Katie and Aaron struggled with a calendar crowded with such cases, and Katie’s quiet voice, laced with the disarming sweet accent of the South, was listened to attentively in hearing rooms where men’s pasts were probed and, too often, their futures destroyed. More and more often, as hysteria rose, she proved her point by using what she referred to bitterly as a public relations gimmick, rather than a legal argument. She planted press releases or ferreted out the photograph of the young son of a Hollywood actor accused of belonging to a union which was purported to be a Communist front. She introduced the photograph as Exhibit A, established the identity of the subject and the fact that he had been killed on Guadalcanal.
“Does a Communist whose philosophy has been programmed by the Kremlin send his nineteen-year-old son off to die for democracy?” she asked in the soft, reasonable tone her opponents had come to fear, and she read a letter in which the actor encouraged his boy to do his best “for the greatest country on God’s earth.” It did not hurt her case that the letter, found in the dead soldier’s pocket, was flecked with the dark blood of death.
But still the cases continued to pile up. One day when Aaron was visiting in Scarsdale, David had stared at a newspaper that reported the jailing of a prominent writer on charges of contempt of Congress for refusing to answer questions about colleagues. He had sighed deeply, his fingers reaching for the bottle of pills which he kept always in his pocket.
“It reminds me of Russia before the Revolution,” he said. “Do you remember, Leah? The sudden arrests, the fear, the Czar’s police?”
“And since the Revolution? Has anything changed? Ah yes, the Czar’s police are now the people’s police,” she replied bitterly.
Through the years, since the war’s end, letters had trickled in from their few surviving friends and relatives. Affidavits were requested and Seymour and David sent them at once and then again there was silence. Letters went unanswered and were returned undelivered. Occasionally Moshe would write to tell them of the arrival of an acquaintance in Israel—sad, bleak reports of broken people living out their broken lives.
Katie and Aaron worked with fierce intensity. She traveled back and forth from Washington, spent long nights in the law library. But still, with increasing frequency, she would arrive home at night and stare blindly into the silence until the tears came, then the sobs, then the steady stream of recriminations. She had not argued well enough. She was not doing enough. No, she was doing too much. No one helped her. Everyone conspired against her. No one cared. Aaron did not love her. She wanted to have a baby. Why didn’t she have a baby?
The questions, repeated again and again, had taken on the wail of an accusation, a susurrant lament, that haunted him even during their quiet times. Why wasn’t Katie pregnant? Was it his fault? The teasing doubt thrust itself at him when his body was intertwined with hers and they made love with the desperate urgency of those who had little time and feared unnamed dangers. Too often, then, he surrendered, feeling himself hopeless and helpless, as his penis shriveled within her and they withdrew and turned from each other, locked in their separate miseries.
“You don’t love me,” she would say, tossing the words into the silent darkness, shooting them out like small incendiary pellets, ignited to scorch them both with anguish.
“I love you.” But his tone was dead and he thought of how heavy a burden was the love she demanded. He could not sustain it.
Still, tonight he felt new hope. He had the feeling that Mollie’s death had ended one chapter and begun another and he sped home with a sense of urgency.
*
“Katie?”
The apartment was dark but she was or had been home because the mail was neatly stacked on the dining room table. He riffled through it quickly, thinking that they must be on every mailing list in America. He tossed aside the urgent requests from the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy, the Emergency Civil Liberties Union, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and quickly and eagerly read a letter from Rebecca. Her desert kibbutz had just completed the building of a communal dining hall and now, as they ate, they looked out on the gentle ocher-colored slopes of the Edomite Mountains. It was very hot but their swimming pool would be finished in a few months’ time.
She hoped Aaron and Katie planned a trip to Israel. She looked forward to meeting Katie and of course Yehuda and their children, Danielle, Noam, and Mindell, wanted to know their aunt and uncle.
Aaron smiled at the thought of gay, carefree Rebecca mothering a family of three, working in the fields and on construction projects, and finding time for her own painting which an Art News critic had recently called “a revolutionary approach to primitive perception.” Still, he was pleased with her letter and pleased too that it had arrived that day. It was an omen of a kind and he held it in his hand and went into the bedroom to find Katie.
She was stretched out on the bed as he had feared she would be, still wearing her pale-blue coat with the small matching pillbox hat askew on her soft golden curls. Her deep-blue eyes were rimmed with violet circles of fatigue and she stared vacantly up at the ceiling. She had not even bothered to peel off her white gloves which were covered with soot from the Washington journey and her fingers were listlessly intertwined.
Often when Aaron found her like this, he grew angry, almost repelled by what he had come to think of as her selfishness, her emotional sloth. The tyranny of the sick, David had said, and David had been right. Again and again Aaron rebuked himself for such feelings, arguing, with a reasonableness that he did not feel, that Katie could not help herself, but more often his argument was defeated by irritation and anger and he would leave the bedroom, slamming the door sharply. But tonight he sank down beside her on the bed, took her in his arms, removed her small hat—a doll’s hat, really—and gently ran his fingers through her soft hair.
“I’m sorry I wasn’t at Mollie’s funeral,” she said softly. “Was it terrible?”
“You know. Seymour took it very hard. And Jakie and Annie too. But my mother was strong. So strong.” He thought of his mother, tall and erect at the graveside, and remembered how her black suit had fit too loosely, its jacket billowing about her narrow frame. She had lost weight during her sister’s long illness.
“I’m sure she was. Where does Leah get her strength, her control? God, I wish she’d share her secret with me.”
“And you? How did it go with you yesterday?”
“You didn’t see the papers? Of course not. That was big time. The Senator himself. Holy Joe. He spits when he talks. A little-known fact vital to the archives of civil liberties. All his creepy aides keep handkerchiefs handy to wipe up the saliva.”
“They ought to use them to hold their noses. The stench must be awful.”
“It is. The Senator called General Marshall himself an instrument of the Soviet conspiracy. That ought to please Ike.”
“Give him enough rope and he’ll hang himself. But how did you do?”
He hated the dry bitterness of her tone and stroked her hair, Rebecca’s letter still between his fingers. Perhaps he and Katie should visit Israel, eat in the shadow of rose-colored mountains, swim beneath a desert sky, while the sickness that infected their marriage was burned to cinders by the scorching desert sun.
“Oh, I won a motion for adjournment and heard the Senator mumble something about how women lawyers ought to stay home and take shit out of diapers instead of bringing it into court. I almost told him that I’d prefer doing that to wiping his spit off my face.”
“Katie, Katie.” He smiled, stroked her neck, and felt her body relax beneath his touch.
“Oh, Aaron, I’m so tired.” The tension in her voice had melted and he saw, without surprise, the familiar tears, twin lambent droplets, course slowly down her pale cheeks.
“Of course you are.” He pressed her to him. “What we need, what we both need, is a vacation. A long vacation.”
“What kind of vacation?” she asked, her voice limpid, dreamy.
She peele
d off her gloves, let them drop to the floor in small flags of defeat. She unbuttoned her coat and slipped out of it but remained supine on the bed. She wore a white silk blouse and blue skirt that matched her coat. He unbuttoned the blouse and cupped her breast in his hand, gently fondling the nipple, feeling it grow taut and hard beneath his fingers.
“My mother and father are planning a trip to Israel. If we join them it will be a real family reunion—our first in years. Michael and Rebecca are there—all of us would be together. My uncle Moshe, my aunt Henia, and my cousins. I haven’t seen my cousin Yaakov since we were together in Ethiopia. We wouldn’t have to go straight to Israel. Perhaps a few weeks in Greece. Or in Italy.”
She sat up abruptly and pushed his hand away. Small fiery patches dotted her cheeks and her eyes were bright—not with tears but with a surging febrile rage.
“You’re talking about weeks and months. A stopover in Greece. A few weeks in Italy. What world are you living in, Aaron? Have you any idea of what my calendar is like—the number of cases, the number of appearances? This isn’t exactly the season for family reunions!”
“Come off it, Katie.” His anger matched her own now. “My calendar’s just as crowded and there isn’t a case on it that I couldn’t farm out to another lawyer. The same is true for you. The world of civil liberties doesn’t rest on the shoulders of Aaron and Katie Goldfeder.”
“You know damn well there aren’t enough lawyers who handle these cases the way we do. I’ve got to take care of them, Aaron. I’ve promised the clients. I’ve promised myself. There’s so much to do, so much to fight. We can’t live thinking only of ourselves the way my parents and sisters do. We’ve got our jobs to do. We’ve got to make the world right.”
Her small fists pummeled the bed and he saw, through the sheer silk of her blouse, the small flower of rage flash into bloody blossom on her shoulder.
“Katie, Katie.” He repeated her name soothingly, his voice taking on the tone his aunt Mollie had used as an aural panacea through their childhood. Aaron, Aaron. Becca, Becca. Jakey, Jakey. The simple repetition had soothed and smoothed. Mollie, Mollie, he thought and heard again the thud of earth upon her coffin. “We can’t make the world right by ourselves. You know that. We have to think of our lives, of our future, of a family.”
He walked across the room and looked out the window. In the apartment across the way a mother slowly undressed a small girl. She peeled off one sock and then the other. He saw the child’s toes wiggle pinkly and the woman bend to kiss them. Quickly he drew the blinds, strangely pained by the glimpsed intimacy.
“But I haven’t got a family. I want a baby. Don’t give me vacations. Give me a baby!”
She hugged her shoulder and drew her knees up to her chest. Her pale skin was mottled and her body shook as her sobs broke forth in heaving gulps, tears and spittle wetly veiling her face. A wave of fatigue and revulsion broke over him and he turned away so that she would not see the sudden anger that flashed across his face. But he could not silence the words that rushed to his lips.
“Goddamn it! I can’t go through this crap again. I have to be in court early tomorrow. I’ll get some sleep downtown.”
He was drained of patience and of pity. Tonight had not been different and tomorrow night would not be different. Their love, their lives, would drown in the torrents of her tears and her terror. She would not help herself and he could not help her. Rebecca’s letter fell from his hand as he fumbled through the bureau drawers for a change of clothes. He packed swiftly and waited briefly in the hall for her to call out to him. When she did not, he slammed the door behind him. He was down the hall and at the elevator when at last she moaned, in the piteous tones of a small child frightened by a sudden incomprehensible darkness, “Aaron, I’m so scared. Aaron.”
There was no answer and she fell back against the pillow into a heavy lethereal sleep that embraced her like a weary lover.
*
The bedroom was streaked with the gray light of a rain-ridden dawn when Katie awoke, and she sat up abruptly and looked about the room as though seeing it for the first time. She stared at the shadowy outlines of their furnishings—at the desk piled high with books, the bureau on which their silver-framed marriage portrait rested (the sunlight cleaving Aaron’s face in two, severing the smile he turned down to her own serious gaze), the armchair in which he spent long evenings reading, his lean form radiant in the soft light of the reading lamp. They seemed to her unfamiliar objects and she struggled toward a memory of how they had been acquired—relieved when she recalled the day they had found the large mahogany desk at a Vermont antique auction. Always on such mornings she searched for such scraps of reality to root her firmly in the new and dreaded day. She shivered in the morning chill and saw, with vague surprise, that she still wore her skirt and blouse and had slept without troubling to slide beneath the blankets. She remembered then what had happened the night before and in the morning stillness she heard again her own words, Aaron’s fierce reply. She remembered the slamming of the door as he left and she knew with grievous certainty that when he left a dangerous border had been crossed. It was the first time that he had turned from her during such a time of darkness, the first time that he had not tried to calm and cajole her out of the desperate arguments born of her despair. But if he had left her once, he would leave her again. And in the harsh light of a new morning, she did not blame him, she could not blame him.
Slowly she eased herself up, stripped off her clothes, and left them in a careless pile on the floor. In the bathroom she allowed the water to run until threads of steam clouded the mirror and then she stood for a long time beneath the hot spray of the shower as though its heat might scald away her misery. Very slowly she washed herself, using the lemon-shaped soap her mother sent her each month from the Dryades market so that her skin always breathed the fragrance shared by her mother and sisters as they sat beneath the fig trees in their gardens, played endless games of cards, and talked in the soft, unhurried accents of ease and acceptance. She washed her hair too, using Aaron’s shampoo, and when she stepped out of the shower she wrapped herself in his white terrycloth robe which smelled lightly of his body and wiped her cheek dry with the belt, relishing its roughness against her skin. She pressed his robe tighter, sniffed a tendril of her hair that smelled of him, of the dark damp hours of their love, of his body close upon her own. She called the office but there was no answer. Probably he had gone out to breakfast or perhaps over to Joshua Ellenberg’s lavish suite of offices to shower and shave, to breakfast on the china dishes which Joshua had had engraved with his monogram.
“Aaron, I’m sorry,” she said aloud to the empty room, rehearsing a speech to be delivered at a distant hour when lights were dimmed and soft music played in soothing, narcotizing segues. But this time soft lights, soft words, would not be enough, she knew. They had entered a new time which would require new words, new actions.
She stooped to pick up her soiled clothing and found Rebecca’s letter, a tissue-thin green sheet of paper, lying on the floor. She read it through and thought of how simple life was for this unknown sister-in-law, for Leah’s daughter who had inherited Leah’s strength, her gifts and sense of purpose. Rebecca worked on a dining hall and it was built. She helped with the planting of a crop and it was harvested. She stood with brush and palette before an easel and a painting evolved. She did not work with amorphous words, struggling with abstract concepts, excising small nuggets of reason from a heavy lodestone of law. She did not yearn to be a mother, then abort the small life that struggled within her womb. Lucky Rebecca. Poor Katie and poor Aaron. Poor, poor Aaron.
In the kitchen she made herself breakfast, carefully measuring out cereal and milk, boiling an egg, brewing coffee, waiting patiently for the golden toast to soar up from the stainless-steel depths of the toaster. The domestic routine soothed her and she felt a new calm, a new control. But when she had set the food neatly on the table before her, she could not eat. A nausea gripped her a
nd she remembered that she had barely eaten the previous day. She managed to down her juice and half a cup of coffee and went into the bedroom to lie down. The phone rang and she did not reach for it but allowed herself to drift into a half-sleep.
When she awoke her body was coated with a damp veil of sweat and her hand swung wildly toward the silent telephone. She knew that she had missed an urgent call and the loss was profound, irrevocable. Again a wave of nausea coursed over her and she ran to the bathroom and vomited up the juice and coffee which she had forced herself to drink.
A small vial of yellow-jacketed pills stood in the medicine chest, given to her by Dr. Hernandez as he checked her for the last time before she left Puerto Rico. “Nembutal,” the pharmacist’s label read, and the cadence of the word soothed her. It was the only comfort the doctor had offered her during that long weekend of silence and pain. He did not believe in abortions, he had told her, as his rubber-gloved finger probed her womb and found the shielded embryo huddled within it. Abortions were an affront to his religion. She too did not believe in abortions. They were an affront to her desire. Yet together, in the sterile white room, with the hot Caribbean sun piercing the shaded window, a seabird screaming wildly from across the nearby beach, they had become partners in this act which they mutually disavowed. Perhaps a ghostly Dr. Hernandez had performed the abortion just as a ghostly Katie Goldfeder had undergone it.
From a safe distance, her real self had watched her strange penumbric twin make the arrangements, get the name of the Puerto Rican doctor from her father-in-law’s friend, and juggle bank accounts so that Aaron, inveterately careless about money, would not notice the $1,000 shortage. Her real self had frowned in disappointment, offered arguments, even wept as the plane carried her through skies of brilliant blue in which families of careless clouds chased each other. But her real self had been defeated and had fashioned that defeat into a shadowy memory which had lost both shape and substance so that she often, with exquisite ease, forgot she had ever journeyed to Puerto Rico and cursed her husband because no life came to her womb, choosing at that moment to forget the life that had been destroyed within it.
Leah's Journey Page 47
