I was spending more and more time upstairs with Betty. I don’t know where she learned how to be such a good mother. She was strict about manners and school but she would get down on the floor and play with her boys, let them climb all over her, anything for fun. And Levine thought she walked on water.
I finally forgave Betty for being happy in the life that had been a disaster for Celia. I had stopped hating Levine a long time ago, but for some reason I could never get myself to call him Herman.
When the war ended, the big orders stopped coming and Levine had to lay off half his workers. He slipped each of them a twenty-dollar bill, which was a lot then, but he felt so bad about firing people that he started losing weight. Betty wasn’t going to stand for that. She told him to get out of the shmatte business and go into real estate.
Levine said he’d give it a try, but the first building he bought looked like a big mistake. It was a wreck of a house on a run-down street but it was cheap and close to downtown. “Location, location, location,” right? He sold it a few months later for three times what he paid.
Levine went around telling people, “I made a killing and I didn’t hurt anyone.” So he sold the shirt factory and started over in a one-room office downtown.
The business was just the two of us and he was mostly out, walking around the city, talking to people, getting to know the neighborhoods, and figuring out where to buy property he could sell at a higher price later. My job was to wait for the phone to ring and look through the newspapers for stories about fires and foreclosures—anything that might mean someone was selling. Of course I looked at the obituaries, but I read everything else too, down to the sports pages; once in a while a player would have to sell a house in a hurry.
With all that reading, I got to be an expert on Boston politics, the social set, and the Red Sox. I could also tell you anything you wanted to know about Fatty Arbuckle’s drinking problem, the League of Nations, and the fight over Prohibition. I got in the habit of reading a newspaper even when I wasn’t at work because it made me feel like I was living in a bigger world. I never stopped, not even during the Depression. I just read them a day late.
One time, I saw a story about three brothers who were suing each other over their family’s fish store in Roxbury, a place Jews were starting to move to. From what I could tell, none of the brothers wanted to run the business, so I told Levine to see if they’d sell it to him and split the money. He took my advice, bought and sold the store, and made a bundle. For that he gave me a nice raise and a “promotion” to executive secretary.
I was going to Saturday Club, but the girls I knew were getting married and having children. Even the younger members were “dropping like flies,” as Gussie put it.
Gussie was a real career woman by then. After a few years at Simmons, she went to the Portia School of Law, which was women only, and passed the bar on her first try. When no one would hire a lady lawyer, she went out on her own. Her first client was a woman who wanted to open a hat store but didn’t know anything about banks or leases. Soon Gussie had a “specialty” as the lawyer for women who wanted to start their own businesses and for a long time, she never had to pay for cake, dresses, or flowers.
Irene, Gussie, and I all liked our jobs and didn’t talk about men all the time, so Gussie started calling us the Three Musketeers. But work didn’t mean the same thing for Irene and me as it did for her. Gussie was a lawyer with every fiber of her being.
Irene was a supervisor at the telephone company with thirty girls under her, but it was still just a job and she didn’t want to do it for the rest of her life. And although Irene didn’t talk about it in front of Gussie, she did go out with men. After she bobbed her hair—like everyone except me at that point—her green eyes looked twice as big and pretty. But the moment any man told her what she should or shouldn’t do, he was finished. As for me, I would have preferred not working for Levine, but how could I complain about a job where I got to read most of the day?
I was still gun-shy about men because of the coast guard schmuck, but I was still as romantically inclined as any twenty-year-old girl who went to the movies. And by then I knew not all marriages were as bad as my parents’. Betty and Levine were happy, and I liked Helen’s husband, Charlie, who was a sucker for their little girl, Rosie. They named her after our friend Rose, who died of the flu. And you want to hear something strange? The baby was born with red hair. Nobody in either family had red hair and they had picked out the name when Helen was still pregnant, but Rosie came out a redhead.
Every now and then Betty would try to get me to go out on a date. “There’s nothing wrong with books, but you could also go out with a fellow once in a while, have a nice meal. Why not?”
The one time I made the mistake of saying “I suppose you have someone in mind,” she was ready for me, and two days later I was eating steak with a man who sold children’s shoes. The next morning, before I was even out of bed, Betty came to my room asking about my rendezvous.
I said it was very educational and did she know that Boston was the center of the children’s shoe business and that you can sell more pairs of shoes to girls but you can charge more for boys, and that shoemakers in Massachusetts were going to put themselves out of business if they kept raising their prices?
Betty said, “Okay, so he didn’t sweep you off your feet, so what? You got out of the house and the food was good, so it wasn’t a complete waste.” She also said I had to kiss a lot of frogs before I found a prince and lined me up with a high school teacher. He sounded interesting but turned out to be a nudnik, too. Almost the first thing he said when we sat down was that he’d been cheated out of a promotion to be principal, “and the only reason is because I’m Jewish.” Meanwhile, he yelled at the waiter for forgetting the ketchup, for bringing him coffee without cream, and for being slow with the bill. I told Betty they probably didn’t give him the job because he was a jerk.
The next one was a good-looking man who was in dental school. He took me to a beautiful white-tablecloth restaurant, but by the time I’d finished my lamb chop, I knew I was there only as a favor to one of Levine’s business friends.
At least the dentist was honest. He said he needed a wife with connections. “I know that sounds bad, but it’s the only way I’ll be able to set myself up in practice. And it’s not like money would be the only condition.”
I said, “I guess you’d also want two arms and two legs.” For spite I ordered the most expensive dessert on the menu, the one with the cherries that they light on fire. You know the saying about how revenge tastes better cold? Well, it tastes just as good warm.
Betty was ready with a nice quiet bookkeeper, but I said I didn’t want to meet any more frogs. “So what are you going to do?” she said. “Sit around the house and listen to Mameh call you an old maid and say ‘I told you so,’ and that you’re ‘too smart for your own good’?” Betty kept hocking me about going out again until I said, “Would you leave me alone if I go back to night school?”
She said that would be okay but that she wasn’t going to stop nagging me until I signed up and started class. It was annoying how she treated me like I was one of her children and not a grown woman. But it was a good thing, too.
I thought he was sweet and that I was sweet on him.
I ran into Ernie Goldman on the trolley but I wouldn’t have recognized him if he hadn’t introduced himself. He looked ten years older than the last time I’d seen him, which was only a few years earlier in the Shakespeare class. He was so pale and skinny, I thought he’d been sick, but then I saw the cane, which meant he’d probably been overseas in the war.
I asked what he was doing and he said he was working in his father’s scrap metal business. When I told him I was on my way to a class at Simmons, he said, “I figured you for a college girl. You always asked the best questions.”
When I said that was one of the nicest compliments I e
ver had, all the lines around his mouth relaxed and his whole face rearranged itself into a smile that reached up into his eyes. When a shy person smiles, it’s like the sun coming out.
We got to my stop and said goodbye and honestly I didn’t give him a second thought. But the next morning, there was a bouquet of roses on my desk. The note said May I take you to dinner on Saturday? Ernie Goldman.
Five minutes later, the phone rang and Betty said, “Herman says you got roses from Ernie Goldman? Who is he? Do I know him?”
He asked me to pick the restaurant. Betty said the Marliave was nice but when we got there, I was mortified; the dining room was lit with candles and all the tables were full of couples holding hands and whispering. There was even a violin player walking around playing schmaltzy music. I was afraid Ernie would think I was being pushy, but he didn’t seem to take it that way. He held out my chair and said he liked how quiet the place was.
I knew Ernie was shy, so I’d thought up some questions to get him talking, but he managed to turn them all around and I wound up doing most of the talking while he leaned forward and watched my face as if he was afraid of missing something. It was very flattering, and when I got him to smile I felt like I’d won the lottery. By the end of the evening, I thought he was sweet and that I was sweet on him.
We saw each other once a week after that, and when he found out that I usually went to Saturday Club, he asked if I would prefer we go out on Sundays instead. He was thoughtful that way, nothing like the blowhards I’d been fixed up with, and the complete opposite of you-know-who.
Ernie was formal, even a little stiff, but I didn’t hold it against him. I was pretty sure it had something to do with his being wounded, but when I asked where he’d been in the war he shook his head. “The doctors said I should put it all behind me.” I didn’t ask again.
When I think back, I get mad at what they did to those poor men. Ernie must have had PTSD—they called it shell shock—and the doctors told him to keep it all bottled up inside. They didn’t know any better, but it was like treating syphilis with candy bars.
A few weeks after we started going out, I finally got up the nerve to get my hair cut. The barber said I was lucky; my hair was so thick and wavy, it looked like I’d had it marcelled. Of course, what I wanted was straight hair with big spit curls on each side, but that would have taken a pound of pomade. No girl is ever happy with her own hair, is she?
But I did look good, if I say so myself. On the way home, a stranger actually stopped me on the street and asked if I was single.
When Ernie didn’t notice my haircut at all, I was hurt. Betty just shrugged and told me not to worry about it. “Typical man.”
But I was starting to wonder about Ernie. It’s not like I wanted him to make a pass at me, but after three months he hadn’t even kissed me on the cheek. Once when we were at the movies and he had his hand on the armrest, I put my hand on top of his. He didn’t pull away, but he didn’t take it, either, and I felt like an idiot.
And then there was the day at the art museum. I’d gotten two postcards in one day from Filomena, so I told Ernie I’d rather go look at the paintings than go to a matinee. He said okay, like he did to everything I suggested, but when we got off the trolley I saw he was limping more than usual. I asked if he wanted to sit down and rest and he snapped, and I mean like one of those turtles that bite. “Don’t talk to me like that.”
I pointed out some of the paintings Filomena had shown me but Ernie didn’t seem interested in anything, so after a little while I said we should leave.
We were on our way out when he stopped and stared at a big painting of a young man floating in the sea. Right next to him was a huge shark with its mouth wide open, like he was getting ready to bite the man’s head off. Some men in a boat were trying to rescue him but it looked like they were too late. His skin was gray and his eyes were glassy. It was gruesome.
One look was enough for me but Ernie couldn’t take his eyes off it.
“It’s from a true story,” he said. “Do you see the blood in the water, there? Do you see that his foot is missing?”
“What an awful way to die,” I said.
“But he didn’t die.” Ernie limped across the gallery to a bench facing the painting and I sat down with him. He was still staring at the painting. “This was the first place my nurse took me when I got out of the wheelchair. She said if Watson could be the mayor of London without a foot, there was no reason I couldn’t get myself up and out of the house.”
“And you did,” I said.
Ernie put elbows on his knees and held his head in his hands and sat like that for a long time. He didn’t answer me when I said we should go, and eventually one of the guards came over to see if something was wrong. Ernie didn’t say another word all day.
That night, I decided to break it off. I felt guilty—like I was abandoning a puppy I had adopted. And there was even something unpatriotic about walking away from a veteran of the war. But Ernie had been getting moodier and quieter, and then there was the physical element, or the complete lack of it.
The next morning, Ernie called me at work and said how much he enjoyed our time at the museum, as if nothing had happened. He asked if I’d go to the movies with him on Sunday, but I said I couldn’t because I was going to Revere Beach with Betty and the family. He told me he didn’t like going to the shore so I thought I was off the hook.
But later that day I got a bunch of daisies and the note said, “Maybe you could teach me how to like the beach.” It was so sweet, I thought, Okay, one more chance. But by the weekend I was praying it would rain so I wouldn’t have to see him again.
No such luck. Sunday was sunny and hot and Ernie met me with a daisy in his hand. “You look pretty,” he said, and I could see how hard he was trying. “Your hair is pretty, too.”
There wasn’t room in Levine’s car for us to ride with them, but I wanted to take the trolley anyway. With everyone going to the beach, it was like a party. There were hampers in the aisles and children running around and strangers debating where to get the best ice cream. I thought it was fun, but Ernie pulled his hat low on his forehead to shut it all out.
I told him it would be better once we got off, but it wasn’t. The boardwalk was mobbed like downtown at Christmas, only with the roller coaster roaring overhead. The beach was even worse. It was like an obstacle course of blankets and people. It was hard for him to walk on sand and the cane didn’t help at all.
When we found Betty and Levine, Eddy shrieked and held out his arms for me to pick him up. Jake was jumping up and down. “Aunt Addie, tell Pop to let me go to the arcade. I’ll win a toy for Eddy. Tell him I’m big enough to go by myself.”
Betty said, “Take him to the arcade, Herman. I have company now so you don’t have to worry about me.” She was very pregnant and trying to cool off with a big straw fan. “The baby makes me even hotter than usual. At least I don’t have swollen ankles like when I was pregnant before. Herman thinks it means I’m having a girl, which is what he wants.” She patted her belly. “This one is moving around just as much as my other boys. But no matter what comes out, this is the last one.”
I could see that Ernie was mortified by the way she was talking about her body; he didn’t know where to look and was sweating through his jacket. I asked Betty if she’d be okay for a few minutes if we walked to the water to find a breeze.
It wasn’t any cooler there and we ended up near a bunch of boys who were setting off firecrackers left over from the Fourth of July. The popping made Ernie nervous so we started back and that’s when the first rocket exploded over our heads. Ernie jumped and tried to walk faster.
The next blast was so strong, I could feel it in my chest, and babies started crying. Ernie threw himself down on the sand face-first, his hands around the back of his head. I crouched over him and said it was just kids making noise, but then a whole string of
loud explosions went off, echoing up and down the beach.
Ernie pulled himself up and ran, dragging his bad leg behind him. He was running blind, with his head down and his hands over his ears, so he had no idea that he’d knocked a little boy to the ground or that the boy’s father was chasing him. He was a short man with muscular legs and it took him no time to catch up to poor lame Ernie in his shoes full of sand. He tackled Ernie, who curled up in a ball and started making those terrible choking noises men make when they cry.
The man stood over him for a moment, but then he kneeled down and started patting Ernie on the back, saying things like “It’s all right now, soldier. I know. I was there, too, but it’s all right now. You’re home.”
When he noticed me holding Ernie’s hat and cane, he said, “Are you the wife?”
“Friend of the family,” I said, ashamed of how fast I’d answered so no one would think I was married to this poor lunatic. “What should I do?”
“Let’s get him out of here,” he said and hoisted Ernie up by the armpits and dragged him toward the boardwalk. A man with an empty sleeve met us and said, “There’s a police car down by the carousel.”
I said I’d go and ran down the street as fast as I could. When the cops heard that Ernie was a veteran, they turned on the siren. They were very kind to him as they got him into backseat—they must have been in the war, too.
I never saw Ernie again. His parents sent him to a sanitarium in Colorado. I heard that they sold everything and moved out there to be with him.
Betty said, “I hope you aren’t taking this too hard. I never thought he was right for you.”
“I should have ended it a long time ago,” I said. “I was going out with him for something to do. God, that sounds so awful.”
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