The Hired Girl(117)

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.