The nation became obsessed with that V as the war went on and it became clear that victory was distant, ephemeral, and perhaps—although they dared not articulate such a thought—impossible. In David’s consulting room, grown men stretched across the tweed couch and wept, women scratched at their bodies and pummeled their faces in despair.
Michael tore up the badminton court in their backyard, turned the earth, and began a victory garden. Feathery carrot greens, acrid tomato plants, tender beet and onion greens flourished where once they had sat on cushioned chaise longues and watched Rebecca and Aaron volley for serve. Leah sniffed at the fragrant greens and remembered her parents’ kitchen garden in Russia. Her eyes filled with tears and she hurried back to her drawing board, banishing her worry over her parents and Aaron with fierce addiction to her work.
It was Michael, too, tall for his age and heir to David’s sharp lean features and his mother’s velvety black hair, who organized a brigade of youngsters. They trailed through the neighborhood with wagons collecting wastepaper and tin cans. In the Goldfeder garage, they stamped and hammered the cans down to packets of flattened tin, roped the newspapers into great piles, and set aside a bushel basket to be filled with emptied toothpaste tubes.
Michael worked with a fierce determination which frightened David. The boy’s nightmares were less frequent now but he spoke of Aaron incessantly, making plans for the camping trip his brother had promised him. He clipped from the newspaper Bill Mauldin’s best Willie and Joe cartoons and the streamers of Sad Sack which appeared daily in their local paper. He was saving them for Aaron, he explained. There was a drawer in his room in which he kept such things for his brother. Its most prized content was a glossy photograph of Betty Grable in a bathing suit inscribed: “For Aaron Goldfeder, When He Comes Marching Home.” Michael had written to the actress and explained that his brother was missing in action but Michael was sure he would be home any day now. And he was sure. One day he would be sitting in front of the house—a sunny day—and Aaron’s shadow would streak before the pavement in front of him and then he would be caught up in his brother’s strong arms.
That November, as the family sat in the living room and listened to the report of the Allies’ invasion of North Africa, Michael went to the map and drew a circle around Ethiopia. It would not be long now. The Allies were closing in on the area where his brother had disappeared. He clipped pictures of Omar Bradley and George Patton from the newspaper. These were the men who would rescue Aaron. David listened to him quietly and searched out Leah’s eyes across the room. Her gaze was heavy with despair and the familiar unbidden sudden tears stood in her eyes and rolled down her cheeks in crystal splinters of grief. She was tired, so very tired.
The fatigue had become a part of her. It weighed her down when she went one afternoon, as required by the Office of Price Administration, to Scarsdale High School, to collect their ration books. There, in the huge gymnasium, on whose polished floors Aaron had leaped for baskets and run the mile, she waited patiently on the line that said “F through H.” The letters were cut out of red, white, and blue construction paper, lest anyone forget why it was necessary to stand on this line and wait for their families’ needs to be reviewed and the booklets of stamps needed to purchase sugar, eggs and meat, shoes and gasoline, to be meted out. It was a long line and Leah shifted impatiently. Although she had traveled back from Washington on a night train and spent the morning at the factory setting up production schedules for an urgent uniform consignment, she knew she was not alone in this bone-racking weariness. These were not times where one asked for preference on slow moving lines.
It had rained that morning and the gymnasium smelled of the damp rubber galoshes the women wore. The woman ahead of Leah wore the overalls of a defense worker. Her hair was caught up in a bright bandanna and on her metal lunch box she had pasted a decal that read “Silence Is a Weapon.” Just behind her a pale young mother in the uniform of a postal worker stood, holding a blond toddler by the hand and reading a V-letter. Leah turned and further up the line she saw Lisa Frawley’s mother standing with regal indifference. Priscilla Frawley wore her long gold hair, the same color as her daughter’s, piled high; her slender form was encased in a simple black suit which Leah’s professional eye recognized at once as an original Chanel. Her long legs (Lisa had inherited those legs) shimmered in nylon stockings and she stood on her black ankle-strapped platform shoes as though upon a reviewing stand. Leah caught her eyes and smiled and the tall blonde woman turned swiftly away but not before a hot red dotted her cheeks and her eyes filled with a betraying febrile anger. The fury of that glance impelled Leah to wait at the gymnasium door and reach out to touch Priscilla Frawley as she hurried by.
“Please, Mrs. Frawley,” she said, “there is something I must ask you.”
“Yes?” The blonde woman launched the question on wings of ice and it hung frigidly above them. “You know that my son Aaron is missing in action?”
“I’m sure I’m very sorry.”
“Then perhaps you’ll understand why I ask—why I must know. Was there a child?”
She asked the question, knowing that she had known for months what the answer would be—wondering why it had taken her so long to confront that realization.
Priscilla Frawley stared hard at her and the fury drained from her eyes. It was over. It was done and it had not after all been Leah Goldfeder’s fault. It had not been anyone’s fault. Other women rushed past them as they stood there together, both mothers, both caught in a war, riven by anxiety and uncertainty, forced to endure long lines in overheated gymnasiums.
“There was a child,” she said. “A boy. Born dead. Strangled in the cord. I hope your son is found but Lisa is out West now, building a new life. It was terrible for her and it is over. You understand?”
“I understand.”
The two women shook hands then and walked their separate ways. As she drove home, Leah wondered if the child, her dead grandson, had been born with a shock of red hair. She remembered Aaron as a baby and the way the sun had turned his clusters of red ringlets the color of burnished copper. Would she ever hold such a copper-curled baby again, she wondered, and mourned quietly, in that brief drive along tree-lined streets, for the strangled baby and his father whose infancy and childhood she had squandered in doubt and misery and whose young manhood was denied her.
The pace of work at S. Hart Inc. had intensified. They had undertaken a special government contract for WAC uniforms and it was difficult finding factory workers. Mrs. Schreiber worked in the office now but Mr. Schreiber, along with other German immigrants, had been called to Washington as a consultant to military intelligence. He sat at a Pentagon desk, bent over maps and documents, grimly, methodically avenging the death of his son, murdered for the crime of loving an “Aryan” girl. It had been months now since there had been a communication from Frederic Heinemann and by tacit agreement neither the Schreibers nor Leah mentioned their valiant German friend.
Jake Hart, Mollie and Seymour’s son, enlisted in an officers’ training program and their daughter Annie became engaged to an Air Force lieutenant who received his overseas orders immediately after presenting Annie with a ring. They were married in a swiftly arranged garden wedding in Mollie’s backyard, and Leah sat beside Rebecca and Joe Stevenson who had traveled down from Vermont. How swiftly the years had gone. It seemed such a short time ago that Annie had been a small girl newly arrived from Europe, too fearful to walk down Eldridge Street without holding Rebecca’s hand. Now the cousins were young women, Annie a bride whose husband was off to war and Rebecca—she glanced at her daughter who sat beside Joe Stevenson, her eyes too bright, her color too high. Rebecca, Leah thought half wistfully, half gratefully, was still their Becca, their baby.
Joshua Ellenberg did not enlist. As Leah and Seymour Hart spent more and more time in Washington and traveling around the country in an effort to obtain fabric and other materials and contracting out jobs to other factories, he assumed
more and more responsibility at S. Hart. Often he slept on a cot in the office, waking to check a production schedule, trace a missing shipment, or operate a cutting machine himself for a rush job. He instituted a payroll savings plan and took out an ad in Womens Wear Daily, announcing that the workers and management of S. Hart had bought over $100,000 in war bonds. Twice he dutifully reported to his draft board as summoned and received a medical deferment because of a mastoid operation during his early childhood. It occurred to him as strangely ironic that a self-inflicted ear injury had kept his father out of a war he had chosen to avoid while he would be deprived of serving in a war he would have chosen to fight. But he was too busy to brood about this—so busy in fact that he missed Annie Hart’s wedding and no one told him that Joe Stevenson had traveled down with Rebecca.
He installed a loudspeaker system in the factory and the sewing machines whirred to the tunes of “This Is the Army, Mr. Jones,” “They’re Either Too Young or Too Old,” and “Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree with Anyone Else but Me.” In the packing room, the huge shipments were wrapped as the speakers wistfully resounded to “When the Lights Go On Again” and “You’d Be So Nice to Come Home To.” Sam and Sarah Ellenberg, who worked together in the packing room, achieved modest success for their duet rendition of “Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition,” delivered with the Yiddish inflection that seemed to grow more pronounced with each year. But every hour on the hour, work stopped as everyone listened to the news and always there was a dull, defeated silence afterward, followed by a record, frenetically whirling at too fast a speed.
It was Joshua, too, who organized a blood drive—once a month the long cutting tables were cleared and covered with mattresses as Red Cross units moved in with their donor equipment. The first donor at S. Hart was Leah, who watched as though hypnotized while the scarlet blood slowly filled the bottle that hung suspended above her. Into whose body would her blood feed, she wondered. Had another mother’s blood fed into her son’s veins? She clenched her fist as she had been advised to but did not weep. Such thoughts no longer brought tears.
The third time Joshua Ellenberg was summoned to his draft board, his physical examination was more exhaustive. Twice a young doctor, his own uniform still newly creased and his army-issue stethoscope brightly reflecting Joshua’s flushed pink face, bent over the mastoid scar.
“Ever give you any trouble?” he asked Joshua.
“None,” Joshua replied firmly.
Three weeks later a letter arrived; and after reading it, Joshua called the bus station for the Bennington schedule. He had just time to visit a jeweler and tell his parents and his assistant at S. Hart that he would be out of town for a few days.
As the bus, crowded with soldiers and sailors who blocked the aisle with their bulky duffel bags and passed around pint bottles of bourbon wrapped in paper bags, wound its way up the stark New England mountains, he twice took out the small leather box and looked at the diamond ring inside, cushioned on its tiny royal-blue velvet pillow. Twice, too, he reread the letter, as though searching for a mistake. But he knew that there was no mistake. If family men, fathers of small children, were now being drafted, it would take more than a mastoid operation to keep Joshua Ellenberg out of the army. And he did not, after all, want to miss this war. It would, of course, slow down his plans, throw a crimp in his operation, but just briefly, just until they managed to beat those bastards. He hoped he’d be sent to Europe. The Japs didn’t interest him as much as those damn Nazis. The bastards. He read the letter again, beginning to like its sound.
Having submitted yourself to a local board composed of your neighbors for the purpose of determining your availability for training and service in the land or naval forces of the United States, you are hereby notified that you have been selected for training and service therein…
“Selected.” He liked the sound of the word, smiled, and once more opened the little leather box. In the dark bus, the small diamond glinted like a distant star.
It was late when the bus reached Bennington and although he had planned on seeing Rebecca at once, he went instead to the Bennington Inn and phoned her dormitory. She was not there but he was given a phone number where she could be reached.
He dialed, feeling a sudden uneasiness which evaporated when he heard Rebecca’s familiar voice on the phone. As always her tone was high and sweet, her greeting enthusiastic, expectant, as though everyone who called Rebecca Goldfeder had something pleasant and exciting to impart to her.
“Becca. It’s Josh. I’m here in Bennington.”
“Josh! That’s marvelous. Are you here to see Eleanor?”
He remembered then that Eleanor Greenstein had undertaken production of a Hart contract. Of course, he would call Eleanor and maybe even go over to see her operation. It might be interesting to start up on his own in a small town after the war, especially since Becca seemed to have gotten used to that sort of life. On her visits to New York she was impatient to get back to Vermont, often cutting her vacation short by several days. It was highly possible, with S. Hart expanding so rapidly, that after the war Seymour might be interested in establishing a rural plant. Maybe a subsidiary company. Hart and Ellenberg. He doodled the name, then crossed out the Hart and wrote instead “J. Ellenberg Inc.”
“Well, I’ll get over to see Eleanor. But I came to see you. I’ve got some news for you,” he said. He reached into his pocket and touched the small jeweler’s box. The ring within it was bigger than the diamond Annie Hart’s flyboy had given her.
“News? About Aaron?” Her voice trembled with fear and he was briefly irrationally, jealous of her brother, his friend whose loss hung over their days in a lingering miasmic mist.
“No. Sorry. This news is about me.”
“Oh? Give me a hint. Is it good news?”
“That depends. Listen, it’s sort of late but since you’re out anyhow, suppose I take a cab to wherever you are and walk you back to your dorm and we can talk,” he suggested.
“No. That is—I’m studying for a big prelim—with a friend. I’m staying the night here. But I’ll meet you first thing in the morning. For breakfast. Okay?”
“Here at the Inn,” he said. “Nine. Is that too early?”
She laughed. “Nine-thirty. And Josh?”
“Yes, Becca?”
“Sleep well.”
“Good night, baby.”
But he did not sleep well. The curious uneasiness returned and he awakened twice in the night. Instinctively he reached for the small jeweler’s box and looked to that starlike diamond for reassurance.
Rebecca surprised him by being on time, and when he saw her in her plaid skirt and duffel coat, her long black hair glossy beneath a red knit beret, he wished he had thought to change to sport clothes. He felt out of place in his wide-lapeled suit, white-on-white shirt, and narrow silk tie in the sunny dining room where the other men wore tweed jackets and V-necked sweaters with slacks that were too baggy yet looked somehow just right.
“Josh! Oh, Josh! How marvelous to see you here.”
She hugged him and his arms closed about the soft curves of her body, that sweet body he had watched shed its small-girl fat and flesh out into the graceful form that moved so sweetly within his outstretched arms. His Becca. His baby.
They had breakfast and he watched with amusement as Rebecca smothered her pancakes with golden maple syrup, and primed him for news of the family. During their childhood together, in the apartment on Eldridge Street, it had been his job to cut her food to her liking and he remembered how she had coated her toast with sugar, her cereal with blankets of butter. She had not changed. All of life’s sweetness and richness were due her and she claimed them without embarrassment or hesitation. Patiently he gave her news of the family.
Her mother was in Washington just now. There was talk of rationing clothing and the Office of Price Administration wanted Leah’s opinion. David and Michael might join her there on the weekend, taking the train with Mrs. Schreiber, w
ho spent every weekend in the capital with her husband. Peter Cosgrove had volunteered for a special military psychological unit and Bonnie was once again working at S. Hart. Carefully, they avoided talking about the news that had brought him to Bennington. She told him about her work as a Red Cross volunteer. She was, she said laughing, the slowest bandage-roller on campus. During a silence as they sipped their coffee, he remembered to tell her that he had heard that her old friend Lisa Frawley had been married in California. An older man, they said.
“Yes. Lisa sent me a marriage announcement and I wrote her a note. But she didn’t answer. I wonder why.”
He shrugged and when he did not answer she slipped on her coat.
“Let’s walk,” she said. “I’ll show you my favorite places.”
Arm in arm, they strolled the hill-bound campus. They passed groups of laughing, chatting girls, their heads bent close, their long hair swirling about windswept faces, eyes very bright, wool scarves trailing after them in woven streaks of color. The red and white of Harvard. The orange and black of Princeton. It was January, 1944. In Casablanca, Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt talked of the future of Europe, and across North Africa boys from Spokane and Duluth cleaned their rifles and mended uniforms shredded by jungle thorns. But in Bennington, Vermont, sharp wintry winds kissed the air and young women in plaid skirts and loose mohair sweaters allowed themselves to forget the war and speak instead of Matisse and Mahler, of Kant and Weber.
A light snow had fallen during the night and was now stretched across the earth in a crusty lacelike frost that crackled beneath their feet.
“Do you remember how you used to pull me along the street in a wooden box when it snowed?” Rebecca asked.
“Sure. We had the runners that Aaron pried off a rotting sled someone had thrown in the garbage. Up and down Hester Street we went on snowy days. I was selling scarves that winter. That little guy who boarded with us, Morris Morgenstern—he married Pearlie—got me a gross somewhere. You held them in the carton while I pulled you and hollered about what a bargain they were. You know what the other peddlers called you? The shmatte angel.” He smiled and looked at Rebecca, his “angel of rags” grown to this beautiful, laughing young woman.
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