Epitaph Read Online Free PDF Page B

woman. I’m going to ride a bicycle. And vote.”
    â€œAnd how are you going to make a living?” Hattie inquired. “You think Papa is going to support you while you’re out voting and being emancipated?”
    â€œIt would be a mitzvah for the girls to take lessons,” Sophie pointed out. “Evelyn Hirsch is a widow. She needs the money.” She waited a moment before adding piously, “Maimonides says the highest form of charity is to help that someone should make a honest, good living.”
    Henry glanced at Hattie.
    She looked at him narrow-eyed, then shrugged. “Fine,” she said. It’s on your head, she meant.
    â€œThey can go to the concert,” Henry told his wife, “but that’s all.”
    SO SADIE AND HATTIE MARCUS accompanied Mrs. Hirsch and Dora to some lady’s piano recital a few nights later. And to her mother’s delight, Sadie came home simply dying to take piano lessons.
    Everything about the recital had thrilled her. That dress! Ivorysatin, gleaming in the limelight. The lady’s hair! Sweeping smoothly upward, adorned with tiny flowers and pearls. Her creamy shoulders. Those jeweled bracelets flashing as her hands moved. The rapt attention of the audience, all eyes on the performer. The waves of applause! With the sudden, certain emotion of adolescence, Josephine Sarah Marcus became unalterably determined to tour the world as a concert pianist. New York, Paris, London—they were out there, waiting for her!
    All she needed was a piano.
    Everything might have turned out differently if Henry Marcus had simply told her, “We can’t afford it,” but he had never been able to say no to Sadie. What he said instead was “I don’t got time to shop for a piano.”
    Big mistake.
    For the next week, whenever he sat down, Sadie pounced, and it was “Can we look for a piano this afternoon, Papa?” He came up with excuses. He was making inquiries, he told her. A customer thought she might be willing to sell him her piano. Two days later: “The lady changed her mind.” That kind of thing.
    But Sadie wouldn’t let it go. Her whole future depended on this. Her father was cruel and neglectful. He obviously hated her. Well, she hated him. If she could not have a piano, she did not want to live .
    Every supper ended with hysterical tears, dire threats, slammed doors. Hattie stood it as long as she could before marching Sadie into the back room of the bakery and showing her the books. “We’re barely making a living,” she said, and she had the figures to prove it. “Papa’s killing himself, and you are a selfish pig. There isn’t going to be a piano. So quit asking.”
    Sadie sulked for a few days before shifting the terms of the discussion. “We don’t need to buy a piano,” she told Hattie. “Mrs. Hirsch says I can practice at her house. Can we afford just the lessons, Hattie? Please?”
    Hattie had not been thrilled by the concert. She was routinely up atfour in the morning to work at the store and had fallen asleep halfway through the recital, bored senseless by a Mozart piece that sounded like an endless repetition of Deedle deedle deedle deedle. On the other hand, being asked—please—for permission to do something . . . Well, now. That was thrilling. That was not something Hattie wanted to let go too quickly.
    â€œI’ll think about it,” she said.
    For the next three weeks, Hattie’s citadel was stormed. In the end, she agreed to pay Mrs. Hirsch twenty-five cents a week to cover Sadie’s lessons but only because she expected that the expense would be short-term. “She’ll give up inside a month,” Hattie predicted, but to everyone’s frank surprise, Sadie kept going to Mrs. Hirsch’s week after week, month after month.
    When questioned, she rarely remembered what she was working on, but honestly, what was there to