Leah's Children

by Gloria Goldreich

“Sit down, Michael,” she said.

  They sat opposite each other at the kitchen table, their hands curled about the steaming mugs; the fragrance of roasting turkey and baking fruit pies filled the large, pleasant room.

  “I don’t tell you lies, Michael. It’s true that anyone is welcome in our home. Your father and I were refugees from hate, from prejudice. We tried hard to fight in ourselves what we had seen in others. We worked, both of us, with Jews and non-Jews, with whites and blacks. Some became our friends. We laughed with them, shared with them, wept with them. With Jews and non-Jews. With blacks and whites.”

  “What are you trying to say, Mama?” Michael asked.

  “I’m trying to tell you that it does not bother me that your friend Kemala is a Negro.”

  “And if she were more than a friend?”

  “I don’t lie to you. It would bother me.” Her voice was flat, low. Her words were twisted around the armature of hated truth. She did not want to say what she said, but she was too honest to deny her feelings or to remain silent. “It would bother me very much. I want for you what every mother wants for her children—what Aaron and Rebecca have. A shared life. Continuity. Acceptance. Acceptance and happiness for your children, my grandchildren. Can you have that with this Kemala?”

  “We’re not up to marriage,” he said.

  “I see.” He was not up to marriage, but he had reached love, she knew. She could tell it by his voice, by the softness in his eyes, when he spoke the girl’s name. Kemala.

  Her fingers found a sliver of dough, and she fretted it into a tiny ball. What would David have said? she wondered, and thought back to a distant Thanksgiving when Rebecca had brought Joe Stevenson to their home. They had read a letter that day from Leah’s brother Moshe in Palestine, a letter written in Yiddish and describing rescue operations for Jewish children in Europe threatened by the Nazi specter. David had turned to his daughter and her Gentile lover that afternoon and said something about the irony of Jews like Moshe risking their lives for Jewish survival while in America it was treated so lightly. She struggled now to remember his exact words, but could not. Still, his feelings had been clear—clear enough to anger Rebecca, to touch a nerve of truth.

  “Your father,” she said to Michael now, “believed in Jewish survival. Intermarriage means assimilation, and assimilation means Jewish disappearance.”

  “My father did not believe in racism,” Michael retorted harshly. He was on safe ground now. He was no longer battling the ghosts of his mother’s unarticulated objections, her vague generalities that in the end did not mask her rejection of his relationship with Kemala. Kemala was welcome as his friend. She would be less welcome as his lover. She would not be welcome at all as his wife.

  “Wanting you to marry a Jewish girl does not make me a racist,” Leah replied quietly.

  “This is all a little sudden, isn’t it?” he said bitterly. “Suddenly it’s important that we’re Jewish. Was it so important when I was growing up? No one objected when I stopped going to Hebrew school right after bar mitzvah. You didn’t keep kosher until the war. Sometimes you lit candles on Friday night and sometimes you didn’t. And now I’m supposed to be looking for a Jewish girl!”

  Leah bit her lips. Everything he said was true, and yet even during those years when her observance was minimal, her Jewishness had been like a second skin. She and David had grown to maturity in the total Jewish environment of their shtetl village. They dreamed in Yiddish, knew the Sabbath service by heart. Their faith had been as integral to their natures as the color of their hair, the texture of their skin. But in the rush to Americanize their lives, to realize themselves professionally, they had not realized that what had been true for them would not be true for their children. Scarsdale was worlds away from Makover. Yet their Jewishness, until Rebecca’s marriage, had been largely economic and gastronomic: checks dutifully written to the United Jewish Appeal and the synagogue; chicken soup and stuffed cabbage. Perhaps it was not surprising that Michael could fall in love with a black girl. Perhaps the real accident was that both Aaron and Rebecca had chosen partners with deep Jewish commitment.

  Michael stood at the kitchen window, flushed, angry, yet oddly satisfied. They were arguing. They were disagreeing. Emotional blood, at last, was being drawn.

  “All right. Maybe ‘racist’ is too strong a word,” he said. “But we both know what you mean.”

  “Let us say, then, that you know what I mean. Does it matter to you?”

  “Matter?”

  “Yes. Would you go ahead and do what you pleased, no matter how I felt about it?”

  She stood opposite him now, and he noticed, for the first time, that where once her hair had been black and streaked with silver, now it was silver threaded with random black strands. Small lines of weariness wreathed her fine dark eyes, formed a delicate network about her generous mouth. Often, as a small boy, he had coaxed forth her laughter so that he might see the dimple that blossomed magically at the corner of her lips. Once he had pressed his small hand against a newly finished painting, still shimmering with wetness. The effort of weeks had been ruined. “Never mind,” she had said. Once he had broken a delicate teacup. She prized it because she had brought it with her from Russia. “Never mind,” she had said. He wanted to be a small boy again, to coax forth his mother’s dimpled gaiety, her unequivocal, unhampered love.

  “Mama,” he said, and his voice was heavy with regret, uncertainty.

  “I asked you a question.”

  “I know.” He loved her but he would battle her.

  “And?”

  “I can’t answer you. I just don’t know.”

  For them both his doubt was a defeat.

  “Uncle Mikey. Uncle Mike!” Paulette hurtled into the room and he tossed her, laughing and squealing, into the air. His niece’s laughter stifled his mother’s deep sigh. Her merriment obscured the sadness that lingered in the bright and fragrant kitchen.

  In the doorway Boris Zaslovsky studied his friend, Leah Goldfeder, with a worried gaze. She was a strong woman, but he knew that too often, the strong were cruelly vulnerable. He moved to her side, and it was Lydia who noticed how the morning sunlight that streamed through the window formed an aureole of light about their bent heads.

  *

  KEMALA shivered in the northern cold as she exited from the plane at Idlewild Airport. Briefly, she was sorry that she had not stayed in Mississippi. The Mason family had invited her for Thanksgiving, and Matt had even accepted an invitation for the both of them to attend a dinner at the home of a professor at Ole Miss who was determined to demonstrate his liberalism by sharing the meal with a Negro couple.

  “I told you I was going to New York,” she had said.

  “But I promised you would be there.”

  “You had no right.”

  It was one of the few occasions when she had resisted Matt, and she wondered if she had won the battle because she was fighting for Michael and not for herself.

  “Whatever you want.” Matt’s voice had been curt, his body rigid.

  She did not know what she wanted, she acknowledged, as he left, slamming the door behind him. As always, she straddled two worlds, powerless to choose either. Michael drew her toward him with his gentle protectiveness, his caring concern. Matt enticed her with his fury, his febrile energy. She sensed the sorrow that birthed that energy, although he did not speak of it.

  She had stood beside him on an autumn evening, shortly after Michael’s departure, when the lightning of a gulf storm ripped the sky and pellets of rain battered their window. A stone, tossed by a White Citizens Council vigilante had shattered the pane, and they had fitted a sheet of cardboard in its place. It provided no defense against the impact of the rain, and they grew wet as they watched the downpour. Matt stepped back at last and she followed him. He wiped her face and arms with a towel.

  “We’re so damn alone,” he had said bitterly. They were exposed, vulnerable to hatred, to the elements.

 
“Not so alone.” She drew him to her then, felt his body relax against her own. She was moved that she had the power to soothe this man whose moods controlled her, whose vision commanded her.

  The storm subsided and they made love on the battered leather office couch. With swift passion, he reasserted his authority over her. He pinioned her arms, hammered his way into her deepest being.

  She lay awake long after he slept and thought of how Michael’s hands had passed over her body in slow caress, how he had loosened the plait of her braid and threaded his fingers through its dark tendrils. Michael…Matt. She whispered their names. How different they were, yet both of them caused her to moan with yearning, to cry out with joy. Oddly, she felt no disloyalty. Neither man was betrayed because she cared for both of them, she told herself. Each answered different needs for her. Gentle Michael. Fervent Matt.

  She had remained in Neshoba with Matt. It was only fair then that she travel north, as she had promised, and spend Thanksgiving with Michael. Meticulously, she balanced the scales, distributed the months of her years, the hours of her days. One day she would be forced to make a choice, she knew, but there was time.

  She tried not to think of the dream that wakened her more and more often in the darkness of the night, although its details were clear to her. Dressed in a harlequin costume, half black, half white, she stood at a crossroads, and two figures danced toward her through a shimmering mist. One was dressed in black, the other in white. The man in white beckoned her, danced ahead of her, his hand outstretched to lead her, but his adversary gripped her wrist. A willing prisoner, she followed him into the mist and looked back at the man in white who waved sadly to her and whistled an intricate tune.

  A foolish dream, she thought, yet she wept when she awakened from it. She would not tell Matt about it. He would be impatient with her, annoyed. And she could not tell Michael about it.

  Matt drove her to the airport.

  “Do you know what you’re doing, Kemala?” he asked harshly.

  “No,” she replied. “No, I don’t. How can I know?”

  She had no guides. Her parents were dead, her friends dispersed. They lived in new times, and no manuals had yet been written for them, no examples set.

  Michael’s roommates, Jeremy and Les, met her at the airport and drove her to Scarsdale.

  “A Berkeley reunion,” Les said. “Melanie’s here, too. The victorious campaigner. Without Melanie, Kennedy would have lost the election.”

  “Oh, Melanie’s all right,” Kemala replied.

  Michael had shown her the letter Melanie had written him in response to his own long letter explaining his friendship with Kemala, his decision to go to Mississippi.

  “Kemala is a wonderful girl,” Melanie had written, “and I can understand that you should care for her. We live in new times, Michael, and I guess I envy you because you have the courage to meet their challenge. We had our fun, but it was never more than that—was it? I know that we shall always be friends—you and I, Kemala and I, and of course, the three of us together.”

  Kemala had sensed the relief that Melanie concealed between the lines. Michael had cut her loose, and she could travel on her own. After the Kennedy campaign trail, new vistas would open and Melanie, eager and unhampered, would explore them each in turn. She was glad that Melanie would be at the Goldfeders’. She counted her as a friend, a confederate.

  The car pulled up in the circular driveway, and Michael came down to meet them. His heart beat rapidly and his eyes stung. He had not realized, until this moment of seeing her, how much he had missed her. She was even thinner than she had been when he left her in Mississippi, but she looked very beautiful in a suit of burgundy wool, her glossy black hair caught back into a smooth chignon.

  “Kemala,” he said, and his hand touched her cheek.

  “Michael.” Her fingers lightly brushed his lips. He wondered if they would remember this code of touch after much else had been forgotten. Would it endure past their memories of the scent of the last magnolia, the whorls of trillium, the rich blue of the gentian that grew wild in the field behind the Troy schoolhouse and in the Masons’ kitchen garden?

  He saw that her hand trembled slightly when she held it out to his mother, but Leah was warm and welcoming. She greeted Kemala as openly as she had greeted Melanie an hour earlier.

  Had Kemala had a good trip? Was she tired? Did she have family in the area? Kemala’s answers were careful and polite. Her trip had been pleasant because she had flown north. She was tired, but this weekend was the first vacation she had taken since leaving Berkeley, although she had meetings scheduled in New York, so the trip would not be all holiday. She had no family in the area, only friends, very good friends. She smiled at Michael.

  “All you young people work too hard,” Sherry Ellenberg said. “Causes. Campaigns. Meetings. You ought to have more fun.”

  “Oh, come now, Sherry,” Joshua Ellenberg said in the teasing tone he reserved for his English wife. “What were you doing at their age?”

  “That was different,” Sherry said. “There was a war on. We had no choice.”

  Sherry had been a nurse in Bournemouth when the war began. Her parents had been born in Warsaw, and the day that Hitler invaded Poland, Sherry had joined the British Nursing Corps. She had met Joshua in an Allied army hospital. He had been a skinny infantryman who stared disconsolately down at the tautly wrapped bandages that covered the severed stump where once his hand had been. Now he maneuvered his black leather prosthetic hand with skill, and he had grown portly. Too often, he released his belt a notch after a meal, causing his children to laugh.

  The Ellenberg children—the twins, Scott and Lisa, and Joanna and Stevie—lived in a different world than the one their parents had known. War and poverty were banished, spoken about in whispers. Peace and plenty formed the parameters of their lives. They ate red meat every night, took vitamins, and plundered refrigerators amply stocked with fruits of the season, juices that gleamed in rainbow colors, any delicacy for which they expressed a preference. Laughter ruled their lives—the canned laughter of the half-hour comedy programs on television, the insistent gaiety of the professional clown hired to entertain at their birthday parties, the comedians hired for their bar mitzvahs and sweet-sixteens. Only one demand had been made of them during their brief, golden lives. “Be happy!” That was what Sherry and Joshua Ellenberg, who had seen war and death, smelled singed bodies and putrefying limbs, wanted for their children.

  “Did you have a good time? Did you have fun?” Their questions were urgent and fearful.

  “We had fun. It was great.”

  Their children did not disappoint them. They dared not.

  “There’s a war on now,” Kemala said. Michael was catapulted back to the party in Melanie’s Berkeley apartment. She had said the same thing then, and in the background the girl called Joan Baez had plucked her mandolin and softly sung of peace.

  “Oh, come on, Kemala.” In Berkeley Melanie had been sympathetic, now she was impatient. “Things are getting better. You’ve already seen what Kennedy could do when he was only a candidate. Now he’s president. He’ll turn everything around. The whole world.”

  Melanie had already volunteered to serve in the new Peace Corps Kennedy had proposed. She had been with the group of volunteers who had met with Kennedy early in October at the University of Michigan at two in the morning and had heard him advocate the daring new program. His words whirled in her memory. “I want to demonstrate to Mr. Khrushchev…that a new generation of Americans has taken over this country…young Americans who will serve the cause of freedom as servants of peace around the world….” The new president had turned them from a generation of takers to a generation of givers. Melanie saw herself working at a schoolhouse in Ghana, at a clinic in an Asian outpost.

  “Exactly what did Kennedy do?” Kemala asked, and again her tone was reminiscent of the control she had displayed at Berkeley. “He phoned Coretta King and told her that he was really sorry
that her husband was in jail. I don’t call that an act of heroism.”

  “Oh, be fair, Kemala. He did more than that,” Les Anderson protested. “Bobby Kennedy called Georgia and insisted that King be given bail.”

  Les had been in Detroit that day, covering the campaign. The sustained fury of the Kennedy brothers over the black leader’s plight had impressed him. They had called in a lot of important IOUs with that call, he knew.

  “It was all a political ploy,” Kemala retorted calmly. “A friend of mine who really knows what’s going on told me that if the election hadn’t been so close, neither of those calls would have been made. Those two calls delivered the black vote and put Kennedy over the top.”

  “I didn’t think Matt Williams attended Kennedy’s kitchen cabinet meetings,” Michael observed mildly. “How can he be sure?” Immediately he was ashamed. It was the first time he had mentioned Matt Williams directly to Kemala. It struck him as an act of cowardice that he should do so at a festive holiday dinner surrounded by his family and friends.

  Leah, as though sensing unease, served the turkey just then. Aaron carved expertly, never faltering, although Paulette’s hand rested on his wrist. Four years of marriage had added weight to Aaron’s solid frame and contentment to his features. Like many redheads, his hair had lost its color early, and Aaron’s silver-gray hair reminded Michael that his brother was no longer a young man, nor was he himself growing younger. It would be nice to have children of his own, to feel a child’s trusting touch on his own wrist. He shook the thought away and turned to the Ellenberg children, who were happily singing a new jingle for Ellenberg Industries that Joshua’s advertising agency had composed for television.

  “Not a work of art,” Joshua said, “but it sells jeans. That’s the wave of the future—merchandising with television.”

  “Ellenberg Industries has a factory over in Fayette, Mississippi, doesn’t it?” Kemala asked. “I noticed a sign there.”

  “Jakie Hart and I operated a plant together there for a while, but we closed it down.”