The Boston Girl(27)
And then she ran out of there like she was late for a train.
—
Filomena didn’t touch her dinner and went upstairs before I read my poem. I didn’t get back to the room until late and she was already asleep.
In the morning, I found a note on her pillow and I remember every word because I counted them—all fourteen.
Dear Addie,
I’m taking the early train. I’ll see you soon.
Your friend,
Filomena
The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.
Levine changed his business from ladies’ shirtwaists to men’s shirts. Mostly he sold local but some of his customers were Jewish shopkeepers in the South. The day he got a typewritten order from a small town in Alabama, he decided that sending out handwritten bills made him look small-time. So he bought a secondhand typewriter to keep up and told me I should take a class so I could use it “professionally.”
Typing was not what I had in mind for my first night school class, but it was a good thing to know and it meant a night out of the house without an argument. Even better, there was an English class that met right afterward.
The typing class was in a cramped room with a low ceiling on the basement floor of the high school I should have graduated from. All twenty seats were filled, and except for two American girls, the rest were daughters of immigrants like me.
The teacher was Miss Powder, a tall, skinny lady—I couldn’t tell if she was twenty-five or forty-five. She stood up straight as a broomstick all the way to her hair, which was pulled into a tight little bun on top of her head.
Before we even touched the machines, she talked like she expected us to be a disappointment. “None of you will take this advice seriously, but there is nothing more important for the typist than hand position and posture.” She said, “An erect spine translates into accuracy on the page. Slouching is slovenly. Also men will make certain assumptions about the kind of girl who slouches.”
Miss Powder roamed around the room whenever we were practicing, slapping our hands if they weren’t in exactly the right position and pinching back our shoulders. As soon as we knew the basics, she brought in a stopwatch and bell to time us for two minutes as we typed The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog, as fast as we could, as many times as we could.
The bell made everyone nervous except Maureen Blair, a dark Irish beauty who was the best in the class. I was second best and Miss Powder held us up as examples for the others. She always blamed their mistakes on posture, but I thought it probably had more to do with the fact that most of them could barely read.
One evening, Miss Powder showed up with her hair pulled so tight that she looked a little Chinese around the eyes. She was spitting mad. “You will notice an empty chair tonight,” she said. “Miss Blair has informed me that as she is now engaged to be married, so she has no need to continue.
“I trust that none of you are considering doing anything so . . . so . . .” She couldn’t think of a strong enough word. “When I think of the poor girls who were turned away in favor of someone like that.” I don’t think Miss Powder could have been any more outraged if Maureen Blair had murdered her own mother.
After typing class, I ran upstairs to the second floor and Shakespeare. I don’t think I would have picked a whole class on just one writer, but it was my only choice and it turned out to be a good one. Strange, but good.
The teacher was Mr. Boyer, a short, chubby man with bright blue eyes and a thick white moustache. He had a deep voice and talked as if every other word started with a capital letter. “It is my Privilege to introduce you to the Greatest Writer in the History of the English Language,” he said. “Have any of you had the Pleasure of seeing the Great Bard’s Work on the Stage?”
Nobody had.
“A shame,” he said. “In this class, at least, you will hear the Immortal Words of one of his Greatest Works, The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet.”
And then he opened a book and started reading the play and didn’t stop until the bell rang. He picked up where he left off in the next class and the one after that.
At first, I didn’t understand half of what was going on; there were too many words I’d never heard before and I had trouble with all those names. But it was a little like listening to music—Mr. Boyer read with a lot of feeling—and somehow after a while it started making sense.
By the time he finished the play, there were only ten students left out of the twenty-five who started. A moment after he closed the book, Sally Blaustein wailed, “They both died? After all that?” I felt exactly the same way.
Mr. Boyer’s face lit up. “Our first Question,” he said, and then, without any explanation, he started reading the play all over again. But this time, he stopped after every scene and made us ask questions about what we’d heard.
I learned a lot from those questions—not just about the play but about the other people in the class, too. Iris Olshinsky asked Mr. Boyer for definitions of a lot of words—sometimes the simple ones, and usually more than once. He never got annoyed or impatient with her or with any of us. Actually, he seemed to be delighted when anyone asked anything at all.
Mario Romano didn’t seem to like any of the characters except the Nurse. Sally Blaustein felt sorry for everyone but especially Paris, who also died for love. Ernie Goldman wanted to get the facts right: Who was a Capulet and who was a Montague? Was there really a drug that would make everyone think you were dead when you really weren’t?