The Boston Girl

by Anita Diamant

  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.

  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.”

  I said that she was a good writer but she shrugged off the compliment. “I send over a few pages or call the editor and read what I’ve got over the phone. But I’m always late and he’s always mad. I’ve often thought what I need is an assistant to help with actually getting the things on paper and seeing they’re in on time. It’s all I can do to remember who was at which party—especially after a highball or two.”

  I said I took dictation and typed.

  “Do you?” She looked me over and said what wouldn’t she give for some of my curves. I would have given anything to be able to wear her dress, which fell in a straight line from her shoulders to her knees.

  “You’d have to be at the house a lot,” she said. “If we were in New York, I could tell people you were my social secretary, but that’s not done in Boston. And I can’t say you’re a friend because everyone knows all my friends.”

  I said, “Couldn’t we have met at Barnard?” Something else I knew about her from her wedding announcement.

  She said, “You have the memory of an elephant. But since they all went to Smith or Wellesley, I suppose I could introduce you as a college chum.”

  The photographer was putting his cameras in the car and waved for her to get in. I gave her my telephone number at work. She shook my hand and said she’d call me in September.

  I watched them drive away and started planning the rest of my life: I wouldn’t have to be Levine’s secretary forever, but I would have to learn all about Barnard College and New York City if I was going to pretend to be her “college chum.” What would I call her: Mrs. Thorndike or Tessa? I could imagine how proud Miss Chevalier would be to see by Addie Baum in the paper.

  I couldn’t wait.

  My jaw hurt from keeping quiet.

  Instead of dreading going back to work for my brother-in-law, I couldn’t wait to get to the office in case Tessa called. By then I was calling her Tessa in my head. I went in early and left late so I wouldn’t miss her. I even decided not to sign up for night school so I’d be free—night or day—to do whatever she needed. The minute I heard from her, I was going to quit my job and start a whole new life.

  After a month without a word from her, I was going crazy. Maybe she’d forgotten me or maybe she’d decided it was crazy to hire a complete stranger or maybe someone told her that I was the maid.

  I read the newspapers like a maniac, right down to the box scores and the classifieds, thinking that eventually I’d find something about Mrs. Thorndike. I knew she liked having her name in the columns. Finally I saw an item in the Herald about how the Charles Thorndikes were enjoying their stay in London, where Mr. Thorndike was doing business. After that, they were planning to spend a few weeks in Paris before returning to their Back Bay home.

  That explained why I hadn’t heard from her. Either she had forgotten me or had forgotten that she was going on a trip to Europe when we talked. I wondered if there was still a chance that she’d call when she got back. I felt like a fly stuck on a piece of flypaper and wasted a lot of time feeling sorry for myself. Irene started talking about dosing me with Lydia Pinkham’s again and Betty said no sourpusses at her party.

  In December, Betty gave herself a birthday party. Mameh thought making a fuss about birthdays wasn’t just a waste of money, it was like waving a flag at the Angel of Death.

  It wasn’t a big party: just the family, a cake with candles, and a bottle of homemade schnapps. Betty had bought herself a new outfit, which was an occasion in itself. She hadn’t gotten anything new since the twins were born because she’d been trying to lose the baby weight. Betty had never been skinny and she was never really fat. She still had a nice shape, but it was well upholstered now and her new dress made the best of it.

  But the real reason Betty wanted us all together was to make an announcement. “You’ll never guess what Herman got me for my birthday,” she said. “A house!”

  She could hardly get the words out fast enough to tell us about how many bedrooms there were and how many trees in the backyard. Herman was buying bicycles for the boys and a washing machine for her. Levine gave her a kiss on the cheek and said the house was too good a deal to pass up.

  My parents were stunned.

  Betty laughed. “Look at them! Don’t worry. You’re coming with us. Mameh can grow cabbages and Papa won’t have to work anymore. No rent to pay. It’s a two-family. We have the top two floors, and you’ll be downstairs. Just like here.”

  Levine said there was a grocery store around the corner, and a kosher butcher.

  “They have Jews there?” Mameh asked.

  “In Roxbury?” he said. “Are you kidding?”

  Betty said Mrs. Kampinsky from the old apartment building was living there already with her son and daughter-in-law. “Sh
e said to tell you hello and to visit as soon as you can.”

  Papa’s face was like a mask. “You talk like it’s all settled. Like I’m too old and sick to work. Like I am not still the head of my own house.”

  “Of course you are,” Levine said. “If you want to keep working, I understand. There’s even a trolley near us.”

  Betty started talking about how much quieter it was in Roxbury and how there were better schools for the boys. Levine said the neighborhood was coming up. My mother asked if there was a fish store close enough to walk to.

  And then, boom, Papa slammed his fist on the table. “We are not going anywhere.”

  It was like the clock stopped. My father never did things like that. Even Betty was speechless.

  Mameh said, “What do you mean we aren’t going? I am going. Without me your grandsons would grow up like wild animals. You do whatever you want. Stay here and starve.”

  He said, “Addie will keep house for me.”

  “She can’t even boil water.” Mameh threw up her hands. “Ach, what do I care? You can both starve.”

  They went around and around for a long time: Levine explained, Betty argued, and Mameh yelled until finally my father stood up. “You can talk until the Messiah comes but I am not going anywhere.” On the way out, he slammed the door so hard the cups on the table jumped.

  Levine turned to me. “What’s going on? I thought this would make him happy.”

  Happy was not a word I would put together with my father or my mother. But I told him that the problem was my father’s synagogue.

  After Lenny died, my father had gotten more religious. He started working the night shift so he could pray in the morning on his way home and ate an early supper so he could pray before he punched in. He made his schedule so he didn’t work on Saturdays and spent most of it at shul.

  Papa was a different person when he was there. At home he was quiet—aloof even. But when he walked in there, men would run over to shake his hand and he would smile and say things that made them laugh. He was an important man there—a scholar.