And my heart is burning. It isn’t just a figure of speech. When I think of David going away, the pain is like a fist against my breastbone, hot and sore. A mist rises before my eyes as I write this, and teardrops splash onto my inky words. He’s going away. He’ll see Paris and forget me; I know he will. I’ve lost him, my only love: the artist who was going to show me Paris; the man who was going to teach me to draw. I weep for the conversations we never had and the kisses I wanted to take from his lips. We never even said good-bye.
But in a year’s time, I will go to school. I don’t seem to care about it, but it’s what Ma would have wanted. It’s what I wanted, once. I wanted it more than anything.
In a year’s time, I will go to school.
Sunday, September the twenty-ninth, 1912
This morning Mimi bought me a present, a blank book from Rosenbach’s Department Store. She plunked it down on the ironing board and said, “Here. Now you can write another diary.”
I retorted, “Why? So you can read it behind my back?” which I thought was very cutting. But Mimi only flicked open her lorgnette and answered, “So you can be an authoress.”
I’ve never been able to get Mimi to feel any remorse over reading my diary. Whenever I try, she flashes me one of her starry-eyed, admiring looks (she’s practicing that look so she can use it on boys) and says my diary was the best book she’s ever read. That’s where I lose ground. I’m unmanned by flattery.
I thanked her for the blank book, which is handsome: crimson leather with stiff creamy pages. I didn’t promise to write another diary, though. Once someone reads your diary, you’re never the same again. You realize you’re not alone when you write, and you start to write for the person who will read your words. I think that’s a bad thing, but I’m not sure, because I do think of being an author someday, and authors have to commune with their readers.
After Mimi left and I finished the ironing, I went to my room and took Anna’s old dressing case from under the bed. Anna gave me the dressing case after she found out that Mimi read my diary. It has a lock and key, so I can be private.
It’s been almost a year since I opened this diary. So much has changed since I locked it away! There are nine blank pages left at the end: I’m going to fill them up with everything that’s happened, lock up the book, and begin the new year. I’ve become very Jewish, because it seems to me that the real New Year begins in the fall, with housecleaning and Rosh Hashanah.
And school! I’m starting school tomorrow, and I’m very excited. I’ll be studying Algebra and Latin, Ancient History, Art, English Literature, and Creative Expression. Mr. Rosenbach took us to see the school building, and it’s sumptuous. The house on Auchentoroly Terrace used to be a mansion. There are high windows everywhere, so the rooms are full of light, and at the foot of the grand staircase, there’s a statue of the Roman god Mercury. I expect to feel very aristocratic, going up and down those stairs.
It’s strange and wonderful to be a student again. On Thursday, Anna and Mrs. Rosenbach took Mimi and me to buy clothes — schoolgirl clothes, not maid uniforms. We began at Slesinger & Son’s, because the school letter says all pupils must wear comfortable shoes with a flexible sole, so we can exercise in the gymnasium. We are also required to have thick wool sweaters made to a particular pattern, because the fresh-air classrooms will be cold. Mine lacks half a sleeve. Malka’s helping me with it. Dear Malka! I am still her Shabbos goy, but a Russian girl comes in twice a week to help her with the heavy work. Malka says the Russian girl is a klotz, and she only loves me.
After Mimi and I bought our shoes, we went to Rosenbach’s Department Store. I bought a holly-green sailor suit, a waist with Gibson pleats, and half a dozen hair ribbons — I haven’t worn hair ribbons for a year and a half. Anna bought me a rose-plaid jumper suit and a primrose silk that will be good for school dances, if anyone asks me. She insisted on paying for them because she says looking after Oskar has been hard on my clothes. That’s true, but I’ve come to love Oskar. We have splendid games together. He’ll start kindergarten tomorrow, and I expect he’ll do well, because he’s very clever. Every Monday we visit the Pratt Library and read the snake books in the children’s section. I taught him to sound out the letters, and one day — it was astonishing, how fast it happened — he began to read! I was never so proud of anyone in my life.
I did a wicked thing on Saturday. While the Rosenbachs were at Temple, I went to the store and bought one of those watch lockets I’ve been hankering after. It’s dark-green enamel, with pansies on it. My heart beat fast when I put down the nine dollars, but I told myself I’ll be needing a watch, with work and school and Oskar to look after. I know I won’t look like a scholarship pupil with that locket around my neck.
After I came home, I put on my first-day-of-school clothes and peered at myself in the mirror. A schoolgirl smiled back at me: a wide-awake-looking girl, with a pink hair ribbon and a locket round her neck. She looked happy and prosperous, as if she’d never known passion (only I have) or worked like a drudge at Steeple Farm.
Father has written. Mr. Rosenbach made me write and tell him I was safe. At first I was terrified that Father would make me go back to the farm. But when Father wrote back — and it took him three months! — he wrote that Mark is married to Carrie Marsh, and she does the woman’s work now. He added that if I wanted to live with a pack of dirty Jews, it was all right with him, only I’d better not think I could come sashaying home when it suited me. Well, I have no notion of sashaying home. When I left Steeple Farm, I left forever. And I don’t think a man who never washes his neck has any right to cast aspersions on the Jews.
I didn’t want to show Father’s letter to Mr. Rosenbach, because of the anti-Semitism, but Mr. R. asked to see it. I think he was surprised that Father is so horrid. I wasn’t surprised. At first the nastiness hurt my feelings, but then I felt relieved. I’m glad Father doesn’t love me, because I don’t love him. Father Horst says I must find it in my heart to forgive him. I’m going to someday, but I haven’t gotten around to it yet.
The good thing about writing Father was that afterward I was free to write Miss Chandler. She was overjoyed to hear from me, but I think she is a little bit prejudiced, because she’s worried that the Rosenbachs are educating me so they can convert me to Judaism. I sent her a copy of Daniel Deronda. Dear Miss Chandler taught me so much! Maybe she’ll let me teach her about the goodness of the Jews.
Mr. Solomon married Ruth Kleman last April and moved to New York so he can attend yeshiva. I still think he’d be better off with Nora Himmelrich (except they don’t love each other), but he and Ruth seem to be happy so far. David is in Paris, studying at the Académie Colarossi.
Moonstone has become my cat. She wakes me every morning, purring and tickling my face with her whiskers. I think I would rather have a cat than a sweetheart, after all. They are less trouble, and even the handsomest sweetheart is sadly lacking in fur.
I still think about David. When I flipped through this diary, I came across the passage where I wrote that his kiss changed me from a girl into a woman. That seems like the sort of thing that should turn a girl into a woman, but now that I look back, it seems to me that I was awfully young at the time. I’m almost sixteen now, but I don’t feel grown up. All the same, it was passion that I felt for David, not a childish crush. It was thrilling and painful and beautiful. Being in love was one of the most interesting things that ever happened to me.
But it wasn’t the only interesting thing. Last Easter I was confirmed, and that was not only interesting, but important. It’s an awe-inspiring thing to take the Sacrament. Each time I approach the altar rail, I feel reverent and buoyant, as if my body were recalled to life, as well as my soul. But the sad thing is now that I’m a true Catholic, I sometimes lack religious fervor and am apt to oversleep on Sunday mornings. Kitty and I say the rosary together (she is Catholic, too), and when we hear the church bells, we stop work and pray the Angelus. I’m glad to be religious, because re
ligion is tremendous. Sometimes it doesn’t feel tremendous; sometimes it feels like being inside a fence. But God is spacious and mysterious.
I have seen the Ocean! This past summer, after Oskar and Irma had chicken pox, we went to Atlantic City, and I beheld the majesty of the unplumm’d, salt, estranging sea. Often I got up early so that I could watch the sunrise. I would walk barefoot at the edge of the water and think about David — not just David, but myself and love and art and death. When I behold the ocean, I know that the world isn’t just the grind of small tasks and small thoughts. The world is wide and wild and grand. Someday I will sail my little bark into the great ocean of life, braving the winds and the tide. And while the waves may dwarf me, they will not belittle me, because I will be the master of my fate and the captain of my soul.
Mr. Rosenbach is determined that I shall learn philosophy. I read several of the Socratic dialogues and I liked them, but eventually I got tired of Socrates winning all the arguments. So I wrote a dialogue where I taught Socrates some important things about the nature of true love. The dialogue ended with Socrates saying submissively, “Yes, that is so.” When Mr. Rosenbach read it, he laughed so hard he nearly died. Just now we are reading Shakespeare together. First we read Macbeth, which is thrilling, and then we read As You Like It. I like it when Rosalind says, “Men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them, but not for love.” That’s exactly how I feel about David Rosenbach.
I thought I would love David forever, but now I’m not so sure. I think of him often, but not as much as I did. He sends me postcards from Paris, but they are identical to the ones he sends Mimi. There isn’t a particle of sentiment in them, and I know why. He’s afraid of inflaming my propensities. Mimi says her friend Maisie Phillips’s brother, Sam, would be sweet on me if I gave him a little encouragement, but I’m not going to do it, because he’s a Methodist and not interesting. Also, I’m busy: I’m planning to write an epic poem about the life of a Vestal Virgin. I was hoping to start it tonight but decided to finish this diary instead. I’ll begin it tomorrow, in Mimi’s new book.
Tomorrow, oh, tomorrow! What will my destiny be? Maybe I’ll be a teacher, as Ma encouraged me to be. Or a great novelist, like Charlotte Brontë. Or perhaps I’ll be a famous journalist like Nellie Bly and investigate insane asylums and fascinating places like that. One thing is sure: after I’ve paid Mr. Rosenbach for my schooling, I mean to go to Europe. I’ll see the bridge where Dante met Beatrice, and the Alhambra, and the slate-gray roofs of Paris. Maybe in Paris I’ll pay David to paint my portrait — because by then I’ll be ever so stylish and self-possessed, and maybe he’ll fall in love with me, and I’ll spurn him.
Or maybe I won’t.
Fortunately, I don’t have to decide just now, because my immediate tomorrow dictates only that I start school. School! As Shakespeare would say, O wonderful, wonderful, and most wonderful wonderful! and yet again wonderful, and after that, out of all whooping!
I think about Ma, telling me to get educated, and dear Malka, who told me to grow up and become a woman.
And so I will.
In The Hired Girl, I have tried to be historically accurate about language. This has led me to use terms that are considered pejorative today, such as Hebrew, Mahomet, and Mahometans.
I used Mahomet and Mahometan for two reasons. The word Muslim, which is now preferred, was not in use until much later in the twentieth century. And, as a reader of Jane Eyre, Ivanhoe, and The Picturesque World, Joan would have encountered the words Mahomet and Mahometan. These are the words that were used at that time.
Similarly, many Jewish people today find the term Hebrew offensive, but the fact that many Jewish organizations in Baltimore used it (the Hebrew Sheltering and Immigrant Aid Society, the Hebrew Literary Society, the Hebrew Orphan Asylum, etc.) suggests that at the turn of the century, the word Hebrew was used with pride.
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or, if real, are used fictitiously.
Text copyright © 2015 by Laura Amy Schlitz
Cover image courtesy of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
(The House Maid, William McGregor Paxton, 1910)
Art acknowledgments are found here
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in an information retrieval system in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, taping, and recording, without prior written permission from the publisher.
First electronic edition 2015
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 2014955411
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