The Boston Girl

  Levine apologized to Papa. They should have asked him first and of course if Papa wanted to stay put, he could always move later if he wanted. But if he did come, there was a synagogue a few blocks from the new house. It had a big library with a whole Talmud and electric lights so you could read at night. The rabbi had a long white beard.

  “He’s not American?” Papa asked.

  Levine said, “I think he’s from Germany.”

  “Even worse.”

  Levine gave up. There was no way he could change Papa’s mind, but it turned out that he didn’t have to because the landlord kicked my father’s synagogue out of the storefront and Avrum, the caretaker, was moving to Roxbury. Avrum told Papa that he’d been to Levine’s temple and said that the library was pretty good, which was like an A-plus. He also said that the rabbi wasn’t bad for a German, which was high praise coming from a Hungarian.

  So, in the end, Papa moved to Roxbury with everyone else. But I did not.

  —

  I didn’t say anything about my plans until the day they were moving. Just as the truck pulled up I told my parents that I had taken a room in Mrs. Kay’s boardinghouse on Tremont Street. It was a very respectable place and Betty told me to mention that it was mostly Jewish ladies who lived there, as if that would make any difference.

  My father made a sour face but he didn’t look surprised, which made me think that Betty had told him in advance. My mother was a different story. She gave me a look like I was a worm. “I should be glad you’re going to a Jewish whorehouse?”

  And that was just the beginning. I was disobedient and stubborn. I was disrespectful. I never told her what I was doing or where I was going. I was a disappointment, a fool. I had a big head.

  The longer she went on, the madder she got.

  Finally, she said, “You’ll be sorry. And don’t come back when you’re in the gutter.”

  My jaw hurt from keeping quiet. I had promised myself I wouldn’t fight, but inside my head I was screaming, Don’t call me a whore. Why does reading books give me a big head? Why don’t you ever ask what I’m reading? The gutter? Who’s been paying your rent?

  “You don’t even look at me when I talk to you!” Mameh screamed. “Get out of here, go. I’m finished with you.”

  Betty said, “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “Look who’s talking? The big shot! I blame you for this—you and that husband of yours. All you care about is money and making a big impression. I know you think I’m a nothing, a greenhorn. But you two are peasants, climbers. I only hope your children treat you the way you treat me.”

  Betty told me, “Don’t pay attention.” Levine slipped me five dollars and said, “She doesn’t mean it.”

  I used to dream about how wonderful it would be on the day I went to live on my own but what I remember about that day is running to the curb and throwing up.

  —

  The boardinghouse was cheap and clean but my room was dark and smelled like mothballs. Actually, the whole building smelled like that, even the dining room. I was the youngest person there by thirty years and the only one who went to work. The rest were spinsters or widows living on pensions and all of them were lonely.

  If I took a book into the parlor, one of them would sit down by me and complain about the landlady, or an ungrateful niece who never visited, or how awful the other women’s table manners were.

  They all agreed that things were better in the old days. Some of them were sad about it and some were bitter, but it was always “Nothing is as good as it used to be.”

  I swore I would never talk like that and you know what? Now that I’m an old lady myself, I think that most things are better than they used to be. Look at the computers. Look at your sister, the cardiologist, and you, graduating from Harvard. Don’t talk to me about the good old days. What was so good?

  Even with the old ladies and the mothballs, I loved not having to explain where I was going or where I’d been. It was like being on a vacation from my family. I talked to Betty a lot. She and Levine got a telephone for the house and the two of them talked at least three times a day. She called me, too, and asked what I was up to and when was I coming for dinner, which I didn’t do too often.

  I knew I should have been looking for another job, but I couldn’t stop hoping that Tessa Thorndike would rescue me when she came back to Boston. From the society pages I found out she was home. Mrs. Thorndike had been seen at a tea wearing a strange black dress, “very French for New England,” which meant that everyone hated it.

  A week after that, Serena’s column returned to the Evening Transcript with a note about Mrs. Thorndike’s recent appearance in a très chic Parisian ensemble by the world-famous designer Coco Chanel. Not that anyone in Boston was familiar with Chanel or even knew how to pronounce her name.

  You had to admire the chutzpah of how she praised herself, but I finally realized that she was never going to call me. If I wanted a change, I’d have to do it myself.

  For months, Irene and Gussie had listened to me talk about ­Serena and how she was going to hire me, a little too much, I guess. Because when I said I wasn’t waiting around anymore, Irene said, “It’s about time.” Gussie said she’d make some calls and told me to start looking at the Help Wanteds. There were a lot of openings for typists and some of them looked interesting. I wanted to apply at Wellesley College, but it would have taken hours on the trolley. I inquired about working in a doctor’s office—that would get me into a whole different world—but when I called the job had already been filled.

  Irene said she’d keep her ears open, too, which meant listening in on calls she thought might lead to something. Not entirely kosher, I know, but Irene said nobody was going to give girls like us anything, so we had to take our chances wherever we found them.

  She didn’t even say hello when I picked up the phone. “The typist in the Transcript newsroom just quit. Put on your coat and get over there now.”

  It made me feel like a real Boston girl.

  It was already four in the afternoon when Irene called so I didn’t get to the Transcript building until after five. The lobby was almost deserted, but I thought, What the heck, I’m here, so I asked a man about where I’d go about a typing job in the newsroom. He said go to the second floor and see if Mr. Morton was still around but not to bother if I couldn’t type fast. Then he winked. “It won’t matter to him how pretty you are.”

  I was always surprised when people told me I was pretty. I couldn’t see it then, but when I look at old pictures of me, I have to say I was kind of cute. After I lost the baby fat on my face and cut my hair, my eyes seemed bigger and my nose looked smaller. And I was very lucky with my teeth.

  When I look at my eighty-five-year-old face in the mirror today, I think, “You’re never going to look better than you do today, honey, so smile.” Whoever said a smile is the best face-lift was one smart woman.

  Anyway, the man saying I was pretty made me smile and I went upstairs feeling a little less nervous.

  I walked into a big room that looked like a hurricane had been through it. There was paper all over the floor. The trash cans and ashtrays were overflowing and it smelled of cigar smoke. It looked like the newsrooms you see in the movies—only with cockroaches.

  Nobody was there. The Transcript was an evening paper, which meant that everyone would be long gone. In my head I was saying, Damn, damn, damn, but one of those damns must have come out of my mouth because I heard a voice say, “Ha!”

  A fat man with a hat pushed back on his head walked out from behind a glass door at the far end of the room. I said I was looking for Mr. Morton about a job. He gave out another “Ha,” and said, “You’re looking for me.”

  “I’m here about a job,” I said.

  “The typing job, right? Don’t tell me you think you’re the next Nelly Bly.”

  I had no idea who that w
as. I just said that I could type.

  “Fast?”

  “Very fast. And I’m good at dictation.”

  He told me to hold out my hands and I silently thanked Miss Powder for her rule about short nails.

  “You would have to answer the telephone.”

  I said I had lots of experience at that.

  “What would you do if it was some crackpot called in hollering about the Bolsheviks in the police department, like it was your fault.”

  “Why would anyone call about that?” I said. “The police strike was five years ago.”

  He had a double chin and a heavy five-o’clock shadow, but he grinned like a little boy when he said the next “Ha!”

  I thought he was laughing at me but I found out that “Ha” could mean anything, from “What a jerk” to “Good morning” or even “You’re hired.” That particular “Ha” meant I was hired.

  My first month there was a blur. I never worked so hard, not even cleaning at Rockport Lodge, because I was trying to do everything perfectly and also because I was doing everything. I ran upstairs to the business office, downstairs to the pressroom, and back up to the advertising office. I went out for cigarettes and bottles in brown paper bags from the pharmacist. I answered the phone and listened to a lot of crackpots who complained about everything—their neighbor’s dog, women drivers, broken streetlights, President Coolidge’s collars.

  Mort—he said he’d fire me if I ever called him Mr. Morton—said that the telephone was a curse except when you needed it, like when a reporter didn’t have time to get back to the office to file a story. There were days I went home with a terrible stiff neck from taking dictation with the receiver between my ear and my shoulder. You have no idea how heavy those things used to be.

  I did all the typing for the older reporters who refused to learn how. The younger ones used two fingers but they were fast. The guy who covered the courts was faster than me but he was also a terrible drunk. Sometimes he’d come in an hour before deadline, type his story, and pass out at his desk. I couldn’t believe that anyone that pie-eyed could write so well.

  But one day he was just too far gone and turned in a real mess. Mort told me to clean it up as well as I could and he’d finish it. Let me tell you, I slaved over those two pages and I was a nervous wreck when I turned them in. Mort moved my ending to the beginning, took out all the adjectives, cut the whole thing in half, and made it one hundred percent better.

  “That’s how it’s done,” he said. Best writing lesson I ever had.

  Not that he wanted me to be a reporter. God forbid! Mort disliked women reporters. “They always stick themselves in the middle of the story. The stunt girls show off how brave they are, pretending to be a lunatic or a housemaid, and the sob sisters tell you too much about the murderer’s clothes and nothing about the gun.”

  He didn’t have such a great opinion of men reporters, either, and there were plenty of bad examples in that newsroom: not just drinkers but married men who kept asking me out to dinner. Mort said if he saw me with any of them he’d fire me on the spot. “Not that I expect you to be here very long,” he said. “The smart ones leave fast and the good-looking ones go even faster, so I figure I’ve got you for six months, tops.” Then he asked if I’d met Sam Gold in sales. “Nice boy, not married, one of your tribe. You could do worse.”

  “Don’t be such a yenta,” I said.

  “I’ve been called worse things than a matchmaker.”

  That time I said, “Ha!” Obviously, I wasn’t Mort’s first Jew.

  He and I had what you would call a mutual admiration society, which is why he kept me away from the women’s pages, or, as Mort called it, “The goddamn ladies’ room.” He hated the stories about clothes, cooking, makeup, parties and teas, women’s clubs and charity events. “Fluff and nonsense.” But it was popular with readers, and the society types followed that genealogy column the way my nephews read about the Red Sox.

  Except for the columns, the whole section was written by two middle-aged women who never took off their hats. Miss Flora, who was tall and fat, and Miss Katherine, who was tall and skinny, could turn out copy faster than anyone in the newsroom, which was a good thing, since the women’s pages kept growing. The soap companies and department stores wanted their advertisements to run next to stories their customers would probably read. Mort used to mutter, “Pretty soon they’re going to have to change the name of the paper to the Goddamn Ladies’ Home Journal.”

  But nobody hated the section more than its editor, Ian Cornish. His nickname was The Bantam because he had red hair and a voice like a trumpet. I once saw him stand on top of his desk and holler, “I am in hell.”

  He was about thirty years old with nice green eyes and a cleft chin like Cary Grant’s, but I’ve never cared for pale men with red hair. I think they look like shrimp that have been boiled and peeled.

  Cornish had been sent to “the hen coop,” as he called it, as punishment for a fistfight he’d had with someone upstairs. He figured he’d be called back to the news desk after a few weeks, but when he realized he was stuck with the ladies he started coming in late and never spent more than two or three hours in the office. Flora and Katherine were so good at their jobs it didn’t make much difference, but when two more pages got added to the section, Cornish had to produce something, too.

  Serena hadn’t turned anything in for months, so he started a new column about women’s clubs, parlor lectures, and private salons. Those were like book clubs today, but more formal. The toniest ones competed with each other for famous guest speakers.

  Cornish called his column Seen and Heard, under the name “Henrietta Cavendish,” and he didn’t write one single word. It was all copied straight out of the morning papers, which he cut up and left all over his desk as if he was daring someone to catch him. He got away with it for so long, it was clear that none of the higher-ups were reading his column. Not even Mort.

  I didn’t have anything to do with the women’s section. Flora and Katherine didn’t need help and Cornish could type, or he could until the day he showed up with his right hand in a sling from punching someone who called him Mary, because of where he worked.

  Mort wasn’t happy about sending me over there. He had four daughters and he treated me as if I were his fifth. He thought Cornish was a weasel and warned him to be a gentleman or he’d break the other hand.

  But Cornish was all business. He handed me copy to type without a “please” and took it back without a “thank you” and never looked me in the eye.

  The first time he said two words to me was the day he gave me a piece of fancy stationery, holding it between his thumb and forefinger as if it were a dirty handkerchief. “Type this right away,” he said. “Her Highness, Serena, has decided to grace us with her wit and we’ve got twenty minutes to rip up the section and fit it in.”

  I said, “Well, she is the best writer in the section.”

  He seemed surprised that I could talk. “You may be right, but she’s a royal pain in the ass. She writes whenever she pleases and I have to put up with it because the public likes her and so does the publisher. It’s a damn shame she’s rich because if she was hungry she might be a real spitfire.”

  That column wasn’t one of Serena’s best. Most of it was about the engagement party of a young woman who was probably a friend since it didn’t contain a single sly or snappy word. Katherine or Flora could have knocked it off in five minutes.

  I know it’s not nice to enjoy someone else’s failure, but Tessa Thorndike never called me, and I took more than a little pleasure in how mediocre her writing was. Not very nice of me, but you won’t hold that against your dear old grandma, will you?

  After a few weeks on the women’s pages, I had to agree with Mort that it was a big waste of time: freckle-removal recipes, tips on sweet-smelling breath, hemline “news,” and society drivel.


  Cornish’s column was the worst: a stolen list of “intimate” events with a roll call of the women who went to “lovely” teas and listened to “intriguing” lectures in “charming” homes. It didn’t matter. Seen and Heard was almost as popular as the genealogy column and for the same reason: people like seeing their names in the paper.

  Cornish’s hand healed fast, thank goodness, but a few days after I went back to my regular job, Mort called me to his office. He was holding the telephone and said that Cornish was calling in sick and Katherine was at home with a dying mother, which meant I would be spending the whole day in the hen coop with Flora.

  “He wants to talk to you.”

  When I picked up the phone he said, “Is this Baum?” That was the first time Cornish had ever used my name. “You’re going to write my column today.”

  “Me?”

  He said, “Why not? You’re smarter than a monkey,” and told me to go to the newsstand on the corner and ask for his copies of the Herald, the Globe, the Advertiser, and the American. “Write about any gathering of respectable females and look at the pictures. Sometimes you can get an item out of a caption. Just make sure you spell the names right.”

  That was my first newspaper assignment. It wasn’t exactly a stop-the-presses moment, but I was excited. As I started to put it together, I realized that there was a strict pecking order to the lists of names. You always began with the very First of the First Families: Adamses, Cabots, Lodges, Winthrops, and such, followed by other well-known names, then club officers, married women, unmarried socialites, and at the bottom of the heap, spinsters of a certain age such as—and there she was—Miss Edith Chevalier.

  I felt a shiver go up my spine when I saw her name and finally understood why people were so keen on reading those columns. Knowing Miss Chevalier meant that I was somehow connected to important goings-on in the city. It made me feel like a real Boston girl.