The Boston Girl(34)

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.”