Leah's Journey (6 page)

“From the wall they hang a hoop and the game is to jump up high and throw a ball through it. Sounds meshuga, crazy, but it’s fun.”

He was a man who had spent his boyhood hunched over the study tables of one-room Hebrew schools and shadowed Talmudic academies. It was only in the years of his young manhood that he discovered the joys and freedom of play. Leah did not begrudge him his new life but she worried about her sister in Russia.

Malcha’s letters were simple, written for her by the village scribe, but Leah read into the shy, short sentences her sister’s impatience and loneliness.

“Yankele started cheder. Chana helps me bake on Fridays. Will their father recognize them?” Malcha wrote and Leah would then prod Shimon to bring his family over.

“Good Shabbos, Leah,” he said and bent to kiss his sister-in-law. He strutted proudly across the room in a new navy-blue suit with a vest and presented each child with a bright red lollipop.

“Not before dinner,” Sarah Ellenberg cautioned her son, but she had no cause for worry. Joshua had thrust his lollipop beneath his assortment of rags and Leah knew he would sell it at the first opportunity on Sunday morning. Her own children had stripped the cellophane off and were licking the sweet with wide-eyed delight.

“Aaron, do we eat candy before dinner?” Leah asked harshly.

“Rebecca’s eating hers too,” the boy protested.

“She’s only a baby,” Leah replied, doubly angered because she knew she was wrong to have singled out only Aaron for reproof. Still there was no time to patch things up because the staircase echoed with the sound of the boarders’ tired footsteps as they trudged up the many flights.

She rushed to the kitchen to make sure there was enough hot water for everyone, ladling it into porcelain bowls which each boarder in turn carried into the common bathroom. Leah and David considered themselves lucky to have found a flat with a self-contained bathroom, and the boarders were happy to pay an extra twenty-five cents a week instead of having to use the hall bathroom, which always exuded a stench of ammonia. Occasional complaints about the inaccessibility of the bathroom were met with Shimon Hartstein’s account of the outside facilities he had been forced to use during his first year in America.

“This here is luxury,” he would proclaim and banish the complainer.

When they were all finally assembled at the long table, David Goldfeder arrived, breathless and apologetic about his lateness.

“There was a line at the library,” he explained.

His arms were loaded with books and Leah thought that she had never seen him look so tired. Just as Shimon had put on weight since coming to America, David Goldfeder had become thinner and paler. He had, since their arrival, lived a double life, dividing his time between work and study and applying full strength to both tasks. For ten hours a day he worked in a large flat which an enterprising tailor had turned into a factory to produce men’s pants. A cutter worked in what had once been the dining room and passed up the sliced heaps of fabric to the men in the living room who stitched seams and passed them on to other workers who sewed belts and cuffs. David worked in the kitchen, pressing the finished garment with the heavy steel irons that were kept burning hot on the stove. He had chosen pressing, which paid even less than the other jobs, because it required the least amount of concentration. Using his fingers for guides against creases, he automatically passed a heavy iron over the fabric and kept a textbook always open on the ironing board. While his arm moved agonizingly up and down the thick materials, his eyes followed the printed page, memorizing irregular French verbs, geometric axioms, basic biological principles. He read slowly in a language that was not his own.

“Goldfeder, you’re meshuga. What will it get you? A lot of burned garments,” his fellow workers jeered, but David shrugged indifferently and turned back to his books.

In five years he had never burned a garment, although an ugly mound of shriveled skin on his arm marked the spot where an iron had seared his flesh, burning him so deeply that for hours afterward the room stank with the odor of scorching meat. He remembered always the text he had been reading that day, which so distracted him from his usual caution. It was Sigmund Freud’s essay on the nature of the subconscious.

“Did you get me a picture book, Papa?” Aaron asked now and David smiled. “Of course. When did I forget you?”

He encircled the boy in an embrace and Leah thought, with an odd mixture of relief and annoyance, that David sometimes paid more attention to Aaron than to Rebecca, his own child.

David did not kiss Leah but touched her lightly on the shoulder, his fingers gently fondling the soft gray wool of the dress she always wore for the Sabbath meal. She had designed and made the dress herself, and sewn a scarf for it, piecing together brightly colored scraps of taffeta from Joshua Ellenberg’s discards.

“Let us eat,” she said and David softly intoned the blessing over the wine and the braided Sabbath loaves, slicing the golden bread, still warm from the oven, and passing the plate around the table.

The three young women boarders, who shared a small corner bedroom, each broke off a tiny piece and ate with such delicacy that Leah smiled. They were all attending an etiquette class at the Irvington Settlement House, taught by a German Jewish woman who arrived each week in a chauffeur-driven car and gave elegant directions on how to walk and sit. Since Bryna, Pearl, and Masha had enrolled in the class the Goldfeder flat rang with courtesy.

“I beg your pardon,” they sang to each other at every opportunity. “Would you be so kind to excuse me?” “I would so appreciate if you could hurry in the bathroom.” Masha, who was the prize student, even used the word lavatory, but still it was better than the pounding and shouting often heard at the door of the hall toilet, and they were all good girls.

Blond Bryna, a bookkeeper, was engaged to a furrier who had given her a tiny fox collar with the animal’s head attached to it, and when she left the flat each evening, the bright dead eyes stared accusingly at them. Pearl worked in a pencil factory and Masha ran the buttonhole machine in the factory where Shimon Hartstein worked as a cutter.

Occasionally when Masha and Shimon arrived home together they would be deep in conversation, and they shared a repertoire of secret jokes.

“Who’s this?” Shimon would chortle suddenly, as they sat about during an evening. He would mince about the room on his toes, twitching his behind with surprising skill. He was an accomplished pantomimist, a talent he seemed to have discovered when he shaved his beard. Masha would then collapse with laughter and offer the name of a fellow worker and they would both clap with delight at their shared cleverness. On other evenings, Masha tried to teach Shimon some of the dance steps she had learned at the dancing academy she and Pearl frequented. Laughing, she pulled him across the room while Joshua Ellenberg hummed the music and Leah watched, thinking of her sister Malcha alone in Russia.

“East Side, West Side,” Joshua sang while Leah wondered whether it would not be better if Masha found another flat to board in.

Across the table from Masha sat Label Katz, a hatter who shared his room with shy, thin Morris Morgenstern who had recently taken the lease of a small trimming store on Orchard Street. Morris Morgenstern spent his evenings making endless lists of figures, adding, subtracting, and then passionately crumbling his calculations and beginning again. He was saving to bring his parents over from Poland. He had already paid the passage of his brother’s entire family and once he had made arrangements for his parents he would be free to think of a wife and family.

“After all, I’m not an old man. Is forty-eight old?” he had asked Leah shyly.

The last group at the table was the Ellenberg family. Sam Ellenberg was two inches shorter than his wife, a fact which he considered a great joke. He delighted in pushing his porky little body next to her and laboriously stretching himself upward. His red face, the features almost lost amid the flesh, and his multitude of chins trembled as he laughed uproariously. Aaron Goldfeder was fascinated by Joshua’s father and often spent an entire meal staring at him. This was because Sam Ellenberg had only one ear. A neat flap of pale skin had been sewn into a patch where the other ear should have been, and although Sam’s face was always florid with wine and humor, the pallid fold of dermal covering never changed color. The ear had been removed in Russia, when Sam was seven years old, as a protective measure against the Czar’s conscription of small Jewish boys into the imperial army. Aaron could not understand two things in Sam’s recounting of this incident. First, he could not understand why anyone would not want to go into an army and do brave things for his country. Secondly, he could not understand how anyone would opt to lose a perfectly good ear. Nervously he put his hands to his own ears and saw his father wink at him as though he knew exactly what Aaron was thinking.

Leah and Sarah moved swiftly about the table serving the meal. Only when all the plates were full did they themselves sit down to eat.

“Delicious as usual, Leah,” Shimon said and sucked noisily at a chicken bone.

Pearl and Bryna stared at him disapprovingly and delicately dissected the meat on their bones, but Masha defiantly whistled through her own wishbone and kicked Shimon under the table, a movement which Leah noticed.

“Oh, in my family my sister Malcha, Shimon’s wife, is the best cook. Remember her borscht, Shimon, and her schav. You know she used to go out to the fields and pick the sorrel grass herself, she was so particular,” Leah said, smiling innocently at her brother-in-law.

She did not look up from her plate but knew that David was staring at her, his lips curled in amusement. Like Aaron, she felt that David always seemed to know what she was feeling, but unlike her son she took no pleasure in the knowledge. Her husband’s prescience made her uneasy and her eyes avoided his gaze. She was relieved when Morris Morgenstern took up a new conversation.

“Does your sister also sew so beautifully, like you?” he asked. “Tell me, Mrs. Goldfeder, where did you get the pattern for that dress? Such a pattern I don’t have in my store.”

“The pattern I made up,” Leah replied. “I had the idea and cut the pattern from newspaper.”

It did not seem a great accomplishment to her and she was surprised by the gasps of admiration from Bryna, Pearl, and Masha. Only Sarah Ellenberg was not surprised.

“Leah always made her own clothes that way. I remember like yesterday the full skirt she made for her wedding to Yaakov. For months afterward every bride in Odessa had to have a skirt like Leah Adler’s,” Sarah said, stumbling over the last words because a tense silence had fallen over the room.

Everyone there knew that Leah had been married before and that David Goldfeder was not Aaron’s father, but Sarah’s words disturbed them and they felt uneasy, as though a lingering ghost had suddenly wafted over the crowded room and hovered above the cluttered table. All of them had come from Eastern Europe, fleeing poverty and pogroms. They had all heard the screams, seen the flames, felt the hunger, and shivered in fear and uncertainty. Death and loss haunted each of them, and in the darkness of their rooms on Eldridge Street they were visited by the faces of parents they would never see again, brothers and sisters lost and dead, friends wandering in South America or pitting themselves against the swamps of the Galilee.

Pretty Masha, her hair clustered into a castle of ringlets topped by a velvet comb, flirting now with Shimon Hartstein whose wife and children awaited an unwritten letter, had been betrothed to a young merchant killed in a pogrom. Label Katz, the sad-eyed hatter, had once had a wife who also set the Sabbath table with snowy cloth and watched the lateral lines of flame streak out against silver cups and golden Sabbath loaves. He had found her one night lying across the kitchen floor, her dress pulled up above her head, the breath forced from her body by fingers so harsh that their purple impressions hardened and were frozen into the woman’s death-stretched flesh. He never knew whether she had been raped before or after she had been strangled although he prayed it had been after.

The mention of Leah’s first marriage released these troubled memories and in the silence that settled on the room, small Rebecca suddenly began to cry. The child’s sobs released them and as David Goldfeder cradled his daughter, new wisps of conversation rose. Joshua Ellenberg told them that the woman who sold chestnuts on Pitt Street had given him some scraps of satin.

“I saved some for you, Mrs. Goldfeder, to make a scarf like that one. You know, if you made enough of them, I could sell them for you.” His high squeaky voice was rich with street wisdom and Leah sometimes thought he was a midget businessman and not a child only a year older than Aaron.

“The scarf you also made yourself,” Morris Morgenstern asked, with professional interest. He had been looking at the gay ascot, with its brilliant rainbow colors, and had noted the expert stitching and how well the different materials had been placed to form an unusual and striking pattern. “You have a good hand and a good eye, Leah Goldfeder. You should do something more with such talent.”

“You know what you ought to do,” Pearl suggested. “You ought to come down to the Irvington Settlement House with us and take a design course. There’s a wonderful teacher there—Mr. Ferguson. I have a friend of mine who took a class with him and she says he’s just marvelous.”

“Ach, she doesn’t need a course,” Sarah Ellenberg retorted. “Leah could teach such a course. Besides, isn’t one student already enough in the Goldfeder family?”

They all turned to look at David, who calmly spread honey across his challah. Although they asserted to each other that David Goldfeder’s undertaking was a madness—who had ever heard of a greenhorn first studying English, getting a high school diploma, and then getting admitted to the night school at the City College? But their landlord had done just that and they were secretly proud of him, awed by his energy and achievement. Furtively, they stared at the books and notebooks he brought home—Morris Morgenstern, who had studied briefly for the law, touched them sometimes, as though they were magic talismans—and during the rare hours David spent in the apartment, they always contrived to give him the seat where the light was strongest.