Authors: Anita Diamant
Don’t let anyone tell you things aren’t better than they used to be.
It wasn’t a fancy wedding. No long gown or veil, like Betty wanted, but I think I looked pretty great in my tan dress with the pearl beads, and I wore the most beautiful hat I ever owned. There was no music and no dancing the hora, but it was much bigger than I’d imagined and not only because there were so many Metskys. Between my family, all of my friends, and their families, there were plenty of people on the Baum side, too.
Levine held one of the poles for the huppah. He almost cried when I asked him. Aaron’s brother held another and I don’t remember who the other two men were. It never occurred to me to ask Betty or Rita. Fifty-eight years ago, asking a woman to do that would have been like asking when a man was going to walk on the moon—something only a crazy person would say.
Don’t let anyone tell you things aren’t better than they used to be.
—
We had lunch in the synagogue because there were too many people to fit into Betty’s house. There were long tables with white tablecloths, big platters of herring, rye bread, salad, and pickles—the usual. There was plenty of wine and even a bottle of whiskey with a real label, a wedding present from someone. Since we were in a temple, we didn’t even have to put it in a teapot so we wouldn’t be raided. Prohibition didn’t end until ’33, which I only remember because it was the year your aunt Sylvia was born.
After we ate, there were toasts and jokes about how Aaron and I met. Filomena stood up and asked us to open her present in front of everyone because there was a story to go with it.
Her gift was a big blackware vase with two spouts. “It’s called a wedding pitcher,” she said. “The two openings stand for the bride and groom and the handle in between makes them into one.”
At an Indian wedding, the bride drinks from one side, the groom drinks from the other, and then they’re married. If the husband or wife dies, the other one is supposed to give it to a young couple getting married. It sounded sort of Jewish to me.
Anyway, I’m giving mine to the grandchild who gets married first. I don’t think you should rush into anything with Brian just to get a nice piece of pottery. But it’s something to keep in mind.
—
I wish Levine had taken a picture of me with Aaron and Filomena and the pitcher. He took a dozen of us in front of the wedding cake Mildred had baked—four layers and white frosting. My mother would have called it goyishe, but it was delicious and there wasn’t a crumb left over.
I noticed my father bringing a slice to an older lady I didn’t know. I figured she was with the Metskys, but it turned out that she was a member of the synagogue. Betty said, “She was at Mameh’s shiva, but there’s no reason you would remember her.” There had been a whole flock of widows at the house after the funeral and they brought pots of soup and kugel over to the house for weeks afterward. Betty called them “the vultures,” which was kind of mean but kind of true. Whenever an older man lost his wife, there was a competition to get him. Of all the widows, Edna Blaustein had brought strudel as well as casseroles. She was one of the younger ones and kept herself looking nice. She was also the only one with the chutzpah to invite herself to the wedding party. I’m pretty sure that she asked Papa to marry her.
Betty thought it was terrible that Papa didn’t wait a whole year to marry her, but he said there was no law against it so they did and he moved into her house, a triple-decker that gave her a nice little income.
It turned out that Edna had expected Papa would take care of the building like her first husband had, but my father didn’t know anything about fixing sinks or putting glass in a broken window. And after a few years of reading and teaching in shul all day, he wasn’t about to shovel coal for the furnace.
“I almost feel sorry for her,” Betty said. “Almost.”
You’re that Addie, aren’t you?
Aaron and I went on a little honeymoon: three nights at the Hotel Edward in Rockport, Massachusetts. Our room faced out to the sea and the full moon on the water was so bright that we had to close the curtains to sleep. It was very beautiful, very romantic.
During the day, I showed him everything. We took the train that used to run around Cape Ann. We walked on the beaches and up to the big rocks in Dogtown. We poked around in the art galleries and bought taffy to bring to our nephews. We ate fish every day and ice cream two times a day.
The cliff house where Filomena and I had met Morelli was gone. Washed away in a storm, I guess. All that was left were the granite steps and the slab that used to be in front of the red door.
Of course, I took Aaron to see Rockport Lodge. The woman who answered the door didn’t want to let us in but I kept saying that I had been a lodge girl myself and please could we just look around. She finally said I could come into the parlor for a moment but not Aaron. The house was quiet, so I knew the girls had to be on an outing; there was no good reason to keep him out. “We won’t be long,” I said. “It’s our honeymoon. It would mean so much to me.”
I didn’t stop talking until she let us both inside, where she didn’t let us out of her sight, as if we were going to steal something. I don’t know what she thought when the first thing I did was head straight to the kitchen.
The closet I’d slept in was back to being a pantry and there was a big new refrigerator and fresh linoleum on the floor. The cook was standing at the door, blowing cigarette smoke through the screen. Mrs. Morse would have thrown her out for sure. But when she turned around, I realized it was her sister, Mrs. Styles. She was thinner and grayer but she still had that “Who do you think you are?” look on her face.
I had sent her a letter when I heard Mrs. Morse had died, saying how sorry I was and how I would always remember how good she’d been to me, but I wasn’t sure she even got it.
Mrs. Styles said, “I know you. You’re that Addie, aren’t you?”
I was surprised that she remembered my name.
“Maggie used to talk about you and what a big fuss you made over her pies. I never understood why she did so much baking when she was here. There’s nothing wrong with a plate of stewed fruit, and you only have to make it twice a week.”
I introduced her to Aaron, who said he liked a plate of stewed fruit himself. Mrs. Styles might have been flattered, but it was hard to tell.
A few weeks later, I got a note from Mrs. Styles with a recipe for piecrust. “My sister would be glad for you to have this. I never bother with it myself.”
I know you think my pies are the best in the world, but believe me, they’re not nearly as good as Mrs. Morse’s. Sometimes I wonder if that sister of hers left something out on purpose. Or maybe it’s just because I use butter instead of lard.
|
1931 . . .
|
Some of the best years of my life.
Your grandpa loved his work. His whole life he tried to make things better for poor children, but his real calling was being a father. It was a talent with him.
As soon as our girls could sit up, he was wheeling them to the library and taking out books to read them bedtime stories. I used to listen, too. It was the first time I’d ever heard some of those fairy tales, and I was surprised at how scary some of them were. Your mother didn’t sleep for a week after “Rumpelstiltskin.”
We liked the Little House on the Prairie books so much that he would run to the bookstore whenever there was a new one and we’d stay up late to find out what was going on with the Ingalls family.
Aaron was heartbroken when Auntie Sylvia and your mom were old enough to read on their own and “fired” him. When your sister and you were born, it was as if he’d been holding his breath for all those years. Sometimes, we’d drive to your house and stay just twenty minutes so he could read you a story. He had most of Dr. Seuss memorized. Do you remember how you jumped all over him for
Hop on Pop
?
We were the only ones on either side of the family to have daughters, and the aunts went overboard. Betty bought every doll she ever saw, and Rita, who had two boys, kept our girls in pink until they were in high school. Grandma Mildred taught them how to bake bread and took them to the flower show every spring and bought them corsages.
It was like we were in that fairy tale where all the fairy godmothers bring gifts to the princess. Gussie bought savings bonds for every birthday. Helen, who was the best-dressed woman I ever knew, gave us her daughter’s beautiful hand-me-downs. Miss Chevalier gave them books, and Katherine Walters bought them each a new diary every year.
When Betty found out we had asked a neighborhood girl to babysit, she read me the riot act. That was
her
job.
—
When I was pregnant, I was petrified about being a good mother. I would lie awake at night and worry about all the mistakes I was going to make: dropping, yelling, nagging, even poisoning. It took me a few years to get the hang of cooking.
It’s a good thing babies don’t give you a lot of time to think. You fall in love with them and when you realize how much they love you back, life is very simple. Of course, I was fascinated by every sneeze and yawn, and when my babies started to talk, I was sure they were geniuses and your grandfather and their aunties agreed.
I remember Irene saying everyone thinks their children are geniuses until they go to kindergarten. I was a little offended by that until I saw that two other children in class had started to read three months before mine did.
Being a mother wasn’t as scary as I thought it would be, not only because Aaron was a good father, but because I didn’t have to invent the wheel. I learned from Betty that it was good for children to have fun with them, to get on the floor and play. And I watched the way Irene talked to her son and daughter almost as if they were grown-ups. There was no baby talk and no beating around the bush in her house. Irene always told the truth and called a spade a spade and a penis a penis. That was unheard of in the ’30s. When her little boy, Milo, said “penis” at a family dinner it was as if he’d murdered the pope.
When Irene’s kids were both in school, she got a job as the office manager for the Birth Control League of Massachusetts; she didn’t keep it a secret from Joe’s family, either. They were horrified and tried to get him to make her quit, but Joe knew better than anybody that there was no way to
make
Irene do anything. And he loved her for it.
Irene and Joe, Aaron and I were a foursome. We spent so much time together, our kids were like cousins and when Joe lost his job in the Depression, it didn’t feel so much like charity when we had them over for supper twice a week.
Not that we didn’t feel it, too. We ate a lot of beans and I remember putting newspaper in a pair of shoes to get another summer’s use out of them. But compared to most people, we had an easy time. Aaron didn’t lose his job, but what made the biggest difference was that Levine moved us into one of his buildings in Brookline and wouldn’t let us pay rent. “You’ll mow the lawn,” he said.
The lawn in front of that triple-decker was so small you could cut it with a pair of scissors. But that was my brother-in-law. He was a know-it-all his whole life. If you asked Levine what time it was, he’d give you a lecture about how his watch was the best one on the market and only a nudnik would buy anything else. But I don’t think he ever evicted a single tenant from the buildings he owned.
It’s strange to say, but I had some of the best years of my life during the Depression, because that was when I had your mother and aunt. They were nothing like their namesakes. Your mother, Clara, was the opposite of Celia. Clara was a spitfire who started talking at seven months, and once she started walking, I never sat down. Your aunt Sylvia was nothing like Aaron’s birth mother, Simone, who was famous for her sense of humor and for starting the Metsky hug. My Sylvia didn’t say a word until she could talk in sentences and always took things to heart too much, but she was the kindest, most loyal person you ever met.
So much of who a person is has to do with temperament. I think my sister Celia was probably born without any defenses, like Betty was born with skin like a rhinoceros.
I’m somewhere in between. It helped that I was born in America and that I got to go to school. But there was something built into my makeup, too; something that let me connect to the friends and teachers who helped along the way. I think my girls inherited that from me.
They both did well in school, too. Your mother was the valedictorian at Northeastern.
You didn’t know? That’s terrible! You should do an interview with her next. Or maybe it would be better to wait until you’re a little older, when you’re completely cooled off from adolescence.
—
Oh, yes, your mother and I butted heads when she was in high school. I didn’t like her friends—a bunch of rich girls who treated her like a pet dog and started her smoking cigarettes. She thought I was telling her how to live her life and treating her like a five-year-old. We were both right, but it took until she was out of college for us to admit it.
Old friends are the best.
The year both of the girls were in school, I decided I would take some daytime classes. Aaron picked up the Simmons catalog and asked if I’d be interested in Social Work Practice with Delinquent Youth. I’m sure he would have taken that class if he could, but after years of listening to Aaron’s stories from work at the Child Welfare League, it sounded interesting to me, too. I’d never given social work a thought because those classes were held all the way downtown. But Aaron said so what; the trolley went downtown, too, and we could have lunch together, just the two of us.
So I signed up and that was that. The minute the teacher opened her mouth, I knew what I was supposed to do. Ann Finegold was one of those people who lights up a room. You wouldn’t think so to look at her: she was in her forties, five feet tall, plump, frizzy-haired, and brilliant.
She told us that social work was a young profession still finding itself. She called it a “creative science” and said that, in her opinion, the best social workers were intelligent and compassionate, and while she could give us ideas and tools to help our fellow man, she couldn’t teach us how to put ourselves into another person’s shoes. She said, “If you don’t already know how to do that, you should drop this class and consider another line of work.”
She reminded me of Irene: no bullshit. She made me think of my Shakespeare teacher, too, because he was so passionate about his subject and curious about us. Ann insisted that everyone use first names in class, which was unheard of back then.
I took every class she taught and we got to be good friends. The husbands, too. You probably don’t remember, but they were at your bat mitzvah.
When I had to do my fieldwork, Ann sent me to Beth Israel, where I did intake interviews with women who were waiting in the emergency room.
I was given a list of questions to ask: age, where they were born, years of schooling, marital status, reason for coming to the hospital. There was one woman—she was my age but looked twenty years older—who answered everything in a flat, quiet voice. When I asked how many children she had, she stopped and gave me a hard look. Then, as if she was admitting to something terrible, she whispered, “Three living children, but six times pregnant.”
It was all I could do to keep from throwing my arms around her and telling her that I had two living children, but I’d been pregnant four times.
I had two miscarriages before your mother was born and I was sure it had been my fault: I’d eaten the wrong thing or ridden on a bumpy streetcar or maybe I shouldn’t have gone to see that scary movie. Or else it was a sign that I shouldn’t have children because I wasn’t fit to be a mother.
I didn’t talk to anyone about how brokenhearted I was or how hopeless I felt. I had no idea how common it was to lose a pregnancy. Betty came to see me in the hospital after I lost the second one. She noticed I hadn’t touched the cookies she brought the day before.
I said I didn’t feel like eating.
But instead of her usual noodging, she sat down next to me on the bed and told me that she had lost a baby, too. “It was after you got married. We really did want a little girl.”
I said, “Why didn’t you tell me?”
She said, “I don’t know.”
Women used to think we were supposed to act as if nothing had happened, as if losing a baby you wanted wasn’t a big deal. And if you did say something, people told you that you’d forget all about it when you had a healthy baby. I wanted to punch them all in the face.
Betty cried. I cried. We had never been closer.
—
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.