Leah's Children

by Gloria Goldreich

  “Never mind. Never mind. It will be taken care of.” Sherry moved swiftly forward and a maid armed with brush and dust pan hurried over. But Lisa knelt and, like a sleepwalker, touched a sliver of glass.

  A tear-shaped drop of blood formed at her fingertip, and she stared at it until Joshua pressed his handkerchief against it.

  “Another toast.” Aaron’s voice diverted their attention, restored their mood, and they turned gratefully to him.

  “To the new year of 1967. To peace and freedom.”

  “To peace. To freedom.” Again they lifted their glasses, but this time their voices were resonant with solemnity.

  They drank to peace, although they daily inhaled the sour breath of war. Uniformed youths marched across their television screens as they watched the war each night, heavy-hearted with sorrow, glassy-eyed with disbelief. They leaned forward to study the incineration of a mountain village and averted their eyes from the footage of moaning men, writhing with pain as they were carried to helicopters.

  They flicked their sets off when weeping children trailed across the screen. Jakie Hart’s oldest son was a combat soldier in Vietnam. A youngster Michael had tutored in Troy had been wounded in the Tet offensive; Jared Parks, his Berkeley student, had been killed. Michael lifted his glass, but he did not drink. He could not drink to peace when war haunted his thoughts. He looked at Rebecca, who shivered, although the fire was hot against her back.

  “To peace!” Aaron had said, but Rebecca remembered the last radio broadcast she had listened to in Israel—Nasser’s bellicose voice and the thunderous response of his people. “What are they saying?” she had asked Yehuda, whose Arabic was fluent. His reply had been flat. “We want war. Kill the Jews.” He had invited her then, perhaps, to understand why he had to continue what he called his “special obligation,” but she had not responded. She understood all too well. Her comprehension lay heavy on her heart, formed a ganglion of doubt and fear that she fought daily.

  They drank to freedom and thought of the fires that had blazed that past summer in the ghettos of Cleveland and Chicago, of the civil rights workers who had been terrorized and beaten in the hamlets and on the highways of the South.

  The champagne left a bitter taste in Les Anderson’s mouth, but he downed it because he was determined to get drunk. He was exhausted after his work on an in-depth essay on James Meredith’s march from Memphis to Jackson. He wondered if he should tell Michael that he had interviewed Kemala. She had married Matt Williams, but it was rumored that the marriage was not a happy one. Her replies to his questions had been laced with bitterness.

  “Meredith’s just lucky that the bullet that stopped him didn’t kill him. Time is running out for nonviolence.”

  She had not asked about Michael, and she had stared contemptuously at Les as he copied her comment into his notebook. He had used it as the closing quotation for his article. A stupid summation, he decided, and allowed the maid to refill his glass.

  “To freedom,” he said, but his voice was flat, deadened. He hoped his essay would not win any journalistic prizes. He did not want to write any more civil rights stories. He would ask for an assignment overseas and cover a real war in which armed men fought one another openly. He was sick to death of bombs concealed in the basements of southern Baptist churches where blacks came to worship, of sniper bullets whizzing across highways and rooftops, of volleys of hatred fired across the airwaves. He would go to Vietnam, perhaps, or to the Middle East, or even to Biafra. One thing was certain about the new year of 1967—he would be offered a varied choice of wars.

  The doorbell rang again and again and more and more guests arrived. Men and women in evening dress smiled benevolently at younger guests in jeans and open shirts, in brightly colored mini-dresses and loose-fitting dresses of African design. They talked and laughed, flushed with the cold and with drinks consumed at other parties. A light snow fell, and Rebecca tasted the melting flakes as she dutifully kissed the cheeks of the relatives and old friends who pressed forward to greet her.

  “So wonderful to have you back, dear. Isn’t it wonderful to be home again? Your mother is so pleased.”

  But I’m not home, she wanted to reply. Or at least, I don’t think I am. In fact, for the first time in almost twenty years I’m not sure where home is.

  Instead she smiled and nodded and pretended not to hear their murmuring voices as they walked away. (She’s still so pretty, our Rebecca. But she looks so tired…. Perhaps it’s just that white dress. Leah should have found her something more colorful…. You know how those Israeli women are, not at all interested in clothing—so idealistic….)

  Rebecca studied the crowd, searching out familiar faces, trying to match husbands with their wives, to remember the bits of gossip about friends and relations that had filtered down to her through the years. She recognized the Levensons, who had been their neighbors in Brooklyn, and the buxom woman whose hair was dyed bright red was Pearlie, who had boarded with them during those early years in Eldridge Street. But who was the tall man with iron-gray hair who was talking so earnestly to Charles Ferguson? His craggy, uneven features were teasingly familiar, but she could not place him. An old friend of Charles’s, she supposed. She turned to greet her uncle, Seymour Hart, grown so frail now that she could not match him with her memory of the buoyant man who had tossed her into the air each evening of her childhood, delighting her with scraps of fabric, empty bobbins, and bits of sticky penny candy.

  “You’re well, Becca?” the old man asked her. “Everything is all right by you?”

  “Yes, Uncle. Why do you ask?” His question and the knowing worry in his eyes aroused her defenses.

  “Nu? You think I don’t know what it’s like to be born and grow up in one country and then to live in another? You think in one language and you speak in another. When I first came to America I used to dream every night about the meadows and forests of Russia. Still I can remember the smell of the pines and the feel of grass and leaves beneath my feet. That I remember. That I didn’t forget.”

  He forgot so many other things. His grandchildren’s names eluded him, and when he went for a walk he counted the blocks carefully because once he had lost his way and it had taken him hours to find his house. His wife, Mollie, Leah’s sister, had died years ago, but still in the darkness of the night he talked to her, even quarreled with her. But he never forgot the woodlands of his Russian boyhood or those early years in America.

  He studied his niece with his shrewd, old man’s eyes.

  “Still, I don’t worry about you, Becca. You’re your mother’s daughter. You know how to fight, how to survive. Like Leah knew.”

  He looked at Leah, who stood before the fire, laughing at something Boris said. Seymour Hart’s own mirth was thin and hesitant, but Leah, who was of his generation, laughed as young women did, with zest and eagerness. There was no need to be concerned about the daughter of such a woman. Rebecca’s struggles, like Leah’s, would be arduous, but in the end, her laughter, too, would ring with vibrancy and she, too, would move from strength to strength. Seymour Hart sighed, impatient with himself because he was an old man who knew too much yet remembered too little.

  “Rebecca! You look marvelous.” Charles Ferguson made his way across the room to her. He was full of news about her retrospective. Every major critic had accepted his invitation to the opening, and it was certain that Art News would do an interview. Just today he had had an inquiry from public television about a possible feature. “Isn’t it exciting?” he said and rushed away before she could tell him that she was thinking of returning to Israel before the opening.

  A trio of youthful musicians set up their instruments near the window, and couples danced to the mellow commingling of piano, flute, and guitar. The music was slow and dreamy. Rebecca swayed to the rhythm of the slow fox trot of the Carousel theme. She remembered dancing to it during her Bennington days, barefoot and wearing jeans and her father’s oversized white shirt, her black hair clustered in bu
nches at her ears. She had been Joe Stevenson’s girl then. Joe had been her sculpture teacher, her first lover and now her friend. He and his Danish wife, Inga, had been invited to this party, she knew, but Sherry had told her that they had called earlier in the evening. The fog was thick above Nantucket Island where they lived. They would see Rebecca at the opening of her show.

  The pianist played alone now. “Strangers in the Night.” She moved to the music, so lost in her mood that she did not notice the man with iron-gray hair and craggy features until he opened his arms. Obediently, she danced into the circle of his embrace and allowed him to lead her out to the improvised dance floor. His hand held hers lightly, gently, but his arm against her back was controlling as he danced her around the room. He did not release her when the song ended but held her until the musicians struck up “The Tennessee Waltz.”

  Now they whirled about the room, and she surrendered to the ease and grace of the dance. They sang the first verse softly together, as though they had long been partners and this was an established custom between them.

  They laughed because the next line eluded them and instead they hummed softly. Their voices joined again as the words rushed at them in a sudden spurt of memory.

  The music stopped and they stood looking at each other, song and laughter still on their lips. Each waited for the other to speak, but their silence was oddly comfortable and unstrained.

  “Excuse me.” Joanna Ellenberg stood beside her. “My mother said to tell you there’s a call for you. You can take it in the den. I’ll show you.”

  Rebecca’s heart beat more rapidly. Names rushed into her mind and her throat grew dry with fear. Yehuda. Yaakov. Amnon.

  “Excuse me.”

  “Of course.”

  She felt his eyes follow her as she hurried after Joanna, but she could think only of the phone call. It would not be bad news, she decided. Any bad news would have been communicated to her brothers. Surely, the call was from Yehuda. He was calling to wish her a happy new year, to apologize for the few hastily scrawled letters he had sent her since her departure, to tell her that he loved her and that he wanted her to return soon—soonest. Rivka, my Rivka. The sound of his voice was reverberant in her memory. “Yehuda, my Yehuda,” she whispered. She smiled at Joanna, closed the oaken door of Joshua’s den, and picked up the receiver.

  But it was Danielle’s voice, crackling with excitement, that greeted her, magically strong as it traversed continents and oceans.

  “Rivka—happy new year! Don’t be worried. Everything is all right. But I wanted you to be the first to know.”

  “To know what, Danielle?” She felt dizzy, caught on the mixed currents of relief and disappointment. Everything was all right, but it was not Yehuda who had called.

  “Yair and I have decided to be married. Just today we came to the decision.”

  “I’m glad, Danielle.” She had always liked Yair, and she admired the way he coped with his disability. He was neither bitter nor dispirited. And he would never have to go to war again. Danielle, whose mother had been killed by a German officer and whose brother had been murdered by an Arab terrorist, would not be widowed by war. That was something. That was a great deal.

  “Yaakov and Amnon are here in the office with me,” Danielle said. “Do you want to talk to them?”

  “Yes, of course. I want to speak to everyone, but let me speak to your father—to Yehuda—first.”

  There was silence, and Rebecca feared that their connection had been lost, but then Danielle was speaking again, her voice more subdued, more distant.

  “I’m sorry. He’s not here. He’s traveling about and told us that we might not hear from him for a while. We’re not even sure that he’s in the country. Hasn’t he written you?”

  “Yes. Of course.” Yehuda’s few letters had been posted from Israel, but that meant nothing, she knew. Often, before he left for a mission, he prepared letters in advance, which were mailed periodically to the children so that they would not be anxious. Almost always she had known when he would be out of the country. But this time she did not know. He had been vague about dates, destinations. He had thrust her further out of his life, out of his confidence. Damn his “special obligation.” Anger flashed and replaced disappointment.

  But her voice was controlled as she spoke to her sons. Yaakov sounded treacherously mature as he assured her that he watched over Amnon and complained that Amnon did not always mind him. Amnon’s voice quivered. He struggled against tears, she knew.

  “Are you coming home soon, Ima?” he asked.

  “In a while,” she replied and realized that she, too, struggled against tears.

  And then Yair was on the phone, his voice bursting with his triumph, with his love.

  “I’m going to make Danielle very happy,” he promised.

  “I know,” she assured him. “Yair, is everything all right in the country?”

  “Yes. I think so. The attacks on the northern border are all for show—something to keep Kosygin happy. We have to worry about the Arabs when they stop shooting.” He laughed, the mocking, defiant laughter of the native-born Israeli.

  She passed the phone to Mindell, who had burst into the room and was shouting her congratulations into the receiver until the operator interrupted and the connection was severed.

  They went back to the party then. Crowds milled through the dining room, and Rebecca filled a plate with the delicacies of Sherry’s ample buffet. She looked at it with lack of interest and set it down. The large television set had been switched on, and the older guests were looking at their watches, counting the minutes before midnight. The musicians had abandoned their corner, and instead the amplified voice of Sandie Shaw shrilled from the stereo unit. “I’m Only a Puppet on a String”—the singer mourned the lyrics sweetly, sadly.

  “As I have been,” Rebecca thought suddenly. For too long she had been controlled by the dreams and desires of others. Since the day she had met Yehuda in Italy (how bright the sun had been on the piazza as they sat over their plates of gem-colored ices), she had danced to the rhythm of his destiny. It was time now for her to make new assessments, new evaluations. It was time for her to find her own music. She felt a surge of strength, a new determination.

  Someone turned the television louder. The announcer counted the final seconds of 1966. Guy Lombardo led his band in “Auld Lang Syne.” Mindell pressed her cheek against Michael’s. Aaron held Lydia close. Leah and Boris stood side by side and watched as Sherry and Joshua Ellenberg danced slowly, dreamily, crossing the border from one year into another.

  Rebecca drifted from one crowded room to the other. Jakie Hart gave her a glass of champagne.

  “Looking for someone?” he asked.

  She acknowledged, then, that she had been looking for the tall, craggy-featured man with iron-gray hair whose name she did not know. But he had left the party. She stood at the window, sipped her champagne, and studied the lightly falling snow, as though she might discover an important secret in the swirling flakes.

  *

  IT snowed on the afternoon Rebecca’s retrospective opened. It was the first heavy snow of the season, and the hurrying shoppers on Madison Avenue slowed their steps and lifted their faces to the thickly falling flakes. Their fingers stiffened with the cold, and frost glazed their clothing and their hair, but the snow promised excitement and adventure, sparked memory and longing. Charles Ferguson hired an extra doorman to stand in front of the gallery to hold a sheltering umbrella over his guests as they emerged from their cars and taxis. A uniformed maid stood in readiness in the vestibule to relieve them of their wraps and guide them into the brightly lit gallery, where a blazing fire welcomed them.

  Exhilarated by the cold, soothed by the light and warmth, they accepted glasses of mulled wine from the smiling young art students who considered it a privilege to assist at a Ferguson opening. The snow continued to streak the huge plate-glass windows, but they moved through the white-walled room and studied canvases that i
rradiated brilliant sunlight, moonswept desert, and verdant mountain land. They nodded and murmured softly to each other, glancing from catalogue to painting, stepping back to study one work and moving forward to admire another. Their slow pace pleased Charles Ferguson. The elderly art dealer knew that a viewer who paused before a large canvas and then returned to study it yet again was a potential purchaser. He would wait for the right moment to sidle up to such a patron and talk softly to him about Rebecca Arnon’s work, the power of a particular painting.

  Rebecca herself walked slowly from canvas to canvas and studied her work as though each canvas were new and unfamiliar to her. She had, in fact, not seen some of them for many years. She had routinely sent the completed canvases she wished to sell to the New York gallery. Charles Ferguson had kept a careful record of her sales, and he had gone to great efforts to borrow back her early works for this exhibit.

  She stood before a display of the Jerusalem cityscapes she had done during her first year in the country, and she remembered how long it had taken her to blend the oils that captured the rhodochrosite hue of a Jerusalem sunset. She had painted the emptiness of city streets at the evening hour, the loneliness of the Judaean Hills as shadows fell. She and Yehuda had been separated then too—he had been involved in illegal immigration, smuggling the concentration camp survivors into Palestine, and she had been a student at the Bezalel art school—the mood of her aloneness, she saw now, permeated that early work.

  Then there were the paintings of their first happy years in the Galilee. They had married, certain of their love and certain, too, that each could triumph over the other’s past. The purposefulness of the life he offered her would compensate for the separation from her family and the life she had known in America. Her love for him would soothe the grief and loss he had felt since the death of his first wife during a World War II intelligence mission. She had worked feverishly during those early years, fired by the happiness of their life together. There were her pastels of the children dancing at the festival of the first fruits, her complex gouache of the kibbutz members celebrating a communal seder. She had sketched Danielle and Mindell fondling a small goat, but she had used vibrant oils to paint Noam as a boy, burdened with sheaves of wheat that matched the golden radiance of his skin. Noam. She closed her eyes now and tried not to remember his body in the plain pine coffin that the military ambulance had delivered to Sha’arei ha-Negev. The burial society had washed the body carefully, but the charred flesh remained the color of ashes.