Leah's Journey (31 page)

“About Joshua,” Rebecca said carefully. “Joshua is just like a brother to me. You know, we practically grew up in the same house.”

“Well, he may be like a brother to you but I don’t think you’re like a sister to him,” Lisa replied. “Oh, look, the far court is empty. Let’s run for it.”

The two girls in their gleaming white tennis dresses dashed across the grassy slopes of the lawn, passing a middle-aged couple in street dress who sat with their heads bent close to a large portable radio, listening to a news commentator analyze the situation.

“One remembers now,” the announcer ruminated sonorously, over the faint static, “the day Mr. Chamberlain abandoned Czechoslovakia to Hitler. ‘It is peace in our time,’ he said, but Winston Churchill replied, ‘Britain and France had to choose between war and dishonor. They chose dishonor. They will have war.’ And today, Churchill’s prophecy has come unhappily true.

It is only a matter of hours until England must make its move. We stand on the threshold of a world at war.” The radio was clicked shut and the couple, without looking at each other, moved on.

On the shaded tennis court Rebecca Goldfeder tossed a new white tennis ball into the air and slammed it over the net, laughing when it fell neatly into a corner on the opposite side and rolled off into the purple-flowered shrubbery. Overhead a plane flew low, hovered briefly, and then soared upward with startling speed. Rebecca stared after it, then took a new ball and offered Lisa another serve.

*

By late afternoon, almost all the guests due at the Goldfeder home had arrived. Leah, in a long dark skirt that swung gently around her calves and a cowl-necked white blouse, passed plates of miniature stuffed cabbages. Charles Ferguson accepted a drink from David and watched his elegant hostess, her dark hair threaded with glinting strands of silver and pulled back into a graceful chignon, circle the terrace. He thought back to that distant wintry day when a timid young immigrant woman whose blue-black braids were woven into a coronet stood shyly at the door of his studio. He remembered too the librarian on East Broadway who had told him of a red-headed boy who had insisted that his mother looked like the princess in “The Sleeping Beauty.” He had recognized that child to be Aaron Goldfeder and although he had not thought of Leah as a princess then, there was certainly something queenly about her this afternoon. Among designers, he knew, she was considered creative royalty. Her fashions took prize after prize and if Seymour Hart was fast becoming a millionaire, he owed his swift rise to Leah’s talents and ingenuities. Certainly, much of her work was derivative of the major European designers, but it was a talent to know from whom to improvise. Charles himself still wished that Leah would return to serious painting, but the design fever had seized her early and her career had been spurred by her need to make a living for the family while David studied medicine.

David himself, Charles thought, had aged scarcely at all. True, a small tuft of gray sat spongily in the center of his beard, but thin men with their spare frames and narrow features clearly had the advantage in the years of advancing age. Charles touched his own corpulent middle and looked with satisfaction across the porch to where Seymour Hart sat, pleased to notice that Leah’s brother-in-law was loosening the belt on his plaid slacks. The heavyset manufacturer laughed too loudly, breathed too hard, and ate too much. His pudgy daughter, a year or two older than Rebecca, dangled too many charms on a heavy gold bracelet and circled her eyes too thickly with violet moons. Mollie Hart wore too much rouge and her hair was dyed a too brassy red. Even their son Jakie’s white buck shoes and V-necked tennis sweater were, after all, too white. The Harts were a family given to excess just as the Goldfeders were given to understatement. Charles Ferguson enjoyed wrapping people up into neat judgmental packages and he smiled, pleased with himself and with his friendship with the assembled group that had weathered so many years. Other things in his life had inexplicably vanished or faded into a whirling mist of forgotten days and dark, disappointed nights.

“You seem content today, Charles,” Leah remarked, sitting down in the lounge chair next to him. “Doesn’t the war in Europe worry you?” Her voice was calm but he saw the tiny lines of strain about her fine eyes.

“I’m too old to fight and too young to despair,” he replied and then banished all lightness from his tone. “But I know it must worry you.”

“Yes, I’m worried. My family is still over there. I warned them. Three years ago, when I went to Europe.”

She spoke quietly but Mrs. Schreiber, who sat near her, leaned forward, seizing on her last words.

“We all warned each other,” the German woman said. “My husband and I warned our friends and neighbors. Our poor lost son warned us and we in turn warned him. England and France warned Germany and Germany warned the world. But the warnings were never enough. We would not believe and if we believed we would not act.”

“I think your pessimism is premature, Frau Schreiber,” Charles Ferguson said gently.

“No. I have lost a son. My pessimism was too late,” she replied and went to join her husband at the far end of the terrace where the men gathered around the radio which was issuing periodic news bulletins interspersed with baseball scores.

“Where are the children, Leah?” Charles said. He had noticed how Leah leaned sharply forward as a car sounded on the street or the phone rang within.

“Aaron isn’t here yet. I wonder where he can be. I’m a bit worried.”

She walked to the terrace railing and leaned forward, looking into the dimming light, watching for her tall bright-haired son who had spent so many hours of his boyhood watching for her.

“Oh, he’ll be here any minute, Aunt Leah,” Joshua Ellenberg said. He was carrying a tray with glasses of iced tea for his parents, still the dutiful son he had been since childhood. “See, there he is now.”

He looked down the hill which Aaron was swiftly climbing, glad that his friend had arrived, annoyed at him for causing worry. Well, that was Aaron. Joshua deposited the glasses at the small table at which his parents sat and went off to join Rebecca, who was holding Bonnie Cosgrove’s small daughter on her lap while Michael fashioned a paper plane out of the front section of the Times, creating a graceful wing from which the face of Hitler addressing a cheering crowd leered.

“Your prodigal brother returns,” he said to Rebecca, and Lisa Frawley, who had been standing nearby, moved to the brick steps which Aaron was climbing two at a time. When Lisa was sure he had seen her she moved off and began an animated conversation with Annie Hart, automatically laughing with an elegant toss of her long blonde hair at something Jake Hart said, although she had scarcely heard his comment.

“You don’t really like Aaron, do you?” Rebecca asked.

Bonnie’s child giggled and a spot of pearly saliva gleamed on the shoulder of Rebecca’s white tennis dress. Joshua leaned forward to wipe it off and felt his body throb as it drew closer to her dark skin with its smell of perspiration and Ivory soap.

“I like Aaron. But I can’t stand this Bolshevik crap he’s been spouting. Particularly since he really doesn’t know anything about the working class and the famous intolerable ‘conditions’ he’s always discussing. You don’t find out much about factory workers in the library at Washington Square College. I could tell him a few things about the old days at Rosenblatts and even about the new days at S. Hart. I guess I’m just tired of being the listening post for his theories and hearing everyone worry about ‘poor Aaron.’”

“He does get these horrible moods,” Rebecca admitted. “But I think his politics have changed since last week. The Hitler-Stalin pact really got to him. Daddy said he was so shocked he could hardly believe it. And poor Gregory Liebowitz just took off—dropped his courses and everything.”

“Yeah—it got to all of them. The sudden light of reality. How could their marvelous idealistic Soviets do that? The world of tomorrow takes giant steps back into the Dark Ages. Hitler and Stalin exchange the kiss of survival. I hear them in the coffeehouses downtown.” He raised his voice to a cruel pitch and imitated the conversations that were repeated daily through the city. “I can’t believe it. I won’t believe it. It’s not worthy of the Communist system. System—phooey!” He spat the word out as though it were an obscene epithet. “Systems don’t make any difference, Becca. The only thing that makes any difference is what you do yourself in the world. Everyone has to go after his own. Did a system build S. Hart? It wasn’t a system that made your mother a designer and your father a doctor. It was their own guts and work. They did it all themselves—just the way I’m going to.”

“But what are you going to do?” Rebecca asked teasingly.

Bonnie’s child had fallen asleep on her lap and she arranged the little girl’s head on her shoulder and looked at Joshua. He did not answer, but small beads of sweat rimmed his lips and his large hand shook slightly. A small thrill of pleasure ran through Rebecca and she wondered, with sweet guilt, why it was that her body delighted in making Joshua Ellenberg nervous.

Bonnie Cosgrove, swaying gracefully on her heels in the manner of the newly pregnant woman, took the sleeping child from Rebecca. Michael walked down the garden path between Mr. and Mrs. Schreiber, listening with delight as they told him the German name of each of the flowers his father had planted with such gentle delight. The Schreibers adored Michael, sent him small gifts from time to time, and often took him out to concerts and theater. He had become their surrogate son, replacing the serious-eyed young man in the photograph whose voice would never again lift with laughter. Charles Ferguson took up the large sketch pad which he carried everywhere, and filled it with rapid charcoal drawings. Peter Cosgrove and David bent over a medical text while the Ellenbergs, their heads close together, dark-gray hair touching silver, listened to the radio which had been playing all afternoon. Bonnie Cosgrove, her child asleep in the stroller, read the newspaper, her hand resting on her stomach where new life grew as she read of distant death.

Aaron and Lisa disappeared into the house and emerged moments later through the garage, mounted on bicycles which they pedaled with urgent speed.

“We’ll be back before dinner, Mom,” Aaron called and Leah waved and watched them streak by, the full afternoon sun turning Aaron’s cropped hair the color of new-lit flame.

“Don’t worry, Leah. They’ll be back in time for dinner.”

Leah turned and saw her sister standing beside her. There had been times during these past years when she scarcely recognized Mollie. The sister she had known—the pale, dutiful bride, the frightened wife and mother—had disappeared and were absorbed by the overweight woman whose hair changed color too often, whose rings and necklaces matched the bright two-piece dresses bought during endless journeys to department stores for display to a husband who seldom noticed his wife. But now she saw the honest worry in Mollie’s eyes and Mollie’s plump hands clenched painfully together just as they had been so many years ago when she trembled beneath the marriage canopy.

“No, Malcha, not to worry.”

The sisters stood together on the porch and watched a boy and girl walk by hand in hand and then went into the kitchen to begin setting out the meal, their thoughts gliding sadly back to the distant troubled land of their birth.

*

The Bronx River Parkway snakes its way gently northward and its sloping shoulders are thick with long grass and shaded by young maples and graceful willows. In some places the trees intertwine to form a bower and wild hedges create a natural wall. At the break of dawn on the Sunday morning of that Labor Day weekend, Lisa Frawley and Aaron Goldfeder parked their bicycles against such a hedge and locked themselves into the sweet dark room created by the walls of leaf and bark. Thus concealed from the road, they stretched full length on the grass and allowed the sweat accumulated on the ride to dry into delicious coolness on their arms before turning to each other and generating a new, electric warmth fired by skin and touch. Aaron’s arms looped about her body and his mouth pressed hard against her soft lips, biting them suddenly and forcing his tongue into her mouth which yielded open in pain and pleasure. She took his hand from her back and pressed it against her breast, needing his touch against the painful hardness that filled her.

“Aaron.” Her voice, usually so gay and light, was shy now, almost nervous. “Do you like me? Really like me?”

He smiled and rolled away from her, pulling up a long thread of grass and biting at it. When he was with Lisa his eyes lost their brooding melancholy and lit with an amused gladness. She seemed to him a delightful child, a small innocent girl, and he wondered why it was that this childish, wondrously naive quality of hers called forth his own urgent bursts of manhood. The girls he knew in the city, the girls who worked with him in the Movement writing and mimeographing literature, the girls who sat next to him in seminars devoted to an examination of the Hegelian dialectic—What, he wondered now, would Hegel have thought of the Hitler-Stalin pact? Probably he would have dismissed it as the product of a period of synthesis—left him wary and distant. Once, after a party when he had drunk too much Chianti after singing too many songs about the liberation of Madrid, Aaron went to bed with an earnest coed who wore her thick brown hair severely cut in a butcher-boy bob. She delivered a cogent argument on the biological tragedy of the woman and moaned and writhed when he silenced her with his body. But he never saw her again nor had he wanted to, fearing her seriousness, her complexity.

It was Lisa, his sister’s friend, a child like Rebecca herself—a golden Scarsdale princess who wore a matching cashmere sweater set with little twinkling buttons, who skied in the winter and played tennis every day in the summer—whom he sought out, feeling soothed and safe when he was with her. Lisa, who had once said that she thought Hitler was “sort of cute” and whose father, a prominent land developer, was convinced that Hitler had done great things for the German people and pointed out the Autobahn and the wonderful garden apartments for workers. Her father quoted Colonel Charles Lindbergh extensively, and Lisa’s mother kept a stack of wrapped copies of Mrs. Lindbergh’s books which she gave as gifts for a strange variety of occasions.