The Boston Girl(56)

My mother did go out of the house more since they moved to Roxbury. Maybe because there were no neighbors in the same building, or maybe it was because there were fewer cars. At first she did some of the shopping, but the greengrocer kicked her out of his store when she accused him of putting his thumb on the scale. She gave the butcher such a hard time about how much fat he left on the meat that he wouldn’t let her in his shop, either.

Eventually, the only place Mameh could go was the fish market, where she was friends with the owner’s wife, who was as quiet as a fish herself. She had an unmarried nephew and the two of them decided he was perfect for me. Mameh said he was from a good family and he made a nice living. “He’s thirty-nine years old and ready to settle down.”

Betty said, “He’s two hundred pounds and not very smart. Leave Addie alone, Ma.”

“With ankles like that, she’s not such a catch herself,” she said, as if I wasn’t in the room.

They still didn’t know about Aaron. I wasn’t worried about introducing him in person: a Jewish man with a good profession, from a nice family? What’s not to like? But until he was standing next to me, I didn’t think I could have said his name out loud without crying like a baby.





I have no choice, Addie.

At least I still liked my job, which was never boring.

Miss Flora announced that she was leaving to be the editor of the women’s page of the Cincinnati Enquirer. I was stunned. I always thought she was as Bostonian as the statue of George Washington in the Public Garden. And just as permanent.

If Flora had been a man, I’m sure Cornish would have understood why she’d want to run her own section, but he said good riddance and it just proved that women were fickle and didn’t belong in the newsroom. The morning after she left I found him passed out under his desk. When he sobered up, he told Katherine that she’d have to take over Flora’s work in addition to her own.

Katherine marched into Mort’s office and said she would stay on only if she got a promotion and a raise, and if I came on as her full-time assistant. Cornish called that “uppity” and thought she should be fired, but Mort gave her everything she asked for.

I hadn’t known much about Katherine or Flora. We didn’t pal around after hours like the men did. Katherine was a hard worker but Flora had been the bigger talker. Until she took over, I didn’t know how much Katherine had on the ball.

She told everyone to call her Miss Walters and to call me Miss Baum. “You and I can be familiar with each other,” she said, “but why should they call us by our Christian names if we can’t do the same to them? We’re not their maids.” She was right, but nobody in the newsroom was ever going to call me Miss Baum. When you start out somewhere as “the girl,” you never grow up.

Katherine—Miss Walters—told me I would still be writing Seen and Heard, but she wanted more about the younger set, especially what they were wearing. She brought in a stack of Vogue magazines and I learned a whole new language: organza, peplum, bias cut, pinafore.

All that reading made me take a new look at what Katherine was wearing. Maybe I hadn’t noticed because she was always in black, but now I realized that she wore whatever was the latest “silhouette,” one of my new words, and that her drop-waist dresses were perfect for a woman of her height.

No one would ever call Katherine Walters a pretty woman: her face was strangely flat and one eye was a tiny bit higher than the other. After Flora left, she took off her hat, cut her bangs, and was suddenly striking and stylish, which is actually much better than pretty.

Katherine said I could also go back to writing about interesting lecture topics in Seen and Heard, but “nothing as upsetting as that piece about the Negroes.” She said there was a place for stories like that, but not on the women’s pages. She suggested I look into the work of the Women’s Educational and Industrial Union and the ladies who sat on the symphony board of trustees. “You’ll enjoy that.”

I did. But I also had to write the “how to” stories that had been Flora’s specialty: how to lose weight, clean the icebox, make homemade hand lotion, set the table for an afternoon of bridge or mahjongg, mend stockings so it didn’t show. It wasn’t hard, but it was a lot to learn about things that didn’t interest me at all.

Katherine kept everything running smoothly so Cornish could go on as he did before: coming in late, reading the papers, joking with the reporters, and leaving early. Katherine kept her distance from him but she read him the riot act when she saw me delivering his morning coffee.

“Miss Baum’s new responsibilities are such that she no longer has time to act as your personal servant. Please remember that.”

He was too surprised, or maybe too hungover, to come up with a snappy comeback. But if looks could kill . . .

Cornish didn’t speak to her at all after that. If there was something he absolutely had to tell her he dropped a crumpled-up note on her desk or sent a message through me. “Tell that blasted beanpole she’s got to cut ten inches today.”

I must have smiled at “beanpole,” which set him off making up funny names for Katherine: Miss Maypole, the Giraffe, the Boston Colossus. He started announcing them loud enough so everyone in the newsroom could hear. The reporters got a kick out of this until the day he called her the Monumental Bitch.