A French Doll

Fiction

- By Cynthia Ozick. Photo Ilustration Joan Wong

The music came down the hall from a door marked 3-C in one of those neighborhood clusters of five-story walkups, which some years later a brutish city planner would raze in favor of an imperial highway

It was not a radio or a needle wobbling on a turntable; it was living notes cascading from piano keys, and it was temperamental. Sometimes it bleated meekly, hesitantly; sometimes it raged, like scales gone berserk. The piano was mainly in need of tuning. Sometimes you heard it, sometimes not. Coming home from school at three o’clock in the afternoon, I would now and then set my knapsack down on the zigzag tile floor in front of that door and listen, not to the music but to its absence. I pressed my ear hard against the peephole until it seemed to me that someone on the other side was breathing, exhaling with an odd little groan—or was it the faint inmost rumble of my own heartbeat? An inch above the peephole was a slot with the name Isidore Atlas.

The piano itself was not an anomaly. Every apartment where there were children, from the first to the fifth story, harbored at least a secondhand upright, and the blend of the lessons, or the practicing, sent out a noisy staccato throb up and down the stairs and all along the corridors. I, too, had once been regimented by piano lessons, but it was no use. I had no facility or patience for it, and, besides, my mother, who worked as a typist in an insurance office, was too fatigued to enforce it. She believed that a fatherless child, a half orphan such as I was, ought not to be compelled to conform. There was another reason that I was freed from the piano: the cost of Miss Zink, the piano teacher.