blackware vase with two spouts. “It’s called a wedding pitcher,” she said. “The two openings stand for the bride and groom and the handle in between makes them into one.”

At an Indian wedding, the bride drinks from one side, the groom drinks from the other, and then they’re married. If the husband or wife dies, the other one is supposed to give it to a young couple getting married. It sounded sort of Jewish to me.

Anyway, I’m giving mine to the grandchild who gets married first. I don’t think you should rush into anything with Brian just to get a nice piece of pottery. But it’s something to keep in mind.

—

I wish Levine had taken a picture of me with Aaron and Filomena and the pitcher. He took a dozen of us in front of the wedding cake Mildred had baked—four layers and white frosting. My mother would have called it goyishe, but it was delicious and there wasn’t a crumb left over.

I noticed my father bringing a slice to an older lady I didn’t know. I figured she was with the Metskys, but it turned out that she was a member of the synagogue. Betty said, “She was at Mameh’s shiva, but there’s no reason you would remember her.” There had been a whole flock of widows at the house after the funeral and they brought pots of soup and kugel over to the house for weeks afterward. Betty called them “the vultures,” which was kind of mean but kind of true. Whenever an older man lost his wife, there was a competition to get him. Of all the widows, Edna Blaustein had brought strudel as well as casseroles. She was one of the younger ones and kept herself looking nice. She was also the only one with the chutzpah to invite herself to the wedding party. I’m pretty sure that she asked Papa to marry her.

Betty thought it was terrible that Papa didn’t wait a whole year to marry her, but he said there was no law against it so they did and he moved into her house, a triple-decker that gave her a nice little income.