Leah's Journey (54 page)

But the tall, carefully dressed Michael, who ate his breakfast now on the sun-spattered balcony, did not want to think of nights of quiet weeping and the long days when minutes stretched like hours. Rebecca lived happily in Israel with her tall, somber-faced husband, peaceful at last among the rows of young green plants shooting their way upward through the desert sands, and painting in an exciting new primitive style, according to Charles Ferguson to whom she sent transparencies of her work. And Aaron was a practicing attorney, his copper-colored hair prematurely peppered with gray, about to be married to a golden-haired, slow-voiced girl whose head came up to his chin. And he, Michael, was pouring a cup of coffee and lacing it with thick cream as he watched the busy, colorful street beneath his balcony.

Street vendors passed beneath him, thrusting straw baskets laden with bright springtime fruit—orange-skinned persimmons and sweet purple figs—at leisurely parading passersby. A small soap-box orchestra stood on the corner of Baronne and South Rampart thrashing out metallic jazz beats against scrub boards and clanging pots and pans together. The city intrigued Michael and he thought back to their first day in New Orleans when Katie’s parents had driven them through the Dryades market district and they had wandered about the stalls where small black boys and widely smiling coffee-colored women thrust bolts of colorful fabric and artfully crafted small wood figurines at them.

Katie had not joined them then, nor had she come on the other small tours that followed, pleading tiredness, an overcrowded schedule, but Melanie had told him that Katie seldom left the house on Corondolet Street when she came home for visits.

“Katie gets her moods, she does,” Melanie had said and pulled Michael off to look at a group of small black boys who were imitating the song of the tall woman who wandered the marketplace selling blackberries. Melanie laughingly tossed them a few coins and the children ran off to buy “snowballs,” scoops of slivered ice dyed the colors of the rainbow with sweet syrups.

David, too, had stayed at home after the first excursion. This was his first visit to the American South and his heart had sunk the first time he boarded a bus and saw how black passengers passed to the rear with lowered eyes. On Lafitte Square he had looked at the separate drinking fountains marked “Colored” and “White” and traveled back through the years to his own consulting room and heard again Jeffrey Coleman’s tortured voice rising upward from the couch, speaking in remembered anguish of the ultimate agony of quotidian separation and humiliation.

“Don’t you see,” David had said that night to Leah and Michael, as they chatted about their purchases, “we are back in Odessa again. The Dryades market is the Jewish ghetto. We go as tourists to spy on misery. Colorful misery, yes, but still a disgrace to us, to our humanity. Pogroms, lynchings, whites and blacks, Aryans and Untermenschen—it all comes to the same thing. I do not wonder that Katie stays at home.”

His father was right, Michael admitted, but still New Orleans had captivated him—the graceful transitions from French to English, the wrought-iron lacework balconies bordering homes where slow-moving ceiling fans could be seen through crenellated windows, the color and music of the winding streets. Beneath his own balcony now a procession of musicians wound their way, the largest group Michael had seen all week. The dancing black women who led them were dressed in skirts of shining fabrics and low-cut blouses the color of the flowers of high summer. They danced with each other and alone, their heels clicking, their bodies swaying rhythmically to the music. A saxophone rent the air with a sudden piercing note and as though on cue, voices shouted wildly in a surging song. But through the throbbing cacophony Michael heard a keening, a low sobbing moan. The music softened, grew almost susurrant, and then suddenly picked up pace, boomed out with wild gladness.

The waiter came in to clear the breakfast dishes and he too looked down to the street.

“What’s happening?” Michael asked curiously. “Is it a holiday or something?”

“It’s a funeral,” the waiter replied, loading the tray. “A Bourbon Street jazz pianist died and this is his funeral walk-around. There’s the widow now.”

But Michael turned away and moved from the sunlight of the balcony into the shadows of his room. He did not want to look at a woman newly widowed on this bright morning of the day when his brother Aaron would take a bride.

*

Aaron too awakened early that morning although he had promised Katie he would try to sleep late, offering her the promise to appease the guilt she felt because she had kept him up so late the night before their wedding day. He lay in bed and listened to the sounds drifting up from the busy street below, registering the wild wail of a saxophone and then rich voices of men and women mingling in a song that sounded strangely like a lullaby. Gradually he made out the words.

Sleep, sleep deeply,

Rest now in Jesus’ arms…

It was not a lullaby, then, but a dirge, and the thought disquieted him. He was relieved when the musicians moved on down the street and he could no longer hear them.

He had not slept enough, he knew, and he also knew that no more sleep would come. Fitfully he turned and looked at the telephone, but Katie would not be awake yet. She always slept with a peculiar lethean heaviness after what they called, with wry bitterness, a “scene.” There were other words for it, he knew, and he knew too that his father could provide him with a clinical vocabulary that would clearly define those wild hours that tore at Katie’s soul and at his own love for her. But he could not, would not, bring himself to speak to David or anyone else about it. If he defined those sudden stretches of silence, which were invariably followed by wild weeping and self-castigation when Katie thrust herself at him like an exhausted child and beat against his chest with wearied fists, he would have to acknowledge a disease, search out a cure. It was safer, easier, to dismiss those lost hours as “scenes” and to assure himself that the intervals between them grew longer and longer. Soon, perhaps, they would disappear entirely and the delicate golden-haired girl, whose steady gaze made him tremble with love and yearning, would live happily ever after like the fairy-tale prince and princess in the oversized book he had gazed at wondrously so long ago in the reading room of the East Broadway branch of the New York Public Library. He remembered, now, thinking that his mother resembled those dark-haired crowned beauties and he smiled at the sudden memory of how the sun had pierced those soot-encrusted windows as he read, settling into liquid golden pools on the battered oak table.

The phone rang and he reached for it and said hello, his voice still thick with dreamy memory.

“Aaron, did I wake you?” Katie’s voice was shy, hesitant, as it always was on such a morning, after a night that had trembled with her sobs.

“No, darling. Of course not.”

“Aaron, listen to me carefully. There is still time. If you don’t want to go through with it, we can call the wedding off. It’s happened before.”

He thought of her sitting up in bed, her blonde curls caught up in a pale ribbon, her fragile face drained of color, her body tense with secret fears. There would be a small rose blush across her shoulder and he wished himself beside her now so that he could kiss away the flower on her skin. His sweet, sad Katie, his lovely bride.

“I love you Katie,” he said in reply.

“I love you too, but still…” Her words trailed off like unstrung beads and were lost, scattered. She had had only enough strength to say it once and he was too weak with love and pity to seize her strength.

“At four then,” she said and her voice shook. “Aaron. Love.”

“At four.” He did not say good-bye but listened for the click which was some moments in coming, and then he too gently replaced the receiver and leaned back against the pillows.

He wanted to marry Katie and had wanted to marry her since the day he had sat behind her in the huge lecture hall at the Harvard Law School and watched her small fine features absorbed in thought as her pencil absently curled a tendril of hair that looped its way about her ear. Her hair was the color of fine-spun gold and he had longed to touch it, thinking of its softness between his fingers. He had wanted to marry Katie even after the first “scene” which had occurred on a soft spring evening after a film at the Brattle Theatre. They had walked slowly through Harvard Square which was strangely deserted. The spring term was over and summer school had not yet begun. A lone guitarist stood on the corner and strummed the melancholy folk songs which had been so popular that gentle spring.

I hashé—Come with me

You are young and you are free.

They stopped to look at the new prints in the window of Sehoenhof’s and in the plate-glass reflection he saw tears streaking down Katie’s face. She made no move to wipe them away or explain them. They walked on, still silent, and they had not broken step. When he put his arm across her shoulder she shook it off with a sudden violence that frightened him, but at the apartment the silent tears became wild sobs. Her white skin grew pink and mottled and she held still at last when he bathed her face with a damp cloth and held her close, although she pummeled him with clenched fists, her head butting fiercely against his shoulders. Still, with gentle strength he held her and when at last the sobs stopped, he caressed her gently, his fingers massaging hers into calm, as he listened with heavy heart to the words she shot at him—small verbal volleys of anguish that made his own eyes fill and his heart grow tumid with despair.

“You must leave me, Aaron. I’m no good. I can’t help it. I can’t get close. No one comes close to me. If you do, you’ll be sorry. Please go, Aaron. Please, please, please.”

But he had not gone, not then and not on any other night through the months and years that followed. Each “scene” became a strand in a net which was woven closer and closer, entangling him inextricably with the frail blonde girl for whom his heart yearned and his body ached.

Once she told him that during her junior year at Sophie Newcomb College, perhaps because of the pressure of exams, she had experienced a time so dark that she had sought refuge in a small hospital. She had stayed there for some weeks and remembered it now only as a place of patterned walks and stone benches, shadowed rooms and patient voices that gently but insistently pursued her, wrestled with her. She had left abruptly one afternoon, the darkness and exhaustion vanquished.

“But why didn’t you stay?” Aaron asked.

“It wasn’t necessary. And I wanted to study for the law boards,” she answered.

She had an incredible mind, finely honed, retentive, capable of seizing a problem, approaching it from all dimensions, unearthing its core, and molding it at last into a skillful argument. She was a better law student than Aaron and he watched with pride and a twinge of envy as she stood in her powder-blue wool ballerina skirt and matching blouse and argued winning cases in the law school moot court. In their senior year she published an article in a leading law journal and even before she passed the bar, legal scholars in distant cities called her for opinions on the new civil rights legislation on which she had published a lengthy thesis called “Separate Is Not Equal.”

But it was only during this wedding trip to her home in New Orleans (he had wanted to come before but she had objected, raised arguments, canceled plans) that he had begun to understand the punishing drive that kept her at the library bent over old decisions, new interpretations, pursuing small threads of law and rolling them into a skein that she would unravel at last to strangle a small injustice, to gain a tiny, an almost infinitesimal legal victory in the long and endless battle to which they had committed themselves.

She had driven with him only one morning through the city of her childhood and she watched with set face as he registered for the first time the reality of segregation. They had traveled, on that sultry day, out past the old Metaire Cemetery where the dead were buried aboveground in vaults so that they would not decompose too quickly in the rich muddied Louisiana earth when the river overflowed its banks. Wilted flowers strung with faded ribbons lay on the mottled marble stone and he had looked away and reminded himself that they were taking this road past death to get to the Harmony Club, the Jewish country club, where their marriage reception would be held.

“Can we swim there?” he asked.

She shook her head.

“The pool is closed. But I’ll tell you what. We’ll borrow some suits there and swim down at Pontchartrain Beach.”

It was late afternoon when they reached the beach and the rose-colored sand was brushed with gold and hard beneath their feet. They swam in the clear water and watched two small sailboats, each with bright red sails, flirt with each other as they skimmed across the smooth water that mirrored the muted dying sunlight. At the far end of the beach there was a wall of sea-smooth rock and although the rest of the beach was deserted, a large group of swimmers congregated there. Aaron looked more closely and saw that all of them were black. Katie followed his gaze.

“Now you understand. In America’s Southland we accomplish God’s work for him and divide up nature between the coloreds and the whites. That’s their share of sea and sun, over there by the seawall.”

Her voice was brittle and she told him then about her nursemaid Eula, a black girl, who had taken care of small Katie from her birth. When Katie was six or seven Eula had taken her to the beach and sat on the sand while Katie and her sisters cavorted in the water. Then she had gone for a swim in the section of the beach near the seawall.

“I followed her. I was always following her. I loved Eula. She was the only one who hugged and kissed me when I was a little girl. My daddy was always busy and my mother was rushing off to her clubs and bridge games. Sometimes I used to think that they thought hugging, touching, was too Jewish. Maybe Jews had been kept out of the Mardi Gras because they hugged each other too much.” She laughed harshly and continued. “You don’t understand that, I know, Aaron, because in your family there’s so much touching.”