Leah's Journey

by Gloria Goldreich

  “Me? No. I am just a man who loves a black-haired woman,” he answered, matching the mockery in her tone. He touched her hand and they rose to leave, going to his room where, slowly, relishing this precious respite against haste, they undressed each other. She gently unbuttoned his shirt, slipped it off, and folded it neatly while, as she bent, he unhooked her camisole and let his hand fall across the bare skin of her back. He caressed the expanse of naked flesh until her body trembled and she turned to him with her eyes and flesh moist with desire, aching with memory.

  Now she began to arrive home later and later, but no matter what the hour, from the corner she saw the coppery flag of Aaron’s hair at the window and knew that it would disappear when she turned into the entryway. When she bent over the children, seizing the excuse of a fallen blanket or a sudden cry from Rebecca who had begun to sleep fitfully, she sensed Aaron rigid and wakeful in the darkness, but his eyes remained closed and he did not move when she touched him.

  “What am I doing?” she thought as she stood beside the children’s beds, her body still warm from Eli’s searching hands, his insistent thrust of love. It seemed to her then that she was not one person but several women—her children’s mother, her husband’s helpmate and companion, her lover’s beloved. She remembered, suddenly, a wooden doll that had stood on her sister-in-law Henia’s bureau in Odessa, the whimsical gift of a Russian friend. Its hollow body had contained a smaller doll, which in turn had opened to reveal yet another diminutive one, and that too contained a smaller doll—until five figurines in gradually decreasing sizes stood side by side, their identical painted smiles mutely jeering at each other. How similar she was to that Russian toy; one Leah after another broke forth, all of them contained within a single form. But perhaps one day she would be unable to replace them all in time and one small self would wander off and reveal her secret. She shivered and saw that her hands were trembling wildly.

  “You’re tired. Very tired,” she told herself severely and went to bed, moving away from David on the narrow island of their feather mattress, as though to touch her husband would be to betray her lover.

  She willed herself to sleep, mentally fashioning her life with her family and her life with Eli into two separate worlds. She inhabited them both with practiced ease, recognizing ill-defined borders and treacherous terrain which she traversed with calm and caution. Angrily, she stilled the small voice that told her that this could not last for long. Soon there would be a fork in her dangerous road and she would have to choose one path or another. But not yet. She lulled herself to sleep at last, rocked in a cradle of rationalizations and fragile reassurances.

  Beside her in the darkness, David stirred to an uneasy wakefulness. She was home. He could not, would not, ask where she had been. There were hidden, silent clauses in the contract they had entered into on that park bench in Odessa. He would not violate them. But he trembled in the darkness with fear and clenched his fists with an anger he disowned. So much had been taken from him. He could not bear to lose her too—but then could a man really lose what he had never possessed? The anger left him then and he drew the eiderdown about her bare shoulder that gleamed whitely in a sudden shaft of moonlight.

  “Please, Leah,” he mutely begged and she stirred in her sleep, flung her arm across his body, and then quickly—too quickly―moved it away.

  During the rare hours when they were home together Malcha watched Leah with worried eyes. They spoke of household matters, the need for new pots, light cloth to make summer clothing for the children. Their boarder, Morris Morgenstern, who had finally brought his entire family over from Poland, had decided to marry. He had proposed to Pearl, the shy factory worker, and to everyone’s surprise she had accepted. Perhaps she had tired of reading Masha’s reports of the golden sunshine of California and of visiting Bryna on Saturday afternoons. She had long since given up her classes in elocution and etiquette at the settlement house. Small lines were forming at the corners of her eyes and a fan of gray had threaded its way through her stylishly lacquered bangs. In any case, they would be married and Leah and Malcha talked of whether or not they should take in new boarders now that only the Ellenbergs remained.

  “I don’t think we should,” Malcha said. “Shimon’s business is beginning to show a little profit. He wants me to begin coming in a few hours a day. I wouldn’t have so much time for the house then and you know, it would be good to have more room. The children are getting too big now for boys and girls to share.”

  Leah nodded, noticing that Malcha spoke with new assurance. Her sister had grown slightly heavier and suddenly she had begun to dress in brighter colors and wear her newly grown, uncovered hair in the long pageboy style of the day. Today she wore a bright-green dress and her hair was caught up in a matching snood.

  “And Leah, please, try to come home earlier. Does all this union organizing have to take up so much time? The children need you. You don’t see it but Rebecca is nervous and Aaron―it’s so hard for him.”

  Malcha’s words were laced with warning and Leah stood uneasily and looked into the kitchen where Aaron was playing chess with his cousin Yankele—newly called Jake—while Rebecca and Chanele helped Joshua Ellenberg sort bright squares of silk according to size. Joshua was an acknowledged merchant now. He owned a large black valise balanced on the wheels of a discarded pair of roller skates. With the money he earned as a messenger boy at Rosenblatts he replenished his supplies and hawked his merchandise, pushing his valise before him and shouting mightily to proclaim the beauty and cheapness of his stock.

  “What can I do, Malcha? What can I do?” Leah asked. Her eyes filled with sudden tears, but her sister swiftly snapped her sewing bag closed and hurried from the room, unwilling to hear any confidences that would change her fears to certainty.

  Leah stood in the empty parlor, swaying from side to side as though in prayer, her hands pressed against her eyes. In the kitchen the small girls laughed at Joshua’s jokes and Aaron explained a complicated chess move. Behind her the front door opened and she turned to see her husband, his arms loaded with books, staring at her in sorrow and concern.

  *

  Summer exploded on the east side without warning that year. They plunged from the soothing cool of a gentle spring into days of sizzling heat. In the hot, airless factory, the girls worked with their skirts pulled up to their laps and their sleeves rolled high on their arms. The men worked in their undershirts and the piles of fabric were damp with their sweat. Eli Feinstein stood at the high wooden cutting table operating the shears. He worked rapidly, stripped to the waist, and Leah, passing his post on her way to and from the office, watched the familiar curve of his bare back, the skin shimmering with sweat and the tight muscles tensing and releasing against the force of the shears.

  Leah made Rebecca and Chanele light organdy dresses, and with the remaining pale blue fabric she fashioned a broad-brimmed summer hat for herself. She wore the hat as protection against the heat of the early morning sun and swung it by its satin ribbons after work as she and Eli Feinstein strolled the streets. Once, on such a walk, they met Charles Ferguson and he joined them at the Cafe Royale, sketching them as they chatted and sipped their glasses of cold coffee.

  “How is your union effort coming?” the artist asked, his fingers deftly capturing Leah’s shadowed forehead, veiled by the hat’s floppy brim.

  “Rosenblatt went off to Europe just as we were about to approach him. But he returns soon. We will talk to him then. The whole thing hinges on the fall line and there is still time,” Eli answered. He lit one of the small dark cigars he sometimes smoked and watched Charles draw.

  “Will you be on the committee that talks to him?” Charles asked Leah.

  She smiled and licked the crystal grains of sugar that clung to her full lips. “I haven’t come that far,” she said.

  “No, not that far,” he replied and thought of the young woman he had invited to the concert at Carnegie Hall who had carried a borrowed purse and kept her m
oney knotted in the corner of a handkerchief. Now that same young woman leaned forward and puffed playfully at Eli Feinstein’s cigar. The small gesture answered many questions for Charles Ferguson. When he arrived home that evening he ripped the sketch from his pad, folded it carefully, and put it in a drawer where he kept a snapshot of his mother, the faded sketch of a girl he had met many years ago in the south of France, and a small book of El Greco drawings for which he had paid much more than he could afford.

  The heat of the summer intensified as the days went on. Fire hydrants were wrenched open in desperation and barefoot children danced in the rushing waters. Even some of the yeshiva children joined them and their earlocks danced damply as they jumped about and were dry minutes later. Joshua Ellenberg sold ice water which he sweetened with cherry syrup, setting up his stand on packing cases near the larger factories. Women fainted in the streets and small children complained of muscle pains one day and the next lay motionless, their fever mounting and their limbs heavy and immobile. They were victims of the epidemic of infantile paralysis that accompanied the heat and engulfed the east side in a net of anguish and misery.

  Malcha hung small cambric sacks of garlic around the children’s necks and begged them to stay inside as though the dreaded disease were fazed by walls and doors, and could be repelled by odors. In mid-July Aaron and Yankele left for the settlement-house camp in the Catskills.

  “I didn’t know they had such a camp,” Leah said to Aaron, relieved that in the mountains Aaron, at least, would be safe from the dangers of the disease, but unwilling to have her son leave her. She wondered, wearily, if any decision about Aaron would ever be simple for her.

  “I tried to tell you about it that night—when you were dressing to go to that meeting,” he replied moodily and they did not look at each other, fearful of the anger and shame their eyes revealed. She hugged him hard the morning he left, and although he did not return her embrace she heard his heart beat with fierce rapidity.

  Sarah Ellenberg’s sister, who had taken a bungalow near Peekskill, wrote to tell them of a similar cottage nearby which could be rented very cheaply. The families conferred and it was decided that if they all shared the rental it could be managed. A feeling of excitement and exhilaration gripped them. They had never had a holiday before. Shimon Hartstein would close his small factory for the week and Joshua Ellenberg had acquired a supply of thin cotton T-shirts which he would hawk to vacationing mothers.

  “There they can’t get things so cheap, they’ll think I’m giving them a bargain,” he said, thrusting the merchandise into his valise with its rollerskate wheels.

  His father and mother nodded their agreement.

  “Some head the boy has,” Sam Ellenberg said.

  He and his wife followed the directives of their small son without question now. When Joshua selected a particular corner as a good location to sell undershirts and furnished him with a supply, Sam Ellenberg, out of work for many months now, stood there and sold undershirts. It was Joshua who now brought the board money to Malcha each month, pulling a change purse out of his knickers and counting out the money. It had been a long time since Sarah Ellenberg had talked about getting her own flat.

  The Hartsteins and the Ellenbergs, with Rebecca, left for the mountains on a Sunday evening. David had a research project and Leah had to work that week but they would join the family on Friday.

  Leah and David stood on the curb and watched the children pile into the hired car, loaded with valises and linens, jangling pots and pans, and Shimon Hartstein’s sample case. One could never tell. Small shopkeepers in the country might be interested in his line.

  Rebecca’s tiny face, her cheeks pink with excitement, was framed in the window and Leah dashed forward just before the car pulled away. Seized by a strange premonition, she touched her daughter’s upturned face as though it were a delicate blossom.

  “Be careful,” she said and Rebecca laughed and kissed her.

  Then, with a choke of the exhaust, the car sped away and she and David stood alone in front of the house, neither of them ready to mount the steps and confront the empty apartment.

  Silence stalked the simple dairy dinner they ate alone that night, broken only by polite requests for salt and sugar. Uneasily, they circled around each other in the dimly lit kitchen, desperately offering scraps of conversation to shield themselves against words they could not utter.

  “It must be bitterly hot in the factory,” David said.

  “One of the things the union will insist on is adequate fans,” she said. “Eli is definite about that.”

  She was glad of the excuse to use her lover’s name, to roll it about in her mouth, remembering the way he had pounded the table at their last workers’ meeting, insisting on those fans, on windows that would open to offer both air and adequate fire protection, on a stipulation for early closing when the summer heat invaded the factory, sending more than one girl reeling to the floor.

  “He is a strong leader,” David said, watching her closely. “Yes. Eli—” she pronounced the name and again a shiver caused her to tremble imperceptibly and her breasts grew full and firm. “He really knows how to involve people. I think we have almost everyone committed to the union cause now. But we have to wait for Rosenblatt to get home from Europe and he keeps putting off his return. Eleanor Greenstein says he’s afraid of the polio. Did I tell you about Bonnie Eckstein—the young girl who comes here sometimes? Her baby brother caught it. They’re not sure he’ll live, poor thing.”

  “Lieber Gott,” David murmured sadly. “I’m glad the children are out of the city.”

  “Yes.”

  Briefly, their thoughts wove together, joined by shared worry and shared love for the children. They sat together in the half-light of early evening and watched two cats wind their way up the fire escape outside the kitchen window.

  “Leah.”

  He rose from the table and stood behind her, his hands gentle on her shoulders, his cheek, faintly redolent of soap, pressing against her own.

  “Leah.”

  His hands roamed her body, found her breasts, grown soft again, clutched her upturned palms and pressed them against his mouth.

  “Leah.”

  The sound of her name was a plea, a call to memory, and she wept against the softness of David’s voice; he allowed her no defense because he did not attack. She remained motionless as his touch and breath probed her. His mouth was soft upon her neck, his voice sibilant in her ear, whispering words she did not want to hear. But when he pulled her up and pressed his body against hers, his lips searching out her mouth, she pushed him from her with a suddenness that shocked herself and left David standing in frozen disbelief.

  “No, David, no! Please. You must leave me alone.” She fled into the bedroom and flung herself across the bed they had shared for ten years, burying her face deep into the pillow and surrendering to a heavy dreamless sleep.

  David went into the empty parlor and stood for a moment looking around the room. Malcha had covered the furnishings with white sheets against dust during the family’s absence, and it seemed to him that he stood in a deserted chamber, abandoned to the ghosts of memories. It was a simple enough thing to walk away from a life—one covered the furniture, snapped a valise shut, and closed a door softly in passing. All that had been so laboriously built could be effortlessly destroyed; a single gesture, a few words wrought demolition. He imagined leaving Leah and then he imagined Leah leaving him. A febrile terror seized him and he sank into a shrouded armchair, clutching at it for support. He saw Leah and himself walking together and the shadow of Eli Feinstein slipping between them, prying their intertwined fingers apart. He felt a wild hatred for the unknown man who had captured his wife’s love, and the fury of his hatred frightened him. Having consecrated his life to the struggle against such hate—was he now to fall victim to it? He sat on until the milky light of morning filtered across the sky and he knew at last what he must do.

  When Leah woke the next
morning the pillow slip was damp to her touch although she did not remember weeping. David had covered her with a light blanket because the night had grown strangely cool. David himself was gone. His breakfast dishes were neatly washed and spread across the empty drainboard. The apartment echoed with an unfamiliar silence and she wandered from room to room, smoothing the sheets on beds that had not been slept in. She stood for a long time in the doorway of the living room and went at last to straighten the cushion of a chair which sagged sadly beneath its loose counterpane cover.

  A message was delivered to her at the factory that afternoon. David had been invited to join Professor Thompson on a field trip. He would be away all week and would join her in the mountains on Friday. She clutched the piece of paper and looked across the room to the worktable where Eli held a newly cut garment up to the harsh afternoon sunlight.

  6

  BOTH ELI FEINSTEIN and Leah Goldfeder worked late that Monday evening and when they left the factory, the sky streaked with the gentle mauve shadows of the fading summer evening. They paused beneath a newly lit streetlamp and as they stood together in the pale circle of light, Leah showed Eli the note that David had sent her.

  “And the rest of the household is also away?” he asked softly.

  “Yes.”

  “I see.”

  They walked slowly on, their long shadows falling before them as the last vestige of light was sucked into darkness. Leah removed her broad-brimmed hat and swung it from its long satin ribbons, as they continued to walk westward, free of any sense of urgency about the hour. She felt strangely weightless, as though a decade of cares and worries had suddenly been lifted and she lived once again the life and dreams of the young girl who had danced across the coarse floorboards of an attic in rural Russia, her naked body capturing the dappled shadows of the swaying Lombardy tree. She took Eli’s hand and executed a tiny waltz step. At once, his feet followed hers, so that two old women on the opposite side of the street stopped to watch them and smiled wistfully before walking on.