Leah's Journey

by Gloria Goldreich

  It had occurred to him that the reason he was so drawn to the people of the lower east side was because he too was a refugee, fleeing the calm stretches of fertile plains, the endless rural skyscapes, the farmlands with their fields ranged with geometric neatness, the houses and silos as trim as the small buildings carved for children’s play. Just as Leah had fled the sameness, the repetitious life cycle of the village of her birth, so had Charles Ferguson fled his rural fate for the studios of the city. He had studied at Chicago’s Art Institute, becoming familiar with terms like perspective and composition, and then he had come to New York, a tall blond man with a wisp of pale moustache, magic in his fingers, and uncertainty in his heart.

  He had gone first to the Art Students League and stood before huge canvases splashed with light by the vast skylights. He struggled with thick brushes and plump tubes of oils that bled their rainbow hues across his palette, but on the canvas the bright colors froze and the uncertainty in his heart grew. He began to suspect that he had been cursed with talent but not blessed with a great gift. He found the job at the Irvington Settlement House, thinking of it at first as an economic necessity—his teaching would make his own studies possible. But soon he was spending more and more time on the east side and fewer hours on Fifty-seventh Street. He taught graphics and design, elementary drawing and oils. He offered lectures on art history and sat for hours over his students’ portfolios making comments, worrying, conferring.

  His students came mostly at night, tired men and women, their backs habitually bent low in the habit of their work over sewing machines and ironing boards. But a new vitality gripped them in Charles Ferguson’s classroom and even those with little or no talent sparked with interest as the tall blond man who spoke in the flat tones of the Midwest shared with them the secrets of his craft—for that was how, in defeat, he had come to think of his talent.

  Among these eager apprentices, he found talent of one sort or another. There was Theresa Mercuriotti, a bright-eyed young Italian woman who worked in a powder puff factory. Under Ferguson’s guidance she had learned to draw flowers so well that she soon started a small enterprise for herself, painting bouquets across china plates; when she married she and her husband opened a small shop where Theresa’s plates dominated the window with their bright offerings of rosebuds laced with baby’s breath and buttercups sleeping amid beds of fern. And there had been Faivel Goldstein, a stoop-shouldered Talmudist who had stayed after class one day and shown Ferguson his drawings of insects. Intricate spiders danced across thin sheets of tissue paper, crickets leaped upward in bold strokes of India ink, and graceful butterflies flew low across Yiddish circulars. Faivel was a fabric designer now and his delicately executed drawings appeared on men’s cravats and women’s stoles. Each year, at Christmas, he sent Ferguson a heavy silk scarf emblazoned with his small patterned creatures.

  But it was not until Leah Goldfeder had entered his class, a year ago, that Charles Ferguson felt the surge of excitement peculiar to teachers who suddenly encounter a student of unexpected, unpredictable talent.

  Leah, her thick dark hair coiled about in a glossy bun, her brow high and pale, reminded Ferguson of a Velasquez queen he had studied in a Madrid museum. She registered first for a class in geometric design and he saw at once that although she had had no training, there was a natural sophistication and ease to her compositions. While the other students struggled to order simple triangles and circles, her convex octagons formed graceful pyramids and her quick fingers shaped riots of concentric circles. He worked closely with her, lending her his own colors because he saw, from the careful mending of her cotton stockings and the frayed sleeve of her worn coat, that she could not afford supplies.

  The following semester she took his class in composition and drawing, always rushing in just a bit late and hurrying apologetically to her seat. In the neighboring room the settlement house chorus met, and their high sweet voices, struggling to sing English words they barely understood, drifted over the transom into the studio. Leah hummed as she worked, and once when the chorus director gave Ferguson tickets to a concert he offered them to her. She blushed with pleasure and surprise but shook her head.

  “I am sorry but my husband David goes to school every night and I would have no one to go with.”

  “Every night?” he asked in surprise.

  “Yes. To the City College. He already finished the high school courses. He studies very hard.”

  “Then perhaps you’ll go to the concert with me. Your husband would not object?”

  “Object? Be against? No,” she replied calmly and again he struggled to conceal his surprise. He knew that she practiced traditional Orthodoxy and he had lived among the Jews of the east side long enough to know that their religion was very rigid regarding social and sexual mores. He had seen men cross the street to avoid walking next to strange women and he knew that Orthodox women covered their hair lest they seem attractive to men other than their husbands. Yet Leah Goldfeder had, without hesitation, agreed to go to a concert at Carnegie Hall with him, a single man and a Gentile. Of course, his tall dark-haired student did not cover her hair (today she wore it in a loosely twisted bun and he found himself sketching the loosely wound coils and wondering how they would look brushed loose against her regally held back) and it was unusual that her husband was studying at City College. The Goldfeders appeared to be an extraordinary couple and his curiosity about Leah mounted. He arranged to meet her on the evening of the concert on the steps of Carnegie Hall.

  Charles Ferguson’s invitation marked the first time Leah had traveled the subway beyond Fourteenth Street. She had lived in New York for five years but her life in the largest city in the United States had been confined to the crowded streets near her home where she did her marketing, took her children to the free clinic, went to the settlement house and the synagogue. Occasionally she and David went to the Yiddish theater on Second Avenue but that too was within walking distance of her home. Only once had she gone as far as S. Klein’s imposing emporium on Fourteenth Street, with the enterprising Sarah Ellenberg.

  Leah sat in the dimly lit subway car and studied the faces of fellow passengers. Students sat on the wicker seats with notebooks spread across their laps. The books danced skittishly as the train jerked to a sudden stop but the students read on, their concentration unbroken. So David must sit night after night, Leah thought. The speeding subway was his study hall too, and he had that rare capacity to remain immersed in his books, undisturbed by movement, children’s play, or men’s arguments. In one corner a group of Italian men argued vociferously until the debate suddenly became a joke and they laughed with such good feeling that even the engrossed students looked up, blinked, and smiled before returning to their books.

  A beautiful young black girl sat across the aisle from Leah calmly applying makeup. Leah watched with fascination as the girl, with the care and precision of an artist, brushed her face with a tawny powder puff and etched new coats of redness around her full lips. Leah herself had never worn makeup but now she felt pale and colorless. She bit her lips and pinched her cheeks, glad that she had worn her brightly colored scarf. Twice she opened the leather purse, borrowed from Masha, and checked the small handkerchief into which she had knotted three nickels.

  “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.