The Boston Girl(57)

You could have heard a pin drop. It’s not as if those guys didn’t use that word and plenty worse, but there were rules about where and when you were supposed to say them. Katherine had been ignoring Cornish’s game but this time she said, in the sweetest, most ladylike voice, “My goodness, Ian. Do you kiss your mother with that mouth?”

That got a big laugh, and the police reporter, who was as foulmouthed as the rest of them, said, “Want me to get you a bar of soap to wash it out, Miss Walters?”

Work became a minefield for me after that. Katherine said she would let me go if I did any more favors for “that man.” But the minute she stepped out of the room, Cornish would send me out for a magazine or a bottle of aspirin and threaten to fire me if I didn’t do it.

To make things even worse, the weather was miserably hot and muggy. The newsroom only had three windows facing the street and when the sun hit them in the afternoon I bet it was ninety degrees in there. There was one fan, no water cooler, and those men didn’t shower every day.

—

Aaron’s letters became the bright spots in my life. They always started: My dear Miss Cavendish, I hope this letter finds you and your staff in the best of health.

The first one didn’t mention my snippy postcard, which was big of him, but he didn’t apologize for being so far away, either. He wrote about the trip west and his assignment, which was to talk to any state legislator who seemed to be leaning in favor of the amendment. He said he had eaten the best pancakes he’d ever tasted in his St. Paul hotel and was going to bribe the cook to give him the recipe.

He always ended his letters, Sincerely and forever yours, A. Metsky.

After a few weeks, his letters got to be less cheerful. It was as hot in St. Paul as it was in Boston, his hotel room was suffocating, most of the food was tasteless, and he felt invisible.

Going to Minnesota in the summer had been a big mistake; the state legislature wasn’t in session and the representatives were back at their farms, which were all over the state.

Aaron was riding milk trains to talk to possible supporters, but all he got was splinters on his backside from sitting on wooden crates and bites from mosquitoes he claimed were the size of bumblebees.

He wired his boss to say that he might as well come back, but he was told to stay, find some stories about local child laborers, and get invited to speak at women’s self-improvement societies and church auxiliaries. Aaron said that if you can move a roomful of mothers to tears, you could raise an army for a cause.

There were plenty of stories. For sixty years, children had been sent to Minnesota on “orphan trains.” It was a well-intentioned idea, a way to give abandoned children a better life with wholesome farm families. Being out in the country had to be better than the misery of crowded orphanages, right?

Some of those children must have been well taken care of and loved, but it wasn’t hard finding kids who were not. Aaron struck up a conversation with a young man at a café who said he’d been put on the train from Baltimore when he was twelve and his younger brother, Frank, was five. He remembered being lined up on a platform where the women would pick out little children with blue eyes and good teeth—like his brother—and the men chose bigger boys who could go to work right away. He was told to forget about his old family and start over, but he didn’t forget his brother and tried running away to find him. He got a good hiding when he was caught.

There were plenty of orphan train children still living with families that had taken them in, but it wasn’t easy to talk to them.

Aaron ran into a girl named Martha when he was getting off the train at a stop just outside St. Paul. She was unloading sacks of flour and sugar as if they were full of feathers even though she wasn’t any bigger than me.

Martha was sixteen. She had been eight when the nuns put her on the train and the Olsens took her in. She didn’t pine for her family in New York; after her mother walked out, her father brought her to an orphanage. “He kept my brothers,” she said. “He told them he didn’t know what to do with a girl.”

When Aaron asked if she was happy with her Minnesota family, Martha said the Olsens were not her family. They weren’t as bad as some she knew about. They never hit her and she got plenty to eat and new boots when the old ones wore out. She said they even sent for the doctor once when she was sick. But they made Martha stop going to school when she was ten and they talked about her as “the girl.”

“Tell the girl to pass the milk.”

He said they treated her like something between a prize farm animal and a daughter.

Martha worked in the cookhouse, where she put out three meals a day for farmhands. In the winter, her hands bled from washing dishes.

She had taken to sleeping with a knife under her pillow in case one of the workers got any ideas, but she was really afraid of her “big brother,” who wouldn’t leave her alone. Martha said that Mrs. Olsen wouldn’t believe anything bad about her son.

Those were hard letters to read, but they were love letters, too. Aaron was showing me who he was, what was in his heart. The more I knew him, the more I loved him. And he opened my eyes to what was going on around me. I started to notice boys and girls who should have been in school selling newspapers, shining shoes, scrubbing stoops, and carrying baskets of laundry. It made me proud of what Aaron was doing.

—

I couldn’t leave his letters at home. My mother was always in my room, rehanging my clothes, rearranging my books, even refolding the clothes in my drawers. Once I asked if she was looking for something in my underwear. She said she didn’t like a mess in her house and that I wouldn’t care unless I had something to hide.