The Boston Girl(71)

Old friends are the best.

The year both of the girls were in school, I decided I would take some daytime classes. Aaron picked up the Simmons catalog and asked if I’d be interested in Social Work Practice with Delinquent Youth. I’m sure he would have taken that class if he could, but after years of listening to Aaron’s stories from work at the Child Welfare League, it sounded interesting to me, too. I’d never given social work a thought because those classes were held all the way downtown. But Aaron said so what; the trolley went downtown, too, and we could have lunch together, just the two of us.

So I signed up and that was that. The minute the teacher opened her mouth, I knew what I was supposed to do. Ann Finegold was one of those people who lights up a room. You wouldn’t think so to look at her: she was in her forties, five feet tall, plump, frizzy-haired, and brilliant.

She told us that social work was a young profession still finding itself. She called it a “creative science” and said that, in her opinion, the best social workers were intelligent and compassionate, and while she could give us ideas and tools to help our fellow man, she couldn’t teach us how to put ourselves into another person’s shoes. She said, “If you don’t already know how to do that, you should drop this class and consider another line of work.”

She reminded me of Irene: no bullshit. She made me think of my Shakespeare teacher, too, because he was so passionate about his subject and curious about us. Ann insisted that everyone use first names in class, which was unheard of back then.

I took every class she taught and we got to be good friends. The husbands, too. You probably don’t remember, but they were at your bat mitzvah.

When I had to do my fieldwork, Ann sent me to Beth Israel, where I did intake interviews with women who were waiting in the emergency room.

I was given a list of questions to ask: age, where they were born, years of schooling, marital status, reason for coming to the hospital. There was one woman—she was my age but looked twenty years older—who answered everything in a flat, quiet voice. When I asked how many children she had, she stopped and gave me a hard look. Then, as if she was admitting to something terrible, she whispered, “Three living children, but six times pregnant.”

It was all I could do to keep from throwing my arms around her and telling her that I had two living children, but I’d been pregnant four times.

I had two miscarriages before your mother was born and I was sure it had been my fault: I’d eaten the wrong thing or ridden on a bumpy streetcar or maybe I shouldn’t have gone to see that scary movie. Or else it was a sign that I shouldn’t have children because I wasn’t fit to be a mother.

I didn’t talk to anyone about how brokenhearted I was or how hopeless I felt. I had no idea how common it was to lose a pregnancy. Betty came to see me in the hospital after I lost the second one. She noticed I hadn’t touched the cookies she brought the day before.

I said I didn’t feel like eating.

But instead of her usual noodging, she sat down next to me on the bed and told me that she had lost a baby, too. “It was after you got married. We really did want a little girl.”

I said, “Why didn’t you tell me?”

She said, “I don’t know.”

Women used to think we were supposed to act as if nothing had happened, as if losing a baby you wanted wasn’t a big deal. And if you did say something, people told you that you’d forget all about it when you had a healthy baby. I wanted to punch them all in the face.

Betty cried. I cried. We had never been closer.

—

After those interviews in the emergency room, I never did another intake without asking a woman how many pregnancies she’d had, and just asking the question like that opened a door nobody had noticed was there.

I heard about abortions and unwed girls whose fathers or mothers beat them or threw them down stairs so they would miscarry. I heard from women who had miscarried without knowing what was happening to them, and then nearly died from infections. A lot of them said they’d never told their story to anyone before, and most of them thought what happened to them was their own fault.

When I told Ann what I was hearing, she said I had the makings of a book. I think I laughed at her; I was raising children and had a hard time getting my reading done and my papers written, much less a book. But I never forgot the idea.

When the girls were in high school, I started working on my master’s degree. I interviewed more than two hundred women by the time I was done. I didn’t just ask about their pregnancies but about how they had learned about sex and their first sexual experience. I couldn’t believe how many of them knew nothing on their wedding nights, or worse, how many had been raped. There were days I went home shaking and Aaron would hold me until I calmed down. After all his years in child welfare, he wasn’t surprised by anything.

I talked about what I was learning with my Saturday Club friends, too. We always stayed close, but during World War Two, we really held each other together. Irene lost a nephew in the Pacific. Helen’s son was wounded in England. And our own Jake was killed over Italy; he was a pilot, a hero. We all did whatever we could to get Betty and Levine through the shock, but they didn’t really come back to life until their first grandchild was born. Eddy named him Jonah Jacob, after his brother.

All those years, Filomena kept sending postcards, and once in a while I’d get an envelope with a sketch or a picture of what she was working on. As soon as it wasn’t ridiculously expensive, we called each other long distance once a month at least.