Leah's Journey

by Gloria Goldreich

  “They think we are innocent young lovers,” Leah said teasingly as they rounded the corner.

  “And so we are,” he replied and kissed her lightly on the forehead.

  They had dinner that night in a small Italian restaurant in Greenwich Village, and at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Twelfth Street they boarded a bright-red municipal bus and climbed to the upper deck. The summer stars glinted brightly above them and the great stores and mansions of Fifth Avenue sparkled on either side of the broad expanse. They held hands and she rested her head against him as the bus carried them northward where they could see the lights of the George Washington Bridge and feel the moist breezes of the Hudson River.

  “Such a world,” she murmured and lifted her hands as though to embrace the evening cool, to engulf and seize this strange freedom of riding aimlessly through the wondrously lit city in the arms of a man who sheltered her effortlessly and whose slightest touch moved her to tears and longing.

  They went to Eli’s boardinghouse that night, not going to his room at once but climbing to the roof, where drying sheets billowed out against the infrequent breezes like the sails of a mysterious boat and brightly colored children’s garments hung from makeshift dryers in an array of small flags that danced and whispered in the quiet night. A group of women sat in a corner of the roof, still in their cotton housedresses, talking quietly in Yiddish, their hands clasped in their laps as though they had to be restrained into stillness. Against the balustrade, a young couple leaned and watched the street below. The girl’s long fair hair was covered with a blue silk kerchief. When they turned to each other, the young man removed the small silk square, pressed it to his lips, and allowed handfuls of the shimmering hair to fall through his fingers before bending down to kiss the girl’s upturned face. Slowly they turned and disappeared into the stairwell and Leah watched them with a sudden harsh envy.

  How fortunate they were. They were young and free. They would marry in this new land. Their untouched lives stretched before them, uncomplicated by memories of bloodied streets and screaming children. They would not wake in the night clinging to the ghosts of dead lovers buried in distant lands or whispering the names of loved ones whose faces were slowly fading from memory. Twice now, Eli had wakened in her arms, his strong, tightly muscled body damp with the sweat of anguish, whispering the name of Mira, the young wife he had found dead when he returned from Karkov, a town he could never forget.

  “What is it?” he asked her now, sensing the change of her mood. He cupped her chin and turned her face toward him, perhaps in imitation of the young man’s gesture, but the words and feelings congealed within her, a bitter ganglion of silence that would not be pierced. She buried her face in his shoulder, relishing again the hardness of his body. The women turned to look at them but Eli and Leah ignored the accusing glances and left the roof.

  In Eli’s room, on that narrow cot, a small island of space in the room’s bachelor clutter, they clung together, the passion of their bodies fighting off memory and guilt. Leah’s dress was cast upon a nest of union pamphlets and her hat, that frivolous, pale-blue concoction of organdy and satin that matched her daughter’s summer frock, crowned an open volume of Lectures by Eugene Debs.

  Leah did not go home that night, but spent the night for the first time beside Eli, their bodies sandwiched together in the narrow space. They made love in the darkness and woke as the first streaks of morning light threaded the dimness, to come together yet again, like gluttonous children at a rare feast.

  They did not go to work the next day, each phoning in their excuses separately. They walked together to the Goldfeder apartment where Leah changed her clothes and gathered a few things into a small wicker bag. The empty apartment was like a place suspended in time. In the kitchen the huge empty pots in which she had cooked so many meals sat on the stove, scoured and gaping. The coffee cup which David had placed on the drain-board after his solitary breakfast the previous day was still there, but there was a plate on the kitchen table and a cluster of dry crumbs formed the pattern of a flower across the checked oilcloth. David had returned, then, to pack some things and eat, and she thought of how he must have moved through these empty rooms trailed by the weary sadness that had haunted him throughout this year of silence.

  She washed the plate and dried it carefully, as though the simple domestic action exonerated her. Eli sat in the parlor, impatiently reading a week-old newspaper, and she was grateful to him for not intruding on her now, for keeping his distance as she visited this life that had nothing to do with him.

  Spurred by habit, she stopped at the door of the children’s room. A small pink sock, belonging to Rebecca, dangled from the bedpost and she held it in her hand for a moment as though to capture the smell of her daughter’s sweet flesh, thinking of the small girl’s feet, so tenderly pink after a bath, the toes curled like fragrant blossoms. Aaron’s slippers (he had forgotten them, then—would he be warm enough at the camp? she worried helplessly) lay unevenly beside the bed and she bent to line them up evenly, blue scuffed twins of felt. A longing for the children suffused her. They frolicked now in waters she did not know, against the shadows of mountains she had never seen, while her lover sat and read in their parlor, a live figure caught among shrouded furnishings. She was at once the deserter and the deserted, the bereft and the newly claimed.

  “Leah, are you almost ready?” Eli called and she hurried to him, closing the door of the small room behind her.

  They walked westward from the apartment to the docks and boarded an excursion boat that steamed its leisurely course around the urban island they called their home. The last time Leah had been at sea, during the crossing from England, she had been heavily pregnant with Aaron, newly married to David, and as burdened with loss as she was swollen with child. She re-remembered the long crossing and how she had sometimes stood on deck, staring down at the rolling gray-green waters of the wintry Atlantic. She had almost seen herself lowering gently upon the waves, drifting and swirling until all grief had washed away from her and she could sink effortlessly to the ocean floor.

  But today, with Eli at her side and the sun bright upon their heads, the decks awash with the music of strolling musicians and the carefree voices of the holiday crowd of passengers, she fell in love with the ocean. She marveled at its blueness and was intrigued with the lacy caps of foam that topped each joyous wave. At lunchtime they munched frankfurters, thick with mustard and hairy with sauerkraut, and drank beer from heavy glass steins. She had never tasted beer before and it was the second time in as many days that she had eaten meat that was not kosher. But now, in this holiday interlude in her life, all things were permitted just as all things had been forbidden.

  An accordionist played a swift polka and they danced, losing their balance as the small steamer dipped and bobbed. Eli’s straw hat was carried off by a playful wind and they laughed as though this were the most amusing thing that had ever happened to them. The hat was retrieved by a group of young people, who invited Eli and Leah to join them and taught them the words of “My Darling Clementine.”

  When the boat docked in the late afternoon, their faces glowed with the sun and crowns of salty sea mist had settled into their dark hair.

  They talked a great deal that night, offering each other stray strands of their own histories to be woven together at will. Weeks before, over a table at the Cafe Royale, Leah had told Eli about her first marriage, Yaakov’s death, and the agreement she and David had made.

  “I was never sorry I married David,” she said. “He is such a rare man, so full of gentleness and compassion. But we never pretended to love. Never.”

  She had not told Eli about Petrovich and wondered later why she had not shared this fact with the man with whom she found it easy to share everything else.

  Now, lying beside her, smoking a small dark cigar, Eli spoke to her about his wife, Mira, and the great void that had followed her death.

  “Nothing seemed worthwhile then. I came to Am
erica only because I had to leave Russia where every face on the street had become a murderer’s face. It didn’t matter to me if I lived or died. I think I did not kill myself only because it did not seem to make any difference. Mira was pregnant when she died and I thought again and again of that child, my never-born baby. She was feeling life and I, too, with my hand upon her had felt the baby move within her, kick and move again. They tell me that an unborn child does not feel pain but I thought always of that small moving thing, lying there bewildered in Mira’s dead body, waiting for the nourishment that did not come and curling up at last, in those drying waters, to die unborn. Do you know for years I turned my eyes away whenever I saw a pregnant woman? Then one night, just by chance, I went to a lecture at Cooper Union. Debs was the speaker. I listened to him and came to life again. There was work for me to do, there was a world that could be made better, there were other unborn children I could in some small way protect. I began to read and to write, to work for the union, for a world that will be perhaps a little bit better.”

  Leah listened quietly, thinking of the night David had explained why he wanted to study psychiatry.

  “If we understand hatred, if we understand violence, we will be able to predict it and then to prevent it. There will be no more Odessas, no more dead Yaakovs and Chana Rivkas,” he had said.

  Dreamers both—her husband and her lover. They would root out evil, ferret out injustice, while she, who lay beside them, was blanketed in the bitter certainty that it could not be done, even while she struggled with them.

  “They pray for mercy, I work for peace,” the bearded young poet had sung and Leah, remembering his words, thought sadly that perhaps the prayers might be more potent than the work.

  They went to work the next day, leaving Eli’s room together and returning, with cheerful smiles, the accusing glance of one of the women who had watched them on the roof the night before.

  “She thinks I am a woman of sin,” Leah said, glancing back to the stoop where two women now stood, their light cotton dresses already damp in the morning heat.

  “Do we care what she thinks? Do we care what anyone thinks?” Eli asked and he pressed her hand hard.

  “No,” she said and felt the taste of the lie turn her mouth bitter.

  She did care. She cared desperately about what David would think, what he was perhaps thinking already. They had made an odd bargain that night in Odessa, but it was a bargain she had kept scrupulously until the heat of this summer. She dared not think of all that was now involved in that partnership they had entered into out of shared desperation. Their lives were so intricately interwoven now. David’s studies, his bright persistent dreams, depended on her and her ability to support them. It was a debt she owed and acknowledged.

  And she cared, too, about what her sister Malcha would think, Malcha who was always in awe and always slightly disapproving of Leah’s choices. But there had been a new strength in Maicha’s voice recently, a new spring to her step, and now, at last, perhaps her disapproval would outweigh her awe.

  The children, Aaron and Rebecca, were too young to have any understanding of the situation, but she thought of Aaron’s brooding green eyes, the tight curve of his lips, and of Becca’s flower face, puckered into a bud of puzzlement. One day, of course, they would understand—understand and judge.

  Caught between worlds, she stood balanced between her life with Eli—the factory and union meetings, the smells of his small room and the touch of his hand upon her body—and her life with her family in that apartment where they worked and played, struggling toward a future that would transport them from cluttered rooms and frenzied streets.

  “I do care, in a way,” she whispered softly and was relieved when Eli did not hear her.

  After work that evening they took the subway up to 137th Street and sat on the hard stone steps of Lewisohn Stadium, listening to the strains of Mozart. Around them other young couples sat, clutching books and brown paper bags of sandwiches, leaning slightly forward as though fearful of missing a sound. Above them the summer stars hung in shimmering brilliance and the moon was a perfect crescent carved of burnished amber. These young people were David’s fellow students, she knew, and wondered if her husband had ever granted himself the luxury of sitting beneath the stars and allowing the music he loved to drift over him. During the intermission, she saw a slight, dark-haired man with David’s slow, deliberate gait ascend the steps, and her heart beat faster. But it was not David, of course, and she leaned back against Eli, her hands trembling and her dress damp.

  As the evening grew cooler, Eli took off his jacket and wrapped it around her shoulders. The smell of his body clung to the garment and she pulled it tight around her, as though to envelop herself in his very essence. An odd memory occurred to her suddenly. During the early days of her marriage to Yaakov, she had sometimes wakened in the morning and slipped his discarded shirt around her bare limbs, fondling the material that had nestled next to her young husband’s body and carried with it still the intimacy of his smell. In the bottom of her trunk, still neatly folded, was the blue cambric shirt he had worn the day of his death, the shirt she had mended again and again as an endless penance for the sin of staying alive, during those first mindless days of grief and despair after his death—those days before David had taken hold of her life and gently guided her until she had grown strong enough to guide herself.

  “What are you thinking about?” Eli whispered.

  “Nothing,” she replied, and realized that it was the second time that day that she had lied to him.

  The next day at work, Salvatore Visconti came to them with the news that Arnold Rosenblatt had returned from Europe. He would be in the office on Monday. This was Thursday. They would have only that evening to meet and finalize their approach before the weekend scattered them. Leah had to meet her family in the mountains and others, too, planned to flee the steaming city on the weekend.

  “At my place then. We’ll meet tonight.”

  “No. There’s more room in my apartment,” Leah insisted, and it was agreed that they would meet there that night.

  Eli looked at her thoughtfully.

  “Why did you want the meeting there, Leah?” he asked.

  “There is more room,” she replied, and saw the doubt in her voice reflected in his eyes.

  The same group that had assembled for the first meeting in Eli’s small room gathered again that night, with a few additions. Leah had asked young Bonnie Eckstein to come and represent the girls who worked in her section. Salvatore Visconti had persuaded two young Italian men who worked with him in the shipping section to participate. Eli was pleased to see them. He had explained to Leah that the unions often found newly arrived Italians the most difficult group to organize.

  “They are used to a feudal system where they hand their lives over to a don and in return for their work he clothes them, provides food and housing. In America, bosses like Rosenblatt just became their dons,” he had explained.

  But Leah could understand that Salvatore’s great warmth and his vituperative powers of persuasion would be difficult to resist, and she was not surprised when he reported that he had guarantees of support from every Italian worker at Rosenblatts.

  Eleanor Greenstein arrived late and was at once given the most comfortable seat in the room. She wore a pair of green linen slacks with a matching jacket and Leah realized it was the first time she had ever seen a woman wear pants. She watched as Eleanor lit a small cigar, and offered her an ashtray. They all knew now why the successful designer had joined forces with them.

  Eleanor Greenstein had a daughter who had left home in her early teens and taken a job in a factory in the South Bronx. There had been a fire and the girl had suffered burns on every part of her body. She had died after weeks of pain, screaming in agony through lips that were scorched into ribbons of blackened flesh. It was then that the designer had asked Arnold Rosenblatt to provide adequate fire protection in the factory. He had refused, ignoring her
persistent argument, until she turned to Eli Feinstein and became part of the organizing effort.

  Now she took out her notebook and, in her usual brisk voice, summarized the situation.

  “We’re into July now. The fall line is entirely cut, pieced, and basted. Monday we’re scheduled to begin sewing and trimming. That’s cutting it very close, and if we don’t start work next week there’ll be no shipments in August and no Rosenblatt line in the stores in September. If that happens his creditors will pounce on him and he’ll be through. And not only on paper. All his personal money is in the business now. He needs that fall line. On Monday morning your steering committee will meet with him. We’ve got a ninety percent commitment from the workers to strike if he doesn’t agree to terms. He can’t face that down. Ten or twenty he could fire, but not the whole work force. He’s a shrewd man. I think he’ll see that our demands are reasonable. After all, what are we asking for? The right to collective bargaining. Paid vacations. Sick leave. And most important of all—adequate safety protection. A fire alarm system, windows that open, and accessible fire escapes.” Her voice, always so cool and firm, faltered now and they looked away from her. Some said her daughter had been only fifteen years old when she died.

  “Who’s on the steering committee?” Moe Cohen asked.

  “Eli Feinstein, Salvatore Visconti, and Leah Goldfeder.”

  There was a murmur of approval and Leah felt a small glow of pleasure. It was good to be part of a group and recognized.

  “All right then,” Eli said, taking control of the meeting. “When the steering committee gets back, if we have to strike we’re ready. Everyone will be down in the street in fifteen minutes. We’ll have the picket signs ready and Dubinsky’s organizers will be waiting to help. But remember—this is going to be an orderly strike. If you’re called names you keep on walking without answering. If Rosenblatt brings in scabs, close your lines and keep them from breaking through. If they manage it, let them pass without any violence from us. If the police arrest you, go along quietly. The union will make bail and get lawyers. Make sure everyone in your group knows what’s happening. Any questions?”