by Claire Adams
We sat at the table eating in companionable silence until Blake looked up at the clock and said, “Shit, I gotta go, or I’m going to be late!”
He stuffed the last bite of his bagel in his mouth and gulped down the remainder of coffee in his cup before he grabbed his bag and headed for the door.
“You girls have fun today, okay?” he said, looking anxiously in Nina’s direction.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” she said, waving him off. “I’ll go learn something and have a great time. I promise.”
“Okay, good,” he said with obvious relief before turning toward me and adding, “Thanks for taking her with you, Emily. I’ll see you tomorrow, maybe?”
“Oh, definitely,” I said, smiling up at him. “I’ll be around.”
Once Blake had left, I looked at Nina and said, “I’m not sure what your dad told you, but if you decide you don’t want to go with me to the Waltham Museum, I will understand.”
“He told me that I had no choice and that if you told me I did, I was supposed to go anyway,” she said in a bored tone that I recognized as pure defensiveness. She sighed, “I guess I don’t really have a choice.”
“Of course you do,” I said. “But I think it’ll be kind of interesting, so there’s that.”
“Fine, I’ll go get ready,” she sighed again.
I tidied up the kitchen while I waited for Nina to get ready. Although I’d cooked breakfast for Blake and Nina on the morning after Christmas, I hadn’t really examined the room in any meaningful way. Now I looked at it with fresh eyes and saw a kitchen that was warm and inviting. Blake had painted the walls a warm shade of red, and there were plants situated on floating shelves around the windows, giving the room a colorful touch. He’d obviously spent time thinking about how to make this house feel like a home, and it showed.
When Nina was finally ready, we headed out to the car and drove over to the Waltham Museum, where Burt Maddox was waiting to show us around. Burt and I had become friends when I’d first taken the job at Waltham High School, and now he called me when there was a new exhibit, or when they added something to one of the collections.
Today’s visit was the result of an overhaul of the manufacturing displays. The museum had been working on upgrading the tours and modernizing and restoring some of the displays. Burt had called me the week before to let me know that the exhibits would be open for viewing this week, and I was excited to see the work the museum curators and restoration experts had done.
“Burt! How are you?” I called, as Nina and I entered the museum lobby.
“Well, well, well, if you aren’t a sight for sore eyes, Emily!” Burt laughed as he came out from behind the front desk. He was well into his 70s, but he didn’t look much older than 60. His gray hair was slicked back away from his clean-shaven face and, as usual, he wore a button-down dress shirt with a sweater vest and a matching tie.
“You’re looking snappy, Burt,” I said, as I appraised his outfit.
“Got a new vest from the grandkids for Christmas, and a matching tie from my new girlfriend,” he grinned.
“How is Holly?” I asked. Burt’s wife had died young and left him to raise their two children alone. He did so, and then once they were out of the house, he’d gone out and started dating. Holly had come along around the time Burt had decided to give up, and they’d been together for almost 20 years. Neither one had wanted to get married, so they decided to live in sin and scandalized the old-timers they hung out with. Holly had been diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s disease the year before, and they were struggling to adjust to the constantly shifting landscape that it had created.
“She’s doing as well as can be expected, but her memory is slipping away a little more every day,” he said, without a trace of sadness. “We enjoy the good days and endure the not so good ones. It’s all you can ask for! Now, who is this young lady you’ve brought with you?”
“Burt Maddox, I’d like you to meet Nina Gaston,” I said, as I stepped back. “Nina, this is Burt.”
“Nina Gaston, it’s a pleasure to meet you,” Burt said, holding out his hand. “I think I know your father, Blake.”
“Yes, that’s my father,” Nina nodded, as she took his hand. “It’s very nice to meet you, Mr. Maddox.”
“Oh, please call me Burt, dear,” he said, laughing softly. “Mr. Maddox was my father, and he was one ornery son of a gun!”
Nina and I laughed as Burt turned and motioned for us to follow him. We walked down the wood-paneled corridor toward a large door at the end of the hall. Burt’s shiny black dress shoes clicked on the polished wood floor in a rhythm that was disciplined and precise, and I smiled as I thought about how he’d described his time in the Army and how it had been a cornerstone of his philosophy of life.
“Now, I’m going to show you something no one else has seen yet,” he said with a conspiratorial grin, before pushing open the heavy oak doors to reveal a room that was filled with light and air. I inhaled sharply as I looked around and realized that this was the new manufacturing wing of the museum.
“Oh, Burt, it’s absolutely amazing!” I whispered, as I turned around, taking the whole room in. “You’ve outdone yourselves.”
“They really put a lot of work into it,” he nodded, as he stepped over to a display case full of watches. “They shined it all up and built new cases for these things.”
“What did it look like before?” Nina asked, as she surveyed the room.
“It was dark and dingy, and it was hard to see what was in the collection,” Burt said, as he reached down and pulled open a drawer in the display case. He shuffled a few papers around and then pulled out what looked like photographs and held them out for Nina to see. “This is what it looked like a few years ago.”
“Wow, that looks really old and run-down!” she exclaimed, as she shuffled through the pictures. “This is definitely an improvement.”
A bell rang somewhere in the distance, and Burt excused himself to go answer it. I walked over to the start of the exhibit and began slowly examining the pictures and artifacts that represented the very beginning of the manufacturing industry in Waltham. Nina set the pictures down and joined me, but kept a safe distance as she scanned the pieces.
“Why do people keep all of this stuff?” she asked. “I mean, have you ever seen the show “Hoarders?” It’s like museums are the organized version of all that crap!”
“You’ve got a point,” I laughed, as I thought about how a historian would respond to her observation. “However, it’s not like museums just take everything that’s offered. They curate the collections so that only the most relevant pieces are on display. They try to tell a story with the items.”
“Huh, a story?” she said, looking around.
“Yes, for example, if you look at the section over here on Frances Cabot Lowell, you can see the letters he wrote to his family while traveling in England,” I pointed out the case that contained the letters and waited as Nina skimmed them.
“He said something about looms,” she said.
“Indeed he did,” I nodded. “Do you know what he is famous for?”
“Not a clue,” she shrugged.
“Based on what he learned during his travels, he established a water-powered cotton mill that allowed him to complete all the steps needed to manufacture fabric under one roof,” I said, showing her paintings of Lowell’s factory, which would become Boston Manufacturing Company. “By 1815, the cloth that was made in Waltham was on sale in Boston. Do you know what that was the start of?”
“Um, the fashion industry?” Nina guessed.
“No, but that’s a good guess,” I chuckled. “It was the beginning of the industrial revolution, which changed everything in this country.”
“Wait, making cloth changed everything in this country?” she asked.
“No, the creation of the water-powered mill did,” I said, smiling as a look of wonder spread across her face. “It allowed manufacturers to use power rather than humans
to do the work of manufacturing. It led to the creation of many other forms of early technology, and led to the expansion of mills in Waltham and the surrounding areas.”
“That’s pretty amazing,” she said, as she bent over a case that contained pieces of the water-powered loom and studied them. I waited to see if she had more questions, but after a few minutes, I moved away and let her move through the exhibit at her own pace while I explored the new section on immigrant labor in Waltham during the second half of the 19th century.
“There’s so much I didn’t know about this city,” Nina said, as she stepped up next to me and looked at the map that was highlighted to show where the immigrant workers came from during the Industrial Revolution. “It’s incredible to see the way that people migrated for jobs back then, too.”
“A lot of people think that immigration is a new issue, but it’s really something that this country has been figuring out how to deal with since its inception,” I said, as I thought about the ways in which French, Canadians, and Italians were the groups that were looked down upon back then.
“Did the people who lived in Waltham dislike the immigrants back then?” she asked.
“Oh goodness, the Irish were seen as the blight on Boston and the surrounding cities when they began arriving in large numbers during the Potato Famine,” I said, thinking about how different groups had become the scapegoats for national fear and loathing. “There were signs that said ‘No Irish Need Apply’ in windows all over Boston because the ‘true’ Americans believed that the Irish, and the Catholics, were drunken criminals, and local workers were angry because the Irish were desperate for jobs and would undercut the American workers when it came to wages.”
“But weren’t they just trying to survive?” Nina asked, as she looked at the pictures of the Irish workers gathered around a mill wheel.
“Yes, that’s pretty much what all immigrants try to do,” I nodded. “It’s just that it takes time for those on the inside to adjust to outsiders. Part of it is that they compete for jobs, and part of it is that they have different customs and traditions that don’t always match up with the way people are used to living.”
“They’re scared of new things,” she murmured. “It’s always fear that makes people enemies, isn’t it?”
I nodded, not knowing what else to say to her since she’d hit the nail on the head. Nina silently moved away as she looked at more pictures and examined the artifacts connected to the mills.
“Ms. Fowler!” Nina called from the other side of the room. “Did you know they had classes designed to Americanize the immigrants? They had to attend the during their lunch hour!”
“Yes, indeed,” I said, smiling to myself because I could hear the excitement in her voice as she discovered something new that related to things she could see were still going on in the world around her.
“How can companies do that to people?” she asked. “How can they expect them to spend their own time becoming something they’re not?”
“I don’t think the companies saw it that way,” I said, as I looked at the various flyers that announced classes on how to properly cook American food or raise children the American way. “I think they viewed it as helping their workers adjust to the new world they were living in.”
“But it assumes that the American way is the only way to live!” she cried. “Like one way is the right way!”
“Yes, that’s a problem, isn’t it?” I said.
“A huge problem,” she muttered, as she returned to the display. She was quiet for a long time, and I’d made it through most of the rest of the room taking notes on what they had and thinking about how I could weave this into my future history lessons. When I looked up again, I saw Nina staring up at a photo of a group of women who were standing in front of loom inside the BMC.
“I wonder where they came from and what happened to them,” Nina said softly. “I wonder what their hopes and dreams were.”
“I think you’ve just gotten to the heart of what’s behind museums, Nina,” I said, resting my hand on her shoulder. “They’re here to make us remember, and to wonder about who came before us and how they lived their lives.”
“It’s pretty amazing when you look at it that way, isn’t it?” she said, turning to look at me.
“It’s exactly why I wanted to teach History,” I nodded.
“I can totally see why you would want to do that,” she said, looking back up at the picture. “People’s lives need to matter, but man, these clothes are a trip!”
I laughed as I nodded in agreement and then watched as Nina studied the pictures carefully. I didn’t know what she was thinking exactly, but I could guess that there were a lot of things going through her mind, so I left her with them as I explored a section of the collection that laid out the history of the Boston Manufacturing Company and explained how it had expanded over the years to include textiles, paper, and a range of technological developments. Before I knew it, the shadows grew longer and dusk set in.
Burt returned just as we were getting ready to call it a day, and asked if we’d seen everything we needed to see.
“We’ve seen more than what we needed to see,” Nina said. “Thank you for showing me the history of this city.”
“I’m glad you got to see it,” Burt smiled, as he ushered us out of the gallery. “It’ll be opening next month, and you’re welcome to come back anytime and visit!”
Nina and I shook his hand and walked out of the museum and back to my car. I stopped and picked up dinner for us at a local deli, and then drove back to the house. Nina didn’t say much on the drive home or over dinner, and I was starting to worry about whether I’d done the right thing taking her to the museum.
“Ms. Fowler,” she said.
“How about you call me Emily when we’re not in school?” I suggested. “Otherwise it’s going to get a little weird.”
“Okay, Emily, how did you know you wanted to be a History major?” she asked, as she picked at the coleslaw on her plate. “Are your parents historians?”
“Oh goodness, no,” I said, caught off guard by Nina’s question. “My parents are definitely not academics, well, not the way your grandparents are. They’re smart people, but they don’t completely understand why I do what I do.”
“You mean they disapprove?” Nina asked.
“Yes, but they act as if they don’t,” I said, trying to think of a way to escape having to explain my family to her. I didn’t want to lie, but I also didn’t want to get into the truth. “They’re very wrapped up in the way they see the world, and it doesn’t leave a lot of room for anything that is different.”
“Yeah, like my mom,” Nina said glumly. “She wants me to do what she wants me to do, and when I don’t, she gets mad.”
“Like what?” I asked warily. I didn’t know Remy at all, and since I spent my work days surrounded by teenagers, I knew that sometimes their views on parental behavior were shaped by faulty logic and teenage angst.
“Like she wants me to wear designer dresses and apply to Ivy League colleges,” Nina sighed.
“And you don’t want to do either?”
“I don’t mind dresses, but I like the ones I can find at the thrift stores, you know?” she said, looking at me expectantly. When I nodded, she continued, “It’s like when she and my dad split up, she became a totally different person, and now she wants me to be a totally different daughter, too.”
“It’s hard for parents to adjust to their kids growing up,” I said, with as much neutrality as I could muster. “Your mom just wants what’s best for you.”
“Yeah, well, I don’t want to live her life,” Nina muttered. “I want to live my own life. I want to do things my way, and follow my own dreams.”
“Sometimes it’s hard for parents to see that,” I agreed, thinking of my own parents. “I guess the best path is to be kind and try to understand what they’re feeling and then move forward on your own path.”
Nina took a bite of her sandw
ich and chewed as she thought about what I’d said. I didn’t want to encourage her to do anything rash, but I also knew the weight of parental expectations could feel crushing, and if you gave into it, it could be devastating.
“Think of it this way,” I said. “Parents were teenagers once, too. So, they are only doing what it is they learned how to do. Sometimes that’s a good thing, like with your dad, I think, and sometimes that’s a little harder, like with your mom. The best bet is to try to talk to her and explain how you’re feeling without being angry or defensive. Who knows, she might understand!”
“I doubt it,” Nina said glumly. “She doesn’t understand anything about me.”
“Give it time,” I said, reaching out and patting her arm. “Sometimes they take a little longer to come around.”
“I guess,” Nina shrugged, then changed the topic completely asking, “Wanna watch a movie tonight? I mean, if you don’t have somewhere else to go.”
“Sure,” I said, thinking about KO’s empty house and how, aside from Howard, I had no one to go home to. “What do you want to watch?”
“I was thinking a rom-com,” she said. “Dad bought me a bunch of them for Christmas, and I haven’t watched any of them yet.”
“Sounds like a plan!” I agreed. I cleaned up the dinner dishes while Nina set up the movie in the living room. She’d chosen an oldie but a goodie, and we settled in to watch Hugh Grant charm the heck out of his secretary as the Prime Minister of England while the rest of the stories wove their way around his. Nina laughed in all the right places, and halfway through, we paused the movie to make popcorn.
“That was such a lovely ending,” she sighed, as Hugh and Natalie kissed in front of the audience of parents and kids. “I wish I could find someone like that.”
“In high school?” I laughed. “Good luck with that one!”
“Yeah, true,” she nodded, as she fished around the bowl for the last popped kernels. “Want to watch another one?”
“Sure, why not?” I agreed, as she fished out another oldie and we began watching Meg Ryan and Billy Crystal annoy each other as they drove across the country together.