The Boston Girl(55)

He wasn’t writing as many letters, but I didn’t mind. I knew he was working extra hours so he could leave his job knowing he’d taken care of everything he could.

Things were moving along nicely until the middle of June, when my landlady died in her sleep.

“At least she didn’t suffer.”

That’s what everyone said—in fact, that was all anyone said. Nobody disliked her; actually, nobody knew anything about her, including boarders who had lived in her house for ten years. She was a widow who didn’t have children—that was it.

It was the fastest funeral I’ve ever been to. The only people there were the boarders and two nephews. There wasn’t even a eulogy. After the service, the nephews asked us to meet them in the parlor that afternoon.

We all went. There wasn’t a cup of coffee or a cookie anywhere, but it turned out that we weren’t there for a shiva. It was a business meeting to tell us that they were selling the building and we had ten days to get out.

One of the old ladies fainted and the rest of them looked like they might keel over, too. There weren’t a lot of boardinghouses left for women in Boston; rents were high and what could you find in a week, anyway?

Some of the women had relatives to turn to, but there were five who seemed to be completely alone in the world. They had probably planned to leave the boardinghouse the same way as the landlady: feet first. I could hear them crying in their rooms.

My next-door neighbor stopped me in the hallway and begged me to help her. She said, “I don’t have anyone else to ask.”

I had no idea how to help but I figured that Miss Chevalier would, and by the time we had to move out, she’d gotten five beds at the YWCA on Berkeley Street.

I was embarrassed at the way they kept thanking me. I told Miss Chevalier, “You’re the one who saved the day. I didn’t do anything.”

She said of course they should thank me. “You took pity on them and you knew whom to ask. That’s more than half the battle, and you won it for them.”

It wasn’t a hardship for me. Aaron and I were planning to get married in the fall, so I’d only have to put up with my family for a few months. And I can’t say I was sorry to be leaving that dark, smelly house.

On the day I moved out, I was sitting on the steps waiting for Levine to pick me up with his car. The idea of living under the same roof as my mother made me feel like I was fifteen again—in other words, miserable. But then the mailman came and handed me a letter from Aaron. It was like one of those silly coincidences that only happen in novels. I kissed the envelope. I nearly kissed the mailman. I was on top of the world until I opened it.

Dear Addie,

I hope you won’t be too upset but . . .

Aaron was on a train to Minnesota to see if he could help get the amendment passed in St. Paul. Only four states had ratified so far and they badly needed a win. He said it would only be a few weeks, maybe a month. The rest of what he wrote was apologies: Forgive me. I love you. We’ll be together soon. I’m sorry. Don’t be mad.

I wasn’t just mad, I was spitting nails mad. Hadn’t he said it was a lost cause? Wasn’t I more important than a lost cause? Who knew how long he’d really be gone and how long I’d be stuck in Roxbury with my mother breathing down my neck?

I wrote him an angry letter and tore it up. I wrote him a whiny, woe-is-me letter with tear stains all over it and tore that up, too. In the end I sent a postcard to the hotel where he was staying. Dear Mr. Metsky. Please send mail for Miss A. Baum to Miss Henrietta Cavendish at the Boston Evening Transcript. It wasn’t nice but it could have been worse.

—

Moving into the house in Roxbury felt like I’d gone backward in time. Betty was upstairs with her family and I was on the first floor with my parents. It seemed as if nothing had changed, even though nothing was the same.

The boys had changed the most; all of them were taller, smarter, and louder. My mother called them wild animals—vilde chayas—and said Betty wasn’t strict enough. But Jake, Eddy, Richie, and Carl were just healthy kids who got good grades and did whatever their mother asked. They were always glad to see Auntie Addie when I visited—especially Eddy. But after I told them how big they were getting and after they told me what they were doing in school, we didn’t have much to say to each other. I was like a friendly moon circling around their busy little planet.

And even though he lived downstairs, my father was even more distant. I’m not sure he even knew which grandson was which. He never fell in love with any of them the way he had with Lenny. And he didn’t see much of them, since he was in the house only to eat and sleep.

After Papa got laid off from his job, he did exactly what Levine had suggested and spent his days in the synagogue library with Avrum and a bunch of old men. We called them alter kockers. Today they would be “retirees.”

The rabbi studied with them sometimes, and one day he asked if Papa would be interested in teaching boys to get ready for their bar mitzvahs. The parents would even pay something for his trouble.

I think that was my father’s dream come true. He went to the barber and asked Betty to help him choose a new suit, “because a man who teaches Torah can’t go around looking like a peasant.” He didn’t act much different at home, but he held himself taller. You could almost say he was happy.

Mameh had changed the least. She cleaned and cooked and complained. She wouldn’t touch Betty’s washing machine; she said it ruined the clothes and didn’t get them as clean as she got them with her washboard, and then she groaned about how doing the laundry was killing her back. She grew cabbages in the backyard—bitter and hard like baseballs. No one would eat them but Mameh, who said at least they were fresh and what did we know.