Leah's Journey (38 page)

Joshua Ellenberg poured the wine, helped Leah with the carving of the turkey, made sure his mother had a stool to elevate her foot, now painfully crippled by arthritis. When conversation at the table lagged, he filled the vacuum with raucous humor.

David sat back and stroked his beard, prepared to be amused. God knew there were few enough opportunities for laughter these days. His patient load had tripled. He was one of the few psychiatrists in New York with a knowledge of Yiddish, and welfare agencies were constantly referring newly arrived refugees to him. Of course, his knowledge of Yiddish did not ease the therapeutic task of helping a Polish woman who had become separated from her children during their flight assimilate the loss; nor could it soothe the agony of a man whose wife had been detained and then disappeared somewhere in the Satanic maze they called Nazi-occupied Europe. He thought of the woman who had sat in his office earlier in the week. Years younger than Leah, according to the chart he held in his hand, she looked years older. She kept her gloves on but he knew that one finger of her right hand was missing, surgically removed when it became insensate after a frostbite sustained while crossing the mountains of her Czech homeland. She had set out on that journey with her small daughter, a ten-year-old, tiny for her age. Her husband and son had been arrested in an “action” and sent to Terezin. But Gentile friends had hidden her and the child and helped them to arrange this journey to freedom across the mountains. The small girl wore bright red mittens and the mother held the small mittened hand in her own, clutching the frightened fingers that were flesh of her flesh, offering her child the only thing she could—the touch of her hand. Almost narcotized by a sudden snowfall, they had tramped on through the mountain, and the woman felt that she was walking in her sleep, wending her way through the endless columns of tumescent icy whiteness. Time passed but she could not account for its passage, aware of it only because of shifting shadows, gliding light. They trod lightly, fearful of the sound of cracking twig, startled when an overburdened branch snapped. The mother glanced down from time to time at her hand, frozen now beyond feeling, and was comforted by that brave red mitten still clasped within her grasp.

The falling snow alternately blinded and hypnotized her but she spoke comfortingly to the child, sang her small songs through frozen lips, assured her that the border was not far away, spoke of joys past, promised joys to come. And then they reached the border, scrambled across the dilapidated barrier, and she looked down at last, turning to the child who would be at her side, wearing the red mitten she had clutched so tenaciously for so many frozen miles. There was no child. Somewhere along that mountain path as the mother stumbled more asleep than awake, the small girl must have fallen into a snowbank, the mitten slipping from her hand to become her mother’s only memento of a child who had always been too small for her age.

The woman carried the mitten with her everywhere and she showed it to David. Gently he stroked the red wool, talked to her with as much calm as he could muster, his own eyes awash with tears he could not shed. He longed to tell her that he too had a child who was missing, lost in this terrible, senseless war, just as the small girl (“tiny, so tiny for her age,” the mother repeated again and again as though it were a clue to that loss so overwhelming that it could not, would not, be comprehended) had been lost among those mountains, so soft with new-fallen snow-flakes.

Instead he offered the woman advice he knew would be ineffectual—advice he had followed since the day he held the communication from the British consul in his hand and learned that his bright-haired young son was “missing in action and presumed dead.” As colleagues had well-meaningly, futilely, advised him, the bewildered father, as he had advised Leah, so he advised the Czech woman who sat before him clutching the scrap of red wool, faded by snow and tears.

“Try to think of other things. Concentrate on the future, not the past. You must live for this world now, not for one lost. You must get a job, make friends, go out, build a new life. Yes. Even laugh. You must try to laugh. You have not forgotten how.”

Now at his Thanksgiving dinner table, he followed his own prescription of laughter and turned back to Joshua, giving his full attention to the joke that was forthcoming.

“Yes indeed,” Joshua continued, “the Jews have three worlds: this velt, the next velt, and Roosevelt!”

The group around the table laughed. Rebecca leaned over to Joe and explained, “The Yiddish word for world is velt.”

“You don’t speak Yiddish, Joe?” Leah asked.

“No. I’m not Jewish, Mrs. Goldfeder,” the sculptor replied.

“Oh. Of course. So stupid of me,” Leah murmured.

She should have known from his name that he was not Jewish but she paid so little attention to casual conversation these days. Her thoughts were always riddled with worry about Aaron and about her parents, from whom there had been no word for months. She worried too about Moshe, feeling a great closeness to this brother she had not seen for twenty years, whose son had so befriended her son. Through the secret Yiddish code buried in Moshe’s letters, which were of course subject to British censorship, she had divined that he was involved in illegal immigration—the smuggling of Jewish refugees onto the shores of Palestine.

“We go nightly to the seashore,” Moshe had written her, “and walk with Uncle Mavet and Aunt Sacanah.”

Mavet meant death and sacanah meant danger. Both death and danger were possibilities for those Jews being smuggled into Palestine in defiance of the British White Paper which restricted Jewish immigration. It was an irony of history, Leah thought, that Yaakov, Moshe’s son, wore a British uniform and fought bravely with the British army, while his father broke the law of Britain. What was it David Ben Gurion had said—oh yes—“We will fight Hitler as though there were no White Paper and the White Paper as though there were no Hitler.”

“Come on, Joshua. Another joke,” Rebecca commanded. She had slipped automatically back into her role in the household, that of a princess, ready to be pampered and entertained by Joshua Ellenberg, her court jester and sometime knight, depending on her need.

“Sorry, I’m fresh out of laughs,” Joshua said. “Maybe Joe has one.”

The group turned expectantly to the sculptor, who held his hands up in good-natured despair. Leah studied Joe Stevenson more carefully. He had a fine face and a firm sense of himself. Before dinner he and Charles Ferguson had discussed current trends in painting and she had been impressed with his knowledge. He possessed a quiet gentleness and the artist’s patient, considering forbearance. But surely Rebecca had no real serious intentions. He was a professor and so many years her senior. She was a child—just nineteen. Nineteen. Leah herself had been only eighteen when she married Yaakov and Rebecca’s age when Aaron was born. She looked at her daughter, who was helping Mollie clear the table, somehow relieved to see that a small flower of cranberry sauce clung to Rebecca’s chin. How like Rebecca, their little girl, their baby, she thought. She had always been a careless eater. She risked her daughter’s annoyance by wiping her chin with a linen napkin. Of course, Becca was not serious about this sculptor—it was simply a student-teacher relationship, like her own friendship with Charles Ferguson.

Later that afternoon, Charles drove Joe to an exhibit at the Hudson River Museum and Joshua and Rebecca sat in the living room, talking quietly. Joshua told her about the feverish pace of work at S. Hart. They were overcommitted and Seymour was spending this Thanksgiving weekend in Washington on company business.

“I didn’t know people did business on Thanksgiving,” Rebecca said and Joshua grinned. Seymour’s Washington weekend would consist of a half-hour meeting with lend-lease officials and many hours with a tall blonde model who spoke in a breathy voice that did not mask her mountain-country accent.

“Your mother’s been coming down to the factory regularly,” he said. “She anticipates a whole change in fashion because of the fabric shortage and she’s got a line with shorter skirts and brief bolero jackets ready to put into the works for spring. It’s good for her, too. Takes her mind off Aaron.”

“Aaron. You do think he’s all right—a prisoner somewhere but still all right?” As always since childhood, she had turned to Joshua for protection and reassurance, but this time his eyes avoided hers.

“How can I tell you that, Rebecca? The only thing anyone can be sure of is what they control themselves.”

Michael came into the room then and Joshua grinned at the dark-haired boy.

“Come on outside, Mike. We’ll have a catch,” he said.

“Uh, uh.” The boy shook his head and opened a Flash Gordon comic. “I don’t feel like playing ball now. I’ll play in the spring when Aaron comes home.”

“Michael.” David Goldfeder stood in the doorway, his voice gentle but firm. “Go out and play ball with Joshua now. We don’t know if Aaron will be home in the spring. I have explained that to you. We don’t know, Michael, if we will ever see Aaron again. We hope we will but we cannot know. Meanwhile we continue our lives. So please put on your jacket and have a catch with Joshua.”

Michael looked up at his father, then followed Joshua out of the room.

“Oh Daddy,” Rebecca said and her eyes filled with tears. She reached out for her father’s hands but they covered his face, concealing the grief that twisted those gentle features into a mask of misery. His body trembled briefly as he struggled for control, and when he looked again at his daughter his face was calm. He sat down beside her, a brief smile of apology teasing his mouth upward.

“Rebecca, you are very fond of this Professor Joseph Stevenson?” he asked. His arm rested on her shoulder.

“Yes. Very,” she answered. “Don’t you like him?”

“Very much.” Slowly he lit a pipe and gently blew out a wreath of blue smoke. “We have not talked about this a great deal but you know your mother and I have always expected our children would continue our heritage. We are very upset that he is not Jewish.”

“Oh, Daddy!”

She was surprised and almost impatient. It had been years now since her mother had kept a kosher kitchen, and her parents had only resumed going to synagogue services since Aaron’s disappearance. Of course they were generous to Jewish causes and Aaron had been bar mitzvahed, but she herself had attended Hebrew school only briefly and even then sporadically. She could barely read the prayer book. Naturally, she knew she was Jewish and was proud of it, but what possible difference could it make to her that Joe was not Jewish? Her parents had never seen anything strange in the marriage of Bonnie and Peter Cosgrove, so why should they object to her relationship with Joe?

“Look, Daddy,” she said, as though he were a student having difficulty grasping a basic simple concept. “Joe and I aren’t getting married, but even if we were, would it really make any difference to you that he wasn’t Jewish if he was good and kind and I loved him?”

“Yes,” David replied without hesitation. “Perhaps I cannot explain it or justify it in the intellectual terms you seek, but it would make a great difference to me and to your mother—to your Aunt Mollie and your Uncle Seymour.”

“Uncle Seymour—so busy in Washington. You see how ridiculous that is,” Rebecca retorted. The color rose high in her cheeks and she stormed out of the room, slamming the door behind her.

David sat on in the darkening room, thinking of the Czech woman and the small girl whose frozen body lay buried under hillocks of snow. How swiftly children slid from one’s grasp, how easily their hands slipped away leaving parents abandoned, clutching at scarlet scraps of mittens and bittersweet memories of laughter and tears.

The rest of the Thanksgiving weekend passed pleasantly enough, but David did not find another opportunity to speak to Rebecca alone. He kissed her good-bye as she drove off with Joe Stevenson that Sunday morning, promising to call, as was his and Leah’s custom, the following Sunday evening. But when he made that promised call it took hours to establish a connection because long-distance lines all over the United States were jammed. On that Sunday, ten days after Thanksgiving, eighteen days before Christmas, Japanese planes bombed Pearl Harbor and the phone wires of America, from coast to coast, throbbed with anxious voices that repeated Rebecca’s tearful question.

“Oh, Daddy,” she asked, “now we’re at war—really at war, aren’t we?”

DURING THE WEEKS and months that followed that black wintry Sunday, it was impossible to forget for a moment that they were indeed at war. The desperate battles in Europe and the Pacific permeated every aspect of their lives. Colorful posters appeared on the commuter train and subway which David now traveled daily in an effort to conserve gasoline. He read his Times under the accusing finger of a grim-faced Uncle Sam who declared in bold block letters, “I WANT YOU!” He answered the invitation of a soaring eagle whose great wings enfolded the message “America Is Calling!” and became an air-raid warden. With dozens of other older men, their thinning hair streaked with gray, their eyes worn with worry, he reported each Tuesday night to the Civilian Defense Training Center in White Plains and was issued a metal helmet, an enormous flashlight, and a mimeographed training manual which he memorized like the conscientious student he had always been. David’s young secretary heeded the call of the poster he had hung above her desk and resigned to become a “soldier without a gun”—a worker in a defense plant. He hired an older woman and took the girl out to lunch where she wept into her untasted shrimp salad and thanked him for the month’s salary he gave her. Her fiancé was in the South Pacific and her brother had been a midshipman on the USS New Orleans at Pearl Harbor.

Former patients came to see him, wearing uniforms which never seemed to fit properly. Some spoke shyly, hesitantly, of fear. Others worried him because of their fierce enthusiasm, their impatience for action. All of them shook hands solemnly and promised to write, but few did. Jeffrey Coleman, the young black science student who had been one of his first analysands, arrived one afternoon. He did not wear a uniform but an extremely well-cut J. Press gray flannel suit. He had recently completed his doctorate at Princeton, was married to a pediatrician and the father of a chubby baby whom he had named David. He and his family were en route to a place in New Mexico called Los Alamos where he was involved in research important enough to earn him a draft deferment. It was not a deferment he had sought.