Leah's Journey (44 page)

“Frank, oh Frank!” the blonde woman called, tears streaking her face, her voice melting with gladness. Her arms went around the soldier who embraced her and the child together while his empty trouser leg flapped in the wind.

Rebecca turned away, her heart sinking, and searched the wave of khaki-clad men who surged toward the waiting crowds.

“There he is,” she called to Sarah Ellenberg. “There’s our Josh!”

And there he was, taller and leaner than she remembered, his crew-cut, sand-colored hair bleached to a new brightness by the oceanic sun. She tried not to look at his hand but was impelled to and when she hugged him her lips, in penance for the hurt he had suffered on her behalf, touched the hard black leather fingers that gripped her shoulder.

“Mom! Dad! Becca! Hey, this is great. I never expected you to be here, Becca baby.”

“And I expected you to be the first GI down the gangplank, you operator. What slowed you down?”

“Blame her—my precious baggage slowed me down.”

The young woman in the trim gray uniform of the British Nursing Corps was so tiny that Rebecca had not noticed her as she stood patiently at Joshua’s side. Her military cap sat pertly on a crop of auburn hair and her small face was dotted with freckles.

“She outranks me, so be careful,” Joshua said. “Mom, Dad, Becca, say hello to the biggest Ellenberg coup yet—my cockney bride, Sherry Goldstein Ellenberg, formerly of Bournemouth. She had the great good fortune of being in the right place at the right time—she was right there when they fitted me with this little beauty.” He shook his prosthetic hand and hugged his wife, who blushed and hid her face in his uniform.

“Oh, my darling girl, my darling boy, my children. Kinderlach.” Sarah Ellenberg engulfed the girl in a tearful embrace and Rebecca’s own eyes were filled with tears as she bent forward and gave Joshua’s wife a welcoming kiss.

“Sure I’m still an operator, Becca. Didn’t I arrange to get my wife assigned to my own troopship? Do you know anyone else who had a trans-Atlantic honeymoon on the taxpayers’ expense in this war?”

“Joshua can do anything,” Sherry said and looked up at him, her amber eyes alight with love.

“We know that,” Sam Ellenberg said proudly. He took his son’s artificial hand in his own and put an arm around his new daughter-in-law.

Rebecca trailed along behind them, Sherry’s kit bag over her shoulder. In her bedroom that night, she confronted both her regret and her relief at Joshua’s marriage. She stared into the darkness and wondered now what she would do with the days and years of her life.

It was Aaron, months later, who provided her with an answer. His arrival home had been quieter than Joshua’s and his attitude more subdued. He told them briefly, without detail, of his experiences in a Prisoner of War camp near Trieste. His status had confused his captors. He was an American Jew in British uniform fighting with a Palestinian brigade. Perhaps they had seized on such irregularities to claim an exemption from the stipulations of the Geneva convention and had not listed his name on standard Prisoner of War rosters. Still, they had not treated him badly. He was very thin because there had been very little food and there was still a scarcity of food in Europe. Men who are at war have no time for farming. But, oddly, there had been an excellent library in the prison camp, established by the Red Cross, and Aaron had spent the term of his imprisonment reading. It was then that he had decided to study law.

“This world isn’t going to be changed by wars or revolutions,” he told his family as they sat down together to their first Thanksgiving dinner of the new peace. “There’s work to be done and I want to be part of it.”

“I’m going to be a lawyer too,” Michael echoed and they all laughed. Clearly, if Aaron decided to become a deep-sea diver, Michael would follow his brother into the aquatic depths.

Leah looked around that table with quiet joy. They were all there—her sons and daughter, Joshua and his petite wife who listened attentively to every word he uttered and smiled adoringly up at him, Mr. and Mrs. Schreiber, grown old and frail but finally possessed of a sad, accepting serenity. Their son was long dead and they knew now that their old friend Frederic Heinemann, the brave German who had introduced them to the Goldfeders, had perished in the concentration camp at Matthausen. But Hitler had been defeated, a heavy justice had been won, and they had been in their small way instrumental in its achievement. Their work was done. Fragile Mrs. Schreiber cut Michael an extra-large slice of the apfelkuchen she had baked for dessert. He was a growing boy. He needed sweets and nourishment. How like her son he looked. She coaxed the boy, who had become the grandson she would never have, to eat yet another piece.

Bonnie Cosgrove and her children were there but Peter Cosgrove had been buried in the American cemetery at Ardennes, one of the first casualties of that bloody battle. On a gold chain around her neck Bonnie wore the Purple Heart he had been awarded posthumously and her small son played with his dead father’s medal.

Mollie and Seymour dominated the far end of the table flanked by pretty Annie, who was proudly pregnant now and awaiting the return of her husband who had been assigned to the occupying troops in Japan. Now that he was to become a grandfather and suffered from high-blood pressure and an incipient ulcer, fleshy, florid Seymour had at last abandoned the blonde models who had shared his bed for so many years. There were no more urgent out-of-town trips, no imperative overnight conferences in the city. He and Mollie served on their temple board, went to B’nai B’rith brunches, and held cocktail parties for the Joint Distribution Committee. Now he motioned everyone to silence as Annie told them of a letter she had received from her husband, describing a flight over Hiroshima. Again and again he had written of the waste, the charred desolation.

“It was very terrible,” David said sadly, “but there was no other way.”

That was what Jeffrey Coleman had told him during a brief visit some weeks after that day in early August when a great mushroom cloud of destruction rose over a devastated Japanese metropolis. Jeffrey’s work at Los Alamos had been related to the development of the atomic bomb and it occurred to David that if, years before, his therapeutic effort with the talented young science student had been unsuccessful, Jeffrey would not be the brilliant physicist whose work had contributed to the development of the bomb that ended the war. They were all inexorably linked together in this endless chain of history, he thought, and gently smoothed the hair of Bonnie’s youngest child, golden-blonde like her father’s. Sorrowfully he thought of his friend Peter Cosgrove, his academic mentor, cut down by war in the fields of France which he had hiked so joyously in his student days.

David’s eyes were watchful as Leah’s head inclined toward Aaron and she spoke softly to him. The young man nodded and he and Leah rose from the table, murmured excuses, and left the room. Minutes later, as the family lingered over dessert and coffee, they heard the rear door softly close and through the diamond-paned French windows that lined the dining room, they saw mother and son disappear into the garden, heading for the small stone gazebo whose marble floor trapped a silver pool of wintry sunlight. Leah wore her dark-blue woolen cape, the hood pulled up. Within the heavy cowl her face was strangely pale but her gaze, turned on Aaron, was firm and her eyes glittered with determination. Aaron wore an old tan cardigan, a remnant of his high school days, two buttons still missing, lost on a day when he had rescued Lisa Frawley from a bramble bush along a north county path. But he had grown so thin that the sleeves of the sweater fluttered like loose woolen wings in the gentle wind and he shivered against the crisp autumnal chill.

“Are you cold?” Leah asked.

“I think I’m cold all the time now,” he said. “Dad says it’s slight anemia. He’s pretty sure it’ll pass once I gain back the weight and get generally recharged. Probably iron pills will help. I’m going to see Dad’s friend Dr. Adler next week for a general checkup.”

“I’m glad,” she said. “This is a new beginning.”

“Yes. Yes, it is.”

“Aaron, I want us to have a new beginning too.”

“Yes.”

He fixed his eye on a vagrant prism of sunlight that flashed across a fallen maple leaf, the band of liquid gold balanced on the brittle scarlet surface. He waited for her to go on, his heart tight, thinking that he had waited a long time for this moment, for the words that would tell him at last what he had always longed to know.

They sat on the stone bench and Leah scattered some crumbs she had brought with her. Two hesitant sparrows, who had lingered too long in the north, flew in, hastily plucked up the minuscule morsels, and soared back onto the apple tree. They perched among the barren branches, fragile-winged sentinels balanced on a low-hung bough.

“I always loved that tree,” Aaron said. “It’s funny. I never had much feeling for this house. Maybe I was too old when we finally moved here. But in the prison camp when I thought of home I sometimes visualized the apartment on Eldridge Street, sometimes our house in Brighton Beach. If I thought of Scarsdale—of this house—at all, I thought only of that apple tree. I remembered the curve of its trunk and the way the heavy blossoms weighed down those new young branches. I would think of the way you and Becca used to sketch out here and of the long shadow of the tree in the first days of fall.”

“Yes. Trees become a part of you as nothing else does. When I think of Russia, I too think of a particular tree—a Lombardy tree that stood in your grandparents’ garden. Its smallest leaves were shaped like stars. Their small veins were yellow, as though the sun had left drops of golden light within them. Your father Yaakov—and I, we often sat beneath that tree and talked—and sang—and laughed. I loved that tree until—” Leah’s voice faltered and she bent to pluck up a late-blooming wild rose, flowering on the bush that had somehow threaded its way through the stone lacework of the gazebo’s wall. Her hood flew off and Aaron saw the small wings of silver that crested her black hair.

“Until―”

His voice prodded her on, gentle but insistent. She had come out here today to grant him a legacy long denied. He would have it; he must have it.

“Until—” he said again.

Her fingers smoothed the silver strands and his heart turned with a prescient grief.

“Until the very last day I lived in that house. Your father and grandparents were away. I was alone, up in the attic. Suddenly there were flames. The house next door was on fire—children were crying.”

She spoke softly, as though her voice might disturb the rhythm of the remembered weeping, the staccato crackling of burning wood, the stertorous sputtering of flame against stone, the odors of singed fabric and molten metal.

“I ran out—hurrying toward the children. But I got only as far as the tree, the Lombardy tree. A man came across the fields. I saw his red hair and thought that it was your father. I ran to him. God help me—I ran to him!”

She buried her face in her hands and on their leafless bough the sparrows chirped mournfully. Aaron touched her shoulder, knowing now what she would tell him, wanting her to stop and knowing that she would not, that she could not.

“I fought him. Ran from him. Around and around the Lombardy tree. But I could not escape him. I knew it and he knew it. He caught me at last. That night I managed to reach Odessa—my brother Moshe’s house. There I learned that your father had been killed. And a few weeks later I knew that I was pregnant.”

“And you were never sure of who my father was,” he said with a strange calm, understanding at last those moments when he had caught her studying his face, hovering over his boyhood bed.

“I was never sure. And how wrong I was to have let it matter. I should have loved you no matter who your father was. You were my son. And I did love you, Aaron—in some ways more than I loved your brother and sister. But that day stood between us. We lived together, you and I, in the shadow of that Lombardy tree, in the reflection of those terrible flames, of that terrible afternoon. Until the day of your bar mitzvah.”

“My bar mitzvah?”

He remembered anew the smell of the salt sea in the small synagogue, David’s eyes bright with pride, a baby Michael resting on Leah’s shoulder, and his own voice trembling through the prophetic reading and then cracking with embarrassing suddenness—breaking into the timbre of manhood.

“Your voice,” she said. “It became your father’s voice, Yaakov’s own tenor. There was no doubt. I was free of the wondering, of the uncertainty. But by then it was too late. We had lost so much.”

“It’s not too late.”

Aaron’s voice broke. He knelt beside Leah, his head on her lap, and she passed her fingers through the thick copper clusters of his hair that shimmered beneath the wetness of her own tears, which fell freely now. She raised his head and saw that he wept too, openly, as a strong man weeps. Long unshed tears coursed down his lean cheeks and she pressed her mouth to his face and tasted the bitter salinity of his sorrow.

“Can you ever forgive me, Aaron?” she asked.

He did not answer and she did not question his silence.

They rose then and he held her in a gentle embrace. Slowly, arms entwined, they walked across the long dark-velvet shadow of the apple tree and back to the house where lamps glowed in golden brightness against the drifting shadows of the gathering dusk.

*

“And what about you, Becca? What are you going to do now?” Aaron asked his sister as they walked down the Bronx River Parkway together later that week. It was a time of decisions, of new beginnings, of soft luminous hope after the dark frightening years of the war. Aaron was beginning law school. Joshua Ellenberg, with Seymour’s investment and blessing, was beginning his own business. Leah would work only part-time at S. Hart now. She had begun to do serious painting, and a studio was under construction at the back of the house. Only Rebecca remained in limbo, caught between a vanished love and a wistful yearning for a future that would link adventure with meaning.

“I don’t know. I don’t seem to have an urgent calling,” she said, kicking at a pile of maple leaves, remembering a distant day when Joe had threaded them lazily through her hair as they lay naked in an isolated Vermont meadow, shivering deliciously as the fall wind caressed their intertwined bare bodies. Briefly then she hated Joe for leaving her and loved him for having loved her.