Leah's Journey (8 page)

“Make sure you have the money safe. New York is not a shtetl. New York is a big city,” David had said. But he was pleased that she was going to the concert. It was hard on her, spending so many nights alone while he studied.

Leah did not remember the music that was played that night in the cavernous concert hall, but she never forgot the gowns of the women who sat in the orchestra below their balcony seats. She observed the simple lines in which the elegant dresses had been cut and took careful note of the materials—the deep richness of red velvet, the iridescent gleam of blue satin, the gentle jewel-like tones of emerald green silks and topaz yellow brocades. The beautifully gowned women, their jewels resting against creamy skin, sitting in their green velvet chairs, were like graceful flowers blazing in a distant field.

During intermission, she watched them rise and wave to each other, their stoles draped across their shoulders, fur capes carelessly balanced on their arms. Her fingers ached to touch the fabric of their dresses, to shape the luxurious red velvet not into a ball gown but into a simple afternoon dress. Deftly, in her mind’s eye, she borrowed white satin from another gown and fashioned collar and cuffs for her red velvet creation.

Charles Ferguson watched as her eyes grew brighter and the color in her cheeks rose.

“Wasn’t the Haydn lovely?” he asked as they rode the subway downtown.

“The music was marvelous. But ah, the gowns. The colors. How wonderful,” she breathed and they rode the rest of the way home in a comfortable silence.

He had walked her to her apartment house and as she thanked him, standing in that street which even at that late hour throbbed with activity and noise—a group of girls sat singing on the tenement steps, children cried, an angry shout lashed the air—a man approached them. He was laden with books, and walked slowly as though each step were an effort.

“David,” Leah cried and introduced her husband to Charles Ferguson. The trained artist marked the man’s deep searching eyes, the strength written across the exhausted face, and the quick flash of intelligence when Charles spoke of the music they had heard.

“Haydn,” David said musingly. “Wonderful. Only today I heard the Creation. In the factory we keep the radio on all day to the classical music stations. Imagine this country—to be able all day to listen to classical music.”

Charles Ferguson thought of the rows of men bent over sewing machines and cutting tables, skullcaps on their heads although they worked stripped to their undershirts in the hot crowded lofts, while Haydn’s crescendoes whirled about them. Some factories, he had heard, hired high school students who read novels as the men worked. The workers paid these readers themselves from their small salaries. Some day, the art teacher thought, he would like to paint a room full of such men.

“Will you come in for a glass of tea?” David asked but Charles Ferguson declined, accepting instead an invitation to a Friday evening meal.

He had, since that night, spent several evenings in the crowded Goldfeder apartment among their children and boarders. In his sketchbook there was a series of drawings of pert, dark-haired Rebecca and quiet Aaron with his crown of copper-colored curls casting a shadow across the pages of his ever-present books. Charles thought it strange that the two children bore so little resemblance to each other and stranger still that Leah, so warm and gentle with her small daughter, grew still and pale when her son approached.

But he stopped thinking about the Goldfeders now, and began his lesson with the discussion of a composition problem, showing the students how a design might be spaced in a given area. The class was attentive, with some of the more diligent students taking laborious notes. During the afternoon hours most of his students were high school boys and girls who rushed to the settlement house as soon as the dismissal bell sounded in their classrooms. One very tiny girl chewed a bagel as she worked, her fingers and mouth moving with equal swiftness, and he smiled when she jumped with surprise as he took her hand and guided it across her sheet of paper, showing her how a simple wrist movement eased her task. He moved up and down the room, stopping to remark on one boy’s colors and to gently correct another’s perspective. On his third round he noticed that Leah Goldfeder had arrived and slipped quietly into her seat.

She looked tired and pale today, he thought, and was glad that he had good news to share with her. He watched as she worked and twice leaned over her to correct a linear pattern and suggest a different shade of green.

After class he touched her arm lightly.

“I have some news for you, Leah.”

“Yes?” She was quiet and patient although he knew that, as always on Friday afternoons, she was in a desperate hurry to get home.

“I showed some of your designs to my old student, Goldstein, and he bought one and asked to see others. He thinks you have a real feeling for both fashion and fabric design, and he said to tell you he knows someone who is looking for a forelady and a designer. I told him I didn’t think you would be interested, but still it’s a great compliment.” Charles Ferguson passed the crisp green check over and watched Leah’s face soften with pleasure and the lines of fatigue slowly ease.

“That’s wonderful,” she gasped. “How pleased David will be. You have given us a wonderful Sabbath gift, Charles.”

She took his hand and pressed it with surprising strength and swiftly left.

At the window, moments later, he watched her emerge from the building and hurry down the deserted street. The mauve shadows of evening streaked the gray cobblestoned street. One small boy, his workman’s cap balanced jauntily on his head, ran by, clutching a brown paper sack. A single onion skidded out and rolled down the street, shedding its pale silken skin. The boy dashed after it and plucked it from the arms of a darkening shadow, and then Charles Ferguson could no longer see him because the darkness of night had overtaken the street before the lamps were lit. The art teacher thought of the wintry sunset that briefly bloodied the gray skies that stretched above his father’s striped and somnolent fields. Next spring, he promised himself, next spring he would set out across the prairies. Next spring.

*

David Goldfeder, walking home through the deserted, night-washed streets, did not hurry. Under one arm he carried a sewing machine shrouded in newspaper which he had borrowed from his shop for the use of his brother-in-law Shimon Hartstein. His other arm was laden with books from the public library, including a picture book for Rebecca and a volume of fairy tales for Aaron. The boy had started first grade only a few months ago but already he was reading with easy fluency. They had been right, after all, to send him to the public school rather than a yeshiva. One cannot enclose oneself in a ghetto in a country which offered the opportunity to be free of ghettos. Anything was possible in the United States. Look what he, David Goldfeder, had accomplished in only a few short years. He had earned a high school diploma and was taking university courses. Such things would never have been possible in Russia where only a minute percentage of Jews were admitted to the universities. Even under the new Communist regime in which poor Yaakov had placed such faith, the words of the law had simply been twisted so that a new ideology was attached to ancient discriminatory practices. The killers of Jews had simply become proletariats instead of Cossacks. On the North Campus of the City College one evening, a fellow student, a youth with wild hair and burning eyes, had asked David Goldfeder to sign a petition on behalf of Eugene Victor Debs, the Socialist. David had refused, gently but firmly.

“I’m sure this Debs is a good man,” he had said, “but if you want to know about socialism—sit down and I’ll tell you about socialism.”

The boy had moved uneasily on, looking nervously back at the thin man with the heavy accent who carried his notebooks in a brown paper bag and used the ten minutes between classes to sleep, sometimes snoring lightly through parted lips, to the controlled amusement of his classmates who also understood the bone-weary fatigue of the night school student.

And now even wider horizons had opened for David Goldfeder. He trembled at the memory of Professor Thompson’s words and repeated them to himself again, as though they were a secret incantation whose repetition implied fulfillment.

“Your paper on Freud’s theory of the subconscious was excellent, Goldfeder,” the tall dark-bearded professor had said. “You approach the subject with considerable depth. Remarkable for an undergraduate. Psychoanalysis interest you?”

“Very much.” David’s heavily accented voice, as always, was soft, his words cautious. Psychoanalysis more than interested him. It absorbed him. Since his introduction to the work of Sigmund Freud he had thought of little else. It was as though he had searched in the darkness for much of his life and a great light had suddenly been thrust into his hand. Shadowy corners of doubt and fear were illuminated with reason and explanation. There was, after all, an answer to the question that had hammered at him since he looked down at the body of Chana Rivka, the gentle violet-eyed girl who barely reached his shoulder and whom he was to have married in a few weeks’ time.

Chana Rivka’s jaw had been broken. One arm had been jerked with such force that it had been dislodged from the socket and lay twisted against the tiny lifeless form like the ragged limb of a discarded doll. Chana Rivka had worn a ring, a tiny sapphire that had belonged to David’s mother. The ring finger had been chopped from the hand and David tried not to think of how the jeweled circlet, with which his father had betrothed his mother and which he had given to his beloved on a starlit summer evening, had been wrested from the bloody stump. The severed finger had been found a few meters from the body by the small boys who trailed after the burial society in the aftermath of the pogrom, scraping up blood and scattered limbs, gathering crushed eyeglasses and handfuls of hair jerked from beards and earlocks.

Chana Rivka’s death had filled David with a grief that clung to him like an engraved shadow and the thought of her killers suffused him with a horror that made him despair of life. How could men kill like that? What forces drove them to such excesses of hate? Did they actually hover so close to the world of the jungle that if they took one uneasy step backward they would fall upon each other in a frenzy of violence, fear, and greed? The questions tormented him and he had wrestled with them for five years, until he found hints of a possible answer in the observations of the Viennese doctor who had wandered solitary through the wilderness of man’s anger and anguish. Psychoanalysis, the understanding of man in his most naked psychological being, gave David Goldfeder the courage to counter the desperation that had throttled him since the darkness of that terror-ridden Odessa night.

“You must do more work in the field. Your grasp of the material is unusual, extraordinary. You are a second-year student now, Mr. Goldfeder?” the professor had asked.

“Yes.”

“You have had biological sciences?”

“Only one semester. I go to classes at night and laboratories are difficult to schedule.”

“And in the daytime?”

“I am a pants presser.”

“I see.” Professor Thompson compressed his lips in irritation. It was ridiculous that a man of Goldfeder’s unusual intellectual talents should spend his days pressing pants. Something would have to be done. Some sort of scholarship or loan arranged.

“You must think of medical school, Goldfeder. You must think of studying psychoanalysis in depth.” Decisively the professor walked off to a faculty meeting as though a troubling situation had been settled.

Medical school. The thought teased David Goldfeder as he struggled home, clutching the sewing machine which seemed to grow heavier at every step. Psychoanalysis in depth. It was ridiculous, impossible. Even with scholarships. But still, perhaps he could juggle time. Perhaps it could be arranged. He would talk to Leah about it tonight, after the children were asleep and the boarders had dispersed to their rooms.

Slowly he mounted the steps to their apartment. The stairwell smelled of the ammonia and urine which drifted over the transom of the common bathroom and he pinched his nostrils against the acrid odor. The door to his own apartment was open and he heard the sound of excited talk and Rebecca’s lilting laughter as she scurried after Joshua Ellenberg. The aroma of vegetables simmering in rich golden chicken broth, the yeasty scent of the newly baked Sabbath loaves, and the smell of burning candles banished the foul hallway odors and he closed the door firmly behind him.

“Good Shabbos,” he said cheerfully, looking at the welcoming burning tapers. He realized with a kind of terror that he had almost forgotten tonight that the darkening sky meant the beginning of the Sabbath.

In the kitchen Leah was adding salt to the soup and he noticed that her wrist bore a light streak of blue paint.

“You had an art class today?” he asked.

“With Ferguson.” She bent over the pot again, her face bright with the heat of the kitchen and the rush of preparing the large meal.

Once, standing on the deck of the boat that had carried them across the Atlantic, he had watched her standing in the wind and marked the way the color slowly rose in her pale cheeks, the blood warring against the resistant pallor of the skin and settling finally with ruddy radiance across her upturned face, turning the small dimple in the corner of her mouth into a tender pink bud. She had been pregnant than, heavy with the weight of Aaron and the memory of Yaakov’s death. He had struggled against the unfamiliar stirring of longing and had gone below deck, leaving her to her solitary vigil above the endless waves. Now, in the cluttered kitchen, with her color so hauntingly bright, he was drawn to her and felt his weariness fade as he passed his fingers gently across her face.

“Tired?” he asked and bent his head, his lips searching for the blue scar of paint that trailed against her wrist.

Abruptly she withdrew her hand. A spoon clattered to the floor and she bent to retrieve it, calling too loudly for Sarah Ellenberg to come and help her. She did not turn as David walked from the room.