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.
At twelve I knew and perceived far more than twelve-year-olds today know and understand; I already understood the nature of guilt. The mood of that before-the-war world was ominous, torn open, giving off fumes not only of what was but of what would be: there were signs and meanings everywhere, and, drifting from under the lintel of 3-C, hints and implications. I understood also—it quivered in the currents of the gossip—that the unearthly space behind that door sheltered a shrine to a living deity: Isidore Atlas, venerated by Frieda, his wife. The veneration had something, or almost nothing at all, to do with the piano. I was afraid of both of them, though the husband almost never materialized in daylight. Neighbors who claimed that they had once or twice glimpsed the wife laboring up the stairs with her shopping bag testified that she had wolf eyes. The swollen veins on her hands were fattened gray worms. The floating smells of her cooking were vile, stews that smacked of potions.
And at the same time, flickering close to the fear, was the glamour of an unlikely history. It was said that they had been theatre people in their distant prime. Or else that the husband was even now a musician in a nightly piano bar. Or that he had once accompanied the choir of a famous cathedral. Or that he had performed under the baton of Toscanini. Or that all these tales, and perhaps more, were true. Or that they were all of them nonsensical inventions, and that the two old people were only what they seemed to be, elderly folk who kept to themselves.
We knew that the husband was no more when we saw the ambulance men carry a gurney precariously down the three flights of stairs. A frayed flowered sheet covered the shape of a tiny person, no bigger than a child. Two straps, one over the chest, the other around the calves, prevented it from sliding off. The wife watched with her wrathful eyes from the doorway, and the piano was mum until some weeks afterward, when its dismembered parts—first the legs, then the keyboard, then the frame with its harplike interior—were lifted over the bannisters and paraded from floor to lower floor, jingling mad, erratic, hymnlike tunes. From then on, there was silence behind 3-C; the old woman herself—the witch, the baba yaga, the bad fairy of my fright—was deemed defunct.
But she was there. I saw her standing in the partly open door waiting for me. It was plain that she was aware of when school let out, and when I would come by with my knapsack and my house key, a full three hours before my mother returned from her office. Did she also know that I had pressed my ear against her peephole?
Her left hand was clutching a crinkled paper bag; her right hand was curled in an almost-fist, but with the forefinger wagging.
“Girlie, come here,” she called. “I’ve got a nickel for you, go buy yourself a treat.”
She shook the bag. It rattled with loose coins. She was dressed only in a nightgown that was too long: the hem was caught under her naked toes. She told me that her legs were bothering her, she would trust me with the money in the bag, nickels and dimes, and all she wanted was two eggs and a quarter pound of farmer cheese—would I run down to the grocery for her?
Her look was theatrical—the looming nostrils, the wilted, insistent mouth. It could have been an ode she was reciting, or the urgings of a heroine in a play.
“I can’t,” I said. “I’m supposed to start my homework right away when I get home.”
This was a fabrication. I was not surprised by how easily it came; I was under no such ukase, but I had the habit of guarding my habits, and I was fond of being alone. My mother complained that I had no playmates, yet she was often too tired to scold, and I was reluctant to explain how single-mindedly I gave those solitary after-school hours to my drawings. I drew clowns and skaters and bearded men and pretty girls with perfect profiles. I had a collection of colored pencils, and, with these, I delicately shadowed and rounded and ruddied the cheeks of my creations. And once, soon after glimpsing the tiny swaddled bundle of the dead husband on the gurney on its way down the stairs, I attempted to bring it to life again, and made a picture of a stunted dummy with stiff bristly eyelashes, like a doll’s.
But it was not the offer of a nickel that made me all at once cast off my fear of the wife. It was a sudden itch of desire, an envy of what I could see through the doorway: where, everywhere else, there were rag rugs or linoleum, here was a verdant green carpet with fleur-de-lis designs all over it, as if a flowery meadow stretched far into 3-C. If I accepted the nickel, would I be allowed to enter that secret interior?
When I came back, she shook the bag of coins to test that its weight had not seriously lessened, and sniffed the cheese to be certain that it was fresh, and said that as a reward, in addition to the nickel, she would show me something, but only if I promised to help her out with the groceries, and from time to time the pharmacy, whenever her legs were too sore.
“You seem reliable enough,” she said, “and not one of those wild animals which come spilling out of the schools yelling their heads off. How old are you, maybe thirteen, and I don’t suppose you still play with dolls?”
“I’ve never played with dolls.”
But this, too, was a falsehood, invented out of shame. It was only recently that I had given up my predilection for make-believe.
“So much the better. They afflict the mind. What do you do instead?”
I told her that I liked to draw, and that I would be amenable to helping her out. And then she shut the door and left me standing before it on the zigzag tile.
It was two weeks before she opened it again, and again I glimpsed the green vista beyond her. But this time she was dressed in a brick-red blouse with lacy ruffles at the neck and wrists, and a lavishly pleated blue-black skirt, also trimmed with lace, and white stockings and patent-leather shoes with bronze-colored buckles. Her ankles were bandaged in some thick beige fabric, one layer wound over another. She handed me the same paper bag of ringing coins, and a note that listed bread, raspberry jam, butter, coffee, milk, biscuits, potatoes, onions, codfish, and more. An hour later, seeing me breathless from hauling up four sacks of groceries, she gave me three nickels and said she would show me what she had promised—but first, because it had been raining hard that morning, she would inspect the soles of my shoes to see if they were muddy, and hadn’t I been splashing in puddles?
“Take those filthy things off,” she said.
I obeyed, and stepped in my socks into the luxurious caress of that green and flowery meadow. All around were, to my eyes, the furnishings of a palace. A mahogany breakfront, its four glass panels inscribed with inlaid wood tracings, a dark walnut sideboard on curled legs, and Chinese wallpaper—wallpaper!—all waterfalls and tiny footbridges. And, at the center of these marvels, a round table swathed in a damask cloth, and four chairs with elegantly carved backs. I could not have described, or even named, any of these visions, but what they signalled was, or so I apprehend it now, something ceremonial, almost ritual. She made me wait where I stood, and I heard, hidden from my sight, a muffled kitchen clatter, and the sighs of an icebox, and then her heavy steps moved into another room and she brought out, coiled in a floral bedsheet similar to the one that had shrouded the dead man on the gurney, an elongated object.
The body on the gurney had seemed miniature, doll-like. But this was, as she drew it from its windings, an actual doll. The head with its painted face was made of porcelain; the arms and legs were celluloid. It was elaborately dressed, in a long Ceylon-blue tunic with long sleeves edged in lace, and a densely ample lace-hemmed skirt and black velvet slippers over white stockings. Ivory buttons, or what resembled ivory, ran down its front. The silky threads that streamed out of masses of punctures in the buckram scalp, so minuscule they were nearly invisible, were blacker than any human hair. And glinting between the buttons on the breast was, I saw, a little silver key. The doll was long all over; its neck was lax and long and boneless. If it had been able to stand on its own, it would have been uncommonly tall. It was capable of sitting when propped, but then it sprawled. The woman had placed it on one of the carved chairs, where it lolled languidly, with its ankles turned in, one on top of the other. It was like no doll I had ever seen.
And it was both beautiful and repellent, the red lips like tulip petals, the pastel-pink cheeks, the little curved fingertips with their shell-shaped nails. But it was not a plaything, a toy baby doll that a child could dress and undress and pretend to scold in a grownup voice. It was itself a grownup thing, and I watched as she unbuttoned the front of the tunic and twisted the little silver key to unlatch a hollow torso, out of which she plucked a very small piano, made of tin, with diminutive celluloid keys and two strands of ribbon, one to attach to the doll’s left wrist, the other to circle the right.
“Go ahead, touch the hands,” she instructed me. A command, but also a witch’s enticement. “Just give them a bit of a tug, not too hard. Here, let me do it for now and you’ll see for yourself.”
She tapped each celluloid hand separately, and then both together, and out of the belly of the doll came the rippling sound of an unseen music box.
It was because of this fog of the illicit—the shiver of horror at the sight of the hole in the ribless thorax, the eerily displaced sounds—that I told my mother nothing of my afternoons in 3-C, or of my increasing transactions with the widow of Isidore Atlas. It was a bargain that continued on school days and in every weather, and lured far more than my aimless hours with the colored pencils. The grocery, the drugstore, the Chinese laundry, the newsstand, the grinding rounds her oozing legs could no longer bear: for these services I might be admitted to those sumptuous furnishings and the ornate ladylike figure with her limp and languorous limbs. The eviscerating act of unbuttoning, the turn of the silver key, the tethered hands with their shell-like nails, and the foolish little fake piano somehow began to trouble me less and less, and I was no longer unsettled when I noticed threadbare patches here and there in the green carpet, and certain small scratches and nicks that marred the grandeur of the sideboard and the breakfront, and more than one greasy stain in the damask. But the brick-red blouse with its ruffles and lace was kept away; it was only the doll’s implacable stare that escaped the decay all around as it showed its face in the receding after-school light.
It came to me then, when the doll was already familiar in my hands and I tweaked the ribbons and the music began its loops, that the rite of the brick-red blouse and of the silver key (sham silver, and its usefulness, too, was sham—it was the undoing of the buttons that mattered) had a single intent. Was the doll in her fanciful dress meant to mimic the widow of Isidore Atlas, or was the widow purposefully got up like the doll? And meanwhile the nickels had stopped. I hardly minded. I was there for the doll, and for her lazy long arms and her white stockings and velvet slippers, and for her indolent poses, especially when her head slumped over her knees and she looked up at me out of the silky folds of her tunic with a painted gaze that was both detached and mocking. But whatever position or mood she found herself in, she could not resist the mechanical pull of her wrists, and by now it was I who had mastered the summoning of the music.
The doll, I learned on that long-ago sunless November afternoon in 3-C, was the embodiment of a great crime.
She was called a French doll, or else a boudoir doll, or else a fashion doll. She had once been a bourgeois fad (and what was that?), displayed on satin counterpanes, an indulgence for those who could afford her. The music box was not uncommon, though always the melodies were trivial, worthy of no better than an organ grinder with a chimp—but not this music, no! The sublime defiled, the sacred embedded in a thing of vanity, ridiculed, pirated, usurped, stolen. A felony, a wickedness, a sin.
