Leah's Children

by Gloria Goldreich

  His heart had splintered at leaving her again, and yet he was glad to return to Hutchinson, to the cool of fall afternoons and the sound of his own voice talking calmly, steadily, to young women who listened to him with upturned faces and took copious, competent notes.

  He plotted his next lecture for his class in the sociology of religion, as he strode across the campus, so absorbed in his thoughts that he did not hear the hurrying footsteps of the young woman behind him.

  “Dr. Goldfeder, may I speak to you for a moment?” Her voice was breathless, and when he turned he saw that she was familiar. He had perhaps met her, and certainly he had seen her before. She was a pretty woman whose pale brown hair fell to her shoulders in a careful pageboy and whose green eyes matched her linen shirtdress.

  “I know we’ve met,” he said, “but I just can’t seem to remember where or how.”

  “Of course you can’t,” she said, smiling. “We met at the opening tea for the faculty, and you were probably introduced to about twenty new people. I’m Elaine Handler, and I’ll be teaching the introductory courses in sociology.”

  “Oh yes, I remember now. University of Chicago. You did your dissertation on Weber, I think.”

  “Actually on Weber’s influence on C. Wright Mills,” she said, and a blush colored her cheeks. Immediately, he liked her for that blush.

  “Yes, I remember now,” he said. “I’d like to read it sometime if I may.”

  “I’ll leave a copy at the library for you. But actually, I wanted to ask you about my classes. I know you taught one of them last year, and I wondered if I could show you my outline.”

  “Of course. How about tonight, over dinner?”

  The invitation surprised him almost as much as it seemed to surprise her. He had planned to have dinner with Les and Jeremy and to spend the evening writing a long letter to Kemala. And yet, suddenly, he was pleased at the thought of sitting opposite Elaine Handler in the small Chinese restaurant on East Broadway. He would introduce her to cold sesame noodles, to broccoli in hot garlic sauce, and they would talk of C. Wright Mills and of Max Weber and of Hans Gerth, the translator of one and the friend of the other. It had been a long time since he had spent an evening with a colleague, and Elaine Handler was a very pretty colleague.

  “All right,” she said, after the briefest hesitation.

  It developed that evening that she already knew about cold sesame noodles. She shared his passion for Chinese food and also his passion for chamber music and Humphrey Bogart. It was so late when they began discussing her syllabus that they immediately made a date for a weekend evening. She lived in SoHo, and he walked back to his Eldridge Street flat, whistling happily, after seeing her home. He did not write to Kemala that night.

  He saw Elaine frequently during the weeks that followed. He was not surprised that her background was not too dissimilar to his own. Her grandparents had been Polish Jews who settled in the Midwest, and her father still ran the shoe factory founded by her grandfather. His dream had been to see his children achieve academic success. Her two older brothers had dutifully gone off to medical school and become doctors, and she, less dutifully, had been drawn to sociology for reasons that matched Michael’s own.

  “Social structure fascinates me,” she said. “The way society organizes itself, establishes its traditions, its priorities. The more we understand, the more we can reverse injustices. It’s happening already—the woman’s movement, the civil rights movement.”

  “I know.” Her understanding exhilarated him. “Your father must be proud of you,” he said.

  “Not as proud as he would be if I would just settle down and get married,” she replied.

  “Oh, does he have anyone in particular in mind?”

  “A nice Jewish boy like you,” she said, laughing.

  “And my mother wouldn’t mind a nice Jewish girl like you,” he admitted.

  “What are we waiting for?” she asked.

  “We’re too young,” he said wryly, and they burst into spontaneous laughter. They were having dinner that evening at a Chinese restaurant in celebration of Michael’s twenty-eighth birthday. As they walked to her apartment, through the deserted streets of lower Manhattan, he told her about Kemala.

  “I’m not surprised,” she said quietly. “I knew there had to be someone.” She had seen Michael start uneasily when the phone in his apartment rang. She had noticed how a filter of sadness slid across his face, how he distanced himself from her suddenly and inexplicably.

  “Does it make a difference?” he asked.

  “Not for now. No.” She had a quiet faith in her own powers, in the ease and attraction they shared. Kemala was in Mississippi—a breathless, conflicted voice on the telephone. Elaine saw Michael each day at Hutchinson, spent evenings with him. When he kissed her that night, her body was soft and yielding against his own. He remembered, with a pang of disloyalty, that Kemala had always been wiry with tension in his arms.

  Aaron gave a party, and Michael brought Elaine. His family liked her. She helped Lydia in the kitchen, played with the children, talked with Leah and Boris about the acculturation of the Russian Jews who were arriving in America.

  Aaron told them about the legal clinic he had visited that week. Lawyers were joining together to protect young men who were resisting the draft because they opposed the war in Vietnam.

  “Did you volunteer your time?” Elaine asked.

  “Not yet,” he replied. “I’m not sure where I stand. I’m opposed to the war, but then there were Americans who were opposed to World War Two. What if there had been substantial draft resistance then? There’s an excruciatingly fine line between conscience and national responsibility.” He held his hands out as though weighing the alternatives. Always Aaron struggled for fairness and equity, and, in the end, always his decisions were based on hard-earned clarity and consideration. Such qualities had not gone unrecognized. It was rumored that he would soon be proposed for a judgeship.

  “My hesitations come from a different discipline,” Elaine volunteered. “As a sociologist I think we have to be very careful about undermining a basic social structure.”

  “But that might be what German soldiers said when they did not resist service in the forces of the Reich,” Lydia protested. “Of course I speak subjectively because I was involved in the undermining of such a social structure. Sometimes one has no choice.”

  “But that’s just the point,” Michael said. “In this country there is a choice.”

  The discussion was considered and probing, without the passion and anger that a similar discussion with Kemala would have engendered, Michael thought. He felt vaguely disloyal and tried to call her in Mississippi that night, but she was not home.

  Elaine moved among Michael’s family and friends as though she had known them forever. They liked her and were comfortable with her.

  “Michael’s friend Elaine is just lovely,” Michael overheard his mother tell Rebecca on the phone, and he knew that his sister and Yehuda would like her.

  How easy it would be, he thought, to marry her and live with her calmly, peacefully, as Aaron lived with Lydia. Shared lives, shared work. How pretty she looked tonight in the jade-colored dress that matched her eyes, her light brown hair sweeping her shoulder.

  “I like her,” Leah said to him, her mother-eyes raking his face for secrets, pleading for him to be happy.

  “I do too.”

  He and Elaine left early that night, and Leah and Boris stood in the doorway and watched them drive off.

  “I told you Michael would be all right,” Boris said.

  “Do you think so?”

  “They’re so well matched.”

  “Yes. Yes, they are.” She had watched her son and Elaine laugh together, had seen them engaged in earnest discussion over an academic point, their heads bent close, their fingers touching.

  “And we—we, too, are well matched,” Boris said.

  Leah looked at him, this gentle aging man who had endured s
o much and who understood her so well. She held her hands out to him, and he pressed them gently to his lips.

  leah AND BORIS scheduled their wedding for the following month—a quiet ceremony at Leah’s home. Michael, Aaron, and Lydia were pleased by the news, and Rebecca, whom they phoned in Israel, promised that she and Yehuda would arrange to be there.

  “A holiday this time,” Rebecca said firmly. “This visit will not include one of those damn conferences or fact-finding missions.”

  But two weeks before the wedding, Noam Arnon, whose hair was the color of winter wheat and whose eyes were silken gray, like those of Yehuda, his father, took a walk in the upper Galilee with his friend Yair. He had received a leather-covered watch as a gift to mark both his eighteenth birthday and his induction into the army, and it was not running well. He was studying it as he walked, and he did not notice the odd movement in the roadside overgrowth and thus did not move swiftly enough to avoid the bullet that pierced his right temple. He was killed instantly, his face frozen in an expression of comprehension, as though at the moment of his death he had at last solved the problem of his timepiece.

  Rebecca phoned Leah. Her voice was strangled with grief. She wept softly into the phone. Noam had been like a son to her; she had nurtured him from boyhood to young manhood.

  “He only wanted to make things grow,” she said, and her voice broke. “He loved flowers,” she added, as though somehow a reverence for blossoms, for delicate growing things, should have kept him safe from violence, protected him from death.

  Leah held the phone and wept because eighteen-year-old Noam was dead and because Rebecca was in pain, and she was powerless to comfort her.

  “You must be strong, Rebecca,” she said with all the firmness she could muster, although tears streaked her cheeks, “for Yehuda and for the other children.”

  “I’ll try,” Rebecca said. “Oh, I’ll try.”

  She came to America alone for the wedding, her face ravaged with grief and loss. Yehuda remained in Israel. He lay awake for hours each night, and during the day she was frightened because he walked alone in the desert. Fear shadowed her eyes, slowed her steps. Her eyes filled suddenly, inexplicably, when she saw Aaron walking in the garden with his children.

  “Listen to me,” Leah said to her, one night as they sat together before the dying fire, “you must grieve, but you must not surrender to grief. You must go on. As I went on.”

  She held Rebecca’s hands tightly, as though to infuse her with new strength.

  The next day Rebecca visited Charles Ferguson’s gallery. She studied his new acquisitions, talked of the possibility of an exhibition of her own work. Her mother was right. Noam was dead, but their lives would go on. Each day brought her new strength, new courage.

  On the morning of the wedding day, Rebecca wakened in her girlhood room and was filled with gladness because the sun shone brightly and a cardinal perched impudently on a branch of the maple tree. She wished, with febrile urgency, that Yehuda could have been with her so that she might somehow infuse him with the new hope she had so mysteriously discovered.

  Leah and Boris were married at the twilight hour. Leah’s children watched Boris Zaslovsky slip a plain gold ring on their mother’s finger. The ring that David Goldfeder had purchased from an Odessa goldsmith so long ago was passed on to Rebecca, who would give it to the first of her children to marry—or perhaps to Mindell, who had been bereft of all legacy.

  Boris stepped on the glass wrapped in white linen, crushing it with a vigorous stamp. The room echoed with happiness. Lisa Ellenberg clapped her hands and whirled small Paulette in celebratory dance. Aaron and Michael hugged each other. Lydia and Sherry clutched Leah’s hands, kissed her. Leah felt herself a young woman again, a radiant bride poised at the edge of a new life. She linked arms with Boris, who stared at her as though dazed by the mystery of his own good fortune.

  Joshua Ellenberg, ever sensitive to Rebecca, moved to stand beside her and gently kissed her on the forehead.

  “Mazel tov, Becca,” he said.

  Elaine, moving across the room toward Michael, saw that tears filled Rebecca Arnon’s eyes even as she hurried to join the rest of the family in the traditional wedding hora.

  Michael told Kemala about the wedding on the phone. She did not come to New York, although fall had drifted into winter and it was months since he had seen her. There was too much work to do. Her voice was weary and irritable and then tearful and apologetic. Her letters were brief, yet he opened each with trembling fingers, and always, after he spoke with her, his throat was dry and his body ached with longing. He avoided Elaine after such calls, and she asked him no questions, did not press him.

  He took Elaine to a Miriam Makeba concert at Town Hall. The audience, black and white, young and old, was enthusiastic. They linked hands as they sang the hymns. They laughed as they tried to sing “The Click Song.” The lights went on at intermission, and he stared into the well of the orchestra. Matt Williams, strangely elegant in a camel’s hair jacket and a blue shirt, studied his program. Kemala, to whom Michael had spoken only two nights before (“I can’t stay on the phone too long…we’re so swamped here I can’t breathe…how can I even think of coming to New York?”—her voice strained, annoyed), sat beside him. Elaine noticed Michael’s swift intake of breath, followed his eyes.

  “That’s Kemala?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  “She’s very beautiful.”

  Kemala’s glossy silken braid was wound about her head to form a graceful coronet. She wore a brightly patterned orange-and-green African dress that hugged her narrow body. He waited for them at the aisle, his heart pounding.

  “Michael!” Fear (or sadness? or apology?) flashed in her golden eyes. “The idea of coming north was all so last-minute that I didn’t call you. And besides, there wouldn’t have been time to see you—meetings, planning sessions. Matt’s speaking to Miriam about a nationwide television show—all sorts of things.”

  “All sorts of things,” Matt Williams echoed sardonically. He seemed more amused than perturbed by the meeting.

  Kemala laughed nervously, turned her hands up in mock despair. Michael looked down at the curve of her lifeline where once he had written his name, and introduced Elaine. And then Matt and Kemala were rushed out in a flurry of apologies. They could not even stay for the second half of the concert. There was a press conference, an organizational meeting, an anticipated phone call from Martin Luther King—she would call him, write him. He saw the bright fabric of her dress disappear into the crowd and felt his heart grow heavy with bewilderment. Elaine’s hand on his arm was gentle; her touch was tentative and cognitive of his pain.

  He slept with her that night. She was sweet and soothing, and carefully avoided the parameters of his sadness. She kissed his eyes and slept with her head upon his chest, her long hair silken on his arms. She did not mention Kemala.

  Kemala called him twice that week. Her voice quivered with anguish.

  “You’re not angry, Michael? It couldn’t be helped. I didn’t know I was coming myself.”

  He did not believe her, but the misery in her voice compelled his forgiveness. Her fear of his disbelief mitigated his sense of betrayal. He reminded himself that she had suffered so much and that always he himself had been so sheltered. With agonizing delicacy he arranged and rearranged emotional scales. She sent him a letter enclosing dried gentians and trillium. Carefully, he put them in his wallet, concealing them behind her picture.

  Les Anderson rented a ski house in Vermont, and Elaine and Michael spent weekends there. After a day on the slopes Elaine’s cheeks were bright and her eyes blazed emerald-green. During the evenings they worked. He wrote a monograph, and she made small but vital corrections. Often he did not think of Kemala for days at a time, but he dreamed of her. With Elaine lying beside him, he dreamed of walking with Kemala through a forest dark with danger, carpeted with flowers that had lost both color and fragrance.

  Elaine called to t
ell him that her parents were coming to New York. She wanted Michael to meet them, to have dinner with them.

  “It’s important to me,” she said shyly.

  “But I want to meet them,” he assured her. “When?”

  “Saturday night. At seven.”

  “Fine.”

  He bought a bottle of good wine and wrapped a batik wall hanging of his mother’s design as a gift. At five o’clock on that Saturday afternoon the phone rang. Kemala. She was at LaGuardia Airport. Someone from the coordinating committee had been scheduled to meet her but had not shown up. She had cartons of mimeographed material and no money, and she felt sick. Her voice was laced with weariness, and she whispered into the phone.

  “Can you come and get me, Michael?”

  He heard the desperation in her voice. She was so alone. She had been so often abandoned. Love and pity swept over him, tinged by anger. He recognized and ignored the anger.

  “I’ll be there, Kemala.”

  He called Elaine.

  “Michael!” His name uttered with gladness, without demand. In the background her parents talked softly. He heard the clink of china. Her mother was setting the table.

  “I can’t come.”

  She was silent. He heard her breathe hard as though recoiling from the impact of his words.

  “Is it Kemala?” she asked at last.

  “Yes.”

  “Goodbye, Michael. Don’t call me again.”

  “Elaine—”

  But she had hung up, and he did not call back. Instead he hurried because Kemala was waiting at the airport, alone and ill. Beautiful, sad-eyed Kemala who inhabited his heart like an adhering shadow.

  Elaine did not return to Hutchinson for the next semester. She went to London University to do research and then to a small mid-western university. More than a year later he received a marriage announcement in the mail. Her husband was a Dr. Martin Levenson. Michael studied the stiff white card and ran his fingers across the raised lettering. He hoped that Martin Levenson deserved Elaine Handler. He was suffused with sadness and regret, gripped by an almost palpable sense of loss. The monograph Elaine had helped him with was on his desk. Her corrections were lightly written in pencil.