The Boston Girl(46)
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.
I made sure I got everybody spelled right and turned it in before the deadline, but Flora handed it back without even looking at what I’d written. Some big advertisements had just come in and they had to add a whole page to the section. “I don’t suppose you could possibly give me six more inches in the next half hour?” She obviously didn’t think I could, so I said it wouldn’t be a problem.
The first thing I did was add the names of all the lecturers and what they talked about. In my opinion, it made the whole column much more interesting. The president of the League of Women Voters talked about “Why Aren’t Women Voting?” An English professor from Smith College explained “The Waste Land” by T. S. Eliot. A lady doctor spoke about Sigmund Freud’s sex theory. Miss Chevalier had been at a gathering where a retired schoolteacher talked about her trip to Egypt, “with magic lantern illustrations.”