Leah's Journey

by Gloria Goldreich

  His voice gathered strength and he sang the words of the prophet Amos: “Seek good and not evil that ye may live—thus spake the Lord of Hosts…”

  The congregation sighed and the boy continued: “Hate the evil and love the good…” but before he could continue with the Prophet’s exhortation, his throat rebelled. The voice which moments before had been the sweet tones of a boy had suddenly erupted into the depth of a man’s tremulous tenor, and it was in the voice of a man that Aaron Goldfeder sang the concluding verse: “It may be that the Lord God of hosts will be gracious unto the remnant of Joseph.”

  The boy’s face was red and there was a murmuring and chuckling throughout the congregation. The cantor patted him approvingly on his shoulder. It often happened, in the family of Israel, that a child’s voice became that of a man on the Sabbath of his bar mitzvah, and it was considered good luck. David Goldfeder, his face glowing with pride, ascended the platform, embraced his son, and together they concluded the service.

  In the women’s section, Leah sat quietly, Michael at last asleep on her lap, and acknowledged the flow of “Mazal tovs” that rippled around her. She was swathed in a sweet serenity that had settled upon her as Aaron’s voice trembled into manhood. The timbre of his new voice was a familiar echo that carried her back across the years to that distant day in Odessa when Yaakov had stood beside her beneath the wedding canopy and lifted his voice to sing the marriage vows.

  “Behold thou art consecrated unto me according to the laws of Moses and of Israel,” he had sung to her as they stood sheltered beneath the outstretched prayer shawl.

  Now she was hearing that voice again, and she lifted a corner of the gauze curtain so that she might see her son’s bright hair, burnished amber in light as his father’s had been on their wedding morning. Familiar, too, was the curve of his back in the new navy-blue suit. Finally, in the moment of his new manhood, she had unraveled the mystery of his conception.

  9

  DAVID GOLDFEDER HAD ALWAYS loved the earliest hours of morning, when the first fresh segments of dawn, laced with the gentle quiet of a world still largely asleep, broke through the night. As a medical student it had been his favorite time to study and during his residency he had never objected being on call while others slept. Now, four years after Aaron’s bar mitzvah, as a practicing physician, he still nurtured his fondness for the hours of the morning’s sweet nascence. He cherished boyhood memories of morning walks when he wove his way through the tall and slender trees that lifted themselves defiantly against the wind and watched the darkness of their leaves slowly fade as the lights of morning revealed their fragile greenery. The little forest hut that had been his home must be deserted now. His brother, for whom his son Aaron was named, was dead; his sisters were scattered, and his parents lay buried in the small Jewish cemetery, not far from the grave of Chana Rivka with whom he had so often walked beneath those slender trees.

  “I remember the trees more clearly than I do their faces. I can see the crippled stump of a giant pine that fell during a winter storm. Wet green moss had covered it, growing in the shape of a hand—a four-fingered hand. That I can see, but I cannot remember the color of my mother’s eyes or the sound of Chana Rivka’s voice,” he had cried out during the psychoanalysis that was part of his training as a psychiatrist.

  “But that is natural,” his analyst had replied. “The forest is a symbol. The growing trees and the fallen one are also symbols. Think of them. See their shadows. Watch them sway and tremble, blossom and shed.”

  The gentle voice, belonging to the esteemed Dr. Simonsohn who had trained with Freud himself in Vienna, was quiet but insistent, and hour after hour, year after year, David had obeyed its gentle urging, sometimes with his fists clenched in anger, sometimes with tears coursing unnoticed down his cheeks.

  With Dr. Simonsohn, David had discussed Leah’s love for Eli Feinstein and his own feelings about it, buried for so long in an underbrush of shame and pain. He flushed them out slowly, painfully, and confronted them, in the emotional clearing his analysis had created.

  “I hated him. Without even knowing him I hated him—and wished him vanished or dead. And I had no right to. We had made a bargain in Odessa, Leah and myself, and nowhere in that bargain had we talked of love. Comfort and sustenance, yes. Companionship, yes. But not love. I came to love her but I knew that her feelings remained unchanged. Perhaps I should have spoken. Perhaps if I had told her then of my love, courted her, and won her, she and Feinstein would never have become involved. Why didn’t I tell her? Why couldn’t I tell her?”

  “You could not take the risk just then. You were afraid of losing her,” Dr. Simonsohn said quietly. “Revelation must rest on some guarantee. You had none. So you remained silent.”

  “I hated him,” David said in a low dead tone.

  “Hate. What is hate? Another word for anger unreconciled. You are allowed your angers, David Goldfeder. You have a right to them. Face them. Allow them to percolate. Then they will not simmer and condense into that hatred you so despise.”

  Like warm water across an open wound, the words soothed him, and in the weeks and months that followed he talked more of that time, at last allowing his fear to flow freely and evaporate, while the smoke of Dr. Simonsohn’s inevitable English cigarette drifted in gray clouds through the quiet room. From then on, slowly, the layers of bewilderment and terror peeled away until the day he left Dr. Simonsohn’s office for the last time.

  Now Dr. David Goldfeder strode briskly through silent streets barely silvered by the slowly rising sun, on his way to his first patient of the day, ready to take his own seat in the deep leather chair and watch and help as his analysand lay rigid in the couch and wandered through that wondrous forest of fear and feeling.

  It was very early for an analytic hour: seven o’clock. In order to be at his office that early he had awakened in a heavy darkness. Leah, deeply asleep beside him, had not even stirred as he padded softly about the room, dressing. Of course, she had worked very late the previous evening and had still been bent over her drawing board when he closed his book and commented on the lateness of the hour.

  “You go to sleep. I’ve only just got an idea. I’ve been playing about with it for days and now, suddenly, I see the whole thing clearly,” she said and sent her pencil racing across the sheet in front of her.

  “Why is it, Doctor, that I get my best ideas near midnight?” Leah asked playfully.

  “Psychoanalysts have had little success in dealing with the secrets of the creative mind,” he answered seriously. Like a priest committed to a demanding religion, he too worshiped his discipline and was unable to approach any aspect of it with humor. It was a dangerous tendency, and he had been warned against it by both Dr. Simonsohn and his friend and teacher Peter Cosgrove. He recognized it but still was unable to combat it.

  “I would make a guess,” he offered, “that at this hour, your mind is free of worry about the children and the house and you can focus more easily on your work.”

  “Yes, perhaps,” she murmured, but he saw that she was totally involved in the drawing now and scarcely listening to him. Smiling, he passed his hand through the sleek dark cap of her hair, kissed her pale neck, and went to bed alone.

  He could scarcely resent Leah’s absorption in her work, he knew; it was that work which had made it possible for him to complete his medical studies. For years Leah had been the able breadwinner of the family, and thanks to her artistic ability and Seymour’s business acumen, the fortunes of S. Hart Inc. were soaring.

  “Look, now I don’t pay for advertising. My customers wear my ads,” Seymour chortled jovially, referring to the hart trademark designed by Leah and soon the streaking hart was emblazoned on shirts and jackets, blouses and tennis costumes.

  Banks had been swift to offer Seymour Hart the necessary loans for expansion, and he juggled large sums of money with the same dexterity he had displayed in the days on Eldridge Street when he used a borrowed bolt of cloth as collat
eral to pay a trimming manufacturer.

  The Hart family had adjusted easily to the new prosperity. Mollie covered her entire apartment in deep-gold wall-to-wall-carpeting. Gilt-framed landscapes hung above her royal blue satin couch and she installed a false fireplace with an electric log that glowed rosily when a switch was pressed. She and Seymour slept on an enormous bed beneath a carved headboard facing a matching double bureau.

  “It’s beginning to look like Versailles there,” David remarked wryly after a Friday evening visit to the Harts.

  The Goldfeder home, too, reflected the new prosperity, but in their living room the polished wood floor gleamed beneath woven area rugs and the furniture was simple and neutral, punctuated only with brightly colored cushions. Their living room was dominated by David’s large desk and Leah’s drawing board.

  After all the years of cramped living on Eldridge Street, the Brighton Beach house still felt luxurious to them, but Mollie Hart had already begun to speak disparagingly about the red brick house. It was too small. There was no need for them to live on top of each other. She talked longingly of places like Long Island and Westchester.

  “After all, a doctor, a specialist, needs a good address,” she told David when he completed his residency.

  “Why? Where he lives adds to his qualifications?” he asked joshingly, always feeling a bit sorry for his wife’s sister who had never claimed the right to plan her own life. With stoic acceptance she had rowed on in the random streams of her experience. As the wife of Shimon Hartstein, a poor man, she had diligently lived the life of a poor man’s wife. As Mrs. Seymour Hart, married to a wealthy manufacturer, she moved into the role of a comfortable matron, obsessed with her home, her children’s teeth (both Anne and Jake clamped their lips tightly shut against gleaming braces), and her own bright wardrobe.

  “Why should my Seymour travel on the subway? From the suburbs he could drive, take a comfortable train,” Mollie argued.

  Neither David nor Leah chose to mention the fact that Seymour Hart spent very little time in the house on Ocean View Avenue. More and more frequently he found reasons for staying in the city, and he arrived home later and later when he arrived at all. Only that morning, David, leaving the house at dawn to meet his seven A.M. patient, had met his brother-in-law arriving home, his expensive suit rumpled, his eyes rimmed with an angry redness, his breath sour with whiskey.

  “Very late conference. Out-of-town buyers,” he muttered to David. “Listen, try to come home early tonight. I want to talk to you about something important.”

  David had nodded and now, walking toward his office, he wondered what it was that Seymour had on his mind, but when he reached the door of his consulting room, with professional precision he cleared his mind of all thoughts of his family, ran his fingers across the nameplate on his door as though still in need of reassurance that he was indeed David Goldfeder, M.D., and settled himself behind his desk to begin his long day’s work.

  During the early morning and late afternoon and evening hours, David saw his analytic patients. The rest of the day he spent at the large municipal hospital, not far from his office, passing from the frenetic, turbulent ambience of emergency admitting rooms to the insulated calm of the small consulting cubicles where he examined the miseries and emotional agonies of the city’s poor. After two years of practice he still could not decide which aspect of his work he found more rewarding.

  “I’m a professional schizophrenic,” he complained to Peter Cosgrove.

  “No,” Peter replied, with academic certainty, “the work may be different but the struggle is the same.”

  Peter Cosgrove—tall and lean, whose family lived on the Connecticut side of Long Island Sound, who twice a year, in spring and fall, went into J. Press and bought his narrow rep ties and blazers and slacks, choosing only different colors, slightly darker than those he had chosen as an undergraduate at Princeton and during graduate school at Brown—it was Peter Cosgrove, confident enough of his own gifts, freed by his family’s wealth and acceptance of the petty competitiveness typical of early academic life, who as a psychology professor at City College had spotted David Goldfeder’s gifts. Now his student, the immigrant pants presser, surpassed his own knowledge, and Cosgrove proudly viewed David’s achievements while continuing to offer encouragement and reassurance. Like his Phi Beta Kappa key, his doctoral dissertation, and his academic rank, Dr. David Goldfeder was included among his achievements. A rare friendship and appreciation existed between the two men, who spoke to each other with the complete freedom of those who have come from totally different worlds.

  Peter was right, David had acknowledged. The struggle continued to be against those implacable enemies of the spirit―hatred and violence bred of ignorance and despair. Their dark shadow had clung to him from the bloodstained streets of Odessa to this calm, neutral consulting room where he sat patiently in his leather chair and listened to patients set their fears and feelings afloat in the room’s dim light.

  Jeffrey Coleman, David’s seven-o’clock patient, arrived ten minutes late, but neither he nor David commented on the time lost. Only a few months earlier, Jeffrey, a young black physics student at Columbia University, would have arrived even later, and often he had not arrived at all.

  “Five minutes late—five minutes’ hate,” David thought, leaning back and waiting for Jeffrey to break the silence.

  That silence was both their enemy and their weapon. Draped in its protective folds, Jeffrey had remained mute and constrained, sunk deep into the depression that was paralyzing his academic progress and frightening those professors who recognized his unusual gifts. A fund raised by those same professors was making the expensive analysis possible and while it was an unusual enterprise, Jeffrey Coleman was an unusual case.

  He was a Southern black who had startled his Northern high school teachers with record-breaking scores on mathematical achievement tests. A Westinghouse winner, he was admitted to Columbia on a full scholarship and completed two academic years in one, and then suddenly became unable to study. In a waking sleep he attended lectures, but the equations and theories which he had handled with such ease had become meaningless to him. More dangerously, he slept very little and had almost no communication with those around him. He was indifferent to threats that his scholarship was in danger, and David found it difficult to understand how the boy had been persuaded to see him—a small subconscious streak of self-preservation, he guessed, although Jeffrey claimed he had come just to shut the professors up.

  Still, they had struggled through the silence. Then, in the terrible quiet of the Manhattan consulting room, tales of Southern nights had unfolded—nights when men wearing hooded sheets careened through narrow streets, shattering windows and tossing fiery torches through doors of rooms where small black children crouched in fear and trembling. Scattered images, memories so masked with fantasy that they had to be sorted and scrutinized, dusted with fragments of dreams and pierced with sudden insights. Memories of blood and shouting and a mother’s dark thighs suddenly exposed, kicking upward, twisting against the fierce thrust of the hooded man’s purple throbbing penis, etched in the small boy’s mind as a pale bloodied club. That remembered terror had festered within the child’s secret thoughts.

  David remembered the morning when that memory had at last been wrested forth. He remembered how Jeffrey’s shoulders had quaked with relief and how he had rested afterward, suffused with a silent calm. The boy was almost well now, David thought. Perhaps he might even begin to arrive on time for his analytic hour, he mused wryly, as Jeffrey raised himself on an elbow and talked freely now, his brief battle against the silence won.

  The newspapers that morning had carried the story of the newest Scottsboro trial and there had been a photograph of one of the young Negroes accused of the cardinal sin of the South—the sexual violation of a white woman. Even David, familiar with the case, his own contribution to the defense fund twice repeated, was shocked by the youth of the black boy in his overa
lls whose large bewildered eyes stared out of the front page of the Times. The accused was only a child in a striped T-shirt who, like Aaron, should be dashing out to a softball field after school, his arms raised high to catch a soaring ball, not manacled together in cruel handcuffs.

  Jeffrey Coleman talked about that picture now, his hand clenching into a fist and unclenching so that the skin beneath his fingers turned pale ocher and became newly dark as the angry blood was pumped forward and then released.

  “All of us, growing up down there, had the feeling that maybe it would be us who would end up in a white man’s jail. You know, when I looked at this kid in the paper, I was sorry for him and glad it wasn’t me. It’s like we were born with a shadow, a kind of fear that followed us everywhere, warning us and scaring us. I remember when we first came up north I used to sit on the subway with my eyes down because down there if you looked at a white woman they could get you for the thoughts you weren’t thinking. You wouldn’t know about that kind of being afraid, Dr. Goldfeder.”

  “Yes I would,” David replied softly.

  The young man looked back in surprise. It was unusual for Dr. Goldfeder to offer an answer or an admission.

  “I too have lived in that kind of fear,” David said. He was breaking an important rule of Freudian analysis—revealing himself to his patient—but he sensed that it was important for Jeffrey Coleman to know that he was neither isolated nor unique. It was easy to understand Jeffrey’s relief that it was not his picture of agonized pain in print. With stricken clarity David remembered looking down at his brother Aaron’s body, hearing of Yaakov’s death, and through the blindness of his grief, growing heavy with guilt at the knowledge of his relief that he, at least, was alive. What a fellowship of pain and guilt he shared with young Jeffrey. Was it that same fellowship that had sent a Jewish lawyer with a Russian name hurrying to the South to defend the black boys?