There were few trees on the island, but a great elm grew in the Stevensons’ yard, and small sparrows, as gray as the wintry skies, perched on the barren branches and chirped mournfully to each other. At night the wind whistled a secret and wild song, and she moved closer to Benjamin in the darkness and smiled at the warmth of his breath against her neck. They had found safe haven in this winter solitude. They were strangers here, and the islanders, jealous of their own privacy, would not invade theirs. Here they were protected from curious glance and worried gaze, from her mother’s unarticulated questions, her brothers’ concerned uneasiness, their wives’ muted sympathy. She had seen the wary glances Mindell and Lydia exchanged when Rebecca spoke of Benjamin or entered a room with him.
Like Rebecca, they understood the anguish of uprootedness. Lydia and Mindell loved their husbands and their new lives, but they dreamed of the lands of their girlhoods. A decade had passed since Lydia’s flight from Budapest, but she remembered still the taste of the cream pastries sold in her favorite café on Béla Bartók Boulevard, the flaming slash of light across the Buda woods at sunrise. Mindell walked with Michael along the broad avenues of his city and longed for Jerusalem’s narrow streets; he brought her hothouse roses in winter, and she thought of the anemones in the Galilee, the lavender that inexplicably and briefly carpeted the Negev sands. Still, their choices had been simple: Rebecca walked a dangerous tightrope.
“Rebecca will do what’s right,” Rebecca had overheard Michael assure Aaron.
“But what is right?” Aaron the judge was uncertain.
Rebecca loved her brothers for their fairness, for their caring and unconditional love. She could not offer them any reassurance, any answers. Like Aaron, she did not know what was right.
She had written to Yehuda and told him that she had a new friend. An art critic, she said carefully. A man who understood her work, who understood her. Benjamin Nadler. She felt relief, vindication, because she had revealed her lover’s name to her husband.
But Yehuda made no mention of it in his reply. He told her only that it was likely that he would have to leave the country again. There was great unease. There was civil unrest in Syria, and as always Israel was blamed. Egypt was moving its troops northward. Unlike most of his colleagues and countrymen, Yehuda did not think there would be war, but still intelligence had to be clarified, Israel’s position reinforced.
Rebecca imagined Yehuda at secret meetings on Cyprus and in Athens. He would meet purveyors of arms in Constitution Square, handsome young men who wore suits tailored on Savile Row and ties of Liberty silk. He would meet informants in the cafés of Larnaca. Her husband was concerned with a nation’s destiny. He could not spare time for hers or for his own. She crumbled the letter and quickly smoothed it out again, her fingers trembling as they moved across the thin pale green paper so closely covered with Yehuda’s cramped script.
Yehuda’s letters did not follow her to Nantucket Island. Nor did the daily newspapers. She was absorbed in her work. In pen and ink, in charcoal and chalk, Zalenko’s words were translated into picture images. The poet wrote of spiritual desolation, and she drew the deserted beachscape of winter—frozen lichen clinging to bleached driftwood, snow soaring across sand. He wrote of desperate yearning, and her airbrush flew to capture a gull in lonely flight. “Thus wintry day drifts and fades into darkest night,” he wrote and she used pastels, for the first time in years, to capture the delicate pinks and violets of the melancholy March sunset.
Benjamin Nadler sat with her beside the fire and studied her work.
“You understand Zalenko,” he said. “You understand his landscapes of loneliness.”
She sighed and looked out the window. A strong wind blew, and the branches of the elm tree quivered. Beyond the darkened beach, waves crashed furiously to shore. Pearl-gray clouds, shaped like spectral flowers, drifted menacingly through the night sky. In the distance the lamp of the Nantucket lighthouse blinked, warning sailors of the brewing storm.
“It must be beautiful outside,” she said.
“Come.”
They put on their heavy coats; she pulled the hood tight and he wrapped the bright green muffler about his neck. They went up to the second floor of the house where a French door opened onto the widow’s walk—the narrow railed balcony that girdled many of the sensible white clapboard houses of Nantucket. Here, in years gone by, the wives of sailors had stood, anxiously watching the sea for the sight of their husband’s sailing ships. Rebecca shivered, as though brushed by the ghostly shadow of their worry. She felt herself sister to those vanished women. Her husband, too, confronted hazard, courted danger. She, too, feared that he might not return to safe harbor. How was it possible, she wondered with bitter irony, to worry about her husband as she stood beside her lover? Her life and her loves were severed, and she despaired of ever making them whole again.
Now the waves rose to a threatening height as they rocketed shoreward. They crashed against the great boulders, battled the weatherworn reef, and broke at last against the frost-laced beachhead. The wind whined like a lost and wounded creature and swept the snow and sand in its wake.
The violence and desolation of the scene frightened Rebecca. Still, she knew that in a few months, the beach would again radiate warmth, reflect sunlight; the storm-tossed skies would be serene and the air calm. But when would her own life regain its serenity? When would she be free of the buffeting clouds of uncertainty? As though he read her thoughts, Benjamin Nadler drew her closer. He wrapped the end of his muffler about her neck, and they stood as one as the snow began to fall.
“Stay with me,” he said. “Stay with me always. Don’t go back to Israel.” The plea he had restrained for so many weeks exploded with sudden force. “Always!” His voice rose to compete with the roar of the wind.
“How can I?” Her voice was strangled. “My children—Yaakov and Amnon…” Her eyes closed. Newly fallen snowflakes rested on her eyelids, jeweled her long lashes. He kissed them away and tasted her tears. And Yehuda. His name filled her mind, her heart, but she dared not utter it.
“We’ll bring them here. They’ll be safe. I’ll take care of them. They will be the children I never had….”
His voice broke, and she silenced him by pressing her mouth against his. She could not bear his grief; she could barely sustain her own. The wild wind died and silent snow fell steadily, blanketing them in layers of white.
That night, she lay awake beside him in the darkness.
What shall I do? she thought. Surely, there was a path that she must take, but snow and sorrow had obscured it. Exhausted, she fell asleep at last, as the pale mauve light of dawn stole across the wintry sky.
*
MAY I come in, Rebecca?” Leah hesitated in the doorway and watched Rebecca, who stood at the window of her girlhood room, her hair loose about her shoulders, staring at the maple tree. Although winter winds still blew, furled leaves of tender green had formed on the graceful branches. There was a new softness in the air, and the first shoots of crocus and hyacinth moved tentatively upward through earth still lightly sheathed in snow.
“Yes. Of course. Please.”
Rebecca’s voice was very low, and Leah was reminded of her daughter as a young girl, standing at this same window, caught up in the inexplicable and anomalous misery of adolescence. Now, as then, she placed her hand on Rebecca’s shoulder and stood beside her at the window.
Boris, walking through the garden, looked up and saw the two women standing side by side, wearing the purple velvet robes that Joshua Ellenberg had recently given them. They were of an equal height, and their strong, even features were so similar that strangers knew at once that they were mother and daughter. Leah’s hair had turned completely silver now, and her face had settled at last into the peaceful lines of accepting age. Streaks of that same silver glinted in the thick dark curls that hung loosely about Rebecca’s shoulders. Her face was contemplative, and Boris was reminded of Leah’s expression when she struggled
with a decision and cautiously weighed each alternative. They were not careless women, Leah and Rebecca. They did not deny their passion, but they were not ruled by it.
“Let me think about it,” Leah had said when Boris first proposed that they marry. “Give me time.”
He imagined that Leah had made a similar plea to Eli Feinstein, whom she had loved during the days of her young womanhood. Always her life had been intertwined with those of so many others; she could not and would not deny her obligations. As Rebecca could not and would not.
A weaker woman might take an emotional plunge—abandon the tensions of a marriage grown sad and complex for a leap into a new beginning. But Rebecca Arnon was not a weak woman. She was Leah’s daughter, and she would struggle from uncertainty to conviction. She had been in the throes of that struggle since her arrival home from Nantucket Island, Boris knew. He had seen it in her face, heard it in her voice. He watched now as the two women turned from the window, a single ray of sunlight casting a lucent stole about their regal robes.
“Can you tell me about it, Rebecca?” Leah asked gently as she felt Rebecca’s shoulders quiver beneath her touch.
They sat side by side on Rebecca’s bed, their hands pressed tightly together.
“I don’t know what to do,” Rebecca said at last. “Sometimes I feel as though I’ve spent twenty years living in a dream and I am only just awakening. And then I feel that I want that dream to continue—I want to believe as I believed when Yehuda and I were first married—that peace was possible, that each day was a new beginning. It’s strange; during all those years in Israel I was never frightened for myself. I still don’t fear for myself. But since Noam’s death I am desperately afraid for Yaakov and Amnon. I want to keep them safe. I must keep them safe.”
There was a new and frightening fierceness in her voice. A picture of her sons stood on her bedside table, and she lifted it, looked down at their smiling faces, and pressed the framed photo hard against her breast; she shielded their likenesses as she would never be able to shield their lives. Tears glinted in her eyes, settled like moist brilliants on her lashes.
“Rebecca, do you love Yehuda?” Leah asked.
Rebecca was silent. Her long fingers played with the ruffled edge of the coverlet that was spread across her girlhood bed. She remembered now that Leah had bought it to soothe some youthful disappointment, to dispel a melancholy mood. But she was a woman now, and ruffles and laces provided no relief, offered no appeasement. When she spoke at last, her voice was very low.
“I don’t know if you will understand this—or even if I can explain it properly. I don’t understand it myself. I care for Yehuda. I’m obsessed with worry for him. My heart turns when he calls. He told me last night that he had to go north, to the Lebanese border, and I lay awake worrying because now they are using mine throwers on that border. Still, at the same time, I am angry with him and frightened for him and hurt by him. I think that if there is so much anger and so much hurt and so much fear, then there must be love. And yet there is Benjamin Nadler and what I feel for him.”
“And what do you feel for him?” Leah asked. The question had seared her mind since Rebecca had first introduced her to the art critic, but she had not dared ask it until now.
“I feel so safe with him, so protected. We are calm together—at least when we are not thinking about the future. We share our work, our thoughts. There are no secrets between us, only tenderness and need. He has been lonely. He wants to make me happy, to take care of my sons. Yaakov and Amnon would be safe if I raised them here.” Her voice grew vague, troubled, and she turned away from her mother.
“There are no guarantees of safety,” Leah said, more harshly than she had intended. She had fled Russia as a young woman, searching for a safe haven in the United States, yet Aaron had fought in World War II and had been taken prisoner, Rebecca had risked her life in Israel’s War for Independence, and Michael had confronted danger on the highways of Mississippi.
“Perhaps you’re right. But you must admit that the odds are better here,” Rebecca said without rancor.
“Yes. The odds are better. Not certain, but better.”
Rebecca’s fingers still fretted the ruffle.
“Mama.” Her voice trembled as it had when she was a small girl asking, a serious question. “Do you think it’s possible to love two men at once? It’s a crazy question, I know, but I feel a little crazy.”
“I don’t think it’s a crazy question,” Leah answered carefully. “I have thought about it, and sometimes, it seems to me, that our lives are divided into seasons, and there are different loves for different seasons.”
She paused and allowed herself to dream back across the years; memories surged forward, and she struggled to sort out the seasons of her own life. Her first husband, Yaakov, Aaron’s father, who had been killed during a pogrom on an Odessa street, had been the love of her halcyon days, of the summer season of her girlhood. In the burgeoning springtime of her young womanhood, there had been Eli Feinstein, the labor organizer, her lover, who had died in the terrible Rosenblatt fire. Grief had paralyzed her again, but David Goldfeder had pierced that grief with the force of his love, and she had shared the gentle autumnal years of child-rearing, of life-building, with him. And now, in the winter of her life, Boris Zaslovsky stood beside her in tranquil companionship. Too neat a formula, perhaps, but all she could offer her daughter now were her own secret joys and desperate losses—the legacy of remembrance.
“Rebecca, you know the name Eli Feinstein?”
“Yes. He was the labor leader, the man you worked with who died in the Rosenblatt fire. You dedicated a painting to him—Lost in Flames.”
“I worked with him and I loved him. That, of course, you could not have known. Your father and I had reached a time of separate-ness, aloneness. He was in medical school, absorbed in his studies, and I was caught up in my factory and union work. Both of us were exhausted, worried always about lack of time, lack of money. Eli and I worked together. We shared the same ideas, and we were drawn together. First as friends and colleagues. Then as lovers. We could not help ourselves. As perhaps you and Benjamin Nadler cannot help yourselves.”
“I never knew,” Rebecca said woodenly. She looked at Leah, feeling strangely betrayed, but there was neither apology nor regret in Leah’s eyes, only the wistful glaze of memory.
“Of course you didn’t know. You were a little girl then. You went off to the mountains that summer with your aunt Mollie—you and Aaron and Joshua and his mother. And I stayed in New York—with David, my husband, and with Eli, my lover. And I wondered then, as you do now, how it was possible to care so deeply for two men at once.”
“What happened?” Rebecca asked.
“Life intervened. There was the fire. Eli was killed. I mourned him.” Remembered grief thickened her voice, and her fingers flew to her white hair. Black, it had been, in the days of her grief, and she had hacked it off with blunt scissors, weeping without restraint. Time had faded her sorrow but had not erased it. She thought of Eli’s death and the life she and David had shared. It occurred to her, with a sudden flash of insight, that if she had not cared for Eli, she might never have learned to love David. Love, like seasons, melded. So it might be for Rebecca.
“And if there had been no fire?” Rebecca asked.
Leah smiled sadly. It was a question she had often asked herself.
“How can we reconcile all the ifs of our lives, Becca? What if you had not gone to Israel in forty-seven? What if you had not been in Jerusalem when Yehuda was wounded? What if Benjamin Nadler had been lecturing in the Midwest during your visit to New York? The backward trail is endless; all our lives are a series of accidents and chance.”
“I know,” Rebecca said.
She leaned over and kissed her mother’s cheek, grateful for all that Leah had shared with her. They sat together for a moment longer, mother and daughter in their purple velvet robes, encircled in sunlight—Leah looking back across the past, Reb
ecca straining bravely, arduously, toward the future.
*
ON the first day of spring warmth, a long letter from Yehuda arrived. Rebecca read it leaning against the maple tree, so that the shadows of the young leaves dappled its pages. She reflected on how the quality of his correspondence had changed during the months of her absence. At first he had written brief notes, cursory and curt postcards. But more recently he talked to her in his letters, shared his thoughts and feelings. It was, she thought, almost as though her journey away from him had released his restraint.
Dearest Rebecca, he wrote in the tight English script he had learned at a Mandate school,
It hardly seems possible that almost five months have passed since you left. A long time for us to be without you, but we are glad that you have had this opportunity to be with Mindell and with the rest of your family after all these years. I was glad to see the sketches for the Zalenko book which you enclosed in your last letter. I showed them to Danielle and Yair, who were somewhat bewildered by them. I realized then that my daughter and her fiancé are, after all, children of sunlight and desert and cannot easily understand the landscapes of snowbound beach and winter-weary cities. “How lonely these pictures are,” Yair said, and Danielle nodded m agreement. It is difficult for our young lovers to understand that love does not conquer solitude, does not obviate separateness.
Yaakov and Amnon are fine, although they miss you and talk about you a great deal. Last night Amnon was particularly moody and I asked him why he was so sad.
“I miss Ima and I want to be with her,” he said. “Wherever she is, I want to be with her.”
“Soon,” I promised. “Soon you will be with her, wherever she is.”
I, too, have missed you greatly, but I think that it was important for you to have had this time to step back into the life you left behind when we married. Loss can be assimilated—there is no arguing with the finality of death. But regret lingers, teases, poisons. I would not have you haunted by regret, my dearest Rivka. I know that it has not been easy for you since Noam’s death, and I cannot promise that it will be easier in the years to come. But I can tell you that I will try to share more with you. If that is what you want, after this time apart.
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