“Your children may be physically well cared for in a children’s house. But don’t they need mothering? For instance, who takes care of them when you are traveling?” asked a blond girl wearing a matching navy-blue cashmere sweater set and a strand of pearls. Hutchinson had been a mistake for her—she would soon transfer to Finch College.
“This trip is very rare for me,” Rebecca answered carefully. “It is the first time I have ever been away for so long. When I am on the kibbutz, I think my children do not lack for affection. It is the quality of the time that one spends with children, not the quantity, that counts.”
There was a brief spate of applause. She had given the Hutchinson girls the answer they wanted, but she thought of her distant sons and wondered if she believed it.
That night she dreamed of a weeping Yaakov and a shivering Amnon. Barefoot, they scrambled across the surface of the sand crater, calling her name in sleep-strangled voices. “I’m coming,” she replied and she struggled toward them through billowing clouds of sand, as white as newly fallen snow. But they did not hear her and renewed their cries. She awakened and trembled in the darkness of her girlhood room. What was she doing here when her sons were in another country?
She tried to call the kibbutz the next day, without success. “All circuits are busy,” the bored overseas operator told her. “I will keep trying your number.”
But when the phone rang at last, it was Charles Ferguson. His voice trembled with excitement. Pelican Press planned to publish an extravagant edition of Alan Zalenko’s poems, and he had asked Rebecca to illustrate them.
“He says he has an instinctive feeling that you understand his work,” Charles told her.
Rebecca thought of Zalenko’s poems. He was obsessed by loneliness. He wrote of the desolate skyscapes of winter, of snow-swept coastal villages and frosted windowpanes glittering in the early darkness. Illustrations for such a volume would take months.
“But you did plan to stay on for a few more weeks,” Charles said reasonably. “This is January. You would be through easily by April, May at the latest.”
“I’ll have been away for six months,” she protested.
“But think of what you’ll have to show for it.”
The book would be a classic, she knew, as all Pelican editions were—a limited-edition collector’s item. She had always wanted to work on such a project. Already an idea for a single illustration flowed through her mind—a micaceous reef patterned with winter-stiffened seaweed.
“I’ll think about it,” she promised.
She replaced the receiver and almost at once, the phone rang again. Miraculously, it was Yehuda. His voice was strong, soaring across the enormity of the distance that separated them. Her spirits lifted. He was calling to tell her how he missed her, that he wanted her home. He was calling to absolve her of choice.
“You’re back in Israel,” she said with relief.
“Of course.” She was unprepared for the insouciance of his tone. He did not say where he had been or whether he would be leaving again. He did not say that he had missed her. They were separated by more than distance. An abyss of silence and secrets, of shadow and fear, yawned between them.
She heard herself telling him about the success of the exhibition opening, the Zalenko poems. Her voice was too bright, her words too swift.
“Do you want to do these illustrations?” he asked.
“Do you think I should?”
“You must do what you think right.” His voice was even, noncommittal. “And a book endures.” She recognized his generosity and was grateful for it.
“But what about Yaakov and Amnon?” she asked weakly. (And what about you? she thought. Don’t you miss me—need mef What has happened between us?)
“It’s only a few extra months. The boys miss you, of course, but Danielle manages wonderfully with them. They will understand, I think. Take as much time as you need.”
She sensed a hesitancy and waited for him to continue, but he said nothing.
“I’ll think about it, then. I’ll let you know.”
She remembered the decision she had made New Year’s Eve—that she would carve out her own destiny. Yehuda was giving her license to do so. All right, then, all right, she thought.
“You must do what you yourself want to do.” She looked out the window.
“It’s snowing here.”
“This morning we saw the first almond blossoms.”
She was bounded by winter, while he looked out at the promise of spring.
“Shalom.”
“Shalom.”
The click of silence sounded. The connection was severed, and no word of love or longing had passed between them.
“Yehuda.” She said his name aloud, in pledge and affirmation.
*
REBECCA went into New York that afternoon. She would pick up a copy of the Zalenko manuscript at the gallery and at least read the poems very carefully before coming to a decision. The snow fell in light flurries when she left Scarsdale, but by the time she reached the city a fierce storm was in progress. The huge flakes descended with blinding thickness through mists of fog. Cars moved slowly, tentatively, plowing their way through the streets like clumsy wounded animals. Pedestrians pressed close to the facades of buildings, seeking the brief protection of the brightly lit store windows.
The gallery was deserted except for an elderly couple. Elegantly dressed, white-haired and soft-skinned, they walked from painting to painting with the leisurely gait of the old who have no need to hurry; their decisions have been made and their achievements recorded. Rebecca envied them their calm. They paused before her painting of the youthful Noam. The woman put a white handkerchief to her eyes, and Rebecca wondered if she, too, had known a golden-skinned boy whose flesh had been seared by the fires of war.
Charles Ferguson was out, but he had left a copy of the Zalenko poems and an advance tearsheet of Benjamin Nadler’s essay as it would appear in The Metropolitan. She clutched the thin sheets with icy fingers and read slowly.
Rebecca Arnon, an American-born artist who has lived in Israel for almost two decades, startled the art world with her versatility. The retrospective exhibition, mounted at Charles Ferguson’s prestigious gallery, revealed a depth of perception and a mastery of subject unmatched by other Israeli artists.…
He went on to describe her work and technique in intricate detail. She braced herself to read his critique of her rendition of the sand crater. It was mild enough, she decided with relief. “An unfortunate choice of medium for a dramatic and demanding subject,” he had written. “Arnon has yet to take that daring step which will topple her from mere competence to authoritative artistry.” But it was his concluding sentence that she read and reread.
The viewer feels Rebecca Arnon’s pain and struggle—the loneliness of the outsider who lives on the periphery of a landscape and a life that is at once beautiful and exciting but not quite her own. Still, there is the sense that this accomplished artist will have the strength to confront and surmount her own ambivalence.
Rebecca reeled at the accuracy of his perception. She felt revealed and betrayed. Who was Benjamin Nadler to know so much about her without knowing her at all? The tears she had been fighting since Yehuda’s phone call stung bitterly, and she snatched up the packet of printed matter and hurried out onto the street.
The fog was even thicker now, and a strong wind caught the snowflakes and tossed them through the air in whirling gusts. Their cold touch on her face mingled with the heat of her tears as Benjamin Nadler’s words ricocheted through her mind. She recognized the truth of his insights. She had arrived at a time of choice. She could not straddle both her worlds; somehow she would have to bridge them.
The hurrying urban crowd pressed against her; auto horns screeched angrily, importantly. A group of schoolboys in brightly colored anoraks hurtled down the street tossing snowballs at one another. One of them shoved a friend, who slid toward Rebecca. She darted away to avoid him, half
blinded by the snow and her tears. She did not see the curbside, lost her footing, and fell into the street. A car rushed toward her, its glaring lights almost level with her eyes. Desperately she tried to crawl out of its path, but her wet clothing weighted her down. Brakes shrieked and a woman screamed. Rebecca smelled the burning rubber and wondered if her face was moist with tears or snow or blood. Perhaps the car had struck her, yet she had felt no impact, endured no pain. Then someone picked her up; she was cradled in strong arms.
“Here’s her purse. Her package.” Concerned voices, kindly passersby.
“Goddamn it. How could I see her? I didn’t see her.” She opened her eyes and saw the driver, a small man in an oversized coat. He stood beside his car, trembling with the knowledge that he had almost killed her.
“It wasn’t his fault,” she said to the man who had carried her to the other side of the street and who stood her on her feet now, with great gentleness. “Someone pushed me.”
“I know,” he said. “I saw the boys.”
She recognized his voice and looked up, into Benjamin Nadler’s amber-colored eyes.
An hour later she sat opposite him in the small bright yellow kitchen of his apartment. She had allowed him to lead her there, nodding acquiescently when he explained that it was only a few blocks away.
“We’ll get you dry, make you a cup of hot tea,” he had said soothingly, and, wordlessly, she had placed herself in his charge. She had followed him up to the second-floor apartment in the narrow brownstone on East Sixty-seventh Street, allowed him to remove her sodden winter coat, accepted the pale blue robe he gave her, and obediently disappeared into his bathroom.
She slipped out of her wet clothing, spread the garments out on the radiator, and then stared at herself in the mirror. Streaks of dirt slashed her face and clumps of slush nestled in her hair. She peeled off her stockings and saw that her knees were bruised where she had fallen. Her entire body ached. She had thought only to remove her wet clothing, but now she turned on the shower and stepped beneath the hot water. The strong, steady spray cleansed and soothed her. She washed her hair, and to her own surprise she began to sing softly, pausing when she heard the bathroom door open and then close again. When she emerged from the shower, she saw that he had placed two thick white bath towels on the vanity. The small attention pleased her. She felt safe, cared for.
She combed her hair, but as always, when it was wet, it nestled into recalcitrant clusters of dark curls spattered with silver. She slipped on the blue silk robe—a woman’s garment, almost new. She thrust her hand into the pocket and found a neatly folded batiste handkerchief embroidered with the initials E.N. Its scent was the lavender fragrance she herself favored.
She followed the aroma of freshly brewed coffee and warming croissants into the kitchen, where Benjamin Nadler sat reading a manuscript.
“You look like a little girl,” he said and set his work aside.
“I feel like a little girl—skinned knees and all,” she replied, smiling. “I suppose now is the time to say thank you.”
“You are a well-brought-up little girl.” He poured coffee for both of them and spread lavish smiles of butter across the croissants. “And I think I must be just as well brought up and apologize for my behavior at the opening.”
“A misunderstanding.” She kept her tone light. “And thank you for the review as well.”
“I went back to the gallery, you know. Several times. I hope I understood you.”
“I think you did. Especially your remarks about the loneliness. I fool myself into thinking that I can conceal it, and yet you saw it.” She shared the secret of her solitude with him now, as though it were a gift, a reward for all his ministrations of that afternoon. “How did you discern it?”
“I recognized it. I learned a great deal about loneliness this year.”
She reached into the pocket of the robe and placed the neatly folded handkerchief on the table.
“Ellen’s,” he said and pressed it to his cheek.
She waited and slowly, softly, he began to speak, his voice strained at first and then sonorous with reverie.
He and Ellen had met as students at a huge midwestern university, drawn to each other by a shared interest in the arts, a gentle capacity for silence and irreverent laughter. They had been youthful friends before they became lovers.
“We were almost like brother and sister, people thought,” Benjamin said musingly, stirring his coffee, looking hard at Rebecca.
She nodded. It was said that Yehuda, her husband, and Miriam, his first wife, had also been almost like brother and sister. How wonderful it must be, she thought, to marry a man who knows all the secrets of one’s childhood, who understands the mysterious network of family connections. The terrain of her childhood was foreign to her husband, and she did not know the words to the songs he had sung as a boy.
They had married as graduate students, Benjamin continued. He had been twenty-two and she twenty-one. Life rippled out before them. They would earn their degrees, find teaching jobs on a rural campus, buy a large old house, and fill it with many books, many children. And they had earned their degrees and they had traveled to Europe. Their blueprint was operable. They found jobs at a new experimental college in the Blue Ridge Mountains, and they found a large white shingled house girdled by a sprawling porch. Ellen became pregnant and then miscarried. There were two other miscarriages, and at last she carried a child to term. The delivery was long and hard, and the child, a boy, was stillborn. Benjamin, beside her in the delivery room, prevailed upon the doctor to allow him to hold the tiny corpse. He caressed the dead body of his infant son, felt the moisture of the birth waters on the pale, bluing skin, and promised his weeping wife that it would not happen again.
They abandoned the dream of the rural campus, the large house, and moved to New York, choosing the apartment where he and Rebecca now sat, because it was only blocks away from a huge teaching hospital with the most advanced neonatal center in the world. She taught literature at Barnard. He conducted seminars, wrote his articles, his books. Ironically, their move to New York catapulted them into a kind of academic fame. Art dealers sought his opinion; collectors invited him to offer his evaluations.
They were a much-sought-after, much-admired and -invited couple, but in the night, Ellen lay rigidly beside him and wept. She was a very small woman with sandy-colored hair that she wore always in a boyish bob. Sometimes when he took her into his arms, he thought that it was a little grieving girl he held. But at last she became pregnant again, and the very distinguished obstetrician they consulted, the chairman of the department at the large teaching hospital, assured them that it was a strong pregnancy. No problems. No complications.
She laughed and played records and gave parties and decorated a nursery. Bluebirds winged their way across its ceiling and the floor was painted with grass and flowers. All the artists of their acquaintance shared their happiness and wanted to add to it.
The child was due at the year’s end, and when she went into labor on New Year’s Eve, they saw it as a happy sign. The labor was swift, and she was delivered of a small, beautiful girl-child. They called her Felice, seeing her as their happy fortune, and they carried their beautifully formed, wonderfully healthy child home to the room where birds sang and painted flowers blossomed.
Three weeks later, Ellen, singing softly, had entered the nursery and found Felice curled into a tiny, still bundle of death.
Inexplicable, the doctors said, but unfortunately not unusual. With professional facility they quoted statistics, made learned, irrelevant guesses. And again, Benjamin Nadler held a lifeless child in his arms and wondered at the near-weightlessness of the tiny corpse.
Now there was no reclaiming his wife. Ellen feared another pregnancy, and he dared not press her; they abandoned their love to silence. And then, only a year ago, she felt a strange pain in her abdomen, was frightened by a new fullness, sudden bleeding. She went to a doctor, and he told them that nodules of deat
h grew where life should have been nourished. Cancer. The dread word was uttered gravely, but the doctor’s voice was reassuring. The growth was confined to the reproductive system. They could operate, remove it. Ellen listened as though in a daze. She thought of the invading carcinoma as an ill-fated child, another death force that would be expelled from her womb. She delayed the surgery, and they did not press her. The cancer was contained. They gave her the names of psychiatrists, therapists. She nodded and promised that she would call but instead she talked sadly to herself, wept as she prepared dinner, graded papers.
“Tomorrow I’ll make an appointment,” she promised Benjamin Nadler.
“Next week,” she assured him.
“After the new year,” she said.
He feared to press her. He was advised to be patient. It was late December. They could wait another week, the grave-voiced doctor assured them. He prescribed painkillers and tranquilizers and sleeping pills. The rainbow-colored capsules jeweled her bedside table, and he was comforted because she smiled in her sleep and no longer cried as she stood at the sink.
On New Year’s Eve he returned home late in the afternoon, carrying a bottle of champagne. They would have a quiet toast together because Ellen had declined all invitations. The apartment was spotless. A newly lit fire blazed, and the radio, tuned to WQXR, played Purcell. His heart soared with hope. She was getting better—she would recover.
He went into their bedroom, dark except for the needle of light cast by the bedside lamp. She wore her best nightgown, a lavender batiste that he had bought her when Felice was born. Her sandy hair was newly washed and capped her small head like a child’s helmet. Her knees were curled to her stomach, and he knew, without touching her, and before he saw the empty pill bottle and the tall glass to which only drops of water clung, that she was dead. New Year’s Eve, their daughter’s birthday, had become her death-day.
“I’m sorry,” Rebecca said.
He nodded, accepting now the compassion that she had offered him that afternoon in the gallery, when she had perceived his sorrow without comprehending it.
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