Leah's Journey

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by Gloria Goldreich


  He had not slept enough, he knew, and he also knew that no more sleep would come. Fitfully he turned and looked at the telephone, but Katie would not be awake yet. She always slept with a peculiar lethean heaviness after what they called, with wry bitterness, a “scene.” There were other words for it, he knew, and he knew too that his father could provide him with a clinical vocabulary that would clearly define those wild hours that tore at Katie’s soul and at his own love for her. But he could not, would not, bring himself to speak to David or anyone else about it. If he defined those sudden stretches of silence, which were invariably followed by wild weeping and self-castigation when Katie thrust herself at him like an exhausted child and beat against his chest with wearied fists, he would have to acknowledge a disease, search out a cure. It was safer, easier, to dismiss those lost hours as “scenes” and to assure himself that the intervals between them grew longer and longer. Soon, perhaps, they would disappear entirely and the delicate golden-haired girl, whose steady gaze made him tremble with love and yearning, would live happily ever after like the fairy-tale prince and princess in the oversized book he had gazed at wondrously so long ago in the reading room of the East Broadway branch of the New York Public Library. He remembered, now, thinking that his mother resembled those dark-haired crowned beauties and he smiled at the sudden memory of how the sun had pierced those soot-encrusted windows as he read, settling into liquid golden pools on the battered oak table.

  The phone rang and he reached for it and said hello, his voice still thick with dreamy memory.

  “Aaron, did I wake you?” Katie’s voice was shy, hesitant, as it always was on such a morning, after a night that had trembled with her sobs.

  “No, darling. Of course not.”

  “Aaron, listen to me carefully. There is still time. If you don’t want to go through with it, we can call the wedding off. It’s happened before.”

  He thought of her sitting up in bed, her blonde curls caught up in a pale ribbon, her fragile face drained of color, her body tense with secret fears. There would be a small rose blush across her shoulder and he wished himself beside her now so that he could kiss away the flower on her skin. His sweet, sad Katie, his lovely bride.

  “I love you Katie,” he said in reply.

  “I love you too, but still…” Her words trailed off like unstrung beads and were lost, scattered. She had had only enough strength to say it once and he was too weak with love and pity to seize her strength.

  “At four then,” she said and her voice shook. “Aaron. Love.”

  “At four.” He did not say good-bye but listened for the click which was some moments in coming, and then he too gently replaced the receiver and leaned back against the pillows.

  He wanted to marry Katie and had wanted to marry her since the day he had sat behind her in the huge lecture hall at the Harvard Law School and watched her small fine features absorbed in thought as her pencil absently curled a tendril of hair that looped its way about her ear. Her hair was the color of fine-spun gold and he had longed to touch it, thinking of its softness between his fingers. He had wanted to marry Katie even after the first “scene” which had occurred on a soft spring evening after a film at the Brattle Theatre. They had walked slowly through Harvard Square which was strangely deserted. The spring term was over and summer school had not yet begun. A lone guitarist stood on the corner and strummed the melancholy folk songs which had been so popular that gentle spring.

  I hashé—Come with me

  You are young and you are free.

  They stopped to look at the new prints in the window of Sehoenhof’s and in the plate-glass reflection he saw tears streaking down Katie’s face. She made no move to wipe them away or explain them. They walked on, still silent, and they had not broken step. When he put his arm across her shoulder she shook it off with a sudden violence that frightened him, but at the apartment the silent tears became wild sobs. Her white skin grew pink and mottled and she held still at last when he bathed her face with a damp cloth and held her close, although she pummeled him with clenched fists, her head butting fiercely against his shoulders. Still, with gentle strength he held her and when at last the sobs stopped, he caressed her gently, his fingers massaging hers into calm, as he listened with heavy heart to the words she shot at him—small verbal volleys of anguish that made his own eyes fill and his heart grow tumid with despair.

  “You must leave me, Aaron. I’m no good. I can’t help it. I can’t get close. No one comes close to me. If you do, you’ll be sorry. Please go, Aaron. Please, please, please.”

  But he had not gone, not then and not on any other night through the months and years that followed. Each “scene” became a strand in a net which was woven closer and closer, entangling him inextricably with the frail blonde girl for whom his heart yearned and his body ached.

  Once she told him that during her junior year at Sophie Newcomb College, perhaps because of the pressure of exams, she had experienced a time so dark that she had sought refuge in a small hospital. She had stayed there for some weeks and remembered it now only as a place of patterned walks and stone benches, shadowed rooms and patient voices that gently but insistently pursued her, wrestled with her. She had left abruptly one afternoon, the darkness and exhaustion vanquished.

  “But why didn’t you stay?” Aaron asked.

  “It wasn’t necessary. And I wanted to study for the law boards,” she answered.

  She had an incredible mind, finely honed, retentive, capable of seizing a problem, approaching it from all dimensions, unearthing its core, and molding it at last into a skillful argument. She was a better law student than Aaron and he watched with pride and a twinge of envy as she stood in her powder-blue wool ballerina skirt and matching blouse and argued winning cases in the law school moot court. In their senior year she published an article in a leading law journal and even before she passed the bar, legal scholars in distant cities called her for opinions on the new civil rights legislation on which she had published a lengthy thesis called “Separate Is Not Equal.”

  But it was only during this wedding trip to her home in New Orleans (he had wanted to come before but she had objected, raised arguments, canceled plans) that he had begun to understand the punishing drive that kept her at the library bent over old decisions, new interpretations, pursuing small threads of law and rolling them into a skein that she would unravel at last to strangle a small injustice, to gain a tiny, an almost infinitesimal legal victory in the long and endless battle to which they had committed themselves.

  She had driven with him only one morning through the city of her childhood and she watched with set face as he registered for the first time the reality of segregation. They had traveled, on that sultry day, out past the old Metaire Cemetery where the dead were buried aboveground in vaults so that they would not decompose too quickly in the rich muddied Louisiana earth when the river overflowed its banks. Wilted flowers strung with faded ribbons lay on the mottled marble stone and he had looked away and reminded himself that they were taking this road past death to get to the Harmony Club, the Jewish country club, where their marriage reception would be held.

  “Can we swim there?” he asked.

  She shook her head.

  “The pool is closed. But I’ll tell you what. We’ll borrow some suits there and swim down at Pontchartrain Beach.”

  It was late afternoon when they reached the beach and the rose-colored sand was brushed with gold and hard beneath their feet. They swam in the clear water and watched two small sailboats, each with bright red sails, flirt with each other as they skimmed across the smooth water that mirrored the muted dying sunlight. At the far end of the beach there was a wall of sea-smooth rock and although the rest of the beach was deserted, a large group of swimmers congregated there. Aaron looked more closely and saw that all of them were black. Katie followed his gaze.

  “Now you understand. In America’s Southland we accomplish God’s work for him and divide up nature between the
coloreds and the whites. That’s their share of sea and sun, over there by the seawall.”

  Her voice was brittle and she told him then about her nursemaid Eula, a black girl, who had taken care of small Katie from her birth. When Katie was six or seven Eula had taken her to the beach and sat on the sand while Katie and her sisters cavorted in the water. Then she had gone for a swim in the section of the beach near the seawall.

  “I followed her. I was always following her. I loved Eula. She was the only one who hugged and kissed me when I was a little girl. My daddy was always busy and my mother was rushing off to her clubs and bridge games. Sometimes I used to think that they thought hugging, touching, was too Jewish. Maybe Jews had been kept out of the Mardi Gras because they hugged each other too much.” She laughed harshly and continued. “You don’t understand that, I know, Aaron, because in your family there’s so much touching.”

  Aaron did not reply but he thought of the long nights of his own childhood when he had waited in the silent darkness for the touch of his mother’s lips, the gentle pressure of her hands-thinking always that this was the night she would forgive him at last for the mysterious sin he could not remember committing.

  “Anyway,” Katie had continued, “I followed Eula over to where she was swimming. She was beautiful, all coffee-colored, and heir laugh sounded like bells on a quiet afternoon. She was laughing with some boys and I rushed toward her, splashing like mad, thinking I’d be in their game. Aaron, she acted as though I were a stranger. ‘Get back you, girl,’ she yelled at me. I felt as though she had hit me. And you know, she never hugged me again. Never.”

  Katie clutched herself then, as though caught by a sudden chill, and he wrapped the towel about her shoulders which trembled although the day was still warm.

  The long familiar silence, which he had come to recognize and fear, began then, and persisted through the days that followed. And last night she had vanished from a party in the midst of unwrapping gifts and he found her at last walking in the garden, silent tears coursing down her cheeks. He had known then that they hovered at the edge of a “scene” and he was relieved when Michael and young Melanie left the Vieux Carré nightclub early, knowing that Katie was poised at the brink of whirling misery.

  It had come and run its course as he held and soothed her and now on his wedding morning, he sank back, exhausted by his bride’s aching sorrow. But she would not always be this way, he assured himself, and passed his hand over a scratch on his shoulder where her long nail had scraped at his flesh as he held her tight in his grasp. A fleck of dried blood came off on his finger and he looked at it closely, as though it held the secret to an urgent riddle, then flicked it away impatiently. Everything would be all right, he told himself. They would create a home together and the warmth of their love would seal them against those cold winds that raged against Katie’s calm and dragged her down into a whirling vortex of darkness. They would have children, small boys and girls with hair that glittered like amber in the sunlight or shone pale gold in the haze of wintry light. They would work together in the shared quiet of book-lined rooms and dash after each other down country lanes.

  His lips curved into a smile and his eyes closed. Slowly he drifted back to sleep and did not hear the last bleat of a mournful saxophone as the funeral procession wound its way across Baronne Street to the Cemetery of Saint Vincent de Paul on the other side of town.

  *

  The wedding party that gathered that afternoon at the Touro Synagogue on Saint Charles Avenue was a large one and as the guests entered they blinked sharply, caught by the flash of the photographer from the Picayune-Times. The marriage of Judge Elias Reznikoff’s lawyer daughter to the son of the designer and painter Leah Goldfeder and the New York psychoanalyst Dr. David Goldfeder was no small event in New Orleans. The society page would forgive their Jewishness, even utilize it as an exotic dimension to a clearly brilliant match.

  Mollie and Seymour Hart arrived in the limousine they had hired for their stay in New Orleans and smiled beamingly into the camera. They were used to being photographed; their pictures were taken regularly at art auctions for various charities, Hadassah donor luncheons, Israel Bond kick-off dinners. Mollie cut the pictures from the newspapers and maintained a current montage in a gilt frame in their living room, showing them proudly to visitors. Seymour had retired and S. Hart Inc. was run now by his son Jakie, a pleasant plump young man who had developed a paunch and an ulcer although he was still in his early thirties. It was Jakie now who phoned his fashionably thin wife in Woodmere to tell her he was staying over in the city to entertain a buyer, to catch up on work, to meet with designers. But he would not prolong his extracurricular activities as long as Seymour had, David predicted. By forty-five Jake would be content to stay at home and watch television and dream about slender, smooth-skinned models who had glided in and out of his office and joined him in double beds at the Plaza and the Waldorf and on long weekends in Puerto Rico. It was difficult to look at Jakie and remember the frightened boy, newly arrived from Russia, who had not dared to go out into Eldridge Street without clutching Aaron’s hand. But then, David reflected, within all the adults assembled in the gray-yellow brick synagogue there lurked the vanished children whose small voices still echoed back across the dangerous terrain of distant days and years.

  Leah looked across the room to the corner where Katie stood between her parents. How beautiful the girl looked, but so pale and weary. Violet shadows stretched from below her eyes to her high ivory-shaded cheekbones, almost matching the spray of delicate gentians that rested on her white Bible. Her wedding dress, layered swathes of tulle and delicate lacework, time-faded into an eggshell color, had belonged to her grandmother who had been married in this very synagogue a century before.

  Leah marveled at the luxury of heirlooms, of the miracle of a family remaining for an entire century in one place. Her own family had wandered throughout their generations, her grandparents fleeing the pogroms of Hungary to come to Poland, her own parents in turn seeking what they had thought would be greater protection in Russia, and finally she and Mollie emigrating to America and Moshe, her brother, to Palestine. What had happened to the beautiful wedding dress brought from Moscow for Mollie’s marriage to the shy rabbinical student Seymour Hart had been in that other lost life? She smiled bitterly. She did not know the fate of her own parents, her relatives and friends, yet wondered about a vanished bridal gown. Still, David had told her once, such trivia provided people with their greatest emotional protection. How much simpler it is to worry over the number of miles one gets to the gallon than to think of the fate of a relative ill with cancer, or of swiftly passing years, or alienated, alienating children. It was simpler to worry over a wedding dress than to ponder the fate of her parents, the gentle Talmudic scholar and his gentler wife, whom she had last seen standing together in the half-light of a prewar dawn, their hands clutching the wooden porch railing of the house that had been her childhood home.

  Such ghosts would never haunt Aaron and Katie, children of the American dream. True, Katie was often moody, abstracted, but that would pass when she had children. And she wanted children, Leah knew, because Katie had told her so herself. A large family, she had said—think of it, a row of children all with hair the color of burnished copper.

  Leah and David stood together beneath the bower of flowers as the rabbi intoned the nuptial blessings. They turned to each other as Aaron’s strong voice rang out in the ancient vow and he slipped a narrow gold band on Katie’s finger. “Behold, with this ring you are consecrated unto me, according to the laws of Moses and of Israel.”

  Leah clutched David’s hand.

  “At last,” she whispered. “Aaron is safely married.”

  But David did not reply. He had remembered, suddenly, the name of the patient whom Katie so powerfully brought to mind. Marilyn Turner had been her name. She had shared Katie’s smile and soft voice, her powerful intellectual tenacity. She was involved in cancer research, haunted by h
er father’s death during her childhood of a carcinoma of the colon. One afternoon, a week after the publication of a brilliant paper, she had gone up to the roof of her apartment house to sunbathe; still holding the blanket she had brought with her, she stepped out on the roof’s edge and plummeted to the street below. David remembered the story well now, too well.

  “Mazal tov, mazal tov, good luck!” Seymour Hart hugged David, his breath heavy with whiskey and tobacco.

  “Yes. Thank you. Mazal tov. Good luck,” he said and hurried to kiss his new daughter-in-law, feeling a strange compulsion, as though the touch of his lips might somehow keep her from danger.

  20

  ALTHOUGH HIS GALLERY did not open until the afternoon, it was Charles Ferguson’s habit to arrive early, attend to clerical duties, read through catalogues and art journals, and slowly walk through the large, thickly carpeted room to look at his collection with as much interest as though he were seeing his paintings and sculptures for the first time. He then stepped out onto the street where he studied his display window, making a note to shift a particular painting from one location to another or to place a plant between a large sculpture and a small group of serial graphics. But on this particular spring morning he surveyed his window with pleasure, pleased with the two paintings displayed on twin easels. One was of an enormous butterfly, the winged creature poised on the stark canvas and given life in bright free strokes of gold and orange. The other was a primitive painting in bright acrylic colors showing a group of young farmers bending over rows of seedlings which seemed to dance out of the ground. The signatures on both paintings read “Goldfeder,” and Charles dabbed fussily at a spot on the plate glass’ and reflected proudly that he was probably the only gallery on Madison Avenue displaying the work of both a mother and a daughter. “Mr. Ferguson?”

  He had not heard the quiet step of the small ferret-faced man who stole up beside him, an envelope in his hand. The man wore an overcoat although the day was warm, and spots of lint glinted whitely on his badly pressed pants.

 

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