As I grew older I read about the New Deal, Roosevelt, the WPA, James Michael Curley, Honey Fitz and Joe Kennedy, the movies and music of the period. I read John Dos Passos, Meridel LeSeuer, James Agee, John Steinbeck. I wondered about my father’s mother, an Irish immigrant who, unmarried, gave birth to him in dire circumstances during the Great Depression. We had never known her.

In the 1980s I was a social worker with poor elderly people in Boston. Now I was meeting Jews and Protestants and African Americans, learning things about Boston I never heard mentioned in our neighborhood. Men told me about the burlesque houses in Scollay Square, about the old docks and railroad yards, about the trip North from the Jim Crow South, about the Roseland Ballroom. Old women told me about girls they’d known who, during the Depression, kept themselves alive by doing favors for men. These girls had nice hats and gloves, luxuries, when it was hard to keep food on the table.

Another woman, never married, with all her people dead and gone, told me about the one and only time she ever had sex. Her father was a cantor in Revere. She was raised very strictly. But then her parents died, one right after another, and she was on her own and had to get a job right away. She found work in a greeting card factory that was able to stay open through the Depression. One day she was out walking on Revere Beach and a small plane flew over the shore. The pilot waved to her, managed to land, and convinced her to go up for a ride with him. Later he asked if he could come call on her. He wasn’t Jewish but she said yes. Her parents were no longer there to disapprove.

She had worn a dress with a beaded bodice that night. “Would you like to see it?” She went to her dresser and took it from the top drawer. It spilled from its stiff folds, icy blue.

After that night she never saw him again. A few months later, she asked a co-worker to ask another girl, who was said to know about these things, what you should do if you had a friend who had a friend who got herself into terrible trouble.