The Boston Girl_A Novel

by Anita Diamant

  I grabbed Aaron’s arm. “Do you see that woman? That’s Tessa Thorndike. She’s the other reason we met.”

  Aaron asked if I wanted to say hello.

  I said, “She wouldn’t know me from a hole in the wall. I hope we’re not going to sit next to her.”

  He laughed. “Don’t worry.”

  When it was time to go in, the swells like Tessa went downstairs and Aaron and I headed to the balcony with the regular people: students, shopgirls, clerks. I even saw some laborers’ hands on the banisters as we climbed the stairs. I heard people talking Yiddish, Italian, German, and French. Everyone seemed to be in a good mood.

  Our seats were in the last row of the highest balcony. Aaron held out his hands like he was handing me Symphony Hall on a platter and told me who the statues were and how many lightbulbs were in the chandeliers.

  A man in a black suit walked out to the podium and stretched his arms wide, like one of the black seabirds in Rockport that hold their wings out to dry in the breeze. Aaron whispered, “Koussevitzky.”

  The music was different from anything I’d heard on the radio or from the piano at the movies. Some of the slow parts made me feel like crying, but when it got faster and the violinists were sawing away, my heart pounded like I was watching a horse race. I was listening not just with my ears but with my hands and my heart, too. I can’t describe it. It’s like trying to explain what chocolate tastes like; you just have to try it for yourself.

  When the music ended I clapped until my hands hurt. Aaron said, “I’m glad you like Mozart, too.”

  Taking me to the symphony turned out to be part of his plan to make me a real Boston girl. He said it was too chilly for a Red Sox game, but he took me to Harvard Yard and the Bunker Hill Monument. He even stayed in Boston an extra day for the opening of the swan boats at the Public Garden. We were on the very first boat of 1926.

  I took your mother and aunt to the opening day of the swan boats every year when they were girls, just like I took you and your sister when you were little.

  Aaron got the night train to Washington and I went back to my room and cried myself to sleep. When I went to work the next morning, Katherine said I looked like death warmed over and sent me home. I knew I wasn’t going to feel better in my dark little room, so I went to see Irene.

  She had married Joe Riley the year before, and they were living in a little apartment in the North End. They had met at work, where he was an electrician. It had taken him months to get her out on a date—she was off Irishmen at the time—but he finally got her to agree by getting down on one knee and singing “Let Me Call You Sweetheart” in front of God and everyone. Irene admitted that he had a nice voice but said, “I had to put a stop to it.”

  She was nine months pregnant at the time, so I knew I’d find her at home.

  I told her about Aaron and started crying about how awful it was that he had to leave. But instead of holding my hand and telling me, “There, there,” she grinned. “It’s about time you took a shine to a nice fellow, and this one sounds grand. I like the sound of his name, too. If I have a boy, maybe I’ll call him Aaron. Would you mind?”

  That wasn’t what I wanted to hear. I was blubbering, “But he’s gone. He left me.”

  Irene crossed her arms. “Didn’t you just tell me he’s coming back to see you next month? If you think he was lying, then you’re better off without him and good riddance.”

  That set me off. Aaron was the most honest and decent man I ever met and how could she say such a thing?

  Irene laughed. “All right then,” she said. “So let’s talk about what I should cook when you bring him over to meet us. I’ll try to make something that won’t make us all sick. I could send him an invitation, or maybe a warning would be better.”

  I say so.

  I read Aaron’s first letter a thousand times. He made a list of everything he missed about me: my hazel eyes, my lovely hands, and my red shoes. He said to send him a list of novels he should read so he wouldn’t feel stupid when I talked about books and writers he’d never heard of. As if he was stupid. A college man. A lawyer!

  We sent each other two or three letters a week. He wrote about what was going on at work and what it was like to live in Washington. I didn’t have anything interesting to say about my job, so I introduced him to my friends. Gussie was making so much money she bought herself a big house in Brookline and was renting rooms to Simmons girls who needed a cheap, decent place to live.

  Irene was so bored at home, she spent the whole day talking to her belly and when she ran out of things to say she read out loud from the newspaper. She said the kid was going to come out of her wearing a Red Sox rosette.

  I wrote to Aaron about the postcards Filomena sent from New Mexico and Betty’s love affair with her electric mixer and how my sister was already planning Jake’s bar mitzvah, which wasn’t for months.

  I started checking off days on the calendar until his visit, but then he wrote that the other lawyer in his office had quit and unless someone else got hired, he might not be in Boston for another month or maybe more. He said he was sorry three or four times and that he felt terrible.

  He felt terrible? I was holding my breath until I saw him again and now I didn’t even know when that was going to happen.

  I started wondering if maybe Aaron wasn’t so honest after all. Look at how stupid I’d been about Harold and Ernie. What did I really know about him? Who knows? Maybe he’d met someone else in Washington.

  I wrote back, very polite, and said thank you for letting me know. I think I made some crack about how I hoped he’d enjoy the cherry blossoms and that I looked forward to his next letter.

  Well, Aaron got the message and his next letter was three pages long about how much he missed me and how he hated being away from me and how bad he felt about keeping me waiting. He said he’d started working late every night and told his boss that he had to take a few days off to take care of some family business.

  He ended with a cute little P.S. I was glad that you ordered pancakes when we had breakfast together. Pancakes are the only things I know how to cook and I will make them for you every day for the rest of your life—if you say so.

  I don’t know how many times I read that P.S. before what he was saying sunk in. My letter back to him had only three words. I SAY SO.

  Maybe a week later, when I got home from work, my landlady was waiting for me at the door. She waved a piece of paper in my face and blamed me for almost giving her a heart attack. In those days the main reason people sent telegrams was to say that someone had died.

  “I only opened it to see if I should get out smelling salts for you,” she said. “Some people waste money like it was water.”

  Aaron’s telegram said Tell Irene I will be there on Friday.

  The four of us had a great time at dinner. Irene cooked a delicious meal. For dessert she went to the bakery and bought an apple pie. I said it was almost as good as Mrs. Morse’s.

  “Oh no,” Irene said. “Once she gets started about those pies, there’s no stopping her.”

  “But I want to hear what Addie has to say about pie,” Aaron said.

  Joe winked at me. “He’s got it bad.”

  Aaron said, “Guilty as charged.”

  —

  He had to go back to Washington on Sunday morning, so we really only had one day together.

  I wanted to go to Rockport but it would have taken too long, so we got off the train at Nahant and walked on the beach for a couple of hours. We talked about where we might get married and how many children we wanted and we decided not to tell our families until Aaron moved to Boston. His plan was to be back by the Fourth of July or sooner if they could find someone to replace him.

  That was the day he gave me the gold locket I always wear. Inside it’s engraved, March 29, 1926. The day we met.

  You kn
ow, if one of my daughters had told me she was going to marry a man she’d only known for a week I would have locked her in her room. But we weren’t kids. I was twenty-five and he was twenty-nine. We were completely sure. And obviously we were right.

  Aaron didn’t tell his parents he was in town that weekend. Only Ruth knew. He slept on her couch Friday night, and Saturday night she stayed with a girlfriend so we could be alone, just the two of us, for the whole night.

  I’ll leave it at that.

  At least she didn’t suffer.

  I was counting the days until the Fourth of July and thinking about the best way to introduce Aaron to my family. When should I tell Betty, and would it be better to have her tell Mameh that there would be company for a Friday dinner or should I just have him come to the house on a Sunday afternoon?

  He wasn’t writing as many letters, but I didn’t mind. I knew he was working extra hours so he could leave his job knowing he’d taken care of everything he could.

  Things were moving along nicely until the middle of June, when my landlady died in her sleep.

  “At least she didn’t suffer.”

  That’s what everyone said—in fact, that was all anyone said. Nobody disliked her; actually, nobody knew anything about her, including boarders who had lived in her house for ten years. She was a widow who didn’t have children—that was it.

  It was the fastest funeral I’ve ever been to. The only people there were the boarders and two nephews. There wasn’t even a eulogy. After the service, the nephews asked us to meet them in the parlor that afternoon.

  We all went. There wasn’t a cup of coffee or a cookie anywhere, but it turned out that we weren’t there for a shiva. It was a business meeting to tell us that they were selling the building and we had ten days to get out.

  One of the old ladies fainted and the rest of them looked like they might keel over, too. There weren’t a lot of boardinghouses left for women in Boston; rents were high and what could you find in a week, anyway?

  Some of the women had relatives to turn to, but there were five who seemed to be completely alone in the world. They had probably planned to leave the boardinghouse the same way as the landlady: feet first. I could hear them crying in their rooms.

  My next-door neighbor stopped me in the hallway and begged me to help her. She said, “I don’t have anyone else to ask.”

  I had no idea how to help but I figured that Miss Chevalier would, and by the time we had to move out, she’d gotten five beds at the YWCA on Berkeley Street.

  I was embarrassed at the way they kept thanking me. I told Miss Chevalier, “You’re the one who saved the day. I didn’t do anything.”

  She said of course they should thank me. “You took pity on them and you knew whom to ask. That’s more than half the battle, and you won it for them.”

  It wasn’t a hardship for me. Aaron and I were planning to get married in the fall, so I’d only have to put up with my family for a few months. And I can’t say I was sorry to be leaving that dark, smelly house.

  On the day I moved out, I was sitting on the steps waiting for Levine to pick me up with his car. The idea of living under the same roof as my mother made me feel like I was fifteen again—in other words, miserable. But then the mailman came and handed me a letter from Aaron. It was like one of those silly coincidences that only happen in novels. I kissed the envelope. I nearly kissed the mailman. I was on top of the world until I opened it.

  Dear Addie,

  I hope you won’t be too upset but . . .

  Aaron was on a train to Minnesota to see if he could help get the amendment passed in St. Paul. Only four states had ratified so far and they badly needed a win. He said it would only be a few weeks, maybe a month. The rest of what he wrote was apologies: Forgive me. I love you. We’ll be together soon. I’m sorry. Don’t be mad.

  I wasn’t just mad, I was spitting nails mad. Hadn’t he said it was a lost cause? Wasn’t I more important than a lost cause? Who knew how long he’d really be gone and how long I’d be stuck in Roxbury with my mother breathing down my neck?

  I wrote him an angry letter and tore it up. I wrote him a whiny, woe-is-me letter with tear stains all over it and tore that up, too. In the end I sent a postcard to the hotel where he was staying. Dear Mr. Metsky. Please send mail for Miss A. Baum to Miss Henrietta Cavendish at the Boston Evening Transcript. It wasn’t nice but it could have been worse.

  —

  Moving into the house in Roxbury felt like I’d gone backward in time. Betty was upstairs with her family and I was on the first floor with my parents. It seemed as if nothing had changed, even though nothing was the same.

  The boys had changed the most; all of them were taller, smarter, and louder. My mother called them wild animals—vilde chayas—and said Betty wasn’t strict enough. But Jake, Eddy, Richie, and Carl were just healthy kids who got good grades and did whatever their mother asked. They were always glad to see Auntie Addie when I visited—especially Eddy. But after I told them how big they were getting and after they told me what they were doing in school, we didn’t have much to say to each other. I was like a friendly moon circling around their busy little planet.

  And even though he lived downstairs, my father was even more distant. I’m not sure he even knew which grandson was which. He never fell in love with any of them the way he had with Lenny. And he didn’t see much of them, since he was in the house only to eat and sleep.

  After Papa got laid off from his job, he did exactly what Levine had suggested and spent his days in the synagogue library with Avrum and a bunch of old men. We called them alter kockers. Today they would be “retirees.”

  The rabbi studied with them sometimes, and one day he asked if Papa would be interested in teaching boys to get ready for their bar mitzvahs. The parents would even pay something for his trouble.

  I think that was my father’s dream come true. He went to the barber and asked Betty to help him choose a new suit, “because a man who teaches Torah can’t go around looking like a peasant.” He didn’t act much different at home, but he held himself taller. You could almost say he was happy.

  Mameh had changed the least. She cleaned and cooked and complained. She wouldn’t touch Betty’s washing machine; she said it ruined the clothes and didn’t get them as clean as she got them with her washboard, and then she groaned about how doing the laundry was killing her back. She grew cabbages in the backyard—bitter and hard like baseballs. No one would eat them but Mameh, who said at least they were fresh and what did we know.

  My mother did go out of the house more since they moved to Roxbury. Maybe because there were no neighbors in the same building, or maybe it was because there were fewer cars. At first she did some of the shopping, but the greengrocer kicked her out of his store when she accused him of putting his thumb on the scale. She gave the butcher such a hard time about how much fat he left on the meat that he wouldn’t let her in his shop, either.

  Eventually, the only place Mameh could go was the fish market, where she was friends with the owner’s wife, who was as quiet as a fish herself. She had an unmarried nephew and the two of them decided he was perfect for me. Mameh said he was from a good family and he made a nice living. “He’s thirty-nine years old and ready to settle down.”

  Betty said, “He’s two hundred pounds and not very smart. Leave Addie alone, Ma.”

  “With ankles like that, she’s not such a catch herself,” she said, as if I wasn’t in the room.

  They still didn’t know about Aaron. I wasn’t worried about introducing him in person: a Jewish man with a good profession, from a nice family? What’s not to like? But until he was standing next to me, I didn’t think I could have said his name out loud without crying like a baby.

  I have no choice, Addie.

  At least I still liked my job, which was never boring.

  Miss Flora announced t
hat she was leaving to be the editor of the women’s page of the Cincinnati Enquirer. I was stunned. I always thought she was as Bostonian as the statue of George Washington in the Public Garden. And just as permanent.

  If Flora had been a man, I’m sure Cornish would have understood why she’d want to run her own section, but he said good riddance and it just proved that women were fickle and didn’t belong in the newsroom. The morning after she left I found him passed out under his desk. When he sobered up, he told Katherine that she’d have to take over Flora’s work in addition to her own.

  Katherine marched into Mort’s office and said she would stay on only if she got a promotion and a raise, and if I came on as her full-time assistant. Cornish called that “uppity” and thought she should be fired, but Mort gave her everything she asked for.

  I hadn’t known much about Katherine or Flora. We didn’t pal around after hours like the men did. Katherine was a hard worker but Flora had been the bigger talker. Until she took over, I didn’t know how much Katherine had on the ball.

  She told everyone to call her Miss Walters and to call me Miss Baum. “You and I can be familiar with each other,” she said, “but why should they call us by our Christian names if we can’t do the same to them? We’re not their maids.” She was right, but nobody in the newsroom was ever going to call me Miss Baum. When you start out somewhere as “the girl,” you never grow up.

  Katherine—Miss Walters—told me I would still be writing Seen and Heard, but she wanted more about the younger set, especially what they were wearing. She brought in a stack of Vogue magazines and I learned a whole new language: organza, peplum, bias cut, pinafore.

  All that reading made me take a new look at what Katherine was wearing. Maybe I hadn’t noticed because she was always in black, but now I realized that she wore whatever was the latest “silhouette,” one of my new words, and that her drop-waist dresses were perfect for a woman of her height.