Анита Диамант - The Boston Girl

After I finished elementary school, one of my teachers came to the apartment to tell Mameh and Papa I should go to high school. I still remember his name, Mr. Wallace, and how he said it would be a shame for me to quit and that I could get a better job if I kept going. They listened to him, very polite, but when he was finished Papa said, “She reads and she counts. It’s enough.”

I cried myself to sleep that night and the next day I stayed really late at the library even though I knew I’d get in trouble. I didn’t even want to look at my parents, I hated them so much.

But that night when we were in bed, Celia said not to be sad; that I was going to high school for one year at least. She must have talked to Papa. If she said something was making her upset or unhappy, he got worried that she would stop eating—which she did sometimes. He couldn’t stand that.

I was so excited to go to high school. The ceilings were even higher, which made me feel like a giant, like I was important. And mostly, I loved it there. My English teacher was an old lady who always wore a lace collar and who gave me As on my papers but kept telling me that she expected more out of me.

I was almost as good in arithmetic, but the history teacher didn’t like me. In front of the whole class he asked if I had ants in my pants because I raised my hand so much. The other kids laughed so I stopped asking so many questions, but not completely.

After school, I went to the Salem Street Settlement House with a lot of the other girls in my grade. I took a cooking class there once but mostly I went to the library, where I could finish my schoolwork and read whatever I found on the shelves. And on Thursdays, there was a reading club for girls my age.

This is probably where the answer to your question begins.

“How did I get to be the woman I am today?” It started in that library, in the reading club. That’s where I started to be my own person.

Three cheers for Addie Baum.

The settlement house was a four-story building that stood out from everything else in the neighborhood. It was new with yellow bricks instead of red. It had electricity in all the rooms so at night it lit up the street like a lantern.

It was busy all day. There was a baby nursery for mothers who worked, a woodshop to teach boys a trade, and English classes for immigrants. After dark, women would come to ask for food and coal so their children wouldn’t starve or freeze. The neighborhood was that poor.

Miss Edith Chevalier was in charge of all that and a lot more. She’s the one who started the library groups for girls: one for the Irish, one for Italians, and one for Jews. Sometimes she would look in and ask what we were reading—not to test us but just because she wanted to know.

That’s what happened on the day my club was reading “The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere” out loud. I guess I was better than the others because after the meeting, Miss Chevalier asked if I would recite the whole poem to the Saturday Club. She said a famous professor was going to give a lecture about Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and she thought a presentation of his most famous poem would be a nice way to start the evening.

She said that I would have to memorize it, “But that shouldn’t be a problem for a girl of your ability.” I’m telling you, my feet didn’t touch the ground all the way home. It was the biggest thing that ever happened to me and I learned the whole poem by heart in two days so I’d be ready for our first “rehearsal.”

Miss Chevalier was a small woman, a few inches shorter than me, which meant less than five feet. She had a moon face and chubby fingers and coppery hair that sprang straight up from her head, which is why some of the girls called her The Poodle. But she had one of those smiles that makes you feel like you just did something right, which was a good thing since I was a nervous wreck when I went to her office to practice.

I only got halfway through the poem when Miss Chevalier stopped me and asked if I knew what impetuous meant. She was nice about it, but I wanted to sink through the floor because not only did I not know what the word meant, I had mispronounced it.

I’m sure I turned bright red, but Miss Chevalier pretended not to notice and handed me the dictionary and said to read the definition out loud.

I will never forget; impetuous means two things. “Rushing with great force or violence,” and “acting suddenly, with little thought.”

She asked me which one I thought Mr. Longfellow meant. I reread those definitions over and over, trying to figure out the right answer, but Miss Chevalier must have read my mind. “There is no wrong answer,” she said. “I want to know your opinion, Addie. What do you think?”

I had never been asked for my opinion, but I knew I couldn’t keep her waiting so I said the first thing that came into my head, which was, “Maybe he meant both.”

She liked that. “The patriots had to be impetuous both ways or they wouldn’t have dared challenge the British.” Then she asked, “Would you call yourself impetuous, Addie?”

That time, I knew she was asking for an opinion. “My mother thinks I am.”

She said mothers were right to be concerned for their daughters’ welfare. “But I believe that girls need gumption, too, especially in this day and age. I believe you are a girl with gumption.”

After I looked up gumption , I never let anyone call Miss Chevalier The Poodle again.

—

I told Celia and my parents about the big honor of reciting for the Saturday Club, but when the day came and I put on my coat, Mameh said, “You’re not going anywhere.”

I told her they were waiting for me and that I had practiced and they couldn’t start without me but she shrugged like it was nothing. “It’s too cold. Let someone else get pneumonia.”

I couldn’t believe what she was saying. I argued and I begged and finally I was yelling. “No one else can do it. They’re counting on me. If I don’t go, I won’t be able to show my face there again.”

Mameh said, “When I was your age I didn’t step a foot outside without my mother, so close your mouth before I get mad.”

Celia said, “Let her go, Mameh. It’s not far. She can wear my scarf.”

My mother almost never snapped at Celia, but she said, “Stay out of this. That one sits in that school while you’re killing yourself at work. She’s already ruining her eyes from reading. No man wants to marry a girl with a squint.”

“Maybe I don’t want to get married.” The moment I said that, I ran behind where Celia was sitting so Mameh couldn’t slap me. But she just laughed. “Are you so stupid? Marriage and children are a woman’s crown.”

I said, “Like for Mrs. Freistadt?”

Mameh didn’t have an answer for Mrs. Freistadt. She lived across the street. One day her husband came home from work and said he couldn’t live with a woman he didn’t love, so after twenty years and four little girls, he walked out. Just like that.

The wife didn’t speak English and she didn’t know how to do anything but clean and cook. They got so poor—she and the daughters—everyone in the neighborhood was ashamed for them.

Talking about Mrs. Freistadt was the last straw for Mameh and she came at me with both hands, slapping and cursing and saying things like “Ungrateful worm. Monster. A plague you are.”

I was jumping around to keep away from her, which made her even madder. “My father would have taken a strap to you,” she yelled, and finally got me on my cheek with a loud slap that made Celia wail as if Mameh had hit her instead of me.

My mother had me against the wall, holding my wrists, and I was hollering, “Leave me alone,” when Papa walked in and told her to let me go.