Leah's Journey

by Gloria Goldreich

  He was not a graduate student but the teacher of this class—and she blushed deeply when he grinned at her and took his place in the front of the room where, perched on a high stool, he explained the aims of the introductory course.

  She rushed out after the lecture and halfway to her dormitory she heard running steps behind her and knew that young Professor Stevenson was hurrying to catch up with her.

  “Hey,” he called, “you’re not angry with me, are you?”

  She had anticipated amusement in his voice—she was Becca who amused everyone, who made them laugh and smile and bring her small presents in exchange for a teasing comment, a cute reaction. But there was no amusement in Joe Stevenson’s voice, only worried concern. And so she stopped and waited until he was at her side and together, with measured pace, they continued their walk, not heading toward the dormitory but in the direction of the gentle Vermont hills where the leaves of the maples were already slashed with streaks of scarlet and the heads of the oak trees glowed orange and gold against the steel blue sky.

  She missed the dormitory meal that night but in a small village restaurant she ate a spicy slice of Portuguese sausage on a thick home-baked roll, drank sweet black coffee, and learned that Joe Stevenson came from the Alameda Valley in California where his family had lived since the days of the Gold Rush, when they had come to root treasure from the ground and turned instead to growing golden citrus crops in orchards that ran for sun-blazened acre after acre. Each year they felled the trees whose harvest had been weak, digging up the roots so that the strong trees would have more room to expand. It was that soft fragrant citrus bark that Joe first used to carve the small animals and forms that sprang magically to life under the blade of his blunt penknife. At the rich banks of the shallow stream that bordered the orchard, the small boy dug up heaps of malleable mud of such a peculiar consistency that when he formed a small head, it grew obediently beneath his fingers and hardened in the strong sun. Often by summer’s end he had whole families formed of river mud, living quietly at the edge of the stream, only to be washed away in the torrential California rains. At school his gift was quickly discovered and an excited art teacher offered him tools and clay, wood and the use of paints and kiln, and finally, when she could no longer teach the boy, he went on to San Francisco and the art academy whose great windows were flooded with light. Earnest teachers taught him how to work with his materials and how to look at the work of other sculptors. He was twenty when he completed the academy and went on to the Chicago School of Fine Arts. Then there had been the Fulbright year in Italy and that terrible sense of wonder and fear when he gazed at the marble forms in the Piazza della Signoria—wonder at the work a man’s hands and eyes could accomplish and fear because his mind and fingers ached to fashion their own message but might-not-might, could-not-could. He did not know and was afraid to find out. Now, his doctorate earned, he confronted that terror, teaching and working. He thought now that he was happiest teaching others, freed of the doubt about his work.

  Joe reminded Rebecca of Charles Ferguson and she told him about her mother’s teacher and then about her mother and father, about small Michael and Aaron, whose hair sometimes matched the burnished golden crowns of the oak trees they walked slowly past. When she spoke about Aaron, she began to cry, surprising herself but not Joe Stevenson, who held her hands gently and offered her a handkerchief streaked with ocher clay, and touched her hair lightly when her tears stopped as inexplicably as they had begun.

  It was night when he took her back to the dormitory and they stood on the stone steps, not touching but standing in sweet silence for a long minute before she quickly turned and hurried inside. Since that first day, they saw each other almost daily, sometimes by arrangement but sometimes by chance, as though a mysterious tropism brought them to the same corner of the campus. On weekends they went together into the Vermont hills, their sketch pads underneath their arms. They walked for hours, stopping to picnic on the cheese and beef that Joe carried in his knapsack and to draw the stark trees, bereft of their foliage, that stood in haughty desolation, scraping the near-winter skies. Wrapped in their cocoons of heavy sweaters, they stretched out on a bed of soft fragrant pine needles and watched the sun sink low into the sky and become a huge golden ball balanced on a net of slate-gray clouds that slowly borrowed color and became threaded with fine gold streaks. Against this sky their friends, the barren trees, trembled fearfully, and they, on their bed of pine, felt the wonder and loneliness of mountains melting and disappearing into night. They came together then, in wonder and loneliness, and the loneliness melted, leaving only the wonder and the sweet lovely scent of dry, new-fallen pine needles.

  She stood before the mirror now in her blue wool dress, her long black hair brushed about her shoulders, and wished that it was a weekend morning and she and Joe Stevenson were not going to a party, but up unknown mountain trails where the last wild flowers of autumn trembled in the frost-kissed air.

  “Rebecca Goldfeder—Rebecca Goldfeder. Your escort is here.”

  The bored voice of the proctor summoned her on the intercom and she looked at herself once more in the mirror and hurried downstairs to the common room. Joe, in a heavy tweed jacket and khaki trousers, stood in front of the fire watching the flames, oblivious to the cluster of girls on the couch who were seemingly absorbed in Edward R. Murrow’s broadcast from London, diligently knitting heavy argyle socks to be tucked into Bundles for Britain boxes, and wondering how Rebecca Goldfeder, that dark-haired New Yorker whose lips were really too thick, had managed to snare Professor Joseph Stevenson.

  *

  Eleanor Greenstein lived in a large modern house, perched on a ledge of rock that overlooked a young pine forest. Each room in the house had its own stone fireplace and the dark wood floors were polished to a soft glow and covered with bright rugs. The furniture was low and angular, making the large rooms seem even larger.

  “This was what I wanted when I came up here,” Eleanor had told Leah and David years ago when they first visited her Vermont home. “I wanted space. Light. Room. I’ve spent so damn much of my life in crowded apartments, crowded factories, crowded streets, that sometimes I think I’ll never have enough room.”

  Leah remembered then the tiny cubicle that had served as Eleanor’s office at Rosenblatts, the cubicle that she, as a young factory forewoman, had entered with such trepidation, her own designs clutched nervously between damp fingers. And it must have been from a tiny apartment that Eleanor’s young daughter had fled, striking out to find her own life and falling instead into her fiery death. It was not surprising that Eleanor had fled to these vast green mountains to establish her own small factory. It was also not surprising that she had built this spacious home where she lived alone, relishing the open area of the rooms, the huge windows that overlooked endless trees and skies, their view unhampered by confining draperies. On winter mornings a great white world stretched out before the designer, who lived with the terrifying memory of wild, encompassing flames, fiercely burning, spinning closer and closer, burning away all space, wiping out all paths of escape.

  Leah had not told Rebecca anything of Eleanor’s history when she suggested that she contact her old friend who, like Seymour Hart, had exploited mass production and ready-to-wear clothing and created a successful business enterprise.

  “She has a lovely home and knows a lot of interesting people,” Leah told Rebecca.

  And she had written to Eleanor of Rebecca’s arrival at Bennington, knowing that her old friend and mentor, who had herself lost a daughter, would do her best to help Leah’s daughter.

  Eleanor Greenstein did know most of the interesting people in the Bennington area, and Rebecca and Joe accepted a drink from their hostess and followed her about the room as she introduced them to her other guests.

  “This is Rebecca Goldfeder, the daughter of an old friend from New York—the designer, Leah Goldfeder, she does all the S. Hart originals, you know—and her friend Joe Stevenson. Judge
Lewis, Professor and Mrs. Henriques, Natalie and Alex Gormley, Dr. Harrington…”

  “Goldfeder. I know a Dr. David Goldfeder. Are you by any chance a relation?” Dr. Harrington asked.

  “I’m his daughter.”

  “Ah. You must tell him that I congratulate him on his article in The Psychoanalytic Quarterly.” Dr. Harrington was a black psychiatrist and Rebecca remembered now seeing a book by him on David’s desk.

  “I’ll tell him. He’ll be pleased,” she said.

  The other names were familiar to Rebecca and Joe and they sat down on the white wool rug in front of the fire and listened to a conversation between Judge Lewis, a widely respected jurist, and Dan Henriques, a visiting professor of political science at Bennington.

  Rebecca, whose thoughts were never far from Aaron and the war that had so profoundly affected their lives, listened closely to Dan Henriques, who had just returned from a fact-finding tour of Europe. The tall man’s angular face was weary and as he spoke his voice fell lower and lower, as though he had repeated the same thing too many times and was now convinced that no one really listened.

  “It’s obviously just a question of time,” he said. “The United States will have to go in—it must go in. Lend-lease, the Atlantic Charter, refugee aid—they’re all sops. We’re not just witnessing a war between opposing nationalist forces—this war in Europe and North Africa is a struggle for civilization itself.”

  “Come now, Dan. Don’t you think you’re overreacting a bit? The war is in Europe—it’s between the nations of Europe. We’re on the other side of the Atlantic. We’ve got to think of America first.”

  “What a good name for an organization,” petite Mrs. Henriques murmured sarcastically. “Perhaps we can get Charles Lindbergh, the marvelous Lone Eagle himself, to head it.”

  “Or perhaps that great friend of justice and tolerance, Father Coughlin,” her husband added sarcastically.

  Judge Lewis’s face flushed to an angry pink.

  “Dan, you’ve known me long enough to know what I think of men like Coughlin. It’s too bad that the noninterventionists are attracting reactionary rabble like him, but that doesn’t mean they’re wrong. A man like Lindbergh’s a patriot. He’s right when he says that the President’s first duty is to protect his country from war, and it seems to me that Mr. Roosevelt is doing just the opposite—he’s warmongering.”

  “It wasn’t Franklin Roosevelt who sank the Reuben James” Dan Henriques said shortly.

  The group in the room was quiet. Among the sailors who had been lost on the American destroyer, wantonly sunk by a German submarine on that angry autumnal sea, had been two Vermont boys whose pictures, draped in black ribbon, were displayed in every shop in town. One of the boys had a chubby, friendly face, covered with freckles, and the other had graduated at the top of his class from Bennington High School. Joe Stevenson had been commissioned by the Vermont Arts Council to sculpt busts of the two boys and Rebecca had sat with him as he studied their portraits. In Vermont, the sinking of the Reuben James had not been a distant, unpleasant news event but a grim reality that had pierced the comfortable insulation of their lives. The freckle-faced sailor’s fiancée was the cashier at Food Fair. She wore his small anchor pinned to her smock as, red-eyed and trembling, she bagged their groceries, offered them change. The mother of the second sailor was a finisher at Eleanor Greenstein’s factory, and since her son’s death she had eaten lunch alone, at a corner table, looking out toward the mountains.

  “I don’t want war,” Dan Henriques said harshly. “No sane, civilized man wants war. But we’re not dealing with sanity or with civilization. Germany is a nation crazed with power and hungry for even more power. They’ve marched on countries that were committed to peace. They’ve declared war on civilian populations. They’ve established concentration camps.”

  “Dan, concentration camps are as old as martial history. Cicero talks about them. Herodotus. They’re part of any war. Warring nations routinely isolate saboteurs, enemy agents.” The judge took another glass from Eleanor and settled back in his comfortable chair.

  “Not camps like these,” Dan insisted. “Have you heard of them? Terezin, Auschwitz, Dachau, Matthausen, Treblinka. Surely there are not millions of saboteurs and enemy agents―yet millions of Jews, gypsies, dissenters, and God knows who else, fill these camps. I saw them myself, Judge. Our study mission could not get into them but I saw their gates and their wire barriers—electrified wire—and I spoke to people who have been inside.”

  “Again this hysteria. The Red Cross have been inside. They’ve reported nothing unusual.” The judge’s voice was calm, soothing. He was an old man and he had seen a great deal. He gathered all his accrued wisdom and dispensed it; he was a trained pharmacist of history, distributing pellets of reassurance, placebos of precedents.

  “All right. We ourselves were not inside the camps. But one thing I guarantee you. Very few of those who are inside will ever come out. Those camps are designed for death. They are part of Hitler’s program—the one he proclaims himself—the rendering of Europe Judenrein—free of Jews.”

  Rebecca experienced a shock of recognition, remembrance. She had heard those words before, in the trembling voice of Frau Schreiber, in her father’s heated discussions with Peter Cosgrove, in her mother’s hushed conversations with Mollie. “Free of Jews.” She thought of her grandparents in Russia, the old man and woman whom she knew only through the faded photograph that stood on their fireplace. Her grandmother’s large dark eyes matched Rebecca’s own. In the photo, her grandfather held a book, a large volume of the Talmud which he balanced uneasily before him, as though to shield himself from the camera’s eye. But such a book would not shield him from guns and bayonets, from angry blows and savage kicks. She did not know the gentle old man who was her mother’s father, but she melted with fear for him and was grateful when Joe Stevenson took her hand and slowly traced the pattern of her veins.

  It was only then that she found the courage to ask Dan Henriques a question—the question that had plagued her since the war began for her family on that Labor Day weekend when Hitler marched into Poland and Aaron had left them to disappear in the wilds of North Africa.

  “But you do think that in the end the Allies will win, don’t you?” she asked, her voice so low they had to strain to hear her.

  Dan Henriques hesitated for a moment and then he replied in a voice so flat that it carried the sound of death.

  “No, I don’t. Unless the United States comes in and comes in very quickly, I don’t see a chance for the Allies.”

  “Here now, Dan, you’re being inconsistent,” the judge said reprovingly. “On the one hand you’re condemning the isolationists like Lindbergh and then you say the same things they say—that the Allies have all but lost.”

  “No, that’s not true,” Henriques replied. “Lindbergh and his people advocate coming to terms with Hitler and Mussolini. But I am saying that it is impossible to come to terms with barbarians. I’m not advocating an accommodation with Fascism but a battle against it. If we don’t combat it then all of us, all of us here in this room, are condemned.”

  The assembled group sat mute, looking about the large room with its polished floors and woven rugs, its cheerful prints and its fenestral vista of trees and mountains. A fire blazed, the table was laden with plates of meat and salad, the smoked-glass pitchers sparkled with wine, music played—and all this was threatened. All of them, gathered together on this peaceful Vermont hillside, sat under sentence of death and desolation.

  “Come—enough talk! Let’s dance.”

  Eleanor Greenstein jumped into that sea of silence to rescue her party. Quickly she put a new record on the phonograph and couples rose to dance.

  Give me one dozen roses,

  Put my heart in between them,

  And send them to the one I lo—ove…

  Rebecca and Joe were caught up in the swirl of dancers and moved rhythmically across Eleanor’s polished floor, stilling
the fearful uncertainty in their hearts with the wild beat of the music, their feet tapping out the rapid dance steps, her body swaying and dipping, supported by his strong hand, his easy grace.

  “You’re as good a dancer as your mother,” Eleanor said admiringly when Rebecca, panting for breath, sank down next to her.

  “As my mother?” Rebecca was surprised. She had never seen Leah dance or even listen to dance music.

  “Oh yes. I remember a big meeting at your parents’ apartment on Eldridge Street. After the meeting someone turned on the radio—your Uncle Seymour’s old Stromberg-Carlson—and we danced and danced until the woman downstairs began banging on the pipes with a broom.”

  “My mother danced?” Rebecca asked. “And my father?” It was more difficult still to think of her father, that quiet bearded man who spoke in the gentle voice of his profession, ever moving his feet fast enough for anyone to protest.

  “No—not with your father. He was away then. I remember now. It was the night before the fire at Rosenblatts. She danced with a friend—a good friend. Eli Feinstein. He died in that fire.” Eleanor’s voice grew vague, almost dreamy. Abruptly, she got up to prepare the coffee.

  “Eli Feinstein,” Rebecca thought. The name sounded familiar, but she could not remember when she had heard it. She would ask Aaron who he was. The thought was quick, automatic. Aaron would know. He was the guardian of their vanished childhood, the archivist of places and names. But of course, she could not ask Aaron. He was gone, taking with him their shared heritage of childhood treasures, of feelings unarticulated but cherished. A rush of anger at her absent lost brother overcame her. He should not have gone off and left her alone. He should not have allowed himself to disappear, to be lost in a military action in a country she had never even heard of, that she had difficulty finding on the map. Abyssinia—Ethiopia—it did not even have a proper name. What was the point of it all—of the anguish he had caused their parents, of Michael’s swift and terrible nightmares that made the young boy awaken in the middle of the night trembling in his bed, drenched with sweat, calling for a brother who would not come. It was not even their war. She wanted to believe the reasonable arguments of the white-haired judge, but she remembered then the photo of her grandparents, the dark-eyed woman and the gentle-faced man, he clutching his worn tome of Jewish wisdom. Of course it was their war and of course Aaron had been right to go. Her anger was overweighed by guilt, regret, and then a bitter sadness washed over her and she leaned back, exhausted, and studied the flames that danced teasingly in Eleanor Greenstein’s stone fireplace.