The Boston Girl(45)

“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 was. 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.