Leah's Journey (60 page)

She peeled off her gloves, let them drop to the floor in small flags of defeat. She unbuttoned her coat and slipped out of it but remained supine on the bed. She wore a white silk blouse and blue skirt that matched her coat. He unbuttoned the blouse and cupped her breast in his hand, gently fondling the nipple, feeling it grow taut and hard beneath his fingers.

“My mother and father are planning a trip to Israel. If we join them it will be a real family reunion—our first in years. Michael and Rebecca are there—all of us would be together. My uncle Moshe, my aunt Henia, and my cousins. I haven’t seen my cousin Yaakov since we were together in Ethiopia. We wouldn’t have to go straight to Israel. Perhaps a few weeks in Greece. Or in Italy.”

She sat up abruptly and pushed his hand away. Small fiery patches dotted her cheeks and her eyes were bright—not with tears but with a surging febrile rage.

“You’re talking about weeks and months. A stopover in Greece. A few weeks in Italy. What world are you living in, Aaron? Have you any idea of what my calendar is like—the number of cases, the number of appearances? This isn’t exactly the season for family reunions!”

“Come off it, Katie.” His anger matched her own now. “My calendar’s just as crowded and there isn’t a case on it that I couldn’t farm out to another lawyer. The same is true for you. The world of civil liberties doesn’t rest on the shoulders of Aaron and Katie Goldfeder.”

“You know damn well there aren’t enough lawyers who handle these cases the way we do. I’ve got to take care of them, Aaron. I’ve promised the clients. I’ve promised myself. There’s so much to do, so much to fight. We can’t live thinking only of ourselves the way my parents and sisters do. We’ve got our jobs to do. We’ve got to make the world right.”

Her small fists pummeled the bed and he saw, through the sheer silk of her blouse, the small flower of rage flash into bloody blossom on her shoulder.

“Katie, Katie.” He repeated her name soothingly, his voice taking on the tone his aunt Mollie had used as an aural panacea through their childhood. Aaron, Aaron. Becca, Becca. Jakey, Jakey. The simple repetition had soothed and smoothed. Mollie, Mollie, he thought and heard again the thud of earth upon her coffin. “We can’t make the world right by ourselves. You know that. We have to think of our lives, of our future, of a family.”

He walked across the room and looked out the window. In the apartment across the way a mother slowly undressed a small girl. She peeled off one sock and then the other. He saw the child’s toes wiggle pinkly and the woman bend to kiss them. Quickly he drew the blinds, strangely pained by the glimpsed intimacy.

“But I haven’t got a family. I want a baby. Don’t give me vacations. Give me a baby!”

She hugged her shoulder and drew her knees up to her chest. Her pale skin was mottled and her body shook as her sobs broke forth in heaving gulps, tears and spittle wetly veiling her face. A wave of fatigue and revulsion broke over him and he turned away so that she would not see the sudden anger that flashed across his face. But he could not silence the words that rushed to his lips.

“Goddamn it! I can’t go through this crap again. I have to be in court early tomorrow. I’ll get some sleep downtown.”

He was drained of patience and of pity. Tonight had not been different and tomorrow night would not be different. Their love, their lives, would drown in the torrents of her tears and her terror. She would not help herself and he could not help her. Rebecca’s letter fell from his hand as he fumbled through the bureau drawers for a change of clothes. He packed swiftly and waited briefly in the hall for her to call out to him. When she did not, he slammed the door behind him. He was down the hall and at the elevator when at last she moaned, in the piteous tones of a small child frightened by a sudden incomprehensible darkness, “Aaron, I’m so scared. Aaron.”

There was no answer and she fell back against the pillow into a heavy lethereal sleep that embraced her like a weary lover.

*

The bedroom was streaked with the gray light of a rain-ridden dawn when Katie awoke, and she sat up abruptly and looked about the room as though seeing it for the first time. She stared at the shadowy outlines of their furnishings—at the desk piled high with books, the bureau on which their silver-framed marriage portrait rested (the sunlight cleaving Aaron’s face in two, severing the smile he turned down to her own serious gaze), the armchair in which he spent long evenings reading, his lean form radiant in the soft light of the reading lamp. They seemed to her unfamiliar objects and she struggled toward a memory of how they had been acquired—relieved when she recalled the day they had found the large mahogany desk at a Vermont antique auction. Always on such mornings she searched for such scraps of reality to root her firmly in the new and dreaded day. She shivered in the morning chill and saw, with vague surprise, that she still wore her skirt and blouse and had slept without troubling to slide beneath the blankets. She remembered then what had happened the night before and in the morning stillness she heard again her own words, Aaron’s fierce reply. She remembered the slamming of the door as he left and she knew with grievous certainty that when he left a dangerous border had been crossed. It was the first time that he had turned from her during such a time of darkness, the first time that he had not tried to calm and cajole her out of the desperate arguments born of her despair. But if he had left her once, he would leave her again. And in the harsh light of a new morning, she did not blame him, she could not blame him.

Slowly she eased herself up, stripped off her clothes, and left them in a careless pile on the floor. In the bathroom she allowed the water to run until threads of steam clouded the mirror and then she stood for a long time beneath the hot spray of the shower as though its heat might scald away her misery. Very slowly she washed herself, using the lemon-shaped soap her mother sent her each month from the Dryades market so that her skin always breathed the fragrance shared by her mother and sisters as they sat beneath the fig trees in their gardens, played endless games of cards, and talked in the soft, unhurried accents of ease and acceptance. She washed her hair too, using Aaron’s shampoo, and when she stepped out of the shower she wrapped herself in his white terrycloth robe which smelled lightly of his body and wiped her cheek dry with the belt, relishing its roughness against her skin. She pressed his robe tighter, sniffed a tendril of her hair that smelled of him, of the dark damp hours of their love, of his body close upon her own. She called the office but there was no answer. Probably he had gone out to breakfast or perhaps over to Joshua Ellenberg’s lavish suite of offices to shower and shave, to breakfast on the china dishes which Joshua had had engraved with his monogram.

“Aaron, I’m sorry,” she said aloud to the empty room, rehearsing a speech to be delivered at a distant hour when lights were dimmed and soft music played in soothing, narcotizing segues. But this time soft lights, soft words, would not be enough, she knew. They had entered a new time which would require new words, new actions.

She stooped to pick up her soiled clothing and found Rebecca’s letter, a tissue-thin green sheet of paper, lying on the floor. She read it through and thought of how simple life was for this unknown sister-in-law, for Leah’s daughter who had inherited Leah’s strength, her gifts and sense of purpose. Rebecca worked on a dining hall and it was built. She helped with the planting of a crop and it was harvested. She stood with brush and palette before an easel and a painting evolved. She did not work with amorphous words, struggling with abstract concepts, excising small nuggets of reason from a heavy lodestone of law. She did not yearn to be a mother, then abort the small life that struggled within her womb. Lucky Rebecca. Poor Katie and poor Aaron. Poor, poor Aaron.

In the kitchen she made herself breakfast, carefully measuring out cereal and milk, boiling an egg, brewing coffee, waiting patiently for the golden toast to soar up from the stainless-steel depths of the toaster. The domestic routine soothed her and she felt a new calm, a new control. But when she had set the food neatly on the table before her, she could not eat. A nausea gripped her and she remembered that she had barely eaten the previous day. She managed to down her juice and half a cup of coffee and went into the bedroom to lie down. The phone rang and she did not reach for it but allowed herself to drift into a half-sleep.

When she awoke her body was coated with a damp veil of sweat and her hand swung wildly toward the silent telephone. She knew that she had missed an urgent call and the loss was profound, irrevocable. Again a wave of nausea coursed over her and she ran to the bathroom and vomited up the juice and coffee which she had forced herself to drink.

A small vial of yellow-jacketed pills stood in the medicine chest, given to her by Dr. Hernandez as he checked her for the last time before she left Puerto Rico. “Nembutal,” the pharmacist’s label read, and the cadence of the word soothed her. It was the only comfort the doctor had offered her during that long weekend of silence and pain. He did not believe in abortions, he had told her, as his rubber-gloved finger probed her womb and found the shielded embryo huddled within it. Abortions were an affront to his religion. She too did not believe in abortions. They were an affront to her desire. Yet together, in the sterile white room, with the hot Caribbean sun piercing the shaded window, a seabird screaming wildly from across the nearby beach, they had become partners in this act which they mutually disavowed. Perhaps a ghostly Dr. Hernandez had performed the abortion just as a ghostly Katie Goldfeder had undergone it.

From a safe distance, her real self had watched her strange penumbric twin make the arrangements, get the name of the Puerto Rican doctor from her father-in-law’s friend, and juggle bank accounts so that Aaron, inveterately careless about money, would not notice the $1,000 shortage. Her real self had frowned in disappointment, offered arguments, even wept as the plane carried her through skies of brilliant blue in which families of careless clouds chased each other. But her real self had been defeated and had fashioned that defeat into a shadowy memory which had lost both shape and substance so that she often, with exquisite ease, forgot she had ever journeyed to Puerto Rico and cursed her husband because no life came to her womb, choosing at that moment to forget the life that had been destroyed within it.

Still, the pills were real and remembered and she gulped down several of them, not remembering Dr. Hernandez’s instructions. They would calm her, he said, not meeting her eyes. She was to take them if she felt upset. They had both been in a hurry and anxious to leave each other. He was going to Mass and she was catching a plane. He had not said how many to take. One more or less could not make a difference, she thought, and swallowed yet another. Nembutal. What a nice name. She felt better already.

She dressed carefully, putting on a blue silk shirtwaist that Aaron especially liked. Her hair was dry and she brushed it into a cloud of gold that circled her small face. With trembling fingers she pressed pale powder on the circlets of violet beneath her eyes and outlined her lips in creamy pink. She would go to the office and see Aaron. Neither of them had a court appearance that day. She would tell him that she had thought about it and wanted the vacation in Israel. And then she would see David and her father-in-law would give her the name of a psychiatrist who would help her. She had no secrets from Aaron’s father, she knew. His wise, sad eyes had long ago fixed on her with knowledge, pierced the soft membrane of charm, and searched out the darkness of her true self. What he did not know for certain, he had guessed. He did not like her but for Aaron’s sake he would help her. She would begin treatment as soon as they returned from Israel. She saw everything with startling clarity now. Aaron was right. Other lawyers could handle their cases. The only important thing was that no more doors be slammed between them.

The pills were taking effect and she regretted now not using them before. A new calm propelled her, organized her thoughts, motivated her movements. How simple everything seemed, how organized and orderly. The unmade bed briefly troubled her and she smoothed the covers, puffed up the pillow. A stranger had slept there in fitful sleep, an unknown ghostly Katie who would soon be vanquished. Tonight the real Katie would sleep there with Aaron; she would thread her fingers through his copper-colored hair, move to the rhythm of his love, sob not with grief but with gladness as her body arched beneath his, and they would begin again. Yet again.

Swiftly she left the apartment and in the lobby she was startled to see that the rain still streaked steadily down.

“A cab, Mrs. Goldfeder?” the doorman asked.

She wore no raincoat, carried no umbrella, but she shook her head. The rain was so clean, so soothing. She and Aaron had loved to walk in the rain through the Harvard Yard and return to towel each other dry in their small apartment where a wood fire glowed radiantly against their naked bodies.

“I’ll walk,” she said happily. Aaron’s hair had matched the firelight. She remembered that.

She did not hear the doorman’s protest, the neighbor who called after her. How light and cleansed she felt as the rain drifted about her. Years dropped away, unnamed burdens drifted off. The chimerical pills floated about in her bloodstream, magically cushioning harsh nerve endings. She carried neither purse nor attaché case, only Rebecca’s letter like a lucky talisman pinched between her fingers. She floated down the street, a small golden-haired woman in a blue silk dress that soon shimmered wetly and clung to her body, exactly matching the bright blueness of her eyes.

She did not notice the passersby who stared after her nor the traffic light on the corner of Fifth Avenue and Twelfth Street that went from red to green with startling speed. The rain whispered to her and she followed its rhythmic voice, its steady stroke, and walked calmly into the street. She never saw the speeding taxi, its windshield blinded by the rapid swirls of water, that streaked toward her, swerved but could not avoid her. With silent impact the tons of metal met her flesh, struck her small bright figure, tossed it briefly skyward and then onto the sleek black asphalt where it lay in startled death. Its bright-blue eyes were open in astonishment and one blue-sleeved arm neatly, gracefully spread across a soft breast sadly spattered with mud and blood. A woman wept and the cab driver vomited. A very young policeman found the green air letter from Israel and went to search for a telephone.