Leah's Journey

by Gloria Goldreich

  Seymour Hart read the letter of acceptance carefully and beamed at the assembled family as though David’s achievement were his own. With his new prosperity had come a sense of omnipotence over the lives of his family and he smiled benignly at Jake’s report cards, at the sound of Anne’s off-key violin, at Aaron’s intricately constructed model airplanes. It was as though his financial success had made everything possible, and insured the fulfillment of their talents.

  S. Hart and Company had expanded and moved into new quarters and then had taken over a large factory as business continued to increase. Seymour acknowledged that the company’s success was as much the result of Leah’s talent as of his own shrewdness. Leah worked at home but she was listed on the payroll as a designer and each week her brother-in-law issued her a generous salary check. Occasionally she went down to the factory to supervise, but when she could not, pink-cheeked Bonnie Eckstein, who was Seymour’s forelady, came up to the apartment and she and Leah together worked out problems in piecework on Leah’s designs. They never spoke of the days at Rosenblatts or of the fire, although Leah knew that beneath the ring on Bonnie Eckstein’s right hand lay a curling rim of scarred flesh where a spiraling flash of flame had eaten the skin through to the milk-white knuckle.

  “Listen, we must celebrate. It’s not every day that a greenhorn gets to study for a doctor, even in the United States of America. Let us go out this Sunday,” Seymour suggested.

  “No. You go with the children. David and I have work to do,” Leah protested, smilingly avoiding her husband’s eye.

  Very little work got done during those weekend afternoons when the apartment was empty. More often than not, she and David, like guilty young lovers shyly searching out a secret place of privacy, would wait until the door shut behind the family and then fly into each other’s arms. Like carefree honeymooners, they played house in the apartment which was their home. They teased each other away from work, each surrendering to the other’s mood, whispering and laughing through the long afternoon of love and relishing the luxury of falling into easy sleep, their naked bodies pressed together, while in the street below children played and men and women shouted idle weekend pleasantries to each other.

  Usually, as though by tacit understanding, no one even suggested that David and Leah join the Harts on their Sunday excursions, but this time Seymour was insistent.

  “It’s not to the Roxy that we’re going or even Radio City. This is something special I want you to see with your own eyes.”

  Reluctantly, then, David and Leah joined the outing and dutifully followed Seymour and Mollie to the subway where they boarded the Brighton express and rode it almost to the end of the line. On the Brighton Beach station, they sniffed the sweet freshness of the salt air and craned their necks to see the ocean from the elevated platform.

  It was late spring but Brighton Beach Avenue was already electric with a holiday atmosphere. Young couples, their towels and swimming costumes tucked into small wicker valises, trailed through the streets, eating potato knishes wrapped in greasy waxed paper and gashed with wounds of golden mustard. Seymour bought pink clouds of cotton candy for each of the children and carelessly dropped the change into the outstretched cannister of a young woman who walked slowly down the street holding a small boy, his feet wrapped in rags.

  “Everyone makes promises but still there are children who go barefoot,” David murmured and looked sadly after the woman.

  “Soon. This Depression must finally be over soon,” she replied.

  “With the help of God,” he said and abruptly turned and walked after the woman, quietly pressing a dollar bill into her outstretched hand.

  The little group followed Seymour’s decisive lead as he turned up Brighton Eighth Street and crossed two long avenue blocks. At Ocean View Avenue, where small multifamily red brick houses replaced the string of apartment buildings typical of the area, he stopped in front of a three-family red brick house girdled by a wide porch.

  “A nice house, eh?” he said and his white teeth gleamed beneath his thick moustache.

  His wife Mollie smiled proudly up at him. With chameleonic ease, Leah’s sister assumed the protective coloring necessary for each changing segment of her life. In turn, she had been the dutiful daughter, the shy bride, and the stoically patient wife. Now she was the prosperous matron whose husband showed ambition and foresight, initiative and responsibility. As though to meet the demands of this role, her body had expanded. A wider girth was necessary if she were to exude the proper pride. Her white satin blouse stretched too tight across her full heavy breasts and her blue shantung skirt twitched importantly as she marched beside her husband.

  “It’s a very nice house,” David agreed cautiously.

  “By subway only two blocks to the medical college for you and fifty minutes to the factory for me. Two blocks away is a fine public school. A half a mile away is Coney Island Hospital. And all around nice synagogues, Hebrew schools, good shopping. Perfect for us.” Again Seymour beamed.

  The children were already scrambling about on the porch and Joshua Ellenberg had wandered out to the backyard, which he was measuring step by step. But Leah and David remained looking quietly at each other and then at the red brick house.

  “What do you mean—perfect for us?” Leah asked finally, and Seymour, like a magician who has been waiting for his cue, reached into his pocket and flashed a key at them.

  “It’s ours. That is, so far, mine and Mollie’s, and if you want to come in for a share—good—and if you want to rent from us the apartment—also good. I got it cheap. Six thousand dollars with only a thousand down. On auction.”

  “A foreclosure?” David asked grimly. The small lawn was bordered with bright tulips and he thought of the people who had planted the bulbs, planning for years to come. They had lost the house and the sweet promise of their planting.

  “All right, so it was a foreclosure. Look, I don’t want to make money on someone else’s misfortunes, but someone else would buy if I didn’t. Why shouldn’t we have a little luck? We didn’t work hard enough? We didn’t wander long enough in the desert? Why shouldn’t our children breathe the air from the sea? Tell me—it’s a crime to do a little better for yourself?” Impatiently spitting out answers to questions they had not asked, he pulled out a fat cigar and turned from them to look up at the red brick house with the secret satisfaction of new ownership.

  Leah turned to David and nodded. He too looked up at the small brick home again and its uncurtained windows stared down at him like strangely vacant eyes. As he watched, a seagull swooped lazily down, hovered above them for a moment, then rocketed skyward, shooting toward the ocean.

  “For you the best apartment—the one with the porch. Mollie wants it to be easy for Leah to put the baby out,” Seymour said cajolingly.

  Leah felt the growing life within her stir and stretch against the walls of her womb. How wonderful it would be to pick up a small cosseted bundle of newborn child and settle it in the sunlight of an easily accessible porch. She remembered the small containers David had fashioned for Aaron and Rebecca during their infancies on Eldridge Street. Oversized wooden boxes were lined with pillows and comforters and cautiously balanced on the fire escape while Leah hovered over the window to shield the sleeping children from stray cats. Then they could not afford even a secondhand baby carriage and the fire escape was the babies’ only source of sun and air.

  Leah remembered how her neighbor, poor Yetta Moskowitz, had murmured one day, “For the poor even air is expensive.” Yetta Moskowitz, a casualty of poverty, deserted by her husband and killed by her own despair. Her children, farmed out to relatives, still attended classes at the settlement house and Charles Ferguson had told Leah that the oldest Moskowitz boy was an evening student at the City College. In this solid brick house, with the breeze strong from the ocean blowing toward them, they would be insulated from the miseries of the Yetta Moskowitzes. Leah wondered what it would be like, after a dozen years of boarders and s
hared kitchens and bathrooms, to live alone in rooms that belonged only to their family, to know the privacy of a closed door which would not be thrust suddenly open, and the sweet aloneness of preparing a meal just for her own husband and children.

  “What do you say, Leah?” Mollie asked, and there was a nervous shyness in her voice which Leah found reassuringly familiar. She did not want her sister Malcha, dutiful and shy, to be swallowed by this buxom Mollie who laughed too loudly and wore clothes of a rainbow brightness.

  Impulsively she clutched her sister’s hand.

  “I say fine,” she said. “And the third apartment will be for the Ellenbergs?”

  “Who else?” Seymour glowed with his own munificence and flicked the long, delicate gray ash of his cigar onto the grass, grinding it slowly in. He enjoyed taking charge of other people’s lives, of charting their destinies and reaping satisfaction from their achievements. What he had helped make possible he harvested as his own.

  “The rent they’ll be able to afford and Sarah will finally have her own place. Enough talk. Let’s see the inside.”

  Three weeks later, on Aaron’s eleventh birthday, they left the apartment on Eldridge Street for the last time. They watched as their possessions were loaded on to the moving van—the pots and pans packed in the same barrels that had accompanied them from Russia, still bearing the faded green and white tags of the Oceanic Steamship Line. The tenement-house stoop was lined with women and children who shouted out words of advice and encouragement and whose eyes followed the laden van with glances of wistful hope. Leah, her hand resting on Rebecca’s dark hair, peered through the window of the hired car as it wove its way through the teeming east side streets, swerving to avoid a lumbering pushcart peddler, the driver shouting an angry curse at three yeshiva boys who dashed across the street, their earlocks flying. The car passed the Irvington Settlement House where posters announcing a summer lecture series were being hung, sped past the charred hulk of the building that had once housed Rosenblatt and Sons. The branches of the ailanthus tree were bare and the earth at its base was black with necrotic soot.

  “We are doing the right thing,” David had whispered to her, his eyes following her own to the gutted skeleton of the building where she and Eli Feinstein had stood suspended above flame and death.

  And it had been the right thing, she thought now. She smiled down at wiggling, laughing Michael, her merry child born to this new beginning, soothed by the sea breezes and the distant crashing of weary waves against the shore. The two years in the red brick house had been rich and peaceful, banishing the past into penumbral memories. A new prosperity was slowly wafting its way through the land. The eagle of the National Relief Administration hung over every machine in their factory, and in Mollie and Seymour’s living room a framed color photograph of the newly elected president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, smiled down at them. Freshly painted banks had reopened their doors and men walked with new purpose.

  “Will you be good in synagogue today? You don’t want to ruin Aaron’s bar mitzvah, do you?” Leah playfully asked squirming Michael.

  The child chortled and sprang up, thrusting his fat little fingers through his mother’s sleek dark hair and hugging her hips with his own fleshy small thighs.

  *

  Aaron Goldfeder glanced nervously around the crowded synagogue, the silk of the new prayer shawl his father had given him that morning cool against his neck. Nervously he fingered its fringes and felt in his pocket for the crisp folded pages of his speech. He mouthed the morning prayers dutifully while the incantations of the prophetic reading, which would be his responsibility during the service, trilled through his mind. Next to him his father intoned the prayers without looking at the prayer book, swaying to the intoned cadence with the habit of centuries.

  “God, full of mercy,” David Goldfeder’s strong voice rang out and Aaron thought of how his father had stared moodily at the newspaper that very morning, somberly studying a picture of Hitler’s brownshirted troops striding toward the Reichstag.

  “Now they are marching. Soon they’ll be killing. Leah, we must write again to your family. They must leave Europe.”

  “David, David, Hitler’s in Germany. My family is in Russia.” Leah had been disinterested, all her concentration focused on feeding Michael without letting him soil the light-blue outfit which Mollie had knit for the bar mitzvah.

  “His river of blood will cross Europe,” David replied bitterly.

  But now, in synagogue, his voice rose to full strength. “God of compassion and healing,” he sang, and Aaron wondered how his father who predicted rivers of blood could pray to a God of compassion.

  In the pews behind Aaron the congregation murmured and swayed and he heard his sister Rebecca’s giggle through the yellowing gauze curtain that separated the men from the women in this small seaside synagogue. He was grateful for the thin gossamer barrier because it shielded him from his mother’s eyes, from the worried sweep of her deep stare that settled upon him, sometimes for minutes at a time. What was there about him, after all, that caused his own mother to focus on him with fear and bewilderment? When he was a small boy, absorbed in a game of chess or blocks, he would suddenly feel her eyes heavy on his bent back, as though her stare were possessed of visceral strength. He would continue to play, pretending that she was not there, studying his every motion and gesture. Sometimes in his sleep he felt her eyes upon him and wakened to find her staring down at him, a naked question puzzling her own dark eyes.

  Once, months ago, he had asked his father about it, choosing a moment when David Goldfeder had laid his heavy medical texts aside for a moment and was carefully filling a pipe.

  “Papa,” the boy said hesitantly, carefully choosing the words he had mentally rehearsed, “sometimes Mama stares at me in such a funny way. Sometimes I think she doesn’t even like me.”

  He could not look at his father but stared at the patterned rug, relieved that he had thrust the thought from his mind, allowed the words to be heard.

  But David Goldfeder had not been shocked. He had looked thoughtfully at the boy who had always been just a bit too thin, whose coppery curls burned brightly on days of sunlight and gleamed with burnished splendor even in the grim light of winter. David reached out with a gentle finger and affectionately traced the line of freckles that ran from Aaron’s nose to the crease of his green eyes which had always been too serious for a child.

  “Your mama likes you—she loves you. It is just that she has had a hard life. Many bad things, terrible things happened to her, and sometimes people who have suffered have moods and feel sad when they remember too much. Perhaps when she looks at you like that, she is thinking of Yaakov, the man who gave you life, just as I have given you love. Such a memory may make her sad. You are a big boy, Aaron, with a big heart. Try to understand your mother.”

  David’s dark eyes caressed the boy and he placed an arm in brief embrace about Aaron’s shoulders. But his own answer did not satisfy him. He too had felt the brooding wondering of Leah’s gaze as she looked at her son.

  Aaron turned now and looked about the synagogue, smiling shyly at the familiar faces of those who had assembled to pay tribute to his passage into manhood. There were the old boarders who had shared his childhood—Label Katz the hatter, and little Mr. Morgenstern whose trimming store had kept Aaron provided with wooden spools to be fashioned into miniature soldiers or building blocks. Morgenstern’s wife Pearl, another former boarder, sat with his mother in the women’s section. Pearl had been a thin young woman, her pale skin almost colorless and her voice so soft that the other girls, especially Masha who had gone to California after his aunt Mollie had come from Europe, taunted her and asked her to repeat everything. But the woman who had kissed him that morning was portly, with packets of flesh dangling from her arms, and her small eyes were almost lost in the small mounds of pink flesh which were her cheeks. One child toddled at her side, she held an infant in her arms, and her body curved with the fullness of a n
ew pregnancy. The Morgensterns had arrived in a large maroon Chevrolet car and she had announced in a loud voice that Mr. Morgenstern was doing well, very well. The small shopkeeper seemed to have grown even smaller but his new suit was well cut and his feet were encased in shoes of burnished leather that captured the morning sunlight.

  Just behind Mr. Morgenstern, Aaron saw Charles Ferguson, who taught art at the Irvington Settlement House and who had never come to visit the apartment on Eldridge Street without bringing Aaron a book, knowing with mysterious accuracy just when Aaron’s interest had drifted from the Hardy boys to Robert Louis Stevenson and Daniel Defoe. Mr. Ferguson wore a beard now, a smooth blond growth threaded with silver, which he stroked now and again. Aaron touched his own chin and was comforted by the small, almost imperceptible hint of fuzz that met his exploring fingers.

  David Goldfeder touched the boy’s wrist lightly, fondly, motioning him to pay attention to the services. The cantor, a small, wizened man from whom a powerful tenor voice sprang forth with amazing strength, was summoning the bar mitzvah boy with the vibrant ancient melody to which all the men in the congregation had responded in their time.

  “Let Aaron, the son of David ben Levi, of the tribe of Levi, approach the Torah. Behold how the son of the holy Commandments, the bar mitzvah, is summoned!” The cantillation rang with the strength of centuries and Aaron Goldfeder rose and slowly ascended the platform.

  He stood for a moment before the open Torah scroll and watched its graceful bright-black letters dance before him, almost leaping upward from the yellowed sheet of parchment. The sun poured in from the window beyond the ark and settled on his bright hair. Crowned with warmth, he lifted the fringes of his prayer shawl, kissed them, and placed them on a corner of the open scroll. Softly at first he chanted the blessing over the Torah and then his voice rose in new strength as he sang the prophetic portion he had rehearsed week after week in the cantor’s tiny office, with its pervasive odor of throat lozenges and camphored ceremonial garments.