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.