The Boston Girl(70)

We liked the Little House on the Prairie books so much that he would run to the bookstore whenever there was a new one and we’d stay up late to find out what was going on with the Ingalls family.

Aaron was heartbroken when Auntie Sylvia and your mom were old enough to read on their own and “fired” him. When your sister and you were born, it was as if he’d been holding his breath for all those years. Sometimes, we’d drive to your house and stay just twenty minutes so he could read you a story. He had most of Dr. Seuss memorized. Do you remember how you jumped all over him for Hop on Pop?

We were the only ones on either side of the family to have daughters, and the aunts went overboard. Betty bought every doll she ever saw, and Rita, who had two boys, kept our girls in pink until they were in high school. Grandma Mildred taught them how to bake bread and took them to the flower show every spring and bought them corsages.

It was like we were in that fairy tale where all the fairy godmothers bring gifts to the princess. Gussie bought savings bonds for every birthday. Helen, who was the best-dressed woman I ever knew, gave us her daughter’s beautiful hand-me-downs. Miss Chevalier gave them books, and Katherine Walters bought them each a new diary every year.

When Betty found out we had asked a neighborhood girl to babysit, she read me the riot act. That was her job.

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When I was pregnant, I was petrified about being a good mother. I would lie awake at night and worry about all the mistakes I was going to make: dropping, yelling, nagging, even poisoning. It took me a few years to get the hang of cooking.

It’s a good thing babies don’t give you a lot of time to think. You fall in love with them and when you realize how much they love you back, life is very simple. Of course, I was fascinated by every sneeze and yawn, and when my babies started to talk, I was sure they were geniuses and your grandfather and their aunties agreed.

I remember Irene saying everyone thinks their children are geniuses until they go to kindergarten. I was a little offended by that until I saw that two other children in class had started to read three months before mine did.

Being a mother wasn’t as scary as I thought it would be, not only because Aaron was a good father, but because I didn’t have to invent the wheel. I learned from Betty that it was good for children to have fun with them, to get on the floor and play. And I watched the way Irene talked to her son and daughter almost as if they were grown-ups. There was no baby talk and no beating around the bush in her house. Irene always told the truth and called a spade a spade and a penis a penis. That was unheard of in the ’30s. When her little boy, Milo, said “penis” at a family dinner it was as if he’d murdered the pope.

When Irene’s kids were both in school, she got a job as the office manager for the Birth Control League of Massachusetts; she didn’t keep it a secret from Joe’s family, either. They were horrified and tried to get him to make her quit, but Joe knew better than anybody that there was no way to make Irene do anything. And he loved her for it.

Irene and Joe, Aaron and I were a foursome. We spent so much time together, our kids were like cousins and when Joe lost his job in the Depression, it didn’t feel so much like charity when we had them over for supper twice a week.

Not that we didn’t feel it, too. We ate a lot of beans and I remember putting newspaper in a pair of shoes to get another summer’s use out of them. But compared to most people, we had an easy time. Aaron didn’t lose his job, but what made the biggest difference was that Levine moved us into one of his buildings in Brookline and wouldn’t let us pay rent. “You’ll mow the lawn,” he said.

The lawn in front of that triple-decker was so small you could cut it with a pair of scissors. But that was my brother-in-law. He was a know-it-all his whole life. If you asked Levine what time it was, he’d give you a lecture about how his watch was the best one on the market and only a nudnik would buy anything else. But I don’t think he ever evicted a single tenant from the buildings he owned.

It’s strange to say, but I had some of the best years of my life during the Depression, because that was when I had your mother and aunt. They were nothing like their namesakes. Your mother, Clara, was the opposite of Celia. Clara was a spitfire who started talking at seven months, and once she started walking, I never sat down. Your aunt Sylvia was nothing like Aaron’s birth mother, Simone, who was famous for her sense of humor and for starting the Metsky hug. My Sylvia didn’t say a word until she could talk in sentences and always took things to heart too much, but she was the kindest, most loyal person you ever met.

So much of who a person is has to do with temperament. I think my sister Celia was probably born without any defenses, like Betty was born with skin like a rhinoceros.

I’m somewhere in between. It helped that I was born in America and that I got to go to school. But there was something built into my makeup, too; something that let me connect to the friends and teachers who helped along the way. I think my girls inherited that from me.

They both did well in school, too. Your mother was the valedictorian at Northeastern.

You didn’t know? That’s terrible! You should do an interview with her next. Or maybe it would be better to wait until you’re a little older, when you’re completely cooled off from adolescence.

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Oh, yes, your mother and I butted heads when she was in high school. I didn’t like her friends—a bunch of rich girls who treated her like a pet dog and started her smoking cigarettes. She thought I was telling her how to live her life and treating her like a five-year-old. We were both right, but it took until she was out of college for us to admit it.