Leah's Children

by Gloria Goldreich

  *

  SHERRY ELLENBERG surveyed her brightly lit living room approvingly, flushed with the anticipation of the evening ahead. She had always loved giving parties. As a small girl, growing up in a shabby council flat in Bournemouth, she had improvised parties to celebrate her friends’ birthdays, her relatives’ anniversaries. Later, during the war years when she had worked as a nurse at a military hospital, she had tossed streamers of colored paper through her ward and served pastries begged from neighboring tearooms to mark one patient’s leaving, another’s birthday. Joshua Ellenberg, a patient in that hospital, had fallen in love with Sherry as she led a group of convalescents in a rousing chorus of “Happy Birthday.” He had forgotten about his right hand mangled during a battle along the banks of the Rhine; he had forgotten also about Rebecca Goldfeder, whom he had thought he loved but who did not love him.

  “Sing!” Sherry had urged, and suddenly he had heard his own voice, sounding surprisingly strong and carefree, joining in the song. He had realized then that he was alive and having fun and that his life would be filled with tomorrows. When he proposed to Sherry, in a quiet London pub where a lone drunk mournfully sang “The White Cliffs of Dover,” he had promised her that their life together would be a wonderful partnership full of joy and excitement.

  “One day we’ll have a wonderful house,” he pledged. “Cars, vacations.” There would be trips to England to visit her family, the best of everything for their children. The certainty of his own success pulsed through Joshua’s veins, throbbed in his voice. The postwar years would be boom times, and he would be ready for them.

  “And parties?” Sherry had asked teasingly.

  “And parties,” he had promised.

  He had kept his promise. They had hosted small parties in their first apartment to celebrate the success of Joshua’s first year as an independent manufacturer, Aaron Goldfeder’s first marriage, the birth of the twins, Scott and Lisa; there had been larger gatherings and barbecues in their first tract house in Levittown and then, as Ellenberg Industries expanded and the two younger children, Joanna and Stevie, were born, the famous open houses on their Great Neck estate.

  Sherry’s floral arrangements were unique—pussywillows and orchids to celebrate Aaron Goldfeder’s appointment to a judgeship, rainbow-colored gladioli for the twins’ high school graduation party, russet chrysanthemums for Stevie’s bar mitzvah, and scarlet roses in nests of baby’s breath for Joanne’s sweet-sixteen. But always Sherry’s most spectacular party was given on New Year’s Eve—a dual celebration of the twins’ birthday and the year’s end. And this year, because the party was also in honor of Rebecca Arnon’s first extended visit to the United States, Sherry had worked doubly hard.

  Joshua had told her that Rebecca loved yellow roses, and though they were out of season and outrageously expensive, she had ordered masses of them. The long-stemmed flowers filled the tall crystal vases that stood on every table and were gracefully arranged in the copper planters that banked the marble fireplace. The dancing flames tossed topaz shadows across the delicate petals, and their fragrance filled the room with the scent of summer. Lemon-colored cloths covered the small tables that the caterer had arranged, and on each table a bud vase contained a single tall sunshine-colored blossom.

  “Doesn’t the room look beautiful?” Sherry asked Lisa, who had wandered in.

  Lisa shrugged and a frown furrowed her high forehead. She had inherited her mother’s auburn hair, which fell in silken folds about her shoulders. Her black turtleneck sweater emphasized the pallor of her skin. She seemed so thin in her faded, ink-stained jeans, Sherry thought, and she looked away from the lines of fatigue that webbed her daughter’s eyes. As always, Lisa was working too hard, studying too intensely.

  “It should look beautiful,” Lisa replied. “It cost enough. We probably could have bought a mimeograph machine for the Coalition office for what you paid for those flowers.”

  Sherry did not answer. She did not fully understand her daughter’s affiliation with the Coalition to End the War in Vietnam, but she accepted it as she accepted all things that engrossed her children. Always Lisa’s involvements had been intense, passionate.

  She had been a grave-eyed child who had wept inconsolably over the death of a small dog, struck by a speeding car on their street. Tearfully she had gathered up the broken forms of fledgling robins and buried them in a corner of the garden. When she walked past Bloomingdale’s, she held coins in readiness for the palsied man who hawked comic books in front of the emporium. She averted her eyes as she dropped the money into his outstretched cup. Death and cruelty, deprivation and suffering, bewildered and saddened her. She could not reconcile the prosperity of her home, the protected and protective ambience of her childhood, with the misery and hazards of the world around her. Her parents exhorted her to be happy, and, obediently, Lisa went to parties, took horseback riding lessons, skied in the winter and sailed in the summer. Her father demanded her laughter, and she turned away so that he would not see the pain in her eyes as they drove through the streets of St. Albans on their way to Great Neck. Something had to be done to make the world different, better. There had to be something, anything, that she, Lisa Ellenberg, could do.

  When a young physician from the Coalition showed explicit and terrifying films of the aftermath of a village bombing in Vietnam, during Lisa’s freshman year at Hutchinson College, she had wept openly, written a check that consumed her entire monthly allowance, and returned to her dormitory. There, she lay awake in the darkness and saw, again and again in her mind’s eye, the scarred bodies of small children seared by napalm, the frightened eyes of aged montagnards who had been forced to leave their mountain villages. When she slept at last, she dreamed that she stood alone on a sloping sand dune while graceful yellow-skinned men and women paraded past her and walked mindlessly into a sea of blood. The next morning she cut all her classes, boarded a train for New York, and signed up as a volunteer at the Coalition.

  Her work and her studies absorbed her, and she was increasingly impatient with her family, with the opulence of the Great Neck home, her twin brother’s determined academic ambition, and the frivolity of the younger children. Scott, an economics major at Harvard, had known since his first day as a freshman that he would go on to do graduate work at the Wharton School of Business.

  “Don’t you give a damn about the world around you?” Lisa had asked him contemptuously.

  “I give a damn. I just happen to think more change can be effected by having enlightened people in the seats of power than by having a bunch of screaming Yippies who dropped out in their freshman year making scenes in the street.”

  “The people in the Coalition are not Yippies,” Lisa had retorted. “And they’re not flunking out. At least I’m not.”

  She was, in fact, compulsive about school and made the dean’s list consistently each, semester. It was a mystery to Sherry how Lisa managed to work so many hours for the Coalition and still keep her grades high. She had mentioned this to Michael Goldfeder, who taught Lisa’s sociology seminar, and he had laughed indulgently.

  “She’s Joshua’s daughter. She has his energy. A couple of hours of sleep, a quick shower, and she’s back in business. She’s one of the sharpest gals in that class, Sherry. Not to worry.”

  And Sherry had noticed that although Lisa often arrived home dull-eyed and listless, within a few hours she would emerge from her room as though recharged, moving almost hyperkinetically, her green eyes glittering, her color high. She looked exhausted now, but by the time the guests began arriving, she would be aglow with the wonderful incandescence that caused Joshua to look at her with proud satisfaction. His children’s happiness and beauty validated his own success, and he would hug his elder daughter and never notice that her hands trembled and her eyes were dangerously bright.

  “I’ll change now,” Lisa said wearily.

  Sherry kissed her daughter on the cheek.

  “Happy birthday, darling,” she said. �
�I asked the Goldfeders to come a bit early for a birthday toast, so you don’t have all that much time.”

  “I’ll be ready,” Lisa promised. She loved and admired the Goldfeders, who had been an ancillary family to her all her life. And because she felt a vague disloyalty when she compared her own mother to the Goldfeder women, she hugged her with special warmth and hurried upstairs.

  *

  LIKE a latecomer to the theater, Rebecca paused hesitantly at the sentry of the Ellenberg living room and studied the scene in progress before her. She stared at Sherry Ellenberg, resplendent in a turquoise taffeta dress, and wondered if her own simple white wool dress was too austere. Sherry moved among her guests, talking softly, smiling and motioning almost imperceptibly now and again to a uniformed maid who hurried over to offer a glass of champagne or remove an empty plate.

  A richly patterned Oriental rug covered the polished floor, and the guests moved soundlessly across it, to greet and embrace one another. The trill of laughter and the hum of earnest conversation filled the room, growing louder as glasses were refilled and more guests arrived. Jakie Hart kissed Rebecca and introduced her to his third wife. She smelled the scent of martini on his breath and remembered how, as a small boy, newly arrived from Europe, he had seemed always to smell of onions. Her cousin Jakie had come a long way.

  Aaron and Lydia sat on the deep-gold velvet love seat, their hands linked, and listened to Scott Ellenberg’s analysis of Lyndon Johnson’s domestic policy. The president was naive, Scott asserted with the absolute and impenetrable certainty of the young. A great society could not be legislated into existence. It had to evolve gradually and systematically.

  Lisa Ellenberg listened to her brother and said nothing, although her lips curled with impatience and she toyed nervously with her long strand of amber beads.

  Mindell and Michael stood before the fire with Leah and Boris. The dancing flames ignited Mindell’s fair skin, turned her fair hair the color of honey. She laughed at something Michael said and turned to Leah, who nodded and smiled. Leah looked happy, Rebecca thought, and she watched as Sherry joined the group and led Boris and Leah to seats near the fire. Joshua joined them, carrying a glass of white wine for Leah, a snifter of brandy for Boris. Sherry rearranged the short-stemmed yellow roses that filled a polished copper bowl. She selected two buds and deftly placed one in Boris’s lapel and the other in Joshua’s. The men smiled their approval. Joshua kissed her, and Leah leaned forward and patted Sherry’s upswept auburn curls. Her marriage to Boris had reinvigorated Leah. Joy and companionship, purpose and fulfillment had been restored to her. Her studio was littered with new projects, and she kept a sketch pad in her purse.

  Sherry smiled and moved on to another group, Joshua beside her. A bittersweet jealousy stole over Rebecca. She recognized, with detached clarity, that she was looking at the life that might have been hers. Sherry’s spontaneous gesture might have been her own. Even the yellow roses, displayed in such profusion, would have been the flowers of her own choice. She remembered a distant summer when she and Joshua, childhood companions, had wandered away from the Catskill colony where their two families shared a bungalow. They had found a rosebush growing wild and untended in the garden of an abandoned farmhouse. The profusion of sun-colored flowers had fascinated the tenement children; they had plucked them with wild abandon, pricking their fingers with thorns and scratching their thin arms with the spiky tendrils of their fragrant burdens.

  “When we grow up, I’ll bring you yellow roses every week,” Joshua had promised her. “We’ll live in a big house, and I’ll fill it with flowers.”

  But with the passing years reality had betrayed fantasy. Rebecca had stood beside Joshua in a Vermont meadow and renounced his dream. She remembered still the sad and awkward bulge the ring she had rejected made when he thrust the blue velvet case back into his pocket. Their lives had been severed then, and they had followed separate paths, each finding a new togetherness—Joshua with Sherry, Rebecca with Yehuda. Still, Joshua had not entirely abandoned his dream. He had built a big house and filled it with flowers, and Rebecca came as a guest into the room where she might have stood as a welcoming hostess.

  The thought frightened her, filled her with an unfamiliar and bewildering guilt.

  I don’t regret it, she told herself fiercely. She had not loved Joshua. She had never loved Joshua. It was Yehuda, with his silken-gray eyes and his earth-colored hair, who had caused her hands to tremble and her heart to turn. He had wrenched her free of the life she had known. Like a seductive sorcerer, he had drawn her into the enchanted circle of his dream and spirited her away to live in the whitewashed bungalow at the base of a sand crater in Israel’s southland.

  His voice had been vibrant as he described the life that could be theirs, the exciting horizons that stretched before them. He had held her in his arms, and she had felt herself infused with the energy that drove him. Her body weakened beneath the impact of his certain strength and, in the quiet aftermath of their love, she touched his eyes, the thickness of his ocher hair, the milk-white scar that cleft his high forehead. He had mesmerized her with the intensity of his dream, with the sweet power of his smile, and with the knowing tenderness of his touch.

  She had, of course, been a willing and eager subject. Yehuda’s dream had fired her enthusiasm, ignited her own creative energy. And she loved the country. Its landscapes sprang to life beneath her brush. Her fingers quivered as she sketched. She dreamed in pastels, in vibrant, layered oils. Its history became her own. She and her children, she and Yehuda, were part of a great experiment—they were creating a new nation, a new society. She escorted American visitors through Sha’arei ha-Negev and could not restrain the pride in her voice as she told them that when she and Yehuda had first settled there the kibbutz had been a barren waste and for the first two years they had lived in a trailer. Now the kibbutz fields were lush with burgeoning crops, and neat white bungalows formed a crescent in front of the sand crater.

  She did not tell the visitors that many of the early settlers had left the kibbutz. Even native-born sons and daughters of Israel had found life in the desert too difficult. But she, Rebecca Arnon, who had played tennis on the lawn courts of Scarsdale and walked the shaded meadows of Bennington, had never contemplated leaving. Yehuda’s world, during that time, had become her own.

  It was only in recent years that she had begun to fret over the basic inequity in the love bargain she had struck. It was she who had left home and family. It was she who had had to learn a new language and who dreamed in a tongue unlike the one she spoke. She returned to America and felt herself a visitor and a stranger in her native land. Her children and her brother’s children were strangers to one another. The list of debits shamed her, and she acknowledged, too, the assets, the gains, that settling in Israel had brought her. Still, she could not balance the ledger. Perhaps now, on this journey home, she would reach a justified accounting.

  Rebecca watched Lisa Ellenberg walk across the room. She had been only a few years older than Lisa when she left for Palestine. She heard Lisa laugh and saw her dance away in the arms of a longhaired young man, and she thought that someone should warn Joshua’s daughter to tread carefully because the decisions of young girls became the lives of women.

  “Are you all right, Rebecca?” Leah asked as Rebecca approached her. Rebecca’s eyes were too bright, and her color was dangerously high, almost febrile.

  “I’m fine,” Rebecca assured her and went off to join Michael and Mindell, but Leah watched her with worried gaze. Boris pressed her hand.

  “She will find her way,” he said softly, and Leah sighed, acknowledging that her children had, of course, crossed the borders of her protection and were independent journeyers. And Rebecca, she knew, had the tenacity and strength to endure the most treacherous odyssey.

  “Time for the toast,” Joshua called, and they gathered in front of the fireplace.

  The Ellenbergs lifted their glasses. Lisa’s head rested lightly on
her father’s shoulder, and Scott stood tall beside him. Sherry, flushed with excitement and happiness, held the hands of the younger children, ignoring Stevie’s impatience, Joanna’s giggling.

  What were Yaakov and Amnon doing now? Rebecca wondered. She watched Joshua and Sherry with their children and experienced an almost visceral yearning for her sons. She imagined them asleep on their narrow cots in the kibbutz children’s house, Amnon’s long lashes sweeping across the rise of his cheekbones, Yaakov smiling at a mysterious, happy dream. How beautiful her sons were and how soft their fingers against her upturned palms. What was she doing so far away from them? She would call the kibbutz that night and discuss a speedy return to Israel. She had seen her mother and her brothers, her American friends and relations, and the retrospective did not require her presence. Her life was in another country. The new determination lightened her mood, excused the bitter thoughts of moments before. She leaned against the mantel and listened to Joshua.

  “Tonight,” he said, “Scott and Lisa celebrate their twentieth birthdays. We wish them joy to match the joy they have given us. We wish them long life and happiness. To our son and daughter. To Scott. To Lisa.” His voice trembled. He embraced his wife and beamed at his children. His toast was not wish but edict. His success would guarantee their happiness.

  “To Scott. To Lisa.”

  Their voices rang with gladness, and they saluted the twins with brimming glasses. Scott touched his father’s goblet with his own, and the other guests imitated the gesture. The gentle crystal tympany that filled the room was shattered suddenly by the sound of breaking glass. Lisa’s goblet had slipped from her fingers, and the polished floor was covered with glittering shards.