Chapter 20 — searching for Mademoiselle Reisz

It is the autumn after the Esplanade Street rage. Edna has been thinking about Mademoiselle Reisz for weeks. The pianist is the only person in the city who knows what Edna is feeling; she is also the only person who has been receiving Robert's letters from Mexico in the form Edna wants to hear them. Edna sets out to find her. The address she has — the Bienville Street rooms — is empty. The neighbors do not know where Reisz has gone. The pianist has no friends and pays no calls and is hard to track.

Edna goes to the Chartres Street house where Madame Lebrun and Victor live. Madame Lebrun receives her warmly and offers her tea and a long account of the Mexico letters. Edna reads what is read aloud and watches Madame Lebrun fold the page. In the course of the visit she discovers, by the way Madame Lebrun mentions a passage, that Robert has also been writing to Mademoiselle Reisz — letters that, by Madame Lebrun's offhand remark, contain Edna's name. The discovery decides her. She must find Reisz today. She gets an address out of Madame Lebrun and goes.

Reisz lives at the top of a tall narrow house on a street Edna has never been down. The stairs are long. The door is at the top, slightly ajar. Edna knocks; Reisz, in her rusty black lace, opens it without surprise. The rooms are small, low-ceilinged, smoky from a small stove, with the piano taking up most of the front room. Reisz looks at her with the eyes-that-burn and asks, without preamble, what she has come for. Edna says she has come to be told the truth. The chapter ends on the threshold — the next chapter is the conversation.