Chapter 16
I had thought ahead to wear my own dress to work on Friday—even if it was less fashionable than Betty’s clothes—so while I did have to race upstairs as soon as I got home to get the typewriter ink off my fingers, I didn’t have to change.
I did, however, sneak a peek into the living room on my way upstairs.
If there was a visitor as unpleasant as Cantor Levy, I would throw on dungarees and an old blouse to look as unappealing as possible.
Granted, then I would need to swipe a black dress from Betty for the funeral—my mother would surely die if I pulled something like that.
Thankfully, it was just family. My mother had yet to recover from the shock of finding that stain on her white sofa where Cantor Levy had sat.
My grandmother definitely didn’t discourage her from thinking it was something other than chocolate—even going so far as to suggest that her cooking hadn’t agreed with the poor man. I had never seen my mother go so pale.
We sat at the table, my mother covering her eyes to say the blessing over the candles, and my father led us in a quick, far less melodic rendering of the motzi before we began to eat.
My grandmother winked at me from across the table. “It’s so nice when it’s just family. Isn’t it, Edna?”
My mother pursed her lips at her mother-in-law but said nothing.
If I were my grandmother, I’d take it a little easy on my mother—she didn’t have to let her live here.
But torturing her daughter-in-law seemed to be my grandmother’s main hobby these days—other than her frequent canasta, bridge, and mahjong games—and I got the impression my mother thrived on their sparring too.
“Mother,” my father said warningly.
“What?” Grandma Sylvia asked innocently. “He looked like the frog in that book I used to read to the children when they were little.”
I stifled a laugh. She meant Toad from The Wind in the Willows. The resemblance was quite remarkable.
“Yes, well, he didn’t exactly want to come back after whatever you and Judy said to him.”
“Maybe he was embarrassed,” my grandmother said. “I would be if—”
“How was work this week, Judy?” my father asked, desperate to change the subject before his wife and mother started a brawl at the table.
I didn’t know how to answer that after the roller coaster of becoming a managing editor’s secretary, only to lose the position within three days.
“Interesting,” I said, opting for a half-truth.
“I’m learning a lot.” Mostly gossip about the typing pool’s dating life, but I was learning.
Besides, I now knew where the Oval Office staff met women.
I hadn’t known that at the start of the week.
“Speaking of work,” my mother said as she speared herself a piece of brisket and placed it on her plate. “Do you know a Jacob Feldstein?”
I assumed she was talking to my father, and I looked to him as I chewed a bite of potato. But my mother was talking to me. I swallowed. “Never heard of him.”
“His mother said he worked at The Digest. Or maybe it was The Evening Star?”
Unlikely to be The Digest, considering how Mr. Pullman had responded to my last name.
I wondered briefly if Patricia, good Irish girl that she was, would have been sent back to the typing pool for answering his personal phone.
But over the course of a week and a half typing articles, I had seen a lot of reporters’ names, and that one hadn’t come up.
I shrugged. “Must be The Evening Star.”
“Could be a good match. You’d have someone to talk about journalism with over dinner.”
I glanced involuntarily at Betty. She was right where she had always wanted to be—a wife and mother.
Life would be so much easier if I could be like her.
But I wasn’t. The idea of having to listen to a male journalist talk about his day in the newsroom while I scrubbed toilets, diapered babies, and cooked every meal?
If hell existed, that was my own personal version of it.
I knew my mother meant well, but she didn’t understand that I wanted a different life for myself.
“I had a friend, a long time ago,” my grandmother said. “She became a very successful matchmaker—lived in Philadelphia for many years. And she’d call that logic a load of horse manure.”
“Grandma!” Betty said as my mother set her jaw.
“What? Common interests are a dime a dozen. You need common values. Judy wants to be a journalist, not marry one.”
I smiled at my grandmother, touched beyond words that she understood me.
“So you need to find her a doctor or wealthy businessman—someone who can afford to hire help when she wants to write a story.” My shoulders sank. “Or—wasn’t the Wainwright girl’s father Jewish? Does she have any sons?”
“The father was Jewish, but the mother wasn’t,” my mother said. “So she’s not Jewish, and her kids aren’t.”
“Pity. If you married into a journalism dynasty, that would be the best of both worlds.”
Leave it to my mother and grandmother—the one thing they had in common was they could recite the Jewish lineage of literally anyone in town, whether they knew them or not.
“It’s a shame Joseph Pulitzer died over fifty years ago—I could have just married him. Jewish and a newspaper tycoon.”
“Does he have grandsons?” my mother asked, entirely serious.
I pushed my chair back and stood up. “I’m full. Anyone mind if I go to bed early?”
“Sit,” my grandmother said, pointing down toward my chair. “We’re just teasing you. Aren’t we, Edna?”
I snuck a glance at my mother, who definitely was not teasing me and would likely be asking her network of yentas if there were any remaining unmarried Pulitzers running around, but I did as my grandmother asked, and thankfully she steered the conversation toward speculating whether Betty would have another boy or another girl.
“Whatever it is,” Betty said, rubbing at her lower back as I had seen her doing more and more frequently, “carrying this one is much harder than before.”
“That’s because you have two other kids to take care of this time,” my mother said.
Betty sighed. “That’s what the doctor said too. I guess you’re right.”
“Probably just a big head,” my grandmother added. “They get that from their father’s side.”
Reuben did have a big head. But I saw Betty grimace in pain as she sat down. I didn’t know how a baby with a big head would cause back pain. Then again, what did I know about pregnancy and babies?