The Boston Girl (19 page)

Look at me, I’m becoming a Metsky!

I wanted a wedding like Betty’s: small, quick, and simple, but that wasn’t in the cards. For one thing, there was no rabbi’s office big enough for all of Aaron’s relatives, so “small” was out. Maybe we could keep it simple, but it wasn’t going to happen quickly because Jake’s bar mitzvah was coming up in October and Betty was already up to her eyeballs getting ready for that.

Bar mitzvahs weren’t the productions they are today with caterers and hotels and flowers, but they were still a big deal and Betty wanted it perfect. She tried out I don’t know how many recipes for strudel and cookies, painted the dining room, and made new curtains for the living room. Everyone got new clothes and Levine took Jake downtown to buy him his first grown-up suit, with long pants and a vest. Like I said: a big deal.

On the morning of the bar mitzvah, my mother got up on the wrong side of the bed. Usually she was the first one up, drinking her tea, washing her cup, and putting it away before my father and I even got to the kitchen. But on that day of all days she didn’t even have her shoes on when it was time to go. When I asked if she was feeling all right, she answered like I had insulted her. “When am I ever sick?”

By the time we got to the synagogue, which was only three blocks away, she was practically shuffling and holding on to my arm. She closed her eyes when we sat down in the synagogue and I was sure she was asleep but when my father was called up to sing the blessings, she sat straight. And when Jake chanted his portion from the Torah, she was smiling.

“Wasn’t he wonderful?” I whispered.

“Not bad,” she said.

Jake still looked like a chubby little boy but he did a wonderful job. He didn’t stumble or slow down and he chanted everything loud and clear. I was so proud of him I had tears in my eyes, but Betty just about collapsed from the naches. You’ll understand naches when you have children: there’s nothing like the feeling you have when your child stands in front of a crowd and shines. It was like that when your mother made the speech at her high school graduation, and how I felt at your bat mitzvah, and your sister’s.

After the service, everyone went downstairs for sponge cake and wine. My mother was not the old lady I had helped down the street anymore. She moved fast enough to avoid most of the Metsky hugs and when someone asked if she was proud of her grandson, she said, “Of course. What do you think?” For once she didn’t mention that Jake wasn’t really “her” grandson.

—

Aaron and I took our time getting to the party at Betty’s house. It was one of those perfect fall days when the air is cool enough to wake you up but the sun is also kissing your face. Aaron kicked around in the leaves and I made a bouquet out of red and gold ones; we were like a couple of kids. It felt wonderful to be alone and we had a lot to talk about.

Someone at the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children had heard Aaron had moved to Boston and offered him a job but his brother was trying to talk him into staying at his firm. Michael said if he stayed put, we could buy our own house in a year or two.

Aaron had been working in Michael’s office since he got back to Boston, but he hated it. Writing contracts and arguing with bankers made him grumpy and grouchy like I’d never seen him.

But after one meeting with the children’s society committee, he was glowing. “These are the same people who started the National Child Welfare Committee,” he said. They were his heroes and they wanted to hire him to help the governor’s office make better laws to help children and families. It was a dream job and I knew that the only reason he didn’t say yes on the spot was because they couldn’t pay him the kind of money he was making in private practice. But I said what good is a house if I have to live in it with a crab?

It wasn’t hard to talk him into doing what he wanted. Besides, I was working, too.

Gussie, God bless her, had found me a full-time job at Simmons. The minute she heard that the vice president’s secretary was leaving, she called him and said not to bother looking for a replacement. Betty joked that I got my wish. I was finally going to college. But it wasn’t a joke, because I could take classes after work for free.

Once we decided that Aaron was going to take the job he wanted, he couldn’t wait to get back and tell the families that we were setting a date for our wedding. It couldn’t be soon enough for me; every time I walked into my parents’ house, I felt like I was putting on a corset.

Betty’s place was mobbed. She had invited the neighbors, Jake’s friends, and my father’s synagogue friends, everyone from Levine’s office, and all of Aaron’s family. His brother had surprised everyone by bringing Lois Rosensweig, the woman he’d been seeing for five years. Rita said he’d never brought her to a family event before. “That’s Michael for you. Now that Aaron’s got a fiancée, I bet he pops the question any day.”

Levine was running around with a new camera asking people to say “cheese” and driving everyone crazy. But as usual, the pest with the camera turned out to be a hero. He had a terrible time getting my parents to cooperate, but he didn’t leave them alone until he got some good shots of them. That picture you put on the cover of your family history paper in seventh grade? That was from Jake’s bar mitzvah.

When I finally found Betty, she winked and asked if we’d gotten lost.

I winked back and said, “What are you doing December nineteenth?”

“Why?” she said. “Am I going to a wedding?” All I had to do was smile and she threw her arms around me and gave Aaron a kiss and a hug. “Look at me,” she said, “I’m becoming a Metsky!”

Betty said she had to round up the boys before the announcement and we had to find Mameh, too.

Betty said she’d never seen Mameh in a better mood. She had been friendly and eaten everything without any complaints until Betty put out store-bought cherry preserves for tea. “Then she made that sourpuss face and said she had to show everyone how much better homemade was. I told Herman to go downstairs and get it but she said he didn’t know where to look. Maybe she got lost, like you two.”

Aaron said he’d get her. “She has to get used to me sometime.”

When everyone was crowded into the living room, Aaron’s father shook his finger at me. “I bet I know what this is about,” he said. “And here comes the groom.”

But the groom ran in looking very serious and said, “Somebody call an ambulance.”

My world got very small.

It was a stroke.

They took Mameh to Beth Israel, the old brick one, which wasn’t far from where we lived in Roxbury. They opened the modern building a year later, but it wouldn’t have made any difference. There wasn’t much they could do for strokes in those days other than keep them warm and massage the muscles.

It was hard to know what was happening in the hospital. The doctors didn’t tell you anything and patients were allowed only one visit a day and only one person at a time. When Papa went in, he couldn’t say if she seemed better or worse, but he always looked older when he came out.

Betty brought clean nightgowns and said the sheets felt like wax paper, but she couldn’t tell if Mameh was in pain or comfortable or what. “Sometimes she opens her eyes, but I don’t know if she sees me.” She said her face wasn’t as bad as at the beginning, when the right side looked like it had melted off the bones.

They only let me go once and it was pretty awful. The room was overheated and smelled like bleach. My mother’s face on the pillow was yellow and her hair was combed straight back and tucked under her head so I could see the shape of her skull under the skin. Her cheeks were sunken and her eyelids were twitching. I wasn’t sure if she was awake, so I whispered, “Mameh, it’s me, Addie. How are you feeling? Can I do anything for you?” I tried to sound cheerful but my stomach was in the same knot as always, waiting for her to wake up and demand to know what was I doing there, where was my father, who put her in this place?

After a few weeks, she was a little better, opening her eyes, and drinking through a straw. She could sit up in bed if someone helped her and even though she didn’t say anything, we were sure she recognized us.

The doctor said she might get back some use of her right arm and leg, but that could take months if it happened at all. She could start talking or maybe not. Like I said, they couldn’t do much for her in the hospital, so we took her home.

Her right side stayed paralyzed and the right side of her mouth drooped so the words were garbled when she started to talk. She got agitated when we didn’t understand her, so we knew she was still all there inside her head.

During the day, Papa and Betty took turns sitting with her. I came home straight from work and took over while Betty made supper and my father walked to shul.

We were the only three she let in the room. Mildred and Rita offered to watch her, but when they came to visit, Mameh clamped her mouth shut and refused to open her eyes. If Levine, Aaron, or any of the boys came into the room, she muttered and grimaced until they left. She scared the little ones so much they wouldn’t come downstairs at all.

My world got very small, the way it always does when someone in your family is sick. I was at work or at home, where I was either sitting with my mother or helping Betty with the boys. I didn’t go out on the weekends, either, so Aaron came to the house and taught me to play gin rummy and hearts, and, of course, we postponed the wedding.

My new boss was very sympathetic when I got phone calls at the office. Gussie and Irene stayed in touch. And whenever he could, Aaron met me after work and rode the trolley home with me. He put his arm around me and there were a few times he had to wake me up when we got to my stop.

It was about two months after the stroke, Jake’s best friend was having his bar mitzvah. Papa had been his teacher and Betty was friendly with his mother, so I said I’d stay home with Mameh and told them to have a nice time and not to hurry back.

I hadn’t spent much time with her in the mornings. Betty said she usually woke up around ten o’clock, and that was when she seemed clearer in her mind and it was easier to understand if she tried to talk. But that day she didn’t open her eyes until noon. I offered her soup and tea but she shook her head and nodded toward the door, which meant she needed the bathroom.

She hated the bedpan worse than anything, but she’d lost so much weight since the stroke, it wasn’t hard to carry her.

She let me wash her face and hands, but she turned away when I offered a cup of tea or bread soaked in broth. I asked if she wanted me to read to her but she squeezed her eyes shut.

I don’t know why it’s so exhausting to sit with a sick person. It’s not like you’re doing anything, but it’s a hundred times more tiring than hard work. Maybe it’s the helplessness or maybe it’s the strain of waiting for the body to decide if it’s going to get better or not.

The sky had been overcast all day and when it started snowing, the room got dark. I must have dozed off because the next thing I knew, Mameh was sitting up straight, something we didn’t think she could do on her own. Her eyes were wide open and she was looking around the room as if she was trying to figure out where she was, like she was Rip Van Winkle. She frowned at the dirty glasses on the bureau and at the reading lamp I had moved in.

In Yiddish, I said, “Mameh? Can I get you something? Do you know who I am, Mameh?”

She searched my face and frowned. I could hear her breath get faster and I said, “Don’t worry. Just rest.”

Her eyes got big and she reached out to me with her good arm. I sat down next to her on the bed and she whispered, “Of course I know my own daughter.” Her voice was raspy and the words were slow but I could understand her. “How can a mother not know her own beautiful daughter?”

She ran her hand over my hair and let it rest on my cheek. “I didn’t know right away it was you, sweetheart, zieseleh. Your hair is so short. Have you been sick?”

I told her I’d cut my hair and that I was fine and she didn’t have to worry. But she was anxious and started talking fast, as if she was in a hurry to say something before she forgot. “I want to tell you that I’m sorry. You were right and I was wrong. If I had listened to you, you would have been happier.”

She started crying. “Ich bin moyl. I’m sorry. But you’ll forgive me; I know you will. You were always such a good girl, so pretty, so good . . .”

I had never heard her apologize to anyone, not even once. I couldn’t remember my mother ever looking at me that way or telling me I was pretty or sweet. She never called me darling.

It was like a miracle.

All that talking wore her out and she sank back on the pillows. I kissed her hand and said not to worry about me, that I was getting married to a wonderful man. I asked if she remembered Aaron and she squeezed my fingers.

I said how happy I was to talk to her like this and that I wished I had tried to explain myself to her before.

She shook her head and whispered, “I thought I had lost you, but here you are, just like my mother, your grandmother. You have her golden hands, goldene hentz, like an angel with a needle and thread.

“I was wrong to make you go. I chased you and beat you to force you, even when you were telling me you would die if I sent you away.

“I thought he would keep you safe and that Bronia would look out for you but you knew better. You knew this country would kill you. I am sorry, little Sima. My poor, poor Simmaleh.”

She sighed. Her breath slowed. When she fell asleep I let it sink in.

I had waited my whole life to hear her say those things. That she was sorry. That I was a good girl. And pretty and sweet. But it was all for Celia: the tenderness, the apology, the love. She didn’t even know I was there.

I was too sad to cry.

—

It was late when Betty came back from the party. She turned on the light and asked why I was sitting in the dark. “Did she sleep all day?”

I said yes and that I was going for a walk. I needed some fresh air.

It was a beautiful, clear evening. The snow had stopped and the moon made everything look silver. I was walking a long time before I realized that I was going to Aaron’s house. From Roxbury to Brookline is a long way, five miles at least, and I took a few wrong turns on the way. It was so late by the time I got there, his house was dark except for one light in the living room. They never locked the door, so I just walked in. Aaron almost fell out of the chair.

I said, “Don’t ask. I’ll tell you in the morning.”