The Boston Girl_A Novel

by Anita Diamant

  The ceremony wasn’t in the sanctuary, thank goodness; we would have felt like ants. It was in the rabbi’s study, which wasn’t a closet either, believe me. I remember a big vase of flowers and books up to the ceiling.

  The rabbi was younger than the groom and he didn’t wear a beard or a yarmulke. He shook all our hands and asked my father something in Hebrew, which changed the sour look on his face to complete confusion. I guess you should never judge Jewish books by their covers, either.

  Betty came in from a side door wearing a tan suit and a hat with a little veil that stopped just under her nose. She looked beautiful. Myron and Jacob were in matching suits she’d picked out for them and Jake carried the ring for the ceremony.

  The wedding was quick and half in English, but there was no way to break a glass on the Oriental rug in that room, so it ended when the rabbi said, “You may kiss the bride.”

  A secretary brought in a tray with a decanter of wine and a sponge cake, the rabbi asked Papa to say the blessing, and seven months later, Leonard Levine was born.

  He was a cute, good-natured baby, but I hardly ever got the chance to hold him because my parents wouldn’t put him down. To them he was a miracle. Mameh lit up like a candle when she saw him and grabbed him out of Betty’s arms the minute they came over. She covered his face with kisses and pretended to eat his fingers. “Look how delicious,” she said. “Look how handsome! Has there ever been such a boy?”

  My father couldn’t get enough of his grandson, either, and even stopped going to shul in the evening in case Betty brought the baby to our house. Lenny was named after my father’s brother, Laibel, and Papa called him “my Kaddish”; he didn’t have a son to say the prayer for him after he died and that was ages before women could do it.

  But Kaddish didn’t have anything to do with the way my father played peekaboo with Lenny or laughed at every sneeze and yawn. Papa was a completely different person with him. It was the only time I ever heard him sing.

  But not even Lenny could keep my mother and my sister from fighting. Mameh would start complaining about something—anything—until she got herself worked up about how bad America was.

  Especially the food. Everything here was terrible: bread, eggs, cabbage: “The cabbages I grew were sweet like sugar,” she said. “You can’t get anything like that in this miserable country.” She went on and on until Betty couldn’t stand it anymore and grabbed Lenny. “I wouldn’t trade cabbages for running water and toilets. I was the one who had to carry water in those filthy buckets. Remember when you brought the goat inside so she wouldn’t freeze to death?

  “What do you think, Papa? Is it better your grandson crawls on a dirt floor or grows up where he can go to school like a real person?”

  My father smiled at Lenny. “According to that husband of yours, his sons will be doctors and professors in this country. Who knows?”

  That would have been the nicest thing Papa ever said about Levine, but he couldn’t leave it alone. “Even a broken clock is right twice every day.”

  You know—living life.

  We didn’t call it the First World War when it was happening. When it started, almost everything I knew about it came from newsreels. We saw British soldiers marching in rows and explosions with dirt flying into the air, but the next moment soldiers were cleaning their guns or sitting up in hospital beds, with pretty nurses carrying trays. Then the movie started and it all melted together. None of it seemed real.

  Some people in the neighborhood were worried about family in the old country, but we didn’t have anyone left over there. My mother’s only cousins had immigrated to Australia and South Africa. My father had an uncle who went to Palestine, but nobody had heard from him in so long he was probably dead.

  For three years, most people weren’t interested in the war. They were just working, trying to get ahead, have a good time. You know—living life.

  But not my brother-in-law. Levine read two newspapers every day and knew where the battles were and what the politicians were saying. He was sure that America was going to join the war sooner or later. “And when that happens, they’re going to need a lot of shirts.”

  Levine got it in his head that the commander of the navy was Jewish and decided to go to Washington, D.C., and talk to him “man to man.” It turned out that Josephus Daniels was a Christian and Levine didn’t get anywhere near him, but he said the trip was a success because he’d met “people with connections” at the boardinghouse where he stayed. He was so sure of himself that he rented a much bigger space in the West End and borrowed money for sewing machines so he would be ready when the big orders came.

  “Meshuggener,” my father said. “Crazy.”

  Levine didn’t look so crazy in 1917 when the navy and army started ordering uniforms. He had to keep the factory open eighteen hours a day and he couldn’t find enough workers to keep up. After I finished up in the office, I pitched in and helped pack boxes.

  The war was the only thing anyone talked about. When the draft started taking boys from the neighborhood, a lot of the older Jews got scared and talked about how young men used to be kidnapped by the Russian army; most of them never came back. But the boys I knew weren’t worried. They wanted to show how patriotic they were and went to enlist. In the beginning it seemed like a big adventure and everyone was singing “Over There.” The war was supposed to be over in a few months.

  Of course it wasn’t. Coal got scarce and food prices went up. There were more beggars in the street and every week another business closed. One night, someone painted Hun on the door of Frankfurter’s Delicatessen and broke all the windows. The place closed for good, which was even sadder if you knew that the owners were Polish Jews who picked the name because they thought it sounded American.

  It was a strange feeling knowing that my family was doing fine because of the war. I think it made Levine uncomfortable, too. I was the only one who knew that he had a drawer full of pins and medallions from having bought so many war bonds.

  We moved in 1918, right in middle of the war. It was Betty’s doing. She found two apartments, first and second floor, in the West End. They were close enough to the factory so Levine could have supper with his children and she could put in a few hours here and there while Mameh took care of Lenny.

  Believe me, I wasn’t the least bit sorry to leave that miserable tenement, even if it was the only place I’d ever lived. The new apartment had indoor plumbing and electricity, and I got my own room with a door I could close. It was worth walking a little farther on Saturday nights to see my friends.

  I was still going to the Saturday Club again but the meetings weren’t exactly fun. We rolled bandages and knitted socks and the lectures were about things like using cornmeal instead of flour and chicory instead of coffee. There was no money for punch and cookies and it was so cold in the settlement house we had to keep our coats on, but I didn’t mind; I was there mostly to see Rose, Irene, and Gussie.

  One night, Miss Chevalier told us that the Salem Street building was being sold and we would get together in the library instead. She tried to make it sound like it was all for the best, but I knew it killed her.

  The library was crowded and stuffy but the girls and I kept rolling and knitting, doing our bit for the war effort—even if it wasn’t much. It was dull, except for the night Miss Chevalier brought a friend who had been an ambulance driver in France.

  Her first name was Olive and she must have been as old as Miss Chevalier, but with her uniform and cap and the way she said things like “A-1” and “fed up,” she seemed more our age. She had signed up for the English ambulance service when she found out they let girls drive. “I learned how to change a tire in the trenches and all the boys had to admit I was as good as any of them.”

  After she told us about driving through terrible weather and stories about the other women drivers, one of the girls raised her hand and asked
if they were still looking for volunteers. “I’d do anything to get behind the wheel of a car.”

  “Would you really do anything?” Olive said it with so much bitterness, I swear the temperature in the room dropped twenty degrees. She glared at the girl who had asked the question and said, “Would you hold an eighteen-year-old boy in your arms while he died? A boy with a hole in his belly, who had soiled his trousers and was screaming for his mother? Would you do that?”

  She went on like that until Miss Chevalier stopped her. Though not before the girl who’d raised her hand ran out of the room, sobbing.

  After that night I found myself counting gold star flags hanging in windows—one for each son lost in the war. The next time I saw a picture of Mary Pickford selling Liberty bonds, I wondered which of the handsome soldiers around her were dead. And when I passed a man with an empty shirtsleeve pinned to his shoulder, I shuddered to think he might have been wearing one of our shirts when his arm was blown off.

  How do you go on after that?

  Today, nobody bats an eye when you hear someone has the flu. It can still be dangerous for older people, but even most of them get well. In 1918, it was nearly always fatal, and it went after young people. More soldiers and sailors died from flu than from the war.

  It happened fast. First a handful of sailors were sick, five days later two hundred men were down with it, another few weeks and thousands were dying. When it spread to the city there weren’t enough doctors and nurses to take care of all the sick people, partly because the doctors were dying, too. Not that there was much anyone could do. There was no medicine. Getting well was luck, pure and simple. Or God’s will, if you believe in a God who kills children and babies.

  The flu was fast, too. Someone would leave the factory with a headache and two days later Levine would see the worker’s name in the list of flu deaths in the newspaper. There were weeks when that list had five hundred names on it.

  The city sent out wagons to pick up the bodies but after a while the drivers were afraid to go inside anyplace where there was sickness, so people left corpses out on the porches and even on the sidewalk. A lot of the dead were buried in unmarked graves. It was a real plague and not so long ago.

  The health department closed the movie houses and concert halls and told people to stay away from crowds. Nobody should have been out dancing, but a lot of people ignored all the warnings. My friend Rose was one of them.

  Betty took Myron and Jacob out of school even before the health department closed them and she kept them inside. My mother put a red string on all the doorknobs to keep out the evil eye.

  It didn’t help. One morning Myron said he had a terrible headache and couldn’t get out of bed. Levine said he would take care of him and told Betty to take Lenny and Jacob downstairs and stay there. But she left them with my mother and ran back to be with Myron, too.

  We weren’t allowed near him, but I went up and left them food in the kitchen—trying to hear what was going on in the back bedroom. When I went back later, nobody had touched a crumb and I heard them in the bathroom with Myron, trying to cool him down in the bathtub. At night, I heard Myron coughing and moaning and Levine begging him to hang on.

  Downstairs, Jacob was frantic and kept asking where was Mommy and Daddy, where was Myron. Lenny was quiet. Even though he was barely a year old, he knew something was wrong. No one was paying attention to him, not even my father, but he didn’t make a fuss; he just watched us with big eyes.

  Papa couldn’t sit anymore and went out to find a doctor, even though there weren’t any. He was only gone an hour, but when he got back we had to tell him that Myron was gone. He was nine years old.

  A few hours after Myron died, Betty came downstairs. All she wanted was to see the boys. Jacob ran to her and hugged her and wouldn’t let go. Betty picked him up and whispered, “How’s my Jakey? How’s my Jake?”

  Mameh said, “They both ate a good dinner but Lenny was a little cranky so I put him to sleep in my bed.”

  Betty dropped Jake and ran to the other room. She screamed, “He’s blue.”

  She took Lenny upstairs and Jacob tried to follow her but I caught him and held him tight while he screamed and sobbed and finally cried himself to sleep.

  Mameh, Papa, and I sat up at the table most of the night, not talking or looking at each other, listening for sounds from upstairs. When I brought hot tea upstairs, Levine met me in the kitchen and said, “He seems a little better. He took some water and smiled.”

  I fell asleep with my clothes on and woke up before it was light. Lying in bed, I listened to the footsteps overhead, back and forth, from one end of the apartment to the other. They took turns. Betty walked faster than Levine, but they followed the same path, back and forth, steady as a heartbeat. It went on like that until the afternoon.

  When the footsteps stopped, we all looked at the ceiling. Papa said a blessing. Mameh threw a dish towel over her head and wailed. Jake put his head on my lap.

  After a little while, I tiptoed upstairs and walked through Betty’s apartment. In her house, it was always immaculate, nothing out of place. But with the natural order of things all upside down—children dying before parents—everything she did to keep things in order looked wasted and pathetic.

  I stopped at the doorway to the boys’ room. A breeze from the open window ruffled the sheet covering Myron’s body. In the other bedroom, Betty was curled up on the bed, facing the wall. Levine sat with his back to her, staring at the cradle, which was covered with a blanket. He looked at me with dead eyes and I could feel the sadness coming off him, like cold air on my face.

  They had lost two children in two days. How do you go on after that?

  —

  Coffins and hearses were impossible to come by, but somehow my father managed to get both and the next day we went to the cemetery; me, Papa, and Levine. The city went by in a blur but we slowed down when we passed through a little town where people were pushing baby carriages under red and yellow leaves, as if it were just another nice day in October.

  It seemed like we’d been driving for hours when the driver turned down a dirt road and through a field of weeds to a stand of scrawny trees that marked the cemetery—the saddest, the most forlorn place I’d ever seen. Two men with shovels were waiting for us, and two big mounds of dirt.

  —

  Myron had turned into a nice kid. Betty hadn’t let him get away with anything, but she also hugged him a lot. She called him Mike, he called her Ma, and did his chores without being asked. He was good in arithmetic. His top front tooth was a little crooked. He had a nice singing voice. That was Myron.

  We followed his coffin from the hearse to the grave, where the men lowered the half-sized casket into the ground and waited for Levine to pick up the spade. But he didn’t move. He couldn’t. So Papa stepped forward and shoveled a little bit of dirt into the hole, but so gently, it sounded like rain on the coffin. When he was finished, Levine and my father said Kaddish.

  The driver came back carrying something that, from the distance, looked like a hatbox. When Levine saw it, he made a noise like a wild animal caught in a trap.

  Lenny had been born with a head of silky brown hair. He smiled at everyone and Betty joked that he was going to be a politician when he grew up. He liked peas and his first word was ball. That was Lenny.

  He and Myron were like silhouette portraits cut out of black paper—like shadows of the people they might have been if they’d grown up.

  Papa tried to force the shovel into Levine’s hands to bury the baby. I couldn’t watch anymore and went looking for Celia’s grave.

  I had a stone for her in my pocket. I’d found it on the beach in Rockport and carried it around with me ever since. It was white and smooth, almost as round as a pearl. I put it on top of her gravestone and said, “I’m sorry.”

  Papa came and put a plain brown pebble next to mine
. He traced Celia’s name with his finger. “Your mother said Celia shouldn’t come to America with me. She thought she was too delicate. But Mameh had another baby on the way and her mother was sick, too. I thought it would be easier for her if I took both girls.” He wiped his eyes. “She would still be alive if I’d left her there.”

  Levine walked over to us. Papa put an arm around his shoulder for a moment before he started back to the car.

  Levine hadn’t shaved or combed his hair for four days and his face was swollen. He put a third stone on Celia’s headstone and whispered, “She would be alive if I hadn’t married her.”

  “It wasn’t your fault,” I said. Like it wasn’t my father’s fault. And for the first time since she died, I thought maybe it wasn’t all my fault, either.

  | 1919–20 |

  I was still gun-shy about men.

  Nobody talked about the epidemic when it was over, but everyone was carrying around their own load of heartache, acting as if no one had died. I felt like I was skating on a pond that wasn’t frozen all the way through and if anyone asked me, “How’s the family?” the ice would break.

  People kept saying, “Life goes on.” Sometimes that sounded like a wish and sometimes it felt like an order. I wanted to scream, “Life goes on? Not for everyone, it doesn’t.”

  But when Betty said she was pregnant again, “life goes on” became a fact and I found myself looking forward to the new baby in a whole different way. She had another boy, Eddy, a blue-eyed blond who laughed, I swear, from the day he was born, and I finally understood why people got so silly about infants.

  From the beginning he seemed to like me, too. I was the only one who could settle him down when he got fussy. Betty got a kick out of that. “Auntie Addie to the rescue.” My mother was thrilled with the new baby, but my father would hardly look at him. Papa was never the same after Lenny died.