Leah's Journey (30 page)

Aaron had read the headline he flashed at David but he too remained incredulous. Together he and David had gone into the doctors’ lounge at the hospital, where they listened to H. V. Kaltenborn’s cracked and strained voice give the details of the pact. A young black surgeon, active in a group called Doctors for Peace and Universal Justice, switched the station and they listened to Edward R. Murrow, speaking hoarsely from London, confirm the report. The surgeon had ripped a pin, a red enameled caduceus, from his white jacket and tossed it into the wastepaper basket before slamming out of the room. David looked at Aaron and saw that there were tears in his son’s eyes.

“Your mother predicted this three years ago when she came back from Europe,” he said.

“My mother always predicts everything,” Aaron replied bitterly. “Ballerina skirts, the stock market, and even the Hitler-Stalin pact. Wonder Woman.”

David did not answer. Aaron needed time, he told himself. It was Aaron who had suffered the agonies and hardships of those early years; it was he who bore the scars of their struggle, of Leah’s losses, and, finally, even the acid imprint of her success.

Aaron had returned to class although Gregory had left the city and another friend paraded with a group of Zionist Socialists in front of the doors of the Russian Consulate, carrying signs which linked the hammer and sickle with the swastika.

Well, now Aaron had had a week to assimilate his distress, David thought, and surely he would come to spend this Labor Day weekend with them. Things would surely get better.

David opened the front door and sniffed in the freshness of the morning air. The last of the roses were in bloom and it seemed to him that their scent grew stronger as their season waned. What pleasure the garden had given him, these past three years. Mollie had been right, after all, to urge this move to Westchester on them—right for the wrong reasons. His sister-in-law, ensconced in a much larger house a few miles away, berated him for tending to the garden himself, urged Leah to hire more help, and drove an enormous Buick which she discussed with as much enthusiasm as she discussed the academic and social achievements of her children. Mollie, after all, was Mollie. He smiled and bent to lift the Times, which lay neatly folded on the brick steps, and his eyes still followed the yellow roses as he automatically flipped to the headlines. Always, in the years afterward, when he thought of the war in Europe, he remembered that strong late summer scent of blooming roses, their sweet doomed fragrance filling the early morning air, and the shock of the headline, so long anticipated and still so frightening: HITLER’S ARMIES INVADE POLAND!

“It’s begun,” he thought dully and like his tall son, tears filled his eyes and he wept with bitter credulity and pain for a world so newly at war.

*

Joshua Ellenberg heard the news of the Polish invasion on an early broadcast as he waited for the stock market report. Angrily, his fingers curled around the small copper model of the Empire State Building which he had purchased just months before at the opening of the World’s Fair. The World of Tomorrow, he thought bitterly, and remembered how he and Rebecca had stood for hours to witness the opening ceremonies of “The Court of Peace.” The Germans had already destroyed all hopes of peace and if they had their way, those Nazi bastards, they’d destroy all his tomorrows as well. And Joshua’s tomorrows were so carefully planned—programed and saved for since his childhood. He knew, had always known, where he was going. He wasn’t going to spend his life living in the shadows of the Harts and Goldfeders the way his parents had lived in the back rooms and basements of their homes. And he had already managed to end that period, to achieve for his mother the dream of her own home. When the Harts and Goldfeders had moved to Scarsdale, he had borrowed money from Seymour and used it to buy the Brighton Beach house for his parents. Now, at least they had an income from the tenants in the house and he himself was free to rent a room in Manhattan and continue to mold his secret plans into sweet reality.

He had even risked discussing his blueprint for the future with Rebecca, on the night the World’s Fair opened. Hand in hand, they had walked through the gardens where fountains sprang up from nowhere, among buildings ribboned with sparkling waterfalls, edging their way through excited crowds calling to each other in many languages. Rebecca had worn a navy-blue skirt and a white blouse with the small red hart dancing on its pocket. She had danced herself, twitching excitedly to the tune of “The Sidewalks of New York” which followed them wherever they wandered in that lovely wonderland. They giggled as Elsie the Borden cow spun around with 150 friends on a revolving milking platform and they craned their necks as the brightly colored parachutes plunged earthward past giant-sized Life-Savers. In the amusement park he won a panda for her and she clutched it as they watched Oscar the Obscene Octopus wrestle a very small blonde girl who wore very few clothes.

Rebecca’s long dark hair was loose, held in place by a bright-red headband, and when she moved, twisting easily to the improvised dance step, her body was soft and graceful and her smile, so gay and free, made his heart beat with an arhythmic trembling.

“Oh Joshua, I’m so happy. Thank you for taking me. It’s all so beautiful,” she cried.

“That’s all I want to do, ever, Becca,” he said, the words breaking recklessly out of the carapace of secrecy in which they had been shielded since their shared childhood. “All I ever want to do is make you happy, take you places and give you things. And I will. I’m going to be as rich as your Uncle Seymour, Becca. Only I’m not going to sink all my dough into Seventh Avenue. I’ve been studying the stock market—Wall Street. I’m trading already. Do you know that I already made enough money to pay your uncle back the money he lent me for the Brighton Beach house, and now I’ve paid the whole house off! All from one killing in the market. You can make a lot of money now and I know just how to do it.”

“Of course you do, Joshua. You’ve always known how to make money. Remember that first vacation we had in the mountains with your cousins—the time Mama was in that awful factory fire at Rosenblatts? I’ll never forget how you went to all those bungalow colonies selling the cotton shirts you shlepped up there.” She laughed and remembered how she had trailed after him and called out, mimicking his own voice, the call of the child peddler: “Get your bargains, get your shirts, cheaper than on Hester Street, cheaper than on Orchard Street!”

“I remember,” Joshua answered shortly.

She had not, after all, understood a word he said. She was a baby still, too young to understand that he was talking about a real future, a long future, that they would share together. He wasn’t talking about a couple of pennies’ profit on a shirt from a peddler’s cart but real money, the kind of money that bought houses with swimming pools and tennis courts, limousines with liveried chauffeurs. The kind of money her friend Lisa Frawley’s family had. But there was time. He would wait for her to grow up. His baby, his Becca.

But now, with this news broadcast, there suddenly did not seem to be as much time. If Germany had invaded Poland, then England would have to support its commitment and declare war on Germany. And if France and England went to war, how long would it take before the United States plunged in? Hadn’t President Roosevelt and his wife entertained the King and Queen of England at Hyde Park just that summer? Still, perhaps England would not jump in. They had preached patience, nonintervention, before. Anything could happen. He must not panic. His country was still far from war and his dream was still intact. It would take more than a war to interfere with Joshua Ellenberg’s plans. After all, how many other nineteen-year-olds could buy their parents a house—and for cash? He looked approvingly at himself in the mirror, smoothed Vitalis on his thick fair hair, and liberally applied a shaving lotion Rebecca had admired. In a half-hour he would meet his parents at Grand Central and they would ride up to Scarsdale together. But they weren’t going to make the shlep by train forever—no sir. Joshua Ellenberg’s next purchase would be a car—a four-door Ford in baby blue, Becca’s favorite color.

“When the moon comes over the mountain…” he sang as he slammed the door behind him, and he dropped a nickel in the blind newsdealer’s plate before going down into the subway but did not take a newspaper. These damn journalists and news announcers exaggerated everything. He had time, plenty of time.

Rebecca Goldfeder and her friend, Lisa Frawley, walked down White Plains Road, carefully weaving their way in and out of the gently swaying shadows of the leaves that dappled the broad thoroughfare. They carried their tennis rackets under their arms and Rebecca allowed the can of balls she carried to swing loosely at her side. Lisa’s long blonde hair hung in silken smooth folds about her shoulders, but Rebecca’s thick dark curls were caught up in two ponytail bunches that bounced at either side of her finely shaped head and were tied with strands of bright pink wool that offset the crisp white cotton tennis dress her mother had designed for her.

Rebecca had begun playing tennis only a few months before and attacked the game with her usual enthusiasm. She always focused all her energy on the particular project in which she was involved, approaching it like a storm with a whirling vortex aimed in a set direction. Rebecca concentrated fiercely on her goal and then, like a dispersed wind, she abandoned it without regret. The previous year she had been addicted to horseback riding and haunted the local stables, having cajoled her parents into giving her lessons. Both Leah and David had been reluctant. Horseback riding, for them, was vaguely associated with midnight marauders, hoofbeats in the darkness, booted Cossacks galloping past houses where frightened children crouched. Still, they overcame what they acknowledged to be their “ghetto neurosis” and allowed Rebecca to ride. The day after her first show, in which she jumped the highest hurdle set up in the Scarsdale Riding Academy corral, she sent her jodhpurs to the cleaners and tossed her boots into the back of the closet.

That winter she had bought an expensive pair of figure skates, and bright felt skirts which she wore with heavy, cable-stitched white sweaters. She went daily to the frozen expanse of Twin Lakes until she could carve her name in elegant letters on the blue white ice, then hung the skates on a basement hook and gave two of the felt skirts to Lisa. Now tennis was her passion and she haunted the red clay courts of Scarsdale High School, fretting about her game and whether her favorite court would be available.

“She should stick to something,” Leah worried.

“She will. She’s only seventeen,” David replied. He himself admired Rebecca’s single-mindedness. Well, she had come by it honestly. Hadn’t her mother known how to concentrate her energies and become mistress of her craft? And without a single-minded approach would he be a psychiatrist today?

The two girls ran lightly as they approached the courts.

“Of course they’re not crowded today,” Lisa said contentedly when they saw two empty expanses. “Everyone is probably home listening to the radio. My father hasn’t moved from it all day. I don’t understand him. The war’s across the ocean, for heaven’s sake—in Europe!”

Lisa’s voice implied that Europe was a distant planet and Rebecca remembered how months before when everyone in Scarsdale had been upset by a devastating fire which had torn through Greenwich, Lisa had shrugged indifferently and asked, “What’s all the excitement?—Greenwich is in Connecticut.”

“My grandparents are in Europe,” Rebecca said. “In Russia.”

“Oh, that’s all right then,” Lisa said. “Russia’s on Hitler’s side.”

“Lisa, you’re so—so shallow,” Rebecca said impatiently and laughed in spite of herself.

Lisa too laughed. “Shallow” was not a derogatory adjective, when used about a pretty girl at Scarsdale High School in the autumn of 1939.

“Well, I hope your brother Aaron thinks so too. Your friend Joshua may like ‘deep’ women but I’ll bet Aaron, for all his Modern Library giants, doesn’t mind my being ‘shallow.’”

She smiled, thinking of the many hours she had spent with Rebecca’s brother the past spring and fall, the quiet and the laughter, the long talks over lukewarm cups of coffee, the early-morning bike rides, that made up her time with the tall red-haired boy who quivered at her touch, but spoke about things she did not understand.

It had begun one afternoon when Lisa had come to call for Rebecca. Her friend was out playing tennis and Aaron had looked up from a political theory text he was reading on the terrace to tell her so.

“Oh darn. I wanted her to bike along the Bronx River Parkway with me. It’s such a perfect day. When your sister gets hooked on one thing she can’t think of anything else.”

“I’ll bike the Parkway with you,” Aaron offered, tossing his book aside. He did not smile but there was pleasure in his eyes and his tense, thin features relaxed as they rode into the wind and followed the curving road up to the crenellated fortress of the Kensico Dam. The pleasure deepened as they rested side by side in the tall grass and then his long muscular arms reached about her, cradling her body while his lips tenderly touched her cheeks and eyes and finally came to rest, first gently, then with fierce certain strength, against her yielding lips. When they stood, locked in a sweet silence, to mount their bikes again, Lisa’s body was deliciously moist. At home she stared at herself in the mirror, ashamed of her ignorance. Since that day, she had haunted the Goldfeder house each weekend, her heart soaring when Aaron’s hand touched her shoulder and he said, in that oddly quiet voice of his, “Do you want to walk or bike this afternoon?”

“You can ask Aaron yourself,” Rebecca said now, twirling her racket. “He called to say that he’d be up this afternoon and my mother asked if you’d stay for dinner. There’ll be quite a crowd—the Harts, the Ellenbergs, the Cosgroves, and Mr. and Mrs. Schreiber—they’re from Germany and their English isn’t too great, so talk slowly.”

“Sure, I’d love to come. At my house they’ll still be wrapped around the radio,” Lisa said and felt her breasts harden at the thought of sitting across the table from Aaron, remembering the hand that had moved so gently across her arm, strewn with dancing bands of the palest orange freckles.