The Boston Girl

by Anita Diamant

  I had sent her a letter when I heard Mrs. Morse had died, saying how sorry I was and how I would always remember how good she’d been to me, but I wasn’t sure she even got it.

  Mrs. Styles said, “I know you. You’re that Addie, aren’t you?”

  I was surprised that she remembered my name.

  “Maggie used to talk about you and what a big fuss you made over her pies. I never understood why she did so much baking when she was here. There’s nothing wrong with a plate of stewed fruit, and you only have to make it twice a week.”

  I introduced her to Aaron, who said he liked a plate of stewed fruit himself. Mrs. Styles might have been flattered, but it was hard to tell.

  A few weeks later, I got a note from Mrs. Styles with a recipe for piecrust. “My sister would be glad for you to have this. I never bother with it myself.”

  I know you think my pies are the best in the world, but believe me, they’re not nearly as good as Mrs. Morse’s. Sometimes I wonder if that sister of hers left something out on purpose. Or maybe it’s just because I use butter instead of lard.

  | 1931 . . . |

  Some of the best years of my life.

  Your grandpa loved his work. His whole life he tried to make things better for poor children, but his real calling was being a father. It was a talent with him.

  As soon as our girls could sit up, he was wheeling them to the library and taking out books to read them bedtime stories. I used to listen, too. It was the first time I’d ever heard some of those fairy tales, and I was surprised at how scary some of them were. Your mother didn’t sleep for a week after “Rumpelstiltskin.”

  We liked the Little House on the Prairie books so much that he would run to the bookstore whenever there was a new one and we’d stay up late to find out what was going on with the Ingalls family.

  Aaron was heartbroken when Auntie Sylvia and your mom were old enough to read on their own and “fired” him. When your sister and you were born, it was as if he’d been holding his breath for all those years. Sometimes, we’d drive to your house and stay just twenty minutes so he could read you a story. He had most of Dr. Seuss memorized. Do you remember how you jumped all over him for Hop on Pop?

  We were the only ones on either side of the family to have daughters, and the aunts went overboard. Betty bought every doll she ever saw, and Rita, who had two boys, kept our girls in pink until they were in high school. Grandma Mildred taught them how to bake bread and took them to the flower show every spring and bought them corsages.

  It was like we were in that fairy tale where all the fairy godmothers bring gifts to the princess. Gussie bought savings bonds for every birthday. Helen, who was the best-dressed woman I ever knew, gave us her daughter’s beautiful hand-me-downs. Miss Chevalier gave them books, and Katherine Walters bought them each a new diary every year.

  When Betty found out we had asked a neighborhood girl to babysit, she read me the riot act. That was her job.

  —

  When I was pregnant, I was petrified about being a good mother. I would lie awake at night and worry about all the mistakes I was going to make: dropping, yelling, nagging, even poisoning. It took me a few years to get the hang of cooking.

  It’s a good thing babies don’t give you a lot of time to think. You fall in love with them and when you realize how much they love you back, life is very simple. Of course, I was fascinated by every sneeze and yawn, and when my babies started to talk, I was sure they were geniuses and your grandfather and their aunties agreed.

  I remember Irene saying everyone thinks their children are geniuses until they go to kindergarten. I was a little offended by that until I saw that two other children in class had started to read three months before mine did.

  Being a mother wasn’t as scary as I thought it would be, not only because Aaron was a good father, but because I didn’t have to invent the wheel. I learned from Betty that it was good for children to have fun with them, to get on the floor and play. And I watched the way Irene talked to her son and daughter almost as if they were grown-ups. There was no baby talk and no beating around the bush in her house. Irene always told the truth and called a spade a spade and a penis a penis. That was unheard of in the ’30s. When her little boy, Milo, said “penis” at a family dinner it was as if he’d murdered the pope.

  When Irene’s kids were both in school, she got a job as the office manager for the Birth Control League of Massachusetts; she didn’t keep it a secret from Joe’s family, either. They were horrified and tried to get him to make her quit, but Joe knew better than anybody that there was no way to make Irene do anything. And he loved her for it.

  Irene and Joe, Aaron and I were a foursome. We spent so much time together, our kids were like cousins and when Joe lost his job in the Depression, it didn’t feel so much like charity when we had them over for supper twice a week.

  Not that we didn’t feel it, too. We ate a lot of beans and I remember putting newspaper in a pair of shoes to get another summer’s use out of them. But compared to most people, we had an easy time. Aaron didn’t lose his job, but what made the biggest difference was that Levine moved us into one of his buildings in Brookline and wouldn’t let us pay rent. “You’ll mow the lawn,” he said.

  The lawn in front of that triple-decker was so small you could cut it with a pair of scissors. But that was my brother-in-law. He was a know-it-all his whole life. If you asked Levine what time it was, he’d give you a lecture about how his watch was the best one on the market and only a nudnik would buy anything else. But I don’t think he ever evicted a single tenant from the buildings he owned.

  It’s strange to say, but I had some of the best years of my life during the Depression, because that was when I had your mother and aunt. They were nothing like their namesakes. Your mother, Clara, was the opposite of Celia. Clara was a spitfire who started talking at seven months, and once she started walking, I never sat down. Your aunt Sylvia was nothing like Aaron’s birth mother, Simone, who was famous for her sense of humor and for starting the Metsky hug. My Sylvia didn’t say a word until she could talk in sentences and always took things to heart too much, but she was the kindest, most loyal person you ever met.

  So much of who a person is has to do with temperament. I think my sister Celia was probably born without any defenses, like Betty was born with skin like a rhinoceros.

  I’m somewhere in between. It helped that I was born in America and that I got to go to school. But there was something built into my makeup, too; something that let me connect to the friends and teachers who helped along the way. I think my girls inherited that from me.

  They both did well in school, too. Your mother was the valedictorian at Northeastern.

  You didn’t know? That’s terrible! You should do an interview with her next. Or maybe it would be better to wait until you’re a little older, when you’re completely cooled off from adolescence.

  —

  Oh, yes, your mother and I butted heads when she was in high school. I didn’t like her friends—a bunch of rich girls who treated her like a pet dog and started her smoking cigarettes. She thought I was telling her how to live her life and treating her like a five-year-old. We were both right, but it took until she was out of college for us to admit it.

  Old friends are the best.

  The year both of the girls were in school, I decided I would take some daytime classes. Aaron picked up the Simmons catalog and asked if I’d be interested in Social Work Practice with Delinquent Youth. I’m sure he would have taken that class if he could, but after years of listening to Aaron’s stories from work at the Child Welfare League, it sounded interesting to me, too. I’d never given social work a thought because those classes were held all the way downtown. But Aaron said so what; the trolley went downtown, too, and we could have lunch together, just the two of us.

  So I signed up and that was that. The minute the teacher op
ened her mouth, I knew what I was supposed to do. Ann Finegold was one of those people who lights up a room. You wouldn’t think so to look at her: she was in her forties, five feet tall, plump, frizzy-haired, and brilliant.

  She told us that social work was a young profession still finding itself. She called it a “creative science” and said that, in her opinion, the best social workers were intelligent and compassionate, and while she could give us ideas and tools to help our fellow man, she couldn’t teach us how to put ourselves into another person’s shoes. She said, “If you don’t already know how to do that, you should drop this class and consider another line of work.”

  She reminded me of Irene: no bullshit. She made me think of my Shakespeare teacher, too, because he was so passionate about his subject and curious about us. Ann insisted that everyone use first names in class, which was unheard of back then.

  I took every class she taught and we got to be good friends. The husbands, too. You probably don’t remember, but they were at your bat mitzvah.

  When I had to do my fieldwork, Ann sent me to Beth Israel, where I did intake interviews with women who were waiting in the emergency room.

  I was given a list of questions to ask: age, where they were born, years of schooling, marital status, reason for coming to the hospital. There was one woman—she was my age but looked twenty years older—who answered everything in a flat, quiet voice. When I asked how many children she had, she stopped and gave me a hard look. Then, as if she was admitting to something terrible, she whispered, “Three living children, but six times pregnant.”

  It was all I could do to keep from throwing my arms around her and telling her that I had two living children, but I’d been pregnant four times.

  I had two miscarriages before your mother was born and I was sure it had been my fault: I’d eaten the wrong thing or ridden on a bumpy streetcar or maybe I shouldn’t have gone to see that scary movie. Or else it was a sign that I shouldn’t have children because I wasn’t fit to be a mother.

  I didn’t talk to anyone about how brokenhearted I was or how hopeless I felt. I had no idea how common it was to lose a pregnancy. Betty came to see me in the hospital after I lost the second one. She noticed I hadn’t touched the cookies she brought the day before.

  I said I didn’t feel like eating.

  But instead of her usual noodging, she sat down next to me on the bed and told me that she had lost a baby, too. “It was after you got married. We really did want a little girl.”

  I said, “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  She said, “I don’t know.”

  Women used to think we were supposed to act as if nothing had happened, as if losing a baby you wanted wasn’t a big deal. And if you did say something, people told you that you’d forget all about it when you had a healthy baby. I wanted to punch them all in the face.

  Betty cried. I cried. We had never been closer.

  —

  After those interviews in the emergency room, I never did another intake without asking a woman how many pregnancies she’d had, and just asking the question like that opened a door nobody had noticed was there.

  I heard about abortions and unwed girls whose fathers or mothers beat them or threw them down stairs so they would miscarry. I heard from women who had miscarried without knowing what was happening to them, and then nearly died from infections. A lot of them said they’d never told their story to anyone before, and most of them thought what happened to them was their own fault.

  When I told Ann what I was hearing, she said I had the makings of a book. I think I laughed at her; I was raising children and had a hard time getting my reading done and my papers written, much less a book. But I never forgot the idea.

  When the girls were in high school, I started working on my master’s degree. I interviewed more than two hundred women by the time I was done. I didn’t just ask about their pregnancies but about how they had learned about sex and their first sexual experience. I couldn’t believe how many of them knew nothing on their wedding nights, or worse, how many had been raped. There were days I went home shaking and Aaron would hold me until I calmed down. After all his years in child welfare, he wasn’t surprised by anything.

  I talked about what I was learning with my Saturday Club friends, too. We always stayed close, but during World War Two, we really held each other together. Irene lost a nephew in the Pacific. Helen’s son was wounded in England. And our own Jake was killed over Italy; he was a pilot, a hero. We all did whatever we could to get Betty and Levine through the shock, but they didn’t really come back to life until their first grandchild was born. Eddy named him Jonah Jacob, after his brother.

  All those years, Filomena kept sending postcards, and once in a while I’d get an envelope with a sketch or a picture of what she was working on. As soon as it wasn’t ridiculously expensive, we called each other long distance once a month at least.

  Old friends are the best and I dedicated my book to them. It took me almost twenty years to finish. Unasked Questions came out the same year as The Feminine Mystique. Gussie was outraged that my book got lost in all the hoopla about Betty Friedan. “That woman stole your thunder.”

  I told her not to be silly. I wrote my book for social workers; it was never going to be a best seller. But it was a success in its own way. It got me the teaching job at Boston University, and I got a lot of letters from women thanking me for writing it. I can’t tell you how much those meant to me.

  I still miss him like crazy.

  Your grandfather and I went to New Mexico twice. The first time was when the girls were twelve and fourteen. It was our first big family trip.

  We went horseback riding and hiking, and Filomena took us to the Pueblo village where her teacher lived. Virginia was pretty frail by then, but she lit up when she saw Filomena. We were all invited inside to eat.

  One night, Filomena kept the girls at her place for a sleepover. They camped outside and she woke them up in the middle of the night to watch a meteor shower. Your mother and your aunt Sylvia didn’t stop talking about it all the way back on the train.

  Aaron and I made a second trip when the girls were in college. It was just the two of us that time. We got a sleeper car and drank wine in the dining car. It was like a second honeymoon.

  We stayed with Filomena, who was living in a big house with her husband. I bet you weren’t expecting that. She got married when she was almost sixty and always said she was more surprised than anyone.

  Saul Cohen was an art collector from Philadelphia who fell in love with Filomena’s pottery on a visit to Taos and bought everything she had to sell. Four weeks after they met, I got a telegram that started “Sit down.” It’s in the box with all her postcards.

  They lived in Taos most of the year but Saul came back East a lot to see his children and grandchildren. Filomena came with him, so I got to see her pretty often. She was here for Miss Green’s funeral and for the fiftieth reunion of all the Saturday Club girls.

  When Aaron died, she flew from New Mexico for the funeral and stayed with me for a whole month.

  I still miss him like crazy. You should only have my luck in that department. Not that he was perfect. Your grandpa snored like a buzz saw and I never saw him eat a piece of fresh fruit. How can you not like apples or watermelon or even raspberries? It drove me nuts and I’m sure I drove him nuts hocking him about it.

  As he got older, Aaron got set in his ways about a lot of things. He hated television—wouldn’t even watch PBS with me. To him, all popular music written after 1945 was garbage, and he thought I was only pretending to like the Beatles so my students would think I was cool.

  But he did like trying new things: bread baking, guitar lessons, fishing. When we started renting the cottage in Gloucester, he read everything he could find about Cape Ann and asked the old Sicilians at the coffee shop on Main Street for stories. They adopted him and taug
ht him how to swear in Italian and drink sambuca.

  But after he found out that they were going to vote for Ronald Reagan, he took his newspaper to Dunkin’ Donuts and never talked to them again. He hated Reagan. I always thought that election had something to do with his getting sick.

  —

  Your grandfather was a peach. If he’d been at my birthday party, he would have made a speech so schmaltzy there wouldn’t have been a dry eye in the house. It’s a shame he wasn’t there, but it’s worse that he missed being at your sister’s wedding and at your graduation from Harvard. He would have been so proud. Harvard.

  Like I said, I miss him like crazy. But life goes on.

  | 1985 |

  Now there’s something to look forward to.

  My birthday party was wonderful, wasn’t it? So many people: the family, colleagues from Simmons and B.U., my graduate students, and my friends. Irene turns eighty-five next month, and Gussie with her walker but still going strong. Of course, I thought about everyone who wasn’t there, too: Miss Chevalier, Helen, Katherine, Betty and her Herman.

  Filomena felt bad that she couldn’t make it, but her hip didn’t heal fast enough for her to travel. I’m thinking about flying out to see her. Don’t tell your mother, okay? She worries about me taking trips alone. Of course, I’d much rather be going with your grandfather.

  But maybe you’d like to come with me? It’s such a beautiful part of the country and you’ve never been. You’re not going to have time for a real vacation once school starts and it would be my treat. Just you and me. As much as your Brian loves me, he’s not going to want to go on vacation with his grandmother-in-law. If you get married, that is.

  Oh no. Maybe I am becoming a yenta after all!