Katherine took me out for dinner to celebrate and Miss Chevalier called to ask if I would speak at one of her Sunday afternoon gatherings. “I seem to remember that you can be very effective in front of an audience.”
I wanted to show it to my family. Betty would have made a huge fuss and told everyone in the neighborhood and all of her clubs and organizations. Even my parents might have been impressed. Maybe. But since I didn’t know how to explain how I knew about Martha without mentioning Aaron, I decided to wait.
I was walking on air all week and I guess I didn’t hide my feelings very well because Betty asked if I’d met someone, Eddy told me I looked pretty, and my mother said, “Since when do you whistle?”
I was in such a fog that when Mort said he wanted to talk to me in his office, I thought he was going to give me a raise. But when he pointed at the chair across from his desk, I knew I was in trouble. Sitting down in there was never a good sign.
Mort’s face was usually easy to read, but not that time. He said Cornish had seen my story in The Nation and sent it to the owner of the Transcript.
“What were you thinking, Addie?” Mort said. “You must have read the paper’s editorials against the amendment—a plot against states’ rights and the sanctity of the family and all that. This was like spitting in the owner’s eye. I was upstairs all afternoon getting my ass handed to me.”
I told him I never meant to get anyone in trouble, especially him.
“I’ll be all right, but it took some doing to talk him out of firing Katherine Walters. I told him she didn’t know a thing about it and I never want to know otherwise, you understand?”
I apologized. I asked if there was anything I could do. Would it help if I wrote the owner and told them it was completely my fault?
Mort shook his head. “Why the hell did you have to use your own name? If you’d signed it Sally Smith, you could have made your point and we wouldn’t be sitting here. I thought you were smarter than that.”
He looked like his dog had just died.
“I have no choice, Addie. I have to let you go.”
This is Auntie Addie’s fella.
I didn’t tell them at home I’d been fired. Betty would push for the details and Levine would tell me to come work for him again. Most of all, I didn’t want to see the “I’m not surprised” look on my mother’s face.
The next morning, I left the house at the usual time as if it were a regular workday. First I went to the telegraph office to let Aaron know not to send any more letters to the newspaper. Then I went to see Gussie about her offer to help me get another job. It was so early, her office was still locked. I leaned against the wall in the hallway to wait and I guess I closed my eyes because the next thing I knew, she was next to me. “Addie, what’s wrong? Did somebody die?”
Gussie asked me if I wanted an aspirin or a cup of tea. I kept telling her I was okay but she said she was getting me a glass of water, which was good because it gave me a minute to take in the decor.
Did I already tell you about how Gussie dressed? Boxy suits, flat shoes, no lipstick. But her office looked like the powder room at the Rit
z. There were embroidered pillows on all the chairs and pictures of flowers on the walls. Even the lampshade on her desk was pink. It was hard to keep a straight face when she came back and asked what was going on. This being Gussie, it turned into a real cross-examination. She was up-to-date about the story I’d written, but I hadn’t said much about Aaron other than how we’d met and that we were writing letters to each other. Since Gussie saw Betty at Hadassah meetings, I didn’t want her spilling the beans before I did. It’s not that Gussie was a gossip, but sometimes she got excited.
When I finished telling her the whole story, she let me have it. Her feelings were hurt. She was mad that I didn’t trust her. What did I think friends were for, anyway?
And then, before I could say I was sorry, she asked if I wanted to start working right away for a lawyer down the hall. One of his secretaries had sprained her wrist and he was in a jam.
That was Gussie in a nutshell: full of herself and ready to give you the shirt off her back.
I started working for the lawyer that morning, and even though typing contracts and letters was not nearly as interesting as newspaper work, I made a lot more money for fewer hours than I had at the Transcript.
There was a phone on my desk at the lawyer’s, and Gussie called every few hours to see how I was doing and to tell me what she was up to. She had done the same thing when I was at the newspaper until I said I’d get fired if she didn’t stop.
Gussie loved the telephone like nobody else. She had one at home as well as in her office, and whenever a new model came out she bought it. She said everyone was going to have a telephone sooner or later, but not soon enough for her.
Betty and Levine had a phone at home, too, though I think they only used it to talk to each other during the day. Nobody ever called at night, so when Betty came downstairs and said there was a call for me, I knew it had to be Gussie.
But she didn’t call to tell me about an idea she just had or to ask if I wanted to have lunch with her tomorrow. She had a message from Katherine Walters, who wanted me to go to her apartment after work the next day. Before she hung up Gussie said, “And afterward, you are going to tell me everything she says.”
I was praying that Katherine had a letter from Aaron and when she opened the door with an envelope in her hand, I did a little dance. “You’ll notice I didn’t open it,” she said, “but I was tempted.”
Aaron was on his way home. He had to stop in Washington to pack but he would be in Boston as soon as possible. “Two weeks tops.” The letter was postmarked almost a week earlier, which meant he could be home any moment. It also meant he left before he got my wire about being fired.
I let Katherine read the letter. She said she couldn’t wait to meet him and she had some other news for me. “I didn’t want you hearing it from anyone but me.”
Cornish had caught her in the mailroom with Aaron’s letter to Miss Cavendish. “When he told me to hand it over, I stuffed it down the front of my dress, wished him a lovely day, and quit.”