Letter on Walnut College graduate residence stationery, two sheets, folded. Helen P. Galt's hand. Posted at the campus post office Monday afternoon, 7 October 1957. Received by Margaret Galt Hewitt in Akron, Ohio, on the morning of 9 October. Kept by Mrs. Hewitt with her other letters from Helen in a tin in the linen closet of the house on Roselawn Avenue.
Margaret —
My notebook is gone. I am writing this Monday after supper to tell you and to make myself say the sentence to somebody whose face I cannot see while I am saying it, so that I will know whether I really believe it.
I went to the lab last night, Sunday, to fetch the notebook for tonight's preparation. The seminar is tomorrow at four. I had spent Saturday with Joyce as I said I would; we drove to the coast and walked, and I did not think about chemistry between nine in the morning and seven at night, which is the first time in three weeks that has been true. On Sunday I was going to have supper at the rooming-house and then go down to the lab for an hour and write out the chalkboard table I am going to put up tomorrow. I went over at half past six. The notebook was not in the right-hand drawer where I left it. It was not in the left-hand drawer. It was not on the desk. It was not on the bench. It was not in the cabinet. It is not in the lab.
I came back to the rooming-house and I did not sleep. I have not slept. I went to Mrs. Steed first thing this morning and she showed me the access log. Roger was in the building Saturday afternoon from 2:15 to 4:50. He was not in the lab on Sunday or Monday morning. Dr. Morley was not in the building until this morning at 8:30. The janitor Mr. Janik was in the building twice on Saturday. There is no other name on the list.
I went up to Dr. Morley. I told him. He listened. He did not say what I expected, which was Roger took it. He said, very carefully, that the seminar would be postponed by a week. He said this in the way one says something one has decided before being told the reason for the decision. He said he would speak with Roger privately. He said he would prefer that I not be in the room for that conversation.
Margaret, I have, on the one hand, three columns I can re-run on Tuesday and Wednesday. The data is in my head and in the rough scratch-sheets I keep on the bench, which Roger did not take. The seminar I will give in a fortnight will not be exactly the seminar I would have given tomorrow, but it will, I think, be the same in its conclusion.
I have, on the other hand, a feeling I cannot name. Roger came up to me at noon today, in the corridor outside Dr. Morley's office, and asked me what had happened and whether I had eaten lunch. He was wearing the same brown wool tie he was wearing on Friday afternoon. I told him I had eaten and that Dr. Morley was speaking with him at one. He said oh. He looked at me for a moment too long. I did not say did you take my notebook. I did not say I think you took my notebook. I went to the library and sat in the periodicals room with a back issue of the Journal of the Chemical Society until two o'clock, when I judged the conversation in Dr. Morley's office would be over.
I will write you again on Wednesday. The columns will tell what the columns tell. The man who took the notebook will eventually be the man who returned the notebook, because what he has done is not a thing he can finish, only a thing he can delay. I should have locked the drawer. I should not have had to lock the drawer.
I am sorry to land all of this on a Monday. Give my love to John and to the boys.
— Helen
P.S. — The Soviet satellite went up on Friday. We did not hear of it until Saturday afternoon at the coast, on the car wireless. Joyce wept and I did not know why, until she said her brother is at White Sands and will be working from nothing for the rest of the year. The world is bigger by one moon and my notebook is, by the same arithmetic, smaller by one book. I am not surprised that the second thing should not seem to matter compared with the first; I am surprised that it does, still, to me. — H.