"The Origin Of Species"
by
“Say! What you think!” cried Rebecca Einstein to her friend and neighbor Esther Nolan. “What you think we got to our house?”
Esther confessed ignorance.
“A baby,” cried the triumphant Rebecca.
“It’s mine,” said Esther promptly. “I writes such a letter on the Central Park Stork he shall bring me a baby. I tells him I got a crib even. It’s too little fer me. I likes I shall lay all longed out on the sofa. Und extra he goes and makes mistakes and leaves it by your house. It’s boys, ain’t it?”
Rebecca admitted it was a boy.
“And did you write such letters on Storks?”
Again Rebecca admitted that she had not. “We don’t got to write no letters over babies,” said she with pride. “We gets ’em anyways. My mamma is got thirteen childrens. We ain’t all babies now, but we was.”
Esther returned crestfallen to her second-floor home, and sought the comforting arms of Mrs. Moriarty, her chaperon and guardian.
“But whatever made you write for a baby?” demanded Mrs. Moriarty, when the Stork’s carelessness had been explained to her. “Aren’t you and your father and me happy enough in this grand new house without a baby to be botherin’ us?”
Unconsciously she had touched the root of Esther’s trouble.
“I needs a baby,” she wailed, “the whiles my papa he ain’t lovin’ no more mit me. And I wants somebody shall love me.”
“Tut, tut, now!” admonished Mrs. Moriarty, and then again, “Tut, tut! Now Esther, dear,” said she, after a pause, “you’re getting to be a big girl.”
“I’m eight. I will become nine.”
“Please God you will. But, anyway, you’re big enough to know that your father loves you as much as ever he did, but hasn’t time to show it, bein’ in heavy trouble, God help him. You know about your auntie, her that was to have the bringing up of you as your father often tells ye.”
“She don’t never comes,” Esther complained. “I waits und I waits und my auntie don’t comes, und mine papa ain’t lovin’, und I needs I shall have a baby out of that Central Park.”
The heart loneliness of which Esther complained was real enough. The material prosperity which had recently fallen upon her had deprived her of all the old comfortable joys which had brightened less prosperous days. Chief among these had been her father’s light-hearted companionship. Mrs. Moriarty, the brightest feature of the new conditions, did her best to cheer and comfort the motherless child, but she could not hope to take the place of Jacob Morowsky, who had changed in so much more than name since he became John Nolan. Esther had dutifully tried–and failed–to understand why she, who had for so long been Esther Morowsky, was now Esther Nolan. And yet the explanation was sufficiently ordinary, and was the cause of her improved surroundings and the result of her father’s preoccupation.
Jacob Morowsky had, upon his first coming to America, found employment with old John Nolan, whose little shop of sacred statues, crucifixes, and holy pictures was the survival of the Irish Catholic era in Henry Street’s history. There are not many traces of this era now remaining, but John Nolan’s little shop was one of them, and economy overcame racial prejudice on the day he engaged Jacob Morowsky as his assistant. Later he congratulated himself upon this apostasy, calling it interchangeably “an act of charity, no more than that,” or “the best bit of business ever I done,” for Morowsky was an artist, and the heavenly choir, as represented by John Nolan, soon became separate dainty works of art more like Tanagra figurines than like the stiff and stereotyped figures which John Nolan’s six or seven moulds had formerly produced.
Later still, when John Nolan was gathered to his fathers, and afforded, one must presume, the opportunity of judging the accuracy of his portraits, he left his business and his name to Jacob.