This he had told her during her first lesson. He had not been bragging, she understood, but letting her know what she should have known already when she came to him that first time with the note of introduction from her music teacher at school. He mentioned it in passing—the way someone else might have said, “Oh yes, I sold vacuum cleaners once, a lot of them. I was pretty good at it.” Without arrogance, and yet also without false humility, he spoke of a certain performance, a certain mezzo soprano with whom he had sung then for the first time. He was making a point about Esther’s own voice, if she worked hard and did everything he said, if she stopped singing from her chest and from her throat and set aside the “very silly” show tunes she so loved, two of which she had just sung for him, or tried to sing for him—for he had interrupted the first one, saying, “Clambakes? Do not use this lovely voice to sing to me of clambakes!” and the second with a shout (“Corn and Kansas and blueberry pie? And what does a beautiful girl who has spent her entire life in New York City know about corn and Kansas and the making of pies and so on? No, no, no! This is a voice made for singing of tragic love, of longing”). She was flattered, naturally, but so dazzled by what he had just revealed about himself that she couldn’t concentrate on being pleased. She was speechless as she watched him move about his studio that afternoon, his hands—small, pale, slim-fingered hands that shot out extravagantly, suddenly, from the cuffs of his suit jacket like little white birds newly freed—making eights and circles in the air as he explained his method, explained what she would have to unlearn to begin her studies with him.
She had never met—had never seen—anyone who was in any way like him. His hair was the longest, wildest hair she’d ever seen on somebody who wasn’t young, and much longer than she’d ever seen on any boy or man of any age. The long white curls flopped and swung around his head as he paced, telling her what she must not do anymore and what she must begin to do. She saw that he was old, she knew that he was old—it was not as if she didn’t notice it, or noticed it but didn’t “understand” it (which was what Kathleen had said once—“It’s like you don’t even understand how old he is”—and also what her father had said, later, in a meaner, uglier way she still didn’t want to think about, even after so much time had passed). Bartha was old but he was not “an old man,” she tried to explain (to Kathleen—not her father; to her father that night she did not try to explain anything once he started yelling at her and pounding his fists on the door frame and the stove and the kitchen table, and she left home that same night, climbing out the window like a thief whose job was done, without having said another word to him).
Bartha didn’t look or act or move like an old man—not like the old men she knew, not like Kathleen’s grandfather or his friends or the other old men in the neighborhood, the ones who came into her parents’ candy store. He was nothing like her own grandfathers—what she could remember of them. Both had died a long time ago. What she remembered was that both had been small, mostly quiet men, though one—Papa Jack, her father’s father—had been given to sporadic fits of temper, during which he would yell, either at his wife (Grandma Leni, also long gone now) or at his only son, Esther’s father, in a language Esther didn’t understand and which her father never spoke although he must have understood, and which she knew was called Ladino. These outbursts sent shock waves through the family but seemed to leave Papa Jack himself unaffected, for within seconds after each of them, he was calm, he was speaking English again, and his voice was gentle, so unscary it was hard to imagine how it could have been so terrifying not even a minute before.
Her other grandfather had been Papa Shimon, who hardly spoke at all, but when he did it was in a mix of three languages—Yiddish, Russian, and English—so that Esther had understood only a third of what he’d said. Not that it mattered, since she could not recall him ever speaking to her, only to her mother or, stiffly, to her father. His wife, Grandma Pesse, Esther had never even known. She had died when Esther’s mother was still a child.
Both grandfathers had died before Esther was ten years old, but she remembered that they had both been nearly bald, a few strands of stiff gray hair slicked down flat across their shiny heads, and that both of them had spent all their time in chairs or in recliners—sitting, resting, lying down. That was what old men did.
Bartha didn’t sit that first day, her first lesson, for more than a minute at a time. As he talked, he kept on pacing—confidently, grandly: around and around the piano and the chairs and the glass-shaded stand-up lamps behind them, around the little tables topped with stacks of books and papers, around the music stand and the green velvet sofa and Esther herself as she stood, hands clasped (clenched, in fact—and even so they trembled) in the center of the room. If he sat, briefly, on one of the upholstered chairs or on the piano bench, it was only because he had snatched a book from one of the piles and wanted to find a particular piece of music, to demonstrate a point—but then he was on his feet again, moving again.
More than two years had passed since that day, the day he had become her teacher, and for months now (three more months and it would be a year!) he had not been her teacher—and yet even after all these months that they had lived together, sometimes she would catch herself still thinking of him in that way. It happened when she came upon him unexpectedly: if she saw him on the street when she was out with Alexander and he had decided to come home a little early, or if she returned from a walk with the baby and found him already there, drinking a cup of tea and studying The New York Times. She would not think János is home, as it seemed to her she should by now. She would think Here he is, the teacher.
She never spoke of this to him, since she could not be sure how he would react. She never liked to tell him things if she could not prepare for his response first. What she told herself was that a lapse like this was natural, that after all he’d been her teacher for a long time before he had become her lover—and even then he had not ceased to be her teacher, for her twice-weekly lessons with him had continued right up to the day before they had had to run away together. She had not yet had the opportunity to grow accustomed to the change in their relations—that was what she told herself, and sometimes it eased her mind. But at other times it seemed to her that there had been no change in their relations—that, but for their lovemaking itself (on the green velvet sofa, folded out into a bed, after her lesson each Tuesday and Friday afternoon), nothing had changed between her first lesson and her last.
And in the months since? What had really changed, besides the plain fact that they now lived together? He continued to treat her just as he had when she had been his student, formally (though pleasantly, and almost always kindly), tolerantly (and some days only tolerantly, which both then and now disheartened and unsettled her), and sometimes with pride (then, when she had sung particularly well; now, when she behaved the way he wished her to—graciously, unchildishly, “as befits a gentlewoman.” Yentlevoman, he would say).
The form of their relationship had certainly changed, she thought. But had its contents?
This was such a coolly grown-up question that for an instant she was pleased, and praised herself for thinking of it. And all at once she was thinking of her English teacher, Mr. Inemer—her favorite teacher, the best one she’d had at Lincoln. He was the one who had taught her, junior year, to think about form and content—and now, as if it had been only last week that she’d sat in his classroom, she could hear Mr. Inemer saying sound, direction, rhythm, predetermined limitations, technique, imagery, devices. Wouldn’t he be pleased, and proud of her?
But what could she be thinking of? This was her life, not a poem. And yet—form, meaning structure, shape—she could not only hear him, she could see him perched on the front edge of his desk, counting off each term on his fingers, just as he always did. What do I mean by content? Anybody? Subject matter, theme, motif. Can anybody tell me what motif might be? Esther? I’m willing to bet that you can.
And she could, too. She always could.
But this wasn’t poetry or art or music, this was just her life, and Room 325—last row, first seat—was thirteen hundred miles away. Mr. Inemer was at this very minute