Leah's Journey

by Gloria Goldreich

  “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.

  After dinner that night, she read aloud a letter from her brother Moshe, in Palestine. David listened to her soft voice rising and falling in rhythmic Yiddish and realized that he was beginning to think more and more in English. He had to strain to understand one or two of Moshe’s references and he wondered whether this was because Moshe, too, had lost an easy grasp of the language of their childhood and was more at home now in Hebrew. David tried to concentrate on the letter now and not think about that brief scene in the kitchen. He and Leah had agreed upon a partnership when they married, a viable union against loneliness and despair. He had no right to demand more from her than he had offered that fall evening when they had talked without touching in the Odessa park, as the madwoman rushed off to meet a train that would never arrive.

  His feelings for Leah had changed since that evening. From the small roots of affection, from the need to somehow fill the great emptiness left by Chana Rivka’s death, a trembling love had grown. He knew, though, that Leah’s feelings had not altered. And so he struggled to withhold his love from the woman who was his wife.

  Rebecca scrambled onto David’s lap and Aaron remained in a corner, his bright hair glowing in the soft circle of lamplight which was left glowing throughout the Sabbath, his eyes rooted to the pages of the Blue Fairy Book. Aaron loved the sound of his mother’s voice but he did not listen to her words. Like David, Yiddish was becoming an unused language for him and Aaron allowed the words he understood but no longer spoke to flow over him as he read on in English.

  Leah heard Moshe’s deep voice behind the written words and in her mind’s eye conjured up Henia’s patient, loving face. She continued to read.

  “This letter will reach you after we here, and you there, have celebrated the New Year and observed the Day of Atonement. We wish you and all of Israel peace. Our spirits are high this year because at last we have managed to drain the swamp on the northern border of our settlement and we are certain that in the spring we can at last begin planting.

  “A thousand dunams will be given over to alfalfa which we can market and we will plant the rest with vegetables for our own use. Small Yaakov went with us to the market in Tel Aviv and returned full of excitement. Truly, we also were excited when we saw the new city built on the sands. There is so much to do here and so much to learn. Tonight I am on guard duty. We have tried mightily to befriend the neighboring Arabs but they return our overtures with attacks. I am sorry to tell you that Mottel Abramowitz who studied with us in Odessa lost an eye in such a raid. But we comfort ourselves with the knowledge that this is not Russia. Here, Jews are allowed to defend themselves. I wish we could persuade the rest of the family to leave the old country and join us here. Write to us soon. Our hearts are with you.”

  Leah refolded the sheets of paper and put them back in the envelope. She peeled the English stamp off the envelope and gave it to Joshua Ellenberg, who had announced that he was now collecting stamps for a hobby. Aaron knew that Joshua saved the stamps he begged from other people’s letters and sold them to the old man who kept a coin and stamp stall on Canal Street. He wondered why his friend didn’t tell the truth and turned back to the fairy tales which were less puzzling to him than the people around him.

  “Your brother sounds like a marvelous man,” Masha said.

  She was wearing a new dress and as she talked to Leah her eyes laughed across the room to Shimon Hartstein. The dress was of a rustling brocade and when she reached over to pick up the weekend edition of the Yiddish Morning Journal, her skirt brushed against Shimon’s knees. He blushed slightly and pressed the richly waxed curves of his handlebar moustache with nervous fingers. Twice last week Leah had heard soft voices behind Shimon’s closed door and on the second occasion, late in the evening, she had recognized Masha’s softly lisping voice. She had noticed too that whenever Masha emerged from her room to announce that she was going to the roof to collect her drying laundry, Shimon felt the urgent need for a breath of air.

  “My sister is also a marvelous woman,” Leah said. “I wonder if Moshe’s Yaakov can be as cute as Yankele and little Chana?”

  Shimon coughed nervously and looked away from Leah.

  “Did you bring home the sewing machine?” he asked David, swiftly changing the subject.

  “It’s over there.” David pointed to the machine which he had set down on a bench. “What do you want it for over a Sabbath?”

  “My business secret,” his brother-in-law replied, but leaned forward conspiratorially. “I bought a pattern for a new kind of shirt front. A dickey, they call it. They’re like the shirtwaists the girls wear to go to business but without sleeves or a back. Jus
t for show underneath the jacket and very cheap to make. I got a good buy on the fabric and I figure I can cut and sew myself and sell direct. I listen when the boss talks to the buyers and salesmen and all the names I got in my head.”

  “And I can deliver for you,” Joshua Ellenberg volunteered. “I just put new wheels on my wagon. I can go all over the city.”

  “Wonderful,” David murmured. “Everyone here in this apartment is a Henry Ford, at least.”

  “So what’s wrong with a little ambition?” Masha asked, looking up from her paper. “It’s better to have some ambition than to give up and put your head in the oven like that poor young woman on Monroe Street. Every week something like that in the paper, and then I think of poor Mrs. Moskowitz next door left with all those children. Ach, it makes me not want to read any more.” But she licked her lips expectantly as she bent over yet another headline offering a reward for information about men who had deserted their wives.

  “You had a good day, David?” Leah asked. She wanted to change the subject quickly, to steer the conversation into calmer waters, away from the shoals of suicide and desertion and the desperate race against poverty.

  “A day like all days,” he answered.

  “You must have had something on your mind though,” Morris Morgenstern said. “When I saw you at the bathhouse you looked right through me. Thinking about your books, maybe.” He glanced with reverent eyes at the small mountain of David’s texts in a corner of the room.

  “No, I had something on my mind,” David admitted and blushed slightly as everyone leaned toward him.

  Even Aaron looked up from his book and small Rebecca left the basket of spools she had been patiently dressing in scraps of rags and climbed onto his lap. Her dark hair, thick and glossy like her mother’s, smelled vaguely of the fresh lemons Leah squeezed into the home-blended shampoo. He pressed his cheek against her curls as he so often longed to do with Leah’s long tresses when she brushed them each night, sitting on the side of the bed.

  “What was on your mind, Papa?” she asked. “What’s a mind, Papa?” David laughed.

  “A mind is what helps you think, little one,” he answered. “The most precious thing you have. Better than money or a thousand patterns.”

  “So what were you thinking in your mind?”

  “About something a professor said to me. This professor—he’s a smart man, a wise man—he thinks your papa should study to be a doctor.”

  His words were followed by a stunned silence. Sam and Sarah Ellenberg looked at each other and Sarah shrugged and raised an eyebrow quizzically while Sam nodded, their silent marital signals expressing amusement and incredulity. Morris Morgenstern and Label Katz stared at their hands and then at the ceiling as though to avoid embarrassing David Goldfeder by looking at him. The man had had a moment of madness. He was entitled. But until he recovered they would not intrude on him with their doubting eyes. The young women, Masha, Bryna, and Pearl, tried not to look at each other and when Bryna rose and announced that she would take a walk before bedtime, the other two quickly offered to accompany her. Their soft giggles trailed up the staircase and David heard Pearl say, “A doctor yet. I’m surprised he doesn’t want to be president.”

  “To be president you have to be born here,” Masha replied and the laughter began again.

  When the door slammed behind them, Shimon Hartstein clapped David on the back and slammed his hands together derisively.

  “Medical school now? All right, so you finished the high school and you’re going to the college. But for medical school you can’t work by day and go to school by night. And medical school is not free. What greenhorn goes to medical school?”

  “There are scholarships,” David answered feebly.

  Secretly he agreed with Shimon and, more clearly than his brother-in-law, he saw the incredible obstacles that lay before him. Even if he did get a scholarship, how would they live? The extra income from the boarders could hardly support the family. And how could he pass the entrance examinations to medical school? He would be competing against men ten years younger than him, for whom English was a native language. The other applicants had studied in libraries and laboratories, not on rumbling subway trains and at the edge of an ironing board in an airless factory. The idea was insane, preposterous. He wondered how he had ever seen any hope at all in Professor Thompson’s words.

  “Of course there are scholarships,” Leah said calmly.

  “And on what do you live while he studies?” Shimon asked.

  “I will get a job,” Leah replied, as though she had thought the entire situation through and created a workable blueprint that would carry them through the next several years. “Only today Charles Ferguson told me that he showed one of my designs to a designer, a friend of his, who liked it so much that he bought it. In my bag I have the check. This man knows someone who is looking for a designer and forelady and he thought of me. From that I’ll bring home what David brings home from the factory.”

  “And who’ll run the house?” Shimon asked. “Who’ll see to the boarders, the cooking, the laundry? That too you’ve thought of?”

  “Certainly,” Leah said. “Malcha. My sister. Your wife. With the money I have from that design and some other money I put aside from here and there, I have enough now to add to your savings and bring her and the children over. And while I work, Malcha can manage the house.”

  “Leahle,” David protested weakly, thinking suddenly that he did not know his wife at all. How swiftly she had formulated this plan and he knew that she would set it into operation with equal swiftness. He remembered with what expeditiousness she had left her native village for the unknown experience of Odessa and how she had agreed, in a matter of minutes, really, to marry him and come to America. She was a woman who moved with sudden certainty, fording each new bridge with the courage of her intuition and the strength of the resulting resolve.

  “Why is it so strange, David?” she asked. “Didn’t my mother work so my father could study Talmud? So I will work and you will study medicine.”

  She was busy with the children, holding Aaron by the hand and carrying sleepy Rebecca. Walking from the room, she turned back at the doorway and said, “Tomorrow night, after Shabbos, I will write to Malcha and tell her to prepare for the journey.”

  Shimon Hartstein stared after his sister-in-law, his jaw slack with defeat and admiration. Something in the way Leah held her head, or perhaps it was the graceful slope of her shoulders, reminded him suddenly of his own wife.

  “I wonder,” he said musingly, “if my Malcha still wears her marriage wig.”

  4

  “MAY I SPEAK to you for a moment, Mrs. Goldfeder?”

  Leah Goldfeder looked up from her drawing board and stole an impatient glance at her watch. Her heart sank. It was almost four o’clock and the sketches for the new shirtwaist dress were not nearly completed. In another hour she would have to switch from designing to her duties as a forelady and begin checking work, collecting materials, and finally, the task she disliked most, the personal inspection of the girls who worked under her to check that they were not leaving the factory with stolen fabric, patterns, or thread. She was rushed enough and now there was yet another interruption.

  “Yes, of course. What is it?” she asked, adjusting her voice as always to conceal her mood.

  Like all the employees at Rosenblatt and Sons, she knew the man who stood before her. He was Eli Feinstein, the chief cutter, and she knew too that it was only his speed and skill, both recognized as extraordinary, that kept him employed at the dress and blouse factory. Arnold Rosenblatt, the paunchy, balding man who ran the factory for his father and an older brother who was always mysteriously traveling in Europe, had often spoken derisively about Feinstein in Leah’s hearing.

  “That Communist,” Rosenblatt had muttered when told that the cutter, one scorching summer day, had refused to continue his work unless everyone in the factory was given a fifteen-minute break and the factory was closed
an hour early. The temperature in the airless workrooms had risen to ninety-five degrees that afternoon. One girl in Leah’s section had slid from her stool although her foot was caught on the treadle, so that the machine continued its rhythmic progress while she lay in a faint so heavy that for a moment they thought her dead. After that there had been a series of small accidents. The needle of a sewing machine had pierced the thumb of a fifteen-year-old finisher and the blood had spurted upward, staining the low ceiling with the peristaltic scarlet gush. A girl’s hair had been caught in the bobbins of a rapidly moving embroidery machine, and only Leah’s swift move to disconnect the current had prevented the girl’s head from being dragged into the machine’s works. Finally the break had been granted and the factory closed a half-hour short of the usual closing time, to the great displeasure of Arnold Rosenblatt, who stood at the office door twirling his gold pocket watch and glaring at the backs of his departing workers.

  “I should like to speak to you in private,” Eli Feinstein said, bending closer over Leah’s drawing board, looking critically at the half-finished design. Leah recognized that his tone was devoid of any request. He was, rather, demanding her time and his voice was calm with the assurance that he would not be refused.

  She looked up at him, giving him for the first time her full attention and noticing, with surprise, how tall he was and how erect he stood. It occurred to her that she had never seen him before when he was not bent over the cutting table, his eyes rooted to the mountain of fabric piled before him, overlaid with tissue-paper patterns through which he would cleave with razor and knife, carving out sleeves and shirt fronts which he trimmed to size with enormous gleaming scissors. She had passed him perhaps a dozen times a day in as many months but only now did she notice that his hair was as dark as her own and grew with such thickness that it covered his head in wildly uneven layers. His eyebrows too were thick and grew together in a shaggy line, but beneath them his eyes were river-green and he looked at Leah as though he guessed a secret which he would not share.