The Hired Girl(59)

I love that. I think I will start saying that.



Monday, July the thirty-first, 1911

I want to read tonight — The Moonstone is very exciting and funny, too — but first I want to write about two important things. One is that starting tomorrow I’m going to have religious instruction with Father Horst.

I asked him yesterday. It seemed brazen to go right up to a priest and ask to become a Catholic. Father Horst has a worn-out, irritable look to him when he isn’t smiling, and I was afraid he’d think I was presuming too much. But I told him how I long to take the Sacrament, and his face broke out in a smile of true benevolence. When I asked him where I might buy a missal, he gave me one. He said someone left it in the pew a year ago, and no one’s claimed it, and he’s been saving it for the right person, which is me.

It’s a dainty little book with black-and-white plates and thin pages edged in gold. It always opens to the Seven Penitential Psalms, so I guess whoever owned it before was either very wicked or very good. I don’t much like those psalms because they’re mournful. I turned to the Litany of the Virgin, because I’d forgotten parts of it. It’s so poetical: Tower of Ivory, House of Gold, Morning Star, Mystical Rose. I love that. I told Father Horst I have a great devotion to the Blessed Mother, and that made him smile again.

We agreed that I should see him for an hour on Tuesday afternoons. His face darkened when I explained to him that sometimes I might not be able to come because of Mrs. Rosenbach’s bridge ladies. He asked me if my employer was the Mr. Rosenbach who owned the department store, and I said yes, and he said he hoped that living in a household of worldly Jews wouldn’t keep me from holding fast to my faith. I don’t think that was anti-Semitism, because I guess there are some Jews who wouldn’t want me to have a good Catholic faith, but the Rosenbachs aren’t like that. I told Father Horst how good they’ve been to me and how Mr. Rosenbach lends me books. Father Horst looked worried and asked which books. I didn’t want to mention The Moonstone, because it’s a little sensational, so I said Ivanhoe. It wasn’t exactly a lie, because Mr. Rosenbach has a copy of Ivanhoe and I’m sure he would lend it to me if I asked him. Father Horst seemed relieved and said he was especially fond of the works of Sir Walter Scott.

The other important thing happened this morning, and I’m still thinking about it. I was polishing the brass fittings on Mr. Solomon’s desk, and one of the drawers wouldn’t go in all the way, so I took it out. There was an envelope wedged behind it.

I didn’t mean to read what was written on it. I don’t think I’d have read it if it had been a private letter, but the thing is, it was verse. It began, Oh, Nora, when I see your radiant face — and after that, I had to read on.



Only I guess he didn’t like that line, because he crossed it out and wrote instead:



But he didn’t like that any better, because he crossed that out, too. Then he changed it to:



Which I thought was better. Then the poem goes on:



Then he crossed that out, probably because he already had breast in there. He wrote tumultuous chest, and he must have hated that, because he crossed it out so hard I could scarcely read it. Then he had a stroke of inspiration, because he wrote:



And then I guess he got stuck, because underneath he wrote:




And then, up one side of the page he wrote:



There he ended and the envelope was crumpled up as if he’d crushed it in his fist. I sympathized with him because there’s not much that rhymes with love except dove and glove and the stars above, and in my opinion, the stars above are a little shopworn.

My heart beat fast when I read that poem, and divers sensations throbbed in my breast. First there was the sensation of invading Mr. Solomon’s privacy, which was shameful but thrilling. Then I felt envious, because he wrote Nora a love poem, and that’s so romantic. I declare, if anyone wrote a poem and called me a fragile nymph, I would swoon dead away. Though it isn’t likely that anyone ever will, because I’m an ox of a girl.

Then I felt dreadfully sorry for Mr. Solomon. Here he is, head over heels in love with Nora but cruelly separated from her because he wants to study Talmud instead of run his father’s department store.

I can’t help thinking it’s a pity that Mr. Solomon never finished his poem. He should have stuck with it and had the courage to send it. If Nora Himmelrich read his poetry, she might come to appreciate him. I bet she’d like being called a fragile nymph and a blushing rose. Why, even the Blessed Mother must like being called Morning Star and Mystical Rose, or it wouldn’t be in the prayer book.