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remember? Five-finger exercises. Scales, up and down, up and down, with that awful metronome clack-clack-clacking away. On the other hand, she could play simple melodies by ear after she got Mrs. Hirsch to run through them first, “So I’ll know how they should sound when they’re played beautifully.”
    Of course, Evelyn Hirsch knew that old trick. Perhaps one student in a hundred was alive to the instrument—pulled forward by the piano itself, not shoved at it from behind. Sadie Marcus had a good ear, but she was the kind who’d never learn to read music well. Eventually her progress would stumble and come to a halt. Until that day arrived, however, Mrs. Hirsch saw no reason to inform Mr. Marcus that his daughter was wasting his money. Evelyn Hirsch was, after all, the sole support of her family, and two bits was two bits.
    What she did not expect was the mutually beneficial pact Sadie proposed after it became clear that a career as a concert pianist required considerably more effort than Sadie was willing to devote to the project. “I’ll still come over after school, Mrs. Hirsch, but Dora and I will study together, which I really need to do because I’m having a terrible time in school and I don’t want my parents to know.You’ll still get my twenty-five cents for the lessons, but you can take on another paying student, which will bring that hour’s income to fifty cents.”
    Nobody—in the bakery or above it—need be the wiser.
    Evelyn was initially troubled by the arrangement, her need for easy income at war with her ethics.
    â€œIt’s not lying , Mrs. Hirsch,” Sadie assured her. “It’s just . . . not telling.”

YOU WILL NEVER BE LOVELIER THAN YOU ARE NOW

    S HE DID NOT TELL HER PARENTS SHE’D QUIT PIANO. She and Dora Hirsch and their friend Agnes Stern spent the time holed up in Dora’s room instead. Talking about boys. Poring over illustrated fashion magazines. Studying hats and sleeves and bustles, not music. Or rhetoric or history or mathematics. She never mentioned how she and Dora screamed with excitement when Agnes arrived one afternoon bearing a newspaper announcing that the French actress Sarah Bernhardt would tour America, or how thrilled she was when she realized that she would soon be breathing the same air as the extraordinary Jewess who’d set the world on fire with her boldness and courage on stage.
    Soon, however, everyone in the country was talking about Bernhardt. Sadie herself filled a scrapbook with dozens of articles celebrating the Divine Sarah’s extravagance, her sexual exploits, her genius, her madness. Bernhardt slept in a coffin. She took lovers. She made no effort to conceal her son’s illegitimacy. She traveled with a cheetah, a parrot, three dogs, and a monkey named Darwin. She wore trousers when the very word was unspeakable in polite company. She dismissed bourgeois respectability with the breezy declaration, “Quand même!” It’s all the same to me!
    Condemned by anti-Semites and snobs, Bernhardt said and didanything she pleased, and she didn’t just get away with it. She was adored for it!
    Bernhardt allowed her astonishing, springlike hair to burst out all around her face; Sadie’s own tight curls became a point of pride. Beneath strong dark brows, Bernhardt’s magnetic eyes were rimmed by dark lashes; Sadie spent hours gazing into her mirror, practicing intense, dramatic, mysteriously tragic glances. Bernhardt was thin and her breasts were small, like Sadie’s still were. The ideal beauty of their times was voluptuous and well-endowed, but— Quand même!— the Divine Sarah was the object of every man’s lust in Paris, London, and New York. “Kwand meem,” Sadie would murmur, imagining herself equally desirable, hearing applause in her imagination.
    AMERICA HAD HARDLY RECOVERED from Bernhardt fever when the nation was stricken