Michael stood in his crib, toddling from one end of it to another. His dark curls were clustered wildly about his head and she reproved herself for delaying the child’s first haircut for so long. It was wrong, she supposed, but she wanted Michael to stay a baby, if only for a few months longer. It was the first time that she had enjoyed a child’s infancy and she wished to prolong these precious days when she wheeled him about the streets of Brighton Beach in his stroller and watched him crawl across the grainy sands and rocks of the seashore. What luxury it was to feed the child in the cheerful warmth of a kitchen which belonged entirely to her and would not be invaded by stray boarders, or even her sister, who now called herself Mollie.
And, of course, there was the special sweetness of Michael himself, so relaxed and amiable, a child conceived in passion and carried with peace and certainty. David, citing a course in neonatology, had told her that there was a theory that the mental and emotional state of the mother during the period of gestation did much to influence the personality of the infant. Leah’s own children substantiated that theory. She had carried Aaron during an agony of uncertainty, weighed down by her own sense of loss and suffering, feeling his growing weight within her as an unwelcome cancer that grew against her will. She had even resisted his birth and her breasts had refused to nourish the child. And when she had at last emerged from that forest of despair, when Yaakov’s death and the assault she had suffered had finally been assimilated into a new life of her own choosing, it had been too late. The lonely child had grown into a bitter boy, as tense and rejecting as she herself had been through the years of his helplessness. Even today, she knew, as he made the requisite speech of gratitude to his parents, the speech demanded of all boys on their bar mitzvah, as though no child could assume the responsibilities of manhood without acknowledging a debt to childhood, her son’s eyes would burn with anger, giving the lie to the words laboriously composed with the stoic assistance of the rabbi.
Suddenly tense, as she always became when thinking of Aaron, she lifted Michael from his crib and let him pull at her hair as she changed his diaper and listened to him sing a glad and wordless song.
Rebecca had been a cheerful child but she had lacked Michael’s exuberance. She had been conceived on a night of shadowy memories after a day susurrant with repentance and memory. Her gestation had been a time of stoic calm, of resigned withdrawal. She was a child of sacrifice, borne by Leah as an offering to David who had supported and befriended her, who had become her husband through pain and compromise, rather than through promise and discovery. Michael had been born when Leah and David, husband and wife for a dozen years, had at last become lovers. Leah felt a special tenderness for her raven-haired daughter, but never had she felt the surging love that overcame her with small Michael, who wriggled now beneath her touch, tossing diapers to the floor, clutching at her face and bringing it close to his own for the great sloppy licks which he called kisses.
Sometimes Leah, pushing Michael in his carriage along the boardwalk, rocking him in tune to the beat of the ceaseless waves, thought back to that long year before Michael’s birth. She remembered those months before their move from the crowded enclave of the lower east side to the Brooklyn streets, redolent with the smells of the ocean, the concrete pattern of the broad avenues broken by great fields of green in which Italian farmers, impervious to urban encroachment, grew tomatoes and broccoli, round rows of lettuce, and neat, sharply verdant patches of broccoli nodding under beads of crystal dew. Like all clearly defined expanses of time, she assigned borders to that period—emotional markers signifying a beginning and an ending. That time in her life had begun with Eli Feinstein’s funeral and ended on the sunset evening when she turned to David and found her heart beating with sudden fervor and her body weak and fluid with desire.
She charted the days of that year with startling accuracy. Whole hours were returned to her in memory and she saw herself walking alone down streets she and Eli had wandered together during the brief season of their love. At the Cafe Royale, in those days of grief, she had sat at the same table she and Eli had shared with Charles Ferguson. A young poet had read a series of quatrains called “Sweatshop Inferno,” dedicated to the workers of the Rosenblatt fire. She had listened dry-eyed to the impassioned lines, wondering why it was they seemed foreign to her, as though the horror of that holocaust had been endured by someone else, only dimly related to her. She had lost her lover and her friends, yet she sat here drinking coffee and allowing the words to scatter about her like careless pebbles. After the reading a plate was passed for the benefit of the survivors who were undergoing skin-grafting and the families of the victims. Like the other café sitters, she reached dutifully into her purse and placed a few coins on the battered aluminum dish. The collection was one of thousands being held all through the country. For weeks after the fire the money had poured in and a committee had swiftly been formed to administer the funds. Contributions had come from every part of the country and checks had arrived from England and the Continent. The sympathy and conscience of the world, deaf to the pleas of union organizers and workers, had been stirred by the sepia pictures of the flame-consumed bodies of young girls hurtling through smoke-drenched air.
“Too late. They realize everything too late,” Eleanor Greenstein had said bitterly when she visited Leah. She had come to say good-bye. She was leaving New York for a small Vermont town. A manufacturer had offered her a job there and she had seized the opportunity for a new life.
“There is nothing left for me here,” she said, looking out of Leah’s window to the street below where the women sat on the tenement steps, watching the small boys shoot immies in the street and the girls jump rope double-Dutch, their feet beating a fierce rhythm against the hot pavement. “All I have here is a grave.”
All our lives are dotted with graves, Leah thought, and wondered if anyone tended the graves in the small Russian cemetery where Yaakov and Chana Rivka, the attendant ghosts of her marriage, lay buried.
Part of the money raised in the collections would be used for headstones for the graves of those victims who had died without families. Leah realized, when she heard that, that she did not even know where Eli had been buried. She had not ridden out to the cemetery with the funeral cortege but returned home with David, to sit for hours at the window watching the purple shadows of the descending evening glide down and briefly veil the ugly streets in coolness and beauty.
“Why did you cut your hair, Mommy?” Rebecca asked, her small fingers regretfully touching the hacked ends of those pitch tresses that Eli had stroked for hours on end.
“To show that she was sad, silly,” Aaron answered and led his sister away, as though, with mysterious wisdom, he understood his mother’s grief.
In the kitchen, Malcha and Sarah Ellenberg whispered earnestly to each other and cautioned the children, stunned by Leah’s silent mourning, to play in the street or on the roof. Firmly, like experienced nurses familiar with the spectrum of grief, they brought her plates of cold borscht, filled with nourishing vegetables, which she left uneaten on the table beside her. She remained at the window when they went to sleep but in the night they heard the door softly open and whisper closed. Through her own window, Malcha saw Leah walk slowly down the deserted street; minutes later David appeared behind her, a vigilant guardian trailing in the shadows of his wife’s grief.
One afternoon, Leah went again to the pier and boarded the cruise ship on which she and Eli had spent their one golden afternoon which still rang in memory with song and laughter. The ocean was choppy that day and she stood on deck and watched the foam-capped waves roughly thrust themselves against the cruising vessel. The waves, as they rushed toward her, were bright green, the color of Eli’s eyes, but they faded into a soft grayness as they broke. Did eyes retain their color in death? she wondered, and leaned so far over the rail, as though to search out the answer in the ocean itself, that a man standing near by moved swiftly to her side and led her to an empty deck chai
r.
She sat in the sun for the rest of the brief voyage and when the boat docked, David was waiting at the pier. A patch of sunlight sat like a small crown on his dark hair and fine lines of worry rimmed his deep-set eyes.
“How did you know I would be here?” she asked.
“I followed you,” he replied, and draped her shoulders with the sweater he had brought with him.
A strange calm suffused her and she put her hand in his, content to have him lead her home as though she herself had forgotten the route. Late that evening she placed the picture hat with its streaming ribbons in the bottom of her trunk, next to Yaakov’s cambric shirt.
The next morning she went to Monroe Street, where a Hungarian woman maintained an improvised beauty salon in her apartment, and had the hair that she herself had viciously shorn with Shimon’s cutting shears shaped into a sleek cap that curled smoothly about her head. She looked at herself in the mirror, registering the swift metamorphosis with relief and approval. She had emerged finally from a fierce struggle within a restraining cocoon of grief and achieved a quiet, heavyhearted acceptance of all that had come to pass.
Slowly, thoughts of the fire receded into a netherworld of shadowy pain, a world of gossamer memory through which Eli’s strong and graceful form moved with purposeful certainty. Rosenblatt’s factory never reopened and one evening in early fall, Arnold Rosenblatt rented a room at the Astor Hotel, ordered two double scotches, drank them, and shot himself in the right temple. His suicide occurred two days before a municipal hearing into the causes of the fire, a hearing that resulted in legislation demanding fire safety precautions for all factories in the city.
That day the union paper carried a photograph of the courtyard cluttered with the bodies of the Rosenblatt workers and the solemn headline THEIR DEATHS WERE NOT IN VAIN. Leah stared for a long time at the front page of the paper which Bonnie Eckstein brought her, and then carefully cut the page loose and placed the clipping in a manila envelope where she kept letters from Europe and Palestine.
Gradually, the demands of day-to-day life encroached upon mood and memory. Shimon Hartstein’s business, built on the bankruptcies that riddled the city, was thriving. Like an economic scavenger, Shimon darted from auction to bankruptcy sale, snatching up bolts of material, yards of thread, battered cartons of varied trimmings. He brought samples to Leah, who fingered the goods with practiced hands, draped a length of dark cloth into a fashionable calf-length skirt, and trimmed the waist with a strip of bright embroidered fabric, skillfully adding a pocket or a scarf to match. She easily translated the creation into tissue-paper patterns which were swiftly cut, sewn, and marketed under the label of “Fashions by S. Hart.” It was Joshua Ellenberg who suggested the line drawing of a speeding hart as a trademark, and Leah sketched the graceful animal at the kitchen table one night while the children did their homework.
The simple line drawing was reproduced on labels and soon the small jobbers who sold to the larger stores were being asked for more styles bearing the hart insignia, and for the first time Shimon could suspend his juggling—he was receiving more checks than bills in the daily mail.
Now he no longer called himself Shimon Hartstein, but had become with painless ease Seymour Hart, and had renamed Malcha Mollie. Chana and Yankele were now Anne and Jake, and the shy youngsters had suddenly become as Americanized as their names, as though a chimeric transformation had taken place. Chana and Yankele had clung to their mother’s side like frightened children, still caught in the shadowy dangers of the shtetl, starting in fear at sudden noises, glancing nervously away from strangers, as though still entrapped in the loneliness and fear of their fatherless childhood in the Russian village where Jews lived their lives on the edge of terror. But Jake and Anne, he in store-bought knickers and jerseys, she in plaid pleated skirts and brightly colored blouses, were laughing youngsters who rocketed to popularity at school by treating their classmates to pretzels and egg creams. Sometimes Aaron, watching his cousins run gaily down Eldridge Street laden with brown paper bags of sweets, remembered the day they had arrived from Europe and stood shyly on the threshold of the apartment, each clutching a cloth sack from which the handles of worn pots protruded. He had liked his cousins better in those days, he thought, and always shrugged his shoulders and left the room when Jake, a good-natured boy, suggested that Aaron accompany them on their ritual Sunday afternoon excursions.
Rebecca occasionally joined the Hart family and returned with glowing tales of the golden dome of the Roxy theater where real stars twinkled. The seats in the theater were of red velvet, like the thrones of kings and queens, but she and Anne were particularly entranced with the ladies’ room, which they visited several times during each film.
“Mama, the floors are marble and when you wash your hands you don’t even need a towel. There’s a special machine that breathes hot air and dries you,” the child reported. David, studying at the dining room table, looked up and his eyes and Leah’s locked in shared amusement.
Often during those months such moments passed between them. An understanding stretch of calm sheltered them as they shared quiet laughter or lengths of comfortable silence during which he studied and she worked at her drawing board while in the next room Aaron and Joshua Ellenberg played chess. When it happened that they were alone in the apartment and she made tea and brought the steaming glass to him, the small service made his heart rise in sweet contentment.
They were alone there one Sunday afternoon, a grim day when lamps had been lit in the early afternoon, creating small islands of light in the room suffused with wintry grayness. They had done their separate work while the radio played, Caruso’s tender voice lulling them into a mood of melancholy nostalgia. Leah looked up from her drawing board and was startled to see that the colorless sky was suddenly soft with graceful domes of drifting pink clouds, laced with threads of fading gold. She switched off her lamp and went to the window, where she stood watching a slow darkness descend and, with shadowy ease, swallow the gentle clouds. As she watched, she heard David’s soft step behind her and he stood beside her, his arm lightly touching hers.
Together, in the fading light that brushed their faces with soft-toned shadows, they watched the pink-gold sunset reluctantly surrender to darkness. They turned to each other then and David bent his head gently and kissed her on the lips. She raised her arms and placed them on his shoulders, pulling him closer to her, feeling his heart pump wildly against her breast. Again their lips met, this time with a fierce urgency, and his arms pressed tightly across her yielding body. The window was black with darkness and they turned from it, arms linked, as though having come together at last, they were now fearful of losing touch. Slowly, in the dark familiar bedroom where they had shared so many years of nights, together but alone, they undressed each other, their hands traversing each other’s body with sensate wonder, newly discovering the mysteries of the flesh they had known so well.
He came into her with a force and strength for which she was unprepared but which her body welcomed with fierce acceptance, rising and falling in rhythm to the urgency of his love, until together they soared and wept in fulfillment and fell back in exhausted wonder.
They slept then, drowsing contentedly through the early evening hours as the apartment beyond their closed door filled with noise and light, with laughter and bustle. Their bodies entwined, they stirred luxuriously, murmured careless answers to the knock that came at last to their door, and when they emerged to join the family at the table, their cheeks burned and their eyes were soft. Across the room, Sarah Ellenberg and Mollie Hart smiled at each other with secret knowledge and the men became suddenly boisterous and teased the children, who giggled in wild freedom. All who sat around that communal table, laden with its weekend meal of cheeses and sour cream sparkling with vegetables, and bright-red borscht in which fragments of emerald-green scallions floated, were suffused with a sense of relief, as though an uncertain battle had at last been resolved.
Four mont
hs later Leah was pregnant with Michael, and the day she slipped on her first maternity dress, a blue-and-white checked shift which she designed and made herself (causing Seymour Hart to visualize a full line of maternity clothing), David came dashing up the stairs.
“I’ve been accepted. In the fall I begin the medical school at Downstate!”
Like a small boy overwhelmed with the enormity of his good fortune, he pulled Leah to her feet and whirled her around the room in a dance of unrestrained joy. They were still dancing, the stiff white letter of acceptance clenched in David’s teeth, when the children arrived home from school. Rebecca, Anne, and Jake joined them in that frenzied dervish spinning, and even Joshua allowed a few minutes of business to be lost as he too grasped hands and tapped out rhythms of joy. Only Aaron stood shyly by, watching, although his coppery curls bobbed up and down in tune to the music and his eyes followed his mother’s light steps with heavy wistfulness. But it was David who drew him into the circle finally, so that moving with awkward self-consciousness, he joined for a few minutes the spontaneous outbreak of joy. Then the widow in the apartment below banged with righteous fury on the water pipes and the dance was ended.
Exhausted, Leah sank into a chair and remembered with a sadness the summer evening when the Rosenblatt workers had danced to the music of the radio. The widow had banged on the pipes that evening too, but days after the fire she had waited for Leah on the steps, her eyes red with worry and regret.
“I’m sorry for stopping the party that night,” she said. “How was I to know?”
She could not have known, of course, that for some of those dancers, the music they swayed to that night was the last music they would ever hear. She would not have denied them that respite of joy had she known that the next day their laughter would be frozen into screams of terror and the little young limbs would be scarred and mutilated. But now, months later, that regret had been forgotten and she knew only the irritation of the moment. Grimly, she protested the sounds of joy, pounding her broomstick against the metal pipes, drowning out the music that violated and emphasized the silence of her loneliness.
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