The Boston Girl(33)

After a little while, I tiptoed upstairs and walked through Betty’s apartment. In her house, it was always immaculate, nothing out of place. But with the natural order of things all upside down—children dying before parents—everything she did to keep things in order looked wasted and pathetic.

I stopped at the doorway to the boys’ room. A breeze from the open window ruffled the sheet covering Myron’s body. In the other bedroom, Betty was curled up on the bed, facing the wall. Levine sat with his back to her, staring at the cradle, which was covered with a blanket. He looked at me with dead eyes and I could feel the sadness coming off him, like cold air on my face.

They had lost two children in two days. How do you go on after that?

—

Coffins and hearses were impossible to come by, but somehow my father managed to get both and the next day we went to the cemetery; me, Papa, and Levine. The city went by in a blur but we slowed down when we passed through a little town where people were pushing baby carriages under red and yellow leaves, as if it were just another nice day in October.

It seemed like we’d been driving for hours when the driver turned down a dirt road and through a field of weeds to a stand of scrawny trees that marked the cemetery—the saddest, the most forlorn place I’d ever seen. Two men with shovels were waiting for us, and two big mounds of dirt.

—

Myron had turned into a nice kid. Betty hadn’t let him get away with anything, but she also hugged him a lot. She called him Mike, he called her Ma, and did his chores without being asked. He was good in arithmetic. His top front tooth was a little crooked. He had a nice singing voice. That was Myron.

We followed his coffin from the hearse to the grave, where the men lowered the half-sized casket into the ground and waited for Levine to pick up the spade. But he didn’t move. He couldn’t. So Papa stepped forward and shoveled a little bit of dirt into the hole, but so gently, it sounded like rain on the coffin. When he was finished, Levine and my father said Kaddish.

The driver came back carrying something that, from the distance, looked like a hatbox. When Levine saw it, he made a noise like a wild animal caught in a trap.

Lenny had been born with a head of silky brown hair. He smiled at everyone and Betty joked that he was going to be a politician when he grew up. He liked peas and his first word was ball. That was Lenny.

He and Myron were like silhouette portraits cut out of black paper—like shadows of the people they might have been if they’d grown up.

Papa tried to force the shovel into Levine’s hands to bury the baby. I couldn’t watch anymore and went looking for Celia’s grave.

I had a stone for her in my pocket. I’d found it on the beach in Rockport and carried it around with me ever since. It was white and smooth, almost as round as a pearl. I put it on top of her gravestone and said, “I’m sorry.”

Papa came and put a plain brown pebble next to mine. He traced Celia’s name with his finger. “Your mother said Celia shouldn’t come to America with me. She thought she was too delicate. But Mameh had another baby on the way and her mother was sick, too. I thought it would be easier for her if I took both girls.” He wiped his eyes. “She would still be alive if I’d left her there.”

Levine walked over to us. Papa put an arm around his shoulder for a moment before he started back to the car.

Levine hadn’t shaved or combed his hair for four days and his face was swollen. He put a third stone on Celia’s headstone and whispered, “She would be alive if I hadn’t married her.”

“It wasn’t your fault,” I said. Like it wasn’t my father’s fault. And for the first time since she died, I thought maybe it wasn’t all my fault, either.





| 1919–20 |





I was still gun-shy about men.

Nobody talked about the epidemic when it was over, but everyone was carrying around their own load of heartache, acting as if no one had died. I felt like I was skating on a pond that wasn’t frozen all the way through and if anyone asked me, “How’s the family?” the ice would break.

People kept saying, “Life goes on.” Sometimes that sounded like a wish and sometimes it felt like an order. I wanted to scream, “Life goes on? Not for everyone, it doesn’t.”

But when Betty said she was pregnant again, “life goes on” became a fact and I found myself looking forward to the new baby in a whole different way. She had another boy, Eddy, a blue-eyed blond who laughed, I swear, from the day he was born, and I finally understood why people got so silly about infants.

From the beginning he seemed to like me, too. I was the only one who could settle him down when he got fussy. Betty got a kick out of that. “Auntie Addie to the rescue.” My mother was thrilled with the new baby, but my father would hardly look at him. Papa was never the same after Lenny died.

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.