“There can’t be a sane nuclear policy. It’s a contradiction in terms,” argued pretty Melanie Reznikoff, but Michael continued to solicit signatures for petitions. He had inherited his parents’ penchant for lighting small candles against the encroaching darkness. He silenced Melanie by putting on a record, and they danced to the strains of Elvis Presley’s throaty desperation.
He had met Melanie on a registration line his first week at Berkeley. They had looked familiar to each other, and within minutes they each had remembered their first meeting. Katie, Aaron’s first wife, had been Melanie’s cousin, and she and Michael had spent time together in New Orleans during the week of the wedding. They had been teenagers then, had kissed gently, shyly, beneath the fig tree in the garden of the Reznikoff house on Corondolet Street. Now, years later at Berkeley, they were young adults, and they made love gently, shyly, in Melanie’s studio apartment. Twice, during their four years together, Melanie had told him that she had fallen in love with someone else—once with a married history professor who, in the end, would not leave his wife, and once with a graduate student of literature whose incessant recitations of Yeats had finally bored her to distraction. Each time she had returned to Michael, and he had dutifully comforted her and thought that it was a shame they were not in love with each other.
Despite the distance between them, Michael had remained in close touch with the family. Aaron occasionally came to California on business, and Lydia had visited Berkeley for academic conferences. Michael was fond of his sister-in-law and proud of her. He enjoyed introducing her to his friends, who recognized her stately beauty and acknowledged her accomplishments. He admired the life that Aaron and Lydia had built together, the careful balance they sustained between career and family. It seemed to Michael that they sensed each other’s moods, predicted actions and reactions, Once he had visited them and watched as they sat together on the terrace of their home. Lydia’s pale hand covered Aaron’s fingers and then caressed them. Aaron lifted the long dark sheaves of her hair and pressed them to his lips. Michael watched them wonderingly, like a viewer at an exhibition, bemused by the elusive beauty of a painting. He had been in New York when Paulette, their daughter, was born, and he had seen the tears glitter in Aaron’s eyes as he held the baby.
Rebecca had been visiting then, and they had stood together and watched their brother with his newborn daughter.
“Daddy cried when you were born,” Rebecca said. “I remember that.”
Her voice had been wistful, as though she wondered still whether their father had cried at her birth as well.
Rebecca’s skin had been bronzed by the constant impact of the desert sun, and strands of silver glittered in her curly dark hair. She had brought several new paintings with her for Charles Ferguson’s appraisal, and Michael saw that she no longer painted in bright primary colors but now used more muted tones. She gave Lydia a landscape for the nursery—the desert at the sunset hour, haunted by long, strangely shaped shadows. Lydia, however, had hung it in Aaron’s study. It was too sad a painting for a baby’s room.
“Tell me about Berkeley,” Rebecca had said wistfully. “I’ve never been to California.”
Michael had wondered at the melancholy that trailed his sister, whose life, unlike his own, was so directed, so clearly defined. There had been no time for a trip west, although he had suggested it. Her visit to America had been brief, made possible by Yehuda’s participation in a conference at Harvard on civil resistance movements. Yehuda’s paper dealt with terrorism. The reception of his arguments had saddened and discouraged him.
“It’s strange,” he said ruefully. “Even with all that is happening in Algeria, the explosion of plastiques, the random kidnappings—there is still no recognition that terror is going to be the primary enemy of democracies in this decade.”
“Perhaps it’s because in this country we’ve been relatively free of any such threat,” Michael countered.
“Michael, the Ku Klux Klan is a terrorist organization,” Yehuda said. “Until now it’s confined itself to scattered cross-burnings, to lynchings. But once the Klan realize that Martin Luther King and his followers are not going to be frightened away, they’ll expand their activities. There will be a wave of terror in the South.”
“You don’t understand this country. It can’t happen here,” Leah said firmly.
Yehuda did not argue with her. Leah’s belief in American democracy was unshakable. She had the reverence of the immigrant for her adopted country. There were no pogroms here, no government-endorsed acts of violence. Of course there were injustices, but in time they would be rectified; Martin Luther King would prevail, this was, after all, the United States.
Deftly, Yehuda changed the subject.
“I should like to hear more about Berkeley,” he said to Michael. “Are there many Arab students there? From what countries do they come? Do you know many of them?” His questions were casual, but Michael knew that his answers would find their way into the small green notebook Yehuda always carried.
“Oh, stop, Yehuda,” Rebecca had said. “This is a family gathering, not an interrogation.”
She knew that Yehuda was always on the alert, always scavenging for scraps of information that might somehow, sometime, prove useful. She shot him a warning glance and showed her family snapshots of the children. Admiringly, they studied the color prints of Yaakov playing in front of the kibbutz children’s house (not far from the spot where David Goldfeder had been killed, Aaron thought as he passed the picture to Lydia); of Amnon, the baby, asleep beneath the avocado tree, his rounded face dappled by the slender leaves; of Noam pruning a vine, and of Danielle and Mindell in leotards. Michael observed that Mindell, who had lived with the Arnons since her arrival in Israel, had grown into a startling beauty. Her honey-colored hair hung to her waist, and her full lips curved into a warm and wondrous smile. Only a vague sadness in her eyes revealed her as the frightened, skeletal child whom Yehuda and Rebecca had rescued from Europe and smuggled into Palestine. She was a medical student now, at the Hebrew University, Rebecca told them proudly.
Back at Berkeley he told Melanie about Rebecca and her life in Israel.
“Too parochial,” Melanie said decisively. “I want to do something for humanity, not just for the Jewish people.”
“They’re not mutually exclusive,” Michael retorted dryly.
He and Melanie traveled to San Francisco and sat on uncomfortable stools in the Six Gallery, drinking warm red wine and listening to a bearded poet from New York named Allen Ginsberg read a long poem called “Howl.” Michael emptied his glass as Ginsberg mourned “…the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked…”
Ginsberg and his disciples frightened Michael. “Beats,” they called themselves, but he judged them beaten. He shied away from their threatening anger, the visceral contempt they heaped upon the world. He believed, still, that he could make a difference. (On account of you, Mr. Goldfeder, Jared Parks had said. On account of you said it could be done.) Vigorously, impatiently, he worked on his thesis: “The Integration Patterns of Eastern European Jewish Immigrants into American Society: Circa 1920.” It did not occur to him until he was deep into his research that he had selected the year of his family’s arrival in the United States. He was chronicling his own history. He completed his writing in record time.
The examiners at his defense had been impressed. A distinguished emeritus observed that he had written with both accuracy and passion—rare qualities in doctoral dissertations.
“I suppose I had a peculiar involvement,” Michael had explained. “The immigrant experience is part of my personal history.”
The assembled academics glanced quizzically at each other. What had the immigrant experience to do with this tall, personable young man in his J. Press suit, button-down shirt, and the striped orange-and-black tie of his Ivy League alma mater? Still, they knew that young people romanticized obscure and dramatic origins. They smiled and passed on his dissertation wi
th enough superlatives to earn him a teaching appointment at Hutchinson College, a small but prestigious woman’s school in southern Westchester. He relaxed and waited for commencement. He had decided to attend, although in the end Leah did not come to Berkeley.
“If you don’t want me to come, there is no point to it,” she said reluctantly in a final phone call. “I’m designing a new line for Joshua, and Lydia is due to give birth any day. Perhaps you’re right. It’s just as well that I stay in New York.”
“I think that’s best.” His tone was even, and he found himself unable to account for the profound disappointment that stole over him. He realized then that he had, after all, wanted his mother to be in the audience when he rose in cap and gown to become Dr. Michael Goldfeder. The second Dr. Goldfeder.
Melanie had come instead, and there had, after all, been a euphoric quality to that commencement day. How different this class of 1960 was from the sober, silent men who had stood beside him at Princeton. His California classmates radiated energy and determination. Bright buttons jeweled their academic gowns, advertising their beliefs, their priorities. They were for free speech, civil rights, John Kennedy, and Adlai Stevenson. They advocated the banning of the bomb and open universities. The women graduates wore garlands of flowers. Several were pregnant, and at least one carried a baby in her arms. The new decade, the sixties, belonged to them. The future was theirs, and they would make it work. Another generation had created the bomb; they would control and harness it. Another generation had perpetuated racial injustice; they would reverse it. Their battle lines were generational and clearly drawn.
They were full of joy and optimism that commencement morning. Les Anderson had concealed a magnum of champagne within the voluminous folds of his academic gown, and they had toasted one another exuberantly, waving the thin leather portfolios that contained their new degrees. Melanie had taken them all back to her apartment afterward for a celebration meal of chicken cooked in wine and spinach salad. They all drank too much wine and discussed their plans for the coming year. Melanie was uncertain. She wanted to do something that would be meaningful, she told them plaintively. “I’m tired of taking. I want to give.”
Les laughed, but Michael understood her. She articulated his own yearnings, his misgivings about accepting the job at Hutchinson. It was an academic plum, he knew, but he, too, wanted to do something beyond teaching the daughters of privilege on a well-manicured campus. Again, foolishly, irrationally, he envied his brother and sister.
Jeremy Cohen, a native Californian (the only one in all of California, he said jokingly), was to intern at a municipal hospital in New York, and Les had landed a job at a national magazine as an investigative reporter.
“What the hell is an investigative reporter?” Michael had asked when Les told him about the job and suggested that they all room together in New York.
“Probably a glorified copy boy,” Les acknowledged. “But it’s going to get me to New York.”
Tall, blond Les had spent years running away from the Kentucky mining town of his childhood. New York was his Emerald City, and the Berkeley degree was the last stop on the yellow brick road that led there. He had grown up in a dingy apartment behind the company store that his parents ran. The Sears catalogue and the Bible had been the companions of his childhood and Thomas Wolfe’s novels the lexicons of his adolescence. New York meant an escape from ignorance and bigotry, from poverty and narrowness. Once he had asked his mother why the Negro women who bought their dresses in the store could not try them on. She had looked at him in amazement. “They got this funny stuff on their skin. You can’t see it, but it’s there.” He had not argued with her. Instinctively, he had known that any argument was pointless. Once he had asked his father if they could spend a day in Cincinnati. There were museums there, a university, a great library. “So what?” the shopkeeper had replied indifferently. Les had not persisted. His father’s limitations had been revealed, and Les had never again suggested a trip, initiated a conversation. He went to Cincinnati alone at last, having earned a scholarship to the university. And then there were journalism prizes, a Berkeley fellowship, and now, at last, the job in New York. The Kentucky hick was about to conquer the world’s greatest metropolis. And he was one step ahead of Thomas Wolfe. He had no desire ever to go home again. Sometimes, he could not clearly remember what his parents looked like.
Melanie had baked a chocolate cake in the shape of a mortarboard.
“The New Orleans touch,” she had said. “My heritage.”
Michael heard the bitterness in her voice. Melanie, too, would not go home again. They were all on the fringe of new lives then, all wanderers in search of a cause.
It had been very late when he left, and that night, too, the phone had been ringing as he entered his apartment building, but he had bounded up the steps and caught the call. It had been his mother.
“Lydia had a little boy,” she said breathlessly. “A beautiful baby. Aaron is so excited. Isn’t that marvelous, Michael?”
“Wonderful,” he said, but he felt no joy. “How did Paulette react?”
Michael adored impish Paulette, whose hair nestled in dark ringlets about her delicately molded head. Her turquoise eyes were like small jewels, and her ruddy complexion matched Michael’s own coloring.
“Oh, Paulette’s as pleased as Rebecca was when you were born. She thinks David is a doll that she will be able to play with.”
“David?” he repeated heavily.
“Yes. They named the baby for your father. I thought you’d be pleased.”
“I am,” he said, but a quiver of disappointment ran through him. His own father’s name had been claimed by his half-brother’s child. Swiftly, his disappointment was replaced by shame. Aaron had been through so much, and David Goldfeder had been the only father he had ever known. Michael could not (and would not, he vowed silently) begrudge his brother his late-found happiness.
“Listen, Mom,” he had said. “Tell Lydia and Aaron that I’m happy for them and that I can’t wait to hug my new nephew.”
“I’ll tell them.”
Leah hung up then, and he realized that she had not asked him about the commencement or congratulated him on receiving his degree. The birth of Aaron’s child had eclipsed his own achievement.
Now, days later, as he sat on the worn couch and stared at the empty cartons, the phone rang again. He placed a single book into a carton, congratulated himself on having made a beginning, and answered it. It was Melanie, and as always, her voice bubbled with excitement.
“Michael, did you just come in? I’ve been trying you for hours.”
“I had things to do.” (Why, he wondered, was he so curt with Melanie lately and why did she tolerate it? Jeremy Cohen had noticed it. He had seen his friend frown at the abrupt tone he used and rush in to comfort Melanie and speak gently to her.) Immediately he felt apologetic. “Anything special?”
“I’m having a party tonight to celebrate the Kennedy victory.”
“It was just the primary,” Michael said. “Which, by the way, he barely won.”
“Oh, come on, Michael.” When Melanie wanted something her southern accent grew thicker and her voice became cajoling. He imagined her pouting, sucking on a strand of her light brown hair. She was a cute girl, a good girl. He wished that he loved her and wondered occasionally if he would have been drawn to Melanie at all if she had not been Katie’s cousin. Would he always trail after Aaron, seeking the elusive drama of his brother’s life?
He wondered, sometimes, if he subconsciously sought a lover whose past was as dramatic as Lydia’s. He had attended Lydia’s Berkeley lectures, and while he had not understood the material, he had recognized the admiration and respect she received from the audience. She was a regal presence on the podium; the pointer she waved majestically across her charts and drawings was a scepter. She accepted questions with the patience of a benevolent regent. Yet, back in his student apartment, she relaxed and laughed with Michael and his frien
ds, charming everyone with her warmth, the musical cadence of her voice.
“Berkeley is wonderful,” she told Michael. “The warmth, the intellectual excitement, the parties.” She admired all that had been denied her during her own troubled student years in Budapest. “You must take every opportunity, Michael. These are the years of your youth. They will not come again.” She was thinking of Paul, he knew, and he touched her hand with understanding, with unarticulated sympathy.
It occurred to him now that Lydia would want him to accept Melanie’s invitation.
“All right, Melanie. I’ll come to the party.”
“Nine o’clock, and bring some beer.”
“I think JFK’s more of a champagne man,” he said, “but if you want beer, I’ll bring beer.”
“Thanks, Michael. And listen, I invited this girl I met when I worked at the child-care center. Be nice to her. She won’t know anyone there.”
“I’m nice to everyone,” Michael said easily. “But I’ll be especially nice to her. What’s her name and what does she look like?”
“Her name’s Kemala Jackson. She’s very beautiful. Tall and sort of ballerina-thin. She wears her hair in a long braid down her back.” Melanie hesitated. “And she’s black.”
Had he imagined it, or had Melanie raised her voice in a decibel of defiance when she said “black”? Melanie, he knew, was self-conscious about the civil rights struggle as only a southern liberal could be. She was burdened with shame and guilt (as Katie had been, he remembered) and determined to reverse the tide. A picture of Martin Luther King hung over her desk and a canister for King’s new Southern Christian Leadership Conference stood on her kitchen counter. Her name appeared on every civil rights petition that circulated on campus, and she could always be counted on to attend a rally, to buy a block of tickets for a benefit performance. But still, she felt a strange uneasiness when a black sat beside her in class or approached her at a party. A southerner’s uneasiness. Once, Melanie had confessed to Michael, a black girl had borrowed her comb and she had thrown it away afterward. Good, generous Melanie, Michael thought, to seek out Kemala Jackson and invite her to a party. Maybe Kennedy and the sixties did mean a new beginning, a turnaround. Maybe his infant nephew David Goldfeder would grow up in a world in which blacks and whites talked and shared easily with each other. A modest enough goal.
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