—
I couldn’t leave his letters at home. My mother was always in my room, rehanging my clothes, rearranging my books, even refolding the clothes in my drawers. Once I asked if she was looking for something in my underwear. She said she didn’t like a mess in her house and that I wouldn’t care unless I had something to hide.
I kept Aaron’s letters in a big envelope under a stack of magazines in the bottom drawer of my desk at work. I was the first one in the newsroom every morning, so I could get the mail for Miss Cavendish and check for new letters. Sometimes I
pulled the drawer open just to see his handwriting.
One day when I opened the drawer, the envelope was gone. I made a beeline for Cornish’s desk, since he was the only one I could imagine who would want them. He could use them to get me in trouble or blackmail me into going out with him again. He might even burn them out of pure spite.
Luckily, Katherine caught me before anyone else came in, “I’ve got them,” she said.
She had seen Cornish sniffing around my desk after I left. “He must have noticed the way you were always leaning over that drawer and sighing. I asked if I could help him find something. It’s convenient that he still isn’t talking to me.”
Katherine had taken the envelope home for safekeeping and told me to come to her apartment after work. “I’ll fix dinner and you can tell me all about Mr. Metsky.”
She had a tiny apartment in the Fenway, not far from where Aaron’s cousin Ruth lived. But Katherine’s place was like a jewelry box inside: a dark red rug on the floor, bright colored fabrics hanging on the walls, scarves hung over the lampshades.
“It’s mostly from Morocco,” she said. “I got them on my honeymoon.”
I said I didn’t know she was married. “Aren’t you Miss Walters?”
“I’m widowed. He died in the war.” She was quiet for a moment. “I don’t like talking about him to strangers.”
You should always be kind to people, Ava. You never know what sorrows they’re carrying around.
It was a very exotic supper of things I’d never heard of: hummus, pita bread, olives with pits, and a kind of chopped salad. Katherine was pretty exotic herself: a Buddhist, a socialist, and a feminist. She graduated from Smith College, was a vegetarian, and did yoga. She was planning to visit all forty-eight states and had been to twelve so far, including New Mexico.
When I told her about Filomena in Taos, she said it was one of her favorite places. “You must see it. You and Aaron.”
Katherine apologized for reading the letters. “At first I was just looking to see what Cornish was after, but I couldn’t stop. It’s been so long since I read anything so sincere or tender. You’re a lucky girl.
“But poor Martha! What an awful story. Have you thought of writing about her?”
Katherine had read my mind. Martha was like a heroine in one of the short stories they printed in women’s magazines; a sad, brave girl in trouble through no fault of her own. But when I said I was thinking of changing it to fiction, she said I should write it as a reporter.
“It will have more power that way. Lewis Hine changed a lot of minds with his photographs of factory girls. Martha’s story might do the same thing.”
We talked about it for a long time. She said the local newspapers wouldn’t print anything like it, but there were magazines that would. The next day I was in the library reading La Follette’s, The Atlantic Monthly, and The Nation. I wrote to Aaron and asked what he thought about my telling Martha’s story but in a way she wouldn’t be recognized. I can’t tell you how relieved I was to get his okay, because I’d already read up on the orphan trains and written a first draft.
I was totally consumed by Martha’s story and the idea that I was helping Aaron to save children from mistreatment. I rewrote that story I don’t know how many times before I let Katherine see it. She said “well done” and made me rewrite it two more times before she said it was ready.
She let me keep my original title, though: “The Human Face of the 20th Amendment.”
I took it to The Atlantic Monthly magazine first, because why not start at the top and also the office was in Boston. The girl at the front desk was very stuck up. “We don’t publish pieces by unknowns,” she said.
After all the work I’d done, I wanted to say, who the hell do you think you are? But I was polite. I told her what my article was about and how it put a face on child labor and I hadn’t seen anything like it anywhere else.
It pays to be nice. She took the story and said her mother started working when she was eleven years old. “She still gets sad when she talks about leaving school. I’ll put it on the editor’s desk myself.”
When I went back a week later, the same girl handed it back to me. She said she was sorry. “I told you they don’t publish unknowns.”
Katherine said rejection was part of the business and to try The Nation, where she knew one of the editors. It was published two weeks later. I opened and closed that magazine over and over for the thrill of seeing my name on that page:
By Addie Baum.
I’d never been prouder of anything.
I sent a copy to Aaron—special delivery, no less. Irene and Joe were very impressed and asked what I was going to write next. Gussie bought a dozen copies and said she always knew I had it in me.