Saturday, March 31, 1956

Dear Mama,

Thank you for the chocolates. I shared them with some of the other girls on my wing. Nobody wanted to eat the kind with pink jelly stuff inside them, but there is a fat girl named Elspeth who will eat anything and I gave them to her. She has asthma and is excused from P.E. class--lucky. Is asthma something you can catch? If you send chocolates again please send Whitman's. Theirs are better than Schrafft's.

Last Saturday Hermione's mother came for the day and invited me to have lunch with them in town. She brought her man friend along. His name is Nicola and he is very good-looking, with black curly hair and very white teeth. Also he is very much younger than Hermione's mother. I asked Hermione if they would get married and she said no, he is just one of her mother's amours--that is the term she used. We went to the restaurant in the hotel in town, the Lockley. You should have seen the waitresses in there when he walked in, they nearly fell all over themselves trying to be the one to take his order. Usually they look so sulky and mean. There is one there with a big bottom and and a tower of frosted hair who is especially nasty. One time she said that Hermione had bedroom eyes already at thirteen and that if she didn't stop looking at the busboys the way she did she was going to end up in trouble, and it was lucky it was her mother was so rich, because she could probably pay to fix it if she did. Even she tried to act nice, and smiled at us. When she did that I could see why she never does smile--she has a big gap between her teeth, which are big like a rabbit's.

Nicola kissed me on both cheeks when he left, like they do in France. He is trying to be a painter. Do you think he knows Alfred? Probably not. I don't think Alfred knows anybody that young. Hermione says she is going to invite me home one weekend to her mother's weekend place on Long Island. There is an old lady who lives there, a sculptor, who gives garden parties on the weekends and Hermione says that her mother will take us. She says that she will lend me one of her dresses if we go--nothing I have is nice enough.

I am clearing the tables in the dining hall in the evening as part of my work scholarship. I do not mind. I have a way of stacking the plates up on the trays so quickly that everyone wonders how I do it. They think I am going to break them, the way I fling them into piles, but I never do. Some girls stay late after they've finished eating to watch me do it. It is fun. The women in the kitchen call me Rita on account of my red hair.

Alfred wrote me a short letter back in the fall but I have not heard from him since. It was written on a piece of old cardboard with some kind of Chinese characters on one side, I could hardly read it. He said he had sold a painting, is that true? It probably didn't help much if he did. I am sorry that he is no longer living at home but you always said it would come to this in the end.

I don't know if I can come home during the holidays. Hermione said something about me spending spring break with her but I don't know if it will come to anything. If I do come home you must have the piano tuned. Last time I was there the lower octaves so out of tune I could barely stand to play it. I am working on some Schubert impromptus for my piano lesson. Miss Plotz says I have talent but have no discipline, and no real technique. She says it may be too late to change my bad habits at my age, even though I am only 14. But she often says mean things like that to get me to practice more.

Tell Maury he owes me a letter. He has only written me two since I've been here and I've written him I don't know how many. Hug Katschen for me--I miss her. I hope her arthritis is better.

Love,

Dorothea