I was horrified. “I made you lose your job?”
Katherine said I had nothing to do with it. “It was just a matter of time before he fired me and I was more than ready to go.” She said that helping me with the child labor story had made it hard for her to keep writing about hats and hairdos.
“Especially with everything going on these days, I need to do something important. The Sacco-Vanzetti Defense Committee needs a person who doesn’t sound like a maniac to talk to the newspapers. Someone like me.”
Even though Katherine kept saying she was glad to leave the Transcript, I felt responsible and working for the Sacco-Vanzetti group could be dangerous. They had just lost an appeal for a new trial and there had been a bombing. Some of the hotheads were talking like bombs were a good thing.
I did a lot of worrying after that. How was Katherine going to manage? What if the child labor people roped Aaron into staying in Washington again? What if Aaron was hit by a car?
I was sitting in my room driving myself crazy when Betty came downstairs and said there was another telephone call for me. “If this keeps up, you’re going to have to start paying me to be your secretary.”
But when I got there, the phone was on the hook.
Betty yelled, “Herman, I’m back.”
He yelled back, “I’m coming.” But it was Aaron who walked in.
First I was speechless. Then I said, “Why are you here?”
He laughed, “Why do you think?” I started crying and we held each other until I pulled away and looked at him. “It really is you.”
Then he got all teary-eyed and I laughed.
Levine and Betty and the boys watched our big reunion and Eddy said, “Is Auntie Addie sad or happy?”
Betty said, “She’s very happy. This is Auntie Addie’s fella.”
Aaron put his arm around my shoulder and made it official. “If it’s okay with you, I’d like to be her husband.”
Betty shrieked and grabbed me. Levine shook Aaron’s hand and poured the last drops out of a secret bottle of whiskey. Prohibition wasn’t over yet. He lifted his glass: “Mazel tov and may you be as happy together as me and my bride.”
What’s his name?
Betty thought the whole thing with Aaron was so romantic, she wasn’t even mad that I hadn’t told her sooner, and she decided a Friday night supper at her place was the best place to introduce him to our parents. She told Mameh that Levine was bringing a young man, the brother of someone he knew from business. “A lawyer,” Betty said. “Herman thinks he’s a catch.”
Just as those words were coming out of her mouth, Eddy walked into the kitchen and said, “Are you talking about Uncle Aaron? He promised to play stickball next time he’s here.” If Betty had been the kind of mother who smacked her kids, he would have gotten it, but she changed the subject and just told him to go outside.
My mother was not going to ignore the fact that we had been sneaking around behind her back. So Aaron started with one strike against him.
It wasn’t so easy with Papa either, not after he heard that Aaron’s family belonged to Temple Israel. “That’s a church, not a shul. I wouldn’t step a foot in the place.”
“You already did,” I said. “It’s where Betty got married.”
“Once was enough.”
Jake was the one who softened Papa up a little. My father was tutoring him for his bar mitzvah, which was probably the first time the two of them spent more than a minute together. Papa said Jake was smart and a serious student and Jake started calling him Rav Baum. So when Jake said Aaron was a good guy, it counted for something.
I wasn’t looking forward to that dinner. I was going to marry Aaron no matter what my parents said. I didn’t want them to hate him, but I was probably more worried what he would think of them. You never marry just one person; you get the whole family as part of the deal.
As soon as Aaron arrived, Betty made us go right to the table—no chitchat. She lit candles and Papa made kiddush with one eye on Aaron to see if he knew when to join in; he did. After we passed around the challah, and they schmoozed a little, he told Aaron that he spoke a good Yiddish.
But Mameh looked at him like he was a sick cow someone was trying to trick her into buying. She shook her head when she saw him pick up his spoon with his left hand and she winced when he unfolded his napkin and put it on his lap. To her, left-handed people were dishonest or unlucky or both, and doing anything but wiping your mouth with a napkin was putting on airs.
She even smirked at his bow tie, which he had bought to make a good impression.
Betty did her best to build him up. “Papa, did you know that Aaron’s first cousin is a big doctor at Beth Israel Hospital?”
Levine said, “And his brother is a very successful attorney.”