—
After those interviews in the emergency room, I never did another intake without asking a woman how many pregnancies she’d had, and just asking the question like that opened a door nobody had noticed was there.
I heard about abortions and unwed girls whose fathers or mothers beat them or threw them down stairs so they would miscarry. I heard from women who had miscarried without knowing what was happening to them, and then nearly died from infections. A lot of them said they’d never told their story to anyone before, and most of them thought what happened to them was their own fault.
When I told Ann what I was hearing, she said I had the makings of a book. I think I laughed at her; I was raising children and had a hard time getting my reading done and my papers written, much less a book. But I never forgot the idea.
When the girls were in high school, I started working on my master’s degree. I interviewed more than two hundred women by the time I was done. I didn’t just ask about their pregnancies but about how they had learned about sex and their first sexual experience. I couldn’t believe how many of them knew nothing on their wedding nights, or worse, how many had been raped. There were days I went home shaking and Aaron would hold me until I calmed down. After all his years in child welfare, he wasn’t surprised by anything.
I talked about what I was learning with my Saturday Club friends, too. We always stayed close, but during World War Two, we really held each other together. Irene lost a nephew in the Pacific. Helen’s son was wounded in England. And our own Jake was killed over Italy; he was a pilot, a hero. We all did whatever we could to get Betty and Levine through the shock, but they didn’t really come back to life until their first grandchild was born. Eddy named him Jonah Jacob, after his brother.
All those years, Filomena kept sending postcards, and once in a while I’d get an envelope with a sketch or a picture of what she was working on. As soon as it wasn’t ridiculously expensive, we called each other long distance once a month at least.
Old friends are the best and I dedicated my book to them. It took me almost twenty years to finish. Unasked Questions came out the same year as The Feminine Mystique. Gussie was outraged that my book got lost in all the hoopla about Betty Friedan. “That woman stole your thunder.”
I told her not to be silly. I wrote my book for social workers; it was never going to be a best seller. But it was a success in its own way. It got me the teaching job at Boston University, and I got a lot of letters from women thanking me for writing it. I can’t tell you how much those meant to me.
I still miss him like crazy.
Your grandfather and I went to New Mexico twice. The first time was when the girls were twelve and fourteen. It was our first big family trip.
We went horseback riding and hiking, and Filomena took us to the Pueblo village where her teacher lived. Virginia was pretty frail by then, but she lit up when she saw Filomena. We were all invited inside to eat.
One night, Filomena kept the girls at her place for a sleepover. They camped outside and she woke them up in the middle of the night to watch a meteor shower. Your mother and your aunt Sylvia didn’t stop talking about it all the way back on the train.
Aaron and I made a second trip when the girls were in college. It was just the two of us that time. We got a sleeper car and drank wine in the dining car. It was like a second honeymoon.
We stayed with Filomena, who was living in a big house with her husband. I bet you weren’t expecting that. She got married when she was almost sixty and always said she was more surprised than anyone.
Saul Cohen was an art collector from Philadelphia who fell in love with Filomena’s pottery on a visit to Taos and bought everything she had to sell. Four weeks after they met, I got a telegram that started “Sit down.” It’s in the box with all her postcards.
They lived in Taos most of the year but Saul came back East a lot to see his children and grandchildren. Filomena came with him, so I got to see her pretty often. She was here for Miss Green’s funeral and for the fiftieth reunion of all the Saturday Club girls.
When Aaron died, she flew from New Mexico for the funeral and stayed with me for a whole month.
I still miss him like crazy. You should only have my luck in that department. Not that he was perfect. Your grandpa snored like a buzz saw and I never saw him eat a piece of fresh fruit. How can you not like apples or watermelon or even raspberries? It drove me nuts and I’m sure I drove him nuts hocking him about it.
As he got older, Aaron got set in his ways about a lot of things. He hated television—wouldn’t even watch PBS with me. To him, all popular music written after 1945 was garbage, and he thought I was only pretending to like the Beatles so my students would think I was cool.
But he did like trying new things: bread baking, guitar lessons, fishing. When we started renting the cottage in Gloucester, he read everything he could find about Cape Ann and asked the old Sicilians at the coffee shop on Main Street for stories. They adopted him and taug
ht him how to swear in Italian and drink sambuca.
But after he found out that they were going to vote for Ronald Reagan, he took his newspaper to Dunkin’ Donuts and never talked to them again. He hated Reagan. I always thought that election had something to do with his getting sick.
—
Your grandfather was a peach. If he’d been at my birthday party, he would have made a speech so schmaltzy there wouldn’t have been a dry eye in the house. It’s a shame he wasn’t there, but it’s worse that he missed being at your sister’s wedding and at your graduation from Harvard. He would have been so proud. Harvard.
Like I said, I miss him like crazy. But life goes on.
| 1985 |
Now there’s something to look forward to.
My birthday party was wonderful, wasn’t it? So many people: the family, colleagues from Simmons and B.U., my graduate students, and my friends. Irene turns eighty-five next month, and Gussie with her walker but still going strong. Of course, I thought about everyone who wasn’t there, too: Miss Chevalier, Helen, Katherine, Betty and her Herman.
Filomena felt bad that she couldn’t make it, but her hip didn’t heal fast enough for her to travel. I’m thinking about flying out to see her. Don’t tell your mother, okay? She worries about me taking trips alone. Of course, I’d much rather be going with your grandfather.