Leah's Children

by Gloria Goldreich

  “Rebecca, I love the new paintings. But it’s time you tried your hand at winter. Come to the island and visit us. We’ll sketch together.”

  “I’d like that,” Rebecca said.

  She smiled at the Stevensons, but her eyes followed Benjamin Nadler, who continued his study of her work. He stood before each painting, holding a pad and pencil; he made copious notes, but he never once glanced in her direction.

  Charles Ferguson introduced her to Alan Zalenko, the talented young poet who had just been awarded both the Hobart Prize and an Endowment for the Arts fellowship. Rebecca knew many of his poems by heart, and she was impressed by the sad-eyed man who held her hand gently in his own, turning their brief introduction into a silent rapport.

  “I admire your landscapes very much,” the poet told her. “You pierce nature’s secrets and share them with your viewers.”

  “As you do with your poems,” she rejoined.

  “We work in different forms, yet our work is not dissimilar,” he acknowledged thoughtfully. “Perhaps one day we might interpret each other’s work.”

  “I should like that.”

  They smiled at each other, and the poet returned to her painting of the dwarfed olive trees and stood for a long time, studying it with hooded gaze.

  Latecomers arrived, and small blue-and-red stickers appeared beside several canvases, indicating that they were either sold or were under consideration for sale. Critics and admirers pressed forward to offer Rebecca their congratulations, to ask questions.

  “Do you have a yearning to paint outside of Israel?”

  “I suppose I do. Of course the landscape of Israel is very varied. But it seldom snows there. I should like to capture scenes of winter.”

  Alan Zalenko hovered at the edge of the crowd but said nothing.

  “Do you miss America?” one of the students asked her.

  “Of course. When I am in Israel I miss America, and when I am in America I miss Israel.”

  Her eyes met Benjamin Nadler’s, and then he turned away and she saw him leave the gallery, pausing in the doorway to pull up the collar of his coat. She noticed, with an almost detached sadness, that although the snow was still falling heavily, he wore neither boots nor overshoes.

  Her family surrounded her. Their joy in her achievement was palpable, overwhelming.

  Leah’s eyes were bright with pride. In the Russian village of her birth it was said that children offered their parents a second chance—they fulfilled the dream. Leah’s own creative life had always been divided. She had been torn between painting and design, and often economic exigency had determined her choice. She had begun her work late, and Charles Ferguson’s settlement-house studio had given her her only training. But Rebecca’s career had combined gift with opportunity, and she had used both well.

  “It is a wonderful show,” Mindell said. Her silk honey-colored maternity dress matched her hair. She stood close to Lydia, whose black braids formed a coronet threaded with satin ribbons of the same hue as her simple skirt and blouse.

  “Our ladies of the rainbow,” Michael said to Aaron.

  “Your ladies of the rainbow—our daughters from afar,” Boris added, and they looked at one another, reminded of the improbabilities of chance and choice that had brought Leah and Rebecca, Mindell and Lydia, together in this wide-windowed Madison Avenue gallery.

  “It was a wonderful show,” Mindell said.

  “Just think—our sister is an artist of international esteem,” Aaron said to Michael, quoting the announcement of the show that had appeared in the Times that morning. The brothers smiled with pleasure at the recognition accorded their sibling.

  “What a successful opening.” Charles Ferguson was flushed with excitement. “The Times is planning an in-depth review for the Sunday edition. And Art News is planning a center spread. Alan Zalenko told me he plans to come back tomorrow.”

  “Benjamin Nadler left early,” Joe Stevenson observed.

  “Yes. But he did tell me that he plans to do a long piece for next week’s issue of The Metropolitan.”

  Rebecca turned away. The excitement of the afternoon was dimmed and overlaid with an unhappy apprehension. She was suffused with a hot anger at Benjamin Nadler, who had read her thoughts and shadowed her day.

  She wrote Yehuda a long letter that night, filling the pale blue airletter with the questions she had not dared to ask him. But in the morning she tore the letter up and wrote him a precise account of the opening. “When the reviews and articles appear, I will send them to you,” she wrote, and her heart beat too rapidly at the thought of Benjamin Nadler’s critique.

  *

  YEHUDA ARNON did not have to wait for Rebecca to send him the reviews of the retrospective. He was in Paris as part of an unofficial delegation of Israelis who were meeting quietly with members of Premier Georges Pompidou’s staff to arrange for the shipment of military supplies to Israel. Yehuda Arnon’s presence had been specifically requested by the premier. He had worked with Yehuda after the war when Yehuda had organized Bericha rescue operations and he had been manager of the Rothschild Banking House in Paris. He had not forgotten the calm, deliberate manner Yehuda maintained in the face of a crisis. He remembered still the courage and ingenuity that Yehuda had exhibited during those tragic years.

  “My people will speak to Arnon,” he had said in a curt dispatch to Jerusalem.

  Yehuda read an in-depth analysis of Rebecca’s work in the international edition of the Tribune as he drank his morning coffee and ate a croissant at the Café des Deux Magots. An ashen wintry light streaked the broad windows of the famous café. The chairs and tables that filled its terrace during the warmer months were stacked in awkward pyramids and shrouded with black rubber sheeting against the snow that would surely envelop Paris before the day was over. The only other patrons were a middle-aged couple who sat in a dimly lit corner, huddled in their winter coats. The man lit one Gauloise after another, carefully placing the burnt-out stubs in the limp blue-and-white packet. The woman sat very still, her gloved hands encircling her coffee cup as she wept with an odd, controlled steadiness. Her face was not contorted and her movements were contained, yet tears streaked her cheeks, and her companion made no move to comfort her.

  Yehuda read the critique carefully. The writer had recognized Rebecca’s strengths and appreciated the subtlety of her work. “The tenderness Arnon feels for her landscapes,” he wrote, “is apparent. Her brush caresses the canvas…one imagines how her pen must have danced across her pad as she sketched the shivering cypresses of Jerusalem, the crouching olive trees of Judaea. And yet an almost overwhelming sense of loneliness, of isolation, adds to the complexity of the artist’s achievement.”

  Yehuda reread that paragraph and then folded the newspaper and slipped it into the pocket of his duffle coat. The review had been reprinted from the New York edition, and he supposed that Rebecca had already seen it. He hoped that the critic’s insight would not wound her. She was so easily hurt, his Rebecca, his Rivka. He was, he acknowledged, all too familiar with the signs of pain that flashed across her face—the rapid blanching of her skin, the lines of sadness that etched their way into her smooth forehead, the shadow of sorrow that blurred the brightness of her sea-colored eyes.

  He wanted, at such moments, to pass his hand across her face and banish the sadness with his touch, to hold her in his arms and soothe and reassure her. But in the years since Noam’s death his own uncompromising grief had restrained and weighted him. He could not comfort his wife when he could not comfort himself. He had surrendered instead to a whirlwind of activity, to urgent journeys and clandestine missions. Fatigue subdued sorrow, obscured anguish. He understood his wife’s pain, her uncertainty, but he could not assuage it. He acknowledged that they were drifting apart, but he was powerless to draw closer, and his own impotence frightened him. He absorbed himself instead in the needs of his country. There was one constant in his life, he told himself—Israel’s vulnerability, Israel’s need. H
e had been a young man when he had first met with Georges Pompidou in Guy de Rothschild’s oak-paneled office and pleaded for funds to spirit the remnant of child survivors out of Europe. Years had passed, and now he met in a conference room of the Ministry of Defense and pleaded for Mystéres and for spare parts to be used by these same children, who were soldiers of Israel now and might soon have to fight for their lives.

  Rebecca both understood and resented his work. Occasionally, when he was back on the kibbutz for a brief respite, he had awakened in the night and had known instinctively that Rebecca was gone from their bed. She wandered through the starlit desert night, a bright shawl flung over her thin white nightdress. Slowly she made her way to the children’s house, where she looked down at her sleeping sons. She was frightened, he knew, but he was too mired in his own inner struggle to offer her strength. Instead, he watched from the window as she completed her lone nocturnal mission.

  He had reassured himself then that she had a need for solitude. They were lonely acrobats, he and Rebecca, each precariously balanced on a shared tightrope of sorrow. They would have to traverse it alone, he knew, and he went back to bed and pretended to be asleep when she returned to their room.

  He had not withdrawn from her out of indifference. Sometimes it seemed to him that besides Israel the only certainty in his life was his love for Rebecca. That love was as intrinsic to his being as the beat of his heart, the intake of his breath. Even through the grief-shadowed years since Noam’s death, that love had remained a steady beacon, beckoning him back, a clear and luminescent flame. He did not want it to be clouded by fear and regret; he did not want its glow to become artificial and harsh. If their marriage was to endure, it would have to be because they loved each other and understood the exigencies of that love.

  He did not want her to remain with him because she was restrained by loyalty, bound by duty. He had never been a man to settle for half measures. He had recognized the risk he took on the evening of the kibbutz wedding, when stars spangled the sky and the music of gaiety invaded their sadness. He had urged her then to leave him so that she might gather perspective, understanding. He had known then, and he knew it still, that he would rather hazard the loss of her love than live with the knowledge that it had been reduced to a simulation, to a sad and stagnant charade.

  He was not unaware of the dangers of his daring gamble. Rebecca would return to the beneficent world of her girlhood, to the protection of her brothers and of Leah, her mother and her friend. In Israel, on the kibbutz, she lived at a remove from the world of her profession (the perceptive critic had written of her “sense of loneliness, of isolation”), but New York was the center of the art world. She would meet painters and sculptors, visit museums and galleries.

  He knew, too, that men would be drawn to her, attracted by her warmth and beauty, her talent and charm. It was not difficult for an attachment to form unbidden, for mysterious desire to stir. Solitude engendered strange and sweet aberrations, and Rebecca would be alone. He remembered still, half with shame and half with wonder, how he had been dangerously drawn to Lydia that distant afternoon in Rhodes. Loneliness made men and women dangerously vulnerable, caused them to respond with strange intensity to the magic of a fleeting moment.

  Only the previous evening, he had attended a diplomatic reception on the Rue Faubourg. A young French woman in a silver sheath that matched the metallic shadow on her eyelids had laughed with throaty excitement at a small joke he had told. He had been pleased and flattered. He had escorted her home, and in the darkness of the hallway, she had lifted her face to his and smiled teasingly. He had touched her hair, brushed his lips against her shimmering eyelids, and thought how easy it would be to follow her into the darkened flat, to assuage both his loneliness and his desire. Abruptly, he had made his apologies and left, hurrying back to his hotel room, where he had stared long and hard at the photo of Rebecca that he carried in his wallet.

  He understood that he had undertaken dangerous odds. Rebecca might not return to him. But he knew that, win or lose, he owed Rebecca the opportunity to make her choice. He had married a young girl in a dangerous and exciting time. He had swayed her to his destiny, ensnared her in a web of dreams and love. But now she was a woman, and she would make a woman’s choice. No muted regret, no unarticulated fear, would shadow their lives.

  He drained the last of his coffee, grown cold and bitter now, and called for his check. It was time for his meeting with Pompidou’s first assistant, for a discussion of how to circumvent de Gaulle’s reluctance to send spare parts for the Mystéres from France to Israel. It had occurred to Yehuda that they might be shipped from Holland. In war, too, direct routes were not always possible. He smiled wryly at the strange parallel.

  As he paid his bill, the couple who had occupied the shadowed corner edged their way out of the café. The woman was pale, and she had not ceased to weep. Yehuda envied her those freely streaming tears. His own heart was weighted with a tumescent sorrow, which he knew would not soon be relieved.

  *

  A CURIOUS DEPRESSION adhered to Rebecca during the days that followed the opening of the retrospective. She experienced a vague sense of aimlessness, a detachment, as though she were a theatergoer observing the interplay of other people’s lives but not involved in them.

  She visited Aaron and Lydia. Their Scarsdale household was suffused with calm. Their three children played amiably, quarreled harmlessly. Lydia’s work schedule was intensely accelerated. Even at home she reworked calculations, studied reports. Her desk was studded with envelopes from the Technion, the Weizmann Institute, the Royal Research Centre in London.

  “Can’t you relax?” Rebecca asked.

  “This is a crucial time for radar scientists—we’re racing against history,” Lydia replied.

  Rebecca understood. The New York Times lay open on Aaron’s chair, its ominous headlines clearly visible. The air war in Vietnam was intensifying. Russia had announced the renewed sale of planes to Egypt and Syria.

  “My wife is of the opinion that the future of the free world is in her hands,” Aaron said. “And I suppose, to a degree, it is.” He stroked Lydia’s hair and smiled at his sister.

  Aaron was a judge now, but he continued to teach at the law school. Still, Rebecca had noticed that despite the demands on their time, Aaron and Lydia almost always managed to have dinner with the family, and they seldom missed a Friday night meal at Leah’s. They talked easily, casually. Aaron had heard an interesting case; Lydia was working on a grant proposal. Paulette told three consecutive “knock, knock” jokes, and David explained them patiently to Rebecca. They did not listen to the news every hour. They did not stir uneasily when a plane flew too low. They anticipated peace and togetherness, just as Rebecca anticipated war and separation.

  She had dinner with Mindell and Michael at the Eldridge Street apartment—the same apartment where her parents had lived as poor, newly arrived immigrants. The little room that she and Aaron had shared would be a nursery for Mindell’s child. Already, brightly patterned curtains hung at the window and a gleaming white rocking chair stood in the corner where the small Rebecca had created dolls from the clothespins and fabric scraps that Joshua had scavenged from the pushcarts of neighborhood peddlers.

  “Rebecca, could you paint a mural—something with flowers and a smiling sun?” Mindell asked. Mindell’s own childhood had been spent in hiding, and she was determined to guarantee sunlight and happiness to her unborn infant.

  “Of course.” Rebecca smiled. She envied Mindell her excitement, her certainty that she could control her life, her love. She, too, had felt that certainty in the early years of her marriage, but it had vanished with the passing years, with the compounding of sorrow and loss, with Noam’s death and Yehuda’s repeated absences, his necessary silences. (“How was your day?” Lydia asked Aaron casually. It was not a question Rebecca asked Yehuda.)

  She visited Hutchinson College and studied the work of the art students. They listened to her
with intense concentration, asked urgent questions. Her present might be their future. A girl whose long black hair fell to her waist asked Rebecca if she felt any conflict between her role as a mother and her role as an artist. Rebecca explained that the unique quality of life on a kibbutz made it possible for her to combine both lives.

  “My children are cared for. I have a studio and a budget for supplies. In return, the proceeds of my work belong to the kibbutz.”

  They nodded. They knew about communes. They clutched their tattered paperback copies of The Feminine Mystique and fingered their shiny metal buttons variously stamped with the dove symbol of the peace movement, the black and white clasped hands of civil rights solidarity, the feminist insignia of the National Organization for Women. Their beliefs were pinned to their sweaters, their faces were pale with exhaustion, but their eyes were bright with hope. Theirs was the generation that would make a difference.

  Lisa Ellenberg, wearing an army fatigue jacket (the khaki fabric of war now gaily decorated with the blue-and-white satin decals of the peace movement), listened carefully. She wished that she had brought her tape recorder; she was just too damn tired to take notes. She had stayed too late at the Coalition office the previous evening and had missed the last train back to campus. Still, she would make it through the day. A premed student at the Columbia dorm where she had slept had given her a handful of bright green capsules.

  “They kept me awake through organic chemistry—they’ll keep you awake through anything,” he had told her.

  Their color reassured her, reminded her of the emerald necklace her father had given her mother for their anniversary—her father, the giver of gifts, who believed that happiness could be bought and paid for, like emeralds and yellow roses purchased out of season. Lisa stared at Rebecca Arnon and wondered if it was true, as family rumor had it, that her father had once imagined himself in love with her. She yearned suddenly to tell Rebecca how tired she was, to ask her how a life could be organized and molded.