Devotion. Michelle Herman

was it that they behaved so recklessly, so badly? (What she overheard from girls she didn’t know or hardly knew in school astounded her. How did they cause their parents so much grief and worry without ever worrying themselves? “It’s just as if they were a different species,” she’d said once to Leah, who’d said, “No. They’re only silly. They’re only stupid. They don’t think.”)

      She was exhausted and close to tears when she let herself into the apartment, and so pale that her mother exclaimed, “You’re getting sick!” and insisted on taking her temperature. (She would not have been surprised if she had had a fever.) She was relieved when after this one evening out with her, Bartha resumed his habit of so many years of going to these restaurants alone.

      How was it that she had never thought before about how he must miss them? He used to go twice, three times a week. And she had never given any thought to all the other things he must miss, too—the opera and the Philharmonic and Carnegie Hall. The Metropolitan Museum, to which he had taken her on every one of the occasions (three) she had managed to slip away from her parents and the store and her friends without a lie—except perhaps a lie of omission—on a weekend afternoon. Oh, and also the Frick, where he had promised to take her but had never had the chance to, “to see the Vermeers, the best paintings in the world,” he said. And the Museum of Modern Art, which she had never visited with him, although she’d been there on class trips, once almost every year. Bartha liked to “drop in, he told Esther, “once each season, at its start, to mark time’s passage.”

      And how he must miss Sheepshead Bay, where he often walked, admiring the docked fishing boats! They made him feel as if he had slipped away to somewhere else, he would tell her (“but then it is so reassuring to find that one is still here after all”). Sometimes he would talk for a few minutes with the fishermen, whose Brooklyn accents were, he said, “so magnificently, so beautifully at odds” with the fishing stories they offered him.

      Sheepshead Bay. And the boardwalk along Brighton Beach. And the pavilion on the boardwalk, where he used to sit on Sundays in good weather, looking at the ocean while he listened to the men who played accordions and fiddles there and told each other jokes in Yiddish. How he must miss a place to sit where there was anything to see, to hear.

      As she used the back of her fork to nudge her vegetables up to the edge of her plate, she thought of how, when they’d first come to Omaha, Bartha had sat once for an hour on Vilmos and Clara’s front porch, and afterwards told her that he had seen “a hundred cars fly down the street, and not one person walking.” Why, he must miss walking in a place where other people walked. He must miss Brooklyn and Manhattan’s streets, he must miss seeing crowds of people. He must miss subways, buses—everything, she thought, and that she’d never thought of this before filled her with shame.

      Think how much he must miss his studio, she told herself. Think how much he must miss his own belongings. There had been nothing in the apartment she’d grown up in that had felt to her as if it were importantly her own, that meant enough to her for her to think of taking when she left—and even so there were times when she missed some object—the round, blue plaster of Paris box with the doll’s head (head, neck and shoulders, and cascading blond hair) that topped it, a gift from the first-grade teacher for whom she’d worked as a monitor when she was in the sixth grade; the tall lamp beside the loveseat in the 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