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told the girls, a poor relation of the Pinkertons of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency, so they should think of her, their teacher, “as the national detective, the enforcer, if you will, of the beauties of the English language.” She had a long face and narrow nose, and her mouth seemed fixed in a permanent look of being put upon, her thin lips turned down somehow even when she smiled, which she hardly ever did. She greeted her class each morning by reminding them of how many days were left in the school calendar and how many days were left till she herself could finally, thank God, retire. “Good morning, ladies,” she would say, as they all took their seats. “You’ll all be pleased to know that there are one hundred and fifty-six days remaining in the school year and, by my calculations, eight hundred and seventy-four days, give or take a day of sick leave, remaining in my illustrious career patrolling these august halls of learning.”
    She had divided up the class into three separate choruses based, she said, on the heft and resonance of their voices. Miriam thought it an odd coincidence, though, that she had put all the gentile girls into one chorus, all the Jewish girls into another, and all the Irish and Italian girls into a third. She had then divided each chorus further into high and low voices. Th ose with high-pitched voices she referred to as “light,” and those with low-pitched voices she referred to as “dark.” Th en she had assigned the choruses a poem to learn each week; whichever chorus gave the best performance, which meant striking the proper balance between dark and light, earned the privilege of giving a public recitation to the entire school at Friday-morning assembly and, best of all, the opportunity to join the drama club.
    At the beginning of each class, Mrs. Pinkerton would have the entire class read out loud from the introduction to their poetry anthology to remind them of what a poem was. “Louder, ladies,” she would say, “louder, enunciate, please, no mumbling, expectorate the ‘spuds’ from your mouth, please.” Th ey would read together about how “verse originates in intense emotion which finds no ready release in activity; this pent-up feeling quickens one’s sense of rhythm and expresses itself in a manner of speech adequate both to the thought and to the pulsing motion of that thought, and this in turn enables one to gain a heightened power that allows him to substitute ‘unity’ for frustration, routine, and the boredom that comes from emotional poverty.”
    Each morning, as Miriam read these sentences, she would imagine that she was reading instead about the stage and all the feelings that a song released. She longed to perform publicly, to sing in front of others. She had a good voice, everyone said so. And everyone said, too, that she was beautiful—her big blue eyes so eager to take in everything around her, her hair done up in the latest fashion, her blond curls and waves swept up off her high forehead, her figure made more slim and rounded by the crepe day dresses she loved to wear, by the drapes and folds that followed her sleek shape. Movie-star good looks, they said. Shirley Temple, all grown up. She noticed how men mostly, but even some women, would look at her now when she was passing in the street.
    But it was already spring, and her chorus, “the Jewesses,” as Mrs. Pinkerton called them, had never once, not once, been chosen to recite to the school. Only the gentile girls’ chorus, week in, week out, seemed able to strike that je ne sais quoi balance between light and dark, to articulate the just-right tonal subtleties of Tennyson or Longfellow, Shakespeare or Keats. Th e Irish, Italian, and Jewish girls were either too light or too dark. It was unfortunate; it wasn’t their fault, Mrs. Pinkerton consoled them. “ Th e tang of steerage,” she said, her mouth grimacing into a smile, still clung to their intonations.
    S O M IRIAM FORMED a