The Piano Maker Read Online Free Page A

pair with a very low heel, almost flat, for recitals, and one with a slightly higher heel for other occasions. All black. Would you be able to do that?”
    “Once I have a last, I can make any kind of shoe you want. Ankle boots, half-shoes. The heels, certainly.”
    He stood and waited. She sensed a firm kindness in the man, a courtesy and patience that made room for her concerns but also offered professional guidance.
    “Mr. Chandler,” she said. “One day, will you show me how this suction machine works? Where does the dust go?”
    “Ah. It goes into a canvas bag in the basement just under here.” He tapped his foot on the floor. “Once a month or so I have it emptied. I keep another shop for the leatherwork, in case you’re wondering. This shop is for engineered patterns and other woodwork.”
    “Interesting,” she said.
    She took off her hat and put it beside her on the bench, and when she could postpone it no longer she set the left foot first on a wooden box there and leaned forward and began to undo the laces.

Four
    THE LAST PHOTO OF HER father had come from West Africa. His face looked tanned and there were hardly any wrinkles on it, just on his brow and at either side of his mouth. His laughing wrinkles, Mother called them. In the picture he wore a tropical shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and he stood holding up a tall wooden blade for the sort of windmill he designed and installed for water and electricity in the colonies. The main building of Habitation Midi, with five grinning black faces on the veranda, was behind him.
    When the picture had first arrived in a letter, she’d sat studying it in the light of her desk lamp, and she imagined him speaking to the people behind him and joking with them. She imagined them all laughing and being grateful for his windmills and water pumps. These people and others in those faraway places saw much more of him than she did, and she envied them.
    The day the news came to Montmagny, she was in the yard helping the workers load kiln-dried wood onto thecart that would take it to the milling floor. It was summer and she had on her pale-green printed dress and long leather work gloves because of the slivers.
    A black motorcar arrived, and the driver stopped in the factory yard and shut down the engine. She watched a man get out on the passenger side and put on his hat and pull down his waistcoat.
    “Where can I find Madame Bouchardon?” he said to no one in particular, and she turned and pointed at the wooden door across the yard.
    The man walked there, and before he knocked he took off his hat and held it strangely close to his chest as though trapping a bird in it. He closed the door behind him, and within seconds she could hear her mother. The first scream was so loud that all the ducks flew off the millpond.
    Mother’s older cousin, Juliette, came over, and while Mother was resting after taking the nerve medicine Dr. Menasse had given her, Juliette told Hélène that her father had been killed in Africa, in Côte d’Ivoire. There had been some trouble, the man from the Colonial Office had said, some sort of tribal uprising to do with tithes imposed by missionaries, and all of Habitation Midi had been destroyed and every living thing there killed. Even the dogs.
    Juliette paused and dabbed her eyes. She said, “I’m sorry, sweetheart. He was a good man, and he loved you and your mother very much. You must never forget that.”
    “The missionaries?” she said. “But why? What did anyone do to them?”
    “No one did anything to the missionaries, Hélène. And your father did nothing to anyone.”
    “Was it the people on the veranda?”
    “The what, dear?”
    “On the veranda behind him. In the photograph.”
    “Oh, them. I don’t think so.”
    “He was making windmills for them.”
    “I know.”
    There was a long silence.
    “I know he was often away,” said Juliette. “But not because he didn’t want to be with you or with your mother. It was his