Leah's Journey

by Gloria Goldreich

  “You are Mr. Charles Ferguson?” he asked and Charles braced himself for his usual speech to salesmen and unsolicited artist’s agents.

  “Yes, I’m Charles Ferguson, but I’m afraid I have a crowded schedule today. I’ve no time for appointments.”

  “I don’t want an appointment,” the little man said. “I just want you to take this.”

  He shoved the outstretched envelope into the gallery owner’s hand and disappeared into the hurrying crowd of shoppers.

  Charles looked at it in surprise, then opened it and withdrew a single sheet of paper. It was the stationery of the United States Senate and it informed him in terse legal phraseology that he was required to appear as a witness in the federal building on Church Street in a week’s time. He read it again and felt an arrow of fear pierce his heart with sudden pain. Only the night before he had been at a party and watched a well-known writer down drink after drink. The writer, someone explained to Charles, who had never seen the man drink before, had been called as a witness that afternoon. Before the Committee. There was no need to explain which committee, and Charles had left the party early and had not bothered to read the newspaper that night.

  He read the subpoena in his hand again, searched through his wallet for a card, and then went inside and closed the door of his office. He dialed the number slowly and when the phone was answered, he hesitated for a moment as though unsure of whom he had been calling. It was with an effort, in an old man’s voice, that he at last said, “Mr. Aaron Goldfeder. Charles Ferguson calling.” He doodled on the pad beside his desk, fashioned a drawing of dancing flames, then crushed it with a nervous fist. “Aaron, how are you?” he said into the phone. “I’m sorry to bother you, but the thing is I’ve received a subpoena. To appear before the Committee. I know you’re busy but...”

  An hour later, he was downtown in the small law office which Aaron Goldfeder shared with his wife, Katie. The newspaper rested on a table but he did not look down at the picture of the Senator from Wisconsin who brandished a pointed pencil as though it were a lethal weapon.

  *

  David Goldfeder, seated in an uptown office, did glance at the morning paper as his old friend, Dr. Sydney Adler, settled himself behind the polished mahogany desk, shuffled the papers in front of him, picked up a ringing phone to offer a curt monosyllabic reply, and fumbled with a cigar wrapper.

  “So David, how is life treating you?” the portly internist asked. “Is Leah well? And the children?”

  David took a long puff on his pipe. Syd Adler was procrastinating too much, spending too much time on small talk. He had spent a quarter of an hour locating an irrelevant X ray taken at least three years ago. The news must be bad. Well, he could always wait for bad news. He blew a smoke ring, watched it wreathe its way around Syd’s head, and told him of the success of Aaron’s law practice, of Michael’s record at Princeton. Syd was bald now, a small halo of gray hair fringing his forehead. David remembered sitting in back of Syd in a pathology laboratory and watching his friend’s too-long hair curl about his shirt collar. None of them could afford the time or the money for a barber in those days when they struggled together through medical school. Well, they had the time and money now but Syd had lost his hair. David smiled.

  “And what do you hear from Tom Boder?” Syd asked.

  The news must be really bad, David thought, if Syd was dredging up classmates neither of them had thought about for years. He shrugged and looked pointedly at his watch.

  “I have a patient due in about forty-five minutes,” he said.

  “Don’t worry. At least your patients don’t die if you’re late. Your daughter’s still living on that kibbutz. She hasn’t made you a grandfather yet?”

  “Well, there are two children from her husband’s first marriage and a little girl they adopted. I expect they’ll have their own soon.”

  He did not tell Syd that Rebecca had miscarried twice and he worried about her although her letters remained cheerful and optimistic. The new young kibbutz in the Negev heartland was flourishing and their last season had been a good one with a bumper crop of avocadoes. Avocadoes. David had never even seen an avocado before he was forty and now his daughter cultivated them in the sands of a distant desert. Rebecca’s painting too was satisfying. She had at last developed her own bright primitive technique, accomplished with layers of heavy acrylic paints. Her paintings were displayed in Paris and London, and often, on his way home, he walked past Charles Ferguson’s gallery for the joy of his daughter’s work and his wife’s, displayed in the same window. Yes. Rebecca was settled and happy. He was glad he could say that about at least one of his children.

  “What about Peter Cosgrove’s widow?” Syd continued, his eyes raking over the report he held in his hand. “That pretty woman. A friend of your wife’s, wasn’t she?”

  “Yes. Bonnie. Bonnie remarried. A surgeon from Atlanta. In fact, she and her family were at my son Aaron’s wedding two years ago. Everyone looking very well.”

  “Well, Aaron certainly picked himself a pretty wife. And a brilliant one.”

  The comment surprised David. Syd had not come to Aaron’s wedding and he could not remember introducing him to Katie on any other occasion.

  “You’ve met Katie?” he asked.

  “Oh yes. A few months ago. When you sent her to me. I must tell you I was a bit annoyed about your sending her to me for that kind of information, David. Your sources are as good as mine. Still, I imagine you wanted an objective referral. At least, that’s what she said. In any case I gave her the name of Dr. Hernandez in San Juan. A good solid man. And I assume there’s been no problem as I haven’t heard from her since.”

  “No. No problem.” Why had Katie lied to Syd Adler, he wondered, but knew that he would not ask her.

  David allowed his pipe to go out, remembering now that Katie had flown to Puerto Rico alone for a weekend holiday some months earlier. She had been tired and Aaron was too involved in a case to join her. She just wanted a weekend in the sun, she had said in the soft quiet voice which generally meant she would have her own way. She had returned with the same pallor she wore when she left. But of course there was very little sunlight in Dr. Hernandez’s maternity clinic, a small cluster of pastel-colored buildings not far from the beach where more babies were aborted than born. Angrily, David tapped his pipe on the desk, shaking the dead ashes into Syd Adler’s large ceramic ashtray.

  “All right, Syd,” he said. “Enough small talk. What’s the situation?”

  “What’s the situation? You tell me. You’re a doctor. You’re fifty-nine years old. A busy man with a superactive schedule, working twelve, thirteen hours a day at a sedentary job that demands absolute concentration. Your younger years were stressful, exhausting, and not spectacular for their concentration on nutrition, exercise, and rest. You’ve also undergone a terrific strain—given the combination of your war work and Aaron’s situation. The heart, my friend, as we both learned, is made of muscle, not cast iron. You’ve been overworking it. Tightness in the chest, constriction in the arm. You recognized the symptoms before you got here,” Syd Adler replied in the same dry tones David had heard him use earlier when he had answered a call from his son asking for an advance on his allowance which had been refused.

  “The symptoms I knew. But not the extent of the damage,” he said. “What did the electrocardiogram show?”

  “Not much. No damage. Minimal strain. As far as your heart is concerned, if you act like a normal human being you’ll live to be an incontinent old man boring too many grandchildren. But you’ve got to curtail your schedule. Work less. Play more. Take up golf maybe.”

  “Golf!” David snorted.

  “All right. Not golf. Travel. The only time your condition could become dangerous is if you undergo a severe strain. You have a prescription and I’ll depend upon you to use it properly. But you have to make some changes, create a break.

  “Take a trip to Israel. Visit Rebecca and her family. You’ve never
even met her husband, David.”

  “Yes. We would have gone long before this but Leah cannot leave her sister now. She wants to be with Mollie until the end.”

  Sydney nodded. He was Mollie Hart’s doctor and it was he who two years earlier had diagnosed the tumor which had lodged itself in the cheerful plump woman’s abdomen as a malignant carcinoma. There had been immediate surgery but he had not needed the pathologist’s report to tell him that the insidious cancer had metastasized and invaded both liver and kidney. The infinitesimal cells of death burgeoned wildly on the soft masses of flesh and tissue and would not be subdued by the surgeon’s knife or the blinding rays of the cobalt machine. For two years now, the cancerous cells had spread, feeding like molecular maggots on Mollie’s flesh, weighing her down with a pain so heavy she could not sustain it. Confined to her bed, she relied more and more on massive injections of Demerol and for months she had lived in a shadowy, airborne world, speaking the Yiddish of her childhood, remembering distant days, vanished years. Through this clearing in her wilderness of pain, she called alternately for her mother and her son and cried out to an absent Shimon, asking why he did not send for her. She too wanted to go to America, the goldene medine—the land of riches and plenty. The days of her dying were passed in the distant time of longing and loneliness. Leah visited her sister almost every day, carrying fresh flowers which Mollie never noticed, answering plaintive questions in a firm calm voice although her eyes were often hot with tears and her fingers trembled so that the pen-and-ink sketches she made of the dying woman wept and wavered their way across the crisp white paper of her pad.

  “Still, David,” Seymour continued, “you must think about rearranging your schedule. You’re a doctor. I don’t have to spell the prognosis out to you if you continue to work at the crazy pace you think is normal.”

  “I consider myself warned,” David said seriously. “I will try to lighten my patient load and I promise that when we can, Leah and I will go to Israel and spend several months doing nothing but getting to know our daughter again.”

  “Fair enough,” the internist said. “Take care, David. And send my regards to your beautiful daughter-in-law. Tell her I’d much rather refer her to a good obstetrician than to Hernandez’s clinic.”

  “I’ll do that, Syd,” David replied. He had never referred her to Syd Adler although she had often heard his friend’s name mentioned in their home. He could not confront Aaron’s wife with his knowledge of her lies, which he knew to be symptomatic of an illness. She was burdened by an emotional neoplasm which, like Mollie’s terrible cancer, multiplied and swelled, threatening that marriage so bravely begun in the brightness of the Louisiana summer. The disease had always been there, David knew and had known it for years, but now it was spreading with dangerous momentum and he, the doctor, was paralyzed by that knowledge and by his love for the tall red-headed young man whom he had raised as his own son.

  *

  “Joshua Ellenberg, please.” Aaron frowned again at the paper he held in his hand and listened to the rapid succession of clicks until a young woman’s voice said with forbidding officiousness, “Mr. Ellenberg’s office. Who’s calling please?”

  “Aaron Goldfeder,” he replied and imagined his boyhood friend behind that enormous teak desk, swiveling about in a huge blue leather contour chair, the exact shade of the thick blue carpet that lined his office, which looked more like an elaborate suburban living room than a place of business. Aaron’s own office was small and austere, as was Katie’s in the adjoining room, but then a civil rights practice was not the most lucrative and, as Katie pointed out, she spend most of her time in law libraries or in Washington and Aaron had never been comfortable in luxurious surroundings.

  “Aaron, how are you?” Joshua came on the phone at once. Any call from the Goldfeder family was immediately accepted.

  “Good. Can we have lunch today, Joshua? It’s important,” Aaron said.

  “I’m scheduled to have lunch with a buyer from I. Magnin. He’s flown in especially.”

  “It’s important,” Aaron repeated.

  “All right. One o’clock here.”

  An hour later the two friends were seated across from each other in Joshua’s private dining room overlooking the East River. Through the window they watched the progress of a small tugboat which bobbed up and down on aqueous hillocks of foam. It occurred to Aaron that the luxurious room in which they sat was only blocks away from the Eldridge Street apartment where they had spent their shared boyhood.

  “All right, Aaron. What’s so important?” Joshua pushed away his unfinished tuna salad plate and poured more coffee for both of them.

  “Charles Ferguson’s been subpoenaed by the Committee. I met with him this morning. Shortly afterward I received a call from Vermont. Eleanor Greenstein’s been called as well. I don’t have to tell you what an ugly business the Committee can be.” Aaron’s tone was heavy and he took out a cigarette although he seldom smoked.

  “Charles and Eleanor. Hmm. The only thing they have in common really is your mother,” Joshua said thoughtfully.

  “Exactly. They both knew her during the same period. The Committee’s been going after creative people with a vengeance. Theater people. Writers. Katie’s been representing some of them in Washington. I guess they’re launching an invasion on the art world now.”

  “Leah hasn’t been subpoenaed?”

  “No, not yet.”

  “I see.”

  “I want to know as much as possible about those years, Joshua. The years my mother worked at Rosenblatts. That abortive union business. The fire.”

  “Aaron, I was a kid then. Ten, maybe eleven years old. I was an errand boy. What could I know?” Joshua protested.

  “Joshua, I know you and I know you well enough to be sure that as a kid of eleven you knew as much about what was going on as any grownup. And what you didn’t know then you’ve probably learned or surmised since. I’ve got to have that information if I’m to give Charles and Eleanor any kind of representation and if I’m to help my mother. She’s the one they’ll get to next, I’m sure,” Aaron said.

  “All right. You may not like all of it but I’ll tell you what I know.” Joshua leaned back in his chair and the fingers of his good hand stroked the wrist to which his black leather prothesis was strapped. It had begun to ache as it always did when something unnerved him, upset him.

  An hour later Aaron walked out of Joshua Ellenberg Enterprises carrying a small black book filled with names and dates. He remembered Eli Feinstein’s name now and he remembered, too, that long hot summer decades past when the ghost of polio roamed the streets of the lower east side and he and Rebecca and Aaron had been sent to the mountains for the summer. That fiery summer had ended in the flames that consumed Rosenblatts. Now those same flames reached across the years and threatened to consume the lives they had labored for so strenuously. Somehow he would have to protect his mother, Aaron knew. Somehow. He reached into his pocket and withdrew the subpoena Charles Ferguson had received that morning. He had two weeks in which to work.

  21

  THE WHITE STONE federal building on Church Street was not air-conditioned and the windows in the hearing room on the third floor could not be opened. The room had been painted that winter, and congealed scabs of oily olive-green paint sealed the windows and resisted the mallet thrusts of the sweating workmen who struggled with them. The cloying odor of paint hung over the cavernous chamber in an odiferous veil, and when fans were brought in the moving air wafted the ugly smell from one side of the room to the other and lifted small clouds of dust from forgotten corners.

  Aaron and Katie Goldfeder had arrived early, and as they spread their papers on a large golden oak conference table, a nervous cleaning woman circled them with a damp mop.

  “The witch hunters from Washington see Communists in dust motes,” Aaron muttered. “She’d better be careful or she’ll be subpoenaed as part of an environmental conspiracy engineered by the Kremlin.”
<
br />   “Hmmm. Maybe if I defended her she’d come in and do the apartment,” Katie replied. “Well, here it all is. I think it will work, Aaron.”

  She handed him a stapled sheath of mimeographed papers with a top sheet that read “The Rosenblatt Experience.” He glanced at it and slowly leafed through it although he knew its contents as well as Katie did. For the last two weeks, since the day Charles Ferguson had sat before him, the subpoena twisted in his hand, he had lived and breathed life at Rosenblatts, the factory whose name was still synonymous with avarice and exploitation, fire and death. He had flown to Atlanta and met with his mother’s friend Bonnie, who still wept when she thought of that day. Bonnie had opened a large candy box and shown him news clippings, yellowed photographs, a scrap of pink organdy, its charred edges crumbling to ashes beneath his touch.

  “It was the dress I wore that day. I had just finished it. It was the first dress I ever designed and made. They took me home wrapped in a bolt of cloth. Leah had used that cloth to beat out the flames on my dress and this scrap is all that was left of the dress itself. The girl who worked the machine next to me—Goldie was her name and she was to be married that week—the flames caught the hem of her dress, her hair, she was a torch of fire that ran and danced until she fell to the ground. I’ll never forget it, never.”

  The prosperous Atlanta matron sat on the terrace of her home in bright sunshine and shivered in remembered terror. She gave him the box of mementos and made him promise that he would call her as a witness if he needed her.

  “There is nothing that I would not do for your mother,” Bonnie said. “Leah gave me my life.”

  He had traveled upstate to a small farming community and visited the chubby grandmother who had been the tiny factory girl, Philomena Visconti. Philomena too had her collection of clippings which included obituaries in the Italian newspapers of her father, Salvatore Visconti, who had worked closely with Eli Feinstein and died with him in the wilderness of flames.