Leah's Journey

by Gloria Goldreich

“Oh Joshua, I’m so happy. Thank you for taking me. It’s all so beautiful,” she cried.

  “That’s all I want to do, ever, Becca,” he said, the words breaking recklessly out of the carapace of secrecy in which they had been shielded since their shared childhood. “All I ever want to do is make you happy, take you places and give you things. And I will. I’m going to be as rich as your Uncle Seymour, Becca. Only I’m not going to sink all my dough into Seventh Avenue. I’ve been studying the stock market—Wall Street. I’m trading already. Do you know that I already made enough money to pay your uncle back the money he lent me for the Brighton Beach house, and now I’ve paid the whole house off! All from one killing in the market. You can make a lot of money now and I know just how to do it.”

  “Of course you do, Joshua. You’ve always known how to make money. Remember that first vacation we had in the mountains with your cousins—the time Mama was in that awful factory fire at Rosenblatts? I’ll never forget how you went to all those bungalow colonies selling the cotton shirts you shlepped up there.” She laughed and remembered how she had trailed after him and called out, mimicking his own voice, the call of the child peddler: “Get your bargains, get your shirts, cheaper than on Hester Street, cheaper than on Orchard Street!”

  “I remember,” Joshua answered shortly.

  She had not, after all, understood a word he said. She was a baby still, too young to understand that he was talking about a real future, a long future, that they would share together. He wasn’t talking about a couple of pennies’ profit on a shirt from a peddler’s cart but real money, the kind of money that bought houses with swimming pools and tennis courts, limousines with liveried chauffeurs. The kind of money her friend Lisa Frawley’s family had. But there was time. He would wait for her to grow up. His baby, his Becca.

  But now, with this news broadcast, there suddenly did not seem to be as much time. If Germany had invaded Poland, then England would have to support its commitment and declare war on Germany. And if France and England went to war, how long would it take before the United States plunged in? Hadn’t President Roosevelt and his wife entertained the King and Queen of England at Hyde Park just that summer? Still, perhaps England would not jump in. They had preached patience, nonintervention, before. Anything could happen. He must not panic. His country was still far from war and his dream was still intact. It would take more than a war to interfere with Joshua Ellenberg’s plans. After all, how many other nineteen-year-olds could buy their parents a house—and for cash? He looked approvingly at himself in the mirror, smoothed Vitalis on his thick fair hair, and liberally applied a shaving lotion Rebecca had admired. In a half-hour he would meet his parents at Grand Central and they would ride up to Scarsdale together. But they weren’t going to make the shlep by train forever—no sir. Joshua Ellenberg’s next purchase would be a car—a four-door Ford in baby blue, Becca’s favorite color.

  “When the moon comes over the mountain…” he sang as he slammed the door behind him, and he dropped a nickel in the blind newsdealer’s plate before going down into the subway but did not take a newspaper. These damn journalists and news announcers exaggerated everything. He had time, plenty of time.

  Rebecca Goldfeder and her friend, Lisa Frawley, walked down White Plains Road, carefully weaving their way in and out of the gently swaying shadows of the leaves that dappled the broad thoroughfare. They carried their tennis rackets under their arms and Rebecca allowed the can of balls she carried to swing loosely at her side. Lisa’s long blonde hair hung in silken smooth folds about her shoulders, but Rebecca’s thick dark curls were caught up in two ponytail bunches that bounced at either side of her finely shaped head and were tied with strands of bright pink wool that offset the crisp white cotton tennis dress her mother had designed for her.

  Rebecca had begun playing tennis only a few months before and attacked the game with her usual enthusiasm. She always focused all her energy on the particular project in which she was involved, approaching it like a storm with a whirling vortex aimed in a set direction. Rebecca concentrated fiercely on her goal and then, like a dispersed wind, she abandoned it without regret. The previous year she had been addicted to horseback riding and haunted the local stables, having cajoled her parents into giving her lessons. Both Leah and David had been reluctant. Horseback riding, for them, was vaguely associated with midnight marauders, hoofbeats in the darkness, booted Cossacks galloping past houses where frightened children crouched. Still, they overcame what they acknowledged to be their “ghetto neurosis” and allowed Rebecca to ride. The day after her first show, in which she jumped the highest hurdle set up in the Scarsdale Riding Academy corral, she sent her jodhpurs to the cleaners and tossed her boots into the back of the closet.

  That winter she had bought an expensive pair of figure skates, and bright felt skirts which she wore with heavy, cable-stitched white sweaters. She went daily to the frozen expanse of Twin Lakes until she could carve her name in elegant letters on the blue white ice, then hung the skates on a basement hook and gave two of the felt skirts to Lisa. Now tennis was her passion and she haunted the red clay courts of Scarsdale High School, fretting about her game and whether her favorite court would be available.

  “She should stick to something,” Leah worried.

  “She will. She’s only seventeen,” David replied. He himself admired Rebecca’s single-mindedness. Well, she had come by it honestly. Hadn’t her mother known how to concentrate her energies and become mistress of her craft? And without a single-minded approach would he be a psychiatrist today?

  The two girls ran lightly as they approached the courts.

  “Of course they’re not crowded today,” Lisa said contentedly when they saw two empty expanses. “Everyone is probably home listening to the radio. My father hasn’t moved from it all day. I don’t understand him. The war’s across the ocean, for heaven’s sake—in Europe!”

  Lisa’s voice implied that Europe was a distant planet and Rebecca remembered how months before when everyone in Scarsdale had been upset by a devastating fire which had torn through Greenwich, Lisa had shrugged indifferently and asked, “What’s all the excitement?—Greenwich is in Connecticut.”

  “My grandparents are in Europe,” Rebecca said. “In Russia.”

  “Oh, that’s all right then,” Lisa said. “Russia’s on Hitler’s side.”

  “Lisa, you’re so—so shallow,” Rebecca said impatiently and laughed in spite of herself.

  Lisa too laughed. “Shallow” was not a derogatory adjective, when used about a pretty girl at Scarsdale High School in the autumn of 1939.

  “Well, I hope your brother Aaron thinks so too. Your friend Joshua may like ‘deep’ women but I’ll bet Aaron, for all his Modern Library giants, doesn’t mind my being ‘shallow.’”

  She smiled, thinking of the many hours she had spent with Rebecca’s brother the past spring and fall, the quiet and the laughter, the long talks over lukewarm cups of coffee, the early-morning bike rides, that made up her time with the tall red-haired boy who quivered at her touch, but spoke about things she did not understand.

  It had begun one afternoon when Lisa had come to call for Rebecca. Her friend was out playing tennis and Aaron had looked up from a political theory text he was reading on the terrace to tell her so.

  “Oh darn. I wanted her to bike along the Bronx River Parkway with me. It’s such a perfect day. When your sister gets hooked on one thing she can’t think of anything else.”

  “I’ll bike the Parkway with you,” Aaron offered, tossing his book aside. He did not smile but there was pleasure in his eyes and his tense, thin features relaxed as they rode into the wind and followed the curving road up to the crenellated fortress of the Kensico Dam. The pleasure deepened as they rested side by side in the tall grass and then his long muscular arms reached about her, cradling her body while his lips tenderly touched her cheeks and eyes and finally came to rest, first gently, then with fierce certain strength, against her yielding lips. Wh
en they stood, locked in a sweet silence, to mount their bikes again, Lisa’s body was deliciously moist. At home she stared at herself in the mirror, ashamed of her ignorance. Since that day, she had haunted the Goldfeder house each weekend, her heart soaring when Aaron’s hand touched her shoulder and he said, in that oddly quiet voice of his, “Do you want to walk or bike this afternoon?”

  “You can ask Aaron yourself,” Rebecca said now, twirling her racket. “He called to say that he’d be up this afternoon and my mother asked if you’d stay for dinner. There’ll be quite a crowd—the Harts, the Ellenbergs, the Cosgroves, and Mr. and Mrs. Schreiber—they’re from Germany and their English isn’t too great, so talk slowly.”

  “Sure, I’d love to come. At my house they’ll still be wrapped around the radio,” Lisa said and felt her breasts harden at the thought of sitting across the table from Aaron, remembering the hand that had moved so gently across her arm, strewn with dancing bands of the palest orange freckles.

  “About Joshua,” Rebecca said carefully. “Joshua is just like a brother to me. You know, we practically grew up in the same house.”

  “Well, he may be like a brother to you but I don’t think you’re like a sister to him,” Lisa replied. “Oh, look, the far court is empty. Let’s run for it.”

  The two girls in their gleaming white tennis dresses dashed across the grassy slopes of the lawn, passing a middle-aged couple in street dress who sat with their heads bent close to a large portable radio, listening to a news commentator analyze the situation.

  “One remembers now,” the announcer ruminated sonorously, over the faint static, “the day Mr. Chamberlain abandoned Czechoslovakia to Hitler. ‘It is peace in our time,’ he said, but Winston Churchill replied, ‘Britain and France had to choose between war and dishonor. They chose dishonor. They will have war.’ And today, Churchill’s prophecy has come unhappily true.

  It is only a matter of hours until England must make its move. We stand on the threshold of a world at war.” The radio was clicked shut and the couple, without looking at each other, moved on.

  On the shaded tennis court Rebecca Goldfeder tossed a new white tennis ball into the air and slammed it over the net, laughing when it fell neatly into a corner on the opposite side and rolled off into the purple-flowered shrubbery. Overhead a plane flew low, hovered briefly, and then soared upward with startling speed. Rebecca stared after it, then took a new ball and offered Lisa another serve.

  *

  By late afternoon, almost all the guests due at the Goldfeder home had arrived. Leah, in a long dark skirt that swung gently around her calves and a cowl-necked white blouse, passed plates of miniature stuffed cabbages. Charles Ferguson accepted a drink from David and watched his elegant hostess, her dark hair threaded with glinting strands of silver and pulled back into a graceful chignon, circle the terrace. He thought back to that distant wintry day when a timid young immigrant woman whose blue-black braids were woven into a coronet stood shyly at the door of his studio. He remembered too the librarian on East Broadway who had told him of a red-headed boy who had insisted that his mother looked like the princess in “The Sleeping Beauty.” He had recognized that child to be Aaron Goldfeder and although he had not thought of Leah as a princess then, there was certainly something queenly about her this afternoon. Among designers, he knew, she was considered creative royalty. Her fashions took prize after prize and if Seymour Hart was fast becoming a millionaire, he owed his swift rise to Leah’s talents and ingenuities. Certainly, much of her work was derivative of the major European designers, but it was a talent to know from whom to improvise. Charles himself still wished that Leah would return to serious painting, but the design fever had seized her early and her career had been spurred by her need to make a living for the family while David studied medicine.

  David himself, Charles thought, had aged scarcely at all. True, a small tuft of gray sat spongily in the center of his beard, but thin men with their spare frames and narrow features clearly had the advantage in the years of advancing age. Charles touched his own corpulent middle and looked with satisfaction across the porch to where Seymour Hart sat, pleased to notice that Leah’s brother-in-law was loosening the belt on his plaid slacks. The heavyset manufacturer laughed too loudly, breathed too hard, and ate too much. His pudgy daughter, a year or two older than Rebecca, dangled too many charms on a heavy gold bracelet and circled her eyes too thickly with violet moons. Mollie Hart wore too much rouge and her hair was dyed a too brassy red. Even their son Jakie’s white buck shoes and V-necked tennis sweater were, after all, too white. The Harts were a family given to excess just as the Goldfeders were given to understatement. Charles Ferguson enjoyed wrapping people up into neat judgmental packages and he smiled, pleased with himself and with his friendship with the assembled group that had weathered so many years. Other things in his life had inexplicably vanished or faded into a whirling mist of forgotten days and dark, disappointed nights.

  “You seem content today, Charles,” Leah remarked, sitting down in the lounge chair next to him. “Doesn’t the war in Europe worry you?” Her voice was calm but he saw the tiny lines of strain about her fine eyes.

  “I’m too old to fight and too young to despair,” he replied and then banished all lightness from his tone. “But I know it must worry you.”

  “Yes, I’m worried. My family is still over there. I warned them. Three years ago, when I went to Europe.”

  She spoke quietly but Mrs. Schreiber, who sat near her, leaned forward, seizing on her last words.

  “We all warned each other,” the German woman said. “My husband and I warned our friends and neighbors. Our poor lost son warned us and we in turn warned him. England and France warned Germany and Germany warned the world. But the warnings were never enough. We would not believe and if we believed we would not act.”

  “I think your pessimism is premature, Frau Schreiber,” Charles Ferguson said gently.

  “No. I have lost a son. My pessimism was too late,” she replied and went to join her husband at the far end of the terrace where the men gathered around the radio which was issuing periodic news bulletins interspersed with baseball scores.

  “Where are the children, Leah?” Charles said. He had noticed how Leah leaned sharply forward as a car sounded on the street or the phone rang within.

  “Aaron isn’t here yet. I wonder where he can be. I’m a bit worried.”

  She walked to the terrace railing and leaned forward, looking into the dimming light, watching for her tall bright-haired son who had spent so many hours of his boyhood watching for her.

  “Oh, he’ll be here any minute, Aunt Leah,” Joshua Ellenberg said. He was carrying a tray with glasses of iced tea for his parents, still the dutiful son he had been since childhood. “See, there he is now.”

  He looked down the hill which Aaron was swiftly climbing, glad that his friend had arrived, annoyed at him for causing worry. Well, that was Aaron. Joshua deposited the glasses at the small table at which his parents sat and went off to join Rebecca, who was holding Bonnie Cosgrove’s small daughter on her lap while Michael fashioned a paper plane out of the front section of the Times, creating a graceful wing from which the face of Hitler addressing a cheering crowd leered.

  “Your prodigal brother returns,” he said to Rebecca, and Lisa Frawley, who had been standing nearby, moved to the brick steps which Aaron was climbing two at a time. When Lisa was sure he had seen her she moved off and began an animated conversation with Annie Hart, automatically laughing with an elegant toss of her long blonde hair at something Jake Hart said, although she had scarcely heard his comment.

  “You don’t really like Aaron, do you?” Rebecca asked.

  Bonnie’s child giggled and a spot of pearly saliva gleamed on the shoulder of Rebecca’s white tennis dress. Joshua leaned forward to wipe it off and felt his body throb as it drew closer to her dark skin with its smell of perspiration and Ivory soap.

  “I like Aaron. But I can’t stand this
Bolshevik crap he’s been spouting. Particularly since he really doesn’t know anything about the working class and the famous intolerable ‘conditions’ he’s always discussing. You don’t find out much about factory workers in the library at Washington Square College. I could tell him a few things about the old days at Rosenblatts and even about the new days at S. Hart. I guess I’m just tired of being the listening post for his theories and hearing everyone worry about ‘poor Aaron.’”

  “He does get these horrible moods,” Rebecca admitted. “But I think his politics have changed since last week. The Hitler-Stalin pact really got to him. Daddy said he was so shocked he could hardly believe it. And poor Gregory Liebowitz just took off—dropped his courses and everything.”

  “Yeah—it got to all of them. The sudden light of reality. How could their marvelous idealistic Soviets do that? The world of tomorrow takes giant steps back into the Dark Ages. Hitler and Stalin exchange the kiss of survival. I hear them in the coffeehouses downtown.” He raised his voice to a cruel pitch and imitated the conversations that were repeated daily through the city. “I can’t believe it. I won’t believe it. It’s not worthy of the Communist system. System—phooey!” He spat the word out as though it were an obscene epithet. “Systems don’t make any difference, Becca. The only thing that makes any difference is what you do yourself in the world. Everyone has to go after his own. Did a system build S. Hart? It wasn’t a system that made your mother a designer and your father a doctor. It was their own guts and work. They did it all themselves—just the way I’m going to.”

  “But what are you going to do?” Rebecca asked teasingly.

  Bonnie’s child had fallen asleep on her lap and she arranged the little girl’s head on her shoulder and looked at Joshua. He did not answer, but small beads of sweat rimmed his lips and his large hand shook slightly. A small thrill of pleasure ran through Rebecca and she wondered, with sweet guilt, why it was that her body delighted in making Joshua Ellenberg nervous.