He went to a trunk at the foot of his bed and opened it and removed an ornate mahogany box and took it to a table beneath a window and unlocked it with a key that he kept in his vest pocket, a key that he often fingered absently as he walked the streets of Pine Hill. He lifted from the box two candlesticks of beautifully cut glass and two white candles. He pushed the candles into the candlesticks and placed them on the table, and then he carefully, ceremoniously, took from the box a framed photograph of a woman with a severe, but distinctive, face. He did not tell me, but I knew it was Amelita Galli-Curci. He leaned the frame against the candlesticks, balancing it, and then, in front of the photograph, he placed a sheet of music with a signature scratched across the face of the page, and on the sheet of music, he placed a necklace of costume jewelry.

I thought he was going to say something to me, offer an explanation, but he did not, and I watched as he sat in the chair at the table, his eyes locked on the photograph. A smile settled warmly into his face. I could see his lips moving in a soundless whisper, like a soft, begging prayer. After a few minutes, I slipped the chair away from the door and quietly left the room.

I did not tell anyone about that night, about the candle-sticks and the candles and the photograph and the sheet of music and the necklace of costume jewelry.

People would have laughed. They would have said Avrum had made an icon of an old opera singer. They would have said it was proof that Avrum was crazy, a fool.

And I have never told anyone that during that same summer and for many years afterward, there was a photograph that I, too, kept locked away until I could no longer bear not seeing it. And, like Avrum, I would take it out of its hiding and place it before me—not as Avrum did, not with the candlesticks and the candles, but on a bare table. Then I would hold a blue stone that the girl-woman of the photograph had given me and I would sit, as Avrum did, and look at the face that smiled back at me with bright, giving eyes. I would believe that I could hold her again, touch her mouth with my mouth, feel her hands on my hands. I would make her name with my lips, say it again and again, and my soul would send soft, happy prayers of longing to her.

But I am not as brave as Avrum was. I did not quit my life for an impossibility. I did not risk hearing voices. I still had the photograph and the stone, and there were times when I looked at them and remembered, but I no longer performed the ritual of loneliness.