Leah's Journey (20 page)

They were alone there one Sunday afternoon, a grim day when lamps had been lit in the early afternoon, creating small islands of light in the room suffused with wintry grayness. They had done their separate work while the radio played, Caruso’s tender voice lulling them into a mood of melancholy nostalgia. Leah looked up from her drawing board and was startled to see that the colorless sky was suddenly soft with graceful domes of drifting pink clouds, laced with threads of fading gold. She switched off her lamp and went to the window, where she stood watching a slow darkness descend and, with shadowy ease, swallow the gentle clouds. As she watched, she heard David’s soft step behind her and he stood beside her, his arm lightly touching hers.

Together, in the fading light that brushed their faces with soft-toned shadows, they watched the pink-gold sunset reluctantly surrender to darkness. They turned to each other then and David bent his head gently and kissed her on the lips. She raised her arms and placed them on his shoulders, pulling him closer to her, feeling his heart pump wildly against her breast. Again their lips met, this time with a fierce urgency, and his arms pressed tightly across her yielding body. The window was black with darkness and they turned from it, arms linked, as though having come together at last, they were now fearful of losing touch. Slowly, in the dark familiar bedroom where they had shared so many years of nights, together but alone, they undressed each other, their hands traversing each other’s body with sensate wonder, newly discovering the mysteries of the flesh they had known so well.

He came into her with a force and strength for which she was unprepared but which her body welcomed with fierce acceptance, rising and falling in rhythm to the urgency of his love, until together they soared and wept in fulfillment and fell back in exhausted wonder.

They slept then, drowsing contentedly through the early evening hours as the apartment beyond their closed door filled with noise and light, with laughter and bustle. Their bodies entwined, they stirred luxuriously, murmured careless answers to the knock that came at last to their door, and when they emerged to join the family at the table, their cheeks burned and their eyes were soft. Across the room, Sarah Ellenberg and Mollie Hart smiled at each other with secret knowledge and the men became suddenly boisterous and teased the children, who giggled in wild freedom. All who sat around that communal table, laden with its weekend meal of cheeses and sour cream sparkling with vegetables, and bright-red borscht in which fragments of emerald-green scallions floated, were suffused with a sense of relief, as though an uncertain battle had at last been resolved.

Four months later Leah was pregnant with Michael, and the day she slipped on her first maternity dress, a blue-and-white checked shift which she designed and made herself (causing Seymour Hart to visualize a full line of maternity clothing), David came dashing up the stairs.

“I’ve been accepted. In the fall I begin the medical school at Downstate!”

Like a small boy overwhelmed with the enormity of his good fortune, he pulled Leah to her feet and whirled her around the room in a dance of unrestrained joy. They were still dancing, the stiff white letter of acceptance clenched in David’s teeth, when the children arrived home from school. Rebecca, Anne, and Jake joined them in that frenzied dervish spinning, and even Joshua allowed a few minutes of business to be lost as he too grasped hands and tapped out rhythms of joy. Only Aaron stood shyly by, watching, although his coppery curls bobbed up and down in tune to the music and his eyes followed his mother’s light steps with heavy wistfulness. But it was David who drew him into the circle finally, so that moving with awkward self-consciousness, he joined for a few minutes the spontaneous outbreak of joy. Then the widow in the apartment below banged with righteous fury on the water pipes and the dance was ended.

Exhausted, Leah sank into a chair and remembered with a sadness the summer evening when the Rosenblatt workers had danced to the music of the radio. The widow had banged on the pipes that evening too, but days after the fire she had waited for Leah on the steps, her eyes red with worry and regret.

“I’m sorry for stopping the party that night,” she said. “How was I to know?”

She could not have known, of course, that for some of those dancers, the music they swayed to that night was the last music they would ever hear. She would not have denied them that respite of joy had she known that the next day their laughter would be frozen into screams of terror and the little young limbs would be scarred and mutilated. But now, months later, that regret had been forgotten and she knew only the irritation of the moment. Grimly, she protested the sounds of joy, pounding her broomstick against the metal pipes, drowning out the music that violated and emphasized the silence of her loneliness.

Seymour Hart read the letter of acceptance carefully and beamed at the assembled family as though David’s achievement were his own. With his new prosperity had come a sense of omnipotence over the lives of his family and he smiled benignly at Jake’s report cards, at the sound of Anne’s off-key violin, at Aaron’s intricately constructed model airplanes. It was as though his financial success had made everything possible, and insured the fulfillment of their talents.

S. Hart and Company had expanded and moved into new quarters and then had taken over a large factory as business continued to increase. Seymour acknowledged that the company’s success was as much the result of Leah’s talent as of his own shrewdness. Leah worked at home but she was listed on the payroll as a designer and each week her brother-in-law issued her a generous salary check. Occasionally she went down to the factory to supervise, but when she could not, pink-cheeked Bonnie Eckstein, who was Seymour’s forelady, came up to the apartment and she and Leah together worked out problems in piecework on Leah’s designs. They never spoke of the days at Rosenblatts or of the fire, although Leah knew that beneath the ring on Bonnie Eckstein’s right hand lay a curling rim of scarred flesh where a spiraling flash of flame had eaten the skin through to the milk-white knuckle.

“Listen, we must celebrate. It’s not every day that a greenhorn gets to study for a doctor, even in the United States of America. Let us go out this Sunday,” Seymour suggested.

“No. You go with the children. David and I have work to do,” Leah protested, smilingly avoiding her husband’s eye.

Very little work got done during those weekend afternoons when the apartment was empty. More often than not, she and David, like guilty young lovers shyly searching out a secret place of privacy, would wait until the door shut behind the family and then fly into each other’s arms. Like carefree honeymooners, they played house in the apartment which was their home. They teased each other away from work, each surrendering to the other’s mood, whispering and laughing through the long afternoon of love and relishing the luxury of falling into easy sleep, their naked bodies pressed together, while in the street below children played and men and women shouted idle weekend pleasantries to each other.

Usually, as though by tacit understanding, no one even suggested that David and Leah join the Harts on their Sunday excursions, but this time Seymour was insistent.

“It’s not to the Roxy that we’re going or even Radio City. This is something special I want you to see with your own eyes.”

Reluctantly, then, David and Leah joined the outing and dutifully followed Seymour and Mollie to the subway where they boarded the Brighton express and rode it almost to the end of the line. On the Brighton Beach station, they sniffed the sweet freshness of the salt air and craned their necks to see the ocean from the elevated platform.

It was late spring but Brighton Beach Avenue was already electric with a holiday atmosphere. Young couples, their towels and swimming costumes tucked into small wicker valises, trailed through the streets, eating potato knishes wrapped in greasy waxed paper and gashed with wounds of golden mustard. Seymour bought pink clouds of cotton candy for each of the children and carelessly dropped the change into the outstretched cannister of a young woman who walked slowly down the street holding a small boy, his feet wrapped in rags.

“Everyone makes promises but still there are children who go barefoot,” David murmured and looked sadly after the woman.

“Soon. This Depression must finally be over soon,” she replied.

“With the help of God,” he said and abruptly turned and walked after the woman, quietly pressing a dollar bill into her outstretched hand.

The little group followed Seymour’s decisive lead as he turned up Brighton Eighth Street and crossed two long avenue blocks. At Ocean View Avenue, where small multifamily red brick houses replaced the string of apartment buildings typical of the area, he stopped in front of a three-family red brick house girdled by a wide porch.

“A nice house, eh?” he said and his white teeth gleamed beneath his thick moustache.

His wife Mollie smiled proudly up at him. With chameleonic ease, Leah’s sister assumed the protective coloring necessary for each changing segment of her life. In turn, she had been the dutiful daughter, the shy bride, and the stoically patient wife. Now she was the prosperous matron whose husband showed ambition and foresight, initiative and responsibility. As though to meet the demands of this role, her body had expanded. A wider girth was necessary if she were to exude the proper pride. Her white satin blouse stretched too tight across her full heavy breasts and her blue shantung skirt twitched importantly as she marched beside her husband.

“It’s a very nice house,” David agreed cautiously.

“By subway only two blocks to the medical college for you and fifty minutes to the factory for me. Two blocks away is a fine public school. A half a mile away is Coney Island Hospital. And all around nice synagogues, Hebrew schools, good shopping. Perfect for us.” Again Seymour beamed.

The children were already scrambling about on the porch and Joshua Ellenberg had wandered out to the backyard, which he was measuring step by step. But Leah and David remained looking quietly at each other and then at the red brick house.

“What do you mean—perfect for us?” Leah asked finally, and Seymour, like a magician who has been waiting for his cue, reached into his pocket and flashed a key at them.

“It’s ours. That is, so far, mine and Mollie’s, and if you want to come in for a share—good—and if you want to rent from us the apartment—also good. I got it cheap. Six thousand dollars with only a thousand down. On auction.”

“A foreclosure?” David asked grimly. The small lawn was bordered with bright tulips and he thought of the people who had planted the bulbs, planning for years to come. They had lost the house and the sweet promise of their planting.

“All right, so it was a foreclosure. Look, I don’t want to make money on someone else’s misfortunes, but someone else would buy if I didn’t. Why shouldn’t we have a little luck? We didn’t work hard enough? We didn’t wander long enough in the desert? Why shouldn’t our children breathe the air from the sea? Tell me—it’s a crime to do a little better for yourself?” Impatiently spitting out answers to questions they had not asked, he pulled out a fat cigar and turned from them to look up at the red brick house with the secret satisfaction of new ownership.

Leah turned to David and nodded. He too looked up at the small brick home again and its uncurtained windows stared down at him like strangely vacant eyes. As he watched, a seagull swooped lazily down, hovered above them for a moment, then rocketed skyward, shooting toward the ocean.

“For you the best apartment—the one with the porch. Mollie wants it to be easy for Leah to put the baby out,” Seymour said cajolingly.

Leah felt the growing life within her stir and stretch against the walls of her womb. How wonderful it would be to pick up a small cosseted bundle of newborn child and settle it in the sunlight of an easily accessible porch. She remembered the small containers David had fashioned for Aaron and Rebecca during their infancies on Eldridge Street. Oversized wooden boxes were lined with pillows and comforters and cautiously balanced on the fire escape while Leah hovered over the window to shield the sleeping children from stray cats. Then they could not afford even a secondhand baby carriage and the fire escape was the babies’ only source of sun and air.

Leah remembered how her neighbor, poor Yetta Moskowitz, had murmured one day, “For the poor even air is expensive.” Yetta Moskowitz, a casualty of poverty, deserted by her husband and killed by her own despair. Her children, farmed out to relatives, still attended classes at the settlement house and Charles Ferguson had told Leah that the oldest Moskowitz boy was an evening student at the City College. In this solid brick house, with the breeze strong from the ocean blowing toward them, they would be insulated from the miseries of the Yetta Moskowitzes. Leah wondered what it would be like, after a dozen years of boarders and shared kitchens and bathrooms, to live alone in rooms that belonged only to their family, to know the privacy of a closed door which would not be thrust suddenly open, and the sweet aloneness of preparing a meal just for her own husband and children.

“What do you say, Leah?” Mollie asked, and there was a nervous shyness in her voice which Leah found reassuringly familiar. She did not want her sister Malcha, dutiful and shy, to be swallowed by this buxom Mollie who laughed too loudly and wore clothes of a rainbow brightness.

Impulsively she clutched her sister’s hand.

“I say fine,” she said. “And the third apartment will be for the Ellenbergs?”

“Who else?” Seymour glowed with his own munificence and flicked the long, delicate gray ash of his cigar onto the grass, grinding it slowly in. He enjoyed taking charge of other people’s lives, of charting their destinies and reaping satisfaction from their achievements. What he had helped make possible he harvested as his own.

“The rent they’ll be able to afford and Sarah will finally have her own place. Enough talk. Let’s see the inside.”

Three weeks later, on Aaron’s eleventh birthday, they left the apartment on Eldridge Street for the last time. They watched as their possessions were loaded on to the moving van—the pots and pans packed in the same barrels that had accompanied them from Russia, still bearing the faded green and white tags of the Oceanic Steamship Line. The tenement-house stoop was lined with women and children who shouted out words of advice and encouragement and whose eyes followed the laden van with glances of wistful hope. Leah, her hand resting on Rebecca’s dark hair, peered through the window of the hired car as it wove its way through the teeming east side streets, swerving to avoid a lumbering pushcart peddler, the driver shouting an angry curse at three yeshiva boys who dashed across the street, their earlocks flying. The car passed the Irvington Settlement House where posters announcing a summer lecture series were being hung, sped past the charred hulk of the building that had once housed Rosenblatt and Sons. The branches of the ailanthus tree were bare and the earth at its base was black with necrotic soot.