Leah's Journey

by Gloria Goldreich

  Michael, too, was asleep, his bed barricaded by intricate Erector Set creations and his wall papered with posters from the General Electric exhibit at the World’s Fair. Michael worked for hours, sometimes days, on a single bridge or building, kept it intact for weeks, and then suddenly dismantled it and cheerfully created something new. He shook his dark curls vigorously as he worked and laughed excitedly when a new idea struck him. A happy child was a small miracle, David thought, and as he passed Aaron’s empty room, the neatly made bed caused him a brief pang of misery.

  But then, perhaps Aaron would come home after all, this holiday weekend. It was a good sign that he had completed his summer school courses at New York University. His roommate, Gregory Liebowitz, who had shared Aaron’s intense political involvement over the past two years, had been virtually paralyzed by the turn international events had taken this summer of 1939 and had dropped his courses and disappeared on what he called a “thinking hike.” But then Gregory had been more introverted than Aaron, more isolated, coming as he did from a home still completely rooted in the traditions of the world David and Leah had left twenty years before. Aaron, at least, had had David to confront with his disillusionment and impotent fury when it became at last perfectly clear that Germany and Russia would form an alliance.

  David remembered, as he walked through his quiet house, how Aaron had waited for him in his office the day the headlines proclaimed the news. His oldest son was over six feet tall, with the lean, taut body of the trained runner. His bright hair was closely cropped but even so curled defiantly, and his chiseled features were tense, the young face always sharply wary of nameless dangers. Dressed in the faded dungarees and plaid cotton shirt which constituted his uniform, Aaron pointed wordlessly to the Tribune headline which David had read, with sinking heart, hours earlier: GERMANY AND RUSSIA SIGN TEN YEAR NON-AGGRESSION PACT; BIND EACH OTHER NOT TO AID OPPONENTS IN WAR ACTS; HITLER REBUFFS LONDON; BRITAIN AND FRANCE MOBILIZE.

  “Dad, how could they do it? The People’s Republics signing a treaty with that Nazi scum?” Aaron’s voice was incredulous, betrayed. The headline violated everything he had believed in and worked for during the two years that had passed since he left their Scarsdale home to live near the University—a move which Leah and David had encouraged, each quietly hiding a painful sense of loss.

  “It is time for him to establish his own identity, to find himself as Aaron Goldfeder, his own person, not as the son of Leah and David,” David had said, using clinical terminology to shield himself from the intense private pain he felt as he watched Aaron pack. Increasingly, as his practice expanded, he found he was treating young men and women who had no sense of themselves as individuals and were divorced from their emotional lives. Alienation, his colleagues called it and offered learned theories on its origin—the sudden advent of mass production, the speed of their times, automobiles, movies—the explanations were manifold but the young people continued to writhe in emotional misery and David was determined that his own children should discover themselves.

  “Yes, of course,” Leah had agreed but her voice was frayed with worry. She enjoyed no ease in her relationship with Aaron. It was as though she and her bright-haired firstborn were trapped in an emotional maze, always chasing after each other, their outstretched hands just missing, their voices echoing down newly deserted corridors. She would watch Aaron sometimes, his face tight with concentration as he struggled with a chess problem, his lean body always keyed and taut. She felt suffused with a pride and love she could not display because there was no peace between them. Left alone in a room, they faced each other uneasily, fought for words and avoided each other’s eyes. It would, of course, be better for all of them if Aaron lived at school. He had never liked the large Tudor home on the gentle Westchester hill which they had bought shortly after her return from Europe when it became clear that the new line of S. Hart International Originals was going to make them all rich.

  The arrangement she had made with Frederic Heinemann had been a reciprocal one. She sent him sketches of American designs and fabric swatches and he in turn went to the European shows and shared his drawings and insights with her. The letters were still mailed to and from Charles Ferguson’s because even hopeful Frederic Heinemann no longer dismissed fears of the Nazi influence as irrational. His letters were increasingly worried and he was determined to arrange for himself and his friend Heinz to leave as soon as the establishment on Kurfuerstandamm could be sold.

  “He admits finally that the countrymen of Schiller and Goethe are experiencing an interlude of insanity,” little Mr. Schreiber observed wryly. Schreiber now managed the import and export division of S. Hart, and when Leah visited their bright apartment on Washington Heights it was difficult to recall the grim misery in which they had lived on the Rue des Rosiers. Only the picture of their son, a serious-eyed, thin young man in university cap and gown, stood silent witness to the grief they had known and would never forget.

  Aaron himself had no interest in the business and stayed away from both factory and office—unlike Joshua Ellenberg, who had enmeshed himself in the firm as soon as he graduated from high school.

  Aaron shared none of Joshua’s purposeful direction. He had been a good student at Scarsdale High School, but a pervasive dreaminess clung to him. Often, during his last years at home, Leah felt that he moved through the house as though he were an uncomfortable guest in their midst, observing and judging the ambience of their lives. The small boy who had stood sentinel at a tenement window had grown into a tall young man who moodily listened to other people’s laughter and sat silently through meals at which the conversation of his parents and his brother and sister percolated with ideas and opinions. The New Deal had served its purpose. The federal government should take a more active stand against segregation in the South. Scarsdale High School should encourage an exchange program with foreign countries.

  “What do you think, Aaron?” David would ask. “What does it matter what I think?” the boy invariably replied and waited for the twin shafts of pleasure and shame which followed his rudeness—shame at the pain he had caused his father and pleasure at the distress he knew Leah felt. But she did not reprove him in anger or indignation as she often cautioned Rebecca and Michael for lesser offenses. Instead she sought him out in his room and sat tentatively at the edge of his bed or stood uneasily in the doorway.

  “Aaron, is something the matter?”

  “What could be the matter?”

  Like awkward strangers, they fenced verbally with each other, sparring with questions and answers but never allowing the sheer metal edge of their lonely anguish to pierce the mesh of delicate defenses it had taken them so many years to weave.

  “What do you want to study?” she had asked when he graduated from high school.

  “I don’t know. I need time. Leave me alone.”

  He hurled the words at her as though her question had been an accusation and she did not think to defend herself, knowing that she had earned his anger in other places during other years. Aaron talked vaguely now of studying political theory, and the friends he brought home from the university were thin, almost gaunt, young men, who remained for hours in his room, talking softly while the portable phonograph played The Songs of the Lincoln Brigade. Above the music they heard Aaron’s voice, impassioned and fluent, and the murmurs of agreement that followed when he expounded a theory. Within this group of intense young people he was totally accepted and they left him no time to experience loneliness and apprehension. There were important things to be done, books to be read, the problems of the world itself to be sorted out, solved. They were the generation to confront and conquer poverty, hunger, unemployment. There had to be a more equitable way to distribute wealth. How could Aaron reconcile his Scarsdale home with the Harlem slums he passed on the train that carried him from one life to the other? In the Scarsdale living room his mother and his uncle studied production figures. In his Greenwich Village apartment a poster hung over his saggin
g daybed proclaiming that “Communism is Twentieth Century Americanism.”

  When he came home alone he sat silently in the living room looking contemptuously about at the comfortable furnishings, the soft draperies and deep rugs, as though comfort itself were a personal affront, a conspiracy against him and his tortuous ideals. He smiled only when small Michael laughingly hurled himself at him and enticed him out to the grassy lawn to shag fly balls. A great joy and love soared between the two brothers, nine-year-old Michael and Aaron the nineteen-year-old political theorist. It was always Michael who could make Aaron laugh and Aaron who, during Michael’s childhood illnesses, read endlessly to him and squatted on the floor, following his small brother’s instructions on the Erector Set and Tinker Toy creations. Michael had always been a pet to him, never a challenge, and he cherished the small boy for the peace that had come to the household with his birth.

  Leah, straightening Aaron’s room when he returned to the city, found mimeographed sheets issued by the Young Communist League, the Young People’s Socialist League, crumpled receipts from the Friends of the Spanish Fight for Freedom, clippings from the Daily Worker.

  “He is in the family tradition,” David remarked dryly. “Let him find his own way. Besides, I notice that he is not too involved in politics to neglect taking Lisa Frawley out to miniature golf.”

  Lisa was a young friend of Rebecca’s who always managed to visit when Aaron was expected home, despite the fact that his visits to Scarsdale grew more and more infrequent. When Leah phoned and insisted that they meet in the city, he took his parents to small downtown theaters where they sat in hard-backed seats and watched plays by Aaron’s hero, Clifford Odets.

  “You see,” Aaron would cry exultantly, “he understands poverty. He understands art.”

  “Your mother and I also understand poverty,” David said, looking at the scar on his wrist where the flesh puckered into a grinning welt—the scar earned when he had studied while pressing pants before traveling uptown to his studies at the City College. “I think you too must have some memories of poverty, Aaron. Perhaps you recall the apartment we all lived in on Eldridge Street. Do you remember that there was a fire escape just outside the kitchen window? When you were an infant—we had been in America only a few months and I did not yet have steady work—your mother made a crib for you from a wooden crate and so that you should get fresh air, she put the crib on the fire escape and watched it while you slept because cats ran up and down that fire escape. For hours she sat there and watched. We had a neighbor there—poor Yetta Moskowitz—who used to say that the poor couldn’t even afford air and she was right. For us, air was a luxury. So we too understand poverty.”

  “Those were the years that your father worked as a pants presser—twelve, sometimes fourteen hours a day,” Leah added. “We haven’t forgotten.”

  “But now you have your life’s ambition,” Aaron retorted bitterly. “A big business for Mama and Uncle Seymour, a fancy east side office for you, and a house in Scarsdale.”

  It was not long after that conversation that Aaron moved from the dormitory on Washington Square to a small cluttered apartment on MacDougal Street which he shared with Gregory Liebowitz, who was intensely involved in what they called the Movement. Their small rooms were piled high with mimeographed sheets deploring the lot of itinerant farm workers, of the down-trodden Okies, the tragedy of Spain, and the moral supremacy of the Soviet Union. A large poster of Mother Bloor smiled benevolently down on them. Leah, on an infrequent visit, maneuvered her way through the cluttered room and thought of a similar room where stacked pamphlets had served as furniture and a narrow cot had sufficed a dark-haired young woman and her green-eyed love. She saw that younger Leah, now, as a distant friend.

  Aaron’s involvement in the Movement intensified and he talked about leaving college and working full-time for the Party. No wonder, then, that he had felt so bitterly betrayed when the Hitler-Stalin pact was signed that sweltering August afternoon. A colleague at the hospital had told David that one of his patients, a committed Communist, had attempted suicide when he learned of the Von Ribbentrop mission. A group of Socialists at the City College had draped their red flag in black bunting and initiated a brief hunger strike. In the cafeterias on the upper west side, men and women carrying book bags and brief cases stopped each other and asked in earnest distress, “Do you believe it?” “Is it possible?” “Can you believe it?”

  Aaron had read the headline he flashed at David but he too remained incredulous. Together he and David had gone into the doctors’ lounge at the hospital, where they listened to H. V. Kaltenborn’s cracked and strained voice give the details of the pact. A young black surgeon, active in a group called Doctors for Peace and Universal Justice, switched the station and they listened to Edward R. Murrow, speaking hoarsely from London, confirm the report. The surgeon had ripped a pin, a red enameled caduceus, from his white jacket and tossed it into the wastepaper basket before slamming out of the room. David looked at Aaron and saw that there were tears in his son’s eyes.

  “Your mother predicted this three years ago when she came back from Europe,” he said.

  “My mother always predicts everything,” Aaron replied bitterly. “Ballerina skirts, the stock market, and even the Hitler-Stalin pact. Wonder Woman.”

  David did not answer. Aaron needed time, he told himself. It was Aaron who had suffered the agonies and hardships of those early years; it was he who bore the scars of their struggle, of Leah’s losses, and, finally, even the acid imprint of her success.

  Aaron had returned to class although Gregory had left the city and another friend paraded with a group of Zionist Socialists in front of the doors of the Russian Consulate, carrying signs which linked the hammer and sickle with the swastika.

  Well, now Aaron had had a week to assimilate his distress, David thought, and surely he would come to spend this Labor Day weekend with them. Things would surely get better.

  David opened the front door and sniffed in the freshness of the morning air. The last of the roses were in bloom and it seemed to him that their scent grew stronger as their season waned. What pleasure the garden had given him, these past three years. Mollie had been right, after all, to urge this move to Westchester on them—right for the wrong reasons. His sister-in-law, ensconced in a much larger house a few miles away, berated him for tending to the garden himself, urged Leah to hire more help, and drove an enormous Buick which she discussed with as much enthusiasm as she discussed the academic and social achievements of her children. Mollie, after all, was Mollie. He smiled and bent to lift the Times, which lay neatly folded on the brick steps, and his eyes still followed the yellow roses as he automatically flipped to the headlines. Always, in the years afterward, when he thought of the war in Europe, he remembered that strong late summer scent of blooming roses, their sweet doomed fragrance filling the early morning air, and the shock of the headline, so long anticipated and still so frightening: HITLER’S ARMIES INVADE POLAND!

  “It’s begun,” he thought dully and like his tall son, tears filled his eyes and he wept with bitter credulity and pain for a world so newly at war.

  *

  Joshua Ellenberg heard the news of the Polish invasion on an early broadcast as he waited for the stock market report. Angrily, his fingers curled around the small copper model of the Empire State Building which he had purchased just months before at the opening of the World’s Fair. The World of Tomorrow, he thought bitterly, and remembered how he and Rebecca had stood for hours to witness the opening ceremonies of “The Court of Peace.” The Germans had already destroyed all hopes of peace and if they had their way, those Nazi bastards, they’d destroy all his tomorrows as well. And Joshua’s tomorrows were so carefully planned—programed and saved for since his childhood. He knew, had always known, where he was going. He wasn’t going to spend his life living in the shadows of the Harts and Goldfeders the way his parents had lived in the back rooms and basements of their homes. And he had already
managed to end that period, to achieve for his mother the dream of her own home. When the Harts and Goldfeders had moved to Scarsdale, he had borrowed money from Seymour and used it to buy the Brighton Beach house for his parents. Now, at least they had an income from the tenants in the house and he himself was free to rent a room in Manhattan and continue to mold his secret plans into sweet reality.

  He had even risked discussing his blueprint for the future with Rebecca, on the night the World’s Fair opened. Hand in hand, they had walked through the gardens where fountains sprang up from nowhere, among buildings ribboned with sparkling waterfalls, edging their way through excited crowds calling to each other in many languages. Rebecca had worn a navy-blue skirt and a white blouse with the small red hart dancing on its pocket. She had danced herself, twitching excitedly to the tune of “The Sidewalks of New York” which followed them wherever they wandered in that lovely wonderland. They giggled as Elsie the Borden cow spun around with 150 friends on a revolving milking platform and they craned their necks as the brightly colored parachutes plunged earthward past giant-sized Life-Savers. In the amusement park he won a panda for her and she clutched it as they watched Oscar the Obscene Octopus wrestle a very small blonde girl who wore very few clothes.

  Rebecca’s long dark hair was loose, held in place by a bright-red headband, and when she moved, twisting easily to the improvised dance step, her body was soft and graceful and her smile, so gay and free, made his heart beat with an arhythmic trembling.