The Boston Girl (17 page)

I have no choice, Addie.

At least I still liked my job, which was never boring.

Miss Flora announced that she was leaving to be the editor of the women’s page of the
Cincinnati Enquirer
. I was stunned. I always thought she was as Bostonian as the statue of George Washington in the Public Garden. And just as permanent.

If Flora had been a man, I’m sure Cornish would have understood why she’d want to run her own section, but he said good riddance and it just proved that women were fickle and didn’t belong in the newsroom. The morning after she left I found him passed out under his desk. When he sobered up, he told Katherine that she’d have to take over Flora’s work in addition to her own.

Katherine marched into Mort’s office and said she would stay on only if she got a promotion and a raise, and if I came on as her full-time assistant. Cornish called that “uppity” and thought she should be fired, but Mort gave her everything she asked for.

I hadn’t known much about Katherine or Flora. We didn’t pal around after hours like the men did. Katherine was a hard worker but Flora had been the bigger talker. Until she took over, I didn’t know how much Katherine had on the ball.

She told everyone to call her Miss Walters and to call me Miss Baum. “You and I can be familiar with each other,” she said, “but why should they call us by our Christian names if we can’t do the same to them? We’re not their maids.” She was right, but nobody in the newsroom was ever going to call me Miss Baum. When you start out somewhere as “the girl,” you never grow up.

Katherine—Miss Walters—told me I would still be writing Seen and Heard, but she wanted more about the younger set, especially what they were wearing. She brought in a stack of
Vogue
magazines and I learned a whole new language: organza, peplum, bias cut, pinafore.

All that reading made me take a new look at what Katherine was wearing. Maybe I hadn’t noticed because she was always in black, but now I realized that she wore whatever was the latest “silhouette,” one of my new words, and that her drop-waist dresses were perfect for a woman of her height.

No one would ever call Katherine Walters a pretty woman: her face was strangely flat and one eye was a tiny bit higher than the other. After Flora left, she took off her hat, cut her bangs, and was suddenly striking and stylish, which is actually much better than pretty.

Katherine said I could also go back to writing about interesting lecture topics in Seen and Heard, but “nothing as upsetting as that piece about the Negroes.” She said there was a place for stories like that, but not on the women’s pages. She suggested I look into the work of the Women’s Educational and Industrial Union and the ladies who sat on the symphony board of trustees. “You’ll enjoy that.”

I did. But I also had to write the “how to” stories that had been Flora’s specialty: how to lose weight, clean the icebox, make homemade hand lotion, set the table for an afternoon of bridge or mahjongg, mend stockings so it didn’t show. It wasn’t hard, but it was a lot to learn about things that didn’t interest me at all.

Katherine kept everything running smoothly so Cornish could go on as he did before: coming in late, reading the papers, joking with the reporters, and leaving early. Katherine kept her distance from him but she read him the riot act when she saw me delivering his morning coffee.

“Miss Baum’s new responsibilities are such that she no longer has time to act as your personal servant. Please remember that.”

He was too surprised, or maybe too hungover, to come up with a snappy comeback. But if looks could kill . . .

Cornish didn’t speak to her at all after that. If there was something he absolutely had to tell her he dropped a crumpled-up note on her desk or sent a message through me. “Tell that blasted beanpole she’s got to cut ten inches today.”

I must have smiled at “beanpole,” which set him off making up funny names for Katherine: Miss Maypole, the Giraffe, the Boston Colossus. He started announcing them loud enough so everyone in the newsroom could hear. The reporters got a kick out of this until the day he called her the Monumental Bitch.

You could have heard a pin drop. It’s not as if those guys didn’t use that word and plenty worse, but there were rules about where and when you were supposed to say them. Katherine had been ignoring Cornish’s game but this time she said, in the sweetest, most ladylike voice, “My goodness, Ian. Do you kiss your mother with that mouth?”

That got a big laugh, and the police reporter, who was as foulmouthed as the rest of them, said, “Want me to get you a bar of soap to wash it out, Miss Walters?”

Work became a minefield for me after that. Katherine said she would let me go if I did any more favors for “that man.” But the minute she stepped out of the room, Cornish would send me out for a magazine or a bottle of aspirin and threaten to fire me if I didn’t do it.

To make things even worse, the weather was miserably hot and muggy. The newsroom only had three windows facing the street and when the sun hit them in the afternoon I bet it was ninety degrees in there. There was one fan, no water cooler, and those men didn’t shower every day.

—

Aaron’s letters became the bright spots in my life. They always started:
My dear Miss Cavendish, I hope this letter finds you and your staff in the best of health.

The first one didn’t mention my snippy postcard, which was big of him, but he didn’t apologize for being so far away, either. He wrote about the trip west and his assignment, which was to talk to any state legislator who seemed to be leaning in favor of the amendment. He said he had eaten the best pancakes he’d ever tasted in his St. Paul hotel and was going to bribe the cook to give him the recipe.

He always ended his letters,
Sincerely and forever yours, A. Metsky.

After a few weeks, his letters got to be less cheerful. It was as hot in St. Paul as it was in Boston, his hotel room was suffocating, most of the food was tasteless, and he felt invisible.

Going to Minnesota in the summer had been a big mistake; the state legislature wasn’t in session and the representatives were back at their farms, which were all over the state.

Aaron was riding milk trains to talk to possible supporters, but all he got was splinters on his backside from sitting on wooden crates and bites from mosquitoes he claimed were the size of bumblebees.

He wired his boss to say that he might as well come back, but he was told to stay, find some stories about local child laborers, and get invited to speak at women’s self-improvement societies and church auxiliaries. Aaron said that if you can move a roomful of mothers to tears, you could raise an army for a cause.

There were plenty of stories. For sixty years, children had been sent to Minnesota on “orphan trains.” It was a well-intentioned idea, a way to give abandoned children a better life with wholesome farm families. Being out in the country had to be better than the misery of crowded orphanages, right?

Some of those children must have been well taken care of and loved, but it wasn’t hard finding kids who were not. Aaron struck up a conversation with a young man at a café who said he’d been put on the train from Baltimore when he was twelve and his younger brother, Frank, was five. He remembered being lined up on a platform where the women would pick out little children with blue eyes and good teeth—like his brother—and the men chose bigger boys who could go to work right away. He was told to forget about his old family and start over, but he didn’t forget his brother and tried running away to find him. He got a good hiding when he was caught.

There were plenty of orphan train children still living with families that had taken them in, but it wasn’t easy to talk to them.

Aaron ran into a girl named Martha when he was getting off the train at a stop just outside St. Paul. She was unloading sacks of flour and sugar as if they were full of feathers even though she wasn’t any bigger than me.

Martha was sixteen. She had been eight when the nuns put her on the train and the Olsens took her in. She didn’t pine for her family in New York; after her mother walked out, her father brought her to an orphanage. “He kept my brothers,” she said. “He told them he didn’t know what to do with a girl.”

When Aaron asked if she was happy with her Minnesota family, Martha said the Olsens were not her family. They weren’t as bad as some she knew about. They never hit her and she got plenty to eat and new boots when the old ones wore out. She said they even sent for the doctor once when she was sick. But they made Martha stop going to school when she was ten and they talked about her as “the girl.”

“Tell the girl to pass the milk.”

He said they treated her like something between a prize farm animal and a daughter.

Martha worked in the cookhouse, where she put out three meals a day for farmhands. In the winter, her hands bled from washing dishes.

She had taken to sleeping with a knife under her pillow in case one of the workers got any ideas, but she was really afraid of her “big brother,” who wouldn’t leave her alone. Martha said that Mrs. Olsen wouldn’t believe anything bad about her son.

Those were hard letters to read, but they were love letters, too. Aaron was showing me who he was, what was in his heart. The more I knew him, the more I loved him. And he opened my eyes to what was going on around me. I started to notice boys and girls who should have been in school selling newspapers, shining shoes, scrubbing stoops, and carrying baskets of laundry. It made me proud of what Aaron was doing.

—

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.