Leah's Journey (58 page)

Their drinks had arrived and Michael stirred his rum Collins with a red plastic swizzle stick and took a long sip before he spoke.

“The thing of it is, I’m not sure I want to take the graduate record exams. I’m not sure I want to go to M.I.T. for graduate work at all. At least not now. Maybe in a couple of years, but not now. After.”

“After what?” Aaron put a finger into his bourbon and licked the drink like a small child. Bourbon was not his drink. It was Katie’s, but she had so taken over his life and thoughts that often in restaurants he ordered dishes that she preferred, bought his shirts in the tones of pale blue that she favored, chose films that she wanted to see, books that she had mentioned reading.

“After the army. I want to go to Korea, Aaron. I’m sorry I let everyone talk me out of it two years ago. I should have served then.”

“And now you’ve missed it all,” Aaron said dryly.

He took a long drink and the bourbon seared his throat.

“You know, Michael, war’s not much fun. The only souvenirs you get are stray bullets where you don’t need them. That is, if you’re lucky enough to stay alive. You wouldn’t remember my friend Gregory Liebowitz. We were going to change the world together. Bring in a new era of freedom. It was the year of the people and Mother Bloor smiled down on all of us. We were going to take from the rich, give to the poor. Wipe out starvation and unemployment. People said things like that back in the thirties and they even believed them. And Gregory, the poor bastard, said them loudest of all. Now, of course, Uncle Joe McCarthy sits in Washington calling people like that dangerous to democracy. Dangerous. Naive, maybe, simplistic, yes, but God, they weren’t dangerous. The only thing Gregory ever was a threat to was himself. But he put on battle fatigues and went to Ethiopia to keep the world safe for democracy. He died there. Of diarrhea. You don’t even get a Purple Heart for diarrhea, Mike.” The bitterness in his own tone shocked him and he ordered another drink. It had been years since he thought of Gregory, of the long weeks in Ethiopia, of the small boy who had carried his father’s head in his arms.

“I remember Gregory, I think,” Michael said. “Look, Aaron, you’re talking to me as though I’m some kind of a kid. I’m twenty-one. I’m graduating from college. My whole life I’ve been the kid, the little boy. No one seems to have noticed that somehow I grew up. I’m not Leah and David’s little boy any more. Rebecca wasn’t much older than me when she went to Europe and then to Palestine. When she fought in the War for Independence. But me—I’ve spent my whole life in Scarsdale and Princeton and now everyone expects me to finish up with a stretch in the libraries and laboratories of exotic Cambridge. Wow!”

Impatiently he downed his drink and coughed as the liquor briefly choked him.

“The world’s blowing up around us, with that McCarthy circus in Washington and the crazy ‘military action’ in Korea, and I’m supposed to drink coffee in Harvard Square.” He stared glumly out the window and saw with satisfaction that it had begun to rain. It was a late spring drizzle and the tiny droplets were shot with dancing prisms as they fell.

“What do you want to do with your life, Mike?” Aaron asked quietly.

“You mean eventually, finally? All right. I do want to get that advanced degree at M.I.T. I want to be an engineer. A designing engineer. I’m good at it and I like it and I think I’ll be able to do important work, useful work.”

Aaron smiled. None of them had been immune, after all. All three Goldfeder children had caught David’s fever for “useful” work, for small assaults on enormous problems, for the kindling of tiny flames against an ever-widening darkness.

“Right now I want to do something different, something exciting. That’s why I thought of Korea. It’s not war, I’m looking for, Aaron, you know me better than that.” Michael looked up and met his brother’s eyes. He had never noticed before that Aaron’s thick auburn-colored brows were slivered with silver.

“All right. I can understand that. But I think you can find what you’re looking for without putting on a uniform and going to oversee an artificial peace on an artificial parallel. I like Ike too, but I don’t think he knows what he’s going to do in Korea. Southeast Asia is a big can of worms. We’ve opened it up but we don’t know where to go fishing with it. You don’t want to be part of an army that isn’t even sure it’s an army. You can get a deferment. You don’t want to become a lieutenant just because that little twirp Melanie thinks uniforms are cute,” Aaron said.

“Stop picking on Melanie. We’re just friends. Anyway, she’s Katie’s cousin and she’s a lot like Katie.”

“She’s nothing like Katie,” Aaron said with a harshness that surprised them both. In appeasement, he ordered another round of drinks and held his glass apologetically up to his brother. “If I were you, Aaron, I’d think about heading for the Middle East. For Israel. You could spend some time with Rebecca. Tour the country. Maybe even spend a year working on a kibbutz in a border area. At least you won’t be wearing a uniform and you won’t be carrying a gun unless you have to.”

“Israel,” Michael repeated. “That’s a thought. It’s funny. I just read an article in an engineering journal by a scientist who teaches at the Technion in Haifa. They’re doing a lot of interesting bridge suspension work there. I was thinking that I wouldn’t mind seeing their setup. And God, I’ve missed Becca. I can’t imagine her a little kibbutz woman. Maybe you’ve got something, Aaron. It’s an idea. A real idea. Thanks.”

He grinned in embarrassment at his brother who thought wistfully that in a different year he might have reached across the table and ruffled Michael’s hair. But they were men now and met for drinks in a dimly lit bar.

“Sure,” he said. “And Mike—I didn’t mean to put you down.”

He looked down. His glass was empty. He did not want another drink and he did not want to go home.

“Well, I’d better take off if I’m going to see Aunt Mollie and grab my ride back. See you, Aaron.”

They gripped hands and Michael was out the door. Aaron watched him streak by, a tall thin young man whose black-and-orange scarf dangled over his shoulder. The rain had stopped and the street shimmered wetly in the beginning darkness. Aaron paid the bill and checked his attaché case. He had three copies of “The Rosenblatt Experience” for their files. It had been a long day and quite suddenly he was in a hurry to get home. Perhaps it would be different tonight. Perhaps.

MOLLIE HART DIED on a fall morning and although those who mourned her stood in a circle of liquid sunlight that formed about the dark earth of her freshly dug grave, they shivered as a stray wind breathed out the warning of winter. Newly yellowed leaves gleamed on the tall elms that lined the cemetery lanes, and overhead a lonesome line of birds streaked darkly through the gray-blue sky, winging their way southward. Mollie’s children, Jakie and Annie, huddled together, their families beside them, arms touching, fingers intertwined, but Seymour Hart stood alone. He swayed from side to side as he intoned the Kaddish, the prayer for the dead. His body trembled with each word and he moved in the remembered pattern of the days of his boyhood when those who worshiped with him in the small Russian prayer house released their bodies to the winds of prayer. His voice rose and fell in melodious chant and his children stared at him as though he had become a stranger to them. When he stepped forward toward the grave into which the light coffin that held Mollie’s withered body had been lowered, tears streaked his face. He clenched a handful of earth, felt it grit beneath his fingernails, and dropped it at last onto the pale fragrant wood. He shivered violently at the sound of its soft thud and did not look to see how the clump of earth shattered into small black grains that wept their way across the rough, unvarnished surface of the plain pine coffin.

Leah and David moved forward together but it was a flower, a golden autumn zinnia from her own garden that Leah allowed to flutter down, while David bent and gently placed within the grave a smooth stone which he had carried in his pocket for weeks.

Annie and her husband, Jakie and his wife, approached together and the young women pressed their faces against the rough fabric of their husbands’ jackets and did not look as their own earth offerings drifted down. But Aaron Goldfeder came forth alone and used a small spade to place the first shovelful of ground covering on the naked coffin. A small pebble, caught in the humous dirt, echoed sharply against the light wood. It was a lonely sound and he moved back, his face burning suddenly at the awareness of his own aloneness at this place of death and farewell, where couples moved together, supporting each other with touch and word. Only the widower stood alone and Aaron went to his uncle and put his arm around the quaking shoulders that had so often supported him, a sleepy small boy, mounting the steps of the Eldridge Street tenement or the Brighton Beach house. His uncle had smelled of tobacco and camphor and the wild-cherry cough drops that he bought in brown paper sacks and gave to small children for a treat. But today his uncle smelled of grief and loss and the mildewed pages of the ancient prayer book he carried with him.

“Katie wanted to be here but she didn’t feel well,” he told Seymour and wondered if his uncle believed him.

Katie had arrived home from Washington late the night before, so late in fact that they had not had a chance to discuss her appearance before the Committee. Still, she had awakened with him that morning and had watched, through heavy-lidded eyes, as he dressed.

“You have to come to Mollie’s funeral with me. It will kill my family if you don’t.”

She had turned away, her cheek brushing the white pillowcase that matched her own snow-pale skin.

“You know I hate going to funerals.”

The huge violet eyes had closed and her nose quivered as though the scent of death had seeped into the room. Her splayed fingers, clutching the blanket tightly, whitened and he saw that her nails were ragged and knew that she had bitten them on the plane.

“Poor Katie,” he thought and wondered when it was that pity finally cancelled out love, that compassion negated passion. “Please,” he said. “I’m not going.”

Her voice had become querulous and he had not wanted an argument, knowing that when he argued with Katie at such times there could be neither gain nor satisfaction. His small victories turned into desperate defeats as she wept wildly or stared at him with wide empty eyes, abandoned to a depression that would hold her prisoner for days.

“It’s all right. Don’t go,” he had said, straining to keep his voice even, his tone unaccusing.

And so he stood alone now beside his uncle, his arm on the older man’s shoulders, which grew still beneath his touch.

“Yes. I know. Leah told me. She’s a good girl, your Katie,” Seymour said. “So pretty. My Mollie was a pretty girl too. In Russia sometimes, when we were first married, before the children came, we went on picnics. Sandwiches of Sabbath bread, hard-boiled eggs, and cold borscht we took. Mollie made necklaces from flowers. For her and for me. In the long grass, we took off our shoes and wore our necklaces. From a red flower she made them. The ‘Blood of Russia’ we called it. Do you remember the flower we called the ‘Blood of Russia’?” he asked Leah, as she came up to him, David’s hand on her arm.

“Yes. I remember it. A small red flower with a black heart. Mollie and my mother used it to make dyes and Shaindel—do you remember her, Seymour? Shaindel, the herb healer—she used the dark heart for poultices.”

“Shaindel. Of course, I remember her. She gave Malcha talcum powder made from wild lilacs for a wedding present. So much she gave her that Malcha still had left when she came to America. On Eldridge Street, when Malcha took a bath, the whole house smelled like the meadowlands of Mother Russia. Do you remember, Leah?”

“I remember.”

In front of them, the gravediggers, tall gaunt men in earth-caked work clothes, tossed heaps of black earth into the gaping grave. Just behind them a woman sobbed, her grief escaping her in a sudden muffled moan. Aaron turned and recognized the woman as the young bookkeeper who had been their boarder. Pearl, her name was, he recalled, and Mollie had done all the baking for her wedding. He remembered now the golden mountains of sesame-seed cakes gilded with honey and the way Mollie’s face had grown red in the heat of the kitchen and how small patches of flour clung to her arms, dotted her nose. Tears stung his eyes as he thought of how she had suddenly bent from her work to hug him, to tuck a scrap of the raw sweet dough he had loved into his mouth, leaving streaks of flour on his dark serge jacket. It was for such small things that dead were mourned and remembered—for the sweet lingering fragrance of lilac talcum, for the taste of honey and the rich redness of dark-hearted scarlet flowers that grew between tall blades of grass on vanished landscapes. He thought of the pallor of Katie’s naked shoulders in the dim light of early evening and the red flower that blushed beneath her skin in moments of pain and passion.

Leah tucked her arm through Seymour’s and slowly they walked away from the grave. They did not look back. The funeral was over and now their mourning would begin.

Aaron and David waited for Jakie and Annie and their families to follow and then they too turned. The gravediggers continued their work, but there was no sound as the soft earth mounted and covered the coffin. As the last of the mourners moved away, one of the workmen began to sing a mournful Puccini aria in a tenor that was startlingly rich and clear.

“I am sorry that Michael isn’t here. He loved Mollie very much,” David said.

“Yes. And I think he was her favorite,” Aaron replied.

“That may be. She was here for his birth and throughout your mother’s pregnancy. And because Michael’s birth—the very fact of his birth—meant the end of a bad time for your mother,” David said gently.

“I know.” There was calm acceptance in Aaron’s voice. He had never begrudged Michael his special status in the family. For him too, Michael’s birth had been the end of a bad time, of the season of his mother’s sadness, her long silences and searching stare. “Still, it was the best thing for him to begin traveling right after graduation. He was so damn restless. And Rebecca wrote that he was in great spirits when he got to Israel. Went off on a hiking trip straight away. Good old Mike. All that energy.” A note of wistfulness had stolen into Aaron’s voice and David looked at him thoughtfully.