Leah's Children

by Gloria Goldreich

  She looked at the mural, focusing on the portrait of the young woman at the tenement window. In the neighboring panel she had painted three children walking down a narrow street—two boys and a girl, moving through the sunlight beyond their mother’s vigilant gaze.

  How often she had watched her children move through shadow and light, together and alone. A sliver of memory pricked and teased; she saw her children’s upturned faces brushed with amber light, heard her sons’ deep voices, her daughter’s gay young woman’s laughter. Ah yes, she thought, untangling memories and grasping the moment at last—that first Labor Day party at the Ellenbergs’, when they had laughed and talked beneath the loosely hung fairy lights. That night, after all, had marked a beginning, a new cycle of seasons in their lives.

  Slowly, then, she went to join her children—Aaron, Rebecca, and Michael. She heard their soft voices, their children’s laughter.

  LABOR DAY

  1956

  LEAH GOLDFEDER stood at the window and studied the red-winged blackbird magically balanced on a slender branch of the maple tree that dominated her garden. Her first Labor Day without David, who always had a special fondness for the holiday that marked the end of summer. Still, she noted, with a pleasure that she had not thought to feel again, that the bird’s scarlet flashings matched the tree’s fiery crown of leaves. The brittle foliage, always the first to take on the bright mantle of autumn, rustled musically in a vagrant breeze, and a single leaf trembled and fell onto the thick green grass. She leaned forward, and her sudden movement frightened the blackbird. It soared southward, its brightly slatted wings scissoring their way through the azure summer sky.

  The hallway clock tolled the hour with delicate chimes, and she turned from the window. Aaron and Michael would be arriving soon to take her to the Labor Day party at the Ellenbergs’ Great Neck estate. Traditionally, the Goldfeders had hosted the festive reunion of family and friends that marked the changing season, but Leah had not protested when Sherry Ellenberg cautiously suggested that it be held at her home “this once.” She had, in fact, been relieved. Her journey to Russia had exhausted her, and she was not yet ready to greet her guests alone in this garden, where once David’s presence beside her had been so essential. She had known that it was best to have the party elsewhere, to mark a new beginning and acknowledge that there had been an ending.

  Briskly, racing against a threatening melancholy, she went to her closet and selected a dress of topaz silk, shot through with intricate threads of silver that matched the moon-colored talons that wove their way through her long dark hair. She searched through her jewelry box for the smoky opal pendant and the small combs that matched it. She swept her hair back, sculpted the silvered plaits into a regal crest, and slid the combs into place. She studied herself in the long mirror and acknowledged with shy surprise, with an almost guilty pleasure, that her appearance pleased her. She felt a surge of excitement, of pleasurable anticipation.

  It would be good to spend an evening with old friends, to laugh at mild jokes and stroll through Joshua’s pleasant garden exchanging confidences with those who had shared her life. Tomorrow Michael would leave for Berkeley, but she would share this evening with her sons—a family together on this day when summer drifted into fall and leaves began to fall from laden trees. It was sad that Rebecca was so far away, but her last letter had hinted that she might be visiting New York very soon.

  “Yehuda is involved in a project that may require a trip to New York,” Rebecca had written guardedly. “Perhaps I will come with him.”

  Leah knew that Rebecca could not be more explicit. Her husband, Yehuda Arnon, was often called away from their desert kibbutz to undertake assignments abroad. Rebecca never described these “assignments,” and her American family did not ask her questions.

  Leah heard the car pull up and the front door open.

  “Mom, are you almost ready? Joshua takes points off for lateness,” Aaron called. Even in the brief, jocular admonition she discerned the melancholy in her son’s voice. Sadness had adhered to Aaron since the death of his wife, Katie. He could not forget the fragile young woman whose life had ended beneath the wheels of a car. She had wasted her life and willed her death. Poor Katie, poor Aaron.

  “I’ll be right down,” Leah replied and gathered up her gloves and evening bag. But before leaving the room, she went again to the window.

  The flowers of early fall had blossomed and golden zinnias and tawny chrysanthemums blazed in bright profusion about the privet hedges. They were neighbored by the last of the roses, full-petaled in delicate tones of white and pink, breathing out their poignant, desperate fragrance. The seasons merged; endings and beginnings met in mysterious convection. Autumnal evening winds swept away the lingering warmth of the summer afternoon.

  “Mom!” It was Michael who called her now, his voice as brash with impatience as once her own had been when she had called him in from play. So swiftly did the years pass and roles reverse themselves.

  “I’m coming,” she said again and descended the stairwell.

  Her sons, lean and tanned in their dark blazers and pale linen slacks, looked up at her, and briefly, magically, she saw their fathers in the eyes that met her own—Yaakov, the husband of her girlhood, killed in an Odessa pogrom, in the emerald glint of Aaron’s moody stare, and David, her life’s partner, in the gold-flecked gray of Michael’s gaze. A wave of loneliness swept over her, and she gripped the newel post with whitened knuckles, but when she spoke to her tall sons, her voice was, as ever, steady and controlled.

  “I’m lucky to have such handsome escorts,” she said.

  “You look beautiful,” Aaron said softly. He and Michael exchanged a swift, conspiratorial glance. They shared a secret and the temptation to reveal it to Leah was overwhelming, but they had pledged their silence and so they said nothing. They smiled in anticipation of the pleasure their complicity would bring their mother in only a few hours’ time.

  *

  The stone wall that rimmed Joshua Ellenberg’s Great Neck estate was strung with glimmering lights that cast their drifting pastel hues across the dark-leafed trees and thick-boughed firs. Rainbowed prisms danced across the clear blue waters of the kidney-shaped in-ground pool. The bar had been set up near the cabana, and small white tables and chairs rimmed the pool. Uniformed maids circled the tiled area and offered the guests tiny frankfurters rolled into golden crusty blankets of dough, miniature knishes, small balls of gefilte fish balanced on brightly colored plastic toothpicks. Leah smiled as she dipped her fish into the sparkling red horseradish. Joshua might disguise the cuisine of his childhood, but he remained faithful to it.

  “Exactly the sort of food Sarah used to cook,” she said to Anna Ellenberg, Joshua’s aunt, who sat beside her.

  “What Sarah cooked you could see,” Anna replied. “For this food you need a magnifying glass.” Sarah Ellenberg, Joshua’s mother, had died a year ago, and Anna kept house for her brother now, in the Brighton Beach red-brick house where the Goldfeders had lived after their move from Eldridge Street.

  She shifted her bulk in the small white lawn chair and twirled a frankfurter around disconsolately. The green-and-white print dress her niece had ordered specially from Bergdorf’s strained against her ample bosom, and her thin gray hair had straggled free of the beauty parlor’s hair spray and hung in loose wisps about her florid face.

  “I would have cooked for tonight,” she said sadly, “but Joshua won’t let me put a hand in cold water. ‘Why should my aunt work when I can afford a caterer?’ he says. He doesn’t think that maybe I want to cook, that I enjoy it. Ach, children, do they ever know what we want?” She sighed heavily, and Leah touched her work-reddened hands in sympathy. Anna’s fingers shook lightly, and she forced them into a fist as she struggled for control against the Parkinsonian tremor.

  And what do we want from the children? Leah wondered silently and leaned back because she knew the answer to her own question. She wanted them to be settled, to st
eer their lives according to a charted course; she wished them to be happy in their work, serene in their homes. But Michael was vague about a possible profession. The next day he would leave for Berkeley. She was skeptical about his plans for graduate work in sociology.

  “Why sociology?” she had asked in the car as they sped toward Great Neck. Michael had explained before, but now, on the eve of his departure, she asked the question yet again, as though anticipating a different answer.

  “I thought about different social patterns while I toured Israel. The collective. The kibbutz. The different ways we can live in the world. I want to understand more about people and how they manage their lives. I guess it sounds sophomoric, but more than anything else, especially since Dad died, I want to understand how we can change things, make them better.”

  “It doesn’t sound silly,” Leah had replied gently. He was David Goldfeder’s son, and David Goldfeder had become a psychiatrist because he thought he might discover the origin of the bacillus of evil that had driven men to the excesses of hate he had witnessed during the pogroms of his young manhood in Russia. Michael, too, was a searcher after clues, a kindler of small candles that flickered valiantly against the encroaching darkness.

  “And why Berkeley?” she had asked.

  “I’ve never been to California,” he had replied, apology and defense vying in his voice. She had understood then. California because it was so far away, across mountains and desert, at the edge of a sea she had never seen, distant from her and the life he had known. She, who had left her parents’ village and traveled by herself to Odessa, understood that there came a time when children had to leave their parents, when distances had to be traversed and new pathways forged. It was Michael’s turn now, to journey toward himself.

  She watched him as he leaned languidly against the white-columned portico and chatted with a slender blond girl who kept her eyes fixed on Michael’s face while her fingers toyed with the “Stevenson for President” button she wore on the collar of her pale blue button-down blouse.

  “Leah!” Charles Ferguson strode toward her, his arms outstretched. “I’ve tried to call you but always missed you. I want to hear about your trip to Russia.”

  Her former art teacher would not ask about David’s death, she knew, and she was grateful to him. He had written a tender letter of sympathy, but like many artists, committed to capturing life and movement in sketchbook and on canvas, he was uncomfortable confronting death and stillness.

  He sat down beside her and, cocooned in the intimate, sharing silence of old friends, they watched as the long shadows of evening darkened the turquoise water of the swimming pool. Across the lawn, Lisa Ellenberg and a friend played badminton in the waning light. The girls’ short felt skirts swirled about their bright bare thighs, and they pummeled the feathered bird as though fending off night itself. On the terrace a phonograph softly played “Que Sera, Sera.” The languid song of a generation at peace, the accepting ballad of a country that believed its battles were over. World War II was in the past, and the Korean War was done with. The general who had engineered D day no longer wore a uniform. He sat in the White House, smiling benignly at his people, innocent Mamie in bangs at his side. And his people, in turn, whizzed down newly paved interstate highways in their pastel-colored large-finned cars. They rushed to lay claim to homes in new suburban developments. They filled their oversized trunks with shopping bags and cartons, television sets and Mixmasters, grills to be used on their flagstone patios, and portable radios to broadcast the happy music of peace and prosperity in finished basements painted to resemble knotty pine.

  Joshua Ellenberg stood at the bar with Aaron and Michael.

  “You didn’t tell her, did you?” he asked.

  “Held ourselves back,” Aaron replied.

  “Good. The car just left the airport. They’ll be here in less than an hour.”

  The three men grinned at each other. Leah had prepared surprises for them during their childhoods. Joshua remembered still that the only birthday party he had ever had, Leah had made for him. A surprise party to which each of their Eldridge Street boarders had brought a small gift—a ball laboriously fashioned of rubber bands, a leather-bound account book, his first fountain pen. Rebecca had knitted a scarf for him, of bright yellow wool. Faded and frayed, he had it still and kept it in a secret corner of his armoire. It was his turn now, he thought, to startle Leah with joy, to confound her with pleasure.

  The maids carried lamps over to the large buffet table and flooded it with light. The snowy white cloth was covered with platters laden with chicken and roast beef, bowls of potato salad and cole slaw, intricately cut sour pickles and tomatoes, bright red peppers and golden clusters of pickled cauliflower. Leah thought of the meal she had shared with Jewish activists on her last evening in Russia. Slices of cheese and hard-boiled eggs. Yellowing scraps of lettuce and pale slivers of tomato, all obtained after standing on food queues for hours. How could she explain the austerity of Russia, its stoic sadness, its wintry desperation, to these American friends and relations who surrounded her? They were so deeply tanned, so well fed and well clothed, so full of optimism as they argued amiably about the virtues of Stevenson over Eisenhower, of Long Island over Westchester, of the new large-screen television sets over the filtered magnifiers.

  “When I think of Russia,” Leah said softly, “I think only of darkness. Not of having but of wanting.”

  “What do you mean, Aunt Leah?” her nephew Jakie asked. He was, after all, Russian-born. Occasionally, in vagrant dream, he ran through the green forest of his boyhood, singing a song he could not recall in his waking hours.

  “There was never enough light,” she said. “In every room I visited we sat in shadows and strained to see each other’s faces. There was talk only of what would be, not of what was. Someday there would be a refrigerator. Someday there would be a gas stove, a space heater, a new lamp for the corner where no light fell. In Odessa I visited my cousins. Three families shared one flat. The married couples had to make appointments to use the one bedroom that had a door that closed.” She paused; she would not tell these guests of Joshua’s how the others in the apartment could hear their gasps of delight, their moans of swift ecstasy as they hastily coupled. “They taught the children Hebrew from an old primer that they kept covered with a book jacket from a Russian text,” she went on. “The pages were loose, and after each lesson they taped it carefully together. Like a love letter. I visited David’s niece, who was about to be married. She did not want a wedding dress. She wanted a pair of boots. We tried to buy them in the government-run department stores. They showed us sandals from Bulgaria, canvas gym shoes from Poland. The Dollar store had no boots, and I bought her an electric samovar instead and left her my own boots. A strange wedding present. ‘Never mind,’ the bride said, ‘I won’t need them at all when we go to Israel.’ But who knows when she will get to Israel? They say that the waiting list of applicants stretches the length of the Don.” As she spoke, her voice grew softer, as though she struggled to contain a secret pain; her sentences became abrupt and complicated in syntax. She was again thinking in Russian and translating her thoughts into English. A quirk of age, she thought, annoyed with herself. Still, it had been pleasant to speak in Russian with Boris Zaslovsky, the middle-aged physician with whom she had felt such keen rapport.

  Aaron stood on the fringe of the crowd and listened to his mother. She looked sad, he thought, yet there was a purposeful intensity in her tone, a determination in her movements. She was busy again, involved. Twice a week she went into the city to confer with officials who spoke of organizing a campaign for Soviet Jewry. She was designing a poster, wording a petition. Her absorption took her mind off David’s death, absorbed the energy she might have diverted to wild grief. Vaguely, like a sick man who has despaired of finding a cure, he wished that a new passion had enveloped him at the time of Katie’s death. Then or now. How wonderful to concentrate on agendas and committees, to work fiercely on
position papers and memoranda, to exchange urgent phone calls and hold midnight meetings in dimly lit hotel rooms.

  There would not be time, then, to remember the soft sobbing in the quiet of a springtime midnight, the random flares of irrational fury, the sad deceptions and the sadder truths. He had his work, of course, and he accomplished it competently but without the total immersion and involvement he had felt when he and his wife had practiced law together. Together. The word seemed a bitter mockery to him now. In truth, he and Katie had done nothing “together.” Always, she had been sealed into a terrifying aloneness that excluded and deceived him. He had loved and had been unloved. He had wanted and had been unwanted. And, he thought, he had had the power of intervention and had not intervened. Harshly, he blamed Katie for the illness, the despair, that had swept her to her death, and even more harshly he blamed himself for his own weakness. He should have forced her to seek help. He was the son of a psychiatrist, and he had rejected David Goldfeder’s gentle offers to help, to advise.

  “Aaron, I’m going to fix a plate for myself. Shall I get one for you too?” the dark-haired young woman who stood beside him asked.

  He was startled. Although he had walked across the lawn with her and had been aware of her hand lightly touching his arm, although she had been talking to him softly, almost intimately, her voice a breathless whisper, he had all but forgotten her presence as he lost himself again in memories of the past. His indifference to her saddened and shamed him. Laura. That was her name, he remembered now. She taught third grade at the Brearly School and took literature courses at Columbia University’s School of General Studies. She loved Dylan Thomas. And she was pretty. Her long brown hair floated about her shoulders and was held in place by a headband that matched her turquoise peasant skirt. She had summered on Fire Island, and her white peasant blouse circled shoulders burnished to a rose-lit gold. She was the prettiest of the many pretty girls Sherry and Joshua Ellenberg had produced for him since Katie’s death—the cousins of neighbors, the sisters of business associates, all of them attractive and single.