The Boston Girl Read Online Free PDF Page B

Filomena said. “They’re getting married this year! All of them.”
    Helen said, “Your time will come.”
    “Not me,” said Filomena. “I’m never getting married.”
    Rose said she was too pretty to be an old maid.
    Gussie didn’t like that. “Filomena may want to do other things with her life. For example, I am going to college.”
    “And after that, she’s going to law school,” said Helen.
    “But don’t you want a family?” Rose asked.
    Gussie said, “Helen’s going to have children; I’ll borrow hers.”
    Helen blushed and Irene said, “Looks like she already knows who the father’s going to be.”
    “Don’t embarrass her,” said Rose. “Besides, she’d tell us if there was someone, wouldn’t you, Helen?”
    “My sister can have her pick,” said Gussie. “What about you, Rose? Irene? Any prospects? Addie?”
    “Addie’s too young to think about that,” Filomena said.
    I was too young but it was impossible not to think about marriage. Mameh talked about Celia’s “prospects” all the time, and at every Saturday Club meeting, there was talk about weddings the girls had been to or weddings they were going to. Even the Ediths, when they heard about an engagement, acted like it was some kind of victory—and they were all for women’s rights and education.
    I wasn’t so sure about marriage. I knew my parents were miserable, and from what I heard in the air shaft, other married people said horrible things to each other all the time. On the other hand, who wouldn’t want to be in love and have a man look at me the way Owen Moore looked at Mary Pickford? I used to leave those movies feeling sad that nothing like that would ever happen to me, but I always went back for another happy ending.
    In the magazine stories, I could imagine myself as one of the smart, spunky girls chased by men who loved them for their brains and gumption. Those girls were airplane daredevils, or race car drivers, or even doctors, but in the end they gave it up for love and marriage.
    When I asked Filomena what she would do if she fell in love, she shrugged. “I know that being a wife would mean giving up art, which is what makes me happy. When I say I don’t want to get married, my sisters tell me I’m being selfish, and maybe I am. Or maybe there’s something wrong with me.”
    I said I didn’t think there was anything wrong with her.
    “I wish my sisters were more like you, Addie,” she said. “Betty and Celia are lucky to have such a good listener in the family.”
    Actually, my sisters and I didn’t talk much. They were so much older than me, for one thing; Celia was so quiet, and as for Betty, I saw her once in a blue moon and only when she was sure Mameh would be out of the house and she could sneak in and visit. Even then, she mostly talked to Celia and Papa.

Like nothing I could actually touch.
    I didn’t know my father very well. It wasn’t like today, when fathers change diapers and read books to their children. When I was growing up, men worked all day and when they came home we were supposed to be quiet and leave them alone.
    Papa was a good-looking man; he had a long, thin face, with light-blue eyes and brown hair like Celia’s. He was particular about his clothes, that they should be clean and neat. Whenever he saw a Jewish man in the street dressed sloppy, he said, “They’ll think we’re all peasants.”
    What I knew about him mostly came from Betty. He grew up in a little shtetl that was hardly even a town, just a place with an inn, a synagogue, and a market once a week where people bought and sold everything. Papa’s family had cows, so they weren’t the poorest, but they didn’t have enough money to send him or his brothers to school. Instead they learned with their father, my grandfather, who’d studied at some big yeshiva as a boy. I remember Papa had a very old prayer book; maybe it was from his family.
    When Papa was eighteen or nineteen, there was a cholera epidemic that