The Boston Girl (12 page)

A girl should always have her own money.

Where I grew up, it would have been bad manners to sit in a woman’s kitchen without asking about her children and her parents, her opinion of the neighbors—even her digestion. Mrs. Morse and I talked about the weather and what was on tomorrow’s menu and that was it.

But on Friday nights, when she stayed late to get ahead on the weekend baking, I watched her make bread, rolls, cakes, and cookies and she’d tell me how she came up with her recipes and why she used butter for some things and lard for others. She kept her eyes on the dough or the batter and chatted away like a different person—a happier person.

Mrs. Morse made pie for the girls the first week, but Miss Lettis decided it wasn’t fancy enough for the dining room, so she baked them just for us in the kitchen. I told Mrs. Morse I’d eat her pie three times a day if I could. She said, “Too much of a good thing can make you bilious.” But after that, she always gave me the biggest slice.

I knew Mrs. Morse liked me, even if she didn’t say so. She told me to get out of the lodge in the evening sometimes: “Go into town, have an ice cream, look in the shops. Lucy can show you around.” But Lucy was too young and silly and I told Mrs. Morse that I was saving my money.

She approved. “A girl should always have her own money so she’s never beholden to anyone.”

I said that was very modern of her, but she didn’t think so. “As far as I can tell, common sense hasn’t been in fashion for a long time.”

What I knew about Mrs. Morse—and it wasn’t much—came from Lucy, whose grandmother was a second cousin or something. I think everyone in Rockport was related to each other.

Her first name was Margaret and her husband had died when she was young. She had a son named George, who was a “disappointment.” But Lucy forgot to mention that Mrs. Morse had a sister named Elizabeth, who I met when she stopped by one Sunday afternoon after church.

I saw the resemblance right away: high foreheads, close-set gray eyes, and thick iron-gray hair. But Margaret Morse was round and mild, where Elizabeth Styles was thin and suspicious. She looked right over my head when I said, “Nice to meet you.”

I went outside so the two of them could talk in private, but Mrs. Styles was so deaf, I might as well have been sitting at the table with them.

She shouted, “I can’t believe you’re back here again.”

Mrs. Morse said, “It suits me,” and that she couldn’t afford to stop working.

Mrs. Styles thought she could do better in one of the big summer kitchens out on Eastern Point. But Mrs. Morse liked being in charge of her own kitchen and going home to her own bed at night. “And don’t worry about the money. I’m doing just fine.”

Mrs. Styles said, “I still don’t know how you stand it around here. All those foreigners would give me the willies.”

Mrs. Morse lowered her voice a little. “At first, I thought the Italians would steal.
I was sure the Irish would smell bad, and I was a little afraid of the Jews. But, after all these years, I tell you some of them are nicer than Americans.”

“These days, they’re all trying to be flippers.”

“Flappers,” Mrs. Morse said. “Our mother would have fainted dead away to see all the leg they’re showing.”

Mrs. Styles said, “Mother would have taken a stick to them. Things were better back then.”

Mrs. Morse said she thought some things were better nowadays, but Mrs. Styles didn’t see it. Summer people had ruined the town and it was taking your life in your hands to cross the street what with all the automobiles. “And those bathing costumes? You can see all the way up to you-know-where. It’s terrible.”

Mrs. Morse said, “Well, there’s nothing you can do about it so why don’t I cut you a nice piece of chocolate cake?” She could fix almost anything with a piece of cake—or pie.

It’s not your problem, Addie.

On the hottest nights, when my room was stifling, I took my pillow and blanket to the porch and made a bed out of chairs and little tables. When you’re young you can sleep anywhere. One night when I was out there, the sound of the kitchen door woke me up. We never locked it and I figured that one of the upstairs girls had been gallivanting. But when I went inside for a glass of water, Mrs. Morse was holding on to the back of a chair, shaking all over, and there was blood on her mouth.

I made her sit down and ran a washcloth under cold water for her face. I asked if she wanted me to get Mrs. Lettis or her sister, but she shook her head. After we both calmed down, I did a pretty good imitation of Betty and ordered her to stay over and sleep in my bed. I took the biggest knife I could find and went back to the porch to keep watch.

I didn’t have to ask who had hurt her. Hannah said that Mrs. Morse’s son was mixed up with the rum-running going on all over Cape Ann. Canadian boats full of liquor would unload onto smaller boats off the coast, and the locals who ferried the stuff in made good money delivering booze to hoodlums who came up from Boston. Men like George Morse skimmed bottles to sell to the rich summer people, who never gave up their cocktails during Prohibition, but if too much went missing, well, those suppliers were very tough characters.

Mrs. Morse stayed in the kitchen the next day and kept her head down, so I was the only one who saw her swollen lip and the bruise on her jaw. She went home after supper but she was back with a valise after lights-out. She said she was going to sleep on the porch, but I knew she couldn’t risk Miss Lettis finding her. That woman was like a one-woman vice squad. The summer before, a girl had been sent home for drinking and another had eloped from the lodge so she was taking extra care to protect our reputation. No hanky-panky of any kind would be tolerated, which was the reason I could talk Mrs. Morse into staying in my room.

I camped out on the porch and when I heard someone walking toward the house, I ran inside. Mrs. Morse was waiting at the door and I begged her to go upstairs. She wasn’t having that. “You go. I’m going to take care of this.” I wasn’t going to win that argument so I went, but only as far as the dining room, where I could keep an eye on her.

She let him in when he started kicking the door. George Morse was an inch or two taller than his mother and broad in the shoulders, with big meaty hands that he clenched and unclenched like he was getting ready to punch someone. I could smell the booze on him from the other room.

They argued in whispers for a few minutes and then Mrs. Morse sank into a chair with her face turned away from George, who hung over her. “You know they’re going to kill me if I don’t get them the money. What do you need it for anyway? I know about your goddamn nest egg, so don’t tell me you don’t have any. You’re just a stingy old woman with one foot in the grave anyway. What kind of mother won’t save her son? Do you want to see me dead? Is that it? If you don’t give me that money, I’m going to burn down the house.”

When he grabbed her wrist, I ran into the kitchen and said, “Leave her alone.”

He looked me up and down and got a sickening look on his face. “Who is this little dish?”

I told him to get out or I’d call the police. He just laughed. “You’re not bad-looking. Maybe if you come outside and play patty-cake with me, I’ll let it go for tonight.”

Mrs. Morse said, “Let her be, George.”

He let go of her wrist and came toward me. “Come on, missy. I’ve got a little rum left. Or maybe you like wine? I can get that, too. I’m not a bad guy. Just got myself into a little jam.”

He was right up against me, breathing into my face. “Tell her, Ma. Tell her I’m a nice guy.”

But Mrs. Morse had gotten a knife and was behind him, jabbing him in the back. When he tried to turn around, she poked him hard enough to make him yelp. “I’ll run you through if I have to,” she whispered, using the knife to get him to the door. Before he left he said, “Next time I’ll bring my own knife and I won’t be so polite with your little friend.”

I didn’t realize how scared I was until he was gone. My voice squeaked when I said we should call the police but Mrs. Morse said it wouldn’t help; the rum runners and the cops were in cahoots.

I said, “So what are we going to do?”

She patted my hand. “It’s not your problem, Addie. Go to sleep now. I’m going to sit here a while.”

There was no sleeping that night. I kept hearing the awful things George had said to me and to his mother. I could still see the ugly look on his face and the bruise on Mrs. Morse’s jaw and it made me remember a woman from Levine’s factory who came to work every Monday morning with a black eye or a swollen lip. Everyone pretended not to see it and no one said a word, including me.

What could I say? “Call the police”? If they did come, they were gone after a few minutes. “Leave the bum”? How could she feed her children on her own?

But with my own eyes I had seen George hurt Mrs. Morse. I knew I couldn’t let it happen again, but I had no idea how to stop it.

—

On Saturday, I met Bess Sparber, who knew Gussie from the courthouse. She was staying at the lodge that week and wanted to say hello and see how I was doing. She was a short blonde with a handshake like a longshoreman’s. She had a little space between her front teeth, which I always think makes a person look honest. I was desperate to talk to someone and told her what was happening to Mrs. Morse.

She said, “This happens all the time. I hear things in court that would make you sick to your stomach: a woman who lost an eye to a beating, a little boy who had maggots in the strap marks on his back. ‘Home sweet home’? Don’t make me laugh.”

She said she’d help in any way she could and that she’d get others to pitch in, too. That gave me the idea to find out who was staying in the room right over the kitchen.

George hadn’t shown his face for a few days but I knew he’d be back, so I locked the kitchen door at night to have some warning and kept a knife and a broom handy.

The moment I heard his footsteps, I tapped the ceiling with the broom handle, then waited to open the door until George started hollering. As soon as he came in, a dozen girls holding croquet mallets and tennis rackets surrounded him. Girls kept coming, quiet as mice, until they filled the room. The only sounds were his breathing and Bess smacking a baseball bat across the palm of her hand.

When George spotted Mrs. Morse standing at the door, he lunged at her, butting his shoulder into the girl next to him like a football player. It must have hurt but she didn’t budge and the others closed in until he was trapped.

Mrs. Morse told him to get out. George called her an old bitch and worse and kept throwing himself toward her. But the girls didn’t give and eventually they pushed him back out the door.

After the lock clicked, there was a big sigh of relief. Bess and I wanted to get everyone out of there as quickly as possible, but Mrs. Morse had to shake hands with each and every girl first.

In the morning, Bess came to the kitchen and said, “That was terrific, but now what are you going to do?” We might try to pull the same stunt for a few nights, but then a whole new group of girls would arrive and they might not be so willing. Or someone might let the cat out of the bag and get Mrs. Morse in trouble. Or George could bring a gun.

I had to get help from someone local and the only people I knew to trust aside from Mrs. Morse were Hannah and Lucy. Hannah laughed when I told her how we got George out of the kitchen. She said, “Wish I could have seen his face,” and said I should talk to Lucy because she knew everyone in town.

Lucy got very quiet when I told her what was going on. “George Morse is a shit-heel,” she said. “He grabbed me between the legs when I was ten years old and I still feel dirty from it. You tell Mrs. Morse not to worry anymore.”

I’m not exactly sure what happened but Lucy talked to her uncle Ned, a temperance man who wasn’t shy about using axes, and not just on whiskey barrels. Ned’s drunken father had broken his nose when he was a boy, so he saw it as his calling to protect the weak—by whatever means necessary.

A week went by without a visit from George. Mrs. Morse stopped jumping up every time the door opened and went back to sleeping in her own house.

Another week passed and it seemed that George Morse had vanished from the face of the earth, but since nobody wanted to see him, nobody went looking for him. There was a rumor about a body washing up on Long Beach but I didn’t see anything about it in the newspaper. Besides, he could have gone to Salem or Boston or anywhere.

Mrs. Morse never mentioned her son again in my hearing. But I had pie for breakfast every day for the rest of the summer.

By Addie Baum.

Remember when you were little and I let you stay up late so we could watch
Upstairs, Downstairs
? That show always made me think about Mrs. Morse’s troubles with George and how Miss Lettis never found out. It wasn’t because she was stupid or because we were so smart. She was just busy with “upstairs” dramas, like the girl who got appendicitis. But she went into a full panic when she was told to expect a newspaper reporter who was coming to do a story about Rockport Lodge.

It might not sound like a big deal, but publicity like that had never been welcome by the women who started Rockport Lodge; they grew up thinking that a lady’s name should only appear in the paper when she got married and when she died. But that had changed and those women—and their daughters—read the society pages whether they admitted it or not, especially in the
Boston Evening Transcript
, which ran a genealogy column every week and reported on the kinds of women’s clubs attended by Boston’s “First Families.” I’m talking about the Lowells and the Cabots and that set. The
Transcript
was like
People
magazine for Beacon Hill types, and the rest of us, too.

Miss Lettis got a phone call from the chairman of the Lodge board and was told to expect a certain “Miss Smith” and to make sure she left with a delightful impression. Everything had to look its best, which meant I polished the banister twice and dusted every damn book in the house. The night before the big visit Miss Lettis sat down in the kitchen—something she never did—and went over the lunch menu with Mrs. Morse.

She was nervous as a cat, folding and unfolding her hands, and telling us more than she was probably supposed to. She said our visitor was the most popular society writer in Boston so we had to put our best face forward or the whole world would hear about it.

Miss Lettis came from Pittsfield, so she didn’t know that “Miss Smith” had to be “Serena,” who wrote a column called Out and About. Everyone read it, not only because she had the juiciest gossip but also because sometimes she poked fun at the people she wrote about, like the time she said Beacon Hill ladies were such penny-pinchers they wore their shoes until the soles were thin as communion wafers.

Nobody knew Serena’s real name. There was a rumor that she was from a First Family herself, which would have made her a traitor to her class and even more fascinating. Some people argued that “she” had to be a man because a woman couldn’t be that witty. When the car pulled up in front of the lodge, I felt like a detective solving the mystery of Serena’s true identity. Reading all those newspapers paid off because the minute I laid eyes on her I knew it turned out that she was Mrs. Charles Thorndike. Case closed!

When a Brahmin like Tessa Cooper marries a Brahmin like Charles Thorndike, there was always an announcement in the paper and sometimes a picture of the bride. Miss Cooper had sent every editor in town a photo that showed off a bare shoulder. Very racy.

Miss Lettis had put on her best “welcome” face, but when she saw three cameras hanging from the driver’s neck, she gasped, “I didn’t get permission for pictures,” and ran inside to call Boston for instructions, leaving Miss Smith high and dry.

She perched on the porch railing and lit a cigarette.

The portrait didn’t do justice to her heart-shaped face and her big eyes. Her dark hair was almost as short as a man’s and parted on the side—a style you might have seen in a fashion magazine but much too much for Boston.

I must have been feeling very brave that morning because I went right out there and said, “Would you like something cold to drink, Mrs. Thorndike?”

She looked surprised at hearing her name, but then she smiled and shrugged. “You read the papers, do you? I could do with a drink but I don’t suppose you have a gin fizz handy.”

I didn’t know what to say: it was eleven o’clock in the morning and the middle of Prohibition.

She laughed. “Relax, child. I’m joking. Are you here from one of the girls’ clubs?”

I wasn’t about to tell her I was the maid, so I said I was a member of the Saturday Club, which was true.

She knew who we were. “Mother’s missionary society bought all their Christmas presents from your little shop a few years ago. Are you one of those adorable pottery girls?”

“Adorable”? She was getting on my nerves. I said no, that I was a secretary in a real estate office and taking classes at Simmons College. “That makes you a real go-getter as well as a fan of the gossip columns.”

That rubbed me the wrong way, too, so I said the society pages were a big waste of time, “except for Serena.” Then I looked her right in the eye and said, “I get a kick out of the way you poke fun at Boston’s high and mighty.”

That wiped the smug little smile off her face.

Miss Lettis reappeared, calmer now that she had her marching orders. There would be no pictures inside the lodge and no pictures of the girls.

“Doesn’t leave much, does it?” said Mrs. Thorndike. She stood up and flicked her cigarette out on the lawn. It must have taken all of Lettis’s self-control not to run over and pick it up. “Let’s get this over with.”

They went off on a grand tour that had been carefully laid out. They stopped at the tennis court, where it just so happened that the two best players were in the middle of a game, and from there paid a visit to a group of well-groomed girls who were reading poetry to each other. Another bunch was crocheting handbags—all of it phony as a three-dollar bill.

Tessa Thorndike didn’t seem all that interested. She didn’t talk to any of the girls or write down a word of what Miss Lettis told her about the history of Rockport Lodge or what happened there. Instead of eating lunch in the dining room with everyone else, she had her lunch on a tray in the parlor, by herself.

The lodge emptied out in the afternoon for a sailboat ride out of Rockport Harbor. Miss Lettis took the photographer to take pictures of the grounds and the house and Mrs. Thorndike went back to the porch to smoke.

I wandered out there with a book under my arm.

“No sailing?” she said.

I said I got seasick and asked if she was having a good time.

She sighed. “Not really. I’m on a tight leash; no funny business allowed.” She sounded discouraged and less snooty. “The only reason I’m here is that Charles’s mother gives money to this place and told the publisher she wanted something
nice
. If I were to be even a little bit clever, she would not be pleased.”

I asked if her mother-in-law suspected that she was Serena.

“Mother Thorndike would make her son divorce me. She finds Serena vulgar, but Charlie thinks she’s funny.”

“He’s right,” I said.

“Why, thank you,” she said and asked my name.

She said, “Addie Baum. That would make a good byline.”

And just like that, I could see it in my head,
by Addie Baum
, in black-and-white. That’s what I wanted to do with myself: I would write for the newspapers.

I had goose bumps, but I pulled myself together and said, “I don’t think I could remember things as well as you do.”

“You mean because I don’t take things down? That’s only because I’m lazy and nobody really cares what I write as long as I get the names straight, and they have someone else check to make sure that I do.”

I said that she was a good writer but she shrugged off the compliment. “I send over a few pages or call the editor and read what I’ve got over the phone. But I’m always late and he’s always mad. I’ve often thought what I need is an assistant to help with actually getting the things on paper and seeing they’re in on time. It’s all I can do to remember who was at which party—especially after a highball or two.”

I said I took dictation and typed.

“Do you?” She looked me over and said what wouldn’t she give for some of my curves. I would have given anything to be able to wear her dress, which fell in a straight line from her shoulders to her knees.

“You’d have to be at the house a lot,” she said. “If we were in New York, I could tell people you were my social secretary, but that’s not
done
in Boston. And I can’t say you’re a friend because everyone knows all my friends.”

I said, “Couldn’t we have met at Barnard?” Something else I knew about her from her wedding announcement.

She said, “You have the memory of an elephant. But since they all went to Smith or Wellesley, I suppose I could introduce you as a college chum.”

The photographer was putting his cameras in the car and waved for her to get in. I gave her my telephone number at work. She shook my hand and said she’d call me in September.

I watched them drive away and started planning the rest of my life: I wouldn’t have to be Levine’s secretary forever, but I would have to learn all about Barnard College and New York City if I was going to pretend to be her “college chum.” What would I call her: Mrs. Thorndike or Tessa? I could imagine how proud Miss Chevalier would be to see
by Addie Baum
in the paper.

I couldn’t wait.