Leah's Children

by Gloria Goldreich

  “Who is that boy, Rebecca?”

  Lisa Ellenberg, wearing the inevitable uniform of jeans and black turtleneck sweater, stood beside her and studied Noam’s portrait with an intense gaze. Joshua’s tall, bright-haired daughter looked pale and tired. She had spent the afternoon at the Coalition offices, sorting through photographs from Vietnam. It was almost certain that Martin Luther King would announce plans for a Vietnam summer, and the Coalition wanted to be ready with a massive photographic display that could be shipped from city to city as demonstrations were launched.

  Lisa’s eyes had grown bloodshot and weary, looking at pictures of weeping, displaced youngsters, of mothers stupefied by grief, staring down at the bodies of their dead children. Staring at the black-and-white prints of maimed adolescents who smiled shyly, trustingly, at the camera and displayed the stump of a mutilated arm, a clumsily bandaged foot, she had longed to hurry back to her room at Hutchinson College, to the solace of the small white pills that calmed her and the gem-colored capsules that revitalized her. But she had promised that she would make an appearance at Rebecca’s opening, and Lisa always kept her promises. She was a good girl who always met her deadlines, produced good grades, and smiled brightly at her father because she knew that Joshua Ellenberg could not sustain the burden of her sadness.

  “That is—was—Noam, my stepson, as a boy,” Rebecca replied. “He was killed three years ago in a border incident.” The calm of her own voice as she spoke of Noam surprised her. Had she lived for so long at the edge of death that she had become inured to it? No. Of course not. She grieved for Noam every day, felt his loss, the sad waste of his young life. Even as Lydia, who approached them now, grieved for Paul.

  They were bereft but not defeated. Lydia had survived her losses and created a new life for herself. She approached them now with a purposeful gait, her face bright with pride. Rebecca’s paintings caught the spirit of Israel. She kissed Rebecca and smiled at Lisa, with whom she felt a special affinity. Like Lisa, she, too, had once thought to change the world. She strained to hear Lisa’s words. The girl’s voice was very quiet.

  “War,” Lisa said. “Goddamn war. So insane for anyone to go to war.”

  “But sometimes necessary,” Lydia interjected gently.

  “Never,” Lisa protested. “War is of our choosing. If we said no—one mighty no—if we all worked for peace, there would be an end to it.”

  “And what if we are not given the choice?” Rebecca persisted. “Noam, you know, was not given a choice.” Nor would her own sons have a choice—gentle Yaakov and willful Amnon. Like Noam, they were sons of a land bordered by war, shadowed by death. They would have no choice unless she offered it to them, snatched them from danger. Again the idea invaded, adhered, teased. She could take her sons away. They could grow up, like their American cousins, on peaceful suburban streets where leaves rustled gently in autumn winds and snow fell silently, softly, through wintry days and nights. She looked at the falling snow, and it occurred to her that she had never painted a landscape of winter. She imagined working with a tube of titanium white, blending it lightly with English pink, to capture the tone of a drift at sunset. A line from the poet Zalenko teased her, but she could not recall it. Zalenko wrote the kind of winter odes that she yearned, quite suddenly, to paint.

  “Everyone has a choice,” Lisa said, and her voice rang with the certainty of the young. She thought of the Cornell sophomore who had visited the Coalition office that afternoon to borrow money for bus fare to Canada. His number in the draft lottery had been dangerously low, and he had vowed that he would never fight in a war.

  “I’ve made my choice,” he had said calmly when the weary psychologist who served as a volunteer counselor at the Coalition asked if he had considered everything,

  “I wish you were right, Lisa,” Lydia said wistfully. She wanted to use her knowledge for peaceful purposes, but instead her energy was concentrated on a project designed to protect nations at war. On Rhodes, Yehuda had stressed the importance of radar evasion techniques, and he had been proved right. They were racing against time, and there were no choices.

  “I think I am.” Lisa’s voice was heavy. Her fingers toyed nervously with the silver peace emblem she wore on a leather thong that hung about her neck. She was tired, so very tired. She was sorry now that she had not refilled the vial of pills in her purse. Still, with a bit of luck, she could catch the 5:49, reach her Hutchinson dormitory by 6:30, swallow an upper, and be ready to tackle the French paper that was due the next day. Her French teacher was fond of Lisa and expected great things of her. Lisa did not want to disappoint him. She did not want to disappoint anyone. She turned to Rebecca.

  “I’m glad I saw your paintings, Rebecca. They’re wonderful. When my parents come, would you tell them I just couldn’t wait to see them? Too much work. A French paper due tomorrow.” She smiled engagingly, but Rebecca recognized the weariness in her voice, the dullness in her eyes.

  “I’ll tell them, Lisa. Thank you for coming.”

  She watched Lisa shrug into her duffle coat and elbow her way out of the room. The gallery was crowded now, and Rebecca felt a secret pleasure because no one had recognized her. She had preserved her anonymity in this room full of people who were examining her work, studying her deepest perceptions. Her photograph appeared in the catalogue, but it had been taken years ago, just after Amnon’s birth. The photographer had captured her as she worked on a landscape, wearing cotton slacks and a smock, her hair loose and falling in wavelets of dark curls about her shoulders, her face set in lines of intense concentration. She had worked well then, she remembered. She had been absorbed in her work, happy with her young sons, content in Yehuda’s enveloping love, the affection of Danielle and Noam. They had known then that their desert kibbutz would succeed, and she remembered how, at day’s end, she and Yehuda had rushed toward each other, trembling with the joy of their life and their love. But that had been before they had been worn down by the constant threat of war, grief-weighted by Noam’s death, Yehuda’s constant absences, and her own troubling doubts. But she would work that way again, she decided defiantly. She smiled at a woman who stared vaguely back. The young woman in the photograph bore little resemblance to this new Rebecca in a dress of peacock-blue silk, whose silver-streaked dark hair was coiled into a neat chignon.

  Fragments of conversation drifted toward Rebecca as she moved slowly from picture to picture.

  “I think I like her earlier work better. It’s so much more optimistic.”

  “But these desertscapes are wonderful. Melancholy, but so romantic.”

  “They say that Ferguson is donating a percentage of his commission to the Coalition for Peace in Vietnam.”

  “Wouldn’t it be more appropriate to donate it toward peace in the Middle East?”

  They laughed bitterly, because they had so many wars to choose from and because their dry cynicism and clever humor briefly banished their fear.

  The students whispered knowingly to each other as they offered glasses of white wine to the patrons. Hilton Kramer of the Times was here, and Harold Rosenberg from the New Yorker. Someone had recognized Les Anderson, who had just written that in-depth piece on James Meredith’s march for Metro. Joe Stevenson, the sculptor, was expected, and the tall silver-haired woman in the dramatic magenta velvet suit was Leah Goldfeder, the designer and painter. She was Rebecca Arnon’s mother, someone said, and they stole covert looks at the two women, and saw the resemblance.

  The students inhaled the fragrance of rich perfumes, studied the well-tailored suits, the elegant gem-colored dresses. Briefly, they forgot their barren downtown studios, their walk-up flats on the Upper West Side, the canvases on which they worked despairingly and the doubts that awakened them inexplicably. Those were the worst times, when they lay inert in the darkness and wondered if they were good enough, if they would ever be good enough. Openings like this one renewed them. One day, their paintings, too, might hang in a white-walled, wide-windowed gallery,
drawing subtle criticism, sweet praise. Rebecca Arnon had been lucky, and her good fortune offered them rekindled hope.

  Rebecca paused before the largest canvas she had ever undertaken and studied it with a disapproving eye. She had used oils to paint the great sand crater at the twilight hour when deep and varicolored shadows moved slowly across its multitextured surface, concealing the secrets of sand and stone. The crater, like a massive breast, a nurturing fortress, rose from the desert floor, and always, Rebecca had perceived it as a symbol of mingled strength and desolation. It was a vigilant natural formation that would survive and endure. Those who lived in its shadow were transient—they would struggle with the desert, do battle with the drifting sands, with only their hope for guarantee. But the crater would remain in place forever, beautiful and unyielding, simultaneously sheltering and threatening. She had worked too hard, she thought. The painting lacked the subtlety she had hoped to achieve.

  “Odd that she didn’t choose to do this on a smaller scale,” a man’s voice said musingly to her. “Chalk would have been natural for it. Yes, chalk.”

  Rebecca was startled. His words plundered her thoughts. Chalk, she had been thinking. And a smaller surface, much smaller.

  She looked up. The man with iron-gray hair and craggy features, with whom she had danced at the Ellenberg’s party, stood beside her. Again memory nagged and eluded her. He had seemed familiar then and seemed familiar now, yet she could not place him.

  “The subject is quite massive,” she replied cautiously.

  “Yes. But in her other work she juxtaposed scope and subject. She used a large, stark canvas for the landscape of the Judaean hillside—the one with the dwarfed olive trees—and she did the gouache of Mount Carmel on a smaller treated sheet. She lost her nerve on this one. Still, the colors are dramatic—the mauve shadows sweeping across that ocher expanse…” There was grudging admiration in his tone. “She’s not consistent, but she’s a hell of a lot better than most of the Israeli artists.”

  “You don’t like Israeli artists?” She kept her tone light and noticed that the leather patch on his worn tweed jacket was loose and his shirt collar frayed. Either lack of money or lack of a woman’s care, she thought, and decided in favor of the latter. The jacket was very expensive and the V-necked tan sweater he wore was fashioned of the finest cashmere. Her observation amused her. How swiftly she had fallen back into her girlhood pattern of judging; she never noticed such things in Israel, never thought about them.

  “I don’t like most Israeli artists,” he acknowledged, and she felt herself bridle defensively. “They’re too blatantly ethnic, most of them. Moshe Gat’s earlocked Yemenites and Reuveni’s Hasidic rabbis. They hit you over the head with their subjects. I like Anna Ticho very much, and the early Schatz was good, but then he got too self-conscious—he painted the Zionist message the way Chagall keeps on painting the fantasy of the rootless Jew. I can’t relate to too many Hasidim dancing on rooftops—fiddlers or no.”

  “Chagall will be desolated to hear that,” she said sarcastically, although secretly she agreed with him. Chagall’s whimsical figures seemed too facile and stereotyped to her.

  “Now, this Arnon woman could develop if she expanded her horizons, gave herself full scope. There’s too much timidity, too much constraint. She’s not at peace with her landscapes. Don’t you think we’d see some really interesting work if she loosened up, experimented?”

  He turned then from his study of the painting and looked directly at her. Recognition flashed in his eyes.

  “But we know each other, don’t we? Didn’t we dance together at some party at Great Neck on New Year’s Eve? You wore a white dress.”

  She was oddly pleased that he remembered that. “Yes. At the Ellenbergs’,” she replied. She would tell him now that she was Rebecca Arnon and avoid further embarrassment, but he gave her no chance.

  “I remember. You were called away to the phone, and the friends whom I was supposed to meet there never arrived. I left just before midnight.”

  “Don’t people usually stay until midnight on New Year’s Eve?” she asked. “That’s the magic hour, the reason for coming.” It was dangerous to be alone, at the midnight hour of a dying year when past and future converged in mysterious nexus.

  “Not for me. Not this year,” he replied. “This year midnight was my reason for leaving.” The vigor drained from his voice, and his tone was dull, almost despairing.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, offering him her hesitant compassion for the sorrow that masked his face, quite suddenly. She held her hand out, intent now upon telling him her name and learning his, but he had turned away.

  “Rebecca!”

  She experienced a thrill of nervous pleasure as Joe Stevenson advanced toward her. Joe had been her teacher at Bennington, and it was he who had awakened her to the joys of art and to the wondrous closeness of love. The world had been in flames during her student years; all of Europe had been a battlefield, and too many gold stars hung in the windows of modest Vermont homes. Her own brother, Aaron, had been missing in action, and she had sought refuge from war and loss in Joe Stevenson’s arms. Eager for certainty, she had thought then that they would be together always. But Joe had been older and wiser, and he had recognized that they belonged to separate worlds. She had felt herself abandoned and alone when he wrote, from his European army base, to tell her that he would not return to her. But with the passing years she had fallen in love again. She had married Yehuda Arnon and forged a new life in the newborn state of Israel. And Joe had achieved an international reputation as a sculptor and married a beautiful Danish ceramicist. She and Joe had written to each other infrequently but with affection through the years and always they had exchanged gifts on their birthdays. Joe and Inga had visited Israel. Yehuda and Joe had been comfortable and at ease with each other. Rebecca had liked Inga, and she had visited the Stevensons at their Nantucket Island home on one of her hasty visits to the States. It pleased her that the love that she and Joe had shared had mellowed into a sweet and loving friendship.

  She was delighted to see them now, but it was the man who stood beside her who hurried up to them. He kissed Inga and enveloped Joe in a bear hug of affection.

  Joe beamed with delight.

  “Benjamin. You look wonderful. And Rebecca. Of course you found each other. It was inevitable.” His square chestnut-colored beard was laced with snow; the droplets melted on Rebecca’s cheek when he kissed her.

  It was Inga who saw the bewilderment in Rebecca’s eyes and noticed the sudden awkwardness, the constrained silence.

  “You have met?” she asked gently.

  Rebecca shook her head.

  “We’ve met, but we haven’t been introduced,” she said faintly.

  “Then I will introduce you. Rebecca Arnon, our dear and good friend, please meet our dear and good friend, Benjamin Nadler. Surely, you’ve read Benjamin’s work, Rebecca? His essays are often in Art World, and I think we sent you his Study of Modern Landscape Art for your birthday.”

  “Yes. Of course you did.” She knew now why Benjamin Nadler had seemed so familiar to her. His photograph appeared on the jacket of the important and insightful volume, which she had read and reread all that year. It was a serious, brooding photo—the craggy features taut with concentration, the unruly iron-gray hair brushed into place. The print had been in black and white, so she could not have known that his eyes were amber-colored like the sands of the northern Negev.

  “Rebecca Arnon,” he repeated in a tight, hard voice. “You are the artist whose work we honor today? I never suspected. I thought we were discussing an Israeli painter. I should have remembered that Joe once said that you had been his student, that you were an American. Still, it was clever of you not to have told me who you are.”

  “You didn’t give me a chance.” She was at once angry and apologetic.

  “Do you often discuss your work as though it is not yours at all?” he continued, and she saw that his lips curled
contemptuously.

  “Oh, come on, Benjamin,” Joe protested. “That’s not Rebecca’s style at all. It’s all a misunderstanding—right, Rebecca?”

  “Of course,” she said, anxious for the incident to be over. She extended her hand. “I’m glad to meet you, Professor Nadler.”

  He hesitated for a moment and then took her hand. Their fingers touched briefly, and he excused himself and joined a group at the opposite end of the gallery.

  “Stupid situation,” Joe said uncomfortably. “He shouldn’t have reacted that way, but he’s not himself just now.”

  “His wife died only a year ago,” Inga added. “Very tragically. It changed him a great deal.”

  “I’m sorry. It doesn’t really matter,” Rebecca assured them.

  “How is Yehuda?” Joe asked.

  “He’s well,” she replied. “He’s in Europe just now.” Only that morning she had received a postcard from him, postmarked Paris. He was well, working hard. He was thinking of going to Cherbourg for a rest. She had smiled bitterly. Yehuda would go to Cherbourg, but not for a rest. He would go there to look at the new French submarine assembly plant, to study the waterfront, to make contact with de Gaulle’s friends and with de Gaulle’s enemies. She had torn the postcard into long strips, and then she had pieced it together again and pressed it to her lips.