![]() I, too, had once been regimented by piano lessons, but it was no use. 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 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. 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. Sometimes it bleated meekly, hesitantly sometimes it raged, like scales gone berserk. ![]() It was not a radio or a needle wobbling on a turntable it was living notes cascading from piano keys, and it was temperamental. ![]() 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. ![]()
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