Flumes Vol. 4: Issue 1, Summer 2019 | Page 29

From Beacon Hill to Bloomingdale's

By Leslie Armstrong

Annette was almost beautiful. She was five foot seven, had a perfect figure, and was a stylish dresser. She had a round face framed by rich, chestnut hair which she trained into soft waves. She was sharp-witted, brilliant, and sophisticated. Rex was equally bright but earthier and more charismatic. He was the youngest professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. Annette, a lawyer, was the first woman to be made an associate at the Boston firm of Hill & Barlow. As a couple they were lionized by the upper echelons of the hard-drinking wartime society that Rex called the Boston Gin Belt. They drank and talked music with the very young and rough-hewn Leonard Bernstein. They drank and dined with the luminaries of Boston’s medical elite. They read Proust and they drank gin martinis at the beginning of the evening, highballs at the end. They worked long hours and they drank. They went out with friends and they drank. And they went out with people other than each other and they drank.

The apartment in which I spent my first seven years was a dingy duplex on the backside of Beacon Hill. Its principal feature was a two-story living room accessed from street level via a narrow stair with a wrought-iron railing that descended against one wall. Large windows gave out onto a lightless courtyard paved in cement. There was no dining room. We never ate as a family. But I remember Annette and Rex sitting on the twin loveseats flanking the fireplace, Annette with her unfiltered Chesterfields nearby and Rex with a huge cigar, each with a martini or a highball in hand.

Annette was constantly battling bronchitis. More than once she succumbed to pneumonia. When I was four, she stuck her left hand with a hat pin. Red lines shot up her left arm. She took to her bed yet again.

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