The Boston Girl (10 page)

How do you go on after that?

Today, nobody bats an eye when you hear someone has the flu. It can still be dangerous for older people, but even most of them get well. In 1918, it was nearly always fatal, and it went after young people. More soldiers and sailors died from flu than from the war.

It happened fast. First a handful of sailors were sick, five days later two hundred men were down with it, another few weeks and thousands were dying. When it spread to the city there weren’t enough doctors and nurses to take care of all the sick people, partly because the doctors were dying, too. Not that there was much anyone could do. There was no medicine. Getting well was luck, pure and simple. Or God’s will, if you believe in a God who kills children and babies.

The flu was fast, too. Someone would leave the factory with a headache and two days later Levine would see the worker’s name in the list of flu deaths in the newspaper. There were weeks when that list had five hundred names on it.

The city sent out wagons to pick up the bodies but after a while the drivers were afraid to go inside anyplace where there was sickness, so people left corpses out on the porches and even on the sidewalk. A lot of the dead were buried in unmarked graves. It was a real plague and not so long ago.

The health department closed the movie houses and concert halls and told people to stay away from crowds. Nobody should have been out dancing, but a lot of people ignored all the warnings. My friend Rose was one of them.

Betty took Myron and Jacob out of school even before the health department closed them and she kept them inside. My mother put a red string on all the doorknobs to keep out the evil eye.

It didn’t help. One morning Myron said he had a terrible headache and couldn’t get out of bed. Levine said he would take care of him and told Betty to take Lenny and Jacob downstairs and stay there. But she left them with my mother and ran back to be with Myron, too.

We weren’t allowed near him, but I went up and left them food in the kitchen—trying to hear what was going on in the back bedroom. When I went back later, nobody had touched a crumb and I heard them in the bathroom with Myron, trying to cool him down in the bathtub. At night, I heard Myron coughing and moaning and Levine begging him to hang on.

Downstairs, Jacob was frantic and kept asking where was Mommy and Daddy, where was Myron. Lenny was quiet. Even though he was barely a year old, he knew something was wrong. No one was paying attention to him, not even my father, but he didn’t make a fuss; he just watched us with big eyes.

Papa couldn’t sit anymore and went out to find a doctor, even though there weren’t any. He was only gone an hour, but when he got back we had to tell him that Myron was gone. He was nine years old.

A few hours after Myron died, Betty came downstairs. All she wanted was to see the boys. Jacob ran to her and hugged her and wouldn’t let go. Betty picked him up and whispered, “How’s my Jakey? How’s my Jake?”

Mameh said, “They both ate a good dinner but Lenny was a little cranky so I put him to sleep in my bed.”

Betty dropped Jake and ran to the other room. She screamed, “He’s blue.”

She took Lenny upstairs and Jacob tried to follow her but I caught him and held him tight while he screamed and sobbed and finally cried himself to sleep.

Mameh, Papa, and I sat up at the table most of the night, not talking or looking at each other, listening for sounds from upstairs. When I brought hot tea upstairs, Levine met me in the kitchen and said, “He seems a little better. He took some water and smiled.”

I fell asleep with my clothes on and woke up before it was light. Lying in bed, I listened to the footsteps overhead, back and forth, from one end of the apartment to the other. They took turns. Betty walked faster than Levine, but they followed the same path, back and forth, steady as a heartbeat. It went on like that until the afternoon.

When the footsteps stopped, we all looked at the ceiling. Papa said a blessing. Mameh threw a dish towel over her head and wailed. Jake put his head on my lap.

After a little while, I tiptoed upstairs and walked through Betty’s apartment. In her house, it was always immaculate, nothing out of place. But with the natural order of things all upside down—children dying before parents—everything she did to keep things in order looked wasted and pathetic.

I stopped at the doorway to the boys’ room. A breeze from the open window ruffled the sheet covering Myron’s body. In the other bedroom, Betty was curled up on the bed, facing the wall. Levine sat with his back to her, staring at the cradle, which was covered with a blanket. He looked at me with dead eyes and I could feel the sadness coming off him, like cold air on my face.

They had lost two children in two days. How do you go on after that?

—

Coffins and hearses were impossible to come by, but somehow my father managed to get both and the next day we went to the cemetery; me, Papa, and Levine. The city went by in a blur but we slowed down when we passed through a little town where people were pushing baby carriages under red and yellow leaves, as if it were just another nice day in October.

It seemed like we’d been driving for hours when the driver turned down a dirt road and through a field of weeds to a stand of scrawny trees that marked the cemetery—the saddest, the most forlorn place I’d ever seen. Two men with shovels were waiting for us, and two big mounds of dirt.

—

Myron had turned into a nice kid. Betty hadn’t let him get away with anything, but she also hugged him a lot. She called him Mike, he called her Ma, and did his chores without being asked. He was good in arithmetic. His top front tooth was a little crooked. He had a nice singing voice. That was Myron.

We followed his coffin from the hearse to the grave, where the men lowered the half-sized casket into the ground and waited for Levine to pick up the spade. But he didn’t move. He couldn’t. So Papa stepped forward and shoveled a little bit of dirt into the hole, but so gently, it sounded like rain on the coffin. When he was finished, Levine and my father said Kaddish.

The driver came back carrying something that, from the distance, looked like a hatbox. When Levine saw it, he made a noise like a wild animal caught in a trap.

Lenny had been born with a head of silky brown hair. He smiled at everyone and Betty joked that he was going to be a politician when he grew up. He liked peas and his first word was
ball
. That was Lenny.

He and Myron were like silhouette portraits cut out of black paper—like shadows of the people they might have been if they’d grown up.

Papa tried to force the shovel into Levine’s hands to bury the baby. I couldn’t watch anymore and went looking for Celia’s grave.

I had a stone for her in my pocket. I’d found it on the beach in Rockport and carried it around with me ever since. It was white and smooth, almost as round as a pearl. I put it on top of her gravestone and said, “I’m sorry.”

Papa came and put a plain brown pebble next to mine. He traced Celia’s name with his finger. “Your mother said Celia shouldn’t come to America with me. She thought she was too delicate. But Mameh had another baby on the way and her mother was sick, too. I thought it would be easier for her if I took both girls.” He wiped his eyes. “She would still be alive if I’d left her there.”

Levine walked over to us. Papa put an arm around his shoulder for a moment before he started back to the car.

Levine hadn’t shaved or combed his hair for four days and his face was swollen. He put a third stone on Celia’s headstone and whispered, “She would be alive if I hadn’t married her.”

“It wasn’t your fault,” I said. Like it wasn’t my father’s fault. And for the first time since she died, I thought maybe it wasn’t all my fault, either.

| 
1919–20
 |

I was still gun-shy about men.

Nobody talked about the epidemic when it was over, but everyone was carrying around their own load of heartache, acting as if no one had died. I felt like I was skating on a pond that wasn’t frozen all the way through and if anyone asked me, “How’s the family?” the ice would break.

People kept saying, “Life goes on.” Sometimes that sounded like a wish and sometimes it felt like an order. I wanted to scream, “Life goes on? Not for everyone, it doesn’t.”

But when Betty said she was pregnant again, “life goes on” became a fact and I found myself looking forward to the new baby in a whole different way. She had another boy, Eddy, a blue-eyed blond who laughed, I swear, from the day he was born, and I finally understood why people got so silly about infants.

From the beginning he seemed to like me, too. I was the only one who could settle him down when he got fussy. Betty got a kick out of that. “Auntie Addie to the rescue.” My mother was thrilled with the new baby, but my father would hardly look at him. Papa was never the same after Lenny died.

I was spending more and more time upstairs with Betty. I don’t know where she learned how to be such a good mother. She was strict about manners and school but she would get down on the floor and play with her boys, let them climb all over her, anything for fun. And Levine thought she walked on water.

I finally forgave Betty for being happy in the life that had been a disaster for Celia. I had stopped hating Levine a long time ago, but for some reason I could never get myself to call him Herman.

When the war ended, the big orders stopped coming and Levine had to lay off half his workers. He slipped each of them a twenty-dollar bill, which was a lot then, but he felt so bad about firing people that he started losing weight. Betty wasn’t going to stand for that. She told him to get out of the shmatte business and go into real estate.

Levine said he’d give it a try, but the first building he bought looked like a big mistake. It was a wreck of a house on a run-down street but it was cheap and close to downtown. “Location, location, location,” right? He sold it a few months later for three times what he paid.

Levine went around telling people, “I made a killing and I didn’t hurt anyone.” So he sold the shirt factory and started over in a one-room office downtown.

The business was just the two of us and he was mostly out, walking around the city, talking to people, getting to know the neighborhoods, and figuring out where to buy property he could sell at a higher price later. My job was to wait for the phone to ring and look through the newspapers for stories about fires and foreclosures—anything that might mean someone was selling. Of course I looked at the obituaries, but I read everything else too, down to the sports pages; once in a while a player would have to sell a house in a hurry.

With all that reading, I got to be an expert on Boston politics, the social set, and the Red Sox. I could also tell you anything you wanted to know about Fatty Arbuckle’s drinking problem, the League of Nations, and the fight over Prohibition. I got in the habit of reading a newspaper even when I wasn’t at work because it made me feel like I was living in a bigger world. I never stopped, not even during the Depression. I just read them a day late.

One time, I saw a story about three brothers who were suing each other over their family’s fish store in Roxbury, a place Jews were starting to move to. From what I could tell, none of the brothers wanted to run the business, so I told Levine to see if they’d sell it to him and split the money. He took my advice, bought and sold the store, and made a bundle. For that he gave me a nice raise and a “promotion” to executive secretary.

I was going to Saturday Club, but the girls I knew were getting married and having children. Even the younger members were “dropping like flies,” as Gussie put it.

Gussie was a real career woman by then. After a few years at Simmons, she went to the Portia School of Law, which was women only, and passed the bar on her first try.
When no one would hire a lady lawyer, she went out on her own. Her first client was a woman who wanted to open a hat store but didn’t know anything about banks or leases. Soon Gussie had a “specialty” as the lawyer for women who wanted to start their own businesses and for a long time, she never had to pay for cake, dresses, or flowers.

Irene, Gussie, and I all liked our jobs and didn’t talk about men all the time, so Gussie started calling us the Three Musketeers. But work didn’t mean the same thing for Irene and me as it did for her. Gussie was a lawyer with every fiber of her being.

Irene was a supervisor at the telephone company with thirty girls under her, but it was still just a job and she didn’t want to do it for the rest of her life. And although Irene didn’t talk about it in front of Gussie, she did go out with men. After she bobbed her hair—like everyone except me at that point—her green eyes looked twice as big and pretty. But the moment any man told her what she should or shouldn’t do, he was finished. As for me, I would have preferred not working for Levine, but how could I complain about a job where I got to read most of the day?

I was still gun-shy about men because of the coast guard schmuck, but I was still as romantically inclined as any twenty-year-old girl who went to the movies. And by then I knew not all marriages were as bad as my parents’. Betty and Levine were happy, and I liked Helen’s husband, Charlie, who was a sucker for their little girl, Rosie. They named her after our friend Rose, who died of the flu. And you want to hear something strange? The baby was born with red hair. Nobody in either family had red hair and they had picked out the name when Helen was still pregnant, but Rosie came out a redhead.

Every now and then Betty would try to get me to go out on a date. “There’s nothing wrong with books, but you could also go out with a fellow once in a while, have a nice meal. Why not?”

The one time I made the mistake of saying “I suppose you have someone in mind,” she was ready for me, and two days later I was eating steak with a man who sold children’s shoes. The next morning, before I was even out of bed, Betty came to my room asking about my rendezvous.

I said it was very educational and did she know that Boston was the center of the children’s shoe business and that you can sell more pairs of shoes to girls but you can charge more for boys, and that shoemakers in Massachusetts were going to put themselves out of business if they kept raising their prices?

Betty said, “Okay, so he didn’t sweep you off your feet, so what? You got out of the house and the food was good, so it wasn’t a complete waste.” She also said I had to kiss a lot of frogs before I found a prince and lined me up with a high school teacher. He sounded interesting but turned out to be a nudnik, too. Almost the first thing he said when we sat down was that he’d been cheated out of a promotion to be principal, “and the only reason is because I’m Jewish.” Meanwhile, he yelled at the waiter for forgetting the ketchup, for bringing him coffee without cream, and for being slow with the bill. I told Betty they probably didn’t give him the job because he was a jerk.

The next one was a good-looking man who was in dental school. He took me to a beautiful white-tablecloth restaurant, but by the time I’d finished my lamb chop, I knew I was there only as a favor to one of Levine’s business friends.

At least the dentist was honest. He said he needed a wife with connections. “I know that sounds bad, but it’s the only way I’ll be able to set myself up in practice. And it’s not like money would be the only condition.”

I said, “I guess you’d also want two arms and two legs.” For spite I ordered the most expensive dessert on the menu, the one with the cherries that they light on fire. You know the saying about how revenge tastes better cold? Well, it tastes just as good warm.

Betty was ready with a nice quiet bookkeeper, but I said I didn’t want to meet any more frogs. “So what are you going to do?” she said. “Sit around the house and listen to Mameh call you an old maid and say ‘I told you so,’ and that you’re ‘too smart for your own good’?” Betty kept hocking me about going out again until I said, “Would you leave me alone if I go back to night school?”

She said that would be okay but that she wasn’t going to stop nagging me until I signed up and started class. It was annoying how she treated me like I was one of her children and not a grown woman. But it was a good thing, too.