Leah's Children

by Gloria Goldreich

  Michael was a teacher (as her father had been, she thought, surprised that the parallel had for so long eluded her), but Matt and Yehuda were warriors. She loved Michael’s gentleness, but the vibrancy of Yehuda’s voice had excited her that afternoon, had reminded her of Matt’s ringing tones as he read the speech he would deliver at a rally in a few weeks’ time.

  Michael spoke gently to his students and to her. Matt exhorted his listeners, issued imperious and impatient demands to her. Michael’s touch was tender against her skin. Matt gripped her wrists, dug his fingers into her flesh. She wondered if Yehuda Arnon was forceful with Michael’s sister, his wife, or if he spoke to her quietly in the darkness.

  “I liked your brother-in-law,” she told Michael that night. “I can see that he has courage—that he can stand up and fight.”

  “There are different ways to do battle,” Michael said mildly and turned away. He felt a foolish jealousy, as though Kemala had compared him with Rebecca’s husband and had found him wanting.

  Always, when she visited Troy, they walked together to the isolated cottonwood field. Always, he wondered at her initial resistance and her swift submission. But she grew thinner, and she seldom laughed.

  “Kemala, what’s wrong?” he asked.

  “How do you know anything’s wrong? You don’t know anything about me—nothing at all,” she lashed out bitterly.

  He did not answer. Their relationship was so fragile that a misplaced word might shatter it. He knew only that she had changed, that she was hurt and grieving, and that she had translated her grief into a bitterness he recognized but could not comprehend. Matt Williams exercised a strange control over her, but he knew, too, that it was dangerous to speak of it.

  She came to the school on the day he was to leave. The Mason family shyly shook hands with him.

  “We hope you’ll come back next year,” Mrs. Mason said. “Rodney learned real good with you. I’ll be piecing a new quilt for your bed.”

  “I’ll be back,” he said.

  Norma Anne baked a chocolate cake, and they ate thick slices from paper plates and drank cherry Kool-Aid from plastic cups. He brought a drink to Kemala.

  “Do you remember the Golden Gate Park?” he asked. “The champagne?”

  “I remember.” Again he touched her cheek with his open palm. Again her fingers flew up and lit gently on his lips. “I’m staying on in Neshoba,” she said. “As Matt’s assistant.”

  A cold streak of sweat ran down his back.

  “Will you come to New York Thanksgiving?” he asked.

  “If you still want me to.”

  “I’ll want you to.”

  “We’ll write.” He had not yet parted from her, but already a letter took shape in his mind. My darling Kemala…my heart’s own flower…

  “We’ll call,” she assured him. She imagined his voice on the phone, the caring questions, the urgent concern. “Are you getting enough sleep? Are you eating well? Please, please, don’t work too hard.” No one had ever worried about her the way Michael did. No one had ever cared for her as Michael did. He had bought her a light blue cashmere cardigan as a parting gift.

  “It gets cold in Mississippi in the winter,” he had said. She had pressed the wool against her cheek. Never had she felt anything so soft.

  “Kemala—it’s time to start back.” Matt Williams leaned against the doorjamb. He would not accept a piece of cake, a drink of juice. He kept himself separate from the small party, the small celebration of gratitude and affection. “You going back to your real life, Goldfeder?”

  “I’ll be back next summer,” Michael replied evenly.

  “Sure you will,” the West Indian said smoothly, contemptuously. “If it doesn’t interfere with your career.”

  He turned. Kemala pressed Michael’s hand and trailed obediently after Matt. Michael watched her, suffused by an apprehensive sadness.

  He turned to the blackboard and wrote a single word. They read it aloud in unison. “Freedom.”

  “Freedom! Freedom!” They circled the room, repeating it aloud. They embraced each other and then moved shyly to Michael, who shook hands with each of them.

  “Come back next year, Mr. Michael,” Lizzie said.

  “I’ll be here,” he promised.

  The sun was setting as he drove away from Troy. He watched it slowly disappear into banks of blood-rimmed clouds, and he pressed fiercely down on the accelerator, saddened and angered and sweetly proud.

  *

  LEAH GOLDFEDER rose early on Thanksgiving morning and hurried to the kitchen to put the turkey, which she had seasoned the previous evening, into the oven. The size of the fowl pleased her, as much as it had astonished Boris Zaslovsky, who still could not accustom himself to American abundance.

  “In Russia you would wait on line three, even four hours for a skinny chicken—a pound of meat full of gristle,” he said and watched admiringly as Leah skillfully filled the turkey’s yawning cavity with wild rice and chestnuts. He was like all who have known real hunger; food remained a minor miracle to him. Leah was glad that he was spending the holiday with her, content that he and Michael, who had stayed the night, were still asleep upstairs. She was pleased to be cooking for a lot of people again, and she watched the winter sunlight streak its way through the barren branches of the maple tree, full of happy anticipation. The years of sadness had passed, and once again there would be the laughter and talk, the music and gaiety of a holiday afternoon shared by family and friends.

  Always, the generations mingled cheerfully at Goldfeder celebrations. Joshua Ellenberg’s teenagers would happily play with Aaron and Lydia’s children, small Paulette and the baby David. Lydia was pregnant again. Too soon after David’s birth, Leah thought worriedly, but she said nothing. Seymour Hart, her aging brother-in-law, would trade reminiscences of Russia with Boris Zaslovsky. Their memories were a litany of vanished communities, of forests become burial grounds and burial grounds become playgrounds. And yet again and again, they invoked the place names of their younger years. Kattowitz. Kiev. Odessa. Kharkov. The winding streets of the towns of the Pale. The tart blueberries in the woodlands beyond Babi Yar. Boris closed his eyes when Babi Yar was mentioned. His wife and children had been killed there.

  Jeremy Cohen and Les Anderson, Michael’s roommates, always listened closely to the talk of the older men. Les had the journalist’s curiosity, but Jeremy was seeking after a past that had been denied him. He spoke restlessly of visiting Russia, of working in Israel.

  Leah liked Michael’s friends. They were sharp-tongued and witty, yet they shared a gentleness and a sense of compassion that she recognized intuitively. It was a rare quality among men, but David Goldfeder had had it and his sons had inherited it. It was not surprising that Michael should seek out friends who shared it.

  It startled Leah, occasionally, to realize how similar Michael was to his father. He had a natural and immediate sympathy for the downtrodden, an instinctive indignation at social injustice. Like David he was possessed of powerful passions and intense, almost selfless compassion. David would have understood Michael’s involvement in the civil rights movement, his commitment to that small school in Mississippi. But David’s experiences m Russia, the harshness and poverty of his immigrant life in New York, had provided him with a wariness, a swift system of emotional and intellectual defense, which was alien to Michael’s background. Michael was, after all, the child of their happiness and prosperity, their fortunate inheritor. Of her three children only Michael had been carried with love and raised without the tension of poverty and conflict. It was ironic, then, that it was Michael who sought out the world they had worked so hard to leave. Michael and his friends even lived in the Eldridge Street apartment that had been the Goldfeders’ first home in America. Of course, he had not known that when he called her excitedly to tell her that Joshua Ellenberg had found them a terrific apartment and he wanted her to see it at once.

  “You’ll love it, Mama,” he had said enthusiastically
(and she reflected that it had been years since he had called her Mama). “Lots of rooms and all off a long corridor. We can use the corridor as a kind of a gallery, hang our friends’ paintings there. A big kitchen. The bathroom’s small, but I guess we’ll manage.”

  Aaron drove them to the apartment, and as they drew closer, following Michael’s instructions through the warren of Lower East Side streets, she and her elder son exchanged glances of recognition. Aaron slowed the car as they passed the public library on East Broadway, the Irvington Settlement House.

  “Do you remember, Mama?”

  “I remember.”

  There was no need to further articulate the question. (Do you remember a sad-eyed, redheaded boy? A tall, lonely woman who wore her black hair in a regal coronet?) As they passed the Eldridge Street Synagogue, Leah closed her eyes, but she could not block the memory of herself limping past the sanctuary on the evening of the Rosenblatt fire as the mourners’ Kaddish was recited. She, too, had been in mourning that distant day—in mourning for her friends and for her lover, whose lives had ended in the fire that still haunted her memory decades later. She wondered if Kaddish was still recited at the Eldridge Street Synagogue, but she supposed not. The stained-glass windows were shattered and nailed over with boards, and even the great brass railings had been ripped from their concrete cornices.

  “Here it is.” Michael’s voice was jubilant.

  They stood in front of the building where she had begun her life in America, and she knew at once as they climbed the narrow stairs that the door which Michael would open with the key he held so proudly would be the door to the apartment where they had lived for so many years. She was only surprised, when they entered it, that she felt no sadness, although she reeled beneath an onrush of powerful memory, of renewed wonder, that so much had happened to all of them, that they had journeyed so far and yet were connected still to their beginnings.

  “We lived here before you were born,” she told Michael (while Aaron went at once to the bedroom that he had shared with Rebecca, to seek out the window where he had sat night after night, waiting for his mother, waiting for David, waiting for the revelation of a mystery, for the beginning of a love).

  She went into the kitchen, newly fitted now with a gleaming refrigerator, a gas stove, a washing machine and a drier. Joshua Ellenberg had renovated with a vengeance, tearing out the coal-fed cookstove, the icebox that did not close properly, the wide sink for laundry—symbols all of his mother’s unrelenting labors, their shared poverty, and the desperate fear that they might never move beyond it.

  She walked slowly down the hallway, where Jeremy had hung three Museum of Modern Art prints from Picasso’s Blue Period. During her own tenancy, they had strung a clothesline down that hallway in winter and walked carefully to avoid the dripping of the wet wash.

  “Sometimes,” she told her sons, “a whole family would arrive from Europe and stay with us. We would set up cots and pallets in this hallway. Always we found room for the stranger.”

  “Like the Masons,” Michael said. “The black family I stayed with in Mississippi.” They had found room for him, the stranger. His mother would like Mrs. Mason, would understand her determination to make things better for her children.

  “Didn’t Joshua tell you that we once lived here?” Aaron asked his brother.

  “I’m not sure he knew. One of his agents told us about it.”

  Leah had helped Michael and his friends furnish the apartment and transform it into a comfortable, casual bachelor realm with tweed couches, burlap drapes, and bright rya rugs on the newly scraped wooden floors that had been covered with scarred linoleum so long ago. It had been an accident and Joshua Ellenberg’s caprice, perhaps, that had brought Michael to that apartment, she knew, and yet there was a chimeric quality to the coincidence. Michael was always looking backward, seeking out something that had been mysteriously and inadvertently denied him. He had spent part of the previous evening looking at family photographs.

  “You’re up early, Mom.” Michael stood in the doorway, watching her as she sliced apples for the pie. He had stayed up late talking with Boris Zaslovsky. Now he rubbed his eyes with curled-up fists, reminding Leah of the sleepy-eyed small boy he had been.

  “There’s a lot to do,” she said. “And I told Sophie I wanted to do most of the cooking myself. I love Thanksgiving. I always did. But I thought you’d want to sleep late.”

  “I wanted to talk to you before anyone got here,” he said. “I guess Lydia will be over early to help.”

  “Yes.” Leah smiled in pleasurable anticipation. It was wonderful that Aaron and Lydia lived so close by and even more wonderful that she and Lydia had become close and loving friends. Paulette often spent the night with her, and the baby David had a special corner in her studio for his toys. Leah reveled in the hours she spent with her grandchildren. She told Paulette stories of Aaron’s childhood on the Lower East Side and her own girlhood in Russia. She walked with the children across the frosted trails of the Rye Nature Preserve, on wintry days, and in the spring she took them to the botanic gardens. Boris often joined them, and then they walked more slowly because Boris limped slightly.

  Leah was happy also in the quiet companionship she and Boris shared. He was comfortable with her children and her grandchildren, and she relied more and more on his advice. She wondered now if they could share more than friendship. Sometimes, in the evening, alone in her bedroom, she thought of him and felt a slow stirring of desire. His fingers were slender, his touch light against her skin. His eyes were sad and gentle, and though his steps were slow, he was a strong man still; muscles rippled at his arms, and his shoulders were straight and broad.

  The children loved Boris. Joshua Ellenberg’s youngsters trailed after him, and they begged again and again for a retelling of the story of Babi Yaga, of the beautiful young tsarina, of the Jews who had lived in the comical town called Chelm.

  “Could Boris be our grandfather?” Paulette asked one day, and Leah was surprised at the hot blush that swept her face.

  When Lydia had an out-of-town meeting, Aaron and the children stayed at Leah’s house. It was compensation for Rebecca’s being so far away and for the loss of real intimacy with her Israeli grandchildren. There was talk now of Mindell coming to America after she completed medical school, but Mindell was not Rebecca’s child, although the family felt a great closeness to her.

  “I wanted to talk to you about this friend I invited,” Michael said. “Kemala. She’ll be coming with Jeremy and Les later.”

  He wondered now, why, after months of not seeing Kemala, he had not waited for her arrival in the city. Was it because he wanted to observe her as she entered his mother’s house, to filter their reunion with the presence of others? Her infrequent letters had disturbed him. Tersely, bitterly, she described the slowness of their organizational work. When they spoke on the phone her voice was weary, and he wondered if Matt Williams stood nearby. Still, she had written and had returned his calls, and today she was coming to this house where he had grown up.

  “Kemala,” Leah repeated. She liked the name. It rolled musically about the tongue. “What sort of a name is Kemala?”

  “I’m not sure,” he replied slowly. “I never asked her, but I think it’s African. Kemala is black.”

  Leah began to knead the dough for the piecrust.

  “This is what you got up so early to tell me, Michael?” Her voice was neutral. Her face did not change expression.

  “You don’t mind?”

  “Should I mind?”

  She slipped the dough into the greased pans, fluted the edges with swift clamps of her fingers. It was natural for her to execute a design, to form pattern on pastry. She was used to controlling the tools of her craft, her brushes and canvas, her stencils and molds. Wistfully, and not for the first time, she thought of how it might be to exercise similar control over the lives of those she loved—to create the pattern that would result in happiness, to conceive the design that w
ould be at once coherent and meaningful. But her children’s lives, of course, were not as malleable as clay, as submissive to her will as paint and canvas.

  “Your father and I never chose our friends because of the color of their skin or because of their religion,” she said calmly. “We have never caused any friend of yours to feel unwelcome here.”

  “I know that,” Michael said. He felt an odd resentment. It might have been easier, he thought, if barriers were more clearly defined, if his family had not always been so carefully civilized, so fair. Les Anderson had told him that he could never invite Michael to his home.

  “My parents hate Jews,” Les had said with bitter honesty. “It makes me mad. I argue with them. But they say it and they mean it, and I know for sure that I’m never going to change them, Of course that means I don’t go home too often. But don’t feel too special, Michael. They also hate Californians, New Yorkers, Orientals, intellectuals, and Democrats, not to mention blacks. Since I’m now a New Yorker who studied in California and I earn my living by my intellect, I’d qualify for a couple of enemies lists except that I happen to be their son.”

  “But at least you know where you stand,” Jeremy Cohen had said. “Their position stinks, but it’s defined and even honest. My parents, on the other hand, are the quintessential liberals. One cultured Negro at least at every big party. Two or three if they’re lucky. They sign their names to every civil rights petition that circulates in Hollywood, but they’re the biggest secret bigots I know—the whole bit—jokes, shoddy comments.”

  “Could you invite Kemala home?” Michael asked him.

  “As a token black, sure. As my friend, maybe. As my date, my girl—never. See what I mean? What about you, Michael? How would your family react to Kemala as in ‘Michael and Kemala’?”

  “I don’t know,” he had replied. Today, this morning, he would find out.

  Leah went to the stove and poured them both coffee in the large milk-white ceramic mugs she had crafted herself.