The Hired Girl (40 page)

I began, “But which one —?”

“Ah, you come to the heart of the story! You want to know:
which was the true ring!
But a mystery lies at the heart of the story; not a solution. The Jew explained to his audience that the truth as to which was the real ring was lost in the mists of time. So it is with religion: every Christian, every Jew, and every Mahometan believes he inherits the true faith. That is the major point of the story. The minor point is that the Jew, because of his wisdom, survived.”

He beamed at me. Mrs. Rosenbach stirred restlessly. “Moritz,” she said, “would it not be better to say plainly what you mean? I’m sure the girl has no idea —”

“By no means,” answered Mr. Rosenbach. “I’m sure Janet understands me perfectly, or will when she has had a little time to think.”

I cast down my eyes and tried to look modest and knowing, but the truth was, I was at sea. I sneaked a glance at Mrs. Friedhoff; she was as baffled as I was. Mr. Rosenbach’s gaze was kindly, but he was also wearing what I think of as a teacher look: that encouraging, expectant look teachers give you when they’re counting on you for the right answer.

Then — quick as the flash of a firefly — I knew. Heaven only knows how I managed it, but I read Mr. Rosenbach’s thoughts; I swear I did. I spoke with absolute certainty. “The story’s a metaphor. All three sons believed they had the right ring, but there was no proof they were right. But all three rings were precious and beautiful, because they came from the father, and the father loved all three sons.” I saw that Mrs. Rosenbach looked dissatisfied, so I simplified it for her. “Mr. Rosenbach’s asking me to respect his faith. He’s telling me, in a kind way, not to try to turn Oskar into a Catholic. And I won’t. I mean, I know better now.”

“
Brava,
Miss Lovelace,” said Mr. Rosenbach, and I remembered David telling me that
Brava
is what you say when a female singer is good. I felt my cheeks grow warm with pleasure.

Mrs. Rosenbach regarded me with surprise and — dare I write it? — respect. She hadn’t thought I could guess the riddle, but I had. It made me feel a lot better, and not so ashamed.

I stood up and excused myself. Then I went upstairs and packed my things. Being a slain buffalo hasn’t done my suitcase much good.

It wasn’t far to the Marlborough apartments — only about a fifteen-minute walk. The building has a mechanical elevator, with a little page boy to run it. I’ve never gone up in an elevator before. I’d thought it would be thrilling, but it was jerky and slow.

When Mrs. Friedhoff unlocked the apartment door, Oskar ran to her and hugged her. Then he threw his arms around me. Moonstone sidled into the room, her eyes bright with curiosity. I wanted to pick her up, but I didn’t — Thomashefsky has taught me discretion. She’s not a kitten anymore; she’s tall and rangy, and her eyes are gold instead of blue.

Oskar wanted me to play with him, but I said no, I couldn’t, not when the apartment was such a mess. His blocks and toys were scattered throughout the apartment. Mrs. Friedhoff told him to gather every single block and make the tallest tower he could. That was a good idea, because it kept him out from underfoot, though of course I had to stop work every so often to admire the tower.

I rolled up my sleeves and set to work. It made me mad, how messy those rooms were. If I could afford to live in a beautiful place like that, with everything new and handsome and fashionable, I’d keep things nice. Some of the furniture had been dusted in a no-account sort of way, but the lamp shades and picture frames were furry with dust, and the baseboards were filthy. The bookcases had books all jumbled and slanty-wise. In the bathroom, there was a greasy brown ring around the tub, and the space between the toilet and the wall was nasty. That bathroom wasn’t fit for a good Jewish home, especially during the High Holy Days. I have pure contempt for the last girl who worked here.

I dusted and wiped and straightened and scoured. Mrs. Friedhoff watched me with something like awe. Supper was good, but the Irish girl, Kitty, is careless about
kashrut.
(She isn’t really a girl; she’s thirty.) She mixes the dish towels and lets the dishes sit in the wrong dish drainer. Kitty whispered to me that what Mrs. Friedhoff doesn’t know won’t hurt her. But her kitchen was spotless, which surprised me, because I’d always heard the Irish were dirty.

After supper, Mrs. Friedhoff put Oskar and Irma to bed. To my surprise, she put on an apron and cleaned with me, side by side. By the time we finished, it was half past ten, and the rooms looked lovely. Mrs. Friedhoff thanked me and said I should go to bed, because she was sure I must be tired.

I’m not that tired. I feel jittery, because I don’t know when I’ll see David again. I wonder if I still have Tuesday afternoon off. I could write to David and ask him to meet me in the park, except Malka takes in the mail, and she might recognize my handwriting, and if she did, she’d open my letter.

And what if David never came?

Monday, September the twenty-fifth, 1911

Today was an awful day. The Friedhoffs came — Anna’s in-laws, I mean: two pursy-lipped, patronizing old biddies. Of course they patronized me, because I’m the hired girl, but they were horrid to Anna as well. They said that Irma looked sickly and told Anna she’d never raise her. Mrs. Friedhoff (the old biddy, not Anna) asked if the beds had been aired properly, and Miss Plaut (the sister) complained about cat hairs on the sofa. Both of them believe that cats are unhygienic, and that Moonstone will suck Irma’s breath.

It rained all day. I couldn’t take Oskar out, and keeping him amused took every ounce of patience I possess. I felt sorry for him, because the Friedhoff ladies insist on kissing him, and Oskar doesn’t like kissing. But he had promised his mother to be good, so he screwed up his elderly little face in a paroxysm of disgust (I think that is a very well-turned phrase) and let them peck at him.

I’ve had hardly a moment to think, but when I do think, I think of David, who is an easy walk away from this apartment and might as well be in China. More and more, I think I was sent here because Mr. and Mrs. Rosenbach want to tear us asunder. I keep thinking about a framed engraving Miss Chandler had on the wall of her little parlor. It was a colored picture of Mariana in the Moated Grange, who is a lovesick lady in Shakespeare. Lord Tennyson wrote a poem about Mariana, who is always wailing, “I am aweary, aweary! I would that I were dead!” I never had much sympathy for Mariana in the Moated Grange because the Moated Grange looks very luxurious in the engraving, and I thought it compared favorably to Steeple Farm. But now that I am marooned in the Marlborough apartment building, I see how little surroundings matter when one is lovesick. My mind is fixed on one object, drawing all its flavors, both bitter and sweet, from the thought of my beloved.

I can’t write any more. I’m exhausted from being Mariana in the Moated Grange. Also, Oskar wore me out setting up bowling pins so that he could knock them down.

Tuesday, September the twenty-sixth, 1911

It’s still raining. I don’t know how Anna stands those Friedhoff women. She meant to take them shopping today, but they looked at the raindrops on the windowpanes and said they would stay in and knit. Oskar tried to please them by reciting the Hebrew alphabet, but they didn’t praise him. They said he was spoiled by indulgence. He wasn’t even doing anything wrong — just standing there in a clean sailor suit, with his hands behind his back.

I took Oskar back to his room and told him I would play anything, so long as it wasn’t bowling. He wanted to hunt buffalo, but I knew that would be noisy, so I persuaded him to hunt alligators in the swamp. We put pillows on the floor to make boats, and I cautioned him to hunt in silence, so as not to scare away the alligators. He did pretty well, except when the water moccasins (which were stockings) bit him. Then he shrieked and writhed in a fearful death agony. I tried to shush him, because I could hear the in-laws whining and clucking in the parlor.

I thought I would lose my afternoon off, but at lunchtime, Anna told me to run along. She knows I’m having religious instruction, and she said I shouldn’t miss it.

Father Horst greeted me kindly. He said I seemed a little tired, which I guess I am. He heard me recite the catechism and talked to me about the Church. I tried to listen, but my thoughts kept turning to David.

All at once I interrupted. I asked Father Horst if I could just go into the church and pray by myself. It was rude of me but I couldn’t help myself.

He gazed at me searchingly. Then he said of course. He said if I had anything I wanted to tell him, he would be glad to listen; if I needed help, spiritual or temporal, he would try to assist me. But he said my instinct to take my troubles to Our Lord was a sound one.

I muttered
thank you,
because I was ashamed of having been so rude. Inside the church, the light was dim, because of the rain. I went to one of the side chapels and propped my umbrella against the wall, and knelt before the Blessed Sacrament. The stained-glass windows were almost colorless, it was so dark, but the lamp burned in the sacristy. It was cold.

I squeezed my eyes shut and clasped my hands together and implored God to tell me what to do. Tears began to seep from underneath my eyelids; they felt hot against my cheeks. It was a relief to shed them, and I realized how miserable I was. I haven’t spoken to David for nearly a week. And I’ve begun to wonder if he cares for me at all, and my heart is starving.

I wondered if I was miserable because of my sin. I thought I ought to open up my heart to the possibility that I deserved to be unhappy, because I’m such a sinner. The more I thought about it, the worse it was. I lied to a priest so I could meet David; I lied to Malka and the Rosenbachs; I listened at doors; I spent money on clothes that I might have given to the poor; and speaking of the poor, I don’t seem to
care
about the poor, and the poor are very important. Of course I wish there weren’t any poor people, but I almost never think about the ones there are, and if I cared about them the way Our Lord told me to, I would worry about them once in a while. But I daydream about clothes more than I think about the poor. And I love a man who’s a Jew, so I’m thinking of becoming a Jew, and I let him kiss me, even though we’re not married, and I’m considering being an apostate even though Ma raised me to be a member of the True Faith.

So I listed all these things before God, and I opened my mind to His chastisement. I waited. But He said nothing. My knees ached from kneeling, and I was sobbing and shivering. I was filled with shame and remorse. But He said nothing.

I thought about what Father Horst had said. I begged for mercy and forgiveness. I opened my heart to receive God’s mercy. My soul felt sore and parched, and I imagined His mercy like dew, falling on my soul.

But I felt nothing. He wasn’t
there.
The light was burning in the sacristy, the light of His Real Presence, but I couldn’t feel Him. I began to recite Hail Marys without counting them, one after another, gabbling, because I was beginning to panic and I needed to feel the presence of God.

And then I stopped. I stopped praying and I stopped crying. I stopped gazing at the lamp as if the moving flame in the red glass could save my soul. I closed my eyes and searched for God.

And He wasn’t there.

And then something happened, and I don’t know how to describe it, because when I put it in words it sounds like nonsense. The closest thing that I can say is that the absence of God, at that moment, was the presence of God. I felt it and it was true. It wasn’t what I’d prayed for. It didn’t answer my questions. It wasn’t forgiveness or chastisement or permission. It was just —
He
was just —
God
was just — real to me. There was darkness, and the darkness was God. There was absence, and the absence was God. There was my longing, and my longing was God. God wasn’t there, and at the same time I was more certain of Him than I’ve ever been in my life.

I stayed there, kneeling. I don’t know how long. I don’t think it was long at all. Then I got up very quickly, as if someone had commanded me. I stopped trying to repent, not because I wasn’t bad, but because it was beside the point. I started walking as if I’d made up my mind about something, which I hadn’t.

I came home through the rain. It was hours later that I realized I’d left David’s umbrella in the chapel. I feel terrible about it, because I love it dearly. But I’m pretty sure Father Horst will find it and keep it for me.

Now that that
thing
— which wasn’t a thing, but I don’t know what else to call it — has happened, I see that I was never meant to be a Jew. I don’t mean that in an anti-Semitic kind of way, because the Jews are good and noble-hearted and love God. They go on loving Him even though they’re persecuted for it. But I have to be a Catholic. Even though what happened this afternoon doesn’t make sense when I put it in words, it was real and it was important and it happened in the chapel of the Blessed Sacrament.

I think there must be hope. Somehow it will be possible;
somehow
I will find a way for David and me to be together. But even as I write this, my eyes are closing. I’m worn out and can’t find my way.

Thursday, September the twenty-eighth, 1911

I am sunk in misery. The old ladies have decided to stay
through Yom
Kippur,
which doesn’t begin until sundown on Sunday. I had thought they’d be gone tomorrow, and I’d see David by Friday night.

I believe Mrs. Friedhoff (Anna) is as wretched as I am. She’s the one who has to talk to them, and their conversation is nothing but whining. Kitty calls the old ladies
the Pills.
They are like pills, too — the bitter kind that get stuck at the back of your throat and don’t dissolve.

Today Mrs. Rosenbach came to visit. I was handing around cucumber sandwiches when Miss Plaut started saying how sickly Irma was, and Mrs. Rosenbach said that they must all remember how many advances had been made in medicine since they (the older Mrs. Friedhoff and Miss Plaut) were young,
which, of course,
was many years ago.
Ha! It took the old ladies a few seconds to realize they’d been insulted; she’d slipped under their guard that easily. I don’t always like Mrs. Rosenbach, but I admire her. She can be as smooth as cream and as sharp as a paper cut.