The sound of the notes is sudden and loud in the silence of the apartment, and so Isabelle starts softly, easing gently into the piece. There are still sections where she stumbles, where her fingering is wrong, but finally she can make it through from start to finish with enough fluency that the sonata seems to cohere into something she can listen to as well as play. Somehow, it is more pleasing to hear the melody coming from beneath her own fingers than it is to hear Horowitz play the same notes on the stereo. His version is flawless, elegant, perfectly tempoed; hers, while bumpy at times and unsure, is her own. She can control the tempo, the volume, the duration and strength of the crescendos, which when she hears them played by others often seem understated, begging for more sound. It makes her feel somehow swollen inside as she plays, as if she might burst. Sometimes, like now, it makes her tired.

She nears the end of the first movement and slows her fingers down. She plays the last notes slowly, gently, and then puts her hands in her lap. She listens for the groan of the elevator, for sounds of her mother, but it is quiet. Sometimes she feels guilty not to share this music with her mother; her mother used to love to hear her play. But she can’t help herself. She can’t help but deprive her mother of that satisfaction, and it makes Isabelle not like much who she is, at least that part of her. She could keep playing right now, she knows. She could play even after her mother has returned, but she won’t. She could, but she can’t.

Ruth sits in the lobby of Isabelle’s school waiting for her nine o’clock Monday meeting with the headmistress. In a canvas bag at her feet are all of Isabelle’s assignments from the week before, completed and ready to be handed in. When she leaves, she’ll take home with her Isabelle’s graded work and another week’s worth of assignments that she knows her daughter will finish in a day. She should stop at the bookstore, too, and pick up some new books; right now, Isabelle is devouring anything to do with World War II. In the past month she has read a biography of Patton, Stalin’s journals, and a Japanese historian’s account of Pearl Harbor. Before World War II, her interest was the Roman Empire, and before that, Emily Dickinson. Sometimes Ruth wonders where her daughter came from.