The Hired Girl (18 page)

He paused for me to speak, but I was lost in the thicket of his questions. He leaned forward, resting his hands on his knees. “Janet. I can call you that, because I’m old enough to be your father. How old are you?”

Quick as a flash I answered, “Eighteen.” And oh, I hated having to lie to him! But what was I to do? Once you start lying, you have to go on. Lying to him seemed worse than lying to the others, because he looked at me so kindly. I wrote before that he wasn’t handsome. He is moonfaced and hawk-nosed and middle-aged. But he has fine eyes: dark and piercing.

“Freyda thinks you’re younger.”

It took me a minute to see that Freyda must be Mrs. Rosenbach. “No, sir,” I said stoutly. “I’m eighteen, all right. I guess I seem younger because —” I hesitated. “Because I’m so ignorant. I left school when I was fourteen.”

“But you want to go on learning.”

“Yes, sir. That’s what I want more than anything.”

“If that’s what you want, who am I to stop you?” He swept his hands apart. “Here are books — novels, histories, poetry. You may read them all. But not too late, not past midnight. You have to get up early to help Malka with breakfast. Many nights, we have retired by ten, and after that, my library is open to you. Do you agree?”

Agree? I thought of myself, reading through those books — Dickens and Scott and
The Picturesque World.
I could scarcely speak. “Of course I agree! I can’t thank you enough — oh, I can never thank you —”

He cut me off. “There is no need to thank me. For a Jew, it is a sin not to educate his children. You are not my child. But you live under my roof; you sweep my floors, you overcook my fish, you burn your hand ironing my shirts —”

“No, sir,” I corrected him. “Malka irons your shirts. But I iron your sheets.” Then I felt myself get red, because I was afraid it was indelicate to talk about sheets.

He didn’t notice. “It’s the same thing,” he said, which shows his masculine ignorance. If you scorch a sheet, you can bleach it with sunshine and vinegar until the scorch marks fade. But shirts have to be perfect. Malka’s awful fussy about the master’s shirts, and she’s right to be.

He went on. “What I am telling you is that so long as you live under my roof, I am responsible for your well-being. I have no intention of standing between you and the books you love. At the same time, I can’t allow you to set the house on fire or ruin your health reading all night. Do you understand?”

“Yes, sir,” I said. I was so happy I burst out laughing.

“That’s good, very good. But now there’s something else we must discuss, and that is Malka. She is very much upset. Will you make it up with her?”

I had forgotten about Malka. “Did Malka tell you why she’s mad at me? It wasn’t just the fire.”

“What, then?”

I linked my fingers together. “I’m Catholic.” I’m not a complete Catholic yet, because I haven’t taken the Sacrament, but I like saying the words. “So I hung my mother’s crucifix over my bed. When Malka saw it, she screamed and told me to take it down.”

“And you refused. This she told me.”

“I wasn’t very tactful,” I admitted, “and I guess I raised my voice. But that crucifix belonged to my mother, and I’ve as much right to be Catholic as Malka has to be a Jew. And I don’t think I should be persecuted because of my religion.”

He nodded rapidly, but he didn’t answer at first. He bounced out of his seat, walked a few steps, spun round, and eyed me as if he were taking my measure. “Malka said you called her a liar.”

“I didn’t,” I said indignantly.

“Did you tell her that what she said wasn’t true?”

I felt myself turn red. “I might have,” I admitted. “She was saying such horrible things. About Christians and even priests slaughtering Jews — things I knew
can’t
be true. But I never called her a liar. I wouldn’t be so disrespectful to an old lady.”

He threw up his hands. “Yes, but to Malka —”

“Yes, sir,” I agreed, because I understood what he meant. To say that someone isn’t speaking the truth isn’t the same as calling her a liar. But to Malka, touchy old Malka, it might seem like the same thing.

“So you will be a good, kind girl and ask her to forgive you.”

I thought of eating humble pie before Malka, and I winced a little, but only a little. I was still so happy about the books. And the truth is, I’m not a very proud girl. Heroines in novels are proud, but for a hired girl, it isn’t convenient.

So I nodded and stood up. “I’ll go and tell her I’m sorry,” I promised. Then an uneasy thought came to me. “But they weren’t true, were they? The things she said?”

He answered slowly, “In America, no.”

He has a special way of saying those words,
America
and
American.
It’s as if each syllable is precious. He lifted one hand in command, so I sat back down. He pulled up a chair and leaned forward. I knew that he was going to entrust me with something important.

“You must understand that Malka is a child of the Old Country. She was born in Germany in the eighteen forties. When she was a child, she knew what it was to have other children call her a dirty Jew, to spit on her, to throw stones. She never knew her grandfather, who was killed in the riots in Frankfurt. He was beaten to death with a shovel. Malka’s grandmother saw it happen and told her the story. Such stories take root in a child’s mind.”

I understood that. I remember how sad stories haunted me when I was a little thing. One of the boys at school lost a finger chopping wood, and at night I couldn’t go to sleep for thinking about the pain and the blood.

“So when Malka sees a crucifix, she remembers how Christians have tormented the Jews.”

I protested. “But the rioters who killed Malka’s grandfather — they weren’t Christian, were they? I mean, they were criminals. Weren’t they?”

He looked as if he was sorry for me. “They were Christian men. I don’t mean to suggest that all Christians are like that. But Christian persecution has gone on for centuries. And those who have burned and tortured and oppressed us have done so in Christ’s name.”

“But that was long ago!”

“Not so long ago,” Mr. Rosenbach corrected me. “It’s hard for you to understand, because you’ve grown up in America, and America is truly the Promised Land. Even here, there is bigotry, but there are laws to protect us. Outside America, there are
pogroms
— massacres. Six years ago, in Kishinev, more than a hundred Jews were killed by an angry mob. The police did not interfere, and the murderers were never punished. The streets were piled high with our dead; even Jewish babies were torn to pieces.” He closed his eyes. “I don’t tell you these things to hurt you. I say them because they are true.”

“But those people in Kishinev —” I faltered. The truth is, I’ve never even heard of Kishinev. I have no idea where it is. “Were they Christians? Were they
Catholic
?”

“The mob was led by priests,” said Mr. Rosenbach. “Not Roman Catholic priests this time, but Orthodox priests: men of God, chanting, ‘Kill the Jews.’ It was the day after Easter. Good Friday and Easter have always been the most dangerous times for us. We Jews are called Christ-killers, though if you read your Bible, you will discover that Jesus was Himself a Jew, and that it was the Romans who put Him to death.”

I felt sick. I had such horrible pictures in my mind: the mobs in the street, the corpses, and Christian priests killing little babies. I felt my eyes get hot, and I was filled with shame. I didn’t want to cry. I’m supposed to be eighteen. I blurted out, “I don’t see why nobody likes the Jews.”

“I, too, have wondered about this,” said Mr. Rosenbach, with a wry grimace that helped me recover myself.

“My teacher, Miss Chandler, took the newspaper. She used to tell us about things that were going on in the world. But she never told us the Jews were being killed.”

“May I ask if Miss Chandler was a Jew?”

“Of course not,” I said. Miss Chandler a Jew! “Nobody’s a Jew where I come from. The only Jews I knew were Isaac and Rebecca, in
Ivanhoe.
And —” I stopped.

“And?” Mr. Rosenbach said, so encouragingly that I had to go on.

“And Fagin, in
Oliver Twist.
”

“Ah, Fagin.” Mr. Rosenbach leaped up and went to one of the bookcases. He stared through the glass doors at the scarlet-bound set of Dickens. “Well, Dickens was a master. When a great writer sets out to create a monster, he creates a great monster. I suppose there are people who hate my race all the more because of Fagin. But Fagin is a bad Jew, because he eats sausages, which are
treif.
And in a later book, Dickens repented of his anti-Semitism and wrote about a good Jew. . . .” He sighed. “Though the good Jew, Riah, is not as memorable as Fagin.”

I recognized that word,
anti-Semitism,
from my first night at the Rosenbachs’. “What is that?” I inquired. “What is anti —?”

“Anti-Semitism. The hatred of the Jews,” said Mr. Rosenbach. “The word is modern, but the hatred has a long history. We’ve been hated for thousands of years.”

“I don’t understand it,” I said.

He shrugged. “Perhaps we are both too innocent to understand it. But we have wandered from the point. What I was trying to explain is that for Malka, your crucifix is not a symbol of the God you love, but of the Christians who have oppressed the Jews. Can you understand that?”

I thought about Malka. For some reason, it wasn’t hard to picture her as a little girl. I imagined her: a little black fly of a child, listening with big scared eyes to her grandmother’s stories. “I guess I can,” I said. “Anyway, I’ll tell her I’m sorry. I never meant to call her a liar. But I still don’t know what to do about my crucifix. Must I take it down?”

“That is for you to decide. I have no wish to persecute you for your faith,” he said, and though he smiled very kindly, I knew our talk had come to an end.

Now I am writing in the library. After my bath, I put on my old brown dress and crept downstairs to write. It will be midnight in another fifteen minutes, and then I must go to bed, because I promised Mr. Rosenbach.

But I want to write two more things. One is that I made up with Malka. It wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be. She was sitting in the kitchen with the Thomashefsky cat in her lap, so I went and knelt before her. I acted as if I was kneeling to stroke the cat, but I was really kneeling because I wanted to atone for all the bad things that were done to the Jews.

I told her I was sorry and that I hadn’t meant to call her a liar. I had a whole speech planned, very penitent and touching, but before I could say much, the cat bit me. I wasn’t hurting him — I was rubbing his cheek with one finger. But he bit me. I swear that cat knows I’m a Gentile.

Malka’s face brightened. She’d been listening to me stonily, but having the cat bite me cheered her right up. She said Thomashefsky was a bad boy, though I know she loved him all the more for it.

But pretending to scold the cat was her way of making up. She asked if I wanted a cookie. When I said I did, she put the cat off her lap and went to the icebox to pour me a glass of milk. While I was eating her cookies, I promised I’d take the crucifix off the wall.

So that’s the second thing I did. I took down the crucifix. I decided I’d sleep with it under my pillow. That way, it doesn’t bother Malka, but Jesus is still close to me. Even though taking Him down is a little bit like being persecuted, it isn’t the kind of persecution where babies are torn apart in the street.

I think this is a good compromise, and I feel peaceful and kind of virtuous. But when I think of the things Mr. Rosenbach told me, I don’t feel virtuous anymore. I feel ashamed and shocked that Christians can be so bad. And it seems to me that Jews like Mr. Rosenbach must be very good not to hate all Christians — though it would be unfair of him to hate me, because I’ve never done any anti-Semitism.

I wonder what my new bathrobe will look like.

Wednesday, July the nineteenth, 1911

I want to read, but I have so much to write! Today I had my day off, and I spent a fortune — a fortune! — in Rosenbach’s Department Store. I rode the streetcar, I met Nora Himmelrich, and I have a new HAT!

I am wildly excited about my hat, so I’ll write about that first. It’s cream-colored straw trimmed with cornflowers and a pale-pink taffeta ribbon. Mimi says it’s a Cheyenne-style hat, which means that the brim turns up in front, more on one side than the other. It’s awfully becoming. Mimi says my hat has a lot of style for a dollar and seventy cents. A dollar and seventy cents! Ma would be horrified if she knew I spent that on a hat. But Mimi seemed to think it was a bargain, and in a way it was, because I saw one hat that cost
twelve dollars.
Mimi said that was because it had a lot of ostrich feathers, which are becoming very dear. It’s a pity girls don’t run department stores, because Mimi seems to know a lot about such things.

Mimi was in a bad humor when we met today, almost silent, except when she was explaining to me about the streetcar. She sat next to me with her nose in the air and a grouch on her face. I made up my mind that I wasn’t going to let a little girl of twelve be rude to me without saying anything, so at last I asked her what the matter was. Then she burst out talking.

She said her father was mad because she hadn’t read any of the books he gave her, and he held
me
up as an example. He said that here I was, a poor hard-working girl, willing to stay up all night in order to read and study, and there was Mimi, with everything made easy for her, refusing to be educated.

Well, I think Mr. Rosenbach has a point. But I didn’t say so, because I can see how aggravating it would be to have your father say you ought to be more like the hired girl. Mimi says her father is mad for education. Just now, he is trying to found a new school — it seems like I should write
find
instead of
found,
but Mimi said
found —
for Christian and Jewish children. Mr. Solomon and Mr. David went to a Quaker school, which is willing to accept Jews, but only if there aren’t too many. It’s a very good school, but when Mr. Rosenbach wanted to send Mimi, they said they weren’t going to take any more Jews. They offered to make an exception and have one more if Mr. Rosenbach would give the school ten thousand dollars.
Ten thousand dollars!
I think those Quakers have a lot of gall, asking for that. But even though Mr. Rosenbach
has
ten thousand dollars — imagine having ten thousand dollars to give away! — he didn’t give it to the Quakers. He said with that much money, he could found (find) his own school, so he and his friends are pooling their money to start one. Only I think he’s going to be very disappointed, because Mimi doesn’t want to go to the new school. She says it’s going to be an especially excellent school, and she knows what that means: too much work!