living room that had three colored glass globes, red, blue, green, that could be lit separately or all together, that she used to read by, choosing lights in different combinations; the eight-inch-tall “grandfather clock,” its face painted with the tiniest of flowers, that stood on the dresser in the room she shared with Sylvia; the small brass bowl on the bathroom shelf in which she’d kept her hair pins and barrettes—objects that she had looked at without feeling anything all her life. But Bartha had left behind things he’d collected, things he had chosen.
Even the things he hadn’t left behind but had sent on from Brooklyn were not with him now but were in storage, for there was no room for them in Vilmos and Clara’s basement. He had told her at the start that there was plenty of money, that she was not to worry (it had not, in fact, occurred to her to worry), that he had “investments and so on” and they would “manage nicely.” Still, he’d told her, as calmly as if it were nothing to him, they would stay with Vilmos and he’d manage with a rented room nearby in which he would give lessons using an old upright piano he had rented while his own grand piano remained locked up in a warehouse, until such time as he had sufficient students once again to justify their renting a house of their own, part of which would be set aside as a studio.
Somehow he had made it sound as if this might occur at any moment, although the few students he had found so far (there were two of them; there had been three, but one had not returned after the second lesson) had come to him through Clara, who’d hung up flyers she had typed herself. new york singing teacher will give lessons to your children at a reasonable price! Bartha had also taken out an ad in the newspaper, but so far that had come to nothing. And yet he spoke as if he had no worries, no regrets. He acted—they both acted, Esther thought—as if it went without saying that she’d left behind much more than he had. The only time he’d spoken of how he felt about leaving was when they had first discussed the possibility of doing it, and what he’d said then was that leaving New York would be “nothing” to him, that it would not trouble him at all, that he was worried only about her—about her leaving school, her family and friends, the only place, the only people, she had ever known.
He had been lying. She had not even considered this as she sat across from him in a luncheonette on Coney Island Avenue, one neither of them had ever been in before, in a back corner booth. By then they had been sitting, talking (she
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