Aaron, as he left the kitchen, also glanced at his mother’s hands. Small golden clots of dough clung to her fingers and he wanted her to hold them out to him and let him lick the moist sweet challah dough as she sometimes allowed small Rebecca to do. But his mother continued her work, never noticing that he no longer played at her feet, and he left the doorway and moved on through the dark hall shadowed by a familiar sadness he did not understand.
“Yes, Aaron is a very good boy,” Sarah Ellenberg continued. “And his hair is so beautiful. Yaakov’s hair. Ah, how I remember poor Yaakov.”
Leah looked at the woman who sat across the table from her, methodically decimating walnuts so that the small nutmeats were spread before her on the bare tabletop like a jagged relief map on which the discarded shells formed an uneasy mountain. Leah and Sarah had been students together in Odessa and Sarah had come from the same small village as Yaakov. She had known Leah’s first husband from childhood and surely, because her father too had managed timberlands, she had known the woodsman Petrovich. Some day, Leah thought, she would mention his name to Sarah, some day when Aaron played in the sunlight and his curls blazed like flaming flowers of the kind that had burned in distant blaze in the distant land of her birth.
“Do you remember the forest worker, Petrovich?” she would ask. “Isn’t Aaron’s hair very like his?”
But, of course, she knew she would never do that. She had guarded her secret with grim strength for five years and she would not surrender it to Sarah’s greedy ears. Her friend’s appetite for gossip and conjecture was insatiable. She knew of desertions before they took place and could recount the illnesses plaguing families, anticipating deaths before they occurred. She shared her news with cheerful generosity, carrying each item to Leah, whose lack of interest perversely encouraged her.
“Leahle, could I ask you something,” Sarah continued, and did not wait for an answer but blurted out the question as Leah had known she would. “Why did you name the boy Aaron? Why didn’t you give him Yaakov’s name?”
“Would it be fair to David to have Yaakov’s name always in the house? Remember, David and I had to start a new life together. We didn’t want to carry too much sorrow with us. And then David’s brother Aaron had also died in the pogrom, with no family at all. It seemed right to give the child Aaron’s name.” The answer sprang with easy readiness from Leah’s lips. She had, after all, rehearsed it so many times, justified it so often, that occasionally she even believed it herself.
She remembered the first time she had offered the name, moments after the child’s birth. David had come to the room where she lay heavy with exhaustion, the bedclothes soaked with her sweat. He had walked softly, as though fearful that even the cushioned tread of his rubber soles might disturb her.
The labor had been long and difficult and twice the midwife had despaired of a normal delivery and urged David to go for the doctor. But Leah, her face streaming with perspiration, her lips caked with blood where she had bitten through them in pain and anguish, had restrained them. The unborn child thrust against her in frenzied terror and she writhed against his attacks, locked in mortal conflict with the tiny form that had grown within her womb. Her fingers curled desperately about the posts of the brass bed, grasping for support against the urgent spasms of the infant who thrust his way downward, seeking the air and light of her body’s entry. Only once before had she engaged in such fierce combat, such urgent resistance, and in her pain the bedpost seemed to take the shape of the weathered Lombardy tree to which she had clung on that day she could not forget.
“You must help the baby. Bear down! Bear down!” the midwife had shouted. “Do you want the child to die?”
The midwife was a small bewigged woman who had herself borne a dozen children and delivered scores of others. She was stoical toward the cries of laboring women and viewed their sweat and vomit, their tears and blood, as unimportant appendages to the giving of life. But she had never before assisted a woman who fought her own screams and braced her body against the onslaught of the struggling infant, refusing to help speed the birth.
In the end they had not sent for the doctor and the child had forced himself out, his lungs screaming for air. He was a large infant whose bright hair shone through the gluey mucus that coated his emerging head and his pale limbs had thrashed in bewilderment. The midwife washed and swaddled him, feeling her weariness fade and her heart grow lighter at the sight of the bright-haired boy whose wails made the women in the house smile and the men to glance away from each other in pleased embarrassment. But when she brought the child to Leah the dark-haired young mother had only glanced wearily at the tiny bundle that was her son and turned her face away, her eyes bright with tears. The midwife was not surprised when no milk sprang from the new mother’s breasts and a wet nurse had to be brought to nourish the child.
“What shall we name the child then, Leah?” David had asked and it was then that she suggested his brother’s name, offering it as a gift he could not refuse. A child had already been named for Yaakov, she pointed out. Her brother Moshe, living now in a communal settlement in the Galilee, had given his firstborn child the name of the young brother-in-law whose dead body he had cradled on an Odessa street.
“Yes, I can see why you would not call him Yaakov,” Sarah Ellenberg said. But she remained quiet for a moment thinking that it was doubly strange, then, that when Rebecca was born they had named her for Chana Rivka, David’s first betrothed who lay buried in the Jewish cemetery of Odessa.
Sarah changed the subject quickly now and talked of poor Yetta Moskowitz from across the hall, whose husband had disappeared. There were four children and one on the way, too much perhaps for the stoop-shouldered, weak-eyed fur nailer who went off one morning carrying his lunch wrapped in newspaper and never returned. The police had been summoned, and a bored, ruddy-faced Irishman had sat taking notes, licking his pencil laboriously as the deserted woman spoke in Yiddish while a teen-aged girl translated into English. Both officer and translator were bored. They had heard the same story too often, and where, in all these United States, could they look for Pincas Moskowitz? Still, they did their jobs and muttered feeble encouragement to the woman, who rested her swollen hands on her stomach and swayed perilously from side to side.
Leah had drawn up a small advertisement for Yetta, which she placed in the Yiddish papers’ classified column, where dozens of other such notices appeared with disturbing regularity: “Velvel Greenberg of Lodz. Contact wife Hinda. Moshe is sick.” “Information sought on the whereabouts of Chaim Lemberg of Attorney Street. Family in dire straits.” “Zanvel Greenberg please come home.”
“You know, in Russia and in Poland, life was very hard. Not enough to eat, sickness, pogroms. Yet this did not happen. Men stayed with their families. Why should it be happening here?” Sarah asked.
“Over there—where could they have gone?” Leah asked, surprised at the harshness of her tone. She was relieved when, at that moment, Rebecca woke from her nap and filled the flat with a combination of crying and prattling that sounded to Leah like the language of the angels.
“Sarah, please put on the water for the soup,” Leah said and rushed down the long narrow corridor of the railroad flat to the tiny windowless room where Rebecca sat up in her crib.
Leah’s heart always caught at the sight of her daughter. Rebecca had been conceived on the night of the Day of Atonement, in a velvet darkness soft with peace and gentleness. Leah could fix the exact time of conception because she and David seldom slept together as man and wife. Their marriage was lived in muted harmony and might have been the partnership of a gentle brother and sister. Their lovemaking was rare and always quiet, tentative, as though passion might shatter the delicate equilibrium of their life together.
Sometimes Leah, lying in the darkness of a sleepless night, felt David’s eyes upon her and sensed the flutter of unarticulated questions float across the silent air as her husband’s hands clenched and unclenched in the pain of loneli
ness and desire. Sometimes, then, her own need to be touched broke across her with frightening fierceness and she would roll into the arms of the gentle, soft-spoken man who had offered himself as her husband but had never presumed to proclaim himself her lover. They soothed each other’s bodies then, their flesh coming together beneath the tent of coarse cambric sheet as though the protection of the fabric were necessary to them. Leah remembered, at such moments, how she and Yaakov had always lain across the bed, their naked bodies open to each other, welcoming touch and tenderness, soaring on waves of breathless passion. She and David concealed their bodies from each other, offering each other solace and compassion but never eagerness or spontaneity.
But on that night of the Day of Atonement, the second such day they had observed in America, as they lay in the soft darkness, David had moaned softly, as though the day of fasting and prayer had released a secret sorrow.
“Leah,” he said quietly, his arms rigid at his side, “I want a family, another child. I do not want Aaron to be alone. I do not want to feel so alone. It’s too hard.” His voice broke then and she pushed off the coverlet and drew closer to him, meaning to comfort him as she sometimes comforted Aaron when he woke from sleep trembling with wild terror.
But he would not have her caress and instead removed her nightgown, kissing and fondling her, his breath growing strong with a desire that ignited her own. They made love that night without the protection of covering and slept at last, exhausted, in each other’s arms.
And small Rebecca, born of that coming together, was a gentle child who placidly sucked at her mother’s breast (because for this child Leah’s milk flowed rich and plentiful) and slept easily with measured breath while her brother, in his trundle bed, thrashed against mysterious nocturnal demons, ground his teeth, and woke in the night shivering with a dread that only David could control.
Rebecca had her mother’s thick dark hair, which Leah patiently formed into curls with a narrow damp comb, and David’s thoughtful gray eyes. She was a child who cherished tiny objects and her brother Aaron had fashioned for her a crib made of half a walnut, in which he had placed a small pebble with hair of grass which Rebecca called Shaindel. It was to that doll, created out of a pebble, that Rebecca crooned softly at night until she fell into her deep and peaceful sleep.
She held her walnut now and called her brother’s name.
“Aaron—A-a-ron,” she called happily as Leah diapered her and spread cornstarch across the dimpled pinkness of her backside. Gently she bent and kissed the child’s exposed skin, the white powder streaking her own cheek.
“Is Rebecca awake?” Aaron asked.
He stood in the doorway, keeping his distance from his mother as he always did, and she in turn, inexplicably angry that he had found her bent like this over the child, answered shortly, “Yes. Take her and play somewhere. I must get dinner. We light Shabbat candles early tonight.”
But she remained still as the children left the room and walked down the dark narrow corridor that linked all the rooms of the large flat.
Why was it, Leah wondered wearily, that Aaron was so calm and quiet during the day and seized with violence when trapped by sleep? The thought, worrisome and painful, stung Leah with a sharp grief and she buried it, hurrying off to begin cooking dinner before the boarders arrived. They would all eat together that night because it was a Friday, the eve of the Sabbath and the only night of the week on which David Goldfeder did not travel the subway up to 137th Street where the City College of New York had been built between the curves of coarsely textured hills.
Leah and Sarah lit candles together in the half-light of the late afternoon. The children watched them from a corner of the room where they played among the straw brooms and feather dusters. Joshua Ellenberg had brought home a small heap of rags which he was laboriously sorting with Aaron’s help. Among his cloth treasures he found a small scrap of bright red velvet which he gave to Rebecca, who delightedly turned it into a covering for her walnut crib.
“Here, Becca, let me show you how to fold it,” Aaron said and carefully rearranged the fabric.
Leah completed the blessing of the candles, but held her hands before her eyes a moment longer and watched the children through the shadowed lines of flame that danced between her fingers. How gentle Aaron looked in the glow of candlelight and how like Yaakov’s his tone had been when he offered to help his sister. At moments like this she was certain that he was Yaakov’s child, but then harsh doubt unsettled her. She could not be sure. She would never be sure. She lowered her hands and sighed, the long escaping breath accompanying Sarah Ellenberg’s whispered prayer.
“Good Shabbos,” Leah said, smiling at her friend, and the two women kissed in quiet acknowledgment of all that they shared.
“Soon, soon, I pray I’ll light candles at my own table. Soon, I wouldn’t be a boarder by you,” Sarah said as though continuing a discussion abruptly interrupted.
“Sarah, you know we are glad to have you. Without boarders how could we manage? David wouldn’t be able to go to the night classes. He’d have to work at another job,” Leah replied, as she had so many times before in the years during which the Ellenbergs had lived with them as paying guests.
Leah sank into an armchair in a corner of the room that served all of them as a combined living room and dining room. It was the only piece of upholstered furniture in the room and had been purchased by her brother-in-law Shimon Hartstein from a family facing eviction.
“A good buy,” Shimon said proudly, stroking the tufted peacock-blue satin of the chair. “Certainly worth six dollars. I’m starting to collect a few things for when Malcha comes.”
“And when will that be?” Leah asked.
It was five years since Shimon had left Russia. Leah remembered standing with her sister and the two small children on the Odessa dock with Malcha’s fingers digging deep into her arm and her head, always too small for the heavy fringed marriage wig, bobbing wildly under its weight.
“When will I see him again? When will the children see their father?” she had mourned.
“Soon. Soon he’ll send for you,” Leah had assured her.
And it was true that Shimon, who had moved in with Leah and David as soon as they arrived in America, talked constantly of sending for his wife and children. He was saving. He was surveying business opportunities. He was getting a feel for the new land. Each week as he handed Leah the three one-dollar bills which covered his room and board, each bill crisp and fresh because Shimon Hartstein loved new money and always stood on line at the bank on payday asking for newly minted bills, he would repeat, “Now I’m a week closer to bringing my wife and children over.”
“They’d better come while they can still recognize you,” Leah replied dryly on the day he shaved his beard and flowing ear-locks. He had long since discarded his gabardine coat and high skullcap, and Leah had difficulty recognizing her clean-shaven, robust boarder as the shy young bridegroom who had stood with Malcha, his eyes downcast, beneath the wedding canopy.
He entered the room now, perfunctorily kissing the mezuzah on the doorpost, and bent to scoop Rebecca up in his arms. He was a good-looking man with thick dark hair and shrewd, narrow brown eyes. In recent years he had put on weight and small jolly jowls had formed below his cheeks. The new strength of his body pleased him and he went regularly to the public showers on Monroe Street. Twice a week he went to the Irvington Settlement House and played basketball in the gym, describing the game with gleeful incredulity.
“From the wall they hang a hoop and the game is to jump up high and throw a ball through it. Sounds meshuga, crazy, but it’s fun.”
He was a man who had spent his boyhood hunched over the study tables of one-room Hebrew schools and shadowed Talmudic academies. It was only in the years of his young manhood that he discovered the joys and freedom of play. Leah did not begrudge him his new life but she worried about her sister in Russia.
Malcha’s letters were simple, written for her by the vi
llage scribe, but Leah read into the shy, short sentences her sister’s impatience and loneliness.
“Yankele started cheder. Chana helps me bake on Fridays. Will their father recognize them?” Malcha wrote and Leah would then prod Shimon to bring his family over.
“Good Shabbos, Leah,” he said and bent to kiss his sister-in-law. He strutted proudly across the room in a new navy-blue suit with a vest and presented each child with a bright red lollipop.
“Not before dinner,” Sarah Ellenberg cautioned her son, but she had no cause for worry. Joshua had thrust his lollipop beneath his assortment of rags and Leah knew he would sell it at the first opportunity on Sunday morning. Her own children had stripped the cellophane off and were licking the sweet with wide-eyed delight.
“Aaron, do we eat candy before dinner?” Leah asked harshly.
“Rebecca’s eating hers too,” the boy protested.
“She’s only a baby,” Leah replied, doubly angered because she knew she was wrong to have singled out only Aaron for reproof. Still there was no time to patch things up because the staircase echoed with the sound of the boarders’ tired footsteps as they trudged up the many flights.
She rushed to the kitchen to make sure there was enough hot water for everyone, ladling it into porcelain bowls which each boarder in turn carried into the common bathroom. Leah and David considered themselves lucky to have found a flat with a self-contained bathroom, and the boarders were happy to pay an extra twenty-five cents a week instead of having to use the hall bathroom, which always exuded a stench of ammonia. Occasional complaints about the inaccessibility of the bathroom were met with Shimon Hartstein’s account of the outside facilities he had been forced to use during his first year in America.
“This here is luxury,” he would proclaim and banish the complainer.
When they were all finally assembled at the long table, David Goldfeder arrived, breathless and apologetic about his lateness.
Leah's Journey Page 4