“Yes, darling, what do you do for fun?”
“We don’t encourage frivolous pursuits for the girls,” the mother said. “She cooks, she cleans, she sews, and she can play bridge.”
Ada pulled out a gold cigarette case and offered one to the mother, who shook her head. Ada selected one for herself and lit it from a matching lighter, taking a long pull before responding. It was my only sign that she was annoyed, and had I not been so carefully observing her, I wouldn’t have noticed.
“What sort of books do you read? Magazines? Television shows?”
Stella again opened her mouth, but her mother began talking. Ada stopped her. “Mrs. Edelman, with all due respect, I’m not looking for a husband for you. Let the girl speak.”
Mrs. Edelman’s mouth snapped shut. But she strangely didn’t look offended.
“We don’t have a television,” Stella said quietly. “I liked the movie Pillow Talk.”
Ada grinned. “Rock Hudson. Now we’re getting somewhere.” Stella smiled back shyly.
After they left, Ada turned to me. “Let’s see those notes.” I handed her my notepad. “You don’t know shorthand, I see.”
“Why would I?”
She ignored me as she read through what I had written. “You’re right that Mrs. Edelman will be a nightmare of a mother-in-law. We’re better off finding either someone with an equally awful mother or someone without a mother at all.” She continued reading. “Now that’s not fair. Stella will make a lovely wife for the right partner. Did you see that smile when she talked about movies? She just needs to get out from under her mother. No domineering men for her. Someone quiet who will let her blossom is who she needs.”
“You got that from talking about Doris Day and Rock Hudson?”
She turned her head to look at me from the corner of her eye. “Yes. You, for example, need someone who will stand up to you. You’ll never respect anyone who caves too easily. And you’ll bulldoze over anyone who gets in your way.”
“Explains why you never got married, then,” I said, unable to stop myself.
Ada smiled. “We know our own kind. The next client will be here in five minutes. Don’t make me ask for the coffee this time.”
Four more mother-daughter pairings came in and two mothers dragging sons, with a break for lunch before the final two customers. The heavy female-to-male ratio explained why she had me soliciting young men.
Then, after the final set, Ada turned to me. “You can take the afternoon off.”
I wanted to ask, “To do what?” But the reality was that I didn’t care what as long as I wasn’t sitting in that chair listening to people who couldn’t wait to get married. I was, however, curious how her method worked.
“What do you do now?”
“Find them matches.”
“But how do you do that?”
She wagged a finger at me. “I don’t share my techniques, and I don’t need competition. Go. You’re dismissed.”
After climbing the stairs to freshen up before going out to explore my new city, I paused at the end of the hall. She had said the other bedrooms were off limits, but she never said I couldn’t look around the rest of the house. With a backward glance over my shoulder to make sure I wasn’t being observed, I ascended the second set of stairs.
I was right about the third floor having been intended as servants’ quarters, but the rooms seemed to be primarily storage. I peeked in a box and found an extremely old collodion photograph of a man and a woman in wedding regalia. I knew that one. It was my mother’s grandparents—she kept a framed copy on her dresser. But a peek below that one showed a whole stack of family photos from the late 1800s.
There was a noise below me, and I quickly replaced the lid. But I would be back up here. I knew that much. There were more boxes labeled “photographs,” along with discarded furniture, luggage, and several armoires. I peeked inside the armoire closest to the stairs, hoping for flapper dresses. But if Ada was seventy-five, that would mean she was born in 1885 and in her thirties when Zelda Fitzgerald was hopping into fountains. Too old for the costume wear I wanted.
Then again, with that bleached hair . . . But no. That particular armoire held an impressive collection of fur coats, capes, and stoles.
I wondered again how much she charged for her services. She hadn’t made that clear in the meetings—the mothers handed her a check of a predetermined amount.
I had never seen a woman manage her own business before. Sure, there were domestic workers, and I knew plenty of girls who went into the business world as typists and secretaries—but mostly to meet husbands. No one ran a company or managed their own money. And her age—along with the fact that she had been in this profession for nearly fifty years—made that even more impressive.
And despite myself, I was envious. Yes, I wanted love and passion and excitement. But the idea of being my own person—of doing what I wanted when I wanted and bossing everyone else around—was intoxicating. More than that though, when Ada spoke, everyone listened.
And I vowed, throwing my notebook into my handbag, to learn from that while I had to be here. It was the exact opposite experience that my father would have wanted. But my mother—I began to wonder if she secretly wanted me to learn this very lesson all along.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The door to Ada’s study—her real office—was closed, so I didn’t disturb her as I left the house to explore. I walked down the street. Much like many New York neighborhoods, once you left Ada’s street, it became a mixture of residential and commercial properties seemingly without zoning. The difference was no buildings blocked out the sky this far uptown, and trolleys replaced the unending traffic I was used to.
I found a mailbox easily and dropped my mother’s letter inside. I hadn’t wanted to risk my defiant return address with the cook. The shops were all locally owned, and, from the names, we were in a heavily Jewish neighborhood, delicatessens dotting corners like street signs. Which also answered another question I hadn’t wanted to ask—How did Ada know the tennis men were Jewish and therefore acceptable matches? On this side of town, apparently everyone was.
Yet crossing a single street brought me out of Eastern Europe and into Italy, immigrants hawking their wares and working in their fully mustachioed glory, surrounded by churches instead of the two synagogues of my aunt’s neighborhood. The smells from the restaurants here began to feel more like home, and I inhaled deeply, wondering if there were any areas where cultures mixed as in the city of my birth.
I wandered for close to two hours, observing my new surroundings. My parents had taken me to Washington, DC, and to Florida as a child, but this was my first time as a solo tourist anywhere. After returning to Ada’s neighborhood, I stopped a young woman about my age and asked how close I was to the Liberty Bell—my sole Philadelphia landmark—but she laughed. Apparently it would be a two-trolley ride to get there and therefore not plausible today.
“Doesn’t anyone take taxis?”
“Why? The trolley cars are cheaper.” She looked me up and down. “You’re not from around here clearly.”
“What gave me away?”